“It’s not a role I really understand.” In a confrontational situation, the wife, she says, tends to attack the other woman rather than her erring husband. Victoria has only once been challenged by a territorial wife “She wrote to me. She said she’d been happy for a few years after their marriage and I remember thinking that wasn’t very good and why hadn’t she left him before? I was being young and horrible – I’ve learned more sympathy since then. Looking back, she was very good about it.”For an example of how not to do it, Victoria would point to Monica Lewinsky. I like Christmas on my own, I was never one for family events.”She says that she likes to keep a part of herself separate for work (but lets slip in the book that she’ll abandon a project at a moment’s notice for an afternoon’s frolicking). I have a small group of close friends who know about my situation, and phases when I see friends who aren’t so close – supposing my lover is on a family holiday. But they have to come second.” Landmarks like Christmas lose their significance “You make your own landmarks.

Mistresses talk about lonely weekends, the feeling of abandonment when the man plays happy family holidays in August. “You have to learn not to look forward to things,” explains Victoria. “If you plan a couple of days away together you know it can go wrong You can’t let yourself bank on anything. But then it’s nice when things do happen because you can’t believe they’re going to.”She tries not to ditch her friends too often because her lover happens to be unexpectedly free “But I don’t always succeed.

We will eat alfalfa sprouts, kelp, hiziki (don’t ask), drink miso, horsetail tea Natural Uncooked We will detox. It’s always good to know when someone’s pleased with the way they’ve handled a tricky passage in life, isn’t it? Mind you – I’ve handled mine pretty well. But more of that later.Ms Kenton is an alternative health guru A Cancerian Dresses in white and floaty, summer and winter She’s a natural beauty Great genes. Sure, there were hot flushes, night sweats, blood trickling down her skirt in the boardroom But she gloried in every natural, female moment Loved the whole bloody thing. This is not a package holiday where you pay your money, take your anti-diarrhoea pills and know exactly what to expect.Leslie Kenton’s new book