Stumbling on melons

You know you are getting on when you find yourself reading the death notices.

That was a habit of our cleaning lady when I was a child. It was not my parents’ – maybe because not having grown up in Sydney they had less cause for it.

Still living in the city of my birth, I haven’t started doing it yet, but I did have reason to scan them today. It’s easier now online though I suspect publishing death notices in a “paper of record” is a dying custom. I didn’t find who I was looking for (not that I am wishing for their death) but was surprised to see notices for two people I knew, or at least knew of.

One was the father of my schoolmate, B.

The other was Beryl Potter. At first I wasn’t sure if it was the Beryl Potter but it turns out it was.

For many years Beryl was a leading accompanist in Sydney. Perhaps the somewhat older Megan Evans was more of a fixture on the vocal side of things. Although Potter performed with singers I think of her as the accompanist you would most likely see for any young instrumentalist’s examination or audition.

Simon Tedeschi has written an obituary which has been published in the SMH.

Tedeschi remarks that Potter “could sight read like nobody’s business.” I’m sure that is true, though by the time Tedeschi knew her there can’t have been many occasions when she had to.

I only just noticed this.

Compare 2010 (not my picture):

A funny thing happened on the way to the…..can anyone guess what I’m thinking of?

I only thought of this because I went to visit a friend who last night at an SSO concert I learnt was in a rehab hospital following a fall at, as it happened, a reunion at our old school.  (He was there about 15 years earlier than I was.)

(I told him, don’t go!)

When I got to the hospital this afternoon he’d just gone off for an hour’s physio.  I couldn’t wait that long, and so left a note with reception, which is when I came to write the date.

The Friday before last to hear the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in their concert titled Heaven is Closed.

I had spent the day in a suburban local court on a legally aided matter.   I had done a lot of work on it laboriously transcribing the copious video evidence – mostly from police-worn body-cam.  This pretty much comprised the entirety of the police investigation, so  I was in as good a position as the police to form a view that the charges should not have been brought.

There had been a scuffle and my client, basically a street person, was ejected forcibly from a flat where he had been staying. He was prevented from taking  his stuff (“new, from the Wayside”)  with him.  He rang the police from a nearby phone box complaining that he had been assaulted.  When the police arrived he confirmed this but said that he was more interested in getting his stuff back.

The police are a hammer to whom everything is a nail.  By the time the police had come back from talking to the people in the flat (and before they had spoken to my client) they had decided that he instead was the assailant and arrested him for that.  No attempt was made to retrieve the possessions, even though the alleged victim of the assault volumteered that there were such possessions to be returned to my client .

What ever happened to community policing?

In the end my work was (with hindsight) unnecessary as one prosecution witness did not show and the other (the “victim”) , who had no choice about attending because now in custody, recanted.  Charge dismissed.

At the conclusion of the hearing, the magistrate asked me if the magistrate knew me from somewhere.  We couldn’t work out where and whether this was so and it is only since with a bit of googling  that I have realised that I probably adjudicated the magistrate in a high school debate circa 1979 or 1980.

After all this excitement I was unable to restore myself to a satisfactory state with a pre-concert nap which was interrupted to boot..

The fare, with violinist Lisa Batiashvili and conductor Dima Slobodeniouk was advertised as:

R STRAUSS  Don Juan
PROKOFIEV  Violin Concerto No.2
KATS-CHERNIN  Heaven is Closed
R STRAUSS  Till Eulenspiegel.

On the night, the Kats-Chernin was played  first and the two Strauss pieces made up the second half.  My own feeling is that the first idea (if that was the idea) was better, as it would have better distinguished the Strauss pieces from each other and also placed the Kats-Chernin in a more favourable place, rather than the slightly hackneyed opening-of-concert-modern-work spot.

I’m not a great Kats-Chernin fan and given the state I’m in I struggled to overcome my prejudices.  Others enjoyed it.

I was a bit surprised to see Ms Batiashvili use a music stand for the Prokofiev.  Was this one of these “obscure” concerti?  Hardly – I certainly recognized it, and especially the second movement.  She did lift me out of my bad state.  I also enjoyed her encore, a Bach chorale prelude arranged for violin and string orchestra.

The Strauss was invigorating.  The SSO is trialling various potential new co-concertmasters.  On this occasion, it was Raphael Christ.  He has beautiful crinkly hair.   This is probably not something I would comment on save that it is still just a shadow of the hairdo he sported as a teenager in this performance . RC’s father is the violist, Wolfram, who has also spent some time in Sydney.  Speaking as a follically-challenged person, I hope Raphael  gets his hair from his mother rather than his father.

I was going to mention something arising out of post-concert chat with my friend and former student and neighbout  DB, but the subject matter is just too disparate to be fitted in to this already quite disparate post.

This is a term much beloved by insurers.  It refers to the fact or the risk (which I suppose is a kind of fact) that, once insured, people are likely to take less care than if they were bearing the risk, uninsured, themselves.  Here is a more formal expression of that:

the chance that the insured will be more careless and take greater risks because he or she is protected, thus increasing the potential of claims on the provider.

As with banking law or indeed any area of social and interaction, the terms of discourse are generally set by the frequent players (banks, insurers) rather than the punters on the other side.  I do love the way in which it is expressed so as to imply that it is the insured person who is being immoral.

But it’s not all one way.  Mostly the flip side of the coin is the cunning use of exclusion and limitation clauses in insurance policies.  A more subtle example is the way that an insurer might conduct your defence if you are being sued and they are the insurer for a liability policy of some sort.  Frequently as a term of such insurance the insurer maintains the right to conduct the defence on your behalf.

As the person subject to a claim, you may well prefer the claim to be settled rather than a potentially embarrassing and risky trial conducted – especially as the insurer will have its own reasons for defending or not defending a claim relating to its own exposure to potential similar claims by others against other insureds.

But here is a more worrying situation.

Sometimes liability insurance policies cover the cost of defending claims by clients, but also contain exclusions against certain types of claims.  For example, you will never be insured against a claim that you have acted fraudulently.

So then suppose the claim against you is a claim for fraud.  You deny it but it will be expensive to defend.  You go to your insurer to pay for your defence.  You have to let them conduct the defence.

But if you lose, which actually means if the insurer loses the case it conducts on your behalf, the policy won’t apply.   Not only will you have to meet the claim, but you will have to pay the insurer back for the money which it has spent unsuccessfully defending the case.

Call it moral hazard, call it conflict of interest.  Either way it’s a scary turning of the tables.

Should insurers be permitted to insist on their right to conduct the defence in such cases?