A nice surprise today: Bob came back from a meeting with a magazine page brought along by a colleague. It was from the February issue of the leading French record magazine Diapason, one of whose editors had taken the new Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music as the subject of his editorial. The Cambridge Companion, an expert anthology of chapters by historians and musicologists, also contains a number of short ‘personal takes’  by people with practical experience of the recording industry, and there’s one by me about my own experience of making records. To my surprise, this article was the focus of Diapason’s editorial. There was a photo of me and several paragraphs of my article translated into French. ‘Her text is an open door onto a work which gives us all the material for proper reflection on what nourishes our passion for recordings.’

not too cold for some

The winter sun was striking low over the lake as I raised my tiny idiot-proof camera to take a picture of a terrier plunging into the icy water. (I mean that my camera is tiny and idiot-proof, not that it’s proof against tiny idiots, though of course that would be a useful specialist feature.)

A deep voice at my side said smugly, ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to point into the sun like that with the camera you have there.’ I turned to see a man carrying a camera about the size of a microwave oven. He proceeded to show me that with his superior camera he could do this, that and the other which would enable him – unlike me – to take a photograph facing straight into the winter sun. He was wearing a big show-off hat, so I ignored his advice. Always distrust a photographer in a big hat, I say.

A one-line letter of mine is in today’s Guardian (click here to read it; it’s the third one down). I sent it last week, straight after reading that the  UK’s last-remaining professorship of palaeography was to be axed, and then  forgot about it until it popped up today. Actually, I think it’s short-sighted and deplorable to get rid of palaeographers, whose specialist work unlocks so many secrets of the past. I did a bit of music palaeography at university and found it fascinating. 

British winters have been so mild in recent years that I had almost forgotten why snowdrops are so called.  But here they are in our garden, living up to their name.  Our poor snowdrops are doubly challenged at the moment because if it’s not snow knocking them down, it’s the local foxes, who trample on them in the night. ‘Foxes?’, I hear you say. Oh yes. They (the foxes, not the snowdrops) have now dug subways under the fence on three sides of the garden.

My publisher, Boydell Press, has put a short extract from my new book Out of Silence on their blog.  You can read it by clicking here. The blog also shows the book’s cover image for the first time. I’m irrationally proud of this cover because I took the photograph! It aims to give the impression of someone coming ‘out of silence’ and into a public space, a journey which performers know very well.