Bob has just made his fourth batch of marmalade this month, using Seville oranges which are only available in January. Batch 1 had to be thrown away when he got engrossed in some editing work and left the boiling marmalade to caramelise. Batch 2 was an unusual recipe with dark muscovado sugar, not a marmalade for [...]

The parade of unusual bird visitors continues. The other day, in our local park, we saw half a dozen large cormorants, or perhaps shags, sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of the lake. Surely cormorants are seabirds, found on rocky cliffs? But there they were slumming it among the ducks and coots. When [...]

In the bread section of the supermarket I was startled to see a tall baguette labelled ‘Pain Flute’. I was reading in English and thought the store’s labelling team had gone all poetical on a dark winter’s afternoon. Isn’t there a poem by Tagore which talks about the flute sounding the notes of the writer’s pain? When I’m [...]

There’s a little interview with me in the ‘Meet the Artist’ series on BBC Music Magazine’s website.  It focuses on the masterclass weekend I’m teaching in February. As is usually the way, the interviewer hasn’t chosen the bits of the interview I would have chosen myself, but perhaps it’s interesting anyhow.

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Out of the Saturday Guardian fell a slim booklet about Keats, the first in a series about Romantic Poets. It fell open at Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. My eye fell on the lines,
‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard//Are sweeter’
I read this line aloud to Bob. ‘Do you think that’s true?’ I asked. ‘That [...]