No reason, just in sort-of honour of David Drinkell.

In the old days, like twenty years or so ago, you knew people because you, er, knew them, that is, you had beheld them with your own eyes and went to school with them, or lived in the same street, or met them at University or in the Army, or played cricket or rugby (Union) or some inferior pastime with them, or they were regulars like you at the Hare and Hounds, or (I hope that this tail end of acquaintances doesn’t indicate a pecking order) they sat near you in church. Or sang in the choir. In case any All Souls saints of old read my blog.

But now we feel that we know folk whom we’ve only ever encountered in cyberspace.  One might lead to the other, of course: Probably Leisa’s and my dearest friends, as the other side of the world recedes into chronological as well as geographical distance, are in this hemisphere and gained in Real Life (™) via cyber life Ship of Fools (of blessed, so far as our participation is concerned, memory).

As is the way with these ramblings, what brought this to mind was a post by a Ship of Fools (we call them Shipmates) who is also a Facebook Friend. Her dearly-loved husband has gone to join his Lord, unexpectedly early. He was a cathedral organist, a species at once weird to some and treasured to others (Leisa and I count ourselves among the others). One of his eulogists quoted J S Bach’s  supposed last words, "Weine nicht um mich, denn ich gehe dorthin, wo Musik geboren wird". Do not weep for me, I go where music is born. Well one thing led to another, and I was listening to Ach Herr, lass dein lieb Engelein from St John Passion.

I have always been sceptical of glossolalia. My father was a Pentecostal pastor (when Pentecostal shacks were tin-roofed sheds with a sprinkling of coal miners and farmers, not today’s mega palaces), and even as a five year old I was embarrassed when the poor chap had to compose an interpretation of tongues from a dear old soul’s “He come on a Honda”. But look, rational language (and I’m not short of the odd paragraph or two) is defeated in the face of Bach. Arms aloft, tears streaming, utterances from who knows where, are all that you can offer as you listen to 

Collegium Vocale Gent