The pandemic is here - but the bandemic has subtly changed

Until six weeks ago, politicians around the world occupied themselves with their favourite pastime of banning things.  Now, they are focused on banning activities, they will conveniently forget their recent trumpeting. 
The most obvious lacuna is the silence from those previous calling to ban the burka.  Many European countries banned the burka, the wearing of face masks, or the hiding of features.  Riot police regularly broke the law, but until recently private citizens risked serious punishment for infringements.  Now, not only are most EU citizens breaking the law when they step outside wearing a mask, but they are also going prepared crime by wearing rubber gloves.  Regular street disinfections will rapidly destroy any DNA traces they leave behind.  What will happen to the ground water with all this anti-septic nobody knows, or cares.  Meanwhile, sales of burkas are up.
Most social and many private outdoor activities are banned.  The only excuse most citizens have for leaving their home is to shop for food.  Food stores operate draconian regimes of sterilisation, separation and protection.  Shoppers must don single-use plastic gloves before entering the store.  Those of us who have fought for sustainability will, of course, keep our gloves and re-use them, but this is not allowed.  New gloves every trip.  It is unlikely that plastic gloves, or any single-use plastic item will now suffer the ignominy of a ban, unlike the poor plastic straw whose last drag will be tomorrow, before its untimely ban on April Fools' Day.
Cotton buds are also banned, but not yet the much more useful wet wipe.  These clog up toilets, drains and sewage systems, but mostly end up in the sea as they are by design almost indestructible in a wet environment.  nervous parents, old age pensioners and OCDers will keep these on the shelves for years to come.

Presentación de 10 Manuels and a Manolete en la Feria del Libro de Huesca, 2015

Buenas tardes, y muchas gracias a todos por venir.  Me gustaría dar las gracias a Chema y a Yolanda por su bienvenida calurosa en esta Feria, y a todos los libreros que han apoyado este evento. 

La curiosidad de este libro es que es el único que está escrito en inglés.  Si no está escrito en castellano, es que me falta un traductor; busco voluntario.  Que se presente al final de la presentación.

Si es un libro único, pienso que es una historia universal.  Es un guía – como dice aquí – del parking a la cima de los altos Pirineos.  Si el libro acaba en el parking de Bujaruelo, esta historia empieza en una pradera a lado de Broto.

Nada me emociona tanto como la idea de salir a la montaña con una mochila bien cargada.  Mi primera memoria es de mis tíos que se iban de excursión.  Yo les pedí que me llevasen con ellos, pero me dijeron que era demasiado pequeño.  Era un gran desengaño.  Solamente muchos años después, aprendí que mis tíos se iban de luna de miel, y no querían llevarse con ellos un crio de dos años.

En este mundo, no hay sitio para pasajeros.  Todos tenemos que ser el conductor de nuestra propia vida.  Esta es la diferencia entre un crio y un adulto.  Mi vida, que empezó para mí en esa pradera de Broto ha sido una larga metamorfosis del uno al otro.

Si hubiera ido de excursión con mis tíos, muchas cosas hubieron sido diferentes, y yo no hubiera escrito este libro.

10 Manuels y un Manolete es una historia de la escalada de diez picos del Pirineode más de tres mil metros, y de uno más pequeño – el Manolete.  Ya les explicaré el nombre, pero primero les explicaré porque lo escribí.

Si me siento Oscense, es verdad que mis padres nacieron en Catalunya y Escocia, mis abuelos en Londres y Lourdes.  Pero mis bisabuelos nacieron en la montaña, uno en Escocia y uno en Aínsa en Casa Buil.  Mi abuela nació en Enate, y mi madre se crío en Barbastro y Huesca.  Yo pasé aquí, en Huesca, en Enate y en Almudévar los mejores días de mi vida – las vacaciones de verano. 

