A week or two back when I asked Lily whether she was going backwards or forwards, her response was ‘bor bor’. I love it when she articulates. She normally makes noises on reversing, which is reassuring enough, but I do hope that she is not secretly an articulating lorry.
Yesterday, as we were about to take her to be left for eleven hours with Grandma and Grandad, Lily gave her daddy a late birthday present: she went forwards. Convincingly and repeatedly. So we disappeared to London without her and hoped for the best. We were going to our first Prom, and were very excited. We took the train, a bus and the tube. We had a lovely meal and decided not to worry about the baby.
The concert was performed by classical pianist Lang Lang, along with a prodigous 9 year old boy called Marc Yu who duetted with him on Schubert’s Fantasia in F Minor. It was stunning. We were sitting where we could see Lang Lang’s face and a lot of his dramatic expressions. He used his eyes to tease and entertain the audience, changing tempos to suit his calligraphic style and clearly loving every minute of playing. Instead of keeping to the keys his hands managed to spend a lot of the time in mid flight like juggling balls in the air and as the concert proceeded it was clear from the audience that he had a medical kind of enthusiasm: TALOIA*.
We were pleased at the end to have an extra piece as an encore and then for Lang Lang’s father to come and play a fast-paced duet with him on the erhu, a traditional Chinese violin. As Lang Lang pointed out, in China people eat with two chopsticks and play a two-stringed fiddle. In the West we have four prongs on our forks and four strings on our violins.
*there’s a lot of it about.
jam and giraffes 