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
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
I’ve just spent a jolly weekend in Birmingham with some old friends, and as part of our activities this afternoon we went off to raid a fine array of charity shops in the part of town where they live. Amongst the truly baffling range of furniture items on offer, the
OK, I’ll admit, it would have been a much weirder film if Disney had decided to animate a tiny ocean-dwelling Beethoven who had to be rescued from a dentist’s fish tank. (Although possibly I should copyright this idea in case there are any avant-garde film makers reading it.) But yes:
It’s halfway through January, the sky is grey and decidedly damp, and after a wonderful week on holiday, I’m now back at work. And rather enjoying being in the thick of it, I must say. But there was one thing about my holiday that I feel I must share with
Safe. Adjective. Six definitions, according to the OED: Protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost Not likely to cause or lead to harm or injury; not involving danger or risk; (of a place) affording security or protection (Derogatory) Cautious and unenterprising
OK, it’s not my catchiest post title. No puns, no clever sideways references. But I mean it. Really. Because I’m sick and tired of reading about happenings labelled as ‘tragic’, and outcomes leaving people ‘disappointed’. We are way beyond disappointingly tragic. We have officially hit catastrophically, potentially permanently disastrous. So
From 1998 until 2012, I had the great privilege and pleasure of being involved with a music summer school for amateur pianists, singers, conductors and composers. I arrived in that first year a terrified fifteen-year-old, convinced everyone on the Young Pianists course would be better than me and not knowing
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I am a deeply old-fashioned kind of person. This is, I realise, a rather ironic statement with which to begin a blog post, brought to you all via social media – the power of a democratised means of publishing which has so
A few months ago, in pursuit of a fact-checking mission for a project I was working on, I found myself signing up to gain access the truly remarkable Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury. The collection was begun in Hamburg early in the twentieth century by Aby Warburg, a brilliant scholar with
