Carmina Burana

The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, once pointed to Orff's cantata as "the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires." I don't have the vocabulary to write about music but last week's concert in The Royal Albert Hall certainly did sound thunderous. It was also barbaric and extremely exciting. There were lots of bangs and people hitting things.

The first time I heard Carmina Burana, I was a teenager and had happened across a scratched CD in a charity shop. My sickly romantic ear immediately grasped the dramatic nature of the thing and I played it loud and often. It was the sweet immediacy that I hung onto. And the way it made my stomach flip and my heart rate quicken. A simple physical pleasure. At the time, the only other piece of music which had done anything similar was a Nick Drake album - the staple diet of any navel delving adolescent.

In 1936, the last surviving Tasmanian Tiger died, the first superhero in skin tight clothing appeared, the Afghan government granted a 75 year concession for oil to the Inland Exploration Company of New York , a king abdicated and Ipswich Town FC turned professional. Oh - and Hitler and Mussolini were up to stuff too. And amongst this whirl of chaos in the name of progress, Carl Orff knocked up a hit.

I don't care if a critic at the time called Orff, 'A rich man's banjo player.' I love banjos. And I find popular music, even suspect popular music, deliciously exhilarating.

Breakfast

Breakfast. There is an art to a fried egg. As a child I would demand that the white was burnt to a raffia mat and that the yellow was left inexplicably raw. And this is still how I crave them. The uncertainty of someone else cracking one into a frying pan is sometimes too much for me to tolerate. I have to leave the room. I have to calm down. I don't want to see the yolk being drowned in spoonfuls of oil. Or the white swimming across the teflon. I don't want to silently witness its body turning to rubber whilst its head is smacked down with the euphemistic and bullying cry of sunnysidedown.

And it was scrambled eggs that I craved when doped on Morphine in an adolescent hospital bed. Buttered and loose eggs. Gentle pale juice seeping into roughly cut bread. And lots of salt. My sister always knew how to add the right amount; she'd shake her arm freely over the pan. And whilst I lay amongst the beeps and groans of NHS fittings, I'd think of her in the kitchen next to the laminate cupboards and woodchip. Her body bent over the dark void where wooden spoons would fall, never to be returned.