A nice surprise this morning – my Cobbett Medal (to be presented next week at a dinner of the Worshipful Company of Musicians) is mentioned in the Herald newspaper.

I was re-reading a chapter from my first book the other day, in preparation for yesterday’s event at the Anglo-Japanese Foundation. Writing about a tour of Japan in 2000, I’d mentioned that a review of one of our concerts had been published in Japanese on the internet, seen by a Japanese friend in Amsterdam, translated by her and emailed to us while we were still in Osaka. At the time this seemed a miraculous turn of speed. I commented in the book that ‘soon it won’t matter if newspapers come to review our concerts or not – the Internet will reach more people’. That remark was made only a decade ago, yet already it seems like an observation from another era. And I note the rather poignant capital ‘I’ that my editor asked me to use on the word Internet, as though we felt slightly uncomfortable with the term. Only ten years later we take it for granted that news and information can reach us instantly, wherever we are.

You can listen to a podcast of yesterday’s discussion between Noriko Ogawa, Robert Philip and me at the Anglo-Japanese foundation on their website