Pero soy vagabundo, y he pasado mucho tiempo en Inglaterra.  Un día, un compañero inglés me preguntó: “¿ A dónde hay que ir en el Pirineo ?”  No sabía lo que decir.  Conocía los nombres de los picos, como el Aneto, el Posets, el Perdido, y de los valles, como Pineta, Ordesa, pero me daba miedo de dar consejos cuando yo no tenía una experiencia personal.  El problema que tienen los ingleses, y los holandeses y alemanes también, es que no conocen los Pirineos.  No existe la literatura como aquella de los Alpes, una cordillera que fue descubierta y descrita por generaciones de ingleses.  No tienen una razón, una motivación, para subir este pico, ese otro.

En cambio, hay más y más ingleses que veranean en el Pirineo, y hay muchos jubilados que viven todo el año en el sur de Francia o el norte de España.  Lo que les hace falta es un guía en inglés, algo que les da la razón, la emoción, la motivación.  Con que decidí, hace diez años, primero de buscar esa experiencia personal que me faltaba, y segundo de contar la historia en un libro.

Subir a la montaña para mí es hacer un viaje de descubrimiento, de ver algo nuevo, de aprender.  En esa época de mi vida, era formador, formando diez mil empleados en Europa.  Enseñando, yo aprendí dos cosas muy importantes: para aprender bien, hay que enseñar; y para aprender muy bien, hay que escribir.  Así es que empecé a escribir libros.

Este libro es el tercero.  Pensé subir un pico cada año durante diez años.  Iba a incluir mapas, rutas técnicas, fotos, pero a lo largo de esos diez años el mundo cambió mucho.  En España, no se usan mucho los mapas, mucho menos la brújula, pero los ingleses sí los usan.  Pero hoy, cualquiera puede encontrar en internet guías, mapas y fotos de todos los picos.  Muchos escaladores tienen GPS con altímetro y brújula incluida en el reloj, y a veces todo junto, internet, mapas, guías, brújula en un teléfono móvil.  Con que me quedé con lo que pensaba era lo más importante, mis sentimientos y el deseo de compartirlos.

La verdad es, que si empecé este proyecto a los cuarenta años, trataba de subir picos pirenaicos desde los dos años, y fallé durante cuarenta.  Es una historia de fallo mucho más que de éxito.  Durante esos años, logré subir los picos más altos de Inglaterra, de Gales, de Escocia, de Noruega.  Subí picos en los Andes de Chile; en Brazil; y en los Alpes de Francia y Italia.  Todo este tiempo trataba de subir a picos en el Pirineo, pero siempre fracasé, siempre encontré una excusa para fallar.

Si era demasiado joven, a los dos años, más tarde descubrí que la montaña era demasiado peligrosa; que llovía; que había peligro de aludes; me faltaban crampones, o botas o piolet.  No tenía tiempo, estaba cansado, tenía que trabajar o quedarme con mi familia.  Mis compañeros también ayudaron a mis fracasos: querían pararse para fumar; querían dormir; tenían vértigo; había demasiado viento, demasiado calor, demasiado frío.  Ya habían previsto algo, una boda or cambiar el aceite en el coche.

Cuando al final, después de cuarenta años, logré subir a un pico en el Pirineo, no solamente sentí el placer del éxito del día, sino también el de enterrar ese desengaño de crío.  No era la conquista de un pico sino la conquista de mi propia historia.

Era una subida tan espiritual, hecho más mística por el calor, la falta de oxígeno, la soledad, y la emoción, que al llegar a la cima no quería bajar.  Hice todo possible para quedarme allí más tiempo y retardecer el regreso al coche en el fondo del valle.  Me impresionó tanto que me puse a escribir, no un relato de la ruta, las cifras de altura, y distancia, sino un relato de mis emociones. 

Lo que descubrí es que las montañas tienen cada uno un alma.  Esto ya lo sabían los pre-históricos, que daban nombre a ideas abstractas, como la victoria o la sabiduría.  Hoy, esos nombres se han convertido, a través de los dioses, en objetos físicos, las zapatillas Nike y la ciudad de Atenas.  Lo que muestra el poder de la palabra.

