Children collecting tadpoles in our local park this week. The things frogs have to put up with!

I looked up ‘tadpole’ in the dictionary. ‘Tade’ is the Old English word for toad. ‘Poll’ means head. Toadhead: a rather graceless image, I find. Somehow the tadpoles’ tails have always seemed more characteristic!

A hospital appointment date arrives in the post. Along with the letter is a leaflet pleading, ‘Don’t be a DNA!’ It turns out that ‘a DNA is someone who Did Not Attend hospital for an appointment and did not advise us beforehand. The clinic was ready, the staff were ready, but the patient was a DNA. Last year, this hospital had 56,618 DNA’s.’

Wait a minute – over fifty-six thousand people who didn’t bother to turn up for their appointments, in a single year – that’s over a thousand people every week! A hundred and fifty-five people every day who don’t turn up or call to say they’re not coming, just at one hospital! And yet most of those must be people who went to their doctors because they were worried about something. They can’t all be people who were automatically enrolled in some national screening programme and sent appointments that didn’t interest them. Think of the numbers of DNAs when multiplied across the whole country! When you know people who really depend on the immediate availability of medical care (see previous post) it’s infuriating to think of so much hospital time being wasted by people who don’t turn up.

A few weeks ago I attended an astonishing concert given by the pianist Jacob Barnes and three of his friends from the Royal Academy of Music. Jacob had been suffering from a rare kind of leukaemia for two years. His presence on the platform was a source of wonder and trepidation to everyone who had been following the course of his illness. Yet he was determined to play the concert, and we were all so glad he did, because it was a memorable occasion. The memory is even more poignant now that Jacob has died at the age of 21.

I had always known he was a talented pianist (when he was 18, he was offered scholarships to all the prestigious UK music colleges) but I think it was only at that concert that I understood the true depth of his musicianship. Although he was no longer strong enough to play all the notes, it was inspiring to witness his utter determination to make clear the musical shape and emotion, to extract every grain of meaning from the twists and turns of the harmony, and to relish communication with his three lovely colleagues. As one of the musicians in the audience said afterwards, ‘It was such wise playing’.

Music was meat and drink to Jacob, and he was just the kind of person that the music world needs. He had an inexhaustible appetite for playing his beloved chamber music, and on music courses he would gather people up to play during lunch breaks and late into the evening. He was also one of those rare musicians interested in the whole range of music. Not long before he died, we met for lunch and he told me he was off to the dress rehearsal of a new opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, ‘just out of interest’. He continued to go in to the Royal Academy to take part in lessons, classes, concerts, and competitions (which he won) – even when it seemed medically inadvisable. But Jacob insisted that music was literally keeping him going, and his doctors seemed to agree. He spoke eloquently about the strength he drew from music-making with his friends, and from the support of his devoted family. Though there must have been many dark moments, I never heard him speak bitterly about what was happening to him, even though it must have seemed monumentally unfair. Somehow he continued to be friendly, caring and courteous. He was a truly inspiring example of courage under fire.

I read last week of the death of ex-Sony chief Norio Ohga, the ‘father of the CD’. When Sony launched the CD format in 1982, Mr Ohga insisted that a disc must be long enough to contain his favourite piece, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This determined the 75-minute length of the new CD format.

I vividly remember the impact that the new format had on us musicians. I and my colleagues had started by recording on LP – two sides of about 25 minutes each, enough to record two substantial works of several movements each.

When the CD format came along, however, record buyers started to expect 75 minutes of music. Soon it was considered ‘not value for money’ if a CD offered much less than this. For us, this meant that two works were no longer enough – we were now expected to record three. This, of course, meant more preparation, more pressure in the recording studio, more challenges to our stamina, concentration and temper. Personally I’d always found it more than enough to tackle two complete works for a disc. Now we had to do three, or whatever amounted to 70-75 minutes of music. The recollection is relevant to the Florestan Trio’s new disc, just out on Hyperion. We planned to record just Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, and the Seven Songs of Alexander Blok for soprano and trio (with Susan Gritton), two works we felt were musically intense enough to stand on their own. But when it was found that the our performances totalled 55 minutes, we were asked to go back into the studio and record the First Trio as well, so that the disc would jump over the magic 60-minute mark and become ‘value for money’. We did, and the result is just arriving in the shops. Early reviews have been lovely.

On the day the world is glued to the Royal Wedding in London, it seems slightly beside the point to mention that this is the second anniversary of my blog ‘going live’, but then, why not? I’m quite pleased about it. I wasn’t sure I’d manage to keep the blog going for more than a few months, but here it is two whole years later. At first I tried to write something almost every day, but eventually realised that less was more, or at any rate that more was not necessarily welcome. The number of readers went skittishly up and down with no obvious link to what I was writing about, or when I had last posted anything. If I went silent for a fortnight, readers still surged or vanished unpredictably, controlled by forces more complex than I could hope to influence. Clearly it was not a simple matter of people noticing that there was something new to read. So now I just write when I feel like it, and perhaps that is why it’s still going. Anyway, Happy Royal Wedding, and happy 2nd birthday, dear blog!