We are moving house. Three years of living above the snowline on the heights of Fairmilehead, much as we have enjoyed them, have prompted us to think again about our environment, which has been prey to lusty breezes from the Pentlands.
So we are heading back a bit closer to town, though still on the south side, to that stretch of Blackford Avenue where a one-sided nineteenth-century terrace, complete with stepped chimney stacks and attractive curlicues, rises beside the Reid Memorial Church towards King’s Buildings and the stone archway marking the approach to the Royal Observatory.
We think we are going to like our ground-floor flat, with window space for our old but still admirably functioning Bosendorfer grand, which I inherited a few years ago from Raymond Monelle, a dear friend in the university music department as a replacement for my Bechstein upright.
Fairmilehead never displayed it to good effect, nor enhanced its warm Viennese resonance but in the room where it will live now I think it will feel at home.
Simultaneously with moving house we are staying for the rest of this month in a favourite Galloway chalet, beside a sandy beach loved by the dogs and close to the charming village of New Abbey where we have found a cafe restaurant that suits us.
While there we shall be visited By Gerald Larner, former music critic of The Guardian, a Manchester friend of long standing and critic of impressive austerity - as well as piquant humour and erudite knowledge - with whom we like to spend time. There is good seafood where we are going and not a bad wine shop, which makes us feel we are somewhere on the French coast.
So as usual this blog will be on leave for a spell, before resuming in August in time for what looks like an unappealing Edinburgh International Festival. But you never know. If Robin Ticciati has recovered from his spinal affliction there will be Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a work on which they will shed the most luminous light. So here’s hoping for this, as well as for Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Donald Runnicles.
6 July 2016
So we are heading back a bit closer to town, though still on the south side, to that stretch of Blackford Avenue where a one-sided nineteenth-century terrace, complete with stepped chimney stacks and attractive curlicues, rises beside the Reid Memorial Church towards King’s Buildings and the stone archway marking the approach to the Royal Observatory.
We think we are going to like our ground-floor flat, with window space for our old but still admirably functioning Bosendorfer grand, which I inherited a few years ago from Raymond Monelle, a dear friend in the university music department as a replacement for my Bechstein upright.
Fairmilehead never displayed it to good effect, nor enhanced its warm Viennese resonance but in the room where it will live now I think it will feel at home.
Simultaneously with moving house we are staying for the rest of this month in a favourite Galloway chalet, beside a sandy beach loved by the dogs and close to the charming village of New Abbey where we have found a cafe restaurant that suits us.
While there we shall be visited By Gerald Larner, former music critic of The Guardian, a Manchester friend of long standing and critic of impressive austerity - as well as piquant humour and erudite knowledge - with whom we like to spend time. There is good seafood where we are going and not a bad wine shop, which makes us feel we are somewhere on the French coast.
So as usual this blog will be on leave for a spell, before resuming in August in time for what looks like an unappealing Edinburgh International Festival. But you never know. If Robin Ticciati has recovered from his spinal affliction there will be Berlioz’s complete Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, a work on which they will shed the most luminous light. So here’s hoping for this, as well as for Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by Donald Runnicles.
6 July 2016
