In my very first year at senior school, a teacher gave an excellent assembly in which he told the tale of those four well-known characters, Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. It’s quite a popular story – you might have heard it before. It’s called ‘That’s not my job’: There was
It’s taken me a while to write this piece. Don’t think, from my radio silence on the subject, that I haven’t been thinking a lot about the various debates, campaigns and speeches that have emerged for and against the so-called EBacc (English Baccalaureate). But there’s a lot to read, a
A little over a year ago, when I first went freelance, I decided that it was time to pay more attention to the place of classical music in the press. I joined Twitter; I started reading more and more articles in online journals, newspapers and blogs; and in general have
There are some arguments, I am sure most of us agree, that are worth having over, and over, and over again. They are usually arguments about things that strike us as personally significant, important, pertinent: perhaps about education, parenting, the economy, segregation in all its forms, healthcare, and so on.
In 2005, when I was finishing my Masters at Nottingham University, I had a job one afternoon a week at a primary school. The school’s excellent music teacher was not a pianist, so I was recruited to sit in the hall at the tinny but serviceable upright, and accompany each
