My Holiday At Home

It will soon be time to see the Bluebells once again.

I have my spies keeping an eye on a woodland not far from where I live in Worthing, in West Sussex, which is easily accessible for me to see this most spectacular event of Spring, in spite of the fact that I am a full-time wheelchair user.

This year, instead of an expensive week in a specialist care home, which is the only location that could accommodate my needs these days, I have opted instead to spread my holiday over the entire year, spending the cost of a week's stay in a specialist care home instead on a series of days out.

Ironically, this is exactly what messages have been given from central government, that for example schools should look more closely at their locality, within their local community, and use the local history around them as a focus for curriculum work.

In my case, because my home environment has been so carefully adapted to my physical needs, it will be so much more straightforward to plan a series of special days, approximately 1 each month, for me to explore these elements of local history and interest.

And there are many. I have already been to the theatre twice, to see Into The Woods, and a local amateur production of Oklahoma! Both of which were exceptionally interesting.

Bluebells will be next, and I am slowly researching and adding to my list of options throughout the rest of the year. It is surprising how much there is when one looks carefully. I was never much of an adventurer even when it was so much easier for me to travel, and in some respects I have been fortunate to have been able to travel widely through my work. So for example I have been as far afield as Japan, courtesy of my employer.

The same employer, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, enabled me to travel widely as the Development Director for the organisation, throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. For two years, I ran the International Young Composer's Course, which involved around 15 of the world's most promising young composers visiting the island of Hoy, the largest of the Orkney Islands, to spend a fortnight sitting at the feet of the master, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who was the Composer Laureate of the orchestra, and this was his island home.

He was the Artistic Director of the St Magnus Festival, and every year his Young Composers Course would enable me to make several visits and spend the best part of a month on this small island, with a population of about 425 people.

400 of whom lived at one end of the island in a small town, and the other end of the island, on which Sir Peter lived contained the other 25.

Each day, the young people, aged between 18 and 25, would meet with Sir Peter in a local church, where they would develop a piece that they had brought with them, with the advice and help from the great composer, who could walk from his cottage almost at the foot of the Old Man of Hoy, about 3 miles away. They would be accommodated at a youth hostel next to the church.

In the second week of the residency, a small ensemble of musicians from the orchestra, about five, would arrive and would help to give voice to the compositions, and at the end of that week, as part of the Festival, a public concert would be given as part of the St Magnus Festival, in the church that had been the focus of the young composers work.

The most extraordinary thing was that there were only 25 people within several square miles of the Church where the performance of these brand new contemporary works would take place.

But there was a landing stage a few hundred yards from the church, and there would be a full audience of around 200 people that would travel from the mainland across Scapa Flow for the concert.

I would be accommodated for my time on the island at a local farmhouse, which had been a farmhouse for about 1000 years. And possibly had been established as a Viking outpost where longboats could be drawn up on to the sand that led directly to the water of Scapa Flow. From the window of the bedroom where I stayed, a colony of seals could be seen basking in the sunshine of this sandy strip.

Edgeworth is a very special way in which to see an isolated part of the UK, and staying with local people gave a sense of connection to that extraordinary history.

It is a part of Orkney that features in a Michael Powell film, the spy in Black, which is located almost precisely in that part of the island.

Extraordinarily, when I was just walking one year in that isolated part of the island, I bumped into someone that I had worked closely with 10 years before, who was now living in an isolated cottage overlooking Scapa Flow, with her husband who was a Marine Biologist. Her husband was at home waiting for some marine mammal to decay is sufficiently on the beach where they lived, so that he could collect the skeleton.

Kate was simply pushing her young child along a totally deserted strip of tarmac towards her home, and I was walking in the opposite direction towards where the workshops would be taking place. We were most surprised to be able to catch up in this isolated stretch of countryside. Kate had worked hard at trying to make an organic herb business by cultivating a walled garden at the Conference Centre Co-operative that I had been part of in Leeds in Yorkshire, all those years before.

How strange coincidence can be. And how small the world really is.