Navarra'd

On Sunday to the last concert of the Dorking Concertgoers season that we shall go to this year, to wit the third concert given by the Navarra String Quartet. Not heard the Schubert (D.112) or the Haydn (Op.77 No.2) before, but both good, in their rather different ways, the former being a young piece and the latter an old. We particularly liked the old. Beethoven (Op.130) as good as ever, but leaving one to continue to wonder about whether one preferred it with ending heavy (Grosse Fuge) or ending light. Both have their points, but ending light worked well on this occasion, BH having found the rather full programme reported on 22nd February quite a lot to take in one sitting, in the evening.

Slightly irritated to find that house management had, once again, not thought to provide the quartet with any interval refreshments, so we had the second violin coming out into the bar to wrestle with the water fountain, to be followed by the cello a few minutes later. Would it cost have them that much to provide a flask of coffee and a jug of water? The same thing happened to the Endellion's viola on one of the last occasions on which they turned up at Dorking, some years ago now, so it is more than a lapse from an inexperienced house manager.

Home to read a rather depressing article in the NYRB about life on the ocean wave, life on a large container ship to be more precise. The big issue was that most merchant ships sail under flags of convenience, a wheeze which facilitates evasion of various civic duties, like providing decent living conditions for your staff or paying taxes. Why does the world put up with it? What is to stop the world saying that ships have to be registered in some proper country? Surely it is not beyond the wit of some maritime policy wonk to come up with an algorithm which assigns all proper ships to proper countries? The little issue was lack of internet for the crew, provision of which, it was alleged, would be a big improvement for them. Maybe the excuse is that it is quite expensive to provide a decent internet link from the roaring forties, from where one would have to pay exorbitant charges to some satellite company.

I would imagine that the shipping business is rather cyclical, with regular gluts and dearths of capacity. With the gluts being common enough to put a lot of pressure on freight rates, pressure which, in turn, puts a lot of pressure on pay and conditions for the people who work the freight. Hence the petty stinginess of shipping companies.

Moved on, in a book about the 'Ambassadors' (see, for example, 25th December last), to read a tale about casting the horoscope of Our Lord to see if his crucifixion was written in the stars. Something which, it seems, Renaissance scholars were into. I might be an atheist myself, but such casting strikes me as disrespectful at best, heretical at worst.