I am in a state of immobility. My bicycle has been temporarily expropriated. Just as well. I need a break from exercise and monotony – as much as I thrive on them both. Besides sitting alone before my computer, glancing at the gulls soaring like kites in the wind over Sarasota Bay, listening to table music, eating walnuts drowned in maple syrup and sipping chilled espresso is an agreeable way to spend an idle Sunday morning. It’s only approaching ten o’clock and already I’ve showered, eaten breakfast and done a laundry. Thus have I expiated my guilt on the Sabbath!

My night was long and laborious. I retired last evening at eight o’clock, wearied by my day’s adventures and stupified by holiday weekend television. During the night my pills wore off and the neuropathy in my legs and feet intensified. I used the disruption to edit my life. It is a flavourless occupation when compared to the catastrophe which some have had to endure, which some continue to suffer. I am haunted by the perverse accommodations of war, the unthinkable assault upon youth.

Like any other creature I remorselessly dissolve in the present. It is a paradigm from which there is no ready escape. For the moment I succumb. My absorption is the nature of my publicity. I have exacted a review of my past and wondered at my present. For what seemed like hours I endlessly recited the names of those whom I have whom, my acquaintances and friends, resolving in the end only that they too have their primary and primitive solicitude.

Tafelmusik (German: literally, “table-music”) is a term used since the mid-16th century for music played at feasts and banquets. Often the term was also used as a title for collections of music, some of which was intended to be so used. The function was displaced in the late 18th century by the divertimento, and its importance soon diminished, but it was revived and partially restored in the vocal genre of the Liedertafel by Carl Friedrich Zelter beginning in 1809, and male-voice choral societies describing themselves by this name continued the practice until the mid-20th century.

Some of the most significant composers of Tafelmusik included Johann Hermann Schein, whose Banchetto musicale of 1617 acquired considerable fame, and Michael Praetorius, who wrote about the phenomenon of Tafelmusik in his Syntagma musicum of 1619. Music from Schein’s collection is still performed by early music ensembles with some regularity.

The Tafelmusik or Musique de Table by the Baroque composer Georg Philipp Telemann is perhaps his most celebrated collection of music. Composed in 1733, Telemann’s Tafelmusik has been compared as a collection to the renowned Brandenburg concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach in clearly demonstrating the composer’s supreme skill in handling a diversity of musical genres and a variety of instruments.Tafelmusik could be either instrumental, vocal, or both. As might be expected, it was often of a somewhat lighter character than music for other occasions