A laborious process

... and that's putting it mildly!

I'm downloading CDs to iTunes in anticipation of getting an iPod when I'm in Jersey next week - it's a tax haven so I'd be daft not to - and boy does it take a long time. There's not even any particular order to it: I've covered Mozart, Beethoven, Telemann, Byrd, Britten, Poulenc, Handel and (because no classical collection is complete without her) Florence Foster Jenkins so far, and there's a while to go yet.

Ho hum.

Limbo

I got back from my trip to Norfolk last night (where I had a lovely time), but as I'm off to Jersey at the end of the week these few days' work feel a little odd, more like an interlude between trips than serious work ... I doubt there'll be much of interest to report before my return from the Channel Islands (next Tuesday), so things are likely to be quiet on the blog front.

O beware, my Lord, of jealousy (again)

(updated 01/08/06 following the purchase of more tickets ...)

It's not actually one year on (only eleven months), but my plans for the 2006 Edinburgh Festival season are so clear that I'm going to show off here and now. All the more so when I point out that these are only the events for which I've booked tickets (or am due to sing in); it's very likely others will be added on the day. Anyhow, this is how August looks:

Thursday 3rd: a preview of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which my mother and cousin will be seeing later in the month. Why should I be left out?
Friday 4th: more Stoppard, this time The real Inspector Hound, a parody of the Christiean murder mystery play which should be fantastic if done well, followed by a one-man-show on Shakespeare's passions.
Sunday 6th: being the first Sunday of the month, we only get two services at church, essentially a warm-up for a very busy month. In between I've got more theatre to go to, in the form of Peter Shaffer's Black comedy, a tremendous farce.
Friday 11th: Ludus Baroque's annual performance of Bach's Mass in B minor, which usually marks the beginning of the Fringe Festival but for some reason appears to be a week late this year.
Sunday 13th: an entire day of Mozart at church, with Muggins singing the tenor solo in the Coronation Mass.
Tuesday 15th: a recital by the flautist Emily Beynon, including the sonatas of Poulenc and Prokofiev, followed by an adaptation of The Canterbury tales (presumably not all of them, as it only lasts an hour) and a group called the Oxford Gargoyles singing jazz.
Friday 18th: taking part in a concert of music for the Queen's 80th birthday, full of old favourites.
Saturday 19th: two big Handel oratorios to sing in the space of one weekend, starting with Saul.
Sunday 20th: besides singing in Handel's Israel in Egypt, I'll be doing those mezzo piano high G sharps in Kodaly's Missa brevis at the church again. Expect me to be voiceless by Monday morning! In between, I'll have a harpsichord recital by Andrzej Zawisza to go to.
Tuesday 22nd: my mother's arrival heralds an inordinately busy week, starting with a concert by Colin Steele, an Edinbronian* jazz trumpeter influenced by Miles Davis and Scottish folk music.
Wednesday 23rd: my mother's going to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead in the afternoon, then I'm joining her for the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer in a programme which includes The rite of spring and Bartók's 3rd piano concerto with Richard Goode.
Thursday 24th: just one show booked, Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa (by the Opéra National de Lyon). Mother will probably spend the day going round various exhibitions at the city's galleries.
Friday 25th: Mother's going to a Christian Zacharias recital, the play Divino Pastor Gongora (about the persecution of an actor by a Viceregal Inquisitor in 18th century Mexico) and a performance by Salsa celtica (who do precisely what it says on the tin) before I show up for the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä performing Petrushka and another 3rd piano concerto, this time Beethoven's, with Llyr Williams as soloist.
Saturday 26th: (deep breath) the historian Antonia Fraser talking about the Sun King, a tribute to Flanders and Swann, Mackerras conducting the SCO in Beethoven's 7th (part of the complete cycle) and the European première of Balanchine's Don Quixote as choreographed by his muse (and its first Dulcinea), Suzanne Farrell. My friends Tom and Abby, in the meantime, will have arrived in the early morning and, after having most of the day free to explore, will be going to the final performance of Troilus and Cressida.
Sunday 27th: besides three more church services, the four of us will be attending a lecture recital by Richard Goode on Beethoven's penultimate piano sonata. Then Mother's off to a talk by Suzanne Farrell (see above), after which we go both along to Murder at the Savoy, which sounds silly in a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque way. Tom and Abby, after (probably) joining in with the singing, have tickets for Stuart MacRae's opera The assassin tree, which will have got its world première on Friday. At some stage, my cousin Laura and her friend Ploy will have arrived, but they're going to play things by ear - at least, they've not asked me to book them any tickets as yet ...
Monday 28th: Mother's going back home, probably exhausted, leaving Tom and Abby to see Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano in recital. They're off back to London afterwards, in time for work the next morning, while I carry on playing host to Laura and Ploy until Wednesday.

