Confessions of a Wino

Can you play a musical instrument? I’ve been trying to learn the guitar for more than 30 years and I am still useless. Every time I pick one up (I own two or three) and start making some progress, I am consumed by some other pastime, like blogging, or work, or trying to lose weight.

My life (and presumably yours) is controlled by one’s own priorities. On a scale of one to ten how do you rate: Family? Work? Music? Art? Science? Procrastination? Procreation? Playstation? It seems that music all too frequently falls down my list.

I once signed up to eBay, purely to sell some old punk singles. When I realised they were going for peanuts, I ended up buying more Monkeys; adding to my rarely played and esoteric collection. Whilst I am now the proud owner of the excellent original version of Banana Splits by The Dickies on yellow vinyl, did I really need it?

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So the football season is coming to a close and it’s time to start thinking about cricket.  England will entertain two wine nations, New Zealand and South Africa, in the 2008 summer’s international test matches.  Tonight I am preparing for the season by drinking wine from a non cricketing nation.  On my world tour of Pinot Noirs, this latest is another one from the Wine Society Chilean PN mixed case (£82), and is the second from the Leyda stable.

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You may have noticed I was having problems with my ISP until recently.  This was driving me to drink which is, fortuitously, a pastime in which I am experienced and capable.

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More from my flirtatious world tour of Pinot Noir, and this one came in a Sunday Times Wine Club Pinot Noir mixed case at £69.99 (the case, not the bottle).

Is Pinot Noir really so fickle?  My recent experience says that many areas of the world are successfully bedding this sex kitten of a grape.  Adolfo Hurtado has certainly put a notch on his bedstead.  For he’s a jolly good fellow!

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I’ve just returned from the opening night of the Opera North production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s play reconfigured as an opera by melody dodger, Benjamin Britten, whose proud boast seems to be never to have written an opera in a major key.

I normally love Opera North (full disclosure, I know one of the chorus quite well), but I am not a Britten fan.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream reminded me of all the negative aspects of the earlier, and otherwise superior, Peter Grimes.  Incessant horns and strings in deliberate discord, keeping the audience on its edge in the same way Hammer House of Horror films used organ fugues to build tension.  Britten never seems to let go, though.  It was like sitting on a train, delayed because of a fatality on the line.  One feels sorry for the victim (or cast in this case) but I just wanted to get home as quickly as possible.  Listening to a gauntlet scratching up and down a blackboard would have been more entertaining, and arguably, more musical.

The humour (what little existed) was 50 years old and could probably only have been written by a tortured homosexual of the repressed mid 20th century.  There were clearly a few from that era in the audience, occasionally chortling and even applauding.  I watched with the same cringingly embarrassed feeling of watching a Carry On film from the Beatles epoch.  Fortunately, to avoid total boredom, I was simply able to stare up at the awesome ceiling of Leeds Grand Theatre, the home of Opera North, and surely one of the best theatres in the world for architectural detail.

Just round the corner from the Grand Theatre is Lounge Bar and Grill, and that is where we chose to eat before the performance.  With 25% off, the bill for two with a bottle of wine came to only £40 plus service.  Even for Leeds that is cheap.

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Software and wine should never be mixed, unless you happen to run a software company and you like wine.  Or someone named after a manure breeze block launches a wine that happens to emulate a content delivery software company.  In this world of legal battles between Apple and the Beatles, who will sue who?

But if you write software, the chances of cutting some quality code when pissed are about as good as enjoying a soirée recital of Vogon poetry.

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I had been looking forward to trying this Chablis wishitwas at £12.95.  Unfortunately, all three bottles I received were badly oxidised and completely undrinkable.  Needless to say the Wine Society honoured its usual pledge and refunded my 39 quid promptly.