Wednesday 8 February 2012

My bike now has now attained celebrity status with its own webpage. It’s feeling a bit sorry for itself at the moment, as one of the after-effects of my collision with tarmac back in November is that it’s just lost its original 1954 pedals. Sorry, I must not anthropomorphise a bicycle, as I really can’t stand it when buses read ‘I’m not in service’, or worst of all, that twee nonsense on the side of Innocent smoothie cartons ‘store me in the fridge’. At least one Glasgow bus company mitigates this slightly by having the display board read ‘Ah’m no in service’ which should baffle foreign tourists nicely.

A few weeks ago I managed to improve my disastrous time management skills just a bit, by putting preparation time for tasks into my diary as well as actual appointments.  But in the last couple of days I’ve realised how far I still have to go. Today and yesterday were each blocked out for a single task: yesterday’s was piano practice and preparation for upcoming gigs with Kathy Fuge, and today’s was listening to Mackintosh session tapes. Usually I start work by around 8.30am, and I’ve been pretty quick to get my desk both days to clear away the urgent emails and leftovers from the previous day’s communication. Well, yesterday I finally started on the day’s allotted task at 2.15pm, and today I was listening to takes by 11.30am. So on a good day like today, it still takes me three hours just to deal with daily administrative stuff. When I start putting that into my diary too, I might begin to have a realistic idea of how much work I can actually achieve.

I hope I wasn’t the only person cheered by Jenny Diski’s appearance on PM yesterday (at about 48’50), not because she was tired of Charles Dickens, but because she was very tired of anniversaries driving cultural content. It really is the laziest, least imaginative way to decide on what you’re going to programme, whether you’re a TV network or an early music group. I’m delighted that so many people got to hear the Monteverdi Vespers in its 400th anniversary year in 2010 (and that so many cornett and sackbut players got so much work) but were the performances more enlightening than they would have been in 2009 or 2011? And did it crowd out other music that would otherwise have got an airing simply because it was the right time to do it, because it was ready and fresh?  It’s our Concerto Caledonia 20th birthday this summer, and what are we doing to celebrate? Um, nothing actually, for the simple reason that in and of itself it’s just not very interesting, and that there are newer, more pressing things for us to get on with. Anyway, in 2009 we pretty much celebrated our back catalogue across four concerts and a live CD in Edinburgh. Having said that, if someone wants to throw us a party, we do have a gig in August …