Beethoven: String Quartet in C Minor, op 18 No. 4

Beethoven sounds impatient from the offset. Here he is as a young man- still Mozartian- and it's all chop, chop, chop, pass along the bus please, don't you know I've got an appointment with fate?  By the end of his life this impatience will have turned into a hands-at-throat struggle with- and partial transcendence of- the ridiculous, fucking torpor of the human condition.

Changeable Weather

My mother expressed a wish to sit outside. We advised against it but she's a stubborn old thing. She lasted for about a minute. I'll admit I'd been sitting/sleeping on the patio earlier but that was when the sun was shining.

And now (3.30 pm) it's raining.