Here's To 2010

Sonny Terry & Brownie Maghee

Take Your Partner

Once In Royal David's City

Green Islands: 1954

It's sobering to consider the change of pace and the degradation of some aspects of society wreaked in just fifty-five years.  Nowadays the voice-over wouldn't do at all - far too sexist, m'dear.  There were no 'security guards' in high-viz jackets confiscating parents' cameras or demanding to see CRB checks and no-one threatening to arrest the man feeding the ducks on the grounds that he was littering (oh, yes, it did happen).  There's been a collective, national, loss of innocence; progress is essential and wonderful but not at the expense of a country's heart and soul - there are things we can still learn from the past.

Don't Let's Ask For The Yogurt

Lightning Strikes

RIP: Bo

And I shall have some peace there,
for peace comes dropping slow,

dropping from the veils of the morning

We Live In Hope

Downfall

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office
Sir Wilfred Thesiger
Dame Freya Stark
The Singing Sands
The Empty Quarter

More Handel

Happy Birthday, Mum

Remembrance Sunday

Sailing By

Horowitz: Pathetique 2nd Movement

More Strauss

Strauss

This was the only snippet I could find on YouTube. Such a disappointment.

Samhain

We were born before the wind,
Also younger than the sun
'Ere the bonnie boat was one
As we sail into the mystic.
(Van Morrison)

Homesick

I enjoyed it better with the sound down:

The Walking Englishman

I Am The Master Of My Fate

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (Invictus)