Some of my favourite pieces of music are variations (or variants) on a theme. Unlike a pop cover version, these aren’t just a different arrangement of the same song, but rather the composer takes a snippet of music, often by someone else and go off in all sorts of directions. My personal favourite is the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (it’s a fantasia because it’s a looser continuous form referencing the original, rather than a set of separate variations, but in essence it's the same kind of thing). The original is a rather staid (though beautiful) hymn tune, but Vaughan Williams takes it to amazing new heights. I was therefore rather disappointed listening to composer Debbie Wiseman talking about her Paralympic homecoming piece I 'm Walking with You (played beautifully by a blind pianist called Lucy - I don't think she's called 'Lucy the pianist' as the image seems to suggest, I think she featured in a TV show called The Piani

REVISIT SERIES -  A post from September 2012 It can be highly entertaining when a drama series attempts to incorporate science into the plot, so last night I watched  Midsomer Murders , and the entertainment came thick and fast. In this particular case, the science in question was astronomy. We started with a dramatic scene. A total eclipse of the Sun. Many folk from kids to serious astronomers are gathering to a witness it. I was a little unhappy with the advice an expert gave a youngster (roughly 'don't look at it through binoculars or a telescope...' so far so good... 'unless you use one of these filters.' Not so good.) But we'll overlook that. What, though, about the eclipse itself? These don't happen randomly, after all. From the car registrations this clearly wasn't the last eclipse visible in the UK in 1999. Anyway, while the location of Midsomer isn't specified (it's filmed in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire), it clearly isn't Cornwall.

Ever since the release of her stunning The Appeal , Janice Hallett has amazed with her ability to tell a mystery story through the medium of a collection of documents - The Examiner maintains that remarkable quality . Here the main vehicle is a university intranet’s chat groups, though we do also get some emails and WhatsApp threads. The setting is a new MA course in multimedia arts, where the six students are very diverse. We are told right up front that there is a suspicion that one of the participants has died. Once again, Hallett enables us to get a wonderful picture of the personalities of the course members and their tutor - and it rapidly becomes clear that something odd is going on. The delight is in working out exactly what has happened and why. Along the way there are several big twists as different evidence emerges. One of these is brilliant - only achievable through this kind of storytelling. And while the underlying plot is in places quite dark, Hallett continues to be ab

REVISIT SERIES -  A post from September 2014 One of the interesting aftermaths of the Scottish Referendum debate was that I have seen a number of people saying 'A lesson to learn is don't trust the traditional media, get your information from social media.' I know where they were coming from, but there are two dangers here - one is that (even more than watching, say, Fox News) you won't get information you will get propaganda, and the other is that even when you aren't being told what you want to hear by your friends and political allies, a lot of internet sources are unreliable. The Tyson story I want to tell you illustrates this doubly. The Tyson in question is not Mike, but science populariser and astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was surprised the other day to hear that Tyson was being pilloried for making up quotes to support an argument. The argument in question is that a lot of people (including many in the media and our elected representatives) are extremel