Just as an aside, Ted Heath called the police to complain about the amount of noise that my choir was making at night.
IIRC, he also went to the same school as my granddad apparently though not at the same time.

Quite a good year for me personally (I was 22).

Not so for the world of conducting, which lost two of its supermen, Sir John Barbirolli and George Szell, within hours of each other at the end of July.

Barbirolli had been booked to front the Halle at the Viennese Night at the Proms the following month.  I've a feeling that John Pritchard stood in for him.

Ian.

Sounds not entirely unlike George's experience!

Erm, I didn't mean to suggest George had sat under a Californian son - there was an element of role reversal implicit in the suggestion that his experience may have been in any way like t-p's!

California is the one place in the world I would like to live but unfortunately would probably never be allowed to.

I have just dug out my diary for the school trip to Rome, by train  in July August 1970 - the first time I had ever been abroad.  I notice I read Chaucer on the way out and Mansfield Park on the way back.  I noted when the train crossed the Alps at Airolo " At once noticed different houses -shutters, vines and crumbling facades." 

I began my life long habit of making liturgical notes Sunday in St Peter's "Mass behind High Altar, Choral with incense and procession (dumpy men with lace suplices and black hats, 3 men in red, cardinals?)"  I knew far less on the subject than I do now. 

Castel San Angelo "Atmospherically gloomy passages.  Charming courtyards.  Dungeons and oil stoves.  Very morbid and great fun."  Encounter with vendor at the Trevi Fountain "Gazed at some cameos and handled one.  Vendor pressed it in my hands.  "Two tausend lire! A cameo! Look".  (He held it to the sun.)  I looked dubious.  "You American?  1500!"  I looked even more dubious.  "1000" he said pressing frantically into my hand.  I paid up."

Santa Maria d'Aracoeli I noted that the "bambino more tasteful than that in S. Andrea", but commented that Il Gesu was a vulgar church., but of San Andrea al Quirinale "for all its coloured marble, cherubs, etc: it is all beautifully controlled."

At the Villa Borghese, I noted that Caravaggio's Boy with Fruit had marvellous brushwork.


And Aida at the Baths of Caracalla "Clapping at end of all numbers, plenty of curtain calls at each curtain and a cry of Brava for the contralto at end of Act 4, Sc 1.  Nothing if not spectacular, which is right for so vast a stage - a camel in Act 3 for no reason.  3 ballets scenes and in Act 2 Sc 2 eight horses all together, who on both their entrances left deposits calling for a stage hand with pan, brush and Egyptian costume."

No, Mort dear, it was the Pyrenees that you were seeing.  (Unless you were ski-ing in the Alps.  Funny the British never take any account of the Pyrenees.)  I went to Lourdes many years later.  There was snow on the mountain tops even for 15 August.  Some find all those disabled and sick gathered together distasteful.  I found it strangely moving - however physically wreaked people are they are still treated with dignity and respect.

Looking at my schoolboy diary, I realise how immensely revealing it was about me.