Trains on a Sunday run to slightly different timetables, so if it was yesterday, I would have made it for the earlier train, but its nearest equivalent is actually later, so my wait is going to be nearly as long.

This morning, I did some aimless walking in the Hull old town. When the museums opened at 11, I went to the Museum of Archaeology. I liked the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age displays, and admired the many Roman mosaics. I also visited the Wilberforce House Museum, which gave a brief history of the house itself, William Wilberforce, and a more in-depth exhibition about slavery, the abolition campaigns and abolition.

I went to three concerts today. The first one had medieval music on a theme of "where are the women". It was held in the Quire in the Minster. Then a joyous concert with York Waits in another church, and finally a concert with a baroque ensemble, Ensemble Augelletti. This last concert was recorded to be broadcast in the Early Music Show on BBC Three in June, so we had dire warnings about silencing phones and not coughing when they were playing. The concert itself was delightful.

The festival organisers were very keen to have people fill in evaluation forms, but having filled one in, I'm not all that convinced they'll get that much useful data out of it. I suppose it depends what their funders are asking them to show. Apparently their three-yearly cycle with the local authority is up for renewal so they were clearly attempting to quantify the benefit to the local area.

What has stood out over the past couple of days is being, at my age, in what has looked like the youngest tenth of the audience. I could understand it if I was, say, fifteen years younger, but not at my age. That kind age distribution doesn't really seem sustainable over longer term, although I suppose it's also a reflection of the age distribution in the local area and people with the means to do a day or weekend away for the festival.

Few days ago, the forecast for today was light rain all day, but luckily that didn't bear out in the end. It rained over night, but the rain had pretty much stopped by the time I was heading out for some parkrun tourism. And some light rain was falling just now when I was walking from Beverley Minster to the station for another night of waiting almost the maximum time between these two trains.

I went to today's afternoon concert, with 17th century Italian music for lute and voice. It was very enjoyable.

Afterwards, I faced a longish gap between concerts, so I ended up doing some very thorough browsing in the shops just to pass the time, and emerged with three books from the Oxfam bookshop, a pair of trousers, and some socks. At least the weather held and it didn't rain.

The evening concert was at the Minster, which is certainly an impressive building. The programme was mostly Palestrina, performed by Stile Antico, and they sounded wonderful.

Finished since the last reading post
Finished Skott and found it wonderful. It was written in a rather pared-down simple style, which helped as I wasn't feeling very confident about reading in Swedish when I started it. But it was easier than I thought even if I did stop and look up some words here and there. It was fewer words than I was perhaps expecting, but looking up skott in the title certainly helped me to appreciate the ambiguity and how it fits with the book. Anyway, it's a continuation war novel with the young Tallgren being sent to the front. He expects to die, but he falls in love, but that's not a happy ending in a novel in wartime.

Currently reading
Still reading Heaven on Earth. Also started reading Family History by Vita Sackville-West, but I'm probably going to leave it at home when I go away for the weekend.

Reading next
Not entirely sure but I'll pick up something unread from my shelves.