Another treat for us ...

... was going out last night to hear some live chamber music, played by
the Galitzin Ensemble (four of whom are members of the Galitzin Quartet).
They played a Beethoven trio, and Kodaly duet, and the Schubert String
Quintet in C major, one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, which
was beautifully performed. I've listened to this piece dozens of times,
but have never seen a live performance, so I was interested to see who
played what.

If you've never heard the lovely Adagio from this piece, have a listen to
this on YouTube ... it brings tears to my eyes. Schubert wrote this in the
last year of his short life, in 1828.

We've had a bit of good news this morning from the insurers for John Lewis
(a huge department store in the UK). Just over 3 years ago, we bought a
super-duper JL washing machine from them, which conked last weekend. At
the time of purchase we paid £70 for an extended warrantee (which is
something we don't usually do for electrical items). A service engineer
called to see us on Tuesday, who said it was an electrical fault within
the machine ... to replace every possible part in the machine would have
cost us £200 - 250 to put right, including labour charges. Today, we
received a lettter from the insurers, inviting us to go in an chose a
brand new machine from JL... restoring the machine to good health wasn't
worthwhile in their opinion. Yippee!

Well, yippee for us, but bad news for the environment, I suppose.