Educational Ambrosia

My friend Benjamin is doing Manchester University's famed MA in Creative Writing - led by Colm Tóibín and staffed by a range of top quality authors who are too good to make a living by selling books.

This was yesterday's class:

…how music can affect our writing. Tóibín brought in the head of music with a stack of different recordings of Bach's Cello Suites (which, incidentally, you're right about and I was wrong about) to explain the variations between them. Oh, and a PhD student, with a baroque cello, to play some of them live. Heaven. 

I am utterly jealous. How I wish all students could have this kind of experience. How diminishingly likely it is that - underfunded and understaffed and unresourced as we are - that our students will get chances like this.