Saturday 14 April 2012

I’m just back from holiday, and as recommended by Graham Linehan, I’ve just been watching this old lecture from John Cleese on creativity. It gets particularly interesting at about 19 minutes in, on different degrees of creativity, and Cleese is also good on choosing when to make decisions.  Just before rehearsals start I am usually miserable and humourless, resolutely in closed mode, and move into open mode in rehearsal: given the amount of laughing that usually goes on, I think we achieve this at least some of the time.

I caught sight of Brian ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ Boyd on telly the other night, which was infuriating: he comes across as a man with good ideas, but blissfully unaware that he’s not expressing them with any clarity at all. He seemed so pleased with himself telling Gordon Brewer that ‘attainment is a subset of achievement’: this is a perfectly good idea, but it’s a terrible way to express it. One of the four capacities that underlie the curriculum for ages 3-18 is ‘effective contributor’: I have two degrees and teach in a university, and I have no idea what that means (contribute to what?), so how a seven-year-old is going to make sense of it as a basic building block of their education is beyond me. No wonder teachers’ morale is low: they’re expected to make sense of all this stuff and actually pass it on. If it wasn’t for the creative resilience of all of us (teachers and learners alike) in the face of ineptitude, I’d suggest we man the lifeboats.  Oddly enough Mike Russell (education secretary) was on Lismore yesterday: I should have asked him if he knew what ‘effective contributors’ meant, and how much of the education budget will be going on trying to explain it to everyone in Scotland under 18.

Also on Lismore yesterday was Mairi Campbell, who had only been on the island for an hour when I cycled past (and stopped very quickly).  Lismore is like that: it only has a population of 180 but many of them are familiar one way or another. The first time I ever went into the shop back in 2007, I met Mike Lean and Patsy Seddon. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’  ‘It’s the shop on Lismore, everybody comes here.’

me and Mairi

I seem to have got myself a suntan, in Scotland in April. It was nice to be out on the Dahon Ciao, which has a sticker on it telling you not to ride it off-road, but it somehow copes with gentle muddy tracks very well indeed.  However, despite some people’s claims to the contrary, Schwalbe Marathon Racer tyres do get punctures …

my morning reading spot

In the middle of last week, I got offered a couple of weeks’ work in the summer on a nice gig with good musicians. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s pretty much the same gig I did nearly 20 years ago. Playing music professionally makes you liable to spend your life repeating yourself, and with classical music you can spend your life repeating other people, which is even worse. So saying no was quite easy really: that and the working title for the CD recording being ‘Baroque Classics’.