Good heavens, Syd. What a surprise! I hope you don`t miss the varied and colourful entourage that would normally travel with you on your passport. Welcome to The Land of the Free.

"How is Eva?" asks a Member. Well we thank the Member for asking, and here is one of her little poems:

      To Johann Sebastian Bach

      Thy art is thought which proves
        The mind a treasure of God
      Towards which ever moves
        Music's divining rod.

                                    E.M.G.

It shows the importance of having an aim and a standard in art does it not? And it manages two rhymes, but regrettably that is about as far as it goes in the poetry direction.

Here is another, rather more poetical poem, this time by William Cory no less, and containing three rhymes:

    To EVA MARY GREW (née INSTONE)

    Oh, music! breathe me something old to-day,
    Some fine air, gliding in from far away
    Through to the soul that lies behind the clay.

Perhaps there is a Member who can tell us about the Instones. . . .

Mr. and Mrs. Grew, living in retirement at Romsley Hill, Worcs., devoted much of their leisure to a close study of Bach. They collaborated on the book "Bach" published in 1947 in the Master Musicians series edited by Eric Blom.

Sydney Grew had deep and devout knowledge of the church cantatas and of the organ chorale preludes. To these he chose to give the bulk of his critical chapters, and his commentary upon them is suggestive and stimulating.

Mrs. Grew tells the story of Bach's life with an extreme simplicity which is again and again lit by sparklets of imagination.

Apart from this book, all Sydney Grew's major work was published in the nineteen-twenties sans Eva. We do not know what he did in the nineteen-thirties.

We have been musing this morning on how it came about that, while the majority of the LOWER ORDERS and many EFFETE and UNMANLY intellectuals succumbed to the depredations of the interstellar dust of 1908, a favoured few such as Mr Grew emerged unscathed with their OBJECTIVE AESTHETIC faculties intact. It occurs to us that perhaps their BEARDS and MOUSTACHIOS played some part, perhaps acting as a natural filter trapping the interstellar particles before inhalation. We observe that walruses too were among the few creatures in the animal kingdom that emerged fully sane and unaffected after 1908. Do Members know of any research that has been conducted on such a hypothesis? Without wishing to indulge in ungentlemanly speculation, one can only wonder, cannot one, by what mechanism Eva also pulled through so apparently unscathed?

Good to see the hound at last Milly 

I am pleased to join the throng of welcome for Mr Grew. I look forward to many pleasant hours of amiable and wide-ranging discussion. 

Mr Grew might be pleased to know that I had the foresight to save his Composers Variously Rated threads (of blessed memory) before finally removing myself from The Other Place. They thus remain available for my perusal. It would have been such a shame to lose them.

And even then I seem to remember they were more honoured in the breach than in the observance...

Hmm. a sheep worrier, eh?