Advent 8

Nothing can be more certainly middle-brow than listening to Classic fm. Nobody does this who really understands classical music (as I most certainly don't) - they listen to Radio 3 and write to the papers about how it is being dumbed down. They could very well be right but, to my eternal shame, I am just not equipped to comment.

So anyway I am driving to university this morning and Radio 4 is annoying me (Libby Purves, Midweek, just doesn't do it for me) so I flick until I hear the familiar strains of Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the Pastoral. This is one of the few pieces of classical music I own and one of even fewer I can name. Rather obliquely this has to do with 'A' level French and a novel by Andre Gide but I'm not going to go into that since it ends at the low point of my academic career and I don't want to go there again. So that's it for today pop pickers, what young Alex in A Clockwork Orange would have called a lovely bit of 'Ludwig van.'