clarina

All our instruments series, episode 4


Here's one (out of two) instruments acquired by marriage - a Hohner Clarina from about 1973. Hohner are famous as makers of accordions and harmonicas, so even if they make simple toys, you can expect them to sound good. The clarina is essentially a melodica (which happens to be a Hohner invention as well) with the white keys only, so you can only play within one scale, which at least for this instrument is G major. The notes are arranged for the right hand to play them as on a piano, so the lower notes are on the thumb side, i.e. nearer the mouth. This is maddening for all woodwind players, and it invalidates the description as a toy clarinet. (Incidentally I had a toy saxophone as a child which probably worked the same way, but I have no idea what happened to that one.) On the plus side, however, you can play chords.

The instrument must have been the last generation of Clarinas made with metal keys - most versions I could find online have got plastic keys (eg the Clarina12). (Stop press: just found one with metal keys on ebay.)

The instrument was red with a cardboard-like surface, but for reasons that have fallen into oblivion, its young owner covered it in black insulating tape, which doesn't come off without destroying the cardboard layer, so it now looks like this (I put the original box in the picture which shows that it's a Hohner instrument):



For the video, I've had a slightly polyphonic go at the anthem of our Galician session, Fisterra:



Further Hohner instruments will be coming along in this series ...

all our instruments

A recent scientific survey has revealed that there are around 50 musical instruments living under my roof. The precise number depends on whether or how you count the contents of my percussions box, which includes 8 scallop shells, a pair of table spoons, a triangle, and other weird and wonderful things. The number also tends to increase with time.

Around ten of the instruments (and the percussions box) get to go out regularly, but the others may get a bit bored, so I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to give each instrument a place in the spotlight, i.e. on YouTube. Posting one video per week that project should keep running for the year (follow the series with the all instruments tag). The order of appearance will be chronological, i.e. the instruments that have been in the family the longest will come first.

So without a doubt the first spot goes to Heinrich the cello, who has been in the family for almost a century now, although I am afraid to say he had to spend a few decades in places not really suited for cellos, such as my grandparents’ attic. I have written about his life story until 2009 before, so I’ll just have to add that since then Heinrich has played lots of lovely music with the young cellist in the family (who is also responsible for the naming of all string instruments).



(a recent portrait of Heinrich)

When she is away at uni and/or playing lots of other instruments, Heinrich may get a little bit lonely, so I like to take him to the Oxford Slow Session and to Cowley Orchestra, and sometimes also to the Galician session, although that can be a bit noisy and rowdy for a gentleman of nearly 100 years.

Heinrich has appeared in a few videos already, but to start the new series, I recorded one of my favourite Galician songs, Lela, music by Rosendo Mato Hermida (1914- 1994):



I've taken inspiration from the version sung by Maria do Ceo. Please don't look too closely at my non-existing technique. The bow-hold goes back to my youthful attempts to play double bass, and the fingerings are based on the fact that the fourth position is a lot easier to locate than those either side of it. (For reference, here's the young cellist playing the same tune faster and with all the fingers in the right places.)

I'll also take this opportunity to round up some of Heinrich's earlier adventures with the young cellist:


Gerald Finzi: Clarinet Concerto 3rd Movement. Oxford Concerto Orchestra, Madhavi Berks (Clarinet). Heinrich is just inside the frame of this video, most of the young cellist just outside.

Mozart: Allegro from Quintet in E minor K516 - The Cardwell Quintet, Oxford Chamber Course 2015.

Anton Rubinstein: Melodie in F - The Downes Cello Quartet at the Oxford Chamber Course 2015.

Guillaume Paque: Souvenir de Curis - The Foxwell Cello Quartet at the Oxford Chamber Course 2014 (more about the composer).

the dancers will fall over

As in 2017, most of the excitement and progress this year was to be had on the musical front. The ships of global and UK politics may be sinking fast, but the orchestra keeps playing.

Speaking of which, the orchestra where I play wrong notes on the cello hasn’t kicked me out yet, and I still crawl through the flute repertoire at a snail’s pace. And I continue to run the administrative side of the Galician Session Oxford, a role which I unexpectedly inherited in the summer of 2017. As some of the more experienced participants are leaving or have already left town, I will increasingly also be in charge of the musical leadership. Scary thought, I may have to put in some extra practice.

