Next week I have to go to Hexham Abbey in Northumberland to shoot Songs of Praise, followed by a brass quintet recital in Cardiff the day after. Without going into too much detail on the logistics of the trip, I have the choice of either getting the train up to Hexham or driving. The train takes 3 1/2 hours (or so says the timetable), while Multimap reckons it’s a 6 hour drive. I would guess at spending about 40 quid on petrol, while the train ticket (saver single) costs 95 quid.

Now I’d quite like to take the train - not least because I can leave later and I don’t have to drive all day, but mostly because it is of course the environmentally responsible thing to do. What beats me is that at a time where “carbon footprints” are trailing all over the news and politicians on all sides are desperately trying to flaunt their green credentials (or pretending that they have them at all), it is deemed quite reasonable for a train journey to cost more than double the same car journey.

Does that seem completely backwards to anyone else? Is having a conscience really supposed to be that expensive? And speaking of consciences, what the hell happens to my 95 quid? This is not a left-wing pinko commie rant (ok, maybe it is a little bit) and I’m aware that the chances of ever having a fully nationalised rail industry are pretty slim, but considering where people’s priorities are these days it seems obvious to me that there are a hell of a lot of votes in it for the guy who can make train fares cheaper.

I’d like to say I’ll be making my protest by taking the car, but the notion of an environmental demonstration by one person in a car seems equally absurd.

I wonder how much flights to Newcastle are these days… (runs for cover amid a hail of Greenpeace placards)

Initially putting it down to a transparent attempt by the desperately insecure Aussies to sabotage one of English cricket’s most deadly weapons (given the quality of English cricket so far this week they needn’t have bothered), I was saddened on further investigation to discover that the long arm of the law reached as far as the home fans as well, stamping out such dangerous behaviour as the Mexican wave, the throwing of beach balls and the consumption of alcohol (and given that one of the most dangerous places in the world is between an Australian and a tinny they must be seriously worried about potential crowd trouble).

Someone should show the Queensland police some footage of the kind of behaviour seen at English football games during the 70s and 80s, so they can see just how lucky they are only to have Bill and his trumpet to deal with.

It’s CRICKET for God’s sake!!!!

• In Copenhagen.
• Tired.
• Hung over.
• Full of cold.
• In need of doing some laundry. Have been wandering around the area for half an hour in search of a launderette which I’m sure wasn’t where the hotel receptionist told me it was. Maybe I was just too tired, hung over and full of cold to comprehend.

I’m on tour with ABBA - The Show again, and while it’s nice to be properly working (i.e. playing the horn for a living), it’s a long one (nearly a month) with a lot of long coach journeys and not much free time. Today is our first real “day off” - we have a show tonight but are free until 3pm, and most of our actual day off yesterday was spent on a coach from Oslo. So I really ought to be outside enjoying the sights and sounds of wonderful Copenhagen but instead I’m sat in the hotel foyer with the laptop and a cocktail of cold remedies.

I promised a post on musicians and airline security, and since this is the first time I’ve flown anywhere since the incidents in August this would be a good place for it. It’s nice to see common sense has prevailed and specific provisions have been made for musicians in the Department for Transport’s regulations on aviation security, meaning that musical instruments of any (reasonable) size are now allowed in the cabin as a second piece of hand luggage (apart from cellos and such which need to be bought a ticket). Less pleasurable is the process of getting through security - in the past you could arrive 2 hours before departure and still have time for a leisurely beer or two and a browse through duty free. Not any more.

I can live with that though. What struck me most about recent discussions on the issue was the extent to which people seemed to accept August’s security crackdown without objection. The discussion on the BBC website featured contributions from notable musicians such as Steven Isserlis, but also elicited reactions such as Matthew from Newcastle’s “Let me remind them (musicians) that we are still in a ‘critical’ state of alert in this country, and if these inconveniences save lives, then they should learn to put up with it” and the ever-so-helpful Laura from Middlesex: “Get real, there is more to life than music”.

Apart from the obvious point that we cannot afford to simply “put up with” what is effectively a bar to working and earning money (if the stricter controls were still in place now I’m quite sure this tour would have been cancelled and I’d have lost about £2,500) there is a broader point. I’m quite sure that at some point in the future there will be a similar terrorist alert. Maybe then the security measures will be tightened again, and maybe then they will not be relaxed afterwards. Do we accept this as necessary to control terrorists, or do we question that which we are told by our government is necessary? Why is it necessary? Will it really make a difference?

