The Fraser Fifield Band with the Nedyalko Nedyalkov Quartet from Bulgaria

Above: Nedyalko Nedyalkov on kaval with Fraser Fifield on bagpipes.

The Fraser Fifield Band are touring Scotland just now, accompanied by the most amazing group of Bulgarian musicians, the Nedyalko Nedyalkov Quartet. I went to see them this evening, but I can't tell you where as I feel a bit guilty about taking photos after being told not to. I'm not sure why you're not to take photos - all I'm doing with them is using them to publicize the bands and their tour. I never use flash in these situations - I know what it's like standing on a stage playing your heart out and suddenly being alarmed by bright lights going off. Not fun. So I keep a very low profile, use a fast ISO setting and try to remain invisible. It almost worked. The man didn't tap me on the shoulder until near the end. If he's reading this . . . please forgive me! I enjoy these things so much more if I've got photos to remind me of it!

I've seen F.F. before, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but the addition of an eastern European band made the prospect of a second visit irresistible. Did I mention I love Eastern European folk music? I think this was the first time I'd seen it live, though.

Nedyalko Nedyalkov (N.N. from now on, for brevity's sake) is an amazing player of an instrument whose very existence I was only vaguely aware of, the kaval, an end-blown flute similar to the ney, but with an enormous range, and the ability to sound like 3 different instruments within the space of half a dozen notes.

Born in 1970, N.N. is known as one of the world's top kaval players. He was already playing music at the tender age of 7 and although he started off on the accordion he soon took up the traditional kaval and spend many years developing his skills until he graduated in 1989 with high honours. He joined the Bulgarian National Radio Folk Orchestra in 1996 and still plays with them as a soloist. He seems to be internationally famous, and has played with all sorts of bands and musicians I've never heard of, but probably should have.

This guy is jaw-droppingly amazing. I've tried playing a ney - it's a very difficult technique, as these instruments are end-blown rather than transverse like our orchestral flute, or fippled, like the recorder. The kaval and its cousins are just open at the top, with an edge over which you have to blow, letting the edge cut the airstream and producing a sound. It's much harder than it sounds, and it sounds hard enough! N.N. makes it look so easy, and then his fingers start moving, faster and faster (he plays with flat fingers like a bagpipe player, rather than bent like a recorder player), and he moves seamlessly through several octaves, producing deep breathy sounds one moment and high trills the next. I was completely gobsmacked by the performance and can't do it justice with simple words. Go to his MySpace site and listen!



N.N.'s wife Stoimenka is even more amazing. She sings effortlessly, with ululations and microtones that sound just impossible for a human voice to produce. The melodies, so heartwrenchingly sad, almost brought tears to my eyes.

Urrr. . . Sorry . . . gotta give myself a shake here. Getting a bit carried away. But you can see, can't you, that this band are very very good. I'd gone mainly to see Fraser Fifield, who is also very very good, but I knew that already, and I know about the instruments he plays - soprano sax, low whistle, bagpipes - so, impressive though it is to see these things being played with such virtuosity, I did sort of know what to expect.

This is one of the exciting consequences of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the introduction of Eastern European nations into the EU. We are now, at last, getting the chance to experience music that in the pre-internet past could only be heard on fuzzy, distant radio stations, late at night when dial-twiddling was all there was to occupy insomniacs. Eastern Europe is full of exciting bands who are still completely new to us - musicians playing instruments we've neither seen nor heard before, in styles we've never come across.

If you're near any of the towns on the itinerary of this tour, I urge you to go and see them. Check it out here. You won't be disappointed!

Snake Davies Woodwind workshop

Busy old week, this. Still recovering from Michael Schenker's gig last night, I find myself at the Rosehill Barn clutching Steve's lovely Martin alto sax and learning some tricks of the trade from Snake Davies, virtuoso jazz saxophonist/flautist.

I find the place full of our customers: mostly sax players, but a couple of flutes and a clarinet as well. I did toy with the idea of bringing one of my recorders, but decided it might be just a bit too radical, expecting such a thing to be accepted as a potential jazz instrument.

After too many years playing classical music from the dots, and folk music from memory (but sticking to the same tune all the time) I find it really hard to let loose and play solos based only a chord pattern. It's OK on a guitar - your fingers fall into the chord shape and all you have to do is play those particular notes in some random sort of sequence for it to sound like an interesting improvised solo, but on a wind instrument it's much harder. I tend to start off OK, and then get lost in whatever I've started playing, and by the time I'm halfway through I've completely lost track of which chord I'm supposed to be playing with. I guess practising occasionally might help . . .