También daban nombres a los picos, y apodos, y sobrenombres.  Y nombres a las cordilleras, come el Pirineo.  Cuanto a picos de una cierta altura, hay grupos de picos de ocho mil metros, en España de tres mil metros, y en Escocia de tres mil pies.  Para los ingleses, es muy difícil, porque no hay picos de tres mil pies, pero también porque “three thousand” es difícil de pronunciar.  Por eso, para los picos en Escocia inventaron los Munro, los picos de más de tres mil pies.  Y a los picos de más de dos mil quinientos se llaman los Corbett.  Ahora hay libros sobre los Munros, hay competiciones para subirlos todos.

Para los ingleses, para hacerlo más fácil de hablar de estos grandes picos oscenses, y hay que acordarse  que casi todos están en Huesca, les he dado nombre de “Manuel”, y a los más pequeños, el diminutivo, “Manolete”.   Muchas gracias.

The haunting call of the male guinea worm searching for his mate will soon be heard no more, thanks to Bill Gates and the World HealthOrganisation. 

This most beautiful creature, the tiger of the parasite world, is threatened with extinction.  The guinea worm presents one of the Nature’s most perfect adaptations.  Baby worms swimming in lakes, ponds and rivers are eaten by small water-borne animals, like water boatmen, which are then ingested by humans who drink this water unpurified.  The animal dies, and the worm larva is released to perform a dance of love.  Surviving both the highly acidic stomach and the highly alkaline intestines, and swimming blind, relying only on the instincts of its ancestors and its sense of duty, the worm penetrates the intestinal walls and in the darkness of the abdominal cavity sings to find its mate.  After a night of bliss, his work done, the male dies, and the female is left alone to fend for herself; she slowly migrates down the trunk of the body, and then down a leg, and at the ankle where there is little flesh, she feels the freshness and causes the skin to itch.  It itches so much that the sufferer more often than not will bathe it in cool water, and this signals the worm to puncture the skin and eject her brood into a local pond or river.  Her babies will in turn be eaten and the cycle will repeat; except that the UN has decreed a death sentence on the worm, and it will follow smallpox and rinderpest and be the third race deliberately exterminated by modern man.  Unlike the other two, the guinea worm is not fatal, and has been the subject of an eradication attempt more because it is vulnerable than because it is dangerous.x

Tony Milne                                                                             milnetony@hotmail.com 

The Red Castle

How far would you go to win the hand of your love ? 

Would you be prepared to go all the way, to commit murder, for love ?  Inspector Lucas, still struggling to make sense of his emotions and the world around him, has to find out for himself how far he is prepared to go, if he is to find happiness.  He accidently meets a beautiful, but sad, lady during the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race.  Lucas struggles to understand the madness that is humanity, evinced by the race and football fans he meets, and struggles even more to judge the aristocratic Monsieur and the charming Madame Saint-Jean. 

But before Lucas can achieve this ecstasy, a terrible and bloody death shocks him and leaves him alone, wanted and hunted, with only € 4 in his pocket.  It is enough to put him on the trail of his most dangerous opponent so far, someone prepared to kill for money, ruthless and efficient.

If a killer-for-hire can be found by his customers, then he can also be found by the police, a problem no thriller-writer can resolve – but Lucas thinks he has found the secret.  He sets off on a tour of France to track down the Rucksack Cowboy that he believes is responsible for the murder, before the killer strikes again.  If Lucas succeeds, he can find true love.

León Melín is a poet who works in the medium of thrillers to better understand the great mysteries of life. 

Emotion and motivation can be conveyed in writing by description of the emotions and desires themselves, of the personal experience, but observers can only judge the actions of the sufferer.  A writer who is omniscient has no need to observe in order to understand a mystery: he can just invent.  Such simplifications just leave more questions unanswered.  It is only by searching, by hard work, by asking questions that someone can eventually reach some conclusion about true life.

