shewhomust | Swings and roundabouts

Two excellent cultural evenings in a row. One Wednesday Gail-Nina took me to the Sage for the New London Consort's performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo. I love early music, and this was in part an experiment to see whether that would enable me to dip a toe into the deep waters of opera - I suspect not, that much of what charmed me about this performance was what was least operatic about it. The staging and surtitles distracted me, the instruments were a joy - the voices too, but especially the instruments: theorbos (theorbi?) and a deep-voiced harp, and an organ-like creature which must have been a regal...

Then last night to the Lit & Phil for the launch of

desperance's new book, River of the World. It's always a pleasure to be read to by

desperance, and afterwards there was - oh, not so much a question and answer session as a free-for-all, which was very jolly. And after that there was curry with various friends, including

samarcand and Simon Who Doesn't Have An LJ (Yet). And some where in between all this there was a chance to meet Mac the Cat, who is a very pretty beast.

The less good was a visit to the dentist this morning - nothing catastrophic, all completely scheduled, a routine X-ray had revealed a cavity hidden under an existing filling, which had to be removed and replaced. No pain, just a lot of lying there with my mouth open: but I must have been very tense, because ten hours later my neck and shoulders are so stiff...

The irritating: after weeks of frustration trying to buy black ink cartridges for my pen, I finally ordered some on line a couple of days ago. This evening, unscrewing my pen to remove the empty cartridge (the last of my current stock) I seem to have stripped the thread from the screw fitting. This would be irritating at the best of times - it's not an expensive pen, but I'm fond of it - but the timing adds to the fun.

Time to go to bed before I break something else.