Michael Schenker at Workington

Seems odd how these big rock stars end up playing on the stage of the little Carnegie Theatre in Workington, a place even Steve's Los Huevos Bandidos have been known to strut their stuff. Hell, I've explored the backstage area myself, and turned up my nose at the grotty dressing rooms, and yet Michael Schenker turns up and plays there.

I had no idea if I'd like it or not, but it's always worthwhile accompanying Steve to see his heroes, even though he won't return the favour. (I'm off to Langholm - alone - next week to see Fraser Fifield - a brilliant Scots sax player - the sort of thing you'd expect Steve to like, but on the strength of 4 tracks on his MySpace site he's decided he doesn't like him. Oh well, it's his loss.)

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Schenker, and even more so because I've finally given in and bought myself a packet of fluorescent yellow expanding foam earplugs from B&Q. Meant to protect your lugs while using power tools, they're brilliant for taking the edge off very loud rock music, to the extent that you can actually hear the notes being played, adding a whole new dimension to this wonderful art form.

The singer and bass player were as good to look at as to listen to, and I now have, I think, the definitive list of players: Leif Sundin - vocals; Thoman Broman- drums; Wayne Findlay - guitar/keyboards; Thomas Torberg - bass.

The rest of the photos can be seen here.

Buttermere

When the sun shines on a Saturday I feel obliged to make the most of it, so I took the dogs down to Buttermere for a bit of a wander. Beautiful lake, of course, but I thought at this time of year it wouldn't be too inundated with tourists. Well, perhaps it's even worse in summer, but honestly, it felt like bloody Princes Street down there, squeezing past families with kids and babies, dogs and grannies, on the narrow path by the lake shore. I've never been to such a busy lake. You can see why, of course - it's crystal clear, flat and mirror-like, surrounded by statuesque mountains, and even boasts a selection of heartstoppingly amazing trees. A photographer's dream, except that at times it's just too flat and mirror-like. I prefer a mirror disturbed by a dog's wake as it dashes in to retrieve a stick.

I mean, honestly, just look at this. Too beautiful, or what?

Anyway, Pace, having just celebrated her 10th birthday, is beginning to show her age. Just as we'd reached more or less the point on our walk that was furthest from the car, she started lagging behind, and at one point looked about to sit down in the middle of the path. I guess I'd better stop letting her do so much swimming, even though she thinks she wants to do it. She needs new batteries, but I don't know where to insert them . . .

I hope this isn't the last photo I'll be taking of Pace swimming with a stick, though.

Fixed. Sort of.

Well, I took the dodgy drive to Westcom in Workington, told them it was urgent, and returned home. About an hour later I received a phone call to tell me it was ready for collection - it was the container holding the drive that had failed, rather than the drive itself. This was more or less what I thought was the matter, so I was very happy, and returned later in the afternoon to collect it.

Plugging it in to my computer, though, I found it still not working, though the computer detected an MTP device (MTP - music transfer protocol - isn't that something like an MP3 player, rather than a hard drive?). Whatever it is, I was informed that it was installed, but wasn't working properly. Oh, great. Tried all sorts of things but nothing happened. Finally I took it to Steve's computer, where it worked perfectly well. Well, at least I know my files are safe and sound . . . I just can't get at them. Used Steve's computer to make 2 DVDs' worth of copies of the stuff I can't do without, but there aren't enough DVDs in the world (well, that's a complete lie, of course. But there probably aren't enough in our house) to copy all my photos and mp3s and stuff so they'll just have to languish for now, unaccessed but safe, until I get my stupid PC to recognise the drive. At least I can get on with some work.

Did I mention that my computer is seriously f***ed up?

Heigh.
Ho.

Making besoms!

Spent the morning at Ashgill Quarry, Plumbland, learning to make birch besoms. Quite a contrast to my previous learning activity, but a lot of fun, and it was nice to be able to go out wearing scruffy old clothes for a change. Bloody cold, so warmth was more important than haute couture.

Got stuck behind a flock of escaped young herdwicks on the way, which was fun, as I love herdwicks, and they did seem to be rather revelling in their newfound, but probably short-lived freedom.

Helen rests her weary legs: Hannah shows off a newly-made besom as one of the students watches in admiration.

The sun shone, the resident border collies brought sticks to be thrown, and we tied birch brushwood together and stuck poles through the middle. I now have a besom HP himself would be proud of, though, sadly, none of us managed to rise so much as a couple of inches off the ground.

