Tuesday 23 January 2007

Still no DG here: he omitted the vital "+1" from the day that his flight gets in on his schedule ... so today I had a chance to catch up with CD business: artwork and booklet copy, double-checking the odd licensing issue, and I got another puncture on my bike (and mended it). I don't think I'm deliberately riding through patches of broken glass ...

By email, I got two offers of orchestral work today in different parts of Europe, followed by a phone call from Berlin to ask 'are you really not free, or did you just think we were a bit weird?' which was pretty funny. I really wasn't free for that one, but the other, a fortepiano tour which I would have jumped at even a couple of years ago, I decided to let pass. If it's music I really want to play, with people I really want to play it with, then great, but otherwise I'm not sure that touring as an orchestral musician, even in a good period instrument band, is a suitable job for a grown-up. Not this one anyway. Although I could use the time in hotel rooms to play my melodica and write tunes - hang on, where's the phone? I wonder what they're paying ...  No! Stop!

Yesterday I had half an hour to kill in Possil (Glasgow readers will find this hilarious: conventional wisdom says that the only thing to do with half an hour in Possil is go somewhere else fast) so I went into Possilpark Library, a small but wonderful Edwardian building built with funds from Andrew Carnegie. The airy, comfortable reading room has 6 huge murals painted by students of the Glasgow Art School in 1914, depicting Science, Astronomy, Geography, Poetry, Commerce and Art. I sat and happily read a book off the shelf, educating myself as instructed. 

It's great: I find the idea that even in Possil there is this beautiful temple to self-motivated education really moving. The management of 'Leisure Services' in Glasgow is about to change radically, and I'm told it's not that likely that Possilpark will remain as a library for much longer. So here are some surreptitiously-taken photos of what it was like when it was still fulfilling its original purpose. I'm going back next week ...

    this way to education

    outside looking up

   and looking round the corner