Snow fell overnight and snow now covers the dirt and everything else like sleep covers frantic thinking. You can just relax about any of those bad habits you might have diagnosed yourself as having. Watch yourself as you perform them. If you watch them carefully enough they will resolve themselves without effort.
The S-Bahn is empty-ish, a beer bottle on the floor, everyone is checking their phones. Snow covers the embankments and the trees. Looking across the carriage and out the window there’s a limit to how far you can see up the embankment because of the reflections and the angle.
An older man with trainers, a white shirt, and a pullover tied around his waist fans himself with a piece of paper while trying to get through to someone on the phone, he mutters to himself and drops the papers he was carrying, which annoys him greatly. He has trouble with the phone.
Then the man suddenly cries out and an elderly lady who has recently boarded and now sits next to him asks him what is the matter. He explains he is annoyed by his ring-tone that had suddenly sounded, because no-one else on the train would have wanted to hear it. He worries too much.
Some weeks later I hear Baldham announced by the automated S-Bahn voice and feel prompted to write again.
I had just been thinking about days where mind and nerve endings seem to be on point: more supple, more relaxed, more capable than usual. How can you tell? The passage you struggle with in the Prelude to third suite suddenly works a bit better, the sounds come together more naturally, it all feels fresher.
I noticed this many years ago while at university, I would pick up the Cello to gauge my state of being for the day: a systems check. Perhaps that’s a routine to re-introduce now.
This reminds me how I noticed again that the mind and the body keep working while away from the instrument. You can practice something a few times and it feels like there’s no progress, then give it a rest for a week or so. When you come back you notice that something has changed, adjustments have been made.
A man with noise cancelling headphones has been sitting diagonally opposite since Grafing. White trousers, blue jacket, black computer bag with a leather handle, round horn glasses, hair back, looks a bit like images of Peter Handke I remember seeing somewhere, a week of facial hair carefully pruned above the jaw-line. What is he listening to?
Just now, the S-Bahn’s display informed me that there are “hi-fi bars” in Munich where music is not just for background atmosphere but for active listening.
I thought I had cancelled my Spotify subscription but realised recently that it is still running, which is just as well. I was inactively listening to Schiff’s lecture on the Beethoven F-minor piano sonata, while typing this, and Spotify has now moved me on to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness cassette, and I am reminded not to be self-critical during the upcoming meditation that I’m not going to do… He instructs me to lie down flat on my back, which prompts association to our S-Bahn episode last time with the group of young people making themselves comfortable on the S-Bahn floor.
All this was prompted by the announcement of the Baldham stop, now long past, which my mind associates with Baldock, which links to “trains of thought” between Royston and London.
I get up and leave the S-Bahn and look down at Peter Handke’s phone. Turns out the guy was on a Teams call. Hi-fi headphones for work…
notes and attempts 