My viola's in 'The Strad'!

Well, almost.

October's Strad, which spent a month lying at the post office, but has finally made it here, has a series of articles about China, it's up and coming string players, and its string instrument manufacture; an article written by David Hume, who it would appear, was at last year's viola congress in Australia together with me.

He writes about a number of companies, and their considerable interest in improving their quality. One of these is KG Instruments, from whom I (somewhat impulsively) bought my 38 cm viola after the congress. It was played at the congress in a comparison of about 35 violas, and did well - in fact it has a clearer sound and better projection than my more expensive German viola (at about a quarter of the price). Does not smell as nice as the German fiddle, though....

The Strad also has a nice article about a festival run by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, in the East Neuk of Fife. This year the Skampa quartet also participated - a wonderful group who I heard play in London a year or three ago.  The SCO has always been a fantastic little orchestra - that festival might almost be worth a trip over there one day.

Trumpet

This is a wonderful book by the black Scottish (lesbian?) adopted writer Jackie Kay, who grew up just over the water from us (Dunoon way?). I would not normally go into someone's private affairs this much, but the book is about a black Scottish transsexual trumpeter, who gets married and adopts a son - some parallels there....As it happens, the trumpeter, Joss Moody, comes from Greenock, where another black Scottish guy I know was born...(port city, you know).

Joss Moody does not get much of a speaking part in this book, given that he is dead and only lives on in people's memories. The thing is that it is only when he dies that most people find out that in fact Joss Moody was a woman. The doctor who comes to sign the death certificate (Moody hated doctors and hospitals, so died at home) finds some bandages around his chest, and under them discovers some perfectly formed breasts - then she looks down his body....; the undertaker, the lovely Bangladeshi registrar, the guy's son, all find out something new about Joss. Then it hits the media and his wife flees the marital home to a wee cottage in Scotland.

The story is lovingly told in a series of little vignettes, from different points of view - and paints extremely sympathetic pictures of all who are involved in dealing with this situation. Even the son, who initially agrees with a tabloid journalist in 'telling it how it was' (how can he, seeing he thought his father was a man) and who at first comes across a bit as an arse (though he perhaps has reason to be angry), eventually becomes quite likeable. The author's descriptions of Moody's trumpet playing are awesome - I wish I could write reviews like this!

There are some logic gaps, though - how could Moody get married as a man? Even in 1955 I am sure they would have needed his birth certificate (Josephine Moore). His mother, who is finally tracked down by her grandson, lives in a sheltered housing scheme in Greenock called 'Larch Grove'. In Scotland, in public housing a name like that? I don't think so - 'Rankin Court' or something like that would have been more appropriate.  It never becomes clear what caused Moody to live as a man - childhood photos show him in a dress (but he was born in 1927, different times, different place).

The first page of the book was a bit hard, a bit irrational - but it was the widow's first days of widowhood, while the media were camped outside her house - this reflected her despair. But I am glad I persevered; it really is a wonderful, wonderful book - especially also with the references to places in Scotland I know and love! Must look out for more books by this author!

3 weeks and they're on stage!

The Raploch 'El Sistema' experiment has started. 3 weeks ago, and already the children have played in a concert!

While it might bring tears to the eyes of professional musicians to have children performing who are just past learning to hold the instrument, those who are participating are loving it. The long-term unemployed father of 7-year-old twins (one of whom plays the double bass!) says the first he heard about it was when the children came home singing. Now that school is breaking up, there will be a summer school and then the work will continue, mostly with 5-8-year olds, to catch them young.

It's wonderful, no? Brings tears to the eyes anyway. Let's pray that it continues successfully.

Murder in Maybole

Maybole is a wee place in Ayrshire, Scotland, where I lived probably for the longest continuous time in my life, apart from my childhood in Germany. Maybole is a very small place of about 5000 inhabitants, over an hour's drive from Glasgow, and on the main road to Stranraer. When I moved there, in 1983, there was talk of a bypass being built imminently. As far as I know, it still does not exist.

