Requiem for a hedgehog

Usher Hall

August in Edinburgh means The Edinburgh International Festival.   There is also the Fringe where the old lady hoists her skirts and kicks her legs with the odd flash of garter but, for the Festival proper, she assumes her best going-out-to-the-theatre hat and makes her way to the douce sobriety of the Usher Hall.      So it was that a scruffy latecomer such as me, managed to squeeze himself into possibly the last available seat.

Perched in the vertiginous heights of the upper row of the upper circle, I exchanged pleasantries with my fellow alpinists.  We were a motley lot… American, Japanese…no doubt, there to hear their own Mitsuko Uchida’s expressive playing of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto… a city-suited gent, a collection of casually dressed tourists and formally dressed locals who had left it late to get tickets and had to settle for a seat in “the gods”.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth is often described as a warhorse having been performed so many times in so many places but, no matter how often it played, it still has the power to speak to each person in the audience, an emotive appeal that’s individual to every listener.

Some of the audience were so carried away by the stirring march of the third movement that they burst into spontaneous applause…maybe they thought that nothing could follow it…but had to endure the anguish of the final movement and its conclusion of reflective, acceptance of the desolation of fate, of the end of a life

Getting back to the country, I stepped out into the garden to watch the beginning of the Perseid meteor showers.  It seemed appropriate given the theme from Tchaikovsky’s first movement was reworked into the pop song “The Story of a Starry Night”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVBTP9JKXA

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipn1qBTN8MU

  Head back, staring up at Perseus, his love, Andromeda, and his perfidious in-laws, the W-shaped Cassiopeia and Q-shaped Cepheus, I didn’t notice the hedgehog snuffling over the lawn, nor him, me.    As soon as I moved, he shot off into the shrubs.

 We haven’t had hedgehogs around here for years so the encounter lifted my spirits and, for the next couple of nights, I left some meal worms out for my guest hoping to encourage him to stay in the safety of the garden.

A week later, my new chum was dead on the road, like so many of his kind.      His race have been around from long, long before Perseus killed Medusa to win Andromeda, his prickles making him invulnerable. Yet now, we seem determined to exterminate his kind and are succeeding.

There is a slow, resigned sadness in this.  It seems inevitable.   Maybe they deserve the Pathetique more than we do.