I have kept missing it because that round usually sells out quite quickly. 4 piano concertos of an evening is a treat not to be passed up but I have kept missing it, until last night.

The finalists ranged in age from 19 to 28, I think, and came from the US, Russia, Latvia and China. Regrettable – and I don’t really like that word – two of them performed the same piece, Tchaikovsky’s first which – to some extent – created a competition within a competition.

The National Concert Hall isn’t always full which I think is a big pity because they get some fantastic music in there and last night really wasn’t an exception. I look at these four young people and I know they’re on a journey that I gave up when I was about 16 years old. It was at that stage that I realised that I had far too many extraneous items in my life to be  a concert pianist; the time to dedicate myself was behind me. It has never stopped me dreaming.

Here in my house is my collection of piano scores – the first of which I bought when I was 14 years old, a piece which I am still capable of devoting hours to if I only had a piano – Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto.

The DIPC has a list of suitable concerto pieces which is extensive; featuring a large number of works by Mozart, some by Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Bartok and Ravel. Of the works on the list, I am least familiar with the Mozart piano concertos; most familiar with Rachmaninov.

Last night, I heard Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto twice which – to some extent – was a bit disappointing, given there were four soloists and 28 different works on the list. However, that minor gripe aside, I cannot take away from the effort and the work that goes into a journey from your first scale in C to a major piano competition and possibly the first great leap in your career.

For me, the stand out performance of the evening was that of the eventual winner, 19 year old Nikolay Khozyainov. He was second to play, so just before the interval, and he played Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto, a piece which I have mixed feelings about. It’s a piece of music which really caught public attention thanks to a film called Shine, and a lot of the discussion around that film, and the discussion of Rach 3 being somehow hard always struck me as somehow superficial from people who don’t listen to much piano music; and yet…they associated it with hard. It’s not a piece I often expect to see young pianists playing – not because it is difficult technically (young people tend to see technical challenges as grist to their mill) but because it’s quite a sombre piece of music, almost dark. The opening notes are quite depressing. It’s a very strong contrast to the imperial opening chords of the piece performed before it, the first of the Tchaikovsky renditions.

On this occasion, the opening notes were absolutely assured with no impression of any nerves and…throughout the appearance, it seemed to me as though the performers on the stage vanished from sight and merely left an impression of sound. I’m not one for usually de-constructing music in any way, but last night’s performance of the Rachmaninov conjured up pictures and images that I’ve never seen in it and it is a piece of music which I have been listening to for a very long.

So two things stood out for me about that performance; one was the imagery, and one was the exceptional technical competence. Every once in a while, a young musician crosses my path who leaves a burning impression. The young Evgeny Kissin was another one – his Carnegie recital of Chopin music blew my mind and is still one of the best solo piano recitals I have had the pleasure to listen to. I bought it in 1995, in Bath. It’s been a while now.

I expect Nikolay Khozyainov to be another one and I will be interested to see what sort of a voice he develops as he gets older.

John O’Connor is planning to run another Dublin Piano Competition in 2015. Three year’s time. He needs money. In his plea for sponsorship last night, he mentioned that 100 people supplying 100E a month to the Dublin International Piano Competition would get him past his target. And that in fact, if you couldn’t get that much to him, he’d take whatever you wanted to give. I believe it is something worth considering.

Someone seriously said this to me yesterday; in relation to the fact that I have 2 maths assignments and a stats assignment due in the next 6 weeks. The two maths ones are some what urgent; the stats one slightly less so.

The Open University is an amazing thing. I started a level 1 course in October; it has coincided with some major things happening at work and a house move. So you could argue that it wasn’t a great time to be starting and yes, I will admit that there have been times, since February when I added a level 2 course to the mix, where I really wondered if I could actually manage this.

I’m not going to say that’s defeatist talk; it’s a recognition that sometimes I’m just not the driver of what is going on in my own life. So I have struggled a bit in terms of organising study around housemoves and unscheduled work issues that turned up out of the blue which happens when you are an operational type person. Reality and planning are not always in sync. I expect the most recent stats assignment score to drop down below my desired standard because it was such a fight to get it out, but apart from that, the scores have been sufficiently high for me to be sure that I’m doing the right course

I’m studying for a degree in mathematics and statistics. The course code is B36 but it has since been superceded by changes to the Open University mathematics and statistics offerings. There are now four streams to that area with differing concentration on areas of maths and statistics. Do I regret getting in there before this happened? Well no, not really, because the fees structure has changed as well. I’m not sure I could afford to do this if I had waited the one year a lot of people felt I should since work was in such a mode of changing.

