This morning, I drove home from dropping the boy off in white-out conditions. It’s cruel, after a lovely warm and sunny weekend. Wasn’t this supposed to be rain? The first few flakes began falling and the boy said, “Why the snow?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think we should tell it to go away.” From the back seat there came a very clear and deliberate, “SNOW, GO AWAY!”

Thank goodness for a lovely recording of The Lark Ascending on CBC that played on my way home. I always think of Pasley when I hear it. Otherwise I’m so irritated by the CBC these days. They’re disbanding the CBC Radio Orchestra — the last surviving radio orchestra in North America — and they’re changing the Radio 2 format yet again so that it’s no longer going to be a mainly classical station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly revamped it to feature more jazz and folk and so forth, with which I’ve not been thrilled but have tolerated (although the radio gets turned off at 6 on the dot because I cannot stand what the evening programming has become). Now, however, they’re formally announcing that they’re going to go more mainstream, and cancelling the existing shows. This was done to net a larger audience, but it’s backfiring already: the backlash has been dreadful, and they’re going to lose droves of current listeners (like me, hello, who’s been a faithful listener for decades). If they did market research, they certainly didn’t think of asking their current audience what they thought of the idea. I’ve been meaning to write about this since they announced it and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put my resentment about this dilution of content and commitment to culture into words. This isn’t what I wanted to say, either, but I have to say something at some point.

I am stiff and achy and want to be in the better mood I was in this past weekend.