Yesterday I took a day off from painting the loo and drove up the Duddon to Cockley Beck Bridge. I hadn't climbed the Scafells for ten years or more, and thought it was worth another go. Up Moasdale, skirting the bogs where possible, then the slog across Throstle Garth to the boggy wilderness of Upper Eskdale. The morning's mist was doing its best to clear, and all the bristling lower buttresses of the high mountains gleamed in the sun, Esk Buttress rearing up like a crag that has just been told to improve its posture.
I climbed Thor's Buttress, a Grade 3 scramble that takes you up to the summit of Pen, a southerly outlier of Scafell Pike. The hardest move was about what you'd expect on a Difficult rock climb, though in walking boots, alone, without a rope and above a big drop, that was quite gripping enough.
After counting the other climbers on top of the Pike (46 including myself), I went down to Mickledore, where the mantrap of Broad Stand awaited, a sunlit cuboid of dangerous allure. I had climbed it three times before, as far as I could remember: once with my Dad aged about 9 or 10 (when I was probably dragged up on a rope), once in 1987 when I helped a Spanish waiter from Keswick up, and the last time in September 1992 on my stag weekend in the pouring rain. Despite this, I felt nervous. Broad Stand is a notorious black spot - people regularly fall off and some die. No-one else was on the route, and there was no-one to be seen on the easier ground above it either.
The entrance lies up a narrow slit, now wet and polished, known as Fat Man's Agony. Then you go round a little corner and up to Broad Stand itself. The bad step is a sloping slab about the size of a ping-pong table whose lower end drops abruptly the best part of a hundred feet to scree. Standing on the slab you are faced with two walls at right angles about 7 or 8 feet high. The right wall you can forget. The left is the way up.
There are pretty much two alternatives only. At the left side of the left wall there is a crevice just a little too small to accommodate an adult. It looks easy, and this is indeed the way my Dad took me aged 9. But it is right over the slab edge, and if you fall from here without a rope you are finished. I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid.
In the middle of the wall there is a small block, a mounting block if you like, and obliquely up left a polished-smooth sloping scoop of a hold; up left again a really quite good foothold that looks as if it might be a game-changer. All you would need to do is hold yourself in balance against the tendency of the wall to push you outwards, and step up. But the top of the wall is rounded and offers little of the reassuringly positive variety, and the second foothold, the polished one, yesterday had a small stream running down it in a thin pulse.
I had three or four goes, flapping about with my hands on top of the wall to try and find the generous handhold that memory assured me had been there last time. Nothing better than a thin crack for the finger-ends. I retreated, puzzled and intimidated. I even had speculative look at the crevice on the left, which left me shuddering at the doom-laden possibilities.
By this time I noticed that a man on Mickledore below had stopped to watch my efforts. It would be humiliating to give up in front of an audience, and if I fell off I would probably stay on the slab. Probably. I picked up my rucksack and chucked it on top of the wall. I made a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to dry the polished scoop, stepped on the mounting block, cantilevered my left foot high on the good foothold, got my right foot into the scoop, pushed up on my left, got my fingers in the crack and somehow thrutched over the top, with all the grace of a wave trying get to the top of the beach and then collapsing into the sand. It was over in ten seconds.
Elated, I waved at the man watching. He waved back. At least I think he was waving.
A few things occur to me. One, it was much harder than I remembered. When I got home I googled "Broad Stand" and "missing hold" but nothing came up. But yesterday I asked my Dad (now aged 90) what he remembered about it, and he too thought there had once been a massive jug handle hold over the top. So maybe it was once easier. On the other hand maybe that was because 21 years ago everything about my body worked, and now much less of it seems to.
Secondly, above Broad Stand there used to be a path. There isn't any more. In fact you can see where the path used to be, but it now has grass growing on it. Maybe internet warnings (like this one) mean that walkers can read about the accidents (one a year for the last few years) and are warned off. Funnily enough Lord's Rake, the easy but unpleasantly loose way to the top which wends its way underneath the crags, is now apparently "closed" to walkers because of a precariously poised boulder; and when I got to the top of Scafell there were only three or four people there. Scafell is now quite hard to get to from the Pike, and demands a detour via Foxes Tarn.