So I’m glad, despite the fact that I started it at a time of a lot of stress in my life, that I did start it.

The reactions of people have been quite interesting. Typically, you can split the responses into two types a) it’s a terrific idea or b) you’re mad.

Interestingly enough, most people who know me think that it’s a great idea. Not that I am bored but that – for whatever reason – the people I know about and care about and who care about me care about me choosing to do things that interest me. The responses from people I work with have been more nuanced and range from complete disinterest to considering that maybe I’m a little mad.

My employer in general is good on supporting personal study from a practical point of view; not that they are covering fees although they have a program to do so if I want to go down that road in the future, but in providing access to people who are experts in the area you are studying. I will be meeting a couple of those people next week. I really value this sort of direct support and I think it’s a great idea.

Actual people I work with, on the other hand, have seen this in terms of “you can make a fortune” and “you’re spinning too many plates” and “why would anyone do this except to get more money”.

In a way, it’s quite interesting to see those responses.

As to why I did it – well, mainly because I wanted to and because one thing I have always regretted is that I let my maths skills slip. I was good at them at school. I got a B in honours maths when I was 17 and I was disappointed. I did my leaving certificate in 1990 and since then, they have streamlined the course twice (ie, reduced the workload). I’m currently averaging around 86 which – cue list of excuses – given work issues and the house move problems – I don’t think is bad. I want to keep it up around there as far as possible.

I also did it because data presentation is becoming very high profile but most people aren’t really stats literate. I saw an interesting graphic on usage rates of social media profiles a little while back which looked very funky but when you actually looked at the detail on which the graphic was based, it compared completely different base data to give a misleading impression. The objective was to compare usage on FaceBook with a bunch of other social media platforms including twitter and Flickr. The figure for FaceBook was based on page loads, twitter was on number of tweets posted and Flickr was based on the number of photographs uploaded.

This isn’t a fair comparison at all. It’s fairly likely that if you compared page loads across the board, FB would still come out on top but…it disproportionately undervalued Flickr usage which is heavily based on page load and not on image uipload, for example, and as for twitter, pageloads plus API calls may be a more accurate reflection of their usage.

I figured if I wanted to get involved with data presentation in any shape or form – and data mining and data exploitation is becoming big news (it’s now called Big Data which as a label pretty much sucks) – I needed some decent stats skills. The sort that gives me more ability to recognise misuse of statistics than just the question of comparing like with not like.

In the meantime though I still have 2 wrap up assignments to do for the first maths module and the 3rd assignment of the first stats module and while it still feels daunting, I feel remarkably empowered for having done this.

For anyone who is interested in having a look at what I am doing at the moment, the modules are MST121 which is a level 1 maths course. It has a lot in common with what I remember as higher level mathematics ca 1990, and M248, an introductory statistics module.

I want to say – by the way – that I looked into doing this via an Irish University. I could not because not one offered it the course in anyway that was meaningfully possible for a part time student such as myself. The Open University currently has tutorial groups dotted around the country for both M248 and especially MST121. Their course materials are excellent and the support I have had from tutors has been excellent; in neither case have I had to draw on them too heavily.

I intend to start MS221 which is the next level maths course in October, and probably M249 also which is the next level statistics course. Currently my planned study route includes a third module in October, and looking at my schedule, that’s down to be M343, Applications of Probability.

If I can get through MST221 and M248 as planned, I’m really looking forward to this.

The pattern is as follows:

2x 50g of Kidsilk Haze
7mm circular needles.

Cast on 141 stitches.
Knit stocking stitch until you are very, very close to running out of yarn. Guess roughly where you’re going to still get about 2 rows out of what’s left of the second ball.
Cast off.

I started this sometime in December I think. I have a third ball of the yarn because I initially expected to make it a little bigger. However, it’s quite heavy already and…also quite beautiful.

The Kidsilk Haze that I used was a Kaffe Fassett variegated colour. I think there were two colourways available at the time, a green woodlandy colour and this which, when I picked it up, spoke to me a bit of the sea. As I knit it though, it spoke to me more of mountains so it got named to a mountain range rather than some coastal village in Brittany.

This is a wave from Couminole Strand. I know it as being near where the Ranga wrecked, and featuring in “possibly some few waves from Dinglesurf’s surf reports” I was there last weekend, and I took a lot of photographs. I loved it.