Peter accuses me of having an insatiable appetite for culture. Wonder from whom I get it?

*No-one else, to the best of my knowledge, uses this term (meaning "an inhabitant of Edinburgh"), but it sounds good, not to mention being a huge improvement on 'Edinburgher' - which is just plain ugly.

Nothing to be ashamed of

So I've not got the EIF job either, but I'm by no means disheartened about it. They were perfectly happy with me, but the luck of the draw meant there was someone better qualified than me there on the day.

For all my lack of experience, there were only seven of us interviewed out of over a hundred applicants, so I think I can be pretty proud of myself.

Interviews and penguins

As expected, I've not got the SCO job - the letter came yesterday, by which time I'd worked out the position must have gone to someone else.

Had another interview this morning though, for a position within the sponsorship department of the Festival, of which the scariest bit was the Excel spreadsheet exercise at the end. I'm not convinced I'll be offered the job as some of my answers were a bit left-field owing to lack of strictly relevant experience. The piece I wrote on my father just recently, for instance, came up in the context of writing concisely without leaving any information out, which was a little odd ...

On the plus side, I was one of only seven to be interviewed, so I've already done well in getting to this stage. There was a lot of thinking on my feet involved - suggesting ways of finding corporate sponsors for obscure Festival productions, that sort of thing - at which I did a pretty good job. That said, I reckon there's a high chance of one of the other interviewees having more relevant experience, so I'm only cautiously optimistic.

If I made a good impression, it was without any help from my stomach, which felt a bit unsettled this morning, the result of being out at a reception for the British Antarctic Survey, for whom we've been selling tickets as part of their "Discover Antarctica" series. The four of us who went had a whale of a time (sorry, the pun was ripe for the picking!) drinking just about nothing but champagne - we switched to white wine when it ran out - bonding with one of penguin statues and laughing at the Ice Queen, whose mere presence was unbelievably camp.

Anyway, back to the job: they should let me know by the end of the week, by which time I'll be in Norfolk visiting family. I expect it'll be a phone call, but I'm going to ask one of the neighbours to keep an eye on the post, just in case.

Unless something terribly exciting happens tomorrow, this will probably be my last entry before leaving on Thursday morning. Back next Tuesday ...

Writing again

Eleven years ago I started work on Wilting daffodils, a rite-of-passage novel set in Victorian Britain and France. Although I worked out the complete plot and structure, life got in the way and I have yet to finish it - maybe when I'm retired? It's going to be a big volume though: I've written around 40,000 words so far and that's not even halfway.

Sometime earlier this year I started thinking about writing something more detailed about my father's last days, initially planning on doing one-year-on posts on this blog, until I realised that it's too personal for this medium, not to mention the difficulties posed by fading memories. No time like the present, so I've been remaining up pretty late these last couple of nights working on what could be termed a short story if it weren't entirely factual.

That said, the creative writer in me still wanted to create something in a distinctive style, which in this case comes over in the narrative structure. It's anything but linear: what appears to be an account told in flashback soon starts jumping about a timeline covering about a month, forever going backwards and forwards in a reflection of the way a mind under stress reels from one thought to another.

The intensely private nature of these recollections means I won't be publishing them, at least not for some years. Who knows, Daffs (as I affectionately call my novel) could be completed sooner ...

On another note, I think it's very unlikely, at this stage, that I've got the SCO job. They said they'd let me know by the end of the week, and chances are it would have been in the form of a telephone call. The lack of any contact would suggest there'll be a rejection letter in tomorrow's post. At least I've got the EIF interview on Tuesday, not to mention the opportunity of looking into writing programme notes for the SCO, which might have been a bit dubious if I were working there.

Job applications under pressure

Maybe it's the way forward. Despite my covering letter for the Festival vacancy being as non-specific as could be - having no information to hand at the time, I didn't have much choice but to leave it pretty general - they want to interview me too. I know, I shouldn't complain, but it's still a little disconcerting.

It's to be held next Tuesday at 9am, giving me time to get downstairs in time for the beginning of my shift an hour later. As the box office staff is all off to a reception for the British Antarctic Survey (for whose visit to Edinburgh we're selling tickets) the previous evening, it means I'll have to behave myself ...

No news about the other job as yet. After my mixed feelings on the day, I'm now cautiously optimistic. True, I may have had some weaker answers but I feel I countered them with some pretty good ones elsewhere.

A slight wobble to the chicken's head

I'm not sure if my slight misgivings about today's interview are entirely justified. It went pretty well overall, but I feel I let myself down with a couple of my answers, in particular that regarding where the position would fit in with my career aspirations. I'd like to hope that they can understand why I was perhaps a little hesitant as this would really be my first step into arts administration proper, so something of a new venture for me.

