That old ‘Popes in a mini’ chestnut

Or, ‘what I did today by me, aged 31 and a half’.

*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.

What are they auto-tuning? A harp?

So, today we learnt that they use auto-tune technology on the X-factor. It must be a mighty important story, ranking as it did over the Pakistan floods. Hmm.

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…

Ernest gets lifetime achievement

An actor I’ve admired for many years is Ernest Borgnine.

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

A Goldie Moment in NYC

Wow! What a couple of weeks. A wedding, then a trip to the US which has seen me and the lovely Sarah: cycle around San Francisco, walk the Golden Gate bridge, hang from a speeding wooden cable car,  drive 1600 miles across 3 US states, see the sun set in Yosemite, drive a Dodge Charger very fast around the edge of the salt flats in Death Valley,  hit 100 on the California Highway, hike the south rim of the Grand Canyon, see Rob Thomas play poolside at the Red Rock in Vegas, row a boat amongst the turtles in Central Park, and catch the Broadway production of West Side Story. Like I said, wow!

More on most of those to come. Now we’ve seen Times Square a few times before, and our trip has been full of chance encounters and coincidences, but just as we were saying goodbye to Times Sqaure, promising not to leave it so long before we come back and heading into the subway we caught sight of this chap having his girlfriend take some pictures of him in amongst the crowds. Completely unrecognised by the crowds around him, it’s Goldie proving that everyone, without exception, is overwhelmed by the scale of Times Square and a sudden need to capture it on film in order to take it all in.

3-6 months

I have the utmost respect for anyone out there with small children. Seriously, well done.

And it’s not for the reasons you might think.

I know there are a million reasons why being a parent is hard, but having lunch with a 2 and 4 year old the other day, I thought the playing with beans, colouring-in part was okay.

But fast-forward 6 hours and there I was in the Early Learning Centre picking toys out as presents for a series of small humans. Now, I know the last time I went into one of these shops was 25 years previously, and I just sat in the window playing with the little wooden trains joined together with magnets, but my return visit was INCREDIBLY stressful.

How on Earth, in the name of Val Doonican, do you pick a toy for a small child. Seriously, I suspect I’d have more insight and chance of getting it right if I was trying to wire the safety and take-off circuits for a space shuttle carrying ickle baby giraffes to the moon.

You can’t just go in and try them out you know. Oh no. Press a button on a toy and the staff will furrow their brow and glare at you. You will be faced with a sea of parental faces sighing and pleading with you simultaneously for silence. If you’re 3 you can go in, throw the toys, run at them, play with them and generally dribble with them to your heart’s content. Try it at 31 and you see them reaching for the button on the desk marked ‘security’.

There are rattlers. Shakers. Electronic blippy things. Toys for 3-6 months. Toys for 5-8 months. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but these are very different age groups. Apparently.

What if you see a toy marked 5-8 that seems perfect, but you’re buying it for a 4 year old? It says it right there on the packet. Even if the child doesn’t snub the toy completely, surely you’re committing the ultimate sin handing a completely inappropriate toy.

So on a Monday morning, when I see a parent delivering two small children to nursery, appropriately dressed, punctual, washed and punctual I’m even more impressed. Not because they’ve achieved all of that, but because they managed to get out of the Early Learning Centre with some appropriate toys for their children before they grew up and left college.

DIY Hopefuls

I know I might be being a bit presumptuous, but generally we all fall under one of two umbrella groups; men and women. I mean, statistically, 99% of us are going to be one or the other. And as a man, one of the jobs befalling my half of the human race is to do DIY.

At this point, I should point out that I thought carefully about my choice of words in that last sentence having originally typed ‘…is to be good at DIY’. I’m sorry, but generally us male-folk are not as a rule ‘good’ at DIY. ‘Lucky’ perhaps. But unless we’re approaching our 75th birthday, live on a diet of spam and Wurthers Originals, and have 2 grandsons, we’re not likely to be consistently ‘good’.

Think about it fellow men. It’s Saturday morning, and there’s something to fix. You’ve got to go to B&Q – you don’t want to do you? You wander around the shop with that swagger every man gets in there, which means they pretend that they don’t spend all week talking about Php, or MySQL, or the statistical quotents, or hot-desking, but that they’re one of the builders. The only thing is, it’s Saturday: There are no builders in B&Q, they’re all in the holiday homes on the Isle of Man they bought with the profits from last year’s call-out fees. Everyone in B&Q on Saturday is a DIY hopeful. Even the staff.

I say this, because the other day I found myself on a Sunday afternoon holding a toilet cistern above my head with my nose unusually close to a functional end of a toilet. Normally for this to happen there would have been some pleasurably event beforehand, over-indulgent eating or drinking. But no, here I am trying to fit some piece of foam which looks suspiciously like a cupholder from the 1980s between some pipework, to stop the filly thing from the toilet doohangle filling all the time.

You could tell the dice weren’t rolling in my favour because exactly 24 hours later I’m standing at the bathroom door whilst a plumber has his head down the works end of the toilet, and it using a special tool to fit the cupholder to my toilet, and he’s even managed to disconnect the pipes so he doesn’t have to hold the cistern over his head or anything.

I’d spent all day working out what to tell him. Clearly, being a male DIY hopeful, this was not going to be the truth. I’d concocted a clever tale of how I’d severed my arm halfway through the job, spent 20 hours in surgery throughout the night and the consultants had told me I must on no account hold a toilet cistern hence I’d needed to call him, but I thought he might want to see the stitches. I considered telling him we’d been burgled, but I didn’t have enough time to hide the TV and valuables before he arrived. I even considered hiring an actor to take a few pictures of beside my toilet in overalls, and show them to the plumber going, ‘look! this clown did this’.

In the end, he arrived before I did and Sarah had let him in. She’d told him we’d got stuck and so had called him.

The thing is, at this point my entire faith in the men was restored. The plumber turned to me and said, ‘the thing is, you did a really good job of changing the mechanism. I only need to do a small bit of work down here’.

So there you are. A plumber humouring a DIY hopeful before all sense of his masculinity is lost. He didn’t need to say it. He could have laughed. He could have asked further questions. But he didn’t. He complemented by DIY skills luck. If only I could believe it was an act of man-to-man kindness. But I suspect it was because I’d just paid for his new kitchen at his holiday pad in Douglas.