The musical notation we all know from the Sound of Music, Do, Re, Me, Fa, So, La, Te, Do, is called  Solfège and comes from a system created by a Benedictine Monk in the eleven hundreds in Italy. The names come from “the first syllable of each line in the Latin hymn “Ut queant laxis”, the “Hymn to St. John the Baptist”, but they don’t actually mean anything by themselves.

They also don’t sound like the notes we use in English. So, here’s a song I wrote to help with that. Thanks to Julie Andrews, You already know the tune. Here’s a question; if Ms. Andrews had sung it in Mary Poppins, would she have used Latin syllables?

Suffering Solfège

Do Re Me is how you learn the notes
in many foreign lands,
But for me and many folks
it’s somewhat hard to understand.
So I made up this little tune
For those who wish upon the moon,
for some way to learn their notes,
that just makes sense to us.

C, a thing we sail upon
D, it’s really not a word
E, is also not a word
F, at least Fa it starts with F
G, how easy can this be?
A, the grade you’d like to get
B, the question Hamlet asks
and that brings us back to C

(Now that wasn’t hard, was it? Here’s the second verse)

Do is C like that makes sense
Re somehow comes out as D
Me, works if your name is “E”
Fa at least it starts with F
So and now we get to G
La at least it ends in A
Te at least it rhymes with B
…and with Do we’re back to C

(I suppose I should bring it home with another verse, but I’m done for now.)

Here’s the Wiki Citation: Solfège. (2023, November 16). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge

I happen to be going to the Yorkshire Dales in September, and I came across this series on Kindle Unlimited while browsing for a UK Police Procedural to read. That it takes place in places I’m going to visit is, well, a little creepy, but as a fan of UK Police dramas, it’s quite good.

If you’ve ever had the eerie feeling watching All Creatures Great and Small that any minute a quirky DCI would show up to solve a grim murder, this will put your mind at ease. DCI Harry Grimm is the classic tough city cop sent to the country to chill, but trouble doesn’t have to follow him, it’s already there waiting.

At first, his secondment to the bucolic countryside populated by farmers and tourists seems like the perfect place to go stir crazy, but then a teen goes missing, and soon enough there’s a body by a lake and despite his new Superindendent’s admonishments to not disrupt the idyl of the dales, as if his IED scarred face wasn’t enough to do the job proper like, Harry just has to roll up his sleeves and do the job.

As the first book, it naturally introduces the recurring cast, all of whom turn out to be pretty credible cops, considering Harry’s expectations, and you have to wonder if the BBC might want to give this a look. After all, they’ve already got the sets built…

Very nicely done.

A London Travelouge That Shows the Road Back from Grief and Loss

A writer travels to London to mourn/discover/bury her mother, dead now for 10 months. The author claims, with great frequency, that it’s not a memoir, no matter how much it seems like one. The lady doth protesteth…

The unnamed narrator is a modified version of the actual author, McCracken tells us in a fourth wall breaking aside to the reader. I read the book cold, with no previous knowledge of the author’s work or life, and was willing to believe her, but really hoping that this secondary narrator, the actual author popping up from time to time, was an unreliable narrator…and that she’d made it all up whole cloth because if she had, it’s pretty amazing worldbuilding. You’re on your own for finding the answer to that.

The protagonist, who may or may not be the hero of the book, if indeed such a thing even exists, is a writer in her late 50s whose mother has died almost a year before and has been taking care of all the details involved. What she isn’t is ready to close the lid on her mother’s life, and she’s gone to London, where they went together three years earlier, and wanders around the town, rabbit holes of recollection looming like open manhole covers on the streets they’d trod together.

It’s not a memoir, she asserts. No, it’s an exercise in self-indulgence and grieving. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. The fictional author is out there processing grief in a melancholy travelogue of a city they shared as she looks for the mother of her memory in museums and theaters, both of which her mother had loved until at last she can accept that its time to open the collection of photos the realtor has sent her, showing a house far too neat, far too empty, and accept that her mother is gone.

Anyone who’s dealt with the decline of an aging relative will find this resonant, and as to whether it’s fact or fiction, as an instructor in a writing class tells the protagonist in the book, said, “If I know one thing, it’s that it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”

Living Memory
by David Walton

Pages/Format: Kindle Unlimited 240 pages
Publication: October 18th 2022
ISBN: B09RW81ZRJ
Goodreads /  Amazon

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