A red-letter day?

This is the day that we finally got broadband at home. Given that we live in a village and British Telecom once poo-poohed the idea that we would ever get ADSL, it seems like a minor miracle. I’ve been accustomed to T1 lines at work for years, but had to put up with the 56k trickle at home. Bliss…

Forty years on

JFK was shot dead forty years ago today. Media are full of it. First thing I heard upon waking was John Connolly’s window remembering the ghastly moment when the President and her husband were struck, followed by an interview on BBC Radio 4 with Robert Macnamara, JFK’s slickly-haired Secretary of Defense. I am old enough to remember vividly where I was the moment it happened. I was in my bedroom, sitting at a sloping desk my parents had bought in an auction, doing my homework. Nothing special in that. But there was an edge to my feelings, because I had actually seen the President, in the flesh, close-to, a few months earlier, on his visit to Ireland. Years later, I wrote about it.

Keynes on English church music

I’m reading the third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s wonderful biography of John Maynard Keynes. Here’s an extract from a letter Keynes wrote to his doctor, Janos Plesch, inviting him to a chapel service in King’s College chapel:

“You would hear English church music in its most exquisite form and in the grandest possible environment. To my thinking, though exquisite, it is lifeless and even moribund… But if you have never been to one of these highly respectable, quasi-aesthetic Victorian performances, where deathly moderation and pseudo-good taste have drowned all genuine emotions, you might find it an interesting experience”.