Inspector Lucas is both an observer and an actor in the social drama that is 21^st century France, a drama that highlights the great dislocation between reality and recitation, between what people say they do, and what they actually do.  Lucas is the tool of the writer, hardly in control of his own destiny, but acted upon by the world he lives in.  He has no prior knowledge, no superhuman gifts, no great vision.  If he can bring to light some understanding of the world, it is through enough curiosity and stamina, a desperate need to know.

In The Green Castle, Lucas has to resolve a pointless crime, and tries to do so without causing more pain, more suffering.  In a battle between good and evil, evil always wins.  It is only in a refusal to fight that good can flourish.  In The Red Castle, Lucas is confronted by evil in its most malign and invisible form, the desire to do good.  In The Yellow Castle, the story takes the reader abroad to confront the greatest threat to humanity, the arrogance of the certain.

In all three stories, León Melín dwells on the personal, not the political.  They are songs of innocence, crying in loneliness in a wilderness of incomprehension, not a grandstand for social action.  That they are based on real incidents only heightens their importance as a record of human behaviour and an attempt at interpretation.  

I am a salesman.  I have been a salesman for more than 20 years.  I have been thrown out of banks in the City of London, and off stands in exhibitions in South Africa and Germany, but I have never been punched.  I was once mugged by an old man (really).  It is unthinkable in the animal world, that the male of a species can visit 50 countries and not be attacked, either by another animal who wants to eat him (ignore mosquitoes and bacteria and viruses and parasites) or by other males of the same species.  The only similarity is with domesticated animals, cats and dogs, as predators, and herbivores.  Which implies that man is a domesticated animal in the same way.

On the other hand, I have paid tax.  I have paid airport tax, VAT, income tax in four countries, parking charges, motorway and road and bridge tolls, religious contributions and solidarity taxes, charity contributions for the Red Cross.

I once saw a bombing run in the Bardenas Reales, a national park in Spain, used by NATO air forces to practice for missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I sat on a rock and watched, in the silence, totally alone.

I saw first a small flash, 10 km away across the desert, about as big as the flame on a cigarette lighter on the opposite side of a football stadium.  I wondered what it was.  It was followed a few seconds later by a tiny puff, like the smoker exhaling his first lungful of smoke.  It looked so peaceful.  More seconds passed.  “Brr-ra-ronn-crack”, no louder than that of a few sticks drying, warming up in the morning sun.  I still didn’t understand what was happening. 

Then, I heard a plane, overhead, very high, 10 000 metres.  And then I understood.  An Afghan village, its old men, the women, the children, a few goats, had been destroyed, wiped out, murdered.  Only a few boys with the main herd of livestock on the hill, and the mujaheddin, mobile, nervous, never in one place for long, would have survived.  This was paid for with my taxes. 

In 2002, I left Britain to avoid paying taxes to such a murderous regime.  But the more I thought about taxation, the more I realised that tax is inextricably linked to murder, to death, to human suffering.  At the same time, I discovered that tax was the basis for many of the world’s great fortunes, a precursor of economic empires as well as the destructor of declining dynasties.  The fascinating story of tax history has rarely been linked to the rest of the world’s history.

Many of the themes that are developed in the book are necessary in order to understand how tax systems work.  History is betrayed by dualism, the typical history of the victors, or the survivors.  Both have their psychological, maybe psychiatric, problems of interpretation.  But to provide a logical explanation of taxation requires the coverage of psychology.

Guilt is rarely managed in thrillers: murder in AgathaChristie stories happens with no more than a scream from an emotional woman.  The trauma is ignored, both physical and psychological, of the onlookers and the participants.   Hollywood focuses on the visibly-obvious suffering of the deceased, unable to communicate the actual emotions and feelings, the smell, the sounds.