After six years and six months, the session lost its long-established home at the James Street Tavern at the end of November. We had one very lovely session at the Port Mahon in St. Clement’s, but are still waiting to hear if this will become a permanent solution.

Along with the Galician, the French and Scandinavian sessions also had to move in December. On the plus side, the move to a venue with a better dance floor attracted the attention of the local dance crowd which used each of the sessions to celebrate a “bal minuscule”. Videos of each of the miniature bals are here.

If I’m still a bit panicky about playing for dancers, it must be because I heard my children’s instrument teachers saying many times: “If you do this, the dancers will fall over.” I can’t quite remember what terrible mistake it was that led to this reaction, or maybe there were different kinds, and I’m sure I’m prone to make every conceivable rhythmic mistake, but luckily, so far, no dancer has fallen over.

Another opportunity to learn about playing for dancers was the very interesting workshop held in October by the ensemble Rigodons et Traditions from Grenoble who exchange visits with Oxford Fiddle Group every few years. Under their very professional leadership we even played for a whole village hall full of dancers. Imagine doing the wrong thing and 100+ people falling over. Now that would look very impressive.

Other new challenges this year included the arrival of a new but vintage (made in GDR) tenor sax, which is surprisingly easy in the fingerings – just a turbo charged flute with the exhaust sawn off, if you excuse a motor metaphor. I find it very satisfying in terms of energy efficiency as well – little effort gives a huge sound. Concern for my lips and the neighbours severely limits the practice times, however, so it will be a while before I can toot my horn in public.



Also new in the collection is an alto recorder – again very easy under the fingers, and I guess the transposition is something one gets used to. In cello terms, everything sounds one string down, so you have a C where you expect the G, and a G where you’d normally have a D. Just give me a few years and I'll get my head round that.

Other opportunities to play wrong notes in public included the first run of the “unusual instruments” class at the Oxford Music Festival (with our highly unusual home-built hammered dulcimer), my second theremin workshop and my second Misa Campesina, a few jam sessions with local band Mad Flamenco, as well as the amazing Folk Weekend Oxford. In July, the visit of the despicable Mr Drumpf to Blenheim Palace offered a welcome opportunity to improve my bugle skills, especially the fortissimo. Subtlety and nuance weren’t really required on that occasion. Previously I had tried the bugle at the London WNBR but cycling and tooting simultaneously doesn’t quite work yet.

So here's to more noise in 2019 ...

PS I forgot to mention: the Guardian asked readers what they do to escape / bypass / fight capitalism, so I sang the praise of folk sessions as free entertainment, pretty far down on this page.

celtic connections

First thoughts on

La hermandad de los celtas
by Carlos Núñez
Espasa 2018


To those of us obsessing over Galician folk music, Carlos Núñez is a massive star – even if this ecological niche isn’t quite big enough to enable him (or anybody else) to lead a proper rock star life. We’ve had the rather amazing privilege of welcoming him to a special edition of our Galician session here last year, a truly unforgettable experience.

So of course I didn’t want to miss his debut book publication, especially not as it is about Celtic (including Galician) music and culture. Actually, preparations for his book were what brought him to Oxford back in May 2017, where he spoke to archaeologist Barry Cunliffe (who, as it happens, also has a new edition of his book on the Celts out this year). But I was also a bit anxious, wondering how he would be as a writer.

The good news is that he writes beautifully. The sentences sing, you can feel his musical talents in the way he writes them. So, as long as you’re caught in the moment, it’s great fun to read him, and it’s entertaining in the same way as it would be to chat to him or indeed to jam with him.

The trouble starts when you’ve read a few dozen pages and you try to get an organised kind of concept of what you’ve just learned. Unfortunately, you don’t get much help with that. There is no index, and the structure within each of the lengthy chapters isn’t really obvious if it exists. In a very conversational manner, Núñez recalls who he talked to, on what occasions, and reminisces about other influences that shaped his musical life or informed his foray into the wider Celtic cultural history. The typical connection between two items is “This reminds me of… “ While this may be absolutely true, it is not much help for the reader who wants to come away with a bit of structured knowledge, rather than just with the fuzzy feeling of having had a nice chat.

