Or: The one in which I get all nostalgic for school. Sorry. This won’t last long.

I know it’s because I went back to Suffolk the other day, and also because lately I seem to fail spectacularly whenever it comes to meeting up with people from school, but my brain keeps flashing up memories of school.

Today, I was driving along and Sting started singing ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Those of you under the age of20 will know it as ‘that one Rachel sang on Glee when she had a crush on Mr Shu’.

Suddenly I’m catapulted back to being about 14 and sitting in assembly. Assemblies at my school were a big thing. OfSted had been in and told the school off for only having 1 assembly a week, and for the fact they had zero religious content, or hymns, or anything really. So, to remedy this, the English teacher Mr O’Connell was standing in front of us taking the assembly. He was telling us about a friend he had at teacher training college in Sheffield (you need to know at this point, that Mr O’Connell was, to schoolkids from a sleepy Suffolk Market town, a gritty northerner with a pale complexion, and weathered skin, a northern accent and a VERY loud voice).

Anyway, I’m sure the point of his assembly was probably about judging people. Or perhaps it was career advice. It could have been about the correct consistency for fondant icing for all we knew. He’d just told us he was best friends with Sting before he was famous – they’d been friends at teacher-training college. And, so to most of us, this made him one step away from royalty.

It wasn’t just this that made him a really good teacher. As he taught us ‘Our Day Out’ by Willy Russell, those of us that were listening and reading between the lines could see that he was comparing it to our school and some of our teachers. He had just the right balance of encouragement and fear too. And as a result, English quickly became my favourite subject.

He wasn’t the only teacher to make a big impression on us. There was our maths teacher Mr Evans, who had a masterly command of writing equations upside down on the overhead projector, and access to an infinite number of beige suits. And then there was Mr Lloyd who decided to saw his own thumb off to make our woodward lesson more interesting one Wednesday afternoon. There was the semi-retired Mr Knight who’d been told to teach RE instead of woodwork (his actual subject), and set about the most un-PC tour of Judaism you could ever imagine. And then there was the morris-dancing history teacher Mr Clarke, who taught us the history of medicing using Blackadder episodes, and the history of the Irish ‘troubles’ via an impressive impression of the Rev. Ian Paisley.

The connection is this though: they all taught you about life and about yourself rather than just the subject (in some cases, they barely touched the subject written on the door to their room!). Think back to the teachers who influenced you the most, and I bet you’ll find the same.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes there was an influential music teacher or two. One in particular gets a mention here.

Going back to where you grew up is always a nostalgic experience. The streets you grew up on (not literally, obviously, I’m not the Littlest Hobo or anything). The park you played in. The school you went to. The shops you shopped in. The houses your friends lived in.

Of course, in reality it’s a bit weird. The streets I grew up on have been pedestrianised, or blocked off and turned into front gardens to make the place look more attractive. The council have decided to build a replacement primary school on what’s left of the park I played in, having built ticky-tacky box houses on half of it already. The school I went to is now some trendy business and enterprise school. The shops have all become either building societies or coffee shops. And most of my friends seemed to move house every year or so, and hardly any of them live there anymore anyway.

So imagine my surprise when I was presented with this page of the local paper.

‘What is he doing here? Do you recognise anyone in this picture?’

Um. Yes, actually. That was me (yes yes, I know you all want to know the name of my stylist, but they’ve long hung-up their scissors). I am famous. In fact, not only am I famous, I’ve met Steve Davis. STEVE DAVIS!!

Quite a big deal for a boy of 8 or 9 who spent most of his days playing snooker in his spare room with a specially-made waistcoat on. I got a morning off school too to go and meet him as he opened the new sports department in the Co-op. Everyone got a signed picture of Steve, signed in silver pen (I still have it). In true Ferris Beuller style, someone from the paper took my picture, and by Thursday everyone knew I didn’t go to the dentist, or whatever excuse my Mum must have made up.

Funny isn’t it. You expect to go back and feel nostalgic as you go passed places, you don’t expect the nostalgia to come to you!

More pressingly, why did they think he needed a bodyguard in a small Suffolk market town. Any why is he taking such a nervous look at me?

Today the BBC killed it off. Not in a kind of shoot-em-up US Postal service rampage sort of way, although that would have made for an interesting episode… No, they just let it slip away peacefully in the night. No big shindig, just the cast heading up the hill in an old tour bus leaving two trouser-less policemen standing in a ditch beside the Yorkshire Dales. S

The thing is, the lovely Sarah remembers watching it with her Grandparents in Cambridgeshire and wondering if they didn’t think it was some kind of documentary of how people live ‘oop-north’.

It certainly was a retirement home for the UK’s veteran actors. Yes, we lost many of them along the way; Compo, Foggy, Wally, Nora – I’d run out of space on this blog before I listed them all. But Clegg’s still there, and Howard, Pearl, Marina, and now they’ve been joined by Captain Peacock from ‘Are you being served’ and Russ Abbot (how, incidentally does an excellent job of reprising his routines from his ‘Russ Abbot Comedy Show’ in the form of Basildon Bond and slapstick, just with less Nazis and fat ladies).

