Failings

It’s all gone to pot, really – summer does that to schedules, in my experience. The sometimes-two-sometimes-three-posts-a-week routine I’d managed to settle into was disrupted first by an inconvenient holiday (not inconvenient personally, you understand – just for sticking to regular Substack posts) and then by my annual visit to Edinburgh with The Rehearsal Orchestra and all that entailed. Intentions are one thing (“Oh I’ll conduct the symphony in the morning and toss off a pithy 500 words about it in the afternoon”); the reality quite another (“Have conducted symphony. Brain hurts. Must sleep.”)

I make this mistake far too often – thinking that conducting a symphony orchestra is somehow a low-intensity activity that will leave me refreshed and positively zinging, no more drained than if I’d gone for a leisurely riverside stroll. It does the opposite – even if the act of waving your arms around in time with the live music-making of seventy people is, in the moment, invogorating, it mo…