Thirdly, the rock climbing grade for Broad Stand, is ridiculous and misleading. Even if it isn't harder than it used to be, grades are given for climbers with a rope and wearing rock boots. Alone, in walking boots, which is certainly the way most people used to climb it, the impasse is a much more serious undertaking than the "Difficult" grade attributed to it.
Lastly, for a father of three, climbing Broad Stand, or Thor's Buttress for that matter, is probably an unjustifiable risk. But these are a bit like the big hit in cricket - get it to the boundary and everyone says "Good shot"; get it wrong and they say, "He chucked his wicket away".
At the moment I am still not out; but undeniably giving the bowlers a bit of encouragement.
Tuesday 27 August 2013
Sunday 18 August 2013
Fracking, democracy and the law
Fracking is going to mess up the countryside to some extent, even if it won't do all the things its opponents claim to the water supply and the stability of their houses. And it looks rather like barrel-bottom scraping in our desperation to find more burnable fossil fuels and avoid the really hard questions about sustainable energy resources for a population that is too big and whose growth is out of control.
But I have grave misgivings about the carnival of protestors that has descended onto the village of Balcombe in Sussex to stop one of the fracking companies, Cuadrilla, carrying out test drilling.
What Cuadrilla are doing is lawful, whether you like it or not, according to laws passed by an elected government. The protestors are trying to impose their will on Cuadrilla. They're bullies, in exactly the same way as animal rights protestors who attack researchers in Cambridge.
The costs of policing their blockade has been reported to exceed £500 million. When the government doesn't have two beans to rub together, I wonder whether they think this is money well spent,
But I have grave misgivings about the carnival of protestors that has descended onto the village of Balcombe in Sussex to stop one of the fracking companies, Cuadrilla, carrying out test drilling.
What Cuadrilla are doing is lawful, whether you like it or not, according to laws passed by an elected government. The protestors are trying to impose their will on Cuadrilla. They're bullies, in exactly the same way as animal rights protestors who attack researchers in Cambridge.
The costs of policing their blockade has been reported to exceed £500 million. When the government doesn't have two beans to rub together, I wonder whether they think this is money well spent,
Monday 12 August 2013
Gibraltar, Trafalgar and other Spanish practices
A fortnight ago I drove past Gibraltar, and, remembering the stories about the Spanish contriving six hour queues at the border, congratulated myself for having organised a flight to Malaga instead.
There is one fact curiously missing from the news coverage of the current dispute, which apparently started when the Gib government placed some concrete blocks in Algeciras Bay to prevent illegal Spanish drag netting of the sea floor. It is that Spain has its own Gibraltar. To be exact it appears to have five of them, across the Med in North Africa.
I have posted a link here to a page which shows where they are. I think it's in Catalan, which is pertinent.
The funny thing is that the Spanish don't realise that the issue is ultimately about democracy, but that's why the Catalans have drawn attention to it. Their case rests on the proposition that the Madrid government should respect the Catalans' democratic wishes for an independent state.
So just imagine how annoying it must be for Catalans that Madrid is happy to hang on to the enclave of Cueta, for example, on the basis that its inhabitants, just across the Strait of Gibraltar, would rather be governed from Spain than Morocco, but would like Gibraltar back even though its inhabitants quite like being British.
Incidentally, Cape Trafalgar, just west of Gibraltar, has a couple of memorials to the thousands who lost their lives in the 1805 battle. Tactfully, neither mentions that Spain lost.
Incidentally, Cape Trafalgar, just west of Gibraltar, has a couple of memorials to the thousands who lost their lives in the 1805 battle. Tactfully, neither mentions that Spain lost.
Sunday 11 August 2013
Revisiting Bongo Bongo Land
No story is too old to be exhumed by this blog, and so here is another outing for the sad case of the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, forced to apologise for referring to countries in receipt of UK foreign aid as Bongo Bongo Land.
I wouldn't use the term myself, for reasons I'll come back to. But is it racist? People like Mr Bloom use the term as a derogatory epitethet for, generally, African countries (although he apparently doesn't like Pakistan much either). The only racist construction I can attribute to it is the suggestion - implicit at best - that the inhabitants of the countries he has in mind do nothing but sit around all day playing Bongos.
But where does this inference come from? Not from Mr Bloom. He suggested that UK aid went into the pockets of government officials in foreign countries. Undoubtedly sometimes this is true. He also suggested that it was immoral to pay money to foreigners when we had people going to food banks in the UK. It's a point of view. Nowhere did he say, "And by the way, these people are doing it because they're black, and that's the kind of thing black people do".
