The taming of the Wordle

There has been correspondence recently in the Guardian in which the writers display the merits of their preferred Wordle start words. If you are dismissive of Wordle in general, or having a preferred start word - let alone writing to the Guardian about it - this post is not for you.

Where I took issue with the writers was that they were unanimous in triumph at the number of vowels they had managed to squeeze into a five letter word: ADIEU was one, for example. I can see why you might choose that strategy, but my own start word - yes, I admit it, I have a preferred start word, and although I experiment with others, I return to it - is all about the consonants. Four consonants and an E gives me a structure, and has just allowed me to solve the Wordle on my second attempt (why does Wordle refer to 'guesses'? I'm not guessing) two days in a row.

This post is not intended as a boast about my cleverness. When the system tells me I have three correct consonants incorrectly placed, it gives me quite a big hint about the correct placing, and frees my imagination to pick a random vowel. The rest is luck.

Title of this post provided by durham_rambler's comment when I told him my start word: which is SHREW.

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Another belated book post, about the book I bought back in January, in a charity shop in Ilkley, for no better reason than that I was intrigued by the title. It seemed such an incongruous notion: 'lost' and 'Siberia' conjured up the frozen wastes, the vast expanse of the wilderness, but how to insert 'pianos' into that mental image? Which is just ignorance on my part: the westward-looking imperial court of the nineteenth century made the piano a fashionable instrument, and Siberia was part of that empire. Local administrators, aristocrats, and even exiled Decembrist rebels all required pianos. Not all of those instruments have survived the harsh climate and equally harsh history, but a piano is a big beast to lose entirely. So when Sophy Roberts set off to look for a piano in Siberia, pianos were there to be found.

She explains the origins of her quest as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world: I was staying with a friend in Mongolia, in the gers, the wood-and-canvas tent in which he spends his summer. One evening we were listening to another friend playing the piano he has there, and it really wasn't good enough. So we decided to try to find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia. As you do ...

The pianist in question was Odgerel Sampilnorov: you can look her up, she's all over YouTube. I can quite believe you'd want to find a piano that was worthy of her. And here's some background on Sophy Roberts: she's a journalist who specialises in long-distance travel, and seems to have managed to make a living at it. If I sound surprised at that, it's not because I doubt her ability, but because the economics of the exercise baffle me. That musical evening in Mongolia took place in 2015; the book was published in 2020. In those five years, the 'Author's note' reveals, there were multiple trips to Siberia, across the length and breadth of the country (which, when the country is Siberia, is saying something). There are interpreters: every conversation in the book is conducted through the medium of an invisible interpreter. Sometimes there is a photographer as well: his work is visible on the book's website. This is a massive mobilisation of resources in the service of a musical instrument which has never appealed to me. Time to recalibrate my assumptions about the value of the piano, evidently.

Perhaps I should also recalibrate my expectation about what kind of book this is. I may have been expecting a travel book in the sense of 'a book describing the author's travels': this is not that. There is no linear narrative of 'how I travelled from A to B'. Questions about logistics and funding, planes and trains and tickets, are out of place. Each chapter takes the reader to a different city, but the book is organised as a hiatorical account: the different locations are the settings for different episodes in the story of the piano in Siberia.

Inevitably, a history of the piano in Siberia is a history of Siberia itself through the 250-year lifespan of the piano. It's a grim history, as well as a fascinating one, well told. I was reading it through the month of February, while Russian history asserted itself and Russian tanks prowled the borders of Ukraine. You couldn't call it comfort reading, but as a way of creeping up sidewise on something I couldn't bear to watch, couldn't look away from, well, it had its attractions.