Monkey business

Although I ‘enjoyed’ a Catholic upbringing, I don’t think a confession will make this go away: I have to confess that I am responsible for (probably) killing a tree. All of the branches of the tree at the centre of our faculty have been cut. Oral history wants that this has been done before and the tree survived, and more: it had never had so many branches before as after the cutting. But not any longer. Now it looks as bare as one of those trees in a zoo environment for monkeys (or a range of other mammals who tend to ‘abuse’ trees, or simply consume them). Every day I get to the office, I am confronted with the consequences of expressing my concern about the noises this tree made under the load of heavy rain and a mild autumn storm. I thought cutting off a couple of branches would have done the trick, but no: all of them had to go. To make things worse: the cutters were publicly enjoying themselves in the act of sacrilege. Also, people around the office came to me (watching the act and its result) to express their concerns that this rigorous approach seemed unnecessary, without knowing that I was the culprit. To some I would confess, to others I didn’t. Luckily after a week people resigned to the state of affairs, but I’m left with this feeling of guilt. A feeling that will last until spring, hoping the tree will have turned out alright again by then. If not …

P.S.  Spring 2009. It’s a miracle, it’s still alive.

What’s your favourite music?

It always annoys me when this question is popped to fill dead air space. To be honest, I don’t know. Any music will do, although classical music does not rank high. Of course, there are some skeletons in my cd-boxes that fill me with shame, but still I listen to these now and then and on many an occasion this will give them a new quality. Normally I will play one album over and over again for weeks, if not months, just because it captures a mood on more than one level. I remember writing my MA dissertation on one record, but strangely enough I don’t remember which one. Which doesn’t really matter, because these times have gone. The other side of this overindulgence in one record (or the other) results in neglect of the larger part of my collection. I’d like to apologise to all records concerned and hope that they will tempt me into overindulgence when their time has come.