Life of Wiley

The band has come through a very productive if not hectic summer season. It’s been good as we’ve had a lot of varied jobs to do and the band have been appreciated where ever we’ve been, including getting several bookings for next year.

We’ve even had to turn a number of jobs down because of other bookings. This isn’t normally too traumatic except one job that we had to turn down was a live appearance on Dick N Dom inda Bungalow on CBBC last weekend.

On a sadder note we’re in the process of saying goodbye to a number of players as they move away from the area either for work or retirement, so we’ve a number of vacancies that need filling.

Last night’s rehearsal was great despite having no horn or trombone sections and me being the only solo cornet. Martyn managed it really well by just playing bits where those that were present were all playing. Now that summer’s over we’re starting to knuckle down to Stantonbury Festival which is the 4th section test piece for the Mineworkers Contest that we’ll be competing in next January.

A friend of ours is devastated that having forked out over £700 to send her son to a Montessori school so that he would get a head start has been told by the head teacher that “it has been brought to [her] attention that [said son] doesn’t recognise letters and doesn’t know his alphabet”!

Now, Euan can’t recognise all the letters yet and whilst he can recite the abc song he doesn’t know his alphabet enough to complete a dot-to-dot following the letters of the alphabet.

I suppose there are two concerns that I have with this as a parent:

1. The potential for huge differences in standards in these respected, but franchised, nurseries.
2. Couldn’t/shouldn’t this have been picked up in the home?

We play games with Euan where it would be obvious if he wasn’t achieving a level that we were expecting. The dot-to-dot books with include letters as well as numbers to follow are excellent particularly for taking on long car journeys or sitting in a restaurant that has no play facilities.

Euan went to a private nursery before joining the nursery class of the school he’ll be attending, this wasn’t a franchise, and was managed quite closely not only locally but also from the companies headquarters. They also provided a day book to record what activities they’ve been doing during the day and it was all built upon play based learning in a completely relaxed environment. It was also half the cost of a Montessori school.

It’s such a shame as all you want is the best for your child and yet, through no particular fault of your own, you could end up setting them back.

Something else I did over the summer holidays was to have a cornet lesson. Not too exciting really, but this was something I’d been meaning to do for some time with a guy by the name of Roddy Lewis. Rod is from South Wales but happened to be coming by as he was flying in to Stansted from Sweden, so I took the opportunity to have him pop and give me a 5 hour lesson.

The first thing to note about Rod is that he is an extreme high register specialist and is lead trumpet of his own Maynard Ferguson tribute band. Now I didn’t take the lesson because I wanted to play in the extreme high register but I did want to learn how to use my embouchure and air properly to make it easier to play in the registers that I use when playing for the band.

Almost immediately the first thing Rod picked up on was the fact that I wasn’t breathing in properly to start playing, instead of taking a full breath through the mouth I was taking a quick snatch of air through the nose. Changing this and the timing of the breath has made significant improvements in my playing. There’s still a fair amount of work for me to do to correct some other aspects of my playing but I couldn’t believe the difference this small change made. As Rod himself said, small changes on their own may not amount to much but taken together with many other small changes big improvements can be made. Now I’ve just got to find the time to fit his practice routine in.

Any brass players out there considering a lesson with Roddy should definitely do it, you won’t regret it. If you’ve never come across Roddy before he’s worth checking out but don’t be put off by his style, he is a really nice bloke. His lessons may seem expensive but a 5 hour lesson is comparable to 5 weeks of 1 hour lessons with any other teacher.

Richard Hall sent me an e-mail the other day asking if I was okay as I hadn’t posted on my blog for a while. It’s nice to know that there are people out there that a) read the blog, and b) care enough to check everything’s okay when time is spent away from the blogosphere. Thanks for your concern Richard.

So why haven’t I posted here for a while? It’s mainly due to holidays and being very very busy at work. It’s good to be busy at work but it does take a lot of energy that means that when I get home the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer screen; that and Louise would object:)

What have we been up to during this hiatus? Well, I took two weeks off to spend time with the family during the summer holidays. Euan’s just had his first summer break and has spent a lot of time with his friends and having swimming lessons. I think he’s really into swimming now thanks to the Olympics. Last night he said that he wanted to do 4 jobs: a spaceman, a diver, a police officer and a swimmer. So I’ve told him he can apply to be a police diver.

Also during the holidays we got ourselves a new shed which meant I had to remove the old one. Not a problem I thought as it’s practically falling down anyway. It actually took a full day (9am to 8.30pm) to take it down! I hadn’t realised how much wood a shed is comprised of, it took a day and half to take it all to the waste disposal site.

We visited Gulliver’s Kingdom in Matlock with my brother and his children. Gulliver’s Kingdom is excellent for families with younger children as all the children except 2yr old Nalini could go on all the rides, unlike Alton Towers where they wouldn’t have been allowed on most of the best rides.

