There are few ‘pastures
green’ on the Continent at the moment
Although
it is almost a quarter of a century since I left England and its
pleasant pastures green, to live ‘on the Continent’ I still find it difficult to
function properly when the temperature rises steadily in the direction of forty
degrees Celsius.
It is
lovely to cycle every day in the sun and feel the warmth seeping through my
skin right through to the bones but for a fair-skinned English person like me
it is sometimes a bit too much. I sometimes find it necessary to hide away in
the coolness of my flat and go out only in the cooler (by a couple of degrees)
hours of the evening. That is what I did last weekend when I had concerts and
opera visits on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings but for most of Friday
and all day Saturday and Sunday I hid away in my sandstone flat. Indoor
temperatures unusually rose higher than the outdoor temperature by Sunday, but
luckily in the evening a short rain storm, accompanied by a fresh breeze, cooled
the air and the flat.
 |
| My tree-shaded balcony |
I slept
outside on my balcony last weekend, for as long as the hardness of a deckchair with
its foot-rest allowed. I managed about four hours in the fresh air and it was lovely – the first
cool sleep for weeks.
 |
| The cushion reads - 'Cats sleep anywhere' |
I slept out there again last night and realized that, although
the collared doves have left their nest in the tree that surrounds my balcony,
I still have neighbours; there were blackbirds fluttering around above me chirping
in the darkness as I tried to sleep – now I know why there was a shiny, greenish-black
feather lying on my chair during the week.
 |
| Candle light |
Mad dogs and
Englishwomen!
Yesterday
in the noon-day sun I cycled a round-trip of 25 kilometres in order to welcome
another conductor and her family to our fold. The team of Magyar men had
already completed the unloading when I arrived, just in time for cooling drinks,
pizza and tri-lingual conversations.
Oh how I love my
conductive lifestyle
I
cannot imagine anymore what it was like to live in just one culture, with only one
language ringing in my ears. At work with the children we add Dutch, Turkish, Russian,
French, and Spanish, to the German, English and Hungarian of my conversation
yesterday.
Keeping a cool head
The
temperatures were already up in the mid-thirties when I woke this morning so
today I will stay-put in my coolish living room where I will carry on with my
presentation-writing for the WCCE 2013.
Notes
England’s
pleasant pastures/mountains green – And did those feet in ancient time
a poem by William Blake from his epic Milton
a Poem
