80 and 100

Bobby Furber was my principal when I was articled as a solicitor in 1966. He may not have taught me much law, but he infected me with his enthusiasm for film and particularly music. "You must," he urged me, "buy Janet Baker's Saga records, Schumann and English Songs: only 12/6d each!" She was little known then, but even on my salary of £450 a year, I felt I could afford a gamble of that level: it paid off, and I still have the two 12" vinyls.

Now Dame Janet Baker, Happy 80th Birthday! I used to keep a record of singers and when/where/in what I had heard them. There can't be many in my book with more than the 33 entries I have for "Baker, Janet (m-s)". Over the period of more than a decade, she was a constant star in my progress to acquiring some sort of musical education, seen and heard mainly in London, but also in Birmingham, in Edinburgh, at Glyndebourne... and then (after her premature retirement) at the opening of the Elgar Birthplace Museum, where she made a pretty speech.

Another milestone: I have just added the 100th photograph of a Gloucestershire church to my website: still 400 or more to go though. The 99th was added yesterday, when I tracked down St John's, Pauntley. This must be one of the remotest churches in the county, but is well worth seeking out for its position. I was on my way to a GOGG garden visit: I had hoped Caroline would be able to come too, as the visit was to Schofields, near Newent. I had been there without her last year, and wanted to show her the amazing cacti, but she was ministering to our current Japanese student, Daisuke from Kanagawa.

"Looking, just looking, is all we have to do to see the essential truth," wrote the late lamented Roger Deakin: I am much enjoying reading his Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, lent to me by Chris Hoggett.

War horse

Les Troyens is on this evening, relayed from the New York Met. Caroline and I went along to our local cinema at 5 o'clock, plus picnic, ready for the five-hour big screen session; but by mutual agreement we came away at the first interval. After eating the picnic round our kitchen table, I find I'm much happier listening to Berlioz in the warmth of my study.

In the 'Sixties, I was an avid fan of this composer: Benvenuto Cellini with Nicolai Gedda was one of my earliest experiences of opera at Covent Garden; and three of us drove specially to Edinburgh in May 1969 to hear Janet Baker sing Dido in Scottish Opera's Trojans. This evening, though, in Cineworld I was bored. Was it the production, the singing or the music? Perhaps a combination of all three.

The ghost of Hector's appearance in a puff of pantomime smoke, stock still and dressed in white on top of a cave, with Aeneas kneeling below, brought the Grotto at Lourdes awkwardly to mind. Deborah Voigt as usual seemed unable to stop smirking, unfortunate when you're playing Cassandra.

Yesterday, we came to the end of the Radio 3's relay of the Ring Cycle in 10 instalments (a recording of the Covent Garden production last Autumn). As then, I listened to pretty well every bar; and that probably explained why tonight's rumpty-tum Berlioz left me squirming on my cinema seat.

Susurrus

En route home from East Anglia, we paused in Oxford in order to go to the Botanic Gardens. I'm ashamed to admit it was my first ever visit. Nor even this time was I there principally to see the Gardens themselves, but because they were the venue for "Susurrus".

This is one of the Oxford Playhouse's "Plays Out", put on to encourage audiences to think differently about theatrical work and where it's performed. At the entrance, you pick up headphones, a miniature iPod-type device and a map. At each of eight different points, you are invited to sit down and listen to a passage on the tape, with appropriate music as you walk round in between.

Susurrus - meaning a soft murmuring or rustling sound - is perhaps not the most appropriate title for a play being performed quite so close to the Oxford traffic. Though the content itself is dark, the musical reference points (Britten's Dream, Janet Baker, and Maria Callas's last UK concerts) and the beautiful setting of the Gardens made it, for me, both a nostalgic and an enlivening experience.

For Caroline, it was rather less so, but both were glad we had made the effort to set aside an hour to go. Susurrus is on till 27th, I see from the theatre's website: if you are anywhere near between now and then, I recommend it.

I certainly hadn't appreciated how extensive and impressive the Botanic Gardens were, nor how close to the Cherwell: next week, with the new term starting, people will doubtless be in these punts if the weather holds.

Hello, I Must Be Going

This is the view (looking across Suffolk Square) from Compass House, Lypiatt Road, Cheltenham GL50 2QJ, where I've worked as a partner - and more recently a consultant solicitor - for the past several years. I've now said farewell to Charles Russell LLP having yesterday attained the magic age of 65.

We dress down on Fridays, so I went to work for my last day in brown shoes, cords and a casual shirt. Some contrast with when I started as an articled clerk at Clifford-Turner 42 years ago! Then I arrived at 11 Old Jewry, London E.C.2 - no postal codes in those days - in shiny black shoes, grey socks, grey three-piece suit, white shirt with separate stiff collar and (probably old school or college or Law Society) tie, with umbrella and bowler hat. Photocopying had just emerged from the era when it resembled a school science lab experiment. The calculator didn't exist, though there was a toaster-sized apparatus with levers and a handle which I toyed with for the purpose of making apportionments, but never really understood. Pairs of women sat in small rooms one reading out an amended draft and the other checking it against the engrossment.

By good fortune my principal was Bobby Furber, a man of considerable culture, heavily involved with the British Film Institute. He took the trouble to recommend to me Janet Baker's Saga recordings: they cost the equivalent of 62p each, which even on an annual salary of £450 I seemed to be able to afford. I sat in on meetings with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, Charles Mackerras and a very young Daniel Barenboim. During my lunch hours, clutching luncheon vouchers worth the equivalent of 15p, I bought a sandwich and went to City Music Society concerts at the Bishopsgate Institute. There were no time sheets to fill in. I confessed once to a more senior articled clerk that I had taken slightly longer than an hour for lunch because the concert overran. Oh I shouldn't worry, he said: I saw War & Peace in my lunch hour the other day.

I was one of an intake of six articled clerks at Clifford-Turner, then one of the largest firms in the City of London. As with all firms, the number of partners was limited by law to 20. According to its website, that firm's present day incarnation, Clifford Chance, now employs "about 6,700 people".