Good Friday

It is weird to wake up on Good Friday by loud pop music, coming from the sports fields of the school opposite. The school celebrates an important anniversary and has organised some festivities for pupils and former pupils. The noise gets worse and worse. All pupils assemble in the middle of the field. I notice they have chalked lines on the grass, probably characters or numbers, and the pupils are requested to gather strictly within the confines of the lines. They all wear white, red and blue and Christmas hats. They are tightly packed together. I do not realise what is going on till a small lightweight plane starts circling overhead and instructions are blaring out of the loudspeakers. The pupils start waving their red and fur trimmed hats while the small plane keeps circling lower and lower. And then it is over. They disperse, the red, white and blue dilutes. The plane disappears from view. Then the beat gets louder and any attempt at conversation in my the garden is drowned out by the noise. No Christian school would ever organise an event like this on Good Friday. Society has grown away so far from the Christian feast days that most people don't even know why they are given a day off. Any free day is an excuse for a party.

It is a warm summer's day again, and people who still wore winter coats and boots last week, now appear in sleeveless summer dresses and sandals. Last year at Easter we had a late snowfall! Now we are having the highest temperatures at Easter time since 1901, according to the weatherman.

At midday I drive to The Hague for a short choir practice before we enter the church to sing during the last hour of a three hour service. The choir has practised till late last night, but since I went to the St. Matthew Passion, I couldn't rehearse with them. Fortunately I know the music well. It is very hot in our heavy robes of man-made fibre. The sun is brilliant and seems to mock the solemnity of the occasion. We sing three anthems, the congregation joining us for the traditional hymns. The singing is alternated with Bible readings, meditations and prayers. One of the anthems we sing is "Surely, surely, He has born our griefs and carried our sorrows", from Händel's Messiah. We only sang the first part during the service. King's College Choir Cambridge of course does a better job, but we didn't do badly at all.

Palestrina's O Saviour of the World, and Turn the unto me o Lord by William Boyce (1710-1779) were the other two anthems.

After the service I take a couple of friends from Leyden home, and we have drinks in my garden. At 4 in the afternoon it is too hot to sit in the sun, but the leaves on the climbers over the pergola and on trees are not yet big enough to provide shade, and I have not had a chance to set up the sun umbrella's. We enjoy cool drinks of beer and cider. Later I take my friends to the station, one to catch a train home, two to take the bus. On my way back I pop in for some provisions, as the shops close early on Good Friday. Most church services traditionally are in the evening.

Being alone that evening I think of my father. He was looking forward to Spring, to the new buds and the young leaves on shrubs and trees. To the bright sunshine and all the blossoming trees. To trips out in my car to see the beauty of the light on the river, the cows in the fields again, the grass, almost fluorescent green after the dullness of winter. Being an artist at heart he enjoyed the colours, but especially the light and what light does to the things we see. He could catch the light in his paintings, something I try to do by taking pictures, which is not half as efficient a medium as painting. Photography cannot play the tricks on us paintings can. Pictures  catch the truth, freeze the truth, paintings show us something different: not only the truth, but what we personally see, our perception of reality, which is subjective and more than the truth. Photoshop might be the new means of achieving something similar, but it can never be as expressive as a painting, which is an artistic representation of what we think we see, or of the way we see things.