missing Macca, seeing Yo Yo's "Silk Road"

In all this merriment about celebrations, I need to signal a great loss and sadness: my beloved Macca did a concert in Hamilton, only 60 k. away from my home, on Thursday night, the night I was sitting in my garden surrounded by family and neighbours, drinking Prosecco. When the concert was announced, I had to do an assessment and decided not to go, though among Macca fans, who fly around the world to follow him, that is despicable laziness. A woman was interviewed in Hamilton who has seen him 90 times. Now that's a fan. Including the twice-in-one-day in Paris in June 1965, I have seen him only seven times. I should have been in Hamilton.

But I was in my garden drinking Prosecco. I love you deeply, Sir Paul, but, believe it or not, there are people and things I love even more.

Including documentaries and music, so today I had a special treat, two in one: "The Music of Strangers: Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble," a doc about the multi-cultural Silk Road band brought together by Ma. It's a stunning film - weep-worthy. Yes, the doc has flaws, it's scattered and flits about at great speed. But the core of the film, the power of music to transcend barriers of language and culture, is clear and glorious. We follow four brilliant musicians especially, a Spanish and a Chinese woman, a Syrian and an Iranian man - particularly these four, who have survived revolution and tragedy - and follow them into their homelands and their new lives in America. We explore Yo Yo's life as a child prodigy, his slow coming home to himself. The music is stunning, especially as we get to know the musicians. I could not recommend this film more highly. I wish I'd seen it before going to the Beach Jazz Festival yesterday; I would have paid more attention to who was playing and what they were saying with the music.

Very very hot, incredibly hot. But I'm almost ready. Tomorrow, ten women are coming to spend the whole day writing in my garden, having lunch and writing and writing. Someone in the film quotes T. S. Eliot about the fact that we are all on a journey, and if we're lucky, at the end of the journey we will come back to the place where we started and see it as if for the very first time. That's what we'll go for tomorrow.

A final word re the political horrors we've been watching south of the border:
"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." - H L Mencken

And at this stressful time in world affairs, with fascist politicians appearing all over the globe and the head of the Ku Klux Klan running for office, let's not even THINK about this:

Alcohol is a direct cause of seven ​​forms of cancer, finds study. PHOOEY!