On the trip up to Sheffield I wanted to take a leisurely drive up and find a nice family friendly pub for lunch, so I turned to the Internet to find the perfect pub. Dave Edmondson neatly sums this experience up in this article. This lead me to thinking that I should set up a venture to create a family friendly review site covering the UK. Unfortunately family-friendly.org.uk is being sat on and is unused. There are alternatives but I may just add some categories here to do the same job. I think Netmums may have some info, but you need to register to get at it. I’d be thinking of covering pubs, restaurants, cafes, theme parks, etc. and their suitability for the 4-12 age range. So if anyone reading this has some valuable information that they’d like to submit contact me and I’ll see how this can be co-ordinated.

Finally, here anyway, we spent a week at the Sherwood Castle Holiday Forest. This was excellent as we were in a wooden cabin on the edge of the forest. There was lots to do on the site including archery, swimming, mountain biking, a maze, and animal centre, loads. It was safe for Euan to play outside unsupervised (but watched) with other kids on the park, and it was close to a number of very good activities for kids. One worthy of particular note is “Making It!” in Mansfield which is a fully interactive “museum” of how goods are made from the concept through to the manufacture and marketing.

Well it’s been a while since I posted here.

Here’s what’s been happening in the Wiley household for the past few weeks.

Euan‘s now on his first ever school summer holiday. Of course he’s loving it; just being able to lounge around in his pyjamas! Fortunately we’ve got him enrolled on a swimming crash course. He’s already going to classes once a week for half an hour, but they finish with the school term. We’re hoping the two week course will consolidate what he’s already learned and get him fairly proficient in time for when we go on holiday later in the year.

Eva‘s now smiling on her own (i.e. it’s not wind induced!) Not only that she’s beginning to find a voice and is making cooing noises. Can’t remember Euan doing that at just 10 weeks old.

I’ve been trying to persuade Louise to get a new car. I think I’ve now succeeded, but may have to wait until next year:( Well, I suppose if we’re wanting to have a loft conversion done, it’s a small price to pay.

I’ve also been discovering the joys of ebay. A couple of years ago I bought a Mr. Potato Head for Euan, but have not really looked into since then. In the last week I’ve now purchased a bluetooth headset for my mobile phone which works very well when I’m driving with the roof down, and a climbing frame and slide for Euan (and Eva when she’s older). I’ve also got my eyes on a mouthpiece for the trumpet and a golf club for the father-in-law.

Finally, due to holidays and injuries I’ve had to play my first gig with the band as Principal Cornet. Considering I didn’t know the programme beforehand and hadn’t had chance to practice any of the solos I think it passed off quite well. I had to deal a cadenza and some solo work in “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” and a solo in “Love Changes Everything“. Fortunately I didn’t need to stand up to do these otherwise I’d have probably been a quivering wreck, and there weren’t too many people in the audience anyway as it was at Watford’s bandstand which is in a bit of an out-of-the-way location. All adds to the confidence though.

Ben has a well written article on his blog about his experience of blogware. As a result of his article and a desire to provide separate blogs for other members of the family I’ve decided to have a play around with b2evolution.

I’ve played with it for little over a day now (Louise and Eva are visiting her parents) and so far I’ve been quite pleased with it. It’s very easy to install and configure for multiple users, blogs and languages. You can import easily from Movable Type, but sadly not from WordPress.

This is the new, experimental blog and I’ll mirror postings for the time being until I play around with the templates and styles, before switching off this blog.

1. Last weekend I saw an advert for the new Vauxhall Astra which, amongst its other benefits, claimed an “Interactive Driving System (IDS)”. Isn’t this just a steering wheel?
2. Whilst eating a bag of crisps at lunchtime today I wondered what the odds were of two consecutive slices of potato ending up in the same bag of crisps.

Ian has a post by Maria Gracia about how to organise your children’s art. Very pertinent to us as our kitchen is overflowing with Euan’s pictures and there are draws full of it in the dining room too.

This picture (also posted here) has got to be the most upsetting thing I’ve seen for a long time. Since becoming a dad I’ve become much more sensitive to images and stories involving the hurt or abuse of children.

Obviously I can’t judge the man in the hood, but is it really necessary to hood these people? And should their children be allowed to see them in this way? At least there is evidence of humanity in the US army, I hope the soldier concerned isn’t held to account for freeing this man’s hands.

There was an uncomfortable moment on TV the other day where a man was arrested for selling dodgy cars in front of his children, to their great distress. At the time my comment was that the man had put himself and his family in that position, which on reflection now seems a bit callous. Could the police have tried harder to make the arrest when the children weren’t present or at least had support officers on hand to explain to the children why their father was being taken away?

A post from dme got me wondering whatever happened to the Empeg, a hard disk based MP3 player. It seems it was bought out by SonicBlue, later Rio and the project scrapped. Which was a pity as it seemed like good value when compared to the offerings from the likes of Sony and Pioneer.