31 August

On 31 August 1997, Diana, the Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul were killed in a car crash in Paris.  Following an unprecedented outpouring of public mourning in Britain and beyond, her public funeral at Westminster Abbey on 6 September drew an estimated 3 million onlookers in London, as well as worldwide television coverage watched by as many as 2.5 billion people.

Four decades earlier, on this day in 1957 Malaya became an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.

Then, in 1978, four hundred of the world's top climatologists met in Geneva, Switzerland to discuss climate change and debate to what extent it is influenced by human pollution. The debate continues, while the planet continues to spin around its axis.  There is some action to address our role in climate change, but not enough.  whatever happens - unless there is some cataclysmic event that shatters the planet in the same way that our Moon was born in the early days of the formation of the Solar System - Earth will be here in a million, even a billion years.  But will mankind survive our own short-sightedness? Nobody knows.

Some first performances of famous music took place on 31 August:  Liszt's Graner Mass (1886), Rossini's opera William Tell, in Paris (1829) and  FP of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, in Berlin (1928).

Birthdays today include the French poet Théophile Gautier (1811), the Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli (1834) the singer/songwriter  Van Morrison (1945) and the violinist Itzhak Perlman (1945).




Christian's song

Today is also the birthday of my friend Christian Bresnier, who follows this blog regularly and who has been posting a "song of the day" regularly on Facebook.  I'm sharing his choice for the day, with his comments.   In fact, I think I am going to ask him if he will allow me to share his song choices regularly as a kind of "Christian's song choice".  

Here are his comments to today's song: "For my birthday song I chose this poem which I consider one of the most beautiful and poignant and which captures the essence of regret and nostalgia. Pity that the English subtitles are so pedestrian. There exists a great english version by Graeme Allwright but unfortunately unavailable on the Internet. Incidentally, George Brassens is my favorite French lyricist, a bon-vivant par excellence, warm, naughty and funny and his death in 1982 or thereabouts touched me deeply. I don't have 'idols' but there is a man I would have liked to meet."