Thoughtful

Cooler than the last weeks, it's only 19° at present and still raining in fits and starts after a terrific thunderstorm late last night; oddly enough the rain hasn't reduced the humidity at all. Can't have everything.

Dinner last night with Princess was at the Neckarblick, an outdoor restaurant on a hillside overlooking the Neckar river above Wangen. Very pleasant. It's not gourmet food, but it was tasty enough and reasonably priced and well served. And the view is tremendous, click on that map link and zoom out towards the northeast (i.e. top right) to see the area we looked out over). We sat until dark and talked about our various recent delights and disappointments, then drove back to town for an ice cream dessert. Very pleasant, I do enjoy being with her.

Princess is ageing, aren't we all. She will turn 49 in November, days before G turns 50. I had a Proustian moment at one point last night, when I turned to her and saw a stranger's face—a middle-aged woman wearing a hint too much makeup—imposed on the person whom I knew to be "Princess," a woman as young as myself. The moment passed soon while she told a story, I recognized that wryly-amused grin as being truly hers. (I just spent the better part of a half-hour flipping through the start of the Guermantes' reception in "Time regained," in search of what I remembered as Proust's vivid and moving description of the effect of seeing a chronology of earlier faces layered upon the physical body that stands before us, but discovered this to be my own distillation of a hundred leisurely pages.)

I have been quite aware of my age since returning from the Camino. I look at somebody on the street and think "Mid-forties" and then "younger than I." I have let so much time and so many opportunities slip through my fingers, as though the supply of both were infinite.

I'm listening to Tristan und Isolde while working blogging and farting about. There's some very fine music in here, especially the last act and in particular Isolde's final aria "Mild und leise wie er lächelt", her farewell to Tristan, which bears a close family resemblance to the "Liebe" theme of the Ring. I saw this in Vienna with Waltraut Meier as Isolde (she was very good, I liked her better than when she sang one of the Valkyries at the Met); can't remember who sang Tristan, so clearly he made less of an impression. Might have been Domingo. Try the link, you might like it.

In business news I have begun to translate and extend my professional website, recognizing that its current state doesn't exactly sell my services. For a start, it's in English and my clients are all Germans; more seriously, it presents the same wide-eyed cheerfully-curious view of the world as does this blog (well, they are both me) rather than giving the impression of an honest and intelligent businessperson who could be entrusted with confidential data and a bag of money. I have been asking myself the alpha-and-omega question that every web-designer should ask every client: What is the site intended to sell to whom? I think that my oft-repeated observation that 90% of database users are women will find application in the answer, but I don't yet know how.