The St Magnus Festival - A Rant.

Just to break up the Paris Parade slightly I'm going to write a few words about the St Magnus Festival. Normally, as long term readers will know, we avoid this, and I've always said that that is because it majors on orchestral music and we're not really fans of that. If you want us to listen to something then stick a human voice in it. I say this not with pride or shame but simply record it as a fact. 

This year however we decided to stick, not so much a toe as half a foot, into the water, largely because Scottish Ballet are here doing two performances and we wanted to go to those. There was a poetry book launch by a Scot Lit person I met in Prague at the Conference last year so I thought I would go along to that and a friend was singing in the Festival Chorus at a concert where the program included the Faure Requiem, which to my mind is always worth a listen. 

The ballet is Thursday and Friday so I can't report on that but the book launch and the concert are now over so I can write about those. 

I should say that my equilibrium has been massively disturbed over the last week and a half by the antics of the decorator we have had in the house. Since he was combining at least two and possibly three jobs and rarely saw fit to tell us when he would be at which job, and when he did come here often turned up at least an hour before we would normally be out of bed, jangling nerves and lack of sleep were really not in it.  I freely admit I am not the world's best at living with uncertainty in any shape or form, and I may therefore be taking a slightly too jaundiced view of festival proceedings as a result. Or I may not. 

Both the book launch and the concert were prime examples of the other reason we never go to the Festival and that's the people who do. Not the visitors, but some of the local luminaries who are involved in organising, introducing, and being commissioned to take part. One of the major problems in the Orkney Arts scene is that many people who are big fish in the tiny pond of Orkney Arts actually consider they are big fish in a much larger pool and as a result they are smug, self satisfied and self congratulatory. All traits which, to be frank,  irritate the hell out of me

A prime example was the concert. In between the musical pieces, some of which were lovely and some of which - well, just weren't - we were subjected to a recording of crashing waves and poems written and read by two local practitioners of the craft. The wave thing was just crass and unnecessary. The poems were unoriginal, laboured and   banal in the extreme. About Orkney, and so obvious in their subject matter; the sea, the tides, the history, the stone, the circle of life. People, I'm not saying that no-one will ever do that better than George Mackay Brown, but I am saying that if you can't do it better, which on this evidence you certainly can't, then don't do it at all. Practice your craft on some other topic, or - heaven forfend - try and find something original to say about the place. 

Reverting to the decorating it is now all done ( well, it is if you allow for the fact that we reduced the original job from three rooms to two)  and done well. Here is the back hall, in a tasteful shade of Wedgewood blue . It will never be quite this tidy again so I shall enjoy it while it lasts.