So, in an attempt at helping my poor old memory, I took some notes in the first half of the book (which is quite long enough to count as a book in its own right, so I am now having a break before I tackle the second half). Here are a few of the amazing but sadly disorganised bits and pieces that I noted:

* There is generally a lack of actual archaeological finds of musical instruments of the ancient Celts. The carnyx (war trumpet with animal-shaped head towering high above the player, as featured eg in Asterix), of which a nearly complete example was found at Deskford, and which you can now buy as a reconstruction, is a notable exception.

* Benjamin Franklin wrote about Scottish music. I can’t find it at GoodReads, must be an essay filed under Miscellaneous Writings? References in the book would have helped with this kind of thing.

* Marie Antoinette played the hurdy-gurdy. He just mentions that in passing, as something everybody is supposed to know, and as I didn’t, I looked it up. Apparently this was the tail-end of a wave of folk music being fashionable at the court of Versailles, which started under Louis XIV and ended within the reign of Louis XVI, so supposedly Marie-Antoinette also put away her gurdy at one point.

* To the same folk wave we also owe the musette de cour – a gentrified variant of the bagpipes. Nicolas Chédeville wrote the sonatas Il pastor fido for this instrument. Wrongly attributed to Vivaldi at one point, they are today part of the repertoire for flute and recorders.

* Music from Celtic traditions was considered primitive in the 18th century partly because it was rarely written down, and if at all, it was written just as a melody line, with harmonies left out. (See also: Bach’s cello suites. It took a Casals to convince the world that they are more than just finger exercises.)

* The fact that Welsh is today the most widely spoken Celtic language can in part be attributed to the popularity of Welsh male voice choirs. These, in turn, were created and supported in a bid to keep miners away from the booze.

* Galileo’s father wrote about the Irish harp. How random is that?

* Speaking of which, the oral tradition of harpers in Ireland (such as eg Turlough O’Carolan, 1670-1738) died out in the 19th century. The reason we know their music at all is that at the last of their regular reunions, which took place in Belfast in 1792, the organist of St. Anne’s Cathedral, Edward Bunting, wrote down some of the tunes they played. (Just a couple of weeks after reading that, I accidentally discovered an LP with this music in our house, recorded by Gráinne Yeats in 1980.)

* Post 1066 Norman rulers used the Arthurian legends to bond with the Celts against the Anglosaxons, which explains why Richard Lionheart had Breton harps playing at his wedding. (Plus lots more stuff about the Arthurian legends, and their various echoes in different parts of Europe.)

The take-home message is that everything in the history of the universe has some sort of Celtic connection. I love all these unexpected cross-links through history and across Europe (in the second half, Núñez also covers the Celtic diaspora around the world, so the connections will become global).

But what I really would have needed would be a set of maps with some arrows to reflect all these intercultural connections, some references and a very good index … Part of which would have been the task of the publishers, not the author, so this omission doesn’t diminish the author’s achievement. It just makes it less accessible to us mere mortals.

He repeatedly stresses his own lack of scientific expertise and says that he dreams of bringing the academic experts in the relevant fields together to one meeting and get them to sort it all out. Seeing that for this book he seems to have spoken personally to everybody who is anybody in any field related to Celtic archaeology, history, culture or music, I don’t quite see what’s stopping him from having that meeting next month.



the cover wants to be appreciated in fully unfolded form ...
The photo was taken, as he mentions on page 52, at the beach of Honón, with the Cies islands in the background. Stone monuments in this location are allegedly linked to the legend of Breoghan, and thus to everything else in the book.

Najla Shami

We were treated to an amazing concert from the Palestinian/Galician singer-songwriter Najla Shami (with guitarist Sérgio Tannus) this week, organised by the university's Galician Studies Centre as part of this year's Forum for Iberian Studies.

I do love a bit of Arabic influences mixed into my music (see also: Shakira), and I may have lost count but I think I heard Najla singing in seven different languages that evening, so this hit all the right spots. Oh, and she's an amazing singer as well.

