Kathleen Jowitt writes contemporary literary fiction exploring themes of identity, redemption, integrity, and politics. Her work has been shortlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize and the Selfies Award, and her debut novel, Speak Its Name, was the first ever self-published book to receive a Betty Trask Award.
Long weekend in the Low Countries, by rail, sea, and jigsaw puzzle
Antwerpen Centraal, Anvers Central, Antwerp Central station is a magnificent neo-Romanesque monument. I knew this, because I have a jigsaw puzzle which features the entrance hall.
So of course I had to go and look at it.
We were actually planning to go last year, before my mother died. That trip happened last June in the end, but was rather curtailed, and Antwerp was one of the bits we had to cut. So this year it got a trip of its own.
We took the night ferry from Harwich and, having taken the whole day off in order to get there with minimal stress, thought we might as well stay on the train to Harwich Town at the end of the line. It made for a pleasant, if breezy, wander, but it seemed to have jumped straight into the off-season and very little was open. That, combined with a poorly toddler who didn’t like the wind at all, rather limited our options. We were extremely relieved to find that a place called Tea@Patricia’s was open and serving very good cakes.
Even Patricia wouldn’t stay open until check-in opened, though, so we decided that the ferry terminal was as good a place as any to eat fish and chips. Very good fish and chips, as it turned out. (Take the train to Dovercourt and go to the Fish House.) I have no complaints about the food in Harwich.
Over the years my overnight ferry bookings have become steadily less spartan. Back in 2007 it was a reclining seat. Ten years later it was a cabin, but nothing fancy. This time round we went for the one with two beds (one double, one single), room to turn around in the bathroom, and a window. Luxury. But I am appreciating sleep more these days, and also somebody has to stay in the cabin after child bedtime, so it’s worth making it slightly nicer.
Anyway, no matter how luxurious, or otherwise, one’s sleeping arrangements, it is exciting to see the ship coming in, and a pain in the backside to get through security and entry/exit (I seem to have defective fingerprints; the officers keep asking me to press harder when I’m already pressing as hard as I can), and it is a long walk up the ramp, and it is very exciting indeed to step on board. And, assuming one gets to sleep, it’s great fun to go to sleep in one country and wake up in another. I’ve done this crossing a few times now, and the red lighthouse at Hoek van Holland is becoming a friend.
Then it’s light rail to Schiedam and main line into the middle of Rotterdam, and then you’re really talking connections. I saw a Swiss loco, complete with boxy pantograph and Jungfrau branding, trundling through the middle of Rotterdam Centraal as if we were thousands of metres above sea level rather than flirting with minus figures. We were only going to Belgium, but, you know, it’s still pretty cool to just buy a ticket to a different nation state from a machine in the booking hall and then step onto a train.
A direct train to Antwerp, bound for Brussels and stopping at Breda and Noorderkempen on the way. I was hoping for a double decker, but I don’t think they run those on the Eurocity route. I got a window seat, anyway. Coming from the Fens, it’s a familiar landscape you see from it, flat and green with trees and ditches ruling it into neat rectangles. Sometimes Doggerland feels like it’s only just under the surface of the water.
And then Antwerp. Of course, arriving, you don’t get the magnificence that the residents see when they book their tickets. It’s not bad, though. Arriving from the Netherlands, the train pulls up somewhere close to the Earth’s mantle and if the lifts are broken (they were) you have to navigate a series of stairs and escalators (roltrap in Dutch, lovely word), and as you ascend you see more and more of the back view of that gigantic fanlight. There’s a certain Brutalist grandeur to the concrete platforms that draw the eye there, I suppose.
After our “metro at rush hour” experience in Lyon earlier in the year, I’d booked a room as close to the station as we could get, and I am making a note to myself here and now that this was a good idea and I should do it again. There’s the obvious practical advantage, of course, but it also makes it easier to avoid the magnetic draw of the historic, touristy bit. Plus there are trams and buses going to the historic, touristy bit, and plenty of places to eat. (Note: it would not be a good idea in Rotterdam, though.) In Antwerp there is also the zoo.
So that was our weekend: eating down the road from our hotel, wandering around the city in search of a playground; taking the tram to Melkmarkt for a glance at the square with the rococo fountain and the stepped gables, stopping to chat to a local mum and toddler (children are brilliant conversation starters), visiting the cathedral, and spending the entire afternoon at the zoo.
