A very pleasant lunch

I had a rather bad week with a heavy cold but by Friday morning I was just about right again.  And that was just in time for a visitor up from Melbourne.  He is a psychologist like me who also takes an interest in politics. He and I have corresponded about the psychology of Leftist politics in a rather desultory manner for some time now.  And I was very impressed by the depth of his insights.  And he finds my analyses pretty spot-on too.  So he finally decided to come up and see me.  We arranged to have lunch together.

Because I am a bit deaf, I don't normally go in much for such meetings but his thinking seemed well worth an effort to communicate in person.

And he actually told me some things about myself that I had been aware of but which I had tended to ignore.  One thing was that in my blogging I tended to speak quite harshly of people I disagree with and that I could therefore come across an an angry person.  He was of course quite right.  Joe once told me the same.  Since I am in fact a very cheerful person who virtually NEVER gets angry and who laughs his way through the day, that impression is a bit unfortunate.  I will have to see what I can do to correct the misimpression.

He had some comfort for me, however.  He said that although my writing is harsh, he could always see a kind heart behind it and meeting me in person had confirmed the kind heart.  So the psychologist was  psychologized!  I actually put a lot of little jokes in my writings but they may be a bit on the subtle side.  I do wonder at times if anybody gets them.

So that was an unexpected lunch topic.  I thought we would be talking mainly about politics -- global warming and all that sort of thing.  And we did have a few laughs about the poor old Warmists and their inability to debate.  But mostly we talked about personal things. And one of them was a most unusual thing.

I am a great fan of Yuja Wang as a classical pianist.  I think she is the world's best. And G., my visitor, shared that feeling. He was even familiar with her interpretations of Schubert Lieder, which I particularly love.  So a quite unexpected meeting of minds there.  We are both filled with wonder at the emotional rightness of her interpretations.

That a Chinese lady from Beijing would have such depth of perception of a rather arcane Western artform seems incredible on the face it of but Yuja Wang IS incredible.  G. and I even had in mind a couple of  Lied interpretations that we both particularly liked:  "Gretchen am Spinnrade" and "Der Erlkoenig".


Yuja Wang

There were other meetings of minds over lunch but those were the two big ones, I think.  It was certainly a very rare sort of meeting in my experience.