Given that Maybole is stuck to the side of a hill, like Tbilisi (200 times the size) the views across the Ayrshire countryside are stunning. It has a fairly strong community spirit, though the town is quite mixed between long-term residents and incomers. I would not say that the religious tensions (protestant/catholic) are as strong as they are in other parts of Ayrshire, but they certainly exist.

Last year there was a murder, and yesterday the murderer was convicted. I'm not sure if I knew the murderer (though in my work I may have come across him) - he actually looks a nice guy in the photo accompanying the story, though his history is quite something else. But I do remember the victim, Amjid Ismail, who was working in the family's wee shop opposite a primary school, even as a boy, at the time we lived there.

Let him rest in peace.

and proud to be Scottish?

The SNP government has so far:

• kept a couple of accident and emergency units open which had already been agreed to be closed. Hope they have enough specialists to staff them all
• announced that they will cancel all graduate debts (which in Scotland were small anyway, compared to those in England and Wales)
• announced that they will scrap prescription charges for chronic illnesses - now they just need to define these. Probably won't cost them all that much since many people with chronic illnesses got free prescriptions anyway on age or income grounds, and anyone else could buy a 110 quid prepayment certificate which meant that they had to pay nothing for the rest of the year
• is considering cancelling the Edinburgh tram and instead upgrading the A9 road through their heartland. It's good to know where your voters live.

It'll be interesting to see what will happen in a year or two, when the cash impact of some of these decisions will hit home....

Scotland's election

We had of course big hopes of the 'perrish cooncil' as T Blair (?) once described the Scottish parliament. But after the wonderful team that originally lead the parliament (Dewar and Galbraith, though Dewar was, shortly before his death described as 'Donald Dither', but a few months later found himself sanctified - having had to die for the privilege), it has been very much the B-team, with anyone who wants any real power going down to the London parly. The level of debate in Holyrood has often given a very poor reflection of the Scottish education system, and there was that education minister who famously stated that she wanted to have nothing to do with schools, and the culture minister whose most common saying was 'where's the fitba' in that'? (You know who you are and at least one of you has just been re-elected).

But all that pales into insignifance when you consider the total balls-up of the most current Scottish election. To be fair, not all was the government's fault (I'm sorry, the Executive's, we are not allowed to call it 'the government'; Mr Blair said so), but really:

• the boat carrying the voting urns back from the Isle of Arran broke down and the urns had to be rescued
• the helicopters due to pick up the urns from the Outer Hebrides were grounded at Inverness airport due to fog
• a man went into a polling station in Edinburgh (sedate Embra!), and proceeded to smash voting urns with a golf club, and tear up completed ballot papers. Whereupon red-eyed polling officials were spotted trying to rejoin bits of paper, trying to match the handwriting on the different parts. The HAND WRITING on ballot papers?
• because two elections with different voting systems took place on the same day, people got confused and mixed up their ticks, oh no, their crosses, and their numbers (or however the other voting system works - I did not get my ballot papers this year) - there are rumours of 100,000 spoiled papers (total population, including non-voters, 5.1 million)
  
• a new electronic system was used to count the votes, where the voting papers were fed through some machine. It had great difficulties in dealing with ticks where there should have been crosses. Thus it was that the results for many Edinburgh constituencies, which did not have to get their ballot papers to cross water, were not ready until late today.

Wunderbar, as my boss, Mrs MrCreadie, used to say. Total Quality Management.

As for the result? The SNP has a seat more than the Labour Party, but both need a coalition partner to get the majority, for which they need 65 seats. Neither SNP or Labour would want to work with the Conservatives in Scotland (sometimes one feels sorry for them!). Neither have enough even with the Liberal Party, and I assume a tripartite coalition with the Liberals and the Conservatives will not go. So they need to work closely with the 2 Greens and Margo MacDonald, an ex SNP member (was she kicked out or did she resign from the party?) - gee, the power these three will have! Ms MacDonald is not known for being a follower...

