Breaking through

With a bit of poetic licence, these might be Monterey pines in Pacific Grove rather than Scot's pines on top of Arnside Knott.  Ok, with the backdrop of the Kent estuary and Morecambe Bay, it's hardly Monterey Bay.  But I've been immersed recently in Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck, and hankering after another visit to Monterey in California.  Not to see Cannery Row, which is a shrine to the commercialisation of these now legendary characters, and the very antithesis of what Steinbeck described.  But to visit the Great Tide Pool at Pacific Grove where Ricketts spent so much time collecting marine organisms, to see the sea otters bobbing in the beds of giant kelp, and to dream of stepping back in time and joining in the discussions in Ricketts' Lab.

I discovered John Steinbeck by chance when I was still at school.  I found a copy of Tortilla Flat in Lear's bookshop in Cardiff, while my mother and sister were clothes shopping.  I had soon read everything I could find by him, and was entranced by the character of Ricketts who featured in so many of his fictional works, as well as the real life version in the Log from the Sea of Cortez, and the wonderful valedictory portrait of Steinbeck's best friend that prefaced the edition of the book that I owned.

'Breaking through' was Ricketts' philosophical musing of transcendence through music and the other arts.  I felt like I had my own breaking through when hearing for the first time last week on Radio 3, the 16th C polyphonic choral music attributed to Leonora D'Este, the orphaned daughter of Lucrezia Borgia who from 4 years old was raised in a convent and spent her adult life as a nun there.

On a more prosaic level, today was the first day for me in our new office, after 20 years in the old.  It wasn't a 'breaking through" experience, but it was good.  We've put a lot of thought and planning into it this last 6 months, and it was worth it.