Wednesday 28 January 2009

My son Robbie took this picture of a nearby cycle lane on Monday. At our local hospital the council has instituted free parking but with a maximum stay of 4 hours, after which there is a £40 fine. So anyone working in the hospital, if travelling by car (and given that people work there all night, some of them are inevitably going to) has to dump their vehicle somewhere in the surrounding streets. And not always with consideration for other road users: it was physically impossible even to push a bike past this one ...

I've been mulling over Sunday night's experience, in the context of comment like this. On Sunday Karine sang Burns's The Slave's Lament with Sly and Robbie - and we can guess that Sly Dunbar's Scottish surname was probably given to one of his slave ancestors by a Scottish master. It's not a part of Scottish history that inspires pride. But on Sunday night there was no doubt that it was the Jamaicans who were in charge. They were the master musicians on the stage; we were in awe at being in their orbit, and for that matter playing to their audience. We gave them precious parts of our culture to transform (Burns Night, even Auld Lang Syne) and were utterly delighted with what they did.  This was no transatlantic expression of 'celtic' pride and identity (whatever that is) but something much more powerful, and I'm very pleased to have been a part of it. Playing classical music can sometimes leave you feeling uneasy about reinforcing some of the cultural assumptions that underlie it; this was a reminder that music can send out messages about the world around us with great subtlety.