My cultured father

Sunrise at 08:29 this Minimal cloud cover should mean that the south eastern sky will start lightening at about 07:00. Sunset at 15:48 means that the day is two minutes longer than yesterday.

Today is the 75th anniversary of my father's birth. However, he died nearly 19 years ago. I feel sure that he would have lived-to-the-full all the years he was denied by his early and untimely death. He would have continued to rejoice in the natural landscape of his adopted Cornwall. He would have continued to enjoy music, the arts, crafts and the social activities that characterised the final ten or so years of his life, some of which were interests developed from boyhood with the encouragement of his mother, and that in turn he passed on to me. (I remember that he had two vinyl LPs (long-playing records): Tchaikovsky's "1812" and "March Slav" that I got to know well, and a jazz record called "How Hi the Fi" (that I have just checked out as being recorded by Buck Clayton and Woody Herman in 1954) but I cannot remember ever having heard it. I now quite often listen to jazz on BBC Radio 3, along with acres of 'classical' music. I think that my father was quite satisfied about me becoming a 'Prommer' (i.e. attending the Henry Wood / BBC promenade concerts every summer evening for three months, mostly in the Royal Albert Hall in London). I am uncertain about whether he ever attended a Prom concert. However, he took my brother and me to a concert of Harrison Birtwhistle music at the Royal Festival Hall in London sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and it is obvious that he was familiar with this concert venue. This was the venue for one of the all-time greatest performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in mid-November 1957, of which I have a recording. It is possible that my father attended the concert..I like to imagine that as a 21 year old young man, recently returned to London winter smogs after National Service in sunny Cyprus, he was trying hard to ignore the coughing and to concentrate on the performance.