It was great. Chips with mayonnaise. Some awkward questions about what exactly is going on in Rubens’ Raising of the Cross and why is the baby sad. Coffee and toasties at a vegetarian café recommended by the local mum. A really satisfying wander around a Turkish-run ironmongery, resulting in the purchase of a pair of child’s sunglasses. A quick look at the exterior of the castle. Admiring art nouveau and art deco doorways.
We paid to get into the cathedral and into the zoo and didn’t regret either. In general I disapprove of places of worship charging entrance fees, but Antwerp cathedral is free for locals and under-18s, and there was a really excellent, thoughtful and thought-provoking, leaflet, and I found that I didn’t mind. As for the zoo, gosh, that was a lot of money, but that was also a lot of zoo, which managed to be surprisingly spacious given it’s right in the middle of town, behind the station.
After the zoo we went into the station from the other side, and it did indeed look just like my jigsaw:
It was almost too perfect. I was relieved to turn around and see a Prêt à Manger.
On Sunday it was raining in Antwerp and we could see it wasn’t raining in Rotterdam, so we returned to the station (discovering that it is indeed such a famous monument that an Asian couple was getting wedding photos done on the steps) and took a train north.
There is nothing helpful near the station in Rotterdam. There are various shops and fast food places in the station itself, but once you’re outside it’s a wasteland of bank headquarters and other forbidding high rise office blocks. But we’d worked this out the last time we were there, and we put our bags in the luggage lockers and took a tram to Beurs, which is the middle of the shopping district. We got welly boots in Hema and burgers and chips in Hkiki, and this was all very satisfying.
And finally, having gone to the end of the line at Harwich, we went to the end of the line at Hoek too, and spent a quarter of an hour on the beach, digging in the sand and watching other people’s kites, and then, when we were tired of the breeze, half an hour in a bar, watching the waves roll in. We saw our ship come in, too; and a couple of hours later we boarded it, and overnight it carried us home.
Straitened slipover
That’s straitened without a gh, you note. As in straitened circumstances. In this case, I had five balls of wool from the British Heart Foundation shop (three quid apiece, not bad for pure wool). The Internet could tell me absolutely nothing about it, so that was all I was ever going to have and I didn’t know what would play nicely with it. So I had five balls of wool. And this is what I did with them.
I started with a pattern from Knitting in Vogue, but I hadn’t even got to the end of the ribbing before it became obvious that I wasn’t going to have enough. So I made up my own pattern. I knitted tension squares (I hate knitting tension squares) and looked up cable patterns and did a lot of arithmetic. I started with the front, then did the back, sewed them together, then knitted on the smallest amount of rib that I could get away with, around the arm holes, and then went round and round the bottom edge with more rib until I ran out of yarn.
I’m really pleased with it. It’s the first pattern I’ve designed, it’s a great colour (the photo isn’t quite right; it’s more purple in real life), it gets to my waist (just about – I have a long back); it works. And I did all the ribbing on double-pointed needles because I didn’t have an appropriate cable one and I just wanted to get on with it. That feels quite badass. I only really regretted it a couple of times.
Now I think I want a high-waisted flared skirt in plum needlecord to go with it…
No such thing as bad weather (only bad kit)
My town bike is waiting for a pair of new tyres so I had to take the cargo bike to the station this morning. Now, the cargo bike is a tank, as bikes go, it’s long and heavy, but it also has an electric motor so getting it up the hill is rather less of an effort than getting a Pendleton Somersby up there on pure pedal power. I appreciated that this morning: it’s wet, so I zipped my jacket up, but it’s not all that cold, so I’d have been uncomfortably hot by the time I got to the top if I’d been doing it unassisted.
Anyway, the bit I really enjoyed was going down the other side. There was no other traffic, it wasn’t wet enough to impede my vision, and the wind and the rain on my face were exhilarating. I once read somewhere that cycling may be the closest most of us get to knowing what it’s like to fly (as opposed to being flown, I mean). It certainly felt like that this morning.
Greengage and rosemary tart
The plum trees have gone absolutely bonkers this year. We missed the best of the Victorias – we always do – because we were on the Isle of Wight, though I managed to freeze three trays full against the winter months. The greengage, though, is doing better than I’ve ever seen it. I’ve made six jars of jam, there’s easily as much fruit again still on the tree, and a load on the ground as well. (It’s been such a hard summer, I’m leaving that for the birds.)
