h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In Cambridge, a May Ball would be held in June, of course.

Sounds roughly the same as the May Ball - this is to celebrate the end of school. "Debs" is short for "debutantes".

Just noticed that I didn't change the title each day.

Today, Mrs G and I drove to Wexford to sort out our mobile home. It's about a 2-hour drive to Wexford. About half way we decided to stop for coffee and found that nowhere in County Wexford seems to open before 12 o'clock. Eventually we found a lovely new restaurant we hadn't seen before only about 15 minutes from the mobile. We had lovely coffee and some buns.

The mobile itself was only a 30-minute job, draining the water from the system, going through all the stored food: stuff that will be ok until next summer, stuff that is past its date and has to be dumped and stuff that is still ok but won't be by next summer - these we brought home. We also packed all the quilts and pillows into plastic bags to protect them from damp.

Once the mobile was sorted, we drove to the nearby Ballycross Apple Farm, where we admired the ducks, goats and horses, then bought a couple of enormous bags of apples.

Now it was time to go home. We drove as far as north Wicklow where Mrs G knew there was garden centre with a very nice restaurant, for a late lunch (it was now 4pm). We couldn't find it and did quite a lot of driving around, but eventually, heading back on our tracks towards Wexford, we saw a sign, and a few minutes later we were sitting down to tomato soup and falafels. I had a glass of wine, as Mrs G had volunteered to do the rest of the driving.

I would have liked to look around, as the garden centre also hosts the National Garden Display Centre, but it was now getting dark at 4:45. So we'll come back some other day and see the gardens.

Back home by about 6.

Sounds like a grand day out

You do reference a paticular bug bear of mine. Sell/Use by dates.

There are some things that should be composted, especially when they glow in the dark, or move faster than expected.

But generally it is my opinion that, whilst they may not taste their best, most foods will last until they crumble into dust.

I always remember buying a certain mineral water which proudly proclaimed, 'filtered through the Vosges mountains for five thousand years' and in small print on the bottom added 'best used by 30th November'

the use by/best before dates on water... seriously...

I also remember a guy who sold honey, which apparently, and to my certain knowledge does, last forever, being required by Health and Safety (bless their little pointed heads) to put a use by date on his product, which he naturally complied with. And so if you buy his honey it specifically states that you must use it by 3013.

But there a " once opened, use by...." Clause, which even applies to water.

Deb

The colours of the leaves were spectacular all along the drive down and back. The sea in Wexford was very calm and reflected a lovely blue sky, although we had some fairly heavy clouds over the land.

The weather forecasters predicted rain, but we only had a few drops. A lovely day.

Have you never smelled the distinctively sweaty aroma of a bottle of mineral water that has been opened and left for a couple of weeks? I certainly have... Still pondwater is different from flowing streams...

I am a bit flexible with sell-by dates, though - I will drink OK milk that has passed the date, because I can tell if it is off or not, and crisps are not so bad if they are older (perhaps not quite as crisp as they were shortly after being made, but not inedible).

I've heard that bottled water often has quite high levels of bacteria in it, and so should be drunk by the best by date.

In general, if the best by date is a few years after the product is packaged, you can overrun it by a few months. If the best by date is only two days after it is packaged, then you shouldn't go over it even by an hour!

[lil] a bit past her sell-by date

Had our small choir rehearsal this evening. We're rehearsing for Evensong in St Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday 8 December.

I've never sung Evensong before, or even been at one. Many of the choir are in the same boat, so the conductor was explaining it all to us. He looks after the girls' choir in the cathedral, so things like Evensong are second nature to him.

We're doing an all-Byrd programme, except for the Psalm. As an Introit (entrance hymn), we'll do Rorate Coeli:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkHpsiO5HaI (this isn't us singing)

and for the Anthem at the end, we do Vigilate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHjAJq4IKY (again, not us).

It's lovely to sing through something like this, not having any idea what it is going to sound like. The conductor had never heard it before, so we were all pleasantly surprised, although we've a good bit of tidying up to do.

More of a shock was the Anglican Psalm - we're given the notes, but how they match up to the words is indicated by strange symbols known as pointing, rather than standard musical notation. It's supposed to sound more like spoken English set to music than normal singing - the rhythm of it is not written down but taken from the normal rhythm of the spoken word. I'd say we'll be doing a lot of practice of it.

All good fun. We've a few more rehearsals before the performance.

Ah, William Byrd! The English Sound.

I thought the Byrds were more Californian?

I printed out the sheet music for the Rorate Coeli a few weeks ago in the hope that we could do it at school for the Advent service at our school. We have exactly the right people in our course to do it one per voice, except the bass part, where we have two, but they are not singers, just organ players.

That pointing - is it the squiggles that we are learning about - i.e. neumes, which are usually in the form of slanting lines, interspersed with directions like "t" for tenete and "c" for celerite, based on the Laon system.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/projects/neumes/neumes.php

No, it's not neumes. The tune is written in standard minims, but each minim can have any number of syllables on it - you just keep going until there is a 'point' in the text.

So if the tune has two minims in the first bar, and the text is:

The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I . shall want

then you put all the words as far as "I" on the first note, and the "shall want" on the second note. It takes a bit of getting used to.

Deb

Aah - our hymn book is like that. The syllable of the psalm where you change the note is underlined. Then there are other little signs indicating where the last stressed syllable comes, whether the stress can go on another note if necessary and which notes can be left off if not needed, as the lines of the psalms don't have a regular number of feet.

This very interesting. And I thought they just sort of made it up as they went along.