Not for the first time, the racial stereotypes come from the critics rather from Bloom himself.
But even if it isn't racist, is it right to use a derogatory term like this about another country at all? I don't often refer to Frogs and Krauts personally, but I'd quite like to retain the option if the need arose. Where do we draw the line? Can we no longer use the word Yanks? Jocks? Taffs? Ockers? Or if for some reason I don't like another country (for example because its people carry out female genital mutilation) and wish to speak derogatorily about it, is that OK just provided I use its proper name?
I said I wouldn't use the term Bongo Bongo Land myself. It's crass and unspecific, and, as Bloom has discovered, makes things easy for people who'd rather attack the messenger rather than discuss the message.
There is a case to be made against foreign aid. Some of it is stolen. In some cases it puts sticking plaster on problems which would otherwise have to be addressed directly by indigenous people. Some countries have a lower top rate of tax than we do (Pakistan). Some countries have a nuclear weapons programme (Pakistan). Every penny we spend in aid has to be borrowed by the Government on the wholesale money markets. We have plenty of people who don't have enough in the UK. Ringfencing the Aid budget has tightened the squeeze on other government departments.
Bloom might have been better couching his tirade in moderate terms; but then the Guardian would never have run the story or the BBC picked up on it.
The monstering of Bloom, coming on a slow news day in the silly season, seems to me just another in a long line of insidious failures, firstly, to think carefully about words and what they mean, and secondly, to consider what is the cumulative effect of compiling a kind of Thesaurus of words you're allowed to use and opinions you're allowed to hold.
At the moment we seem to be arguing about what the Thesaurus should contain. In my book we shouldn't have a Thesaurus at all.
I wouldn't use the term myself, for reasons I'll come back to. But is it racist? People like Mr Bloom use the term as a derogatory epitethet for, generally, African countries (although he apparently doesn't like Pakistan much either). The only racist construction I can attribute to it is the suggestion - implicit at best - that the inhabitants of the countries he has in mind do nothing but sit around all day playing Bongos.
But where does this inference come from? Not from Mr Bloom. He suggested that UK aid went into the pockets of government officials in foreign countries. Undoubtedly sometimes this is true. He also suggested that it was immoral to pay money to foreigners when we had people going to food banks in the UK. It's a point of view. Nowhere did he say, "And by the way, these people are doing it because they're black, and that's the kind of thing black people do".
Not for the first time, the racial stereotypes come from the critics rather from Bloom himself.
But even if it isn't racist, is it right to use a derogatory term like this about another country at all? I don't often refer to Frogs and Krauts personally, but I'd quite like to retain the option if the need arose. Where do we draw the line? Can we no longer use the word Yanks? Jocks? Taffs? Ockers? Or if for some reason I don't like another country (for example because its people carry out female genital mutilation) and wish to speak derogatorily about it, is that OK just provided I use its proper name?
I said I wouldn't use the term Bongo Bongo Land myself. It's crass and unspecific, and, as Bloom has discovered, makes things easy for people who'd rather attack the messenger rather than discuss the message.
There is a case to be made against foreign aid. Some of it is stolen. In some cases it puts sticking plaster on problems which would otherwise have to be addressed directly by indigenous people. Some countries have a lower top rate of tax than we do (Pakistan). Some countries have a nuclear weapons programme (Pakistan). Every penny we spend in aid has to be borrowed by the Government on the wholesale money markets. We have plenty of people who don't have enough in the UK. Ringfencing the Aid budget has tightened the squeeze on other government departments.
Bloom might have been better couching his tirade in moderate terms; but then the Guardian would never have run the story or the BBC picked up on it.
The monstering of Bloom, coming on a slow news day in the silly season, seems to me just another in a long line of insidious failures, firstly, to think carefully about words and what they mean, and secondly, to consider what is the cumulative effect of compiling a kind of Thesaurus of words you're allowed to use and opinions you're allowed to hold.
At the moment we seem to be arguing about what the Thesaurus should contain. In my book we shouldn't have a Thesaurus at all.
Thursday 8 August 2013
Mark Carney and the feelgood factor
Two telling quotes in the Grauniad this morning.
"As Keynes explained, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." That's from one Paul Segal, economics lecturer at the University of Sussex.
