Trio sets

I was just telling someone on Twitter today that my first fiancee broke off our engagement on the minuscule pretext that I ate apples too loudly. I think the real reason was that her brothers had arrived from South Africa to warn her off matching herself up with a no-hoper from NZ, and any excuse was good enough. Ce la vie.

Why do I mention this, because you can get trio sets from Reeds.com. Okay, you say, what are 'trio sets'? Are they string trio players doing a 'set' of popular classics? Not quite, I reply. In fact, all I know is that trio sets have something to do with engagement rings,

A bit more investigation shows that the trio consists of an engagement ring for the fiancee, and a wedding ring each for the bride and groom. Obvious, really. Naturally they come in diamonds. What else?

Now here's a marketing idea. And it would be an encouragement for the young couple to stay together too. Each major wedding anniversary - the silver, gold, ruby, etc - would be commemorated by yet another ring for the bride that fitted the original trio set. If the groom was keen, he could have one too. They probably wouldn't run out of fingers...

A win...and a loss

I've been in Sydney over the weekend, playing for a brass band soloist at a competition called the Ern Keller International Soloist of the Year - the details in the link relate to last year.  Obviously they'll be updated soon, and show that the person I played for (and who took me to Sydney specially to do so!) - John Lewis - won.  Great excitement.   John was the Champion of Champions in the brass competitions for 2011, a title which made him eligible for an invitation to the Ern Keller.

The competition was held in St Mary's suburb in Sydney, where the St Mary's Brass Band has a club that functions all the year round with concerts and a casino and pokies and restaurants and much more.  It's the sort of thing most brass bands probably dream of, because it brings in income that assists the band to function.  Our motel was just across the road - literally.

The weather was much hotter than I'm used to, so it was good that the competition was held indoors in an air conditioned hall, one that's obviously used for other functions where drinks and nibbles are readily available.  The piano was a bit of a disappointment: it seemed muted somehow.  I could only just get it to come to life and no more.  Never mind, in spite of that, the trip was most worthwhile.  And we managed to get away on the plane yesterday in spite of the fact that the terrific storm the night before (with lightning and thunder every few seconds) flooded parts of the Sydney airport, and a good deal of other places.

This is a photo taken around the time
I knew Elizabeth

That's the win.  While I was there, I heard about the loss.  I've mentioned before on this blog that back in the late sixties I was briefly engaged to the opera singer Elizabeth Connell, who was at that time studying at the London Opera Centre; I'd been studying there the year before on the repetiteur's course.  It would have been an interesting marriage, if it had gone ahead: after a difficult start in the operatic world, Elizabeth made a name for herself as singer of roles that required considerable stamina and vocal technique.  She excelled in some of the Wagnerian roles, for instance, and in Turandot, one of the most difficult soprano roles in the repertoire.   When I knew her she was a mezzo-soprano, but she later took time off to lift her voice into the soprano range.   She was briefly married to another singer, but this marriage was later dissolved.

I hadn't heard from her in years, until she wrote to me out of the blue in the early 2000s.  We corresponded a little and I tried to get her email address via her agent so that we could write more directly, but I never heard back from them.   She came out here to judge one of the Lexus aria contest, and we thought about going to the Dunedin concert that came after the event, and then decided against it at the last minute.  Which meant we missed catching up with Elizabeth.

When I was in Sydney this weekend, my wife phoned to say that Elizabeth had died; somewhat suddenly, although she'd been ill with cancer on and off for some time.  She would have been 66 this year.  Even though it's been a long time since we had any real contact, it's still a quite unsettling loss.  I guess people you didn't get married to linger on in the background of your life.  Certainly, on hearing of her death, Elizabeth proved that she had lingered more than a little...

PS: There's a news report about John's win in the Otago Daily Times.

Too early for Christmas thinking!

It's only October, but of course, for retailers that means they'll already have Christmas stock on their shelves, from Christmas gift baskets to those dreadful toys that only seem to appear around this time of the year, cost a fortune, and fall apart on Boxing Day. 

I'm not even thinking about Christmas yet (no longer being a retailer, thank goodness); in fact the main thing on our minds at the moment is my son's engagement party, which takes place on Saturday.   Of course it the engagement party of my son and his fiancee, but I found that hard to work into the last sentence without the grammar falling into the same number of pieces as those dreadful toys I mentioned above are prone to do on the day after Christmas.   Phew.

And then once the engagement party is over, we have more of Grimhilda! on our plate...the auditions, for starters (plus having to get another application in for funding before the end of the month).   So it's all go round here and Christmas is barely on the calendar....as it were.   Certainly not on the radar.  

Actually thinking back to the poor old retailers: we used to have to start thinking about Christmas way before October, anyway, as we had to start ordering stuff somewhere round May/June.   Isn't it a tough life being a retailer?  You're working so far ahead of yourself all the time, and always hoping that all the money you've forked out in orders will be well and truly covered by purchases - six or seven months down the track. 

Thank goodness I'm out of it! 

Hidden in the recesses of time

Thinking not very deeply about diamond stud earrings, and other such flashy items (like nintendo jewellery) and reflecting a little on a letter to the editor that appeared in today's Otago Daily Times about Prince William's gift of his mother's engagement ring to his wife-to-be.   The writer was irate that William was giving Kate a second-hand ring.   Surely that's a very recycling thing to do, apart from any sentimental associations? 

My wife received a secondhand ring too, when we got engaged.   We weren't particularly well off at that stage, and it seemed reasonable enough.   One of my daughters subsequently dropped it down a hole in the stairwell wall and that's the last we've seen of it.  (I have no idea what my daughter was doing playing with it.)

I didn't give my wife-to-be my mother's engagement ring because I'm not even sure if my mother had one.  She was married in wartime, and I suspect engagement rings were regarded as a bit of an extravagance.   Apart from that my mother was still alive when I got married, so if she did have an engagement ring, she may not have been keen to part with it.

On the other hand, my grandmother's ring is something I do have - my English grandmother, that is.  (Again, I don't know if my New Zealand grandmother even had an engagement ring - she had nine children in due course, which probably would account for any lack of rings in the house.)   My English grandmother's ring could easily be recycled too: it looks exactly like a curtain ring.  It's perfectly round and thin as can be.    How it came to be in my possession is something that I no longer remember - not because I'm losing my marbles but because I don't actually recall ever knowing.   Maybe my mother received it at some point, perhaps when my grandmother died.   Who knows?   Hidden in the recesses of time.

Making a Proposal

I had a lot of fun looking at the romantic tips section of the Danforth Diamond site. I’m a bit old in the tooth to think about engagements and engagement rings any more (though I have been engaged twice; married once), but the answers to possible questions people in the engagement market might ask are certainly worth checking out.
You’ll find their ‘romantic tips’ section in the column on the left of their site. It leads to ideas for proposals, how to get a man to propose, and how to propose to a man (Danforth’s say: Thank heavens women are no longer hampered by the old fashioned ideas of the past. Today's woman can propose to a man without being labelled "shameless" or "desperate"!). There’s also a section called Proposal Mistakes, although it’s more about commonsense things to think about when proposing, that actual mistakes. I can’t in the least remember how I went about proposing to my first fiancee – it’s a long time ago – and I’m not going to tell you where and when I proposed to my second. (Danforth’s might not have thought that the occasions was appropriate – and it would probably come under their category of an Impulsive Proposal!) Anyway, wedding rings found themselves on our ring fingers exactly a year later, so the proposal, appropriate or inappropriate occasion aside, must have been satisfactory enough!