The Man with No Time

It's been a busy weekend, so I'm breaking the posts up a bit to avoid a deluge all at once! Not only was it the final weekend of the 2014 6 Nations, but also the BULSCA Student Championships (more on that tomorrow). Except that I was only able to attend the Sunday of that event this year, because I had a concert on Saturday night! My orchestra, the Leamington Sinfonia, were performing at Kingsley School in Royal Leamington Spa. We had a great program of music, featuring one of my favourite symphonies, and gave what I think was a really good performance.

After last weekend's manic musical mayhem, last night was the culmination of all of that work. My last ever University of St Andrews Symphony Orchestra concert was a great success, and one of the best orchestra concerts that I've been part of whilst at this university.

After the Bassoon Quartet concert on Friday, this weekend has seen me massively overdose on music. Seriously, it's been crazy.

Today was a rather sad day. But also, in another way, a rather awesome one. At lunchtime today I took part in my last St Andrews Bassoon Quartet concert (or at least, what should be my last one if everything goes to plan). It's been three years since the quartet formed, initially just to do some Christmas busking, and it's been a blast. We've put on some great concerts in that time, and have repeatedly pulled them off with limited, or accelerated, rehearsals. What's more, most of the music has been arranged specially by our members.

This week has been a busy one so far for me. We're in the middle of the "On the Rocks" arts festival here in St Andrews, which means music, music, and more music! Monday lunchtime saw the St Andrews Bassoon Quartet's last formal concert of the year. We had a pretty intense rehearsal schedule for it, as the other three only arrived back from the Easter break a week prior to the concert, and I was away in Bath . We therefore had to resort to our first ever weekend rehearsal, but we still only had 3 & 1/2 hours of practise under our belts. Fortunately our theme this time around was film music, which allowed us to pull out a couple of pieces that we'd performed before and meant that we were all pretty familiar with the music we were playing. It also helped that we'd made the conscious decision to avoid long medleys; playing multiple shorter pieces definitely cut down on the time required to get them up to scratch. For interest's sake, he...

Part 4 of my series on myriad time-sinks is here. This time I'll be focusing on something that's been a big part of my life for a very long time - music. I'm not talking about listening to music and going to gigs here, oh no. I'm talking about playing music. Sadly (from one point of view) I'm not in a band, and since I can't play the guitar I'm never likely to be. I play a different kind of instrument - the bassoon.

Welcome to my blog! Let me introduce myself. My name's David, I'm 24, and I'm a hobby-holic. I have far too many of them for the amount of time that I have. In fact I frequently hear the phrase "how do you find time to do all of that?" What's that old saying? If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do? That's me all over. I'm currently at the University of St Andrews, studying (hah!) for my PhD in astronomy; specifically, in the art of planet hunting. I'm a member of the WASP consortium, which is one of the biggest transiting planet searches around, and has members from universities around the UK. So far our tally of planets is up to 82, but it's increasing all of the time. I mostly enjoy my work. Life every job, and make no mistake, it is a full-time job (albeit one with a great deal more flexibility than most others), it has its ups and its downs. Around that job I have many, many hobbies, hence the name of the b...