I tried to kill a rabbit once.  I had seen my pencil-thin, 5’ great-aunt kill a rabbit, with a karate-chop to the back of the neck, something she had probably done all her life.  It looked simple enough.  When my dog trapped one with myxomatosis, I thought to put it out of its misery.  I hit it, hard.  Hit it again.  It just looked at me.  “Why are you doing this to me ?” its gummy eyes said.  “I am already suffering and you are making me suffer more.”  I tried kicking it.  In the end, I left it in the field dying miserably alone.  I believe that I felt worse than the rabbit, as many torturers, in psychotherapy, claim.

A Note from the Author of The Crescent of Circumcision

As a travelling salesman, I have walked, sailed, ridden, flown and driven over the ancient trade routes from China to Land’s End and from the North Cape to Cape Horn.  I have sailed through the Panama Canal and climbed extensively in the Pyrenees.  I have walked across the Andes and driven under the Alps.  I have been robbed only twice: once by a nice, old gentleman with a cut-throat razor; and once by a person unknown on board one of Her Majesty’s warships which was enforcing the Freedom of the Seas.  But as a businessman, I have been robbed by tax-collectors in Russia and Brazil, South Africa and China, and as a consumer, I have paid taxes in 50 countries.

I have sold society-changing technology to the great British and Flemish textile manufacturers, to the chemical process industry, to the military-industrial complex, and to the largest industry in the world, the automotive; I have worked in the paper and print industry, the military, and in IT, and I have worked for bosses from America, Japan, China, Iran, Vietnam and Britain.  I have toured factories from the industries that have defined the global economy – the PC, the motor-car and sugar.  I have had meetings in the rooms where James Watt created the industrial revolution, and where the tank was first designed and stayed in hotels next to the world’s first cast Ironbridge, the massive gold deposits of the Witwatersrand, and in great cities of the Orient like Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, and Delhi. [1]  I was the first person in Europe to use a GPS satellite navigation system, and one of the first non-academic users to have an email address on the internet.

Wherever I went, I asked the questions: why here ?  Why then ? Why them ?  The standard answers provided by the guide and history books did not really answer the questions so much as introduce others:  Why did Britain in the 19^th century, Holland in the 18^th, France in the 17^th, Spain in the 16^th, Portugal in the 15^th , Venice in the 14^th Century AD, Athens in the 5^th century BC, Macedonia in the 4^th, Rome in the 3^rd, become global powers, seeming to dominate the world ?  The common history books relate these results to great people, sometimes to technology, sometimes to religion or philosophy.  Looked at logically, these explanations fall almost immediately.  Britain, France, Holland, Spain and Portugal all wanted to remain powerful countries, yet none was able to maintain its position of power for longer than about 100 years.  Whatever was the cause of their rise to greatness also included its almost automatic demise.  A human angle could account for such a rise, except that in almost every case, the greatest humans of the time were against such imperialism.    Neither military competence nor great generals seems to explain the rise or the fall of empires.

Although there is a common human factor, in a great leader who is willing to spend his available funds on international conquest, the common factor seems to be finance – both cash and credit - gained from taxation.  But nowhere was this clearly set out as the reason, and there are few books which even document this; mostly, facts relating to finance are injected into books that would otherwise be nothing more than historical fiction.  A good example is the plaque at Harlech Castle, stating the cost of building.  Harlech Castle cost £ 18,000 to build.  So what ?  How was this calculated ?  Who paid it ?  In what currency ?  What terms ?  Where did the money come from ?  How much did Caernarvon Castle cost ?  Was this price the starting price or was it negotiated down from a higher starting price ?  Was the money ever paid ?  How does this compare to the English King’s annual revenues ?  Did the tax-payer get good value-for-money ?  Did the exploitation of Wales repay the cost of conquest ? 

In researching the answers to these questions, far more popped up: how did finance work ?  What was the role of religion ?  Of military technology ?  Why did people pay taxes ?  Man’s curious nature, his ambivalence towards violence, his eagerness to kill others, but only under certain conditions and, worst of all, his ability to stand by and watch as literally millions of fellow human beings died around him, had to be explained.

