Importing CDs into the laptop means that I listen to more music than I have for years. Three clicks of the mouse leads me to Chopin or Bud Freeman and makes a perfect accompaniment to writing the blog.
Bored with looking for lovely Ludwig's chamber music I googled Amazon and bought the whole lot of the quartets for about twenty quid. It was the same with Bix and this came in at a fiver for forty tracks - surely the best deal ever. The Beethovens are a revelation and all I can say is WOW! Again I had forgotten how good Beiderbeck was. The original "Young Man with a Horn" (A titled disallowed by Hollywood) got a lovely sound out of the cornet, only now available thanks to digital re-recording.
Turning from this to Max Hastings' new book about the Second World War, I read of almost unimaginable carnage, death, destruction and the murder of millions. What terrible things people, civilised and educated people, did to each other. It is difficult to believe that we belong to the same species as the men who created and the men who destroyed. But it did happen within living memory. Have we learnt nothing? This banal question must have the answer "No".
When I let her in the big black lady with the bulging shoulder bag said, "Hello, I'm your district nurse come to give you a 'flu jab. My name is Count Basie." One of the pleasures of partial deafness.
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