Was the country on a critical state of alert before the 7/7 bombings in London? I don’t remember that it was, I would like to think we would have been warned. Can acts of terrorism really be accurately predicted? I doubt it.

While the main goal of the terrorist may be to kill on a mass scale, the secondary and more pernicious aim is to disrupt peoples’ daily lives and work. Every time a restriction is placed upon how we live and work in the name of anti-terrorism, this is a small victory for the terrorist. Yes, of course these measures are sometimes necessary, but there needs to be a constant dialogue between the people imposing these measures and the people whom they affect.

So, Matthews and Lauras of this world, I have no qualms about questioning actions taken for our own security. In a democracy we should do this, otherwise our own control over our lives is taken away. Government by fear is just as insidious a threat as terrorism and engaging in debate on these issues is a responsible course of action to protect our civil liberties as well as our security.

Many things have happened since then which were certainly blogworthy, but for one reason or another I didn’t get around to writing and the moment passed. The main reason for this is a project I have been working on, more of which to follow very soon…

Other things I’ve been doing:

• Building a patio.
• Playing with Fine Arts Brass again.
• Discovering Flickr (not too many photos yet, and I haven’t got around to hooking the feed up to here, but soon will).
• Enjoying the start of the football season - the two (Championship) games I’ve been to so far were more exciting than anything the World Cup had to offer.
• Worrying about the implications of the new airline security regime for freelance musicians, a subject which deserves a post of its own - hopefully not in another three months.

Right now I’ll finish by plugging a site I heard about recently. Scarletmist.com is a site designed to allow the ethical exchange of tickets for gigs, festivals and the like for no more than their face value. It has become very hard of late to get tickets when they first go on sale, as demand tends to greatly outstrip supply and web servers and call centres can’t cope with the numbers. This frustration is normally compounded merely hours later when the same tickets start appearing on eBay, often for several times face value. The laws that prevent the reselling of tickets for football matches do not currently apply to music events, and the result is that bona fide music fans are often priced out of the market.

Anyway, hurrah for Scarletmist. Please use them if you can. I will be.

The other week (Tessa) Jowell (British Culture Secretary) accompanied Condoleezza Rice (US Secretary of State, and an accomplished pianist) to a concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, after which there was a dinner…

..Ms Jowell asked one of the Philharmonic’s principal players: “Are you paid for playing in the orchestra?”

Is this beyond belief, this statement that roughly equates to the Health Secretary walking into a hospital and asking “Are you paid for making all these ill people better”? Actually, not really. I have long been aware that there exists, among many in this country, the misconception that orchestral musicians are not, in fact, trying to pay mortgages or support families or pay tax bills, but merely indulging in a hobby or leisure activity. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn there is nobody in Ms Jowell’s retinue who can put her right on this minor detail of her ministerial brief.

Nor is it surprising, given the antics of other Cabinet members in recent weeks, that this little gaffe has gone largely unreported. Not when there are newspapers to be sold with alarmist headlines of hundreds of dangerous Johnny Foreigners running around the country raping and pillaging everything in sight. The story of a senior figure in the Blair government, with a relatively hassle-free portfolio, who clearly does not fully grasp the workings of an industry for which she is responsible, ought not to be of too much concern to the British electorate, really? I can almost imagine the blaze of indifference when someone pointed this out at the Daily Mail’s morning editorial meeting. Just wait till the next reshuffle, when she gets Defence.

In the meantime, I think I’ll be leaving the country, for somewhere where musicians are respected and their difficulties understood. Like Poland. I’m told the trains are reliable there too.

The rowie (a.k.a. the buttery, or the morning roll), which is composed of flour, butter and salt (although to be honest there’s not that much flour involved), and is the breakfast foodstuff of choice for thousands of Aberdonians, has recently come under fire from such quarters as the frankly disturbing diet guru Gillian McKeith, as well as Terry Wogan, who unwisely compared it to “seaweed” when visiting Aberdeen with his Radio 2 show. In an effort to redress the balance, an enterprising Aberdonian is offering for sale a prime specimen fresh from Aitken’s Bakery in Torry, complete with genuine rowie bag, with proceeds going to Aberdeen Royal Childrens’ Hospital. At the time of writing it’s up to £104.

The questions to the seller make for an entertaining read, though those not familiar with the local patois may need some help (”quine”=young woman, “loon”=young man, “fit like?” / “foos yer doos?” = “How are you doing?”, to which one should always reply “nae bad” regardless of how one is actually feeling.)