Taxation is like the Goose that laid the Golden Eggs.  Each day, a small golden egg was laid by a big fat goose.  Every day, the farmer got a bit richer, but each day he spent more and more money; eventually, he was desperate and killed the goose to get at the eggs faster.  But when he cut it open, there were no eggs inside. [3]  tax-collectors are like the farmer, ever increasing their demands on the  tax-payer until the poor goose is taxed to death.  sometimes the death of the tax-payer is clearly the result of the tax-collector's activities, but often the cause of death is hidden.

European countries today have a legal requirement to charge VAT – up to 25% or more. [2]  This tax is levied on money that has already been taxed at least once – employers pay charges or national insurance contributions, and employees pay their income tax of typically up to 40% or more.  As well as paying VAT, drinkers, drivers and smokers pay additional taxes, as much as 90% of the retail cost of drink, petrol and cigarettes.  High wage earners can pay up to 75% of their money to their government in taxes.  

Taxation has been an integral part of civilisation since at least man learnt to write: indeed, the word scribe means tax-collector in Egyptian, where they documented the taxes raised to fund the pyramids: 20% of their agricultural produce, and labour when there was no work to do in the fields.

It is unlikely that taxation will go away but in a democracy it may be possible to reduce the suffering that it can bring, and to delay the disaster that awaits the tax-payers of Western nations.  In particular, tax-payers can refuse to support tax-spenders who use taxes to bomb poor people, promote their own candidacy as tax-collectors, and generally increase taxation.

Taxation followed the money.  What a single man could carry was worth the effort of two men to steal, but a mule, an ox-drawn cart or a boat could carry enough to make a village or a town rich if one passed every day.  Taxing it at 10% made sense because it did not dissuade other mules, carts or boats; reasonable tax kept the goose that laid the golden eggs alive.

In history, every city or state that has taxed its citizens at rates as high as European states do today has collapsed, either through civil war, foreign invasion, disease or famine, or emigration, and often a combination of these.  The original population has been reduced by a third or a half and sometimes more.  This is a great warning, if it can be heeded.

Modern taxation consists of millions of computers invisibly taking a percentage of transactions and passing the details to a tax-collector, or visibly adding a percentage to a bill to increase the amount paid and still passing the details to a tax-collector.  Growing up with these systems, taxation seems neither surprising nor onerous.  Only by looking at the world before taxation existed can its effects be understood.

---

[1] The SoHo Foundry is still in use as the head office of AveryWeigh-Tronix in Birmingham, and the meeting room is available for hire in the White Hart Hotel in Lincoln.  In fact, the first tank in the world was designed and built before the Great War by the Austrian Navy, but their mountainous terrain and inter-service rivalry meant that it did not go into production.  Photographs of the tank are available at the Austrian Naval Museum,Vienna, Austria.

[2] Businesses can recover VAT, but as they have paid it upfront they lose the interest on the money; the government treats business VAT as a cheap loan.

[3] A traditional tale documented as early as Aesop’s fables.

An Englishman conquers the Piano Competition

Julian Trevelyan was one of five finalists, selected from almost 200 contenders, in the Long-Thibaud-CrespinPiano Competition, held in Paris every three years.  Facing him were Japanese, Korean and Russian pianists. 

At one time, classical English musicians dominated the European stage.  Perhaps the first true superstar was John Dowland.  Dowland was the ultimate singer/songwriter/lead guitarist at the time that the lute was the preferred instrument.  Dowland and his contemporaries like William Byrd were simply the greatest composers in Europe.  The Reformation also encouraged private learning of music, and developed the need for printed music.  Writing for keyboards made it easier to play virtuoso music, and Britain in the 17^th Century was a major centre for such music.