And then here's the leader column: "What lies ahead is a recovery built on credit and house prices. Sound familiar?"
Yes, it does. But not from the pages of your newspaper, my friend. Only those with memories of the goldfish variety will have forgotten that the period of growth from 1997 to 2008 was fuelled by credit and rising house prices. What was the Guardian's line then? One of support for Gordon Brown - borrowing only to invest, abolishing Tory boom and bust, and so on. A little mea culpa wouldn't go amiss.
To return to Paul Segal, yes, the true Keynesian calls for central bankers to take away the punch bowl while the party is in full swing. But I don't remember him saying that in the Graun during Brown's glory years. Perhaps that's their fault for not asking him however.
To be fair to the Graun, hardly anyone on the Left was criticising Brown during the long boom. Can you imagine how it would have sounded? Labour MP urges Chancellor to spend less in case bust turns out not to have been abolished after all? A short way to death by deselection. But no such sanction awaited the commentariat, should they have chosen to put pen to paper. They, the new Keynesians, are Keynesians-lite, urging the government to do the easy bit (borrow) now it's too late to do the hard bit (save).
Thankfully it rather looks as if George Osborne has shot their fox. The economy is growing notwithstanding near slump in the Eurozone. The new BoE governor, Mark Carney, has given it a shove in the right direction by telling the markets he won't raise base rates for three years (probably). That should help it along.
Is it the wrong kind of growth? Perhaps. Plenty of people on the Right think that Carney's made a mistake. I'm a little more sanguine. House prices are already ridiculously high. I'm not sure whether there's room to have a repeat of the 2000s. This is true for debt also. How much more can we all borrow?
Osborne could be forgiven for feeling vindicated, both economically and politically, but I have long predicted that Labour would win in 2015. History shows that people are most likely to vote for "progressive" parties when they're feeling good.
"As Keynes explained, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." That's from one Paul Segal, economics lecturer at the University of Sussex.
And then here's the leader column: "What lies ahead is a recovery built on credit and house prices. Sound familiar?"
Yes, it does. But not from the pages of your newspaper, my friend. Only those with memories of the goldfish variety will have forgotten that the period of growth from 1997 to 2008 was fuelled by credit and rising house prices. What was the Guardian's line then? One of support for Gordon Brown - borrowing only to invest, abolishing Tory boom and bust, and so on. A little mea culpa wouldn't go amiss.
To return to Paul Segal, yes, the true Keynesian calls for central bankers to take away the punch bowl while the party is in full swing. But I don't remember him saying that in the Graun during Brown's glory years. Perhaps that's their fault for not asking him however.
To be fair to the Graun, hardly anyone on the Left was criticising Brown during the long boom. Can you imagine how it would have sounded? Labour MP urges Chancellor to spend less in case bust turns out not to have been abolished after all? A short way to death by deselection. But no such sanction awaited the commentariat, should they have chosen to put pen to paper. They, the new Keynesians, are Keynesians-lite, urging the government to do the easy bit (borrow) now it's too late to do the hard bit (save).
Thankfully it rather looks as if George Osborne has shot their fox. The economy is growing notwithstanding near slump in the Eurozone. The new BoE governor, Mark Carney, has given it a shove in the right direction by telling the markets he won't raise base rates for three years (probably). That should help it along.
Is it the wrong kind of growth? Perhaps. Plenty of people on the Right think that Carney's made a mistake. I'm a little more sanguine. House prices are already ridiculously high. I'm not sure whether there's room to have a repeat of the 2000s. This is true for debt also. How much more can we all borrow?
Osborne could be forgiven for feeling vindicated, both economically and politically, but I have long predicted that Labour would win in 2015. History shows that people are most likely to vote for "progressive" parties when they're feeling good.
Wednesday 7 August 2013
The only good polar bear . . .
All of us have irrational dislikes, and in the animal kingdom mine is the polar bear. It is an animal that is always hungry, and if it sees you its reaction is immediate and predictable - it will try and kill you. Then it will eat you. In this it differs to most predators, which tend to become aggressive only when cornered, which have more reliable sources of prey, which may have fed recently and which may not have developed a taste for human flesh (and this even goes for lions and tigers).