It’s charm was in it’s simplicity. Family-friendly smutty jokes, double-entendre, and stunts worthy of Michael Crawford in ‘Some Mothers Do ‘ave em’. You watch it and your mind says the stage directions ‘compo exits stage left’ because you know it’s just a stageplay on screen. But whilst that gives it it’s charm, it’s also made for it’s demise. A Yorkshire cafe just doesn’t work in HD – there’s only so many pixels in off-white doilies and creme tablecloths. And the media is all about airbrushing wrinkles, and the caps can only cover so much.

It will remain a comedy great, and it leaves me in two minds – should it have been shipped off to Switzerland to rest in peace a decade ago, or is it as much a part of our national identity as the Queen? Personally, with all the hours of television devoted to Dick n Dom, Noel Edmunds and Adrian bloody Chiles, I can’t help thinking that we could have kept 30 minutes a week for Last of the Summer Wine. Sure, no one would have watched, but we’d have all felt good knowing it was there – like those little tea shops in Cotswold town that no one goes in, but which were they to be replaced by wine bars and internet cafes would soon ruin the quaint charm of the place.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get the nice red hues, and the top of the structure in one shot…

So, I thought I’d walk the 3 miles or so across it, to where it looked sunnier incidentally, and try again. But one half of the pesky bridge then started hiding behind it’s non-city brother!

Thankfully, we happened upon China beach in our hire car as we were preparing to cross the bridge and leave San Fran on our roadtrip. Even then, it refused to cooperate with our honeymoon shot (as did my ‘smile’ function, as can be seen below)…

Finally though, it cooperated and appeared in full shot just as we were walking away from the beach, and the city. I did get a few good shots, but they’re being prepared for a new website project. But here’s a shot…

I was going for the 70′s grainy film style picture…

*Clap**Clap**Clap* [in the manner of a school teacher leading a school trip]
Okay Gentlemen… GENTLEMEN. Thank you…
Okay Gentlemen, now we’re going to be lining up outside the Cathedral entrance in a few minutes. Cardinals first, then Bishops two-by-two… So, if you could all finish your teas and biscuits and make your way out. Thank you.

This was all I could hear in the basement of the cathedral. I wasn’t expecting to, but at the time we were attempting to take the world record for the most number of priests and musicians squashed into a loo which necessitated keeping the door open. To the room you understand, not the cubicle. They’re priests you know.

Joking aside, today was a really poignant performance. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played concert performances of Requiems, but as a classical musician rather than an organist, you very rarely get the opportunity to perform them as they were intended: at a funeral. Performing the arpeggio rise and falls of Faure’s Agnus Dei take on an entirely new depth when you’re watching 80 Bishops paying their respects to a departed colleague, whose crook and gown are laid across his casket.

As musicians we take Requiems for granted. Yes, they’re nearly all amazing pieces, very moving. But they were written for an occasion like this, and we don’t get the opportunity to perform them in this setting very often.

For those that don’t know, this is a computer algorithm that corrects dicky tuning in singers competing on the show. It can nudge their voice up or down if they just slightly miss the note they were aiming for, and give everything a more polished sound.

Is it wrong? Well, if you think you don’t want to hear auto-tuned voices you’re too late. Studio time is expensive, and this technology is cheap, so I’d imagine that there are a great many number of records out there that have been tweaked from cuckoo to songbird without everything sounding like Cher in ‘Life after love’. Simon and the entourage of lawyers/spin doctors/PR Gurus and alike were quick to point out that it is only added in post-production and that the stool pidgeons judges hear the real thing, and then it’s altered to make watching the programme more bearable. But hang on, I’m sorry, don’t these programmes make money getting people to vote in a quasi-democratic way for the one they think is the best. Isn’t this skewing the result a little. Why, that’d be like Sky News showing bias against Labour in an election or something.

The truth is though, you’d use it wouldn’t you? I mean, as a classical musician you spend every day of your life trying to make sure everything’s in tune. That your fingers fall in the right place, at the right angle, in the right way. Every time. But if the pressure was on you to make a studio record, with 4 big Texans smoking cigars outside the studio window pacing up and down and pointing at watches, you’d use it wouldn’t you?

The difference comes afterwards though, doesn’t it? I mean, you’re going to go away after the session and practice like you’ve never done before. You can’t mime a concerto with an orchestra, or mime the violin along to a piano trio. And I’m sure the X-factor winners do the same, hairbrush in hand.

Sorry for the abrupt ending – a pig appears to have got tangled in my washing line whilst flying passed my garden. That keeps happening…

So few actors keep their careers on a high for their entire lives. There are countless greats from that old ‘cowboy’ generation who try… Burt Reynolds, John Wayne are a few examples… who nearly make it (okay, maybe not post-moneyloss Reynolds), but it’s great to see Borgnine (after his recent greatly moving role in ER) getting this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11021875