On Saturday’s concert and why I hope the next one isn’t in Scotland

Now, I promised some more information about the concert my housemate Dave and I are organising in Glasgow this Saturday. Wow, ‘this Saturday’ seems a lot sooner than ’16th April’ has been sounding for the past few months – that’s scaring me a little…

Background based on a photo of the Alps by Nicole Kotschate, used with permission

Why Glasgow? Because it’s Dave’s home town and he already had his heart set on St Mary’s as the venue before I got involved. But it’s not ideal, it really isn’t. It’s great experience, don’t get me wrong – but an awful lot of hassle!

Since Dave’s in Manchester most of the time, and since I’ve never even been to Glasgow before, communication can be a real issue – I’ve had to invent faces for the senders of so many emails that it’s going to get very confusing when I actually meet these people. We’ve got an incredibly dedicated team of helpers up there (particularly Dave’s mother Kathy, her friend Helen, Siobhan from the Teenage Cancer Trust and Zoe from the RSAMD) but it’s so tricky to keep everyone in the loop when we never actually see any of them! (The odd transnational Skype session with Kathy and Helen excepted.)

And of course there’s the players – what we’ve effectively done here is set up a brand new orchestra from scratch. That means finding people in one of two categories:

1. England-based players who are willing to organise and pay for their own transport, and crash with other players in Glasgow who they may or may not have met before.
2. Scotland-based players, of whom Dave knows surprisingly few and I know two. Literally two people. And one of those has damaged his shoulder and can’t play.

So you see, it’s not a walk in the park. A Manchester concert wouldn’t be easy either, but we’re so much better connected there that organising the players and the venue would be so much more straightforward. Nevertheless, none of these issues is going to come in the way of this Saturday being fantastic! Although it’s difficult, we’ve worked hard and we’re genuinely confident of a successful evening, and one that raises significant funds and awareness for the fantastic work of the Trust. The really encouraging thing is that right now it feels like if we can pull this off, then maybe we can do anything…! Okay, perhaps not anything, but at least we can be confident the Latitude Symphony Orchestra is capable of future concerts closer to (my) home, no problem.