Of course, waving handkerchiefs isn’t the sole province of the male Morris dancer. Taeppa’s Tump Ladies Morris hail from Maidenhead in Berkshire. Formed in 1981, they’ve danced at many Festivals, villages and towns in the region over the thirty years they’ve been together. Their name comes from a Saxon chieftain’s burial mound nearby in Taplow….
Waving handkerchiefs and leaping around to traditional Cotswold Morris tunes may not seem like a ‘manly’ thing to do these days, but the tradition is still alive and well in many English villages in the summer months. August saw the forty sixth Towersey music festival take place in Oxfordshire, as usual, in very much inclement…
Having missed the grand reopening of Oxford’s superbly refurbished Ashmolean Museum a few months ago, I wanted to visit it to see what sixty million pounds of resources had produced. Rick Mather, the project architect, has created a wonderfully light and airy space with an eighty foot high, glass roofed, central atrium that floods the…
Paul Heumiller is one of those affable, level headed people you hope you’re going to be lucky enough get on the other end of the phone when you really need some sound advice from an experienced professional. He listened patiently to my various attempts at describing the sound I was looking for and my hope, after many fruitless visits to numerous ‘high street’ music stores, that Dream Guitars would be able, finally, to fulfill my long term ambition to acquire a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ instrument of superb quality.
In an earlier article, I wrote about once owning a rather wonderful example of a Martin D-28, albeit very briefly. The ‘heavyweight’ sound it produced and its ability to project that sound to the back of a hall was stunning – a never to be forgotten experience. Mixed in with that memory are my distant recollections of Martin Carthy’s sound, Nick Jones’ sound and the magical Martin Simpson, among many others. I asked Paul if it was feasible to capture all of this in one instrument. He said the only thing to do would be to visit the studio and play a wide range of guitars until I found the one that most closely matched the sound I had in my head.
Great advice. He was right of course, so I arranged to visit the studio in early March, and did just what he suggested – for nearly three days! …….
Finding myself in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and having decided to visit all the local music stores on a guitar hunt, I stumbled across Blue Moon Music. It’s an unassuming place from the outside, but once you step inside you find a veritable treasure house of vintage tube amplifiers, double basses, mandolins, violins and of course, acoustic guitars. Having spent many uninspiring hours playing Martin, Taylor and Alvarez acoustics in the other, more premium local stores, I was not expecting to find anything special at Blue Moon. I could not have been more surprised.
I think I played my way all the way along the guitar racks until I found the Bourgeios. As soon as I picked it up I knew it was a ‘special’ instrument and I suppose it took me all of ten seconds to recognise how alive it felt. I must have lost the next hour just playing it and getting a feel for its special qualities. The owner of the store told me its background. It had been sitting in a collection, unused, until very recently and was underplayed and he thought that it would ‘open up’ when fully played in. He told me that it was hand made in 2002 by a luthier called Dana Bourgeios from Lewiston, Maine who makes about five hundred guitars a year from carefully selected tonewoods.
This guitar has an Adirondack (Appalachain) Spruce top and Bubinga (African Rosewood) back and sides. It resonates beautifully, with a full bass, a superbly balanced, sweet, singing treble with choir like overtones and outstanding sustain. In the store, it was one of those ‘decisive moments’, when you just know that something was meant to happen. So, of course, I made an offer and ……
It’s been a while since I picked up and seriously played any of my very small collection of guitars. They’re instruments I’ve acquired through my on-and-off love affair with the guitar, which began when I was sixteen. Like many teenagers back then I was a member of a ‘rock’ band (The Blue Diamonds) playing covers…
There are three basic elements to the study of Shotokan Karate. The first is Kihon Waza, which means Basic Techniques, and Tai Sabaki which means Body Mobility. The second is Kata, or Form, which describes the practice of performing detailed sequences of basic techniques joined into a single continuous performance. The third is Kumite, or Sparring, which describes various forms of pre-arranged or freestyle training against an adversary.
Basic technique is of course the foundation for everything else and therefore constant and committed practice of basics is the only way to build the skill base necessary for the proper study of Kata and Kumite. That said, Kata is the element that interests me in this particular article.
Sensei Eneoda (9th Dan) was a great supporter of Kata practice. He is quoted as saying …
“Live the Kata. Use all your power as if in life or death. This is something that sport karate does not have. This is why Kata is important. The body is trained, the mind is trained, the understanding of the technique deepens. It is very important that the student understands the application of technique. Many times students do not understand Kata. They cannot see the meaning of the movement They see slow, broad movement. They may think Kata has no purpose.”
As the student advances in his study, his understanding of the technique becomes deeper, more profound. Kata is for understanding each technique’s purpose and application; to understand the many, many uses the techniques have and how to apply them. Without Kata training, one is not following the way of martial art karate …….
