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
As I was scrolling through Twitter on Wednesday, I came across the news that it was National Writing Day. Various people were tweeting advice and enthusiastic messages over the course of the day, encouraging people to tell their own stories and find their own words. Some of them, though, seemed
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
When I was a student at Nottingham University, back in the dim and distant past, I was invited to join a group of friends at a performance of Opera North’s Der Rosenkavalier in town. I’d never seen the show before, and as far as I knew, I didn’t really know
A few days ago, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to a TED talk by the psychologist Guy Winch. It is, as with almost all TED Talks I’ve watched over the years, a compelling and entertaining presentation about the importance of what Winch calls ‘emotional hygiene’. He
This week, something VERY exciting has happened. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the first book in the world which has my name on the cover. Hurrah! Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall is a project some four years in the making, from the conference in 2011 that prompted
Happy 4th July, one and all! And to the staff and students at the Royal College of Music, where I have studied and worked for the last eight years, congratulations on reaching the end of another great adventure of an academic year. It’s been exhausting, exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and packed
It’s that time of year again when school and university students up and down the country are facing deadline days and examinations. Assignment writing through the night on coffee and energy tablets, revision cramming as you struggle down the corridor towards the exam room… we all know the drill. And
