If you've ever wondered when precisely it was the world changed and you became an old fogey then you'll know what I mean when I say that one of the most irritating things in the world is to find, for the second time, doddering-old-fool-like, you'd forgotten that you need a bloody iPod to play music through the dinner-plate sized speakers you discovered in the living room ceiling one late night after a long drive through another rainy georgia night.
I drove home late this sodden afternoon listening to Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine - this being what I wanted to listen to again at home - and wondering, crossly, what it is about rain that makes Georgia drivers throw on the brakes when the first drop hits the windshield. Answer comes there not.
The rhubarb pie I'd discovered at the back of the freezer went into oven, the CD - I still call 'em LPs in moments of inattention to the great amusement of the my other half - went into what I'd forgotten was the DVD player and would not play music. Simply-would-not-play-the-damned-music! One tantrum later - not quite throwing myself kicking and screaming to the floor but could have at a moment's further provocation - the Celt arrived home in a stinking mood (clients) to find the rhubarb pie lovingly thrown into the Miele had fossilized - if rubber can be said to fossilize - me clutching a glass of whine trying to write about the connection between Monteverdi and our library, a photo which you will not find below.
The room you see here is a library, dearth of books notwithstanding, and one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever had the pleasure to be aspirational about - the perfect room in which to listen to a scratchy vinyl 45 of Brook Benton singing A Rainy Night in Georgia.
Photographs by Henry Bourne for an article written by Carol Prisant about an interior by William Diamond and Anthony Baratta published in The World of Interiors, January 1994.
P. S. Just learned I could have used my iPhone to connect to the sound system (are they still called that?)
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