I see the Scottish Socialist Party seems to be out of the parliament altogether; maybe they were unable to deliver on their promises, and perhaps also a bit colourful for their possibly very conservative (small c) followers. George Foulkes, the longtime Westminster MP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley, has got in on the Lothians list, having retired from Westminster at the last election. I wonder if he still lives in Ayr? He was of course one of the directors of Hearts Football Club in Edinburgh, until he resigned in protest against the management practice of its 'Lithuanian' owner, Mr Romanov (he may have a Lithuanian passport, but is an ethnic Russian and may have Russian ways of doing business - it often causes problems, in Lithuania, too).

Edwin Paling

Edwin Paling was the leader of the RSNO who, it seems, has gone to live down under (for non-English speakers that does not mean he has died, but that he has gone to live in Australia [or 'Oz']).

I remember him well, having seen him first when he was a mere stripling of a lad (though older than me), sitting beside the then leader of the RSNO, Michael Davies. That would have been in the season of 1975/76 when I had a season ticket for every single concert; and a great season it was, too - it included what must have been Arthur Rubinstein's last concert in Scotland; there was also a young Ralph Kirshbaum (who was 60 last year), and John Lill, Ida Haendel, Menuhin (in the proms preceeding the season)....

A good few years later, when I could again afford concert tickets, I found him sitting, buddhaesque, in the leader's seat - which, it seems, he occupied for over 20 years. Michael Tumelty, the Glasgow Herald Critic, also forever, says that according to Paling the orchestra was totally leaderless after the death of Sir Alexander Gibson, since many of the conductors who worked with the orchestra were not also music directors - and there was no music director to plan the concert programming. Leaving it on guess who's shoulders?

This seems to be a bit of a non-story given that for the last three years the orchestra has again had a music director and conductor, Stephane Deneve, who seems to be doing very well. I hope they will produce as many recordings as they did under Neeme Järvi, who seems to have recorded everything he ever performed - only a few days ago I bought their recording of Shostakovich Ballet Suites.

I wonder if Mr Paling is going to continue working in Oz? Let's see what I find out when I get there in June.

Buskers

This article from the Washington Post is astonishing! (Thanks, Jessica, for leading me to it). As an experiment, the American violinist Joshua Bell stands himself, with his 3.5 million USD Strad, beside a rubbish bin at a Washington metro station, and starts busking. It's an experiment to see what will happen, how much money he will make, and whether people will pay attention or recognize him. He plays some of the greatest works for violin, including the Bach Chaconne. Over 1000 people walk past him in 43 minutes; one recognizes him (having been to one of his concerts recently), a few others loiter for a bit, a little 3-year-old would love to loiter but is pulled away by his mum who's in a hurry; most rush past. (It's a very long, but fascinating article).

I suspect many musicians have experience of busking at some stage in their lives. My son did it for one summer, in Ayr in Scotland. Just 16, he wanted to get a summer job, went to the local jobcentre, and they would not give him one (it's 12 years ago when jobs were a bit scarce). So he took out his fairly cheap fiddle and played some Scottish tunes - and made as much money then as Mr Bell did this January. It was about as much per hour as he earned as a highly skilled engineer in the UK 10 years later. Interestingly when he went to Edinburgh for a day's busking he hardly made anything at all. Probably the team setting up the experiment made a strategic mistake by placing Mr Bell at a busy place at a time when people were just rushing to work; had he been in a shopping mall things might have been different, and people might have crowded around him.

I remember hearing Josh Bell in Glasgow, quite some time ago (15 years??), and I am sure I heard him live somewhere else before then, when he must have been a mere child. During the interval, in a coffee queue, an older man beside me said, 'Who'd believe that the Americans can produce violinists like this'. I pointed him in the direction of Menuhin.

Spring in Scotland!

My friend Pat sent me this photo from her garden, of recently planted daffodils - aaah, spring in Scotland, a mild spring day, no wind (the shadows are not blurred) - isn't it just wonderful???

In 'my' garden here in Tbilisi the daffodils are just coming out, too! And I hope that when I get back to Vilnius on Thursday, on my balcony they will be flowering!

