The new miracle cure is . . .aspirin! No, wait, that was last week. Must be a heart pill then, it’s difficult to keep up with all these tabloid stories.
Me, I’m waiting for the Daily Mail to report that the new miracle cure is . . . singing. Well, it probably does some good for those with COPD or for strengthening the voice in people with Parkinson’s.
"When I am an old woman," says Jenny Joseph, I shall get up to all sorts of tricks. But 50 years on, her famous poem Warning with its wearing of red hats and sitting on the pavement doesn’t seem that outlandish. A D-Day veteran makes a trip to France perfectly competently. Yet the newspapers, in a desire to evoke derring-do wartime language, talk about his "escape" from his nursing home.
Music. What is it good for? "Playing," said Francois Matarraso at the Everyone Deserves Music conference I recently chaired. But of course that answer isn’t enough. Is "playing," in turn, good for anything?
Everyone deserves music is the title of a conference I’ll be chairing end of April (Community music conference, Gateshead, 29 April). It’s also a good slogan. Music is the way we express our identity and how we relate to the world, especially where the written or spoken word is inadequate or unavailable. As human beings we need music just as we need food, shelter and warmth.