A bit of a shock awaited me later this afternoon with the revelation that the closing date for another application (this post being within the Festival offices) was today - what with wanting to get the SCO one done first, I must have convinced myself (wrongly) that I could afford to leave it for the time being. I'd got my CV in previously so just had the covering letter to deal with, though having to do so at such short notice, without the job description in front of me and hand-written - talk about old-fashioned! - was quite a challenge.

The interviews won't be held until next week, by which stage I can expect to have heard from the SCO. Alea iacta est.

A headless chicken sans the headlessness

Quite a busy day off. By rights, my feet should be in agony.

Before heading out, I'd cancelled a dial-up connection and paid a bill. Then I was off to the post office (to post two Fringe brochures to my mother) and the bank (to cancel a credit card) on the way up to work, as I wanted to check how much time I should allow to walk to my interview tomorrow afternoon - 20 minutes. At that point I retraced some of my steps to book train tickets for my trip to Norfolk in ten days' time, after which I bought a cabin bag which will also do me quite nicely for my two-day trip to Jersey straight afterwards.

By then it was time for lunch, so I went back home and had a bite to eat before going to do some food shopping. Then it was off to the cinema to catch the very powerful United 93, over to Princes St for a quiet coffee over a sudoku and back to the cinema for a showing of, depending on your perspective, the most inappropriate or only possible film to see so soon afterwards: Airplane!

Right, time I went to bed. Big day tomorrow ...

An unexpected development

I dashed off another job application last weekend - for the SCO, whose staff turnover still leaves me worried. My hopes weren't particularly high: the speed with which I wrote the covering letter and my uncertainty about the whole enterprise left me in little doubt I was undertaking little more than a futile gesture. Imagine my surprise, then, when they asked to interview me.

Now my concerns about applying for the position have been superseded by not knowing whether to raise said concerns at the interview. On the one hand, it could well cost me a good job offer, but on the other I'd like to hope they'd appreciate my honesty in raising the matter. Either way, tact and diplomacy will certainly be the order of the day.

A couple of weeks ago I found out some interesting facts relating to the boss' attitude to my work. Following the interview, there were concerns that I would not fit in owing to my greater age and extensive musical knowledge, hence my being offered the shorter (six-week) contract - a decision I am told she swiftly regretted. In the meantime, one of my other superiors took a dislike me for asking too many questions, which information should perhaps serve me as a warning against excessive curiosity.

While I am glad the boss saw sense, it seems I would do well to tone down my enthusiasm in interviews. As far as my inquisitive nature is concerned, however, I consider such an attitude a source of pride, enabling me better to understand the matter at hand, so have no intention to surrender it.

(If you're wondering about my choice of language in this post, I put it down to watching the BBC's 1997 adaptation of Fielding's Tom Jones as I type. I would defy any lover of language not to fall under the spell of 18th century English!)

Theatres and the celebrity factor

Many years ago, my family and I went to a performance of Pagnol's La femme du boulanger (The baker's wife), starring Michel Galabru, one of the greats of French stage and screen - a very enjoyable occasion marred only by the spontaneous applause which greeted Galabru's first appearance. It was the same thing last month, the audience going into raptures to welcome Pierre Arditi, Evelyne Bouix and whoever was playing Sybil in Private lives.

Until tonight I thought it was a uniquely French phenomenon, practised by audiences who think nothing of disrupting the flow of a performance just because they have recognised the star before he or she has uttered so much as one word. Thank heavens Rik Mayall (playing the lead in The new statesman) is a master of comic timing - though that didn't stop me from glaring at the woman two rows in front of me who whooped the moment he bounded through the door.

I've noticed the same thing with audiences on American sitcoms. Never mind the gross sentimentality of the series finale of Friends, what spoiled it for me were the endless cheers as the Ross/Rachel storyline was finally wrapped, about five series too late. On a similar note, audience involvement in the American version of Whose line is it anyway?, in my opinion, utterly ruined a fine programme, rendering much of the improvised comedy inaudible.

It brings nothing whatsoever to the performance and, at worst, there's a chance of the actors losing their stride, so please, just let them get on with it. Save your applause for the end.

A soap opera thwarted

A goes out with B. A and B decide to call it a day. In the meantime, C is going out with D; they split up too. B and C start dating; A and C arranges to meet for drinks. Hijinks do not ensue.

I am A; the rest will remain anonymous, at least for the time being.

One of my work colleagues, who would be a right fag-hag if she didn't have something of a love/hate relationship with gay men, was convinced a triangle of some description would result from my meeting an ex's new man. Said new man is something of a catch, but I know better than to compromise an established friendship and another good one in the offing.

When will some people understand that being gay does not mean you sleep around as a matter of course?