On Monday there was a report in The Guardian about the benefits of being involved in music. This time it was, 'Playing a musical instrument or singing is linked to better memory in older age'. To my delight the next paragraph began, 'The piano was especially...
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During the Christmas holidays we watched The Sound of Music on television. Some parts of it will forever be charming, while other parts have not worn so well. No matter - it's still a feast of nostalgia for those of us who remember the film when it first came out. Bob...
A reader has asked me to specify my favourite books of the year. I keep a note in my diary of the books I read, and this year I read 42 books in their entirety, plus a few more I didn't finish. Here are my top five favourites: 1. The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth....
Which is the front of a church? At the weekend we had a disagreement about it. We were talking about somewhere we'd been on holiday. I referred to a certain road as 'the one that goes past the back of the church'. Bob's response puzzled me. From his description, he...
Tune in to Radio 4's 'Today' programme at 8.35am this morning, Tuesday 29 January, when I'll be taking part in a short discussion about coughing in concerts. We'll be discussing the research of Professor Andreas Wagener, who believes that coughing in concerts is both...
The snow is causing all sorts of disruption. On Friday I went into town to meet someone who didn't arrive because his flight from Austria was cancelled. On Saturday morning, I was supposed to be coaching a young German group, but their violinist was stuck in Germany...
Yesterday I heard on the news that a Liverpool University study had shown the power of literature to boost brain activity. 'Classic texts' such as Shakespeare and Wordsworth appear to catch the reader's attention more than ordinary texts, triggering heightened...
A very happy new year to my readers! Here I am on New Year's Day, eating home-made Christmas cake on an outing to Richmond Park, and enjoying a rare and sudden burst of sunshine.
A nice thing to happen at the end of the year: music critic Kate Molleson, who writes for the Guardian as well as the Herald, has mentioned me at the start of her round-up of the year's musical highlights in Scotland. It brought back good memories of my series with...
I always rather dread this time of year, when cold weather makes my hands feel stiff. Before sitting down to play the piano, I often have to run a basin of warm water and stand with my hands in the water for a few minutes. My piano stands next to an unused fireplace....
An old friend writes from Switzerland to tell me that he was glancing through the newspaper this morning when his eye fell on the radio schedules, and he saw that there was to be a broadcast about me this evening on Bavarian Radio. I'm today's focus in their...
Yesterday I was at the Guildhall School of Music. The Guildhall School must have the most thoroughly urban location of any of the London music colleges, secreted as it is within a forest of City skyscrapers so closely packed and so overwhelmingly monochrome that the...
A group of cormorants arrived on our local pond this week. They stood drying their wings in the sun, monopolising a floating platform which had been abandoned in a hurry by the smaller, meeker birds who usually potter about on it. Close up, cormorants look like...
We took our Viennese visitor to Richmond Park for a walk in the winter sunshine. He was enchanted to see the deer roaming freely in the park, quite close at hand (see photo). While we were watching this group of deer, we witnessed a 'raid' by another stag. He ran up...
In our tiny vegetable patch we (when I say 'we', I mean Bob) have managed for the first time to grow a little crop of butternut squash. There are five or six of them, plus a mysterious green marrow-like interloper growing alongside, perhaps a rogue seed from the pack....