Why do I live in Dublin again?

I drove roughly 850km last weekend. I may be crazy.

but it was worth it. It was so worth it.

The price of me going to Brittany for a few days is that Brittany crops up a lot in my mind for a while afterwards.

Okay.

This is where I was 7 days ago. the photograph was taken from a beach called La Torche which is one of the more reputed surfing, and now kitesurfing also, beaches in Brittany. It is one of my favourite places in the world, it along with the Pointe du Raz. You’re looking at this photograph because for some strange reason, the house on the extreme left of the photograph is my dream house.

I suspect it could be very stormy during the winter, mind.

I love Brittany – most people who know me, know this. But it has to take some rare form of crazy to go there for just 2 days. I needed to take photographs of different but familiar things. It’s the easiest place to go. I’m not going to talk about photography though; I’m going to talk about what it was like to drive there on Saturday night in particular.

I have done a reasonable amount of driving in France, and around Brittany in particular. If I’m there for longer than a day I typically hire a car. Somehow, however, I’d never managed to drive in the conditions I was driving in on Saturday. It was dark, and more to the point, it was teeming with rain. I was driving on the RN165, which is a dual carriageway. I was travelling west to Quimper.

When I say the weather was atrocious, I am not understating how heavy the rain was. But here’s the thing. It was the single worst journey I have ever driven.

I like France. I love Brittany. But road markings there are pitifully bad. The exit signs are white and blindingly reflective. They make the road disappear for a while when you are approaching one. There are no cats eyes and the road markings, the white lines are impossible to see. There were stretches of that road where I honestly had trouble identifying what, if any lane, I was in. I just couldn’t see the road.

France is – on a certain level – trying very hard to improve its fairly abysmal road safety record. Sarkozy I think claims to have halved the fatal accident rate. But they could do a whole lot to improve things on the road markings front. Edge of road markings and centre line markings are impossible to see when it is dark and raining. The exit signs really should be a non-white colour so as not to be blinding and not to be impossible to read.

On the plus side, off the main road, nearly ever village appears to have a 30kph zone. All the school areas are 30kph, for example.

One other thing to note: Quimper has more roundabouts than any other city I have ever been in, including Limerick.

Second effort looked a little better.

I really should stop taking photographs with my phone though; it really isn’t the same as a proper camera.

If you don’t know what Finnish Pulla is, this photograph is not really going to illuminate you. This is because of oven related issues. It decides randomly what temperature it’s going to be; I’ve moaned about it before so will refrain from doing so here.

Here’s the wikipedia page on Pulla. And here is the book that my particular recipe game from.

I bought Spices by Sophie Grigson because it looked intriguing and like my kind of book. It sorts through a bunch of spices, tells you what to do with a few of them, how to take care of them. It is a beautifully photographed book and there are many things in it I want to try. One of the spices it covers is cardamom.

I associate cardamom with Finland, and Finland only for the reason of pulla. It is a sort of sweet bread that is pretty heavily flavoured with cardamom and using cinnamon is just wrong. So I have tended to buy cardamom, use it randomly and wish that IKEA had ready-to-bake mixes of pulla like they used to. They don’t.

I started baking bread a little while ago so am no longer terrified of things not rising – I just bail and start again – so I decided to have a go at this yesterday. The above was the result.

You need ten cardamom pods out of which you have to get the seeds – which is a finicky little job to be honest but well worth it because they smell gorgeous. Then you have to bash them to pieces using a mortar and pestle. I have a tonne weight worth of mortar and pestle which is stone and which I bought in TK Maxx after years of really wanting one. I think I used it once to try and destroy some basil leaves for a pesto. I was happy, on reading Sophie Grigson, to note that I’d gotten a good one because it is abrasive and it does do damage. The bashing of cardamom seeds requires a little bit of work but it smells gorgeous in a way that nothing else I have ever smelled in the kitchen smells gorgeous.

After that, it’s more or less straightforward as bread making goes, you mix and knead it per instructions, you hide it in the hotpress or airing cupboard for 2 or 3 hours, then you shape it. Having looked at it now, what I would do in the future is divide the dough into two batches and make two loaves rather than one, which would require thinner strands. I would then – hopefully – wind up with two neater loaves and I would also be less likely to suffer a burned exterior and underdone interior.

The recipe calls for about 30 minutes baking time. I took more to cater for underdone interior which didn’t help the carbonised exterior but I’m not so worried. The smell in the kitchen while baking was glorious.

I’ve had some for breakfast – this involves just not eating the burnt crispy bits (many of which have sugar on them – and it has turned out to be lovely as far as taste is concerned.

This is a recipe I will have another go at when I have a non-schizophrenic oven. Simple fact is this one appears to have two functional temperatures – 120 and 240.

This is Mathsjam and in Dublin it turns up at Against the Grain on a street which I believe is called Wexford Street, although at the risk of outing myself as still a blow in, I’ve never been entirely sure of the lines between South Great Georges Street, Aungier Street, Camden Street and Wexford Street. This is near Whelans though so Wexford Street is probably a good bet.

This street blindness is a nuisance when arguing with Dublin Bus’s Real Time Passenger Information though. I have some difficulty identifying the nearest bus stop if I don’t know its number. Back with Mathsjam.

Mathsjam is where you can go to spend time solving maths puzzles. They take many forms. For example, on Tuesday I did battle with origami, a balance puzzle and looked at some professor with an inordinate interest in the number of times guests shook hands at a dinner party. It was the best fun I’ve had in a bar for a long time.

Mathsjam also uses twitter very effectively – there is a hashtag which gets busy enough on mathsjam nights needless to mention – you can search for #mathsjam and you’ll find a lot of puzzles coming your way. I am still stumped by this one which I picked up on Wednesday morning.

I’ve always liked maths puzzles. I think a lot of people do because books like Ian Stewart’s Cabinets of Curiosities would not sell as well as they do otherwise. But like a lot of people, I’ve liked them in isolation; in the same way as liking maths was something I did in isolation. Maths doesn’t have to be onerous, and it doesn’t have to be boring or hard. I think it gets a very bad rep from how it is sold in schools which is a pity because logic underpins Sudoku, for example, one of the more popular  It underpins a lot of how the world works today and a reasonable understanding of elements of it is always called for.

Mathsjam goes someway towards making maths a social activity even if you are not a mathematician. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se because it broadens your way of looking at things and this is good. It means you have access to different tools for solving problems. I learned stuff on Tuesday night that just wouldn’t have occurred to me and I wish something like this had been around when I was 16 or 17.

If you’re interested in Mathsjam, it takes place on the 2nd last Tuesday of the month in Dublin and Belfast in Ireland – and if you’re interested anywhere else, you can look at setting one up (if I were to move out of Dublin I would certainly look at doing this). It is running in about 20 cities in the UK and four other cities outside the UK and Ireland. It is completely voluntary and informal

The Dublin Mathsjam Facebook page is here.

I picked up a new one last week. I was in Pure Magic in Clontarf and they had some copies of Stance and Stance always comes armed with a DVD. Here’s the trailer which turned up on Youtube. I saw bits of this in Pure Magic so picked it up and took it home to watch. The Stance DVDs have a couple of different films on them but the one we’re interested in right now is Um Barco Nas Ondas, which is a 25 minute film of waveriding in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. I’ve known they exist for years but have never been down there. It featured four waveriders, 2 of whom I was already familiar with thanks to another kite DVD about 9 years ago, namely Tuva Jensen (I want a haircut like hers) and Bertrand Fleury, and two names which are new to me, namely Mitu Monteiro and Camille Juban. It’s about this latter I’m going to write.

Camille Juban is a windsurfer and it was a couple of clips what he was getting up to which caught my interest. I don’t get to see much windsurfing lately – I no longer track the PWA on Eurosport because to be honest I get overwhelmed with all the television channels we have and practically never watch it. I caught a little bit of it on the PWA’s live stream last year and did idly consider that it would be worth picking up again if they got a bigger picture going. I never quite got around to checking out the schedule do. I’d never heard of Camille Juban as a result and this is a pity. He makes me want to windsurf again.

Yes, again. Not that many people know this but I used to windsurf, a very long time ago. Waveriding as a windsurfer looks like a lot more fun than it does with a kite. And that film made me want to try again.

I’m serious unfit but I am thinking that this year at least I am going to try and get to a PWA event (as well as an ASP event – angling for France this year if it fits in with everyone else, and some kite event although there is a big event coming to Ireland this year so….).

One of today’s tasks is to go looking at PWA dates and kite dates. Meanwhile, the ASP are on the Australian Gold Coast at the moment – the live streams started this morning but I haven’t had a chance to review them yet.