BLOODY COMPUTERS
Spent the rest of the day, on and off, trying to figure out why my external hard drive has suddenly become invisible to my PC. Yesterday morning it was working, but when I switched on the computer again later, it had vanished. Well, it's still there - I can see it - and the LED is lighting up, so it's getting power, but the computer isn't recognising it. Tried it on Steve's PC but it, too, ignores the thing completely. Seems to me it's a mechanical fault, rather than a software problem, which means (a) we can't fix it ourselves, but (b) at least the data is probably safe. So I phoned up Westcom, our trusty local computer repairers, and have booked it in for tomorrow morning.

SECURE BACKUPS?
In the meantime I am bereft. I'm searching through backup CDs for out-of-date copies of my price list so I can update them and send them to enquirers; found one at last, as well as an old copy of several other things I need. But there are a number of jobs I intended to get on with today and tomorrow, and they'll have to be postponed for a wee while now, as I don't have recent enough backups. That'll larn me . . . The question is, though - What is a safe backup method? Everything can fail. I don't trust CDs and DVDs particularly, but that's where my backups are. I thought the external HD was more secure, but now it's failed! I gave up on minidisks because of the nightmare scenerio of some of the drives turning rogue and destroying any disk that was put in them. I just don't think anything's 100% secure. Perhaps I should upload copies of everything to some secure online vault or something . . . but how long would that take? And why should I trust them any more than my own local drives?

NO NUDE FEMALE DANCERS HERE
Heh heh. I've just uploaded to Flickr a batch of photos taken this morning during the besom workshop, one of which showed a strange figure I discovered on site, carved from scrap timber, and depicting an ethnic looking female dancer, apparently unclothed. Among the Flickr tags for this were words such as, "nude, female," and "dancer". It's now an hour or two since I uploaded the photos. Unsurprisingly, since it's Feb 14th and many people probably have better things to do than browsing Flickr, I've had no views at all on most of my photos, except for one . . . guess which one has already had 10 views! I'd love to have seen their faces when, after following links leading to the "nude female dancer" they were expecting,they found this instead!

The Final Session

... of the course I was on, was held this evening in Denton Holme Community Centre, a nice sort of village hall place at the back of the library. But we had to be there for 6pm. 6pm! Whose silly idea was that? No time for anyone to have a meal beforehand, unless, like me, they decided to clock off early, get to the hall before the doors opened, and eat cold bean stir fry and rice out of a plastic box in the car while waiting.

After the course proper, so well organised, so inspirational, so life-changing for some participants, this final session was a complete waste of time. In charge was a pleasant fellow from the new University of Cumbria, who, to give him his due, made the best of the bad situation he'd found himself in, but the whole exercise was pointless.

We'd been given these workbooks to fill in, labelled CREATE '08, which is the name of the course, with the list of the bodies behind it at the top: EU Social Fund; University of Cumbria; Cumbria Cultural Skills Partnership; Leading Learning and Skills. I guess all of these had to be assured that the participants in the course had actually attended the sessions, done some work, and learned something, in order for the funding to go through. The chappie from the UC told us sadly that he had nothing to do with writing the questions, so he was as much in the dark as we were when it came to figuring out exactly what sort of answers were expected.

For example, what sort of reply were we expected to give to this? (A whole A4 page was provided, blank and threatening looking, for our answers): "Please list the types of methods that you would consider using to record your learning activities (for example, written, video production, sound recording etc). Give examples of how you would research these media." Now this was a course where we sat at desks and took notes. One or two of us took some photos. How d'you fill an entire A4 page with that? And what on earth do they want when they ask for, "recording the outcomes of a reflective process"?

Most of us, being conscientious sort of people, had spent many hours labouring over this document, but after 3 hours in the community hall with the so-called expert, we were still none the wiser as to whether we'd passed the course or not. Whether we'll ever find out I've no idea: Veronica and I are still waiting for the results of the course we did in November 2006 . . . we stopped holding our breaths about that one some time ago.

For those of us who are self-employed it hardly matters, but for those like my friend Krishna, who are employed and whose employers paid for their participation, it matters a lot.

David Parrish would be appalled at this disorganised last session. When we left his 4th class we were all on a high, full of inspiration and ideas for developing and transforming our businesses; after tonight we felt crushed by bureaucracy.

