lots of socialising... stained glass... and ready for a concert

This week has included lots of socialising... and some stained glass collecting.

Tuesday late afternoon I made a brief drive to a neighbourhood close to the Hammers, to pick up some stained glass windows that most likely had started their lives in a little church somewhere.  They were extremely inexpensive but of good quality... when I got them home and put them up I realised that they match the colour scheme of the living room perfectly, with the pale green, pale blue, red and yellow colours complementing our decor very well.  A nice find!

les dogs at play

Osa made his way back home on Wednesday, and that same evening we had a nice dinner with Raoul and Luisa in Brussels while Simon spent some time in Brussels with some of his old Belgian friends before catching a lift with us back to Wavre.

Simon and Duncan and les dogs

Yoshi seems to miss his friend Osa

Thursday I drove Simon into Brussels to catch his train back to Paris, and went to the music store Adagio for some scores.  The store is moving again, for what seems like the fourth time since we've been in Brussels, and they are liquidating their stock at half price.  I picked up a volume of Faure songs in the middle voice that has just been printed by C. F. Peters: funnily enough the editor is Roy Howat, whom I was lucky enough to meet a few years ago, when he was giving a masterclass at Queen's University in Kingston.  At that time he was still doing research for this new publication, so it's quite nice to have the fruits of his labour in my hands.  I must confess that while my own enthusiasms as a young singer tended toward German lieder and then Italian art song, I really do enjoy the French repertoire, especially as I now speak French more easily than I did twenty years ago.  In the coming years if  I am to teach some young students it would do well to have some more French melodie in my own repertoire, and so a nice clean copy is important.

We had Christophe and Isabelle over last night for a harvest meal, with leek and carrot soup, venison stewed in red wine, parsleyed new potatoes, baked apples with cranberries, stuffed peppers (from Isabelle) and a banana bread with ice cream to finish.  It was a special meal but it took us until late today to clean up everything!

Today I took Yoshi for a brisk 13km run before going to the Hammers' to give a guitar lesson.  They both are progressing very well; India has been playing the ukelele for a while so she is ahead of Bryan technically to some extent, but I'm focusing on different thing with each of them, and they are both making progress in their own ways.

Now it's off to bed before I have an early start tomorrow: it's a 90 minute drive to get to Oostburg, then the rehearsal, followed by the perfomance in the later afternoon of those two Requiem masses by the siblings of more famous composers.  I think that Duncan and I will still get a little time in together after I get home, and then our week as two bachelors is over...