Palestrina (1525-1594) When I used to sing tenor in various choirs and groups from childhood until not that many years ago, I always found Easter a moving experience because, whatever your faith, it managed to bring the best out of…
Josquin Desprez (1450-1521) It is Good Friday and even if you can’t step out of your busy life for very long, listen to this, the Stabat Mater by one of my favourite Reniassance composers, Josquin Desprez. His music is perfect…
Writing yesterday about T.S. Eliot’s great poem The Waste Land and how it was, at least partly inspired by the English drought of 1921, I look out on my small Lewes garden and hope that it won’t too turn into…
Drought UK 2012 Here in the Southern part of England, we are now officially in drought after an extraordinarily dry winter. Water reserves are low and as from midnight tonight, we will be banned from using our garden hose pipes.…
It’s a great week here on British television. I can live without television quite well most of the time but looking at the shows that I have been waiting to view on Sky+ this week, well I can’t wait. In…
I’m just saying hello from under a pile of paperwork today so forgive my absence good readers. It’s not a bad feeling for someone like me to get down to sorting all the muddles that grow between different drafts of…
Poor Freddie Gage, it must be sad to have lost all your friends but this album sure ain’t gonna bring you any new ones. I have an awful feeling that his performance may have killed them all off. Actually there…
Yesterday was sunny and warm here in Lewes, UK. I would have felt great too if I hadn’t been on my last day of taking some particularly disagreeable antibiotics for my gum abscess. I would have felt worse though it…
George Osborne For all those “grannies” in the United Kingdom who are worried about the cut in their pensions after the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne’s Budget, there is even more gloom if they fancy tottering off down…
I was going to write something irritating about Romeo and Juliet, you remember those annoying teenagers who just couldn’t keep things together, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything cynical about them on the day that I’m writing a…