To Cambridge, where I heard a fine May Week concert at King’s College. (As Clive James pointed out in the title of a book of memoirs, May Week is in June.) It was great to hear that the tradition of excellent music-making continues, even though ‘performance’ is only a small part of the students’ degree course, and not part of their course at all if they are studying a subject other than music.

I spent a pleasant afternoon sitting by the river, watching punts go by. In my student days, most of the punters were students or tourists. Now most punts seem to be steered by professionals who give guided history tours as they glide along ‘The Backs’ of the colleges with their boatloads of foreign visitors. I was startled to hear some of the guides gaily dispensing misinformation. As they glided past, I heard them say that King’s was the only college where students do not have to take exams (untrue); that only students with top exam marks are allowed to live in the building nearest to the river (untrue); that the founder, Henry VI, was married to Anne Boleyn (untrue), that you can be expelled for walking on the lawn (untrue) and even that the famous Chapel was hewn out of a single piece of rock (untrue). The tourists took it all in, nodding solemnly. If they happened to catch my eye, I did my bit for counter-information by smiling and shaking my head meaningfully, but my companions told me to stop. ‘You can’t single-handedly stamp this out – it goes on day and night’, they said wearily.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the jury’s deliberations on the Cardiff Singer of the World final on Sunday night. I’d watched most of the other rounds and had realised it was going to be a difficult choice. It was an exceptionally good line-up, and each one of the five finalists might plausibly have won the competition. After they’d sung, I agreed with the BBC’s guest experts, Joyce DiDonato and Nicole Cabell, that based on that night’s performance, Andrei Bondarenko of Ukraine should be the overall winner – him or Russian mezzo Olesya Petrova. However, it was Valentina Nafornita who won the title.

Having a bit of jury experience myself, I know that voting systems can often produce strange results. Funnily enough, I can usually live with ‘strange’ results better than with compromise results. Last time I was on a jury, we used to compare notes after each voting round, and we generally found that only about half of us were happy with the outcome. I don’t know what system they used in Cardiff, but I found myself thinking that they must have thrown away their score cards and gone on their gut instinct. For the winner, Valentina Nafornita, wasn’t the most accomplished on the night. It was, however, easy to hear (and see) that she had star quality and the potential to be very special. How to mark ‘the potential to be very special’? I’ve never met the voting system that supplies the answer. Yet in music you so often find yourself needing to vote that way – a vote which requires imagination, a vote for the future.

After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45.

What evocative surnames some of them had! Bagot, Bone, Breeds, Butchers, Care, Curd, Deeprose, Dunk, Gladwish, Golden, Hatter, Luck, Stocks, Twort, Welfare. It was like a glimpse of mediaeval England. And yet these were not names on some ancient monument. Nor were they names from a remote region of England – these were men from a thriving town on the south coast. Indeed, because it was once a port you might expect the names to be influenced by foreign languages, but there was no sign of that; as Sir Arthur Sullivan might have said, ‘But in spite of all temptations/To belong to other nations/He remains an Englishman!’  Except possibly for Twort, whose name might be an inspired shaving from the German word ‘Antwort’, meaning answer. I loved the names Curd and Luck, Care and Gladwish and Welfare. I liked imagining what their ancestors had done to be known by those names.

I yield to no-one in my devotion to The Guardian, which I read every day, but I’ve been struck recently by what seems to be a disturbing policy of excluding classical music from discussions of ‘music’. A few weeks ago the paper published a 50-page guide to summer music festivals. 49 and a half pages were about pop, rock, world music, folk, and jazz, unearthing the smallest, most eccentric and remote festivals. At the end, there was half a page on classical music, mentioning only a few major festivals (Glyndebourne, Edinburgh, the Proms) which need no publicity. What about all the other festivals, the chamber music festivals, the classical equivalent of the adventurous little pop/rock festivals they love to promote? It can’t be simply a question of lacking the information, because I know many musicians regularly send in information about the summer festivals they’re planning or taking part in.

A few days later, the Guardian published a ‘Music Power 100’ list which allegedly contained the names of the most influential people in the UK’s music world. As far as I could see, not a single person came from the classical field.

This week, they’re publishing seven supplements covering ‘The History of Modern Music’. What a great idea! But my jaw dropped when I saw the list: Pop, Rock, Hip-hop and R&B, Indie, Dance, Folk and Jazz. Not a word about classical music. I’m sorry, Guardian people, but this is just wrong. Contemporary classical music has its creative geniuses, its specialist musicians and its committed followers just like the rest. It’s widely used and appreciated in the world of film. Even if you’re not a fan, it’s simply not right to airbrush it from ‘the history of modern music’. What’s the agenda behind this?

I’m off to the Florestan Festival in East Sussex today. I always enjoy imagining people setting off towards Peasmarsh from many different compass points. Most of our rehearsals have happened to the accompaniment of pouring rain, so we can only hope the spell of wet weather is almost over. The festival takes place in a little Norman church; the village moved away centuries ago after a plague outbreak, leaving the church standing alone in the middle of fields. When the sun shines, it’s lovely to see our audience sitting on the grass in the churchyard with their picnic baskets, but when it pours with rain, you suddenly notice how little infrastructure there is in the countryside. It’s amazing how many music festivals there are in England which depend on good weather, but often don’t get it. Yet we go on planning our summer festivals and telling people to bring their picnic baskets. The triumph of hope over experience!