Manchester Revisited
It was fun going to Manchester last week – I hadn’t been there for about ten years and everyone told me that I would be amazed by the way it has changed in that time. Well, there are certainly a…
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Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall: it was all in the name.
I went up to Manchester last week for a concert at the impressively modern Bridgewater Hall. I haven’t been back to the city for years but I lived there for a long time and my work meant that I got…
Essential Elgar for a long journey across England
I am travelling across England today by train after a trip to Manchester for a centenary performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto played, superbly, dramatically and tearfully by one of the new kids on the block in violin playing, Nicolaj Znaider…
Nicolaj Zneider celebrates the centenary of Elgar’s Violin Concerto – the passionate record of a forbidden love.
Nicolaj Zneider I am off to Manchester today for a concert at the Bridgewater Hall where, tonight, the brilliant and honey-toned young Danish violinist Nicolaj Znaider plays Elgar’s passionate Violin Concerto in its 100th anniversary year as part of his…
The Chilean miners story: trapped for months in the Atacama Desert.
It has been amazing. Sixty nine days they were trapped there at the San Jose mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert with only their colleagues for company in gruelling conditions with just minimum rations, separated from their loved ones, nothing much…
My schoolboy crush on an Australian singer called Joan Sutherland
I was an excitable schoolboy living in exciting times and I must have had a thing about groups beginning with the letter B. There was The Beatles, of course, the band that turned me on, tuned me in and so…
In comes the east wind but my chili peppers are staying out there for a bit longer.
Here in my garden in Lewes, England, I can feel the first hints of a change in temperature as the wind direction shifts and some sobering Eastern cold air comes in to hurry along the autumn. As the season changes…
My love affair with my feline neighbour gets steamy.
Do you think the new neighbourhood cat is trying to tell me something? First she tried to get into the shower with me (sorry no photo) but decided she didn’t like water so then she went up stairs and stretched…
Lewes on a melancholy Autumn afternoon
Just when I was about to despair about us getting any Autumn here in Lewes, England, the sun came out, the temperature rose and, hey, it all felt good again. There were apples on the trees, the sun on my…
The Company Man is an emotional onslaught at the Orange Tree theatre
I have a friend and relative called Henry who works at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Surrey, England, and he invited me there for the first night of a new play. Oddly enough, I nearly went off the idea…