August Bank Holiday - Update on the Pissporeids

Through the citified light of roof top london I saw one spectacular shooting star - a vapour trail after image etched on the inside of the eye - and that was it. So much for the Perseids... and the Leonids, and Halley's comet, and Telstar and the Kohoutek comet and all the rest of the no-show bastards of antiquity.

Well, almost - the Hale-Bopp comet delivered, hanging in the sky for months with a fiery silver tail over Bruno Allordi's Accordion shop. Gone now - both of them.


( Childhood cluster on the undressed splintery pine vertigo of the old fire escape in Ivanhoe Road waiting for Sputnik or somesuch to pass over, freezing incomprehension circa 1957. My father, "Is that it?" "No, its a plane"... hopes raised and dashed in zeitgeist rhythm, a consistent tradition of natural disappointment )

Hence my lack of surprise at the discovery of a huge immeasurable void close to earth (see below). It just confirmed all my previous experience. So much for the promise of outer space.

Meanwhile, here on earth I hear the greatest performance of Mahler's 3rd Symphony I'm ever likely to at the Albert Hall on Wednesday. Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival orchestra (plus Anna Larsson to sing Neitzsche's "O, Mensch"). Then, Friday, I hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard play Ligeti's piano studies - he turned the piano into an instrument of awe and terror culminating in "the devil's staircase" which left the whole hall spellbound as the basso profundo thunderous climax ebbed away into a breath-held silence.

Then, this morning, up to Hampstead Heath for a similiarly terror-inducing dive into the rain-replenished freezing (slight exaggeration - 17'C 63' F) depths of the almost empty men's pond.

So, to alleviate the mindnumbing horror of the expanding void - a picture of Rupert and Sue