If there is a more unpleasant animal than the polar bear, it has yet to arrive on a TV screen near me. My prejudice against the bear even extends to its appearance: there is something about its flat forehead and mean little eyes which reminds me of the more meat-headed fans you used to see hanging around South London football grounds in the 1980s.
So I may well have been the only person to feel a small flicker of satisfaction at the photograph in the papers today of a dead polar bear on the arctic island of Svalbard.
Of course it was wrong of me. This bear had apparently been forced south by the absence of sea ice, home to the seals on which the bears feed. It had probably starved to death. Now polar bears starve every year, but in a media environment largely warmist in tone a dead one in the papers can quickly become symptomatic of the damage caused by global warming. Less sea ice equals fewer seals to feed on. Fewer seals equals fewer polar bears. Whilst some bear populations are apparently doing OK, rather more of them aren't. So the plight of the bear is our plight also.
I am not writing an anti-warmist rant here - I have seen myself the denuded slopes of Alpine mountains where glaciers once resided, and I can well believe the world is getting warmer. But if it's true, as the warmists believe, that humans are responsible for the warming, why are they only campaigning for reduced carbon emissions per capita?
The amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere is dependent on our population size - to put it crudely, total emissions equals the number of people multiplied by the emissions of each person. By all means target individual emissions (although with living standards increasing across China, India and many other parts of the third world, good luck with that), but why the silence about population? As far as I know all predictions suggest that global population will increase for decades to come, and if that happens the chances of reducing emissions overall, even if you could reduce them per capita, must be zero. By then, if the warmists are right, it will be far too late.
So why not attack the problem from the other end? Why not population control? You don't have to adopt the Chinese scorched earth policy - you can do it by example, by encouragement, and in the UK via the tax system and by targeting state benefits more carefully.
We all know the answer to this. It's because population control smacks of eugenics.
But as long as the warmists fail to address population size they'll look like hand-wringers, crying over the decline of the polar bear whilst ignoring the one measure which offers a practical chance of making it less likely to be fatal.
If there is a more unpleasant animal than the polar bear, it has yet to arrive on a TV screen near me. My prejudice against the bear even extends to its appearance: there is something about its flat forehead and mean little eyes which reminds me of the more meat-headed fans you used to see hanging around South London football grounds in the 1980s.
So I may well have been the only person to feel a small flicker of satisfaction at the photograph in the papers today of a dead polar bear on the arctic island of Svalbard.
Of course it was wrong of me. This bear had apparently been forced south by the absence of sea ice, home to the seals on which the bears feed. It had probably starved to death. Now polar bears starve every year, but in a media environment largely warmist in tone a dead one in the papers can quickly become symptomatic of the damage caused by global warming. Less sea ice equals fewer seals to feed on. Fewer seals equals fewer polar bears. Whilst some bear populations are apparently doing OK, rather more of them aren't. So the plight of the bear is our plight also.
I am not writing an anti-warmist rant here - I have seen myself the denuded slopes of Alpine mountains where glaciers once resided, and I can well believe the world is getting warmer. But if it's true, as the warmists believe, that humans are responsible for the warming, why are they only campaigning for reduced carbon emissions per capita?
The amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere is dependent on our population size - to put it crudely, total emissions equals the number of people multiplied by the emissions of each person. By all means target individual emissions (although with living standards increasing across China, India and many other parts of the third world, good luck with that), but why the silence about population? As far as I know all predictions suggest that global population will increase for decades to come, and if that happens the chances of reducing emissions overall, even if you could reduce them per capita, must be zero. By then, if the warmists are right, it will be far too late.
So why not attack the problem from the other end? Why not population control? You don't have to adopt the Chinese scorched earth policy - you can do it by example, by encouragement, and in the UK via the tax system and by targeting state benefits more carefully.
We all know the answer to this. It's because population control smacks of eugenics.
But as long as the warmists fail to address population size they'll look like hand-wringers, crying over the decline of the polar bear whilst ignoring the one measure which offers a practical chance of making it less likely to be fatal.
Sunday 28 July 2013
Stephen Hough plays Four Sea Interludes
A couple of weeks ago one of my daughters sang in the first night of the Proms. In case this sounds like a large claim, her role was a small one amongst hundreds, being part of the combined forces of the Halle Youth Choir along with a host of others from around the country. But this family involvement meant that I scanned the TV listings for the first night coverage with more interest than usual, and I was startled to learn from the Guardian that, amongst other unlikely sounding propositions, the pianist Stephen Hough was going to play the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.
