One of the great delights of working in so many different roles, in combination with reading a completely all-over-the-place, whatever-comes-off-the-shelf-first sort of collection of books, is that sometimes connections emerge between multiple strands of my activities and leisure reading which make for rather interesting alignments. This week has most definitely
Here’s a question. Some of you might be able to answer it from direct personal experience; for others, it’s a hypothetical. But in all cases, it’s interesting. (Well, I think it is, anyway.) Imagine you love a particular academic subject. Maybe it’s music; maybe it’s physics, or history, or French,
Every time I get off the Tube at Oxford Circus – which, given the host of fun things I’m up to at the Wigmore Hall and BBC Radio 3 of late, is fairly often – I have to go past the Nike flagship store, right on the junction where the
This week, I’ve had two conversations with people which effectively amount to the same worry, and which assume something rather interesting about me. Since coincidences strike me as an excellent excuse for a blog post, here’s the situation: once in the context of speaking, and once regarding writing, people have
So, as I write this, it’s 13th January. How are we all doing so far? How many resolutions have you already thrown in the bin or accidentally (or deliberately) revoked? How many puns on the word ‘January’ have you seen to try to get you to do something, or stop
It’s been a strange few weeks. After the very sad news that my dear friend and mentor Philip Weller had died, I’ve been running to the end of work to stop and see family over Christmas, and have been slogging away the past few days to tie up loose ends
I didn’t get around to writing a blog post last week. I’d just received the very sad news that Philip Weller, one of the most important musical influences on my life and career, and a dear friend, had died. Philip was a long-serving member of staff at the University of
It’s always interesting (to me, anyway) to see what passing news stories and comment articles exercise the people I follow on social media the most. On Friday, I stumbled across a number of people being very frustrated about an opinion piece in the Guardian by James Colley, about why you
It’s been an amazing year for the visibility of women in history. Not just the suffragettes, though of course they have been front and centre – various organisations, including several I work for, have taken the opportunity to showcase the lives and achievements of women across the whole of society,
This week has involved a great deal of travelling. The downside of this is the hours of time it eats, and in this season of ever darkening days, the sure knowledge that the beautiful sunny vista that you can see from the train window will have vanished into pitch black