Stripping today

Yes - stripping down rush chairs, prior to re-seating them. Some jobs are just too messy to do indoors, so you have to wait for decent weather and be prepared to drop everything else if the sun does come out. Someone a long time ago had covered the worn-out rush seat pads of these 3 chairs with fabric, to make them look upholstered. Presumably they couldn't find anyone at the time to re-rush them. Anyway, the fabric has done a very good job of containing every little scrap of broken, disintegrated rush, and as soon as I pulled out the nails and removed the cloth, a fine powdery dust started to escape. Once I started attacking the actual rush pad with my Stanley knife, huge clouds of what looked like smoke were released, and I had to make a quick makeshift facemask from the scarf I was wearing.

Above - not smoke, but powdered rush!

Aineko followed me outside and sat patiently on the picnic bench while I worked. She's good at her job. When I'm inside, working on the computer, she comes and sits on my lap. She's a companionable cat, which is nice.

Misty

Misty today. All day. You could lose your dog on a day like this. Fortunately, I didn't.

Carlisle Enterprise Centre

An interesting old art deco building which seems to have been a factory or something originally (did someone suggest it had been a power station?) and which has now been given a new lease of life, Carlisle Enterprise Centre stands on the banks of the River Caldew below Nelson Bridge, and is the sort of building quite easily overlooked if you don't have to go there for some reason. This is where the course I've been going to is being held. Inside it's full of corridors and fire doors and confusing corners and signs, but you gradually get the layout in your head, and stop getting lost on the trip between the classroom and the loos.

It reminds me of Portobello Pool, or at least the building at the end of it, inside which there was a big cafeteria smelling of chips and with water and detritus all over the floor. I hated going in there in my bare feet, straight out of the water, as you'd end up stepping in squashed chips or pools of spilt Coke. But from outside it looked great, and could easily pass for the long-lost brother of Carlisle Enterprise Centre.Unfortunately Edinburgh City Council didn't think this fine old edifice worth preserving, and all that's left is memories and photos like this.

I keep winning bottles of wine - well, small bottles of wine, but still. Gees. . . it's embarrassing being a smartarse . . . Mind you, if they'd had incentives like this at school I suspect a lot of people would have done a lot better than they did. We had to buy our own booze back then, for heavens' sake!

Ow!

Saturday. Trying to do several things at once, in a bit of a hurry. Trying to slide the back door of the car closed while opening the front one, in order to put my hand in and push down the button to lock the back door. (No, I don't have central locking. I don't like it.) I do this often, though in future I may not, because on this occasion my timing was all to pot, and I managed to complete the sliding-the-back-door-closed bit before starting the opening-the-front-door bit, with the result that part of my right hand, viz., my right pinkie, ended up between the two doors as they collided. Fortunately neither of them was locked at the time, so I was able to slide the back one open again very smartly, but the damage was done. It was incredibly painful. I went jumping back into the house going, "ow! OW! OW! OWWWW!" followed by the cat, who was going, "miaow, miaow, miaow," in a normal, catlike manner, which led Steve to think I was doing cat impressions instead of screaming in agony. I didn't even realise I'd left a trail of blood. I thought I'd just crushed the finger, not burst it open too.

Well, once I'd finished hyperventilating and bleeding all over the kitchen I managed to clean and bandage the wound, which isn't actually quite as bad as it felt. There's quite a deep cut, but nothing's broken, and the wound's nice and clean. The finger's bruised a bit, and of course it's difficult to type with a bandage on your finger if you're the sort of typist who's been using all her fingers on the keyboard ever since that summer when she was 9, and bored, and decided to learn to touch-type on an ancient antique typewriter using her mother's old workbooks which gave her loads of practice in producing nice neat bits of typescript declaring over and over such words of wisdom as, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party".

Heigh ho. I've damaged practically all my fingers at one time or another, so it's nothing new. Let's see: when I was still at school I embedded a penknife in my left hand ring finger while trying to remove the crown cap from a glass Coke bottle; twice I've sliced a bit off the tip of a finger, sending me once to sit in a long queue in the casualty department of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and on the other occasion to the doctor's surgery; I've had an axe through my thumb, cut a piece of finger while slicing onions, burnt a finger on a hot exhaust pipe, squashed a thumb between two rocks while chucking them into a wheelbarrow, lost a couple of nails which eventually grew in again, and of course had my right index finger bitten by a jealous dog when the new dog arrived. Then there are the everyday cuts and scratches caused by sharp tools, hammers and pointy bits of cane, and the burns from touching things that have been soldered without waiting for them to cool down, or from taking bread out of the oven and brushing against a hot oven shelf. There was a nasty blister too, when the steam from the kettle attacked my thumb, and another occasion when a couple of fingers, for no apparent reason, developed a swelling which would quite likely have spread to the rest of my hand and then my arm had I not lived in an era and a place where antibiotics are available.