It’s the last day of Spring, announced the radio presenter, and then immediately, cheekily, she played Vivaldi’s Summer. The raging storm that was forecast last night but never arrived, arrived this morning instead in musical form.

But the sky is clear today — a large expanse of blue to carry the heat of the sun across the city. 

One more month until the end of the year. It’s been a year where, every month, colleagues are heard saying, “Where did that month go?” And “How did we suddenly reach the end of this month?”

Or maybe that was last year. Or both.

Such sameness. But always a bit different.

Adventuring, exploring, discovering; but also retreating into the comforts of repetitions.

Choose your own adventure, as long as it’s within the given parameters. 

The most well-thought-out plans might still fall through. You cannot clear the fog-of-war until you enter the next cavern. The hidden grick will not reveal itself until you’re within tentacle’s reach.

Grounded, back in reality, it’s time to learn. So much learning to do, such limited capacity. Over-encumbered and slowed.

Perhaps I can blame the heat?

An old friend asked recently what books I most like to read. Without hesitation, I replied, “classics”. In the back of my mind Ulysses is still poking around, as is the recent article about the book club that spent 28 years reading and deciphering Finnegans Wake. 

Now Midnight’s Children is on the table, and I’m considering that it’s not necessarily “classics” that I’m drawn to, but to what is perhaps a sub-genre of historical fiction — novels that have some fantastical or absurd element, yet are irrefutably grounded in historical facts. Novels so poetic they must surely exist only in imagination, yet by their very magic are brought to life.

Earlier this morning, before Vivaldi, in the waking hour, the radio played Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience, played by Anna Lapwood on the organ (her own transcription). What a powerful piece to wake up to!

My younger self probably only ever associated the organ with that scene in The Simpsons in which Bart has replaced the church’s hymn music with a reinterpretation of Iron Butterfly’s In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, and the church organist (Helen Feesh is her name, apparently) does a 17-minute organ solo, and collapses at the end.

More recently, the organ invariably makes me think of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony, and how he was a bit strange (he wrote The Carnival of the Animals because of certain other interests), and how Saint-Saëns probably would be ok with his Organ Symphony being used as the theme for a movie about a talking pig (Babe).

And now there is Experience.