25/02/2007 by Andrew Smith.

This has been a bit of a manic week, finishing off everything on the March issue of CRfocus so we can go away on holiday to Center Parcs near Thetford.

Things got off to a bit of a flying start when the Office of Fair Trading issued a report on revising the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS); this caused me to bump the editorial column I’d already written (on the possibility and desirability of a universal standard for research ethics… more interesting than it sounds, honest!) and write a new piece. We managed to put all the final pages together in time, and it’s safely printing this weekend.

The other fun work thing (not a contradiction, I promise) was the PharmaTimes Clinical Researcher of the Year dinner: a black tie do up at an hotel on Park Lane. We had a great time (although I was taking notes for my report next month, so I didn’t paint the town red. We stayed in a hotel in the old County Hall building, which is right next to the London Eye. It looked so beautiful that, when we got back to the hotel at half past midnight, I wandered up and down the embankment half an hour or so, taking photos before going to bed.

Having finished the working week, Jess and I went to see an evening of Noel Coward plays starring loads of our friends. Having started a few months ago as a two-hander revue for Tanya and Rebekah (who I’ve taken to calling Rachel!), it expanded into two one-act plays involving a total of eight performers. Still Life is the play that became a classic of British cinema as “Brief Encounter”, but this staged performance was excellent: the acting was full of character (Rebekah stole the show) but served to accentuate, rather than obscure, the wonderful construction of the script. Everything was in its place, taut, emotive (a cipher for his own hidden sexuality, a la Oscar?) with the occasional laugh to leaven the mix. Red Peppers is more of a comedy, taking a slice of the life of a husband and wife musical hall act sliding down from the peak of their career. The performances were superb, with Tanya hiding her discomfort at performing in her underwear and switching from stage personae to arguments to post-romantic tenderness and back to an hilarious finale trying to tap-dance to a pianist who is trying to floor them with changes of tempo. After the success of this short run (3 nights) and a well-deserved rest, I hope Tanya and Rebekah will come back with something else to please us next year…

Finally, I must share my latest musical discovery: a Nashville-based singer/songwriter(/pianist) called Kira Small. I played some snippets to Jessica yesterday, and we agreed that she had a wonderful voice; I bought her album via iTunes and the songwriting and arranging is also excellent: Nashville cool with soul and jazz intimacy. I found her via a circuitous route (her boyfriend is Bryan Beller, excellent bass player - check out his solo album, View - and regular with my absolute fave musician of the moment, Mike Keneally whose album Guitar Therapy Live is on my regular playlist).

So that’s the week - tomorrow morning, we’re off to Center Parcs for five days of relaxing. Next weekend it’s back to busy-ness: I’m depping on clarinet for a production of Carousel (just the band call… although quite why they hired a musician for a week who couldn’t attend the band call!) followed immediately by a first rehearsal for a showcase evening for RedRoofs theatre school - reuniting me with and Tim Bastock, Mike Wells, along with Scott Burgess who I haven’t played with for since the early days of the Machiel Roets band a couple of years ago. We’re doing a wide range of material ranging from contemporary covers to classics (Loving you, Stuck in the middle with you, Rocking all over the world and… the whole of Bohemian Rhapsody!!)

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it…

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18/02/2007 by Andrew Smith.

How could I have been so naive… all those weeks ago!? Did I really think I’d manage to keep blogging through the last month of hectic activity?

Since the last time I posted here, I’ve played two weeks in the band for a village hall pantomime, spent 3 days in Brussels (being a tourist, but mostly attending a conference on diversity in systems for ethics review of clinical research across the EU… more interesting than it might sound!), performed for a week in an amateur production of “The Boy Friend” and somehow amongst all of that managed to keep up with the regular stuff like family (re-finding the bliss of sorting the recycling and preparing the evening meal) and work (second magazine of the year nearly under my belt…). See my Flickr page for loads of pics of Brussels and The Boy Friend.
(Pauses for breath…)

The one thing that’s fallen between the cracks a bit has been keeping up all those emails back to old friends. I’m consoling myself that some of the might be reading this (… yeah, right!) and that once I’ve fully recovered (ie later this weekend) I might actually be able to spend some time making amends. If any of you are reading this… sorry, and please bear with me just a bit longer.

I’ve also discovered business podcasts, the accessible face of the Harvard Business Review has introduced me to the joys of “Harry Potter Marketing”, ie, building and adapting your brand to follow a particular cohort of customers through their different life-stages, rather than segmenting by age to define customers for “young”, “mature” and “older” products. Not a bad idea, particularly if you have a successful product for which the age segment is just about to “drop off the end”…

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