This tart comes from the original Roasting Tin book. Rukmini Iyer uses huge, beautiful purple plums, which look much prettier cooked. But she had a food stylist and (I assume) didn’t have a glut of greengages. It is extremely tasty no matter how it looks.
Anyway, it’s dead easy: lay out ready-made puff pastry in a lined roasting tin, cover with stoned halved plums of whatever variety (this was 400g, about 5 minutes worth of picking and 20 of prepping), skin side down; mix 75g soft brown sugar with a teaspoonful of ground cinnamon and about the same of finely chopped rosemary and sprinkle it over the plums; add a few more sprigs of rosemary, and bake at 220°C (200°C fan) for half an hour.
It was the first time I’ve used the “Green Ginger” variety of rosemary, too. It’s the furthest away from the door, but I thought it would be worth including it in this one. I’m not sure how much of a difference it really made, but since the whole thing was very pleasant I’ll probably do it again next year. Maybe with more rosemary.
Sundays in the park
All through June and July and August, every Sunday afternoon that we weren’t doing anything else, we’ve gone down to the riverside to hear the brass band playing at the bandstand. Brass bands plural, rather; it’s a different group every week, coming in from the towns and villages all around. One thinks of brass as a Northern, industrial thing, but the council or whoever organises this doesn’t seem to have any trouble filling the schedule. Round here I suspect it’s more of a military, or legacy-military thing, or simply an enjoying-making-music thing.
It’s a lovely way to spend an afternoon, lazing under the trees, listening to live music, with the toddler running between our spot and the play area. In fact, it’s the one sort of concert where I feel really confident bringing a toddler. Maybe we send someone along the riverbank to the ice cream van.
It’s a brilliant community thing. The audience is always a mixture of friends of the band, regulars (their numbers growing through the summer as more and more people catch on) and passers-by. Last week we got there slightly late and found that our next door neighbours, plus extended family, had set up just in front of our usual spot. Yesterday there was one of the nursery families, who’d really just come for the slide and been pleasantly surprised by the music.
I say brass bands. Most of them were: some called themselves jazz orchestras or swing orchestras, but either way, there was a lot of brass involved. There has to be, really, if you want to make yourself heard outdoors with minimal amplification (any singers will get a mic, likewise the bass guitar if there is one, obviously, but that’s about as far as it goes).
Anyway, there’s a wide, if predictable, repertoire. There’s the jazz and the swing, obviously, and when it was one of the less specialist groups you could generally bet on the programme including: some show tunes, probably in medley form, a military march or two, some film music, TV themes (I know I’ve played that Star Trek compilation at some Saturday morning youth music scheme, a decade and a half before I saw any Trek, and I played cello; there must have been a version for full orchestra), a hymn, and some classic rock. It is extremely accessible, and that is entirely appropriate for the time and place. On Sunday I was standing next the climbing frame, alternately offering encouragement and singing along with The Teddy Bears’ Picnic (and getting a little thrown by the repeats not coming where I expected them).
It’s been hot, and dry (you may have noticed). Most weeks, the audience must have been hard to spot from the bandstand, hiding under trees or any other patch of shade. The grass got progressively more parched. The musicians generally took their jackets off. The willow trees stayed green, but there was a depressing expanse of yellow between us and them, and the sky was aggressively blue. This was about the only bearable outdoor activity. Abide with me, the band played a couple of weeks ago, fast falls the eventide, in glaring sunshine. Mind you, up the hill at the cathedral Evensong would just have started.
As the summer wore on, we evolved more and more elaborate seating arrangements (we are, I should say, by no means the only people with folding chairs and a festival trolley). Sometimes I brought a flask of tea; occasionally, a cake from the market; often, a punnet of strawberries. Somebody always has a better-looking picnic: full marks to the people the other week who’d fixed themselves up with a cream tea complete with fizz. My own Glyndebourne-level aspirations will have to wait another year.
Because it’s over. This Sunday was the last concert of the year. It was a bit of a toss-up whether we’d make it, having been away the night before. I’m glad we did. It was the right way to round out August. One last trip to the ice cream van. Some absolute bangers (technical term). A late, blessed, prolonged soaking has turned the grass green again. Towering grey clouds hint at more if we’re lucky. The folding chairs are back in the garage. The Lord’s My Shepherd (tune: Crimond), always imbued for me with a slightly beery, teary nostalgia, is lingering in my head, but the last tuba player has packed up and gone home.