So, anyhow, here are some videos with the some of the songs she played here:


Camiño Branco official video

A lingua que eu falo live with Sérgio Tannus

Coração Estaladiço live with Sérgio Tannus

There's also lots of good stuff on her SoundCloud page.

And here are a couple of photos I took towards the end of the show:

reading in Galician

So this week saw the annual Dia das letras galegas (Galician Literature Day, May 17), about which I have obsessed here and here, and also in the twitter hashtag #Euleoengalego (I read in Galician).

But why do I? One obvious reason is that I need to learn the language so I understand the naughty bits in the songs we sing at the Galician sessions, and reading novels has served me well as a learning strategy for English, French and Spanish, so why not. (Also, there is a special deal with Romance languages, you buy two and get the third one free.)

There are additional motivating factors, however, which I am only beginning to discover. All other languages I have learned before were languages of empires at some point, and were aggressively inflicted on the less-well armed people. Galician, by contrast, only had a modest kingdom for a few decades in the Middle Ages, and has since then been a minoritized language, suppressed over centuries by the Castilian-speaking imperialists. So helping to keep it afloat is among other things also an anti-imperialist statement.

Then there is the familiar and related problem that everything published in English is overrated by default and spread around half the globe even if it has no merit whatsoever. Given this language privilege, all sorts of shady people publish books in English for political or commercial motives, regardless of whether they are any good.

The resulting problem for me as a reader is that not only there is way too much stuff being published in English to keep up even with the reviews, let alone the books, but also there is a substantial risk of picking up something that is downright rotten.

My impression is that this doesn't happen in a minoritized language. Especially in the Spanish situation where anybody who is literate enough to write a book in one of the co-official languages could just as well write it in Spanish instead and reach a potential market more than 100 times larger. So people who do write in Galician, I suspect, do it because they love the language and want to make a contribution to keeping it alive. (Incidentally, the author featured in this year's Dia das letras galegas, Maria Victoria Moreno, learned Galician as an adult and describes her relation with the language as a love affair - one that was downright dangerous under Franco.) And that, according to my theory, explains why, five novels into the Galician reading experience, I haven't yet found a book I didn't like. Prove me wrong.

Here's book No. 5 (almost finished):

romance of wikipedia

I've been slightly obsessed with Galician and some other Romance languages recently, which must have been a side effect of being exposed to and then inheriting the admin of the amazing Galician Session Oxford. I discovered that the Galician version of Wikipedia is quite amazing (considering the number of speakers of the language), so I looked up some other Wiki versions in Romance languages with a view to use one or the other as study aids, and found that their sizes don't necessarily scale with the numbers of speakers:

1 000 000 +

Français 1 975 000+ articles

Italiano 1 430 000+ voci

Español 1 404 000+ artículos

100 000+

Português 997 000+ artigos

Català 577.879 articles.

Română 385.164

Galego 147 109 artigos.

Latina 128 288 paginarum


10 000+


Occitan 84 312 articles
Asturianu 74 671 artículos
Piemontèis 64 327 artìcoj
Aragonés 32 946 articlos
Sicilianu 25 949 vuci
Nnapulitano 14 516 artícule
Vèneto 11 145 voxe

1 000+

Corsu
Emigliàn–Rumagnòl
Lìgure
Malti*
Mirandés
Picard
Rumantsch
Sardu

* NB: I realise Maltese is a semitic language, but half its vocabulary is of romance origin.



Image: Wikipedia

beginning to see some improvement

While Brexit, the Trumpocalypse, and other disasters were unfolding, I had a surprisingly good year, so much so that I looked at the short biography on my website earlier this month and realised it needed a major overhaul (done now), as so many exciting things happened this year. While the writing business continued as normal (but no new books to brag about) and the children are have also finished growing up, the surprising new developments of 2017 were mostly of the musical sort.

Maybe it all started when I attended Lydia Kavina’s theremin workshop in November 2016 – once you realise that you can play tunes by waving your hands around in thin air, anything becomes possible. Seriously though, it helped me to trust my unconscious mind, which appears to be a better musician than the conscious one.

