Today was a long one, and we’ve just got back from Trevor’s. The plan was class and then take-away from the local Indian restaurant in Wye, and this gave Trevor licence to make the day’s class a very long one indeed!

My playing today wasn’t the best. Despite having done a lot of work on sequences over the weekend, I got rather flustered about some of the other warm-up exercises, and so have now been issued with a wad of sight-reading practice along with everything else! I suppose I have to keep look at it in the long term, and at how it’s all contributing to being a good player at the end of these six months.

As for Andersen No. 6, I wasn’t playing grace note short enough, nor (a worse crime) the turns exactly on the second half of the beat. Whoops! Looks like I’m doing a bit more work on that one for next week. Trevor made a very interesting comment about my playing though today – he said that working with me is like trying to build a wall, but when he tries to put another brick on then one lower down often falls out. So essentially, if I try fixing something with my playing, it’s usually at the expense of something else. So the challenge for future lessons is to try and improve while maintaining all the work that I’ve already done.

As for the Indian, I really enjoyed it. Trevor and Dot were kind enough to provide some nice beer, and with it the conversation flowed a little more easily between everyone. After dinner, we watched the second part of the French film Jean de Florette, which was both a wonderful story and stunningly shot in Provence. The theme tune – played by Gerard Dépardieu in the first part on his harmonica – is the theme from Verdi’s opera The Force of Destiny. I feel like it could be stuck in my head for a while!