He was meant to die

That's Sam Galbraith, the former Scottish Health Minister who I worked for (at some distance) in Scotland in the late 90s. Thanks to my friend Pat for sending me this Observer article.

Sam Galbraith is famous for a number of things - his neurosurgery skills, which, according to some stories, he developed by deciding as a teenager, growing up in Greenock, to play the violin (good choice!), his heart-lung transplant 17 or so years ago, following which he became a member of Parliament first in the UK and then in the first Scottish Parliament, and to us aficionados of the health service, as one of the few Scottish health ministers of recent times to preside over a reduction in the hospital waiting lists.

As a Greenock lad (very close to Glasgow) he has razorsharp wit. On being congratulated on his bedside manner during a hospitals visit he suggested it was due to years of practice communicating with comatose patients. A fellow MSP ventured that not all was well with Galbraith's policies but that his heart was in the right place, to which he replied 'The NHS put it there'. As a good politician, during a visit to a hospital which had recently messed up big time, he said to the media, without blinking 'This is a Firrrst Class Hospital'. Aye, right. I liked his comment in the Observer article about a fellow politician who went straight from university into politics, and 'has never done a decent day's work in his life'. Yes, Mr Galbraith, I know exactly what you mean.....

As a neurosurgeon (which he no longer does) he had a huge reputation. The story went about of him getting a call in the back of the ministerial limo where a colleague, a bit stuck with his fingers in someone's brain, called up the then health minister, who proceeded to talk him through the rest of the operation. We understand that the patient lived.

They don't make them like him anymore. He's the last of the crowd surrounding the late, much lamented Donald Dewar, a giant of a man (even if they called him Donald Dither shortly before he died in office), of the days when Scottish politicians still had intellect and culture. The problem with devolution is that it's very much the B-team that plays in Scotland - the A-team is much more into UK politics.

Galbraith also mentions how he misses climbing the Scottish hills. I was thinking about them a week ago when Mrs Annie Gloag of the Stagecoach bus company, who, having come into riches after the bus privatisations of the late 80s, had bought a castle off an impoverished Scottish family, and who now refuses rambles access to her land (which they had with the previous owners). She says it's for her safety and that of her royal visitors, amongst others. Royal visitors? Anyway, all that put me in mind of the Scottish landscape in spring - when there is some mild sunshine, and the grass begins to turn green, first on the sunny side of the valleys, then throughout the valley, then it goes higher up....and the daffodils here and there, the lambs (some of the earliest lambs in Scotland were near Maybole where we used to live), the moment when, for the first time in the year, you can leave a door or window wide open, with the sun streaming in..... And the spring lasts a while, not like in otherwise wonderful Lithuania, where it lasts an hour....

One can miss a place sometimes!

Contributions from my friends

My friend Lynne pointed me towards this article in the Guardian which suggests that Orhan Pamuk has fled to the US for fear of his life in Turkey (following the Hrant Dink murder). Apparently the wee boy who murdered Hrant Dink also made threatening comments about Pamuk. That is a shame....though I suppose different cultures have different ideas of what is offensive and what is not. This does not help the Turkish government trying to join the EU. It's hard to hold this huge country together, what with the more fundamentalist East and the more forward-looking West of the country.

My friend Pat's photo of the snowdrops in her garden. This beautiful little picture of spring in Ayrshire reminds me further of my snowdropping times at Finlaystone - Pat's snowdrops have 'single' flowers, but there are also 'double' flowered snowdrops. When we picked our bunches of 50 we had to make very sure that we only had those of either type in the bunch, not mixed up together. Unfortunately they largely grew together....

The McLaren of McLaren...

aye, himself, ...invited us for a Burns Night last night. Those of us who paid for the tickets, mind.

One assumes that The McLaren of McLaren is the chief of the clan McLaren, though it does not mention that specifically on the British Embassy Tbilisi website (he's Her Majesty's loyal ambassador). His photo, interestingly, has some resemblance to some old Scottish portrait, particularly with that red tie.

