Life has thrown curve balls and been both exhilarating and exhausting, but overall challenging in all the right ways.

It is a continual juggle on a never ending tight rope, but the knocks and falls make the moments of perfect balance all the sweeter when they happen.

It’s little and often from now on!

A mottley crew of musicians and singers gathered around the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square while up on the plinth a country gent reading a news paper was having his lunch.

Next up our intrepid leader, Lawrence Reed, whom many of us had never met, reluctantly took to the plinth to confront his fear of heights in a piece called ‘Acrophobia’. He conducted us through a series of movements that gave us the freedom to play any notes we wanted from given chord sequences to a given rhythm.

Wonderfully effective, the reluctance of the protagonist, was reflected in the initially skeptical sounds emanating from the musicians below. As the movements came and went, so did the composers sense of discomfort with his position up high, grow and diminish. As we began to identify more with his condition so we began to breath more life into the work of Lawrence Reed.

In the end the boundary between musical happening and social experiment was wonderfully blurred and made for a memorable event. Viva la 4th Plinth!

check out the link: http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/vertigo

you can see me at about 14m30sec, if you just want to see my few seconds of fame;)

Also visit: http://www.lawrencereed.com/events01.php

to hear mp3s of the event.

It’s amazing. Part of me has always dreaded working in schools, but with the right people and the right kind of approach and preparation it all felt very natural and above all valuable.

I met up with the guys from Moving Sounds a couple of months ago through a band called The Manjinga 7. Their fiddle player, Jill, had an accident which meant they were looking for a dep and I just happened to fit the bill. It’s been an added bonus that I got to do some workshops with Ed, Keith and Caspar, who have set up Moving Sounds to do eco-awarenesss workshops in schools all over the UK, using music, theatre and multimedia to inspire new ways of looking at issues like climate change, ecology, consumerism and other environmental concerns.

On Mon 29 June, we all met up in Liverpool, caught the ferry over to Douglas (Manx capital) and did some last minute rehearsing till late that night. Bleary eyed (some of us still suffering from Glastonbury-itus) and under prepared we made our way to Ramsey Grammar school, which looked as if it probably held regular Quidditch tournaments. The show, after a shaky start, went down remarkably well and was followed by a series of eco workshops that involved discussions and mind maps, making connections between some of the things we do as consumers and the kind of havoc that is being wreaked on nature by ours truly. We then explore rhymes, raps, riffs and rhythms which get strung into punchy and poetic anthems celebrating the problem spotting and solutions we all feel need to sing from the rooftops. It’s all about creative knowledge sharing.

It was a surreal start, the school being situated next to an airport and the 6th form teacher claiming ‘I can’t do without my holidays’ while reprimanding her stuents for not recycling their lunch leftovers.

And this was before we opened any wine!

I try and hear music in it when I can, but I don’t always like the melodies and the harmonies, although I must admit the rhythms are pretty intoxicating.

And I’m a culprit; a contributor; a hypocritical scallywag. I wish I could make my car run on water, but I’m about as knowledgeable about cars as I am about Ancient Mycean pottery. It’s all Greek to me. So I pray and console myself with the hope that there are wiser, wealthier people out there who are doing something about the problems of the fossil fuel fandango, while I write the occasional protest song and sign petitions on Avaaz.

And I read posts like this one on Slow Business

Long live the petition!