Look, I would post something, only I have the day off and a little boy is visiting my little girl. They were out trying to tip over the swingset, but now they’re in her room. The door is open, and they’re making a lot of noise with her recorder and drum… wait, now they’re downstairs harassing her grandmother. This is not the little boy my wife caught naked with her a while back, it’s the one she caught (fully-clothed) under her bed with her a couple days ago. He is one of the naughtier boys in her class, but he’s scared of me (his mother, who is quite hot, dropped him off and stopped to chat with me for several minutes, which he spent two paces from me, leaning against the house, quaking and trying to render himself invisible) and Gamma appears to have him entirely under control. So I don’t suppose I’ll need to give him a tour of my collection of knives and swords for a while yet.

A baryton (that’s what they call it here, not sure if it has the same name in English) is… what. Like if you had a cello and a gambe? And they mated and the egg hatched? It might be a baryton? Lots of strings – maybe six in front, and more behind the neck to be plucked with the left thumb. The neck is 3 times as wide as normal, because it has what looks like a resonance thing alongside it, for those rear strings. Of which there must be a dozen, judging from all the tuning pegs.
And the whole thing is topped off with a carved head of a guy.
And it was built in 1651, approximately. Mid 17^th century, anyway.
And it’s being played by an instrument geek, played well, in a trio (violin/viola and cello, 18th century instruments) in the Ruprechtskirche, Vienna’s oldest church.
Josef Haydn and Andreas Lidl.
Alpha and I were there last night, with Jessica and Brendan, the famous bloggers. You would think, with music that good, and company that interesting, and pews that uncomfortable, in a church that cold, it would be harder to fall asleep, but I managed. And I wasn’t the only one, people were nodding off all over.
Still, it was brilliant.
The whole day was.
Here, if a sausage isn’t unhealthy enough for you, they will wrap one in cheese and bacon and fry it if you want, and call it a Bernerwuersterl. I had one for lunch just to demonstrate it to our visitors. For dinner, we weren’t very hungry so we all had sausages standing up at a sausage stand prior to the concert (we were standing up, the sausages were lying down, sliced into pieces).
We did a lot of walking.
We looked at a courtyard.
We had coffee at the Hawelka coffee house, which is miraculously still run by the original owners, who were in their seventies twenty years ago when I first went there. They are still there, ancient and sweet and apparently in love.

Look, seriously, swear to god, Jessica just called, I’ll just dart into Vienna for just a sec and pick them up, she and Brendan want to go for a ride in the Dobl