Rydal Water is a beautiful sight any time of the day, but particularly attractive at dawn in summer when the early morning mist is just rising off the lake. Wordsworth, who lived close by at Rydal Mount from 1813 to his death in 1850, is said to have favoured a spot by the lake now…
The Isle of Skye is one of my favourite locations for Landscape Photography. It has fantastic light, like many Scottish locations, and rapid changes in weather conditions to provide endless variety. This is a scene which I know many photographers now avoid. This is because the location was beautifully shot by one of today’s best…
Last December, on an excrutiatingly cold afternoon, I was driving through the Great Langdales in Cumbria. Having climbed out of the valley on my way back for dinner, I happened to glance back over my shoulder to see the light striking the top of Pavey Ark and Harrison Stickle. I jumped out of the car,…
While in Bogota recently, I had the great pleasure to visit the Botero Museum and its superb collection of works by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. The works are housed in a magnificently restored colonial mansion in the heart of Bogota’s historic La Candelaria area, where the city was founded. The permanent exhibition includes more than 120 of Botero’s own paintings, drawings and sculptures as well as 85 original works by such artists as Renoir, Monet, Degas, Matisse, Miro, Chagall, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Dali – all donated by Botero in 2000 when the museum was opened.
I found Botera’s work fascinating, some highlights of which can be seen below, with more in my Gallery. The museum is an absolutely ‘must visit’ treat and should be at the very top of every visitor’s list.
If Botero’s work is unfamiliar, he is among Colombia’s most famous exports. He is the artist who ‘paints fat people’. His love of life and affection for Colombia and its people is revealed in every painting. In the UK, the closest we’ve ever seen to these ‘plump paragons’ is in the work of Beryl Cook from the early seventies. Her work has the very same irreverent sense of fun and ‘joy of life’ captured on the canvas by Botero and she has a similar preoccupation with the ‘larger form’ of her protagonists …..
Whether or not you are an Art ‘enthusiast’, you cannot fail to be impressed by the range and variety of art on offer at this year’s Royal Academy exhibition. I had the opportunity to see it in mid-July after the big crowds had gone, so it was somewhat easier to spend time soaking up the atmosphere and ‘immersing’ myself in the work.
The exhibition is often subject to adverse criticism, but it’s always worth spending the three to four hours you need to take it all in. My favourite works in the 2009 exhibition were those by Allen Jones, John Hoyland, Tom Phillips and Michael Craig-Martin.
Gallery I was hung this year by Allen Jones, one of my favourite modern artists. His extraordinary representations of the female form are infamous, but this year he showed some beautiful work in this room, among which pieces is ”Enchanteresse’, shown on the right. My favourite of his works though was without doubt ‘Showtime’. I was just amazed at both the idea and the sheer quality of the execution ……..
Last year I realised that I had not been to a motor racing circuit for quite some time. My father had been an avid motorsport fan in the sixties and had taken my brother and I on many trips to Brands Hatch, Silverstone and Hill Climbs when we were very young. I recall seeing Stirling…
These images were taken on a recent field trip with master photographer Duncan McEwan to Harris and Lewis, two islands in the Outer Hebrides group which lie off the north western coastline of Scotland. The sequence begins with the famous Standing Stones, a 13 metre circle of 13 stones ranging in height from 1m to…
I’ve always been an acutely visual person, with an instinctive appreciation of the visual arts. As a child, I was given an old box brownie to play with and later a small Kodak roll film camera, to record our family antics, so I suppose the seed was sown early.
Much later, through reading photographic magazines in my teens, I had become fascinated by photography, particularly photojournalism, and had invested in a Canon FTbN 35mm film camera as a first step into the world of film and darkrooms. I was very taken with the images of the great photographers, who worked exclusively in monochrome, although I knew little about it at the time as would have been very obvious from my early efforts.
To me, there was something deeply appealing about conceiving an image, in the mind’s eye, finding the unique location or choosing the ‘decisive moment’, composing and exposing the frame and then working diligently from the latent film image all the way through to a beautifully printed, mounted exhibition print. I just didn’t have the first idea how to go about achieving it. That was when I had the most amazing stroke of good fortune. I met Peter Gant, a true master, who volunteered to show me how it was done ……..
I wrote earlier about how I was introduced to martial arts. Through those early training years I became deeply interested in every aspect of these ancient arts of defence, their origins, history and their development into today’s modern forms.
To the uninitiated, the martial arts is all about the pursuit of violence. Those that think that, do not last long in a Dojo. The better informed often focus on the self-defence aspects, but actually, there is so much more to it than that. But it is where most people. myself included, begin.
When I first discovered Shotokan Karate, in late 1973, it opened up a new world for me. At my first visit to a genuine dojo, I watched in amazement at the speed, agility and incredible balance of the students. Their persistence, dedication, and determination to master the complexities of the techniques inspired me to attempt the training myself. And so it began……..
Calligraphy by Masatoshi Nakayama 9th Dan This is the Shotokan Dojo Kun or Fundamental Precepts as handed down by Shotokan’s founder Gichin Funakoshi (shown above right). It is recited by each karateka in unison at every training session, to reinforce the aims and values of Shotokan training. The translation, from right to left, I remember…
It was quite a while before that first step was taken. I had asked around at my workplace in London and discovered a Korean practitioner who was willing to teach me the basics of Tae Kwon Do during the lunch hour in a basement judo hall, but this proved to be a false start. In…
I remember, at about the age of eighteen, at the end of a jamming session with musician friends, getting into a conversation about the Martial Arts, although I didn’t know anything about them at the time. As it turned out, one of the people in the room had been studying a Chinese form for many…
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