21st century music delivery

Vajraloka, May 2022

Reading about the adventures of Lola II and Mr M in the Far East (via their app) makes this blog seems very parochial. I have done a small amount of travel, but only to London where I was house-sitting again for the travellers. I therefore had a shorter journey to visit mum and dad on the occasion of mum's 90th birthday. Happy Birthday mumsy!

I also went into central London to meet Cousin Y, and at Sister D's recommendation we visited the Wallace Collection. It's amazing - we had a guided tour that lasted over an hour and only scratched the surface. I had no idea! They use all that modern technology though, providing information via scannable QR codes rather than printed labels, and I wasn't feeling hi-tech enough to start messing with that. So I don't think I got the most out of the visit, and I'd like to go back again.

There's been some Buddhism as always, including a Team Meeting where my role is generally Chair, Secretary, Minute Taker and everything else except Treasurer. The person who is supposed to look after the finances invariably turns up saying he hasn't actually looked at the bank account but he thinks it's fine. I also took UJ to the Birmingham Buddhist Centre for a festival day along with my neighbour and another friend, both of whom are being extremely kind and offering to spend time with her - and in the case of my neighbour, also offering up her cat for play time. And another friend and I went off to a local cub scout group to talk about Buddhism. Trying to introduce meditation and explaining ethical principles to a very fidgety group of 8 to 10 year-olds really highlights the gaps in your own knowledge.

Saving the most exciting event until last - I have bought a new amplifier! Although I still occasionally play CDs, and vinyl even more occasionally, since being introduced to Spotify by Mr MXF I have mostly been streaming music through the downstairs hi-fi using a Chromecast audio gadget. Recently the amp has started to become a little unreliable. They made things to last back then - I bought it 40 years ago with my first real wage from employment (a temporary job at the Gas Board before university), and it cost £79.90, when VAT rates were 15% and CDs hadn't been invented. The speakers and cables I bought at the same time (£80.00) are still going strong, the cassette deck died many years ago, and the turntable (£87.50) is a little unreliable but I barely use it now. I never use the tuner; I really should sell it, but it's old fashioned analogue not DAB and I doubt it will fetch very much. [Quick look on ebay - maybe a tenner if I'm lucky.]

I was walking past a fancy music shop in town and went inside on a whim to see what's what nowadays. The man there did exactly what I wanted, taking on board all my preferences and requirements and offering a couple of alternatives. So when I got back from London I went back with my credit card. The new system has barely any external controls, not even an on/off switch, and is managed almost entirely via apps and WiFi. It does have an input for the CD player but not for anything else, and the app incorporates Internet radio, and - most excitingly - I have a second linked speaker for the kitchen, which will replace 'turning up the volume in the living room with the kitchen door open' to hear music in the kitchen. It's such high quality too. And the price? That has increased ten-fold in 40 years. But I hope I won't have to buy another for the next 40 years.

What I've been reading

Time Travel in Einstein's Universe
by J. Richard Gott

"Although scientists are not yet taking out patents on a time machine, they are investigating whether it is possible under the laws of physics. In Newton's three-dimensional world this would have been inconceivable. But with Einstein's theory of relativity a fourth dimension - time - enters the frame."

I found this in a free book exchange at a bus stop in Wales, where the standard of literature was far higher than I could have expected. It's quite a technical read and I couldn't possibly recount the arguments about the curvature of space time and physics of black holes, but essentially the case is made for the possibility of time travel albeit in very theoretical circumstances.

Facing Mount Kanchenjunga: An English Buddhist in the Eastern Himalayas
by Sangharakshita

"In 1950 Kalimpong was a lively trading town in the corner of India that borders Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet. Finding a welcome in this town, nestled high in the mountains, were a bewildering array of guests and settlers: ex-colonial military men, missionaries, incarnate Tibetan lamas, exiled royalty and Sangharakshita, a young English monk attempting to establish a Buddhist movement for local youngsters."

This second volume of autobiography covers a number of years in Kalimpong, a town on the border of India and Nepal, when nothing much really happened except that Sangharakshita meets a lot of interesting people and goes on trips with casks containing the Sacred Relics of two of the Buddha's closest disciples. Despite the unpromising material, he's a good enough writer to make it readable, and I'm enjoying following the unusual journey towards the founding of a western Buddhist community.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera

"In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel 'the unbearable lightness of being' not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine."

Lent to me by the same friend who lent me the Annie Proulx book that I loved, I'm not as keen on this one. Lots of philosophising about promiscuity and the feelings of betrayal of wives, a fair bit of self-justification from the males, and not much more than silence from the female lovers. The setting of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion was interesting, but not the navel gazing that comprises the rest of the novel.

Going out, bafflement and idiocy

Vajraloka, May 2022

I've been enjoying being less busy than during the summer, now that I've cut back on all the volunteering. So what I've been doing is much more ordinary, but it's been fun doing some of it with UJ.

We both enjoy watching films at home, but this week we went to the cinema - UJ is pretty good at following the English but she does miss a few bits. She also came with me to the tiny local cafe/music venue for some stand-up live comedy, which was pretty good, and I took her to see one of my Buddhist friends and we had a walk with another to set up a support network so she isn't entirely reliant on me. She's been going swimming and has joined the gym, she volunteers for a local food bank where I think she meets a few other Ukrainians, and she has one other friend locally, but I think life must be a little unexciting for her most of the time.

I went to the same small venue with another friend to to see Tom Robinson - big star at the end of the 1970's but disappeared and emerged many years later as a DJ on BBC 6 Music. His voice and face both show the passing of the years but he is very entertaining and played the hits for us along with a few new songs. Most notable happening for this evening was when someone on the floor above our basement dropped a drink directly above me and a considerable amount found its way through the floorboards onto my head.

I have been given another new project by Mr MXF. I did ask him whether any of the multiple unfinished projects he has given me have actually contributed anything to the greater good, and he reassured me that despite not having finished anything, the work I had done was good enough to bring in work from customers, so that's nice. 

This job is about using a tool called Hugo to build a static website to display the document I'd previously successfully converted to markdown format. If you don't understand any of that, which is very likely, then you will be as baffled as I was when after succeeding (after a fashion) on my laptop I tried to do the same thing using a cloud environment called Gitlab. I managed to create a website, but try as I might I couldn't get it to display my content, not even using the incomprehensible documentation and all the powers of YouTube. We have spent more than an hour on a Zoom call today, which I recorded, and the next step is to review the recording to see if I understand more after the second (or third) time round.

Sister D claimed her second birthday outing, to Batsford Arboretum. The trees were stunning and so was the weather - wind, warm sunshine, pouring rain and almost everything in between. And then it was time to return to London for more house-sitting - yes, Lola II and Mr M are still globe-trotting - but in an uncharacteristically idiotic moment I had driven as far as Uxbridge before realising with a jolt that I hadn't brought the keys, nor the contact details for the local people who had them, and it was already 11 p.m. The only way it could have been worse was if I had followed my initial plan and forgotten the keys while coming by train - but that plan was defeated by strikes. UJ wasn't in the car to witness my incompetence as she has stayed at home in order to meet her JobCentre coach, but she may arrive for more touristic activity at the weekend, strikes permitting.