Listened to Peter Ackroyd’s wonderful Desert Island Discs while walking the dog in the park this morning. He came across as a simple, clever and thoroughly delightful man who takes himself seriously but is not obnoxious, and is astonishingly committed to what he does. At one point, he chose a piece of music which he described as “sort of my theme tune”, as he’d hummed it ever since he was a boy: it’s Peter’s Theme from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf:
And I thought that was bang on for Ackroyd. It’s light, but beautiful. It’s classical, but accessible. It’s playful, but also ominous (given what we know of what is to come). So I’m now insisting on a new game, a version of This Is My Jam: This Is My Theme Tune.
Mine, this morning, is this:
Over-ambitious, messy, a bit silly, melodramatic, funny (intentionally and unintentionally) and worryingly earnest. Yep, that’s me.