Onywize, as some say in Ayrshire. The Burns Night was held in the Kaiserbrau restaurant, a German outfit. Hmm. The reason for the rather odd 5.30 pm start was soon explained - at 8 pm the Scotland England rugby match was due to start (this was the promised 'Entertainment').

About 100 to 150 people had gathered, sitting at long trestle tables where after a little while the benches began to remind us of church pews. Then a wee guy in a kilt, a maroon jacket and a frilly shirt (much like the 'ice cream cone' that the Scottish media reported Sean Connery to be wearing at the opening of the Scottish parliament) began to play the pipes, quite nicely. Turns out that this was HM's loyal Ambassador - he was the only piper on the spot. Does this make him a 'musician'? I wonder where he learnt that, then, and more to the point, which school he went to, given his admitted lack of a Scottish accent ... Seems to have a nice sense of humour, though, almost dangerously so in his role as a diplomat.

The evening proceeded in fits and starts - the quality of the address to the haggis loses something when someone has to read it from a book, in the process struggling to put on his glasses. The delivery was not like Jim Paterson's in Vilnius, or Jim McKean's in Ayrshire (though the second Jim is more famous for 'Holy Willie's Prayer'). The haggis was not stabbed - what with having the book in one hand - more like gently prodded. Many non-Scots struggled a bit with the rather large helping of haggis that appeared in front of us. It is really rather dry, even with the mashed potatoes....

.... and the evening wore on. There was plenty of wine, whisky (blended only) and the mood became merrier. Thank goodness I left before the rugby match - Scotland lost!

The bunches of snowdrops on the table reminded me of my time at Finlaystone, where at this time of year four or six weeks were spent 'snowdropping'. The estate was covered in snowdrops, with them popping out of the ground in different corners in different weeks. 'Snowdropping' meant picking fifty snowdrops and putting them in a bunch with three ivy leaves. Twice a week we would send dozens and dozens and dozens of bunches of snowdrops to the flower market in Glasgow. Everyone was roped into this job, from age 12 to over 70. Consider, if you will, the temperature in which snowdrops thrive, the height of snowdrops above the ground, and the delicacy of the little stems (you could not do it wearing full gloves) - and you will have an idea of the pleasure this work brought.

...now wash your hands!

...tells us the Scottish Health Minister, Andy Kerr (who in a previous life was responsible for the bins in Glasgow, so he would know).

The Scottish Executive is going to spend 2.5 million pounds on talking posters, telling folks using public toilets to take care of their personal hygiene. 'Tis all in favour of reducing hospital-borne infections. It would help if hospital workers started by doing this.... but governments north and south of the border (oh, I forgot, we don't have a 'government' north of the border) have in the past discussed getting visitors to wear face-masks, banning visiting altogether....moving the blame nicely beyond the health service. Now, when we had matrons like Hatty Jacques that would never have happened - mind you, in her days and her regime the nurses did the cleaning, and the visiting hours were very strictly limited.

Other pieces in the news concern the Rwandan Olympic football team, beginning to train for the 2008 Olympics. Apart from starting without a coach, news media report that 'the turn up was encouraging', and they go on to list the players who 'turned up'. That sounds like real commitment and aching to go, no?

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Oh the Beeb!

One of the joys of being at home is having an internet connection which allows me to listen to the BBC - Radio 3. A minute ago they played 'Sound the trumpet' which my son sang with his school mate(s) at prep school - quite a long time ago, but hearing it always brings back those moments of having driven to the North of Scotland, clambering into the chilly gym with lots of other warmly wrapped parents, seeing our boys and girls in front of us in their navy blue cord shorts and thick wolly sweaters (what we parents paid for the uniform must have offset some of the heating costs of that school), and then bursting into song. He has not sung a note since he left that school!

'Sound the trumpet' was followed immediately afterwards by a pastiche of a Mozart horn concerto where someone was singing about his horn, including the cadenza (might it have been Flanders of Flanders and Swann? - very funny!). Now it is followed by a French song by Michel Legrand, and there was something by Johnny Dankworth ...not the kind of mix one is used to from the Beeb, but it's interesting.