Happy New Year

Just a quick post around midnight on the 3rd of January... sending everyone our wishes for a big HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Everyone else is in bed and I am just sitting here by the fire with Yoshi, and have finished The Midnight Folk by John Masefield.  Baritone singers will recognise the author's name from the Vaughan Williams settings of his Salt-water Ballads, published in 1902; the most famous is probably Sea Fever.  I already owned a copy of his children's book, The Box of Delights (1935), but realised after I had read it a couple of years ago that it was a sequel to his earlier novel, The Midnight Folk (1927), and so ordered that one this Christmas.

It's a fascinating book to try to decode now, almost a century after it was written... if you are interested in more context then here is a marvellous essay by the University of Glasgow's Rob Maslen, entitled, "Poetics of Loss: John Masefield's The Midnight Folk and British Fantasy in the 1920s".

We had an enjoyable time at the Hammer's over NYE, with their family, Lawrence, and a couple more friends.  It was quite good weather, clear and fairly warm, so we were able to do our fireworks at midnight without any trouble.  That is not always the case here in Belgium; sometimes the weather has been so terribly cold and blustery and rainy that we skip the pyrotechnics.  But not this year!

While enjoying some appetisers and socialising in the early part of the evening, we started talking about one of our first NYE parties in Belgium, and the sabreing open of champagne bottles... it seemed like a good idea.  As we had no sabres on hand and had to improvise, naturally Lawrence advocated for a machete, while I as a Canadian opted for an axe.  Happily both were equally effective...

We opted to go "fancy dress" so Kiana and Maggie were in black and gold; India wore a blue traditional Chinese silk embroidered long dress; Duncan was in a grey suit, Bryan in a white dinner jacket and tie, and Lawrence and I in kilts.  We even managed to get Armani to put on Duncan's outgrown tuxedo, at least for a little while.

The next morning we were up around 10:00 and after a nice breakfast casserole and coffee, went out for a nice relaxed 9km run in the countryside.  It was good to blow out the cobwebs, and the day was still and bright, although running at around the freezing point meant we had to bundle up.  The dogs were thrilled to have a muddy run with a nice big group so that they could run back and forth and keep the "herd" together.

Yesterday was a pretty quiet day at home; we did some laundry and cleaned things up around the house, and did our best to work through or dump any left-over food from the holiday festivities.

Maggie, Malcolm, and Duncan all head back to school on Monday.  I don't have anything urgently on the calendar but would like to have a look at the music for what is coming up.  I just received another contract to sing a St. John Passion in later May 2020 here in Brussels, so I'm happy to add another gig to add to the list.  But I haven't sung the two February cantatas before, nor the Homilius Passion, and it's been a while since I last did the Sea Symphony.  (In fact I wrote about performing it in one of my first few blog posts, from way back in April of 2007, so that will mark fourteen years between first and second performances of this amazing work).

Those performance dates will arrive pretty quickly; it would be nice to get the jump on learning them while I have some free time, just in case something else happens to show up in the meantime...