Summer of song
I probably packed too much into this summer. Two arts festivals, one convention, three counties, two concerts, two talks, one opera patched together from at least six others, fourteen train journeys, goodness knows how many bus journeys, more stuff than would fit in a decently sized Kia, two passenger ferry crossings. Four scheduled family get-togethers, ranging from two people to fourteen.
Two worlds, for goodness’ sake: the flat one on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle, and the regular round one. Three centuries, although we seemed to keep skipping over the middle one. Potty training. More dead relations than I’d been expecting. My birthday. That weird thing that time does on the Isle of Wight. Emotions, loads of them.
Specifically, all of that somehow folded up and fitted into three weeks, and now I’ve written it down I’m thinking it’s not surprising I’ve been absolutely shattered ever since we got home from the Discworld Convention. Yes, there is certainly a school of thought that says summer holidays ought to be relaxing, but it is fair to admit that this one wasn’t, really. Although I’d go back and do it all over again.
Two festivals and a convention
Music in the Burnhams. Ventnor Fringe. The International Discworld Convention. The two festivals overlapped – that is, the week that was Music in the Burnhams sat neatly within the ten days that was Ventnor Fringe. At least I’d booked the whole lot as annual leave early in the year. Then we had a couple of days of actual seaside holiday, with intervals of Removing Stuff From My Late Mother’s House, and a week at home before DWCon.
Two concerts, two talks
I’d have liked to have got to more. I’d have liked to hear every single piece of Julius Benedict’s music on the whole week-long programme. But aside from the scheduling, there was travel and childcare to contend with, and what I got was two talks by the world Benedict expert (I didn’t know there was a world Benedict expert! but I am very pleased to have found there is, and to have met him and been enthusiastic) followed by two lunchtime concerts in the Burnhams, and the offer of a ticket at Fringe that I couldn’t realistically take up.
But my word, those two were quite something. By virtue of being the featured composer’s great-great-great-granddaughter, I had front row seats. That gave me a very good view of some extremely good musicians playing some fiendishly difficult music. It always takes me several repetitions to get my head around a piece of music, to have any coherent reaction beyond ‘Wow’ or ‘What?’, and until I get to hear these again I’ll be stuck on ‘Wow’ (and also ‘How?’).
And then there was the rather overwhelming awareness of the fact that I am in the church where Nelson was baptised, listening to music that has not been heard by an audience in one hundred and fifty years, written by my great-great-great-grandfather, who I feel as if I am just beginning to get to know, wishing my parents could have been here to hear this too.
Slow travel
My father would very much have approved of my second day at the Burnhams in particular. I took an early train to King’s Lynn, then rode on the top of a bus that headed for the coast at Hunstanton, sat there for a while to get its breath back, and then traced the coastline. I watched the architecture change from red brick filled in with yellow brick to red brick filled in with flint; lamented dried-up duckponds; boggled at a Fat Face shop apparently in the middle of nowhere. Sat outside a rather chi-chi Italian deli and drank a cup of coffee and watched the world go by. Learned more about The Lily of Killarney – and once again regretted the fact that there was an almost-complete recording on vinyl in 1968 and Pa apparently never knew about it.
Then – and this was more something that other members of my family would appreciate – I rode my little orange folding bike from the talk venue to the concert venue, up and down a single-track lane that dissolved into sand at the verges.
As for the other journeys, well, I’ve taken many trains to Portsmouth and many ferries on to the Isle of Wight. I will say here, though, that it continues to be worth the extra twenty minutes or whatever it is to take the Thameslink through London, change at East Croydon or Three Bridges (you could change at Gatwick Airport, but I wouldn’t) and bumble gently along the Southern line to Arundel and Chichester. There are two reasons: firstly, avoiding the Underground, particularly with a three-year-old, is always a good thing; and secondly, Arundel is just ridiculously beautiful with its spires and turrets set against the South Downs.
Island time
Island time is slow time, and Ventnor time is basically geological. It’s because there’s so much geology around there. I have no idea how the Fringe organisers manage to make the shows start on time. Maybe they don’t. I made it to precisely one show this year, and I was late to that. Anyway, it was good. Weird, and sad, because it’s been weird every year since 2020 and sad every year since 2022, but good. We hung around at the Book Bus, and we hung around at the bandstand, and we got some executor stuff talked about, and I’ll be glad when we don’t have to talk about executor stuff any more, but I’ll also be glad to come back to Ventnor.