Recently, there have been few British piano victors in piano competitions: John Lill and John Ogden and more recently Barry Douglas won the Tchaikovksy, Peter Donohoe took second place and Freddy Kempf came third; Tom Poster won a prize at the 2009 Honens.  And that is it.

The lack of competition winners in British concert pianists increases the difficulties for future performers.  There are few teachers with experience of winning competitions or of living as concert pianists, most perhaps wisely preferring the lower stress of a job as an orchestra conductor or teacher; and there are few British judges with the experience to be selected for the juries that decide who wins; unfortunately, this is a major factor in making champions.

It is worth looking at Britain’s newest competitive success to see what has made a winner.  Julian is home schooled, which should give him an advantage in terms of time, and both his parents are musical, but he squanders as much time as any teenager, studying geology, playing the violin, singing and composing, and playing sport.  He is supported by grants.  He has reached his level of performance by regularly participating in musical activities, in his local Cathedral, St Albans, where he is a chorister, at musical summer camps, and with chamber orchestras.  But perhaps his defining characteristic, or characteristics, is the eagerness with which he competes, and his eagerness to collect feedback.

Julian’s success in the Long Piano Competition is not a surprise to those who know him.  He is well-supported by his family and by other home-schooled pupils, as well as by a musical network that includes the Aldeburgh Young Musicians and the Britten Sinfonia Academy.  Last year, he was a finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition.  This year, before arriving at the Long, he had already won two prizes in international competitions.  He won the Grand Prix as well as the special Ravel prize in the Concours-Festival Répertoire Pianistique Moderne (CFRPM or Contemporary Piano Music Festival Competition) in Paris; and he took 2^nd place in the Île-de-France International PianoCompetition in Maisons-Laffitte, along with the prize for interpretation. 

Marguérite Long was MauriceRavel’s favourite pianist, and Julian’s proven expertise in the CFRPM in playing Ravel was sure to attract attention in the piano competition which she founded.  In the eliminatory round of the competition, he chose a Beethoven sonata, and Ravel’s Scarbo from the obligatory list.  Julian used the hall’s acoustics well in his semi-final interpretation of Shostakovich’s 1^st Piano Sonata to blast his way into the finals, shocking the public and the judges with his ferocity and poetry. 

Nothing gives the young Trevelyan away better than his attack on the N^o 8 Sonata, written by Mozart, another child prodigy and gifted musician.  Immediate and total ownership of the piece, and domination of the piano, is coloured by a depth of feeling, of humour, of fun that can only create an image of the composer in any spectator’s mind.  Colour is a word Julian often uses: the colour he can produce from his playing or from the piece, or from the piano.  He stretches the gamut of the competition grand to every extreme, and never more than when he is furthest from the keys.

If the piano is a concert grand, Julian’s playing style is upright, constantly shifting his position left and right, forwards and backwards, to attack with greater force, or more intimacy, or elegance as required.  Sometimes he leads with his left foot, and sometimes with both feet square, but rarely with his right foot, preferring to let his hands dictate the power of this most awesome weapon.

Julian followed the Mozart with the Frank Martin Preludes and Chopin’s No 4 Scherzo, both beautifully played.  He then had 24 hours to prepare for the final concert, for which the jury had asked him to play Bartok’s 3^rd Piano Concerto.  He gave another brilliant concert, winning the special concert prize awarded by the Prince of Monaco.  His enthusiasm for this piece was visible, his interaction with the orchestra was constant, mostly looking at them rather than the piano, and at the end he made to shake hands with them before bowing to the audience.

Julian Trevelyan is still only 16 years old, the youngest finalist ever, the youngest competitor by three years, and the youngest finalist by ten years.  So he qualified for England’s Young Pianist of the North competition and won that as well to bring the year’s tally to seven prizes in four competitions in a single year.

The next major piano competitions will be in 2018 (Leeds), 2019 (Tchaikovsky), 2020 (Chopin).  The British press and the British public should make the effort to get to know this remarkable young man, to listen and preferably to see him play.