I've taken the pledge, Your Honour

NHS - the No Hope Service

My medical record now shows that I am 5' 6" tall and weigh 13st 11lb, which makes me practically spherical, with a body mass index approaching infinity. Or zero - I never could get my head round reciprocals or metric units. No wonder my BP was up. 152/76, to be precise, systole exactly double diastole, which is handy to remember. I could do with losing a few pounds to bring me back into the appropriate percentile for my age, but I'm borderline. Tum turning into a corporation, but that's genetic. My dad's waist measurement was more than double his inside leg, which made his trousers roughly equilateral triangles in front or rear elevation.

It was my annual check-up at the asthma clinic a couple of days ago. In our village practice you are likely to go in for your check-up perfectly healthy and come out in a hearse, so I give the village practice a wide berth, and attend a branch in the next village, where patients are less likely to be verbally abused by Reception Gorgons under a sign that proclaims that the NHS does not tolerate abuse of its staff by patients, especially those who have still managed to stay alive, despite.

My asthma nurse knows absolutely everything about everything, because she follows a flow-chart on her screen which tells her what questions to ask. A bit like a call centre. If my answers don't fit the pattern they are ignored. In vain have I been saying for years that aftershaves and perfumes are far more likely to trigger severe asthma attacks in susceptible people than cigarette or pipe smoke. Two years ago it took one extremely intelligent nurse to spot an anomaly in my cholesterol readings, and submit a blood sample for analysis. Almost entirely good cholesterol. It's on my medical record. I shouldn't have to remember it - nurses with their faces turned to computer screens should see it, flashing on and off in red.

But that isn't really the point. When I got home from this 'check-up' which would have me on a diet of lettuce and statins in perpetuity I weighed myself. I am my usual 12st 5lb, not 13st 11lb.

I endured a 30-minute lecture from a nurse who can't convert kilograms to pounds.

God forbid that she ever prescribes me a painkiller. It would be a hundredweight of morphine, qid.

A dungarees thing

You can forgive children for not being fully clued-up on such things as geography and countries of the world and language and therefore making boo-boos in their compositions, for a little knowledge is, as the adage reminds us, a dungarees thing.


But we should be less inclined to forgive the writer of the following (who just happens, coincidentally, to be American, a fact hardly worth mentioning) in a best-selling thriller -


"It is so wonderful to make your acquaintance," he said with a faint Swiss accent.


No? Well, think about it.

Easter Sunday, the Pagan Festival

Easter blessings be upon all readers of this blog, and particular blessings on the traffic cop who, on this holiest day in the Christian year, was lurking behind a tree in the church grounds with his speed gun as the congregation – a very large congregation this morning - arrived to celebrate the Resurrection. Try explaining that to the children.

Tell me – do traffic cops and community bobbies ever talk to each other and do a bit of joined-up thinking?

Good Friday, the pagan festival

Just a quick en passant.


The ITV early evening programme which purports to keep us informed of what's going on - ITV national news and Granada Reports - regard Good Friday as a day for interminable reports about people who kick, throw or hit balls for a living.

But that Granada Reports should completely overlook Preston Guild and the Passion, or the significance of Good Friday for Christians, is utterly inexcusable. Perhaps there was an item, but it had to be dropped because they had visuals of smoke rising from a fighter jet crash in Virginia.

Granada Reports. What the eye can't feast itself on didn't happen. And they pretend it's a news programme.

April 1 Stainer

Radio 3 used to be worth listening to when it was the Third Programme, and later the Music Programme, but with Classic Eff 'Em snapping at its heels it had to go downmarket, which is why its schedules are now mainly full of trailers for forthcoming goodies uttered breathlessly by females with exaggerated vocal inflections, in the style of those deliciously OTT Eurotrash voice-overs from Maria McErlane, Davina McCall and Kate Robbins,  or tweets from the sort of twits who tweet and telephone conversations with astoundingly uninteresting people with adenoids living in Essex who are only too happy to relate their experiences in their infant school choir in 1927.

I've very nearly given up on Radio 3, though last week was very educational. It confirmed what I had always suspected - Schubert wrote far more music than it's decent to, and it shows.  A handful of songs which aren't all that bad, but more than 500 which mostly are; chamber music that's more chamber-pot than chamber music, a few masses that sound like Dvorak on syrup and the symphonies, not very well scored. He couldn't even be bothered to finish the last one. The only half-decent stuff he wrote was fugues, in which he is very nearly as accomplished as Max Reger, whose spiritual father also was JSB.

But yesterday, Palm Sunday, R3 put the clock back and pulled material from the European Broadcasting Union, and wow! They are doing wonderful things across the Channel, as well as in Japan, but you wouldn't know it if you listened to R3 regularly.

But the masterstroke, after a day of utterly breathtaking baroque and Bach, was the April Fool spoof - a performance of Stainer's Crucifixion in the Victorian style that had to be heard to be believed. The tenor had picked up the tremolo-on-one-note that Michael Ball relinquished for Sweeney Todd, and the baritone did a La Scala. I think they'd chucked rugs over the organ pipes, because they just sort of rumbled away below the threshold of hearing, and the chorus!  They must have spent weeks boning up on Victorian elocutionary practices, because I've never heard the word 'royal' sung with such a rich variety of mutating 'phthongs. Absolutely brilliant. We had to turn it off after twenty minutes, tears of mirth streaming down our faces, but it's there on iPlayer for a few days if you missed it.

You have to hand it to the Beeb - when they do do 1 April, they pull out all the stops.

Pronunciation of church Latin

Groan, groan. It happened again this evening. Somebody with a smattering of the Latin learned 50 years ago in school felt qualified to lecture an ad-hoc group of church choristers about how to pronounce the Latin in Ave Verum - the Elgar, actually, not the Mozart - absurdly the choir will be singing the Elgar in Latin, and the Mozart in its usual weak English translation (at the same service, I might add, as O sacred head, sore wounded is being sung in an appallingly cack-handed translation).

Don't these self-appointed didacts realise the extent of their own ignorance? In the age of instant Googling choir people and didacts need no longer remain in ignorance. There are millions of sites that explain the pronunciation of church Latin, so there's no excuse.

Here's a quick resumé.

Church Latin is not classical Latin, the language that some of us were lucky enough to get a couple of years  of in grammar schools (remember them?) Church Latin is a language created by the Church in about the 4thC AD. Its structure and its basic vocabulary is taken from classical Latin, but there the resemblance ends. How classical Latin might have been pronounced is irrelevant: Pope Pius X decreed (at the turn of the 19th/20thC) that henceforth church Latin would be pronounced as it was pronounced in Rome.

So, to cut a long story short, church Latin should be pronounced as though it were the Italian spoken in Rome (and not the Italian spoken in the south of Italy.) Choristers who know what they're doing make slight changes in pronunciation if they are singing a Latin text by a German composer, or an early French composer, and, if they are very, very clever, a Russian or Finnish composer, but the Italian of Rome is the default pronunciation.

The problem is that people who vaguely remember their schooldays Latin probably don't know any Italian, which is why they still think Ave Verum is pronounced Ah Way Way Rum and Virgine Weir-ghin-ay.

So - quis custodiet ipsos custodes? You might well ask.

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To read Pius X's words, and the reasoning, go here:

http://choirstalls.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/parish-mag-february-2009.html