With just a short introduction into the basics of the technique, I found I was able to play arpeggios and then tunes. Although the idea was that the teacher played the notes on the piano and the student was to find them on the theremin, I knew both the tunes she played and I realised that when I thought of the next note in my head the hand would do the correct move automatically.

With that in mind, and in preparation for further theremin adventures (and considering that I don't have a proper theremin yet), I picked up the family cello to learn some more interesting pieces, starting with The Swan. To my own surprise, I managed to learn the piece without getting arrested by the animal protection police, so I’m now expanding my cello repertoire, have recently joined an orchestra with the cello (also inspired by John Holt's memoir Never too late), and I’m signing up for the next theremin workshop. Meanwhile, my flute repertoire, supported by half-hour lessons twice a month, is also growing very slowly. I’ve started to mark progress with a still life photo for every piece.

In the very busy Oxford folk scene, I have continued attending many of the regular sessions that I had joined with the young musician during her gap year (2015/16). This was lesson 1 in “Trusting the Unconscious” – if I think about what I’m doing (or sight-read, or recall a tune from memory) I am already three bars behind, but if I just go with the flow, it works much better.

In March I played flute and about three bars worth of guitar in the very lovely Misa Campesina Nicaraguense, which is performed annually in celebration of Oxford’s partnership with León, Nicaragua. Preparations for the Misa Campesina 2018 are underway.

Shortly after the Oxford Folk Weekend, where I played in various sessions for something like 18 hours in three days, we had a special Galician session with Galician bagpiper Carlos Núñez, who is an amazing musician and a huge star in celtic folk and happened to be on holidays in the UK. Which was absolutely magical.



Folk Weekend Oxford 2017, taken by the official photographer.

After the June edition of the Galician session – which has always been my favourite one of the (at least) 10 different folk sessions I have joined or tried out since August 2015 – one of our pandeireteiras (tambourine players/singers) asked me if I was going to run the sessions after Mano’s departure, which was in fact the first time I heard that he was about to leave Oxford. And it was the last of his sessions I could attend, as he moved his final one to mid July, to a date when I was abroad. (Yes I do plan my travel around the Galician sessions and I do get mad when people move them!)

I reckoned that even without Mano’s musical genius and multiple bagpipes, we still had the unique combination of our very enthusiastic and talented Galician pandeireteiras, some seriously good international instrumentalists who can play the tunes much better than I can, and a faithful audience provided by the Intercambio Spanish language meetup, which routinely publicises the sessions as the Galician Music Night. And I reckoned it would be foolish not to do something with these assets.

So, without wanting to claim any musical merit, I agreed to take on the admin and make sure that some of the more experienced folkies would be at hand to keep the tunes flowing more smoothly than I might play them if I was left to my own devices. We had a small session with a core cast at the end of July, but numbers perked up in the following months, as London gaitero David Carril joined us on a regular basis, and after I got hold of the mailing list and set up the facebook group and WordPress blog to make sure that at least the information flows freely.

Simultaneously, our pandeireteiras carried on with their weekly tambourine classes, and we had a few lovely special events, including the Magosto (chestnut party, organised by the Galician Studies Centre), an excursion to David’s third session at London, and a special xmas session.

Oh, and the Galician Studies Centre has also spoilt us with cultural goodies this year. We had the UK premiere of the opera O arame, and the first screening in a new series of Galician movies. All of which is also a welcome opportunity for me to finally get to grips with the Galician language, building on the 2 terms course I attended in early 2016. If you know Spanish, it isn’t all that difficult. It’s essentially the same internal structure with a different set of decorations on the outside. Possibly even easier if you know Portuguese, but I don’t. A native speaker told me it’s just like Portuguese only with lots of xs. And knowing the language also makes it easier to join in the songs we sing at the sessions. So it’s all connected.