What worked
I bought a pair of Loop earplugs on something of a whim ahead of the convention, wore them at dinner with a portion of my extended family at a notoriously loud restaurant, and was an instant convert. Of course, just because I could suddenly hear them didn’t help with anybody else hearing anything else, but it was lovely to see them all.
Other things I was glad I brought to the convention: peppermint teabags; a very large bag of (mostly) shelf-stable snacks; my adorable toucan butter knife; Compeed blister plasters; safety pins.
But in Ankh-Morpork…
I married into Discworld fandom, and, you know, as in-laws go, it’s great. Interesting and amusing people. A chance to apply my English Literature brain, particularly in regard to performance, arts, and stories. The food was a bit of a disaster, but I had prepared snackegy, and there were enough places within a reasonable driving distance (and we’d brought the car) that we didn’t go hungry. But the main point of the event so far as this household was concerned was to see my husband sing two and a half Mozart arias in character as Casununda the amorous dwarf (or, in his case, to actually do this, obviously), and this went extremely well. There was a small exclamation of “That’s my daddy!” from the audience but happily this only reinforces the characterisation.
And that wound things up in a surreal but really rather appropriate manner. Summer for me is for the performing arts and for family, and if that expresses itself in the form of my beloved spouse singing Here in Ankh-Morpork my target is eight – ahem – seven plus one!, very carefully not putting any weight on a disreputable wooden stepladder, well, why not?
Ely, hollyhock season
Summer. Nutholt Lane, Silver Street, Chapel Street. The hollyhocks assert their authority once again. In June they shoot upwards and present massed bands of trumpet flowers. Ice cream colours: white, pink, maybe the deep magenta of an upmarket blackcurrant sorbet. The tallest of them tower several feet overhead, and even the short ones spill out onto the pavement as if by right. They take over the front gardens, claiming every square foot of gravel, taking advantage of any crack in the tarmac. Chapel Street is especially blessed with an exuberant forest of hollyhocks. Who needs a driveway, anyway?
Now, at the end of July, they’re fading. There are still plenty of flowers, but further down the stem there are ring-shaped seed heads ripening and drying, exposing seeds packed tightly, vertically, like slides in an old-fashioned projector. More next year. We’ll do this all over again.
Glorious returns
The thing about writing contemporaries – the thing that I found, anyway – is that the main characters stick around in one’s head and continue to have opinions about what’s going on in the world. Particularly General Synod (Stancester) and professional cycling (A Spoke in the Wheel). Every election result, doping scandal, every disappointing decision, every too-good-to-be-true stage win, I’d know what they thought of it. More generally, I tended to have a good idea of what they were up to now, where life had taken them. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it (probably; you never know) but if I asked myself what so-and-so was doing I’d just know.
And then the next project happened to be a historical novel, and the one after that was far future sci-fi*, and nobody in either of those would understand what’s going on in the world today, beyond the very generic ‘ugh, human nature’. And then I stopped writing altogether, more or less, and didn’t have time to follow cycling any more, and Twitter became unreadable, and everybody went away. It wasn’t quite as definite as that. They just weren’t there any more. Last year Issues in Human Sexuality was binned (not before time), and neither Lydia nor Colette had a thing to say about it, never mind the fact that they both had very strong opinions on it in The Real World and I, personally, cried.
The other week, though, just after I’d got going again, I was at a parent-and-toddler group, and there was Lydia – at least, not there, but very definitely knee deep in small children, in some other church hall. She isn’t even in this new book, I don’t think. Not outside the chapter headings. Probably. Anyway, it was very nice to see her. I’d missed her.
*Does this mean that I have three novels on the go at the moment? Yes, I’m afraid it does. Is that slowing up progress on all of them? I’m honestly not sure. What seems to be happening in practice is that the Shiny New Novel is getting most of the attention, but the others are getting a sentence a day**, and you know, that’s more than anything was getting before, so we’ll go with that.
**Assuming I get any writing time at the computer. If not, Shiny New Novel might get something in a notebook if it’s lucky, and the rest of them take their chances.
Back to Stancester
I’ve been reading my own books.