Aye, ‘at rowies is weel fine.

So here I am, in all my glory, comfortable in my nakedness.

(brrr) It’s a bit nippy though…

So far most of my posts seem to have had something to do with web design or the web in general, and are generally either of a “hey, look at this!” nature, or, like my Apache/PHP/MySQL tutorial, are an effort to condense a lot of reading and web trawling on a particular problem or subject into a form that might save someone else the hassle in the future.

I’ve so far had little to say on the subject of horn playing. I’m not sure why this is. I have some strong ideas on horn playing, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call them my own. I certainly don’t feel comfortable declaring anything so grandiose as a “teaching method”, but I have a definite approach to my own playing, even if I sometimes don’t apply it as rigorously as I should. Anyway, that’s for another post.

I’m quite happy blogging on the wider subject of music. I’ve always had pretty eclectic tastes, and I’m quite secure in the conviction that James Blunt is the most anodyne travesty of an excuse for a singer it has ever been my misfortune to have my auditory channels polluted by (with the possible exception of Aled Jones). Also the Nizlopi album was a waste of 9 quid - just download the JCB song, the lyrics are clever and funny but all the other songs sound pretty much the same. And as for… ok, that’s enough of that.

So the blog is not directed towards any area in particular, and for the moment I’m happy to let it meander as it has done up to now. I don’t really see any conflict between its content and that of any potential (music) business site. Two of my favourite bloggers, Helen Radice and John Oxton, both keep their blogs separate from their business sites, for whatever reasons, but I don’t really see the need to do this myself. The problem is how to reconcile the web presence of James Topp the musician with the already-established presence of James Topp the web designer.

It’s a sad fact that the modern freelance musician needs to be versatile, often to the point of working outside the music business altogether. Musicians’ Marketplace is a site aimed at musicians who have such ancillary skills and services to offer, and already encompasses such areas as joinery, driving tuition, massage, personal training, life coaching and even lingerie selling, as well as web design. Interestingly, not many of the websites linked to by Musicians’ Marketplace appear to mention that their owners are in fact musicians. The one exception I’ve found is that of Simon Haram (silentage.co.uk), who as well as being one of the UK’s most eminent saxophonists, offers a range of recording and production services, and is also available for IT/hardware/software-related work - all advertised from the same site.

While Simon is clearly comfortable with the need to be versatile, not very many other people in the same situation seem to be. This is perhaps understandable, as potential clients may well perceive a multi-careerist (is this a word? well it is now) to be an unreliable choice for some types of work. With web design, however, I have a strong feeling that my musical background and resultant strengths in areas of creativity, teamwork and communication may well be a valuable asset.

So what it comes down to, to start with, is: what am I? Am I, as it says at the top of this page, horn player and web designer? Or are these two facets of my life that should be kept separate, thus requiring separate sites? Comment away.

“Oh thanks”, I replied, “who were you working with last week?”

“It was the English Symphony Orchestra, we were doing Beethoven 9″.

“Errmmm… well, that was me as well.”

I suppose that means my practice regime is working then…

As much as I love playing the horn, I have to admit I’m not exactly King Practice of the Practice People. I find it very difficult to get into a serious regime unless I’ve got an audition coming up, or something equally important. Which is not to say that ESO dates aren’t, but there is generally more diverse material to learn / revise for an audition than for an average concert programme.

This is, needless to say, not a good habit to get into. Concerts like last Friday become a huge shock to the system in terms of short-term stamina, and long-term endurance, like that needed to get through a week’s solid work, is also a potential problem. Any practice routine needs to reflect the amount of playing that may be expected of you - put simply, you always have to practice as though that important audition or heavy run of work is coming up. Given the unpredictable nature of freelancing, this can quite often be the case anyway - the last-minute phone call to go and do a double show is something every freelancer needs to be prepared for.

So I need to address my motivational problem. My long-term goal of a full-time orchestral position really ought to be enough, but I find it very difficult to keep sight of this when work is thin on the ground and I’m having to earn money in other ways. I’m going to try not to focus too much on preparing for specific events and concentrate instead on more short-term targets, like learning a new piece or study every week, which is closer to the kind of work I was doing at college. I have very little on for the next two months until the ESO’s 2006 Elgar Festival, so the state of my playing when I get to that week should be a good indicator of whether my new approach is working.