Watch this space for more linguistic and musical excitement happening in the new year, everything is possible! A back of the envelope calculation revealed I may have passed those magical 10,000 hours of practice some time in this crazy year, and sure enough, as Pablo Casals famously said (when asked why he still practiced the cello every day in his 90s), “I’m beginning to see some improvement.”

galician news

It looks like I have inherited the admin side of Oxford's Galician session, after the founder and all-round musical genius Mano has left town. At the same time I realised that I had a WordPress account that I haven't used in 10 years, so I will now advertise the sessions and generally rave about Galician music there as well as in the Facebook Group which I've just set up.

So, you choose:

Galician Session Oxford (WordPress blog)

Galician Session Oxford (Facebook group)

Oh, and I'm also running an email list, but that will only involve one mail per month, just the reminder I'll send one week ahead of the session. Drop me a note if you want to get on that list.

The sessions will continue to happen at the James Street Tavern, last Wednesday of every month, 8:30pm.



I will never get bored of the illustrations from the Cantigas de Santa Maria.

galician magic

I have been playing Galician folk music for nearly two years now, and (as Pablo Casals famously said about his cello practice in his 90s) I'm beginning to notice some improvement. In the last few weeks I have been spoilt with opportunities to improve further. There was a Galician session at the Folk Weekend, then the the regular monthly one, and a week later, advertised only by word of mouth, a special one, with a special guest. Only two days before the event I found out that the special guest was the most special one you could imagine.

If you read up about Galician folk anywhere, eg in this recent feature in the Economist, the one musician whose name will definitely appear is Carlos Núñez. So, well, he was around visiting friends in the UK, and he came to our special session to listen to us playing and then to join in, playing his whistles (not the bagpipes he's famous for), dancing, chatting and generally being amazing. People in attendance were a mixture of the regulars from the established sessions in Oxford and Cardiff, as well as a delegation from the newly launched Galician session in London, which also set the event apart from our regular sessions.

So, I think everybody (including the paella cook and a stray Morris dancer) felt it was a magical night, and rather than raving on, I'll link to my videos here:

0) Pablo Gonzalez sings Camariñas (before Carlos got involved - any wrong notes on the flute are mine)

1) some dancing

2) A rianxeira

3) Mazurca dos Areeiras (David, who played the whistles at the far side of the room in this video, also recorded a clip of this in which I appear, see embedded video below)

4) an Argentinian chamame, I am told

(These videos are "unlisted" meaning they can only be accessed via these specific links and will not show up in searches.)




Carlos Núñez talking to our group of pandeireteiras (tambourine players). The guy in white at the back is a stray Morris dancer - his side had a dance-out just before our event and he stayed on, playing the spoons.


Mazurca dos Areeiras, the view from the other side of the room:





PS more magic to follow soon. O Arame, the second ever opera to be written and performed in the Galician language will be premiered in Oxford in June, conducted by Tamara Lorenzo Gabeiras. You can see her dancing in my video no. 1). I spent the entire session standing close to her without realising who she was, even though I had seen her in a recital a year before.

59th Galician session

Over a year ago, I raved about Galician folk and created a new tag for it, but then I didn't do much with the tag. So here, at last, are some videos from the April session, which was the 59th - from which I conclude the sessions may have started in spring 2012, but I only discovered them in 2015.


A glimpse of Muiñeira dancing

Muiñeira de Chantada

Pingacho performed by the Oxford Pandeireteiras


(These videos are "unlisted" meaning they can only be accessed via these specific links and will not show up in searches.)

time to move on?

From my family history, I know that people in centuries past have found great opportunity in new homelands, but the crucial thing is to know when it is time to move on. My great-grandfather found business success in Königsberg, Eastern Prussia, and he left literally on the last ship that got through. My ancestors who emigrated to the Odessa region (today's Ukraine) on the shores of the Black Sea in 1806 (having left the relevant oldest son behind!), established a good life there for a couple of generations. After 1870 the new paradise lost its shine and many families moved on to the US. The descendants of those that stayed suffered forced relocation to Asia and prosecution under Stalin.

So, well, right now the candidates among whom the next UK prime minister will be chosen are debating whether or not Britain (in whatever diminished size it will exist then) will allow EU citizens to stay after it has signed out of the EU. Of course they won't deport 3 million people. But conceivably, we might need residence and work permits, and equally conceivably, the recently introduced threshold of £ 35,000 salary required for the permission to stay could also apply to EU citizens (the median salary is substantially below that figure, so only those who fall into the top 40% or so of earners can stay).