I was at least partly prompted, I have to admit, by an entity that emailed me assuring me that it was not a spammer, telling me how inspirational my books could be, and scolding me for what a disaster my publicity has been of late. I know, sender of unsolicited negging guilt-trippy business pitches. I know.
At the present moment, I would have trouble telling you where you can actually buy my books, and I’m painfully aware that they aren’t available in as many places as they should be. As for things like having a social media presence, for what that’s worth these days, and knowing whether or not my mailing list works… *hollow laughter*
Up until very recently, I didn’t care at all. I did not have the capacity to care. The last five years have not left me much room to write, still less to care about selling about what I’d already written. And it was the not-writing that was bothering me.
In a slightly wacky but nonetheless effective practice, I had an imaginary conversation with the version of my future self who has actually been managing to write something. She had robust opinions about my correspondent’s sense of boundaries, but she agreed that my books were worth reading, and suggested I do that.
I was going to start with the work-in-progress workbook on how to write your book while you have a day job, in the hope that my past writing self would have something helpful to say, but, for fairly obvious reasons, the books I have in EPUB format are the ones I’ve already published. So I returned to Stancester. Speak Its Name last Tuesday. The Real World last Wednesday.
Anyway, it turns out they aren’t bad at all. Rereading, I have (of course) found several things I’d do differently now, but only a couple that really made me cringe. (Although I think I had an old file for Speak Its Name. I have vivid memories of fixing all those inconsistently curly inverted commas, and who the hell is Lucy? Didn’t I write her out? Combine her with Georgia?) A while ago I thought The Real World was the best thing I’d ever written, but then it got comprehensively ignored. Now I don’t think it’s stand-out brilliant, but I do think it’s still pretty good. They keep you reading. At least, they kept me reading – and I know what happens.
And now I seem to be writing the third. Don’t get excited: it’s four pages, just over 1000 words, and only about half of those are new. (Yes, I had started writing it some time in the five years of life upheaval…) And does anyone actually want to read Will and Georgia’s lockdown diaries? I doubt it. I’m not even sure that I want to write them. But there’s still a shred of that magnificent indifference clinging to me. I don’t care whether anybody wants to read it. It’s what wants to be written, so off we go.
Meanwhile, my future writing self is drinking coffee and smiling quietly, and talking me down from the old familiar “but can I really write this?” wobble. I haven’t broached the topic of sorting out distribution and publicity for the books I already have. It does not feel like a priority, not when there’s writing to be done. Still, I have just gone through all the links from my book pages and removed some of the dead ones. It’s a start. Thank you for the nudge, mystery correspondent.
Sir Julius Benedict rediscovered
Three years ago, almost exactly, I went to see Opera della Luna’s Sweeney Todd:
– subtitled The Victorian Melodrama, and sub-subtitled NOT the musical by Stephen Sondheim (Opera della Luna). This took the script of the original 1847 production and added – as seems to have been consistent with period practice – background music from a small orchestra. The music came from various (higher-brow) composers of the era, including my great-great-great-grandfather Julius Benedict. Hence our going to see it: I may never hear Benedict’s music performed live by professionals again.
Which just goes to show how much I know. For all my life, Benedict has been languishing in obscurity, my distinguished ancestor nobody’s ever heard of. I mean, I was fairly thrilled the other month to find a copy of Weber in London, which quotes Benedict’s rather gloomy write-up of his teacher’s last concert, in a National Trust second-hand bookshop. One takes what one can get.
But recently I learned – thanks to my husband happening to have Radio 3 on at just the right moment – that a music festival in Norfolk will very much be featuring Benedict’s music performed live by professionals. And not just as incidental music that I won’t actually be able to recognise. As the main event.
In fact, there’s going to be a whole week of it. I’ve had that tab open for a month now and I still can’t quite believe it.
I am thrilled. I am beyond thrilled.
I am very sad that my father did not live to see this, because he would have been even more thrilled than I am.
I am a little frustrated that my circumstances are such that I cannot go to all fourteen events.
I am doing my homework, listening to the recordings I have, reading the books I have.
I am wondering if – hoping that – this is just the beginning, that Benedict is going to be the newly rediscovered unjustly forgotten composer of the moment. I am trusting that I won’t need to regret the ten events I can’t get to, because I will no longer have to worry about this being my only chance to hear his work.
Apart from anything else, it’s lovely. Here, have his piano concerto in C minor:
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And if you can get to the Burnhams, in Norfolk, come and hear more of it. I’ll see you there.
