1. The concert I went to up in the hills was a wind octet concert I was reviewing for the Daily Journal.

With a remote winery setting and with a fancy hot hors d'oeuvres and wine buffet out on the balcony beforehand (the grilled salmon skewers were delicious), this was a concert designed for the well-off to enjoy themselves. The general location, in the thoroughly Well-offville part of the area, and the extremely steep admission price, also contributed to the effect. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't been comped as a reviewer.

However, I'm glad I did go, because the music was excellent, and so were the acoustics of the tiny hall. Two each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn played one of Mozart's serenades for that combo. (No flutes? Some claim Mozart didn't like the instrument. Others claim that that's false.) Then a piece by Ruth Gipps, who is one of those mid-20C women composers like Florence Price who is slowly bubbling up from obscurity. And a modern arrangement of excerpts from Smetana's 19C opera The Bartered Bride, complete with a narration amusingly emphasizing how confusing the plot is.

2. Up in the City, the Attacca Quartet took a brisk and compact Haydn quartet (Op. 50/5) and a brisk and compact Bartok quartet (no. 4) and played them to be even more brisk and compact. Also a piece by David Lang (daisy) in his characteristic style of repeating fragments until they add up to something; and a collection of miscellaneous pieces that weren't listed in the program and which I didn't catch what the first violinist said about them.

On my way to this concert, timing was such that I was able to stop off at a farewell party for a household of three that I know who are moving to Ireland this week (one of them being able to claim citizenship there by virtue of ancestry), not the only people I know leaving the US for good. Fortunately the dire implications of this did not dominate the conversations, and everyone was in a rather cheery mood. Many people there whom I knew in the 1970s and '80s but haven't seen much since. We're all a lot older.

3. Harmonia California, a little nonprofessional string orchestra, did a gratifyingly good job on some Mozart (including the delightful but little-known K. 136 Divertimento) and Bach (the Double Violin Concerto), and then ventured into two obscurer pieces from the turn of the 20C, both excellent works it was a pleasure to hear: Anton Arensky's Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Four Noveletten. Gratifyingly well worth going to.

Well, maybe not that accursed. This is the fourth time I've given this paper - it was premiered less than 15 months ago - and only the second time something went wrong.

The first time was the other time. I was ill and isolating at the conference and couldn't read the paper. So the papers coordinator did it for me.

This time was for a regular meeting of a Zoom group online. In the middle of reading it from the Word copy on my screen, my computer froze. I had to apologize and take a break. In the end, I had to hard-reboot the computer (i.e. press the power button) and it took almost 20 minutes to get everything up and running again, counting all the kerfluffle I'd spent trying to avoid having to do that. How embarrassing.

The other two times went very well indeed. So yes, maybe not that accursed.

Some time ago I wrote of my delighted discovery of Taylor Swift's Tiny Desk Concert, in which she played her songs in simple arrangements I found agreeable, unlike the overproductions of the Eras Tour which was Not For Me.

A few commenters gave suggestions of other TAS numbers I might find agreeable, but they didn't mention what turned out to be the gold mine. DGK sent me links to a couple videos extracted from a documentary film called folklore: the long pond studio sessions, which is on Disney+. The songs are a bit much of a sameness for me to want to listen to all at once, especially with the documentary natter in between, and the songs are more immediately impressive than they are lovable, though the ones I heard first are growing on me rapidly - but only in these versions; I listened to other performances and, nah. Any one or two of them - not just those two - are in this version very much the kind of popular music I want to hear.

Apart from the addition of a guest vocalist on one song, it's just her and two guys, variously on piano and acoustic guitar, occasionally a little light percussion or a soft electric guitar which only once threatens to get even slightly loud. Very soft and gentle and intimate, and quite sophisticated and complex songwriting.

Here's the two songs DGK sent me. The rest can also be found on YouTube with a "long pond studio sessions" search.