Pig Sty Avenue

Getting to the top of the waiting list at the Kennyhill Allotments in Riddrie coincided nicely with getting back from Saudi. I've been almost every day since. I've got half of the plot held by a gardener who's getting on a bit. He clearly knows his onions: the soil is beautiful. One side is fruit bushes which had overgrown and were straggling onto the main bed, and were besides getting choked with nettles, so I've been clearing them, and cutting back the bushes, even though it's really the wrong time of year for pruning. It was nearly job-done tonight, just a few feet and one more bush, a few dozen stinging nettles and couple of brambles to sort out. And then I saw a nest in front of me. Two listless looking chicks, one dead one discarded to the side. I swore and stepped back. I'd cleared the whole area of stinging nettles and feral fruit bushes, pausing as I'd been going along this thirty yard stretch, happy that it was starting to look like a garden. And...

Got home last Friday. After nearly four months practising on the semi-weighted Yamaha, the Kemble felt "rich and strange". Eccentric, even. My first thought was, "We're going to need a better piano". This was especially so with regard to sensitivity - getting a wee pianissimo note out was really difficult. So on Saturday when I happened to be in Biggar's in Sauchiehall St anyway, I had a shot on all of the pianos in the showroom. The digitals, mostly Yahamas, were fine, very touch sensitive, but of course soulless. But the acoustics, even a Broadwood baby grand, weren't appreciably better than my Kemble at home. And so I got back down to it. Next mushqila, all of the white keys from B4 to G5 are liable to stick, making RH scales impossible to play. And not from want of trying: I thought maybe they just needed plenty of work, and they'd loosen up, but no. Meanwhile, (I was so pleased to get my fingers on Mrs K, I was for playing every note), B0 and ...

There is no source for this quotation, which in itself is inspirational: pedagogue musicians have perhaps been saying it to their students for the last two or three thousand years. At work, we've been enduring "Traffic Week", (a colossal exercise in "teslik"), and everyone was given a kind of party bag containing colouring books and crayons, (dished out to grown men, mind), and a pack of cards to play some kind of Happy Families safety game. So I've given each of the cards a value from the ABRSM Grade 1 Piano syllabus scales and broken chords. For example, the card "Follow The Speed Limit" on a red background = A minor harmonic RH. That was the first one I turned over, and I set about learning the scale, playing it again, again, again; looking at the music, looking at the keys, looking at my hands, looking out the window, slowly, quickly, pianissimo, fortissimo, again, again, again. The same mistakes kept coming up, mis-playing the F on the way u...

It's been Oscar Peterson, no less, who's gotten me back to the keyboard. Together with a final shove from my IRL teacher, Flora, who deeply impressed me last week by playing the first dozen bars from Chopin's Ballade from memory. Oscar is the new role model because he brought a concert pianist's discipline to jazz, which tells me I can play all the standards one day, but I need to work at all the scales and arpeggios first. Although I've had a two month lull with not much practice, when I got back to it I realised that I've actually learned a lot prior to this recent hiatus.  Grade 1, after all, is NOT a beginners exam.  Flora was very impressed that I'm playing between the keys, and I was even more impressed to learn that my straight-line wrists are looking pretty good. My date with the ABRSM Grade 1 Piano has been postponed to November this year. Procrastination over. Now I'm doing exactly what it tells me in the syllabus, that is the scales etc gi...

I learned that grade 1 arr. of Imagine. Someone on FB pointed out my shockingly droopy wrists, and yes, they had a point. So I moved on to We Wish You a Merry Christmas, determined to get the wrists right. And I noticed the wrists took care of themselves if I played high up the keys. I got so absorbed in all this, playing G major scales properly, with the fingers right, and high up the keys... That was when I realised that those fingerlings enabled me to play high up the keys, and fit neatly into the gaps between the black keys, and that's why, perhaps, the black keys are arranged as they are in twos and threes... After several years of being a little intimidated by the keyboard, its contours suddenly began to feel friendly, familiar, home-like. The hurried advice I had from Flora (my Sauchiehall St teacher) at last fell on fertile ground: it's actually much easier with your wrists high... It's ok to lean forward... Those two half hour lessons back in October have got me ou...

I had a couple of piano lessons when I was home in Sept/Oct. My fingers were all wrong, and I've learned to do C, G and now D scales with the proper fingers.  And I've got a book of grade 1 pieces - not ABRSM pieces, but grade 1 nontheless, - and I've started with Imagine. Really it more or less just follows the sung harmony of the original song, with some simple wee harmonies in the left hand.   The plan is to learn as many grade 1 pieces as I can now in Saudi from this book, (Scarborough Fair, Greensleeves, The Sound of Silence, California Dreamin') whilst I'm here. I hope it gets easier as I go along. Imagine is hard work, though I'm getting here.  Come February, (or thereabouts), I'll be home again, and I'll get the 2014/15 ABRSM Grade 1 syllabus pieces to learn in time for the Summer 2015 exams in Glasgow. I'm hoping that I can more or less sight read grade 1 pieces by then. I'm just focussing on that for now. Grade 2 et seq will have to wai...

I read somewhere, (The Guardian, probs, but can't find the link now), that personal blogging is about done with, that most of us have moved on in social networking terms.  Subjectively, that's probably about right - I used to post here almost daily. And now it's monthly. But it's coming up ten years now, and this does a job that FB and Twitter don't do.  Really, it's a place to note how things are getting along with stuff I'm interested in, but that will tend to make anyone else's eyes glaze over when I start talking about them: photography, gardening, the piano.  Photography is SO noughties, now. I use the iPhone to get photos - and that means I'm just concentrating on the image, no longer on the process and the gear.  And all that gear, like the Nikon F, I was going to put it all on eBay, but it was all purchased and taken so much care of over a decade, it seems a pity to part with it for mere lucre. So I'm going to box it all up and Molly or s...