Life of Wiley

Recently I decided to end my playing commitment with Watford Band as I felt that I couldn’t play to the best of my ability and to what the band required given my limited ability to practice.

Since leaving I’ve taken up playing with a volunteer military wind band at the NATO Joint Services Unit in Northwood, at the behest of a church friend of mine who plays saxophone with the band. I’ve enjoyed playing with this band as the rehearsals are much less pressured, and although I try to do the best that I can always, I am not left stressed about the amount of practice time I can fit in.

I am the only trumpet/cornet player which has challenges in some pieces as there is little room to rest and it can get quite exposed. But the payoff comes when you get to play some of the more exciting big band numbers or dixieland music that we did at the last two rehearsals.

It was great to use my plunger mute for the first time with my trumpet in the opening, easy solo to a selection from the musical Chicago. Now I just need to learn how to use the plunger properly!

The dixieland piece was good fun too as we had a 4 man dixieland band playing against the rest of the band. It included Copenhagen, Basin Street Blues and When the Saints. It was a bit awkward with Basin Street Blues as Watford Band have a great arrangement of that for trombone by their principal trombonist, Mike Innes, and I kept trying to play what Mike plays instead of what was written.

Thoroughly enjoyable it all was.

It had to happen (well it did a while ago now); the minute I offer to host someone’s website my DSL modem packs up! Unfortunately I am on a BT managed service from Demon. I say unfortunate, not from the Demon experience, but from the BT managed bit, because the modems they supply are/were atrocious. I had an Efficient Networks Flowpoint modem/router/4 port hub. This had been my 3rd, the first two having blown their power supplies. This last one just seemed to get tired and sadly died two weeks ago.

The good thing about a BT managed service though is that I can just phone up Demon support and they get BT to come and bring me a new one. The new modem is in the same shaped box, but is now badged Siemens, it has upgraded firmware, and best of all a 4 port 100Mb/s switch, which has just saved me about £12 as I had been planning to buy one to improve connectivity between my PC and whatever wireless device I put in the living room to stream media to.

So it wasn’t all bad news. So far, there’s been no outages either, other than the odd routing problem at the Demon end.

green LA girl invites folks to take up The Starbucks Challenge where we have to go into a Starbucks coffee shop and simply ask for fair trade coffee and report on the results.

So I was up in Glasgow earlier this week. Glasgow airport has a Starbucks so I thought I’d take up the challenge. For me this was really easy as they were pushing the fair trade coffee as their coffee of the day. So asking for fair trade coffee at the Glasgow Airport resulted in me just getting a coffee with no fuss or questions.

Simple isn’t it? Why not take up the challenge yourself and help Starbucks understand the need to support fair trade.

1st of November and Starbucks have already started playing Jingle Bells:(

We had a lovely time in Cardiff last weekend. It was particularly good to meet up with old university friends whom we’d not seen for nearly 10 years.

We stayed in the renovated or newly built bay area which seemed to be tastefully done with plenty of restaurants and bars to satisfy all tastes. The new Wales Millennium Centre is especially spectacular. The open space outside it would make an excellent outdoor ice rink in winter and “beach” in summer.

We splashed out and ate at Tides Grill at the St. Davids Hotel. It was very nice sat, as we were, overlooking the bay itself. As is often the case I had meat and Louise chose fish making wine a bit of problem so we opted for a half-bottle of red for me and half-bottle of white for Louise! A shame really as it didn’t give us much choice to try something unusual as their wine list is quite extensive.

Whilst Tides Grill was very nice, Woods Brasserie was fab. We ate at the “pre-Opera” sitting that has a limited but still good menu. I’d definitely want to go back to choose from the full menu.

The concert we went to was Four Seasons by Candlelight at St. David’s Hall, given by the Mozart Festival Orchestra. I was looking forward to this as it also featured quite a lot of trumpet literature including one of my favourites, Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Trumpets. To top it off the main trumpet soloist was none other than Crispian Steele-Perkins the best proponent of the natural trumpet (though he didn’t play any on the night), and the chap who recorded the theme tune to the Antiques Roadshow. I was able to have a little chat to him during the interval and he was gracious enough to sign a copy of his CD for me.

Amongst all this I also managed to fit in a trumpet lesson with Roddy Lewis to reinforce some of the things he’d instructed me in before, and Louise managed to spend her birthday money.

All in all we had a great time and it sounded like the kids had had a great time with their Nanny and Granddad, though I suspect the latter were glad to get back home:)