The Man with No Time

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.