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.

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 unheard melodies are sweeter? I’m not sure I agree with Keats about that. I reckon that the sweet melodies you can actually hear are at least as nice as anything you can imagine.’

Bob considered. ‘Depends what’s not being heard’, he said.

our friendly robin

The winter weather has brought some unusual birds to our garden. A week or so ago we had a little flock of birds about the size of thrushes, but more colourful, with orangey plumage on their necks and chests. At around the same time the Guardian mentioned that its readers were reporting unusual bird sightings, and we learned from a photo that our own visitors were fieldfares. I’m sure I had never seen any in our part of London before.

For the past few days we’ve had an incredibly tame little robin in the garden. He seemed quite unafraid of us, and was happy to let us stand right underneath the tree and converse with him. He let me follow him round the garden with my camera, and he almost seemed to be posing for his photograph (see picture). I tried to communicate in what I thought were robin-like whistles until Bob told me to stop. ‘You’re probably saying something unacceptable.’