couchette
My cello slept better than I on the couchette to Mulhouse.
I know the TGV is marvellous but: Bring back the BR 'sleeper'; the BR embossed Egyptian cotton sheets, mattresses, basin, toothbush and paste, blue blankets and, above all, the be-capped gentleman sensitively serving tea and digestives hours after arriving in a Penzance pre-dawn...
"I think you'll find you have reached your destination ma'am. I trust you slept well...?"
On 'Corail' all I got for my money was an hour's delay in Avignon station with mooning and dog-licking into the midnight bargain, a damp acid green cover and a box of 'corail' tissues to comfort me as I failed to sleep on an armless seat they call a bed. On arrival in a ten degree Mulhousian morning and, having lugged my cello and two heavy rucksacs twenty five minutes around the 'gare' trying to find the hotel, I was not pre-disposed to love my Ibis two star room in which I have to spend the next three weeks and in which there is hardly room to manouvre by bum around the bed and into the shower, let alone practice my Rameau part. Nor was I fresh for the six hours of delicate french trilling I faced....
posted by ruth at 11:00 PM
8 Comments:
I remember the BR sleepers ... great memories. Sorry you will have three cramped weeks.
Mooning and dog licking? Does mooning mean what it does in the US? Where is Mulhouse?
Sounds like a video shoot to me... weeks on the road, lugging gear and sleeping in concrete blocks, driving down endless highways that all look the same. Glad I'm home this summer!
I have hazy memories of a sleeper when I was very small. I was very excited by the whole thing.
I can't imagine how awful it must be to try and practice cello in a cramped space. Poor you!
I'm new here, by the way. I'm supposed to be writing other things... argh, you are too good a distraction. Your pictures are grass-is-greener tangified (as opposed to personified, and no, it probably isn't a word - but I'm all for language evolution).
I followed you here from Zinnia, by the way - the allure of your perspicacity drew me in.
Oh yes, Clare, she is indeed alluringly perspicacious.
Ah, the glamorous life of a professional musician! I'm sorry you're having a grim time - but you blog it most entertainingly!
Oooh, I've just been browsing hubby's paintings. The portraits are amazing. And of course, I couldn't help wondering whether any of them are you?
welcome clare. wish i new what perpiexacity meant and i think tangient is a very good additoion to the language so come again. when I'm back on broad band i'll take a proper look at yours which i understand is a little bit rude...! (mmm)
You know I have this awful habit of simply assuming I know what words mean and then discovering I've been getting it wrong.
But I think perspicacity means a piercing intuition - an ability to see right into the heart of things and understand what is the best way to proceed, or understand what makes things tick.
As for my blog being rude... not really. I don't want you to be disappointed! It's just that I have a background image of saggy boobs... which are supposed to be me lightheartedly cocking a snook at conventional ideas of what a woman's body is supposed to look like. I also tend to talk frankly about all sorts of stuff like bodies and sexuality and stuff.
But the blog is not designed to titillate or anything like that - it's just me speaking frankly about whatever happens to pop into my head. And I'm not very good at enigmatic, so you get me warts and all! ;o)
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