So, reluctantly, after 23 years of living here very happily, we're having to consider our options, to make sure that after 2018, we will still be able to live within the EU and without having to justify our existence. Like Scotland, we may have to leave to remain. Watch this space.

A few random thoughts on the issue (will occasionally add new ones at the top of the list):

• 16.8. According to the Sunday Times, article 50 may only be triggered in late 2017 - more time to get ready for a Brexodus. The Brexiteers are beginning to realise that they don't have the skilled personnel they would need in order to even begin thinking about such a gigantic project. Give them a bit more time and maybe they will realise that it wasn't such a bright idea in the first place.
• 8.8. My feature on Brexit and other populist menaces has appeared in Current Biology.
• 13.7. Theresa May has appointed Boris Johnson to the Foreign Office, showing exactly what she thinks of the 7 billion foreigners out there. I for one am taking this as a personal insult. Also, she keeps saying she wants to make the country work for British citizens. No word about EU citizens, but is the chain around her neck supposed to be a subtle hint?
• 11.7. As Theresa May is now certain to become prime minister, her speech held today promises a country that works for everyone. There are some quite progressive things in there, but unfortunately the term "everyone" doesn't appear to include the 3 million EU citizens who live here.
• 6.7. Nice to know that parliament supports our right to stay, but note that this is non-binding and a majority in parliament is against Brexit anyway.
• Considering how much time I've lost following the whole chaos, worrying about our future here and making contingency plans for a possible Brexodus, I would extrapolate that the worries of more than 2 million EU citizens currently working in the UK should add up to make a measurable dent in the country's economic performance.
• Theresa May becoming prime minister (and staying until 2020) is probably our worst scenario, as she has the intelligence and the cold heart to go through and do the worst. Boris Johnson's fantastic incompetence was (relatively) a glimmer of hope while he was still in the running.
• Cultural events I have attended since the referendum: A Galician folk session, a concert by the Liverpool band Dead Belgian, who play the songs of Jacques Brel, and an Irish session. How much of Oxford's international scene will survive once the drawbridges go up?
• Without free movement we probably wouldn't be here at all - so I imagine that the future hassle of work permits etc. may very well redirect part of the academic traffic to alternative destinations.
• While all major scientific organisations are trying to reassure people that international cooperation will go on as before, there are also some, like the Wellcome Trust, that could decide to move their funds and activities elsewhere.
• While Scotland and Northern Ireland understood their best interest, it was quite shocking that Wales, which benefits hugely from the EU, voted out. Some explanations here.

Look, there are 27 countries we can move to!

Image: Wikipedia
(spare a thought for the volunteers who are trying to keep the Wiki entries on the Brexit crisis up to date and readable)

galician folk

Since last summer, I got to know most of the regular folk sessions going on in Oxford city (thanks to the young folkie in the family). While I don't spend all that much time listening to folk, the democratic spirit meaning that I can just walk into a pub and join in is very attractive.

In the process, I discovered that Galician folk is my favourite variety. That’s music from the Northwest corner of Spain, the square that sits on top of Portugal – not to be confused with the region in Eastern Europe which for a short time bore the same name, I think the Habsburg Empire only renamed that area to annoy the Polish, or something along those lines.

Anyhow, so the traditional music from Galicia is really lovely, and it also knows a few keys other than G major. I’ll start a new tag on it beginning with this master post listing some of the links I have discovered so far.

local:

Oxford Pandeireteiras

Galician session at Oxford

Xogara – Oxford-based band mixing Galician and other influences

global:

Radio galega: son galicia Galician music 24/7 - two other radio channels in Galician also available via this page.

Xeitona – YouTube tutorials - also on blogspot, twitter, facebook ...

Luar na Lubre – a Galician band that became famous worldwide in the 90s after collaborating with Mike Oldfield, but is still active today.

Ghastas pista? news from the Galician folk scene

Folkoteca galega (tunes database)

Video evidence to follow soon ...

PS In the process I also discovered the Galician language, about which I'll rave some other time.