Travelling on the long-distance bus

We went to Christchurch and back on the bus. Six hour trip. First time we've used it together, I think, and my first time since I had a very unpleasant experience of not taking the opportunity in Ashburton to go to the loo, and then finding I was very sore when I got to ChCh an hour and a half later. Though admittedly this was in the days before I had my prostate operation, so that would have been part of the problem. (My book on my prostate operation experiences is well on its way - should be out by mid-year, I'd expect). [Update 2020 - this book is now available on Amazon.]

The driver of the northbound bus (from Dunedin to Christchurch, for those who don't know what I'm talking about) was very pleasant, did a bit of spiel about different towns and gave us the list of rules without being too high-handed about it. These included what you couldn't eat on the bus (which turned out to be a bit of a nuisance as we'd brought lunch with us and coffee, and had to wait till we got to Oamaru, about an hour and a half into the trip, before we could get our lunch) and the fact that you needed to wear the seatbelts provided. It's the law in NZ he reminded us. Law or not, very few people put their seatbelts on.

The driver on the southbound trip was much more blunt, and when I asked if he stopped anywhere for comfort stops and a bit of stretching the legs, he replied, Nope. Stopping in Timaru for twenty minutes. This was about half way on a six hour trip, so if you were desperate you would have had to have made a considerable fuss to get him to stop for you. The other driver had made five-minute stops at reasonable intervals, which made sense to me. Driver number two was troubled by the fact that he had a lot of pickups along the way, and a detour to Waimate, so comfort stops were out of the question. As it was he made it into Dunedin a quarter of an hour ahead of time. And never mentioned seatbelts.

It's certainly more relaxing on a bus; if you want, you can look at the scenery. Or you can go to sleep (though sleeping upright has never been a great preference for me), or you can read, or can listen to a CD story, or...whatever takes your fancy within the confines of the space allotted to two passengers. No problems with driving, or other drivers, or sitting with the foot on the accelerator for six hours at a time. And the luggage allowance is far superior to that allowed when travelling by air. No restrictions, effectively. You can take what you want inside the bus, and leave the rest in the bus hold. A European couple who were travelling with two small children, managed to get two very large bike-cum-stroller thing in the hold, though I think it was a bit of a pinch. But there would have been plenty of room for the kitchen sink, if you so desired.

We were untroubled by any difficult or noisy passengers, except in the last hour or so when two male students sitting on either side of the aisle just behind us (with two young girls - not connected to either of them - seated in the adjacent window seats) began to talk about things that shouldn't be spoken about in public. They'd been discussing all sorts of other young male interests before that, mostly geek sort of stuff, but then one of them got onto his private life, and not only did he reveal more than anyone wanted to hear, his vocabulary whittled down to what my wife said was only five or six basic words. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly surprising that someone was so unaware of other people that he could speak so openly without any sense that it might offend those around him. Fortunately the general noise in the bus obliterated some of it, but not completely. Amazing how self-focused some people are that they don't think that their words are being heard by far more than the intended recipient.

A bit of one-upmanship from Mr Haydn

The concert back on Sept 12th went well, though audience numbers were down on last time (in 2006). Had to compete with a Haydn concert at the Town Hall - apparently he's some old dude whose music is still getting played after 300 years. At my concert, one of the singers said after it was over that he couldn't understand why people would go to hear a Haydn concert when my concert was on. I can only agree.

Anyway, to give Mr Haydn his due, I've been playing through some of his sonatas over the last week or so, partly to give myself a break from the music I played in the concert, and partly to keep my fingers moving, and partly to do a bit of sight-reading. I've played these sonatas before, but I think I've probably only ever learnt one with any serious intent. There were times when it seemed as though I was the world's worst sight-reader. Think it was just that I'd been playing the same stuff for so many weeks that my brain hadn't had to use its sight-reading skills to any extent. Went through some of the sonatas again over the last few days and was glad to see that things had improved. Phew!

Meantime, I've been working on getting the CD of the concert off the ground. We recorded it on the night, so it's a warts and all recording - the mistakes I made will live forever, (as it were.) I still have the music tracks from the recording we made of the last concert, and I'm going to have to get that organised as well. I promised copies to people back in 2006 and they're still patiently waiting. Just as well they're not the sort of people who live in mobile homes, otherwise I might never track them down.

However, after my son-the-geek had been here for a while last Friday night I had the tracks for both the new and old CD ready to go and I've now burned a CD copy of both. Things sound pretty good (helped by having a professional recording person on the spot, an old friend who's been willing to do this both times I've put on a concert). Even the warts aren't as bad as they might be.

I've got the programme notes, and the poems on a Word doc, but it's now a matter of sorting all that material out so that it fits into some kind of booklet form. Not a task I'm enthusiastically looking forward to (I'm writing this post to put it off) but I will get it done this time.

3 CDs

Tomorrow I have to take back to the library three CDs I've had over the holiday period. Lilburn's three symphonies are on one, David Farquahar's on another, and the third is a collection of pieces by Edwin Carr [pictured]. It has The End of the Golden Weather music on it (seems a bit bitsy to me); the Concerto for piano and orchestra (something I'd like to know better), Seven Elizabethan Lyrics, which are very pleasant, and An Auckland Ode, which I can't say I'm fussed much about.

Lilburn's first symphony still seems to me to be the best of the three - the second has advanced to that waffly Lilburn stage where it can't seem to make up its mind what it's going to do next, and the third hasn't really made any great impression on me. Admittedly I haven't given it as much attention as I might have done - between being out in the garden working a good deal over the holidays and being away for eight days, these three CDs haven't had their full quota of listening.

I might get all three out again, and familiarise myself with them further. Yes, even the Lilburn!