It's in the nature of Proms programming that occasionally something wacky gets put on, and I thought, "I had no idea Britten had made a piano version", rather than, "Flippin' Grauniad. Can't get anything right".
In the event, as going to the concert revealed and as this week's Private Eye reports, Four Sea Interludes was in fact played by the BBC SO; Hough merely ran his fingers over the Rach / Pag Rhapsody and the Lutoslawski version of the same tune (he was fantastic). The Eye says the listings mistake arose because the broadsheets don't employ many people who know anything about classical music; and that this is because the papers don't print much about it. What the Eye didn't say is that this was because most people aren't interested in classical music, and the papers can't sell the advertising space.
Why is that? Amongst a whole host of reasons is the sad fact that since the 1960s in this country the repertoire has failed to renew itself in the way it did in the past. New pieces have not been played and come into the repertoire. Only a handful of the Second Viennese School pieces, whose influence dominated music in the last century, have managed it (the Berg Violin Concerto - now name four others). None of them come remotely close to emulating the joyous acceptance of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, which received over a hundred performances in the year after its first. Conductors and administrators have programmed music by composers the public didn't like. Unsurprisingly the public has turned its face away. As a whole, it has become disengaged. The mistake in the Guardian's listings is symptomatic.
A week or so later the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra played a piece in the Proms by Helmut Lachenmann, described by the Radio 3 announcer as "one of Germany's leading composers". God help them. It's worth remembering that the Great Serialist Terror began several decades earlier across the Channel, and has not died out there yet. I listened dutifully to Lachenmann's piece. It was rhythmically tedious, ugly and one-paced. It made a half-hearted attempt at sonic invention, but got nowhere near the felicity and verve of, say, Dusapin, nor indeed of the new dance records they play at my gym. It was grim, dull and unpleasant. And putting a worldwide audience off classical music.
Sadly, there are plenty of composers out there who are writing stuff the public do like, and I'm not just banging my own drum here - I listened today to a Piano Trio by Matthew Taylor on Spotify. Excellent. I can't wait to hear some of his orchestral music. Sadly, none of it seems to have been put on at the Proms.
It's in the nature of Proms programming that occasionally something wacky gets put on, and I thought, "I had no idea Britten had made a piano version", rather than, "Flippin' Grauniad. Can't get anything right".
In the event, as going to the concert revealed and as this week's Private Eye reports, Four Sea Interludes was in fact played by the BBC SO; Hough merely ran his fingers over the Rach / Pag Rhapsody and the Lutoslawski version of the same tune (he was fantastic). The Eye says the listings mistake arose because the broadsheets don't employ many people who know anything about classical music; and that this is because the papers don't print much about it. What the Eye didn't say is that this was because most people aren't interested in classical music, and the papers can't sell the advertising space.
Why is that? Amongst a whole host of reasons is the sad fact that since the 1960s in this country the repertoire has failed to renew itself in the way it did in the past. New pieces have not been played and come into the repertoire. Only a handful of the Second Viennese School pieces, whose influence dominated music in the last century, have managed it (the Berg Violin Concerto - now name four others). None of them come remotely close to emulating the joyous acceptance of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, which received over a hundred performances in the year after its first. Conductors and administrators have programmed music by composers the public didn't like. Unsurprisingly the public has turned its face away. As a whole, it has become disengaged. The mistake in the Guardian's listings is symptomatic.
A week or so later the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra played a piece in the Proms by Helmut Lachenmann, described by the Radio 3 announcer as "one of Germany's leading composers". God help them. It's worth remembering that the Great Serialist Terror began several decades earlier across the Channel, and has not died out there yet. I listened dutifully to Lachenmann's piece. It was rhythmically tedious, ugly and one-paced. It made a half-hearted attempt at sonic invention, but got nowhere near the felicity and verve of, say, Dusapin, nor indeed of the new dance records they play at my gym. It was grim, dull and unpleasant. And putting a worldwide audience off classical music.
Sadly, there are plenty of composers out there who are writing stuff the public do like, and I'm not just banging my own drum here - I listened today to a Piano Trio by Matthew Taylor on Spotify. Excellent. I can't wait to hear some of his orchestral music. Sadly, none of it seems to have been put on at the Proms.
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