HERE are a few notes stuck on the fridge door of my week. No theme attends these accounts, other than their being posted together.

Jools Holland is more my sort of thing, but last weekend, the night after seeing Mr Holland’s big band opus at the Barbican, we drove across the Pennines for a concert by the Stockport Symphony Orchestra.

This might seem a long way to see a concert by an amateur orchestra, even such a good one. The reason had something to do with filial guilt, I guess. You see my dad and his wife play violin in the orchestra. At 82, my dad has been chairman of the orchestra for 25 years. And we had never got round to seeing him play.

We put that to rights with a remembrance-themed concert in the splendid Edwardian town hall, featuring music by Elgar, Walton, Butterworth and Richard Strauss. The star turn was Elgar’s cello concerto, performed beautifully by the 17-year-old Laura van der Heijden, BBC Young Musician Of The Year in 2012.

Afterwards we went with some of the musicians to the Arden Arms, well worth a visit should you ever be in a town noted for its viaduct. It’s a characterful Robinsons pub, full of characters too. Unusually, the snug is reached through the bar where pints are being pulled.

As we left late on, the trumpet player tooted my dad out with an impromptu fanfare. None of the other drinkers took much notice. They must be used to that sort of thing.

So we had a good night and put something right. At one point your columnist even opened his mouth and made a sound to accompany the music. Singing is what this is sometimes called, although that is questionable in my case.

 

• ON the way back the next evening, electronic signs nagged us on the M62. A frequent message was: “Is your vehicle ready for winter.” To which the non-singing pedant behind the wheel of the old Volvo had a question of his own: “Has your punctuation person gone missing?”

And to think that they call these ‘smart motorways’.

Perhaps all the question marks were used up one cold winter. I think the Department for Transport should stockpile them, much as they do salt. A nice mound should keep the signs supplied all winter.

Incidentally, I had no idea until just now that another word for an interrogation mark is ‘eroteme’, at least if the internet is to be trusted. Funny what you can learn after being annoyed by an electronic sign on the motorway.

 

• SOMETIMES the weeks fill out with too much television. Lately there’s barely been time to catch up. It’s been a musical spell, what with Mr Holland, Bellowhead last night and two weeks ago the jazzy flamenco guitarist Eduardo Niebla, performing with two York choirs. I enjoyed the concert a lot more than the writer of the review for The Press, but that’s the way these things go.

 

• THE week before last this column suggested that David Cameron’s petulance over the EU budget bill for £1.7bn made him look like a man having a tantrum about his credit card bill. After George Osborne’s specious claim to have cut the bill in half, part of me suspects the whole thing was planned this way. With the set-up being the prime minister’s foot stamping, followed by the chancellor pretending to flourish his scissors.

 

• THERE are so many festivals in York that it can be hard to keep up. The Aesthetica Short Film Festival is fast confirming its position as one of the best.

After attending the opening night at City Screen, I returned on the Friday to watch a batch of mini-films.

First up were six short thrillers, starting with Woodwoo by Johnny Phillips, which uses the language of thrillers to portray a tree surgeon as a hit-man, here having a near-death encounter with a chainsaw while aloft in an ancient tree. The best was Michael Pearce’s Keeping Up With The Joneses, a sharp, shocking and beautifully written tale of an MP’s wife (Maxine Peake) who discovers the truth about her cheating-heart husband. It was grimly funny, too.

The sad romance of Sailor’s Song, a Danish drama, was also rewarding. Well done to Cherio Federico and co for organising such a good festival.