It’s that time of year again: essay marking. My lovely undergraduates at Middlesex University have been beavering away all year on long projects, which I am now tasked to assess. This is the time of year when academics sit together to discuss bloopers, inadvertently hilarious appealing spooling mistales (see what
I have GOT to tell you about the week I just had. It was incredible. And busy – very busy – but worth all the prep, the travel, the early starts and late nights, the frantic library trips in the lead-up. It went like this: Saturday – Live broadcast on
It’s the end of term, and I’ve spent an amount of the last few weeks talking to undergraduate students at Middlesex University about their big written projects, due in early May. They are, as ever, in various stages of completion: from almost full drafts, to agonising blank pages. And it
I am feeling particularly smug today, because I have successfully dispatched all of the Christmas cards that needed posting to assorted friends, relatives, old teachers and colleagues, days before the final posting date. As ever, the choosing of which cards to buy was a slightly tricky business, and I decided
In the last few weeks, I seem to have spent a lot of my time thinking about Beethoven. In addition to a lovely session of Music Talks in South Kensington, where I had a live quartet on stage to help me explain the inner workings of the A minor String
One year to this very day, 5th July, I woke up to find myself unemployed, unaffiliated, and absolutely delighted about it. Last Independence Day (talk about appropriate), I celebrated my last day of working at the Royal College of Music, and stepped out into the unknown to try my hand
Isn’t it amazing how quickly life moves on? Only last week, the General Election was a few days behind us and it was hard to think about anything else. Now, seven days later, my head is full of thoughts about marking the work of the lovely students of Middlesex University;
