There was a conker tree at school which, as far as I was concerned, was in charge of the calendar.…
There are two things which have occupied an unreasonable amount of my adult life: pianos and cars. One is an…
There is a particular sort of musician who spends a large part of life waiting for somebody else to breathe.…
I trained as a classical pianist. Properly trained, in the traditional sense. Scales, arpeggios, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, the usual…
Britain has an extraordinary collection of pipe organs. They are everywhere. They lurk behind carved cases in parish churches, dominate…
For several hundred years, if you wanted to get married properly in Britain, there was a fairly obvious place to…
There are certain things Britain does extraordinarily well. We can build a cathedral that remains standing for eight hundred years.…
There are few jobs in Britain more peculiar than that of the parish church organist. For several hundred years, this…
There are few things in modern life more confidently stupid than a satnav. Not always, obviously. Most of the time…
There is a particular moment in any British village fête when civilisation begins to wobble. It usually happens near the…