I’ve just finished reading ‘Julie and Julia’, an entertaining account of Julie Powell’s year spent cooking her way through Julia Child’s 1961 ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’, the book which famously opened the American public’s eyes to the art and style of classic French cuisine.
Julie Powell keeps things light, perhaps too light, but I [...]

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear website,
Happy birthday to you!
This blog ‘went live’ one year ago today. To mark the occasion, what better than a photo of the cherry blossom which has just come out in the garden?
The first anniversary seems a good time to take stock.  If you read this blog regularly, do you [...]

We attended a funeral in a small church this week. As we sat waiting for the service to begin, an organist was stumbling through some well-known hymns, their outlines blurred by a haze of wrong notes. Though I tell myself to lighten up, I find I’m very impatient with this kind of stumbling. I can’t ignore it and tell myself [...]

Like most other people in Britain I’ve been relishing the sudden quietness resulting from the closure of our airspace because of a drifting cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. On Saturday I sat in the garden for ages, because it felt so special to be sitting  under the Heathrow flightpath with a totally silent sky (see photo). Well, [...]

My piano tuner asks whether I’m happy to keep my piano at the usual pitch, A=440. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?
Well, he says, some British orchestras are now asking for pianos to be tuned at A=442 Hz. Now that there’s so much musical traffic between countries, we’re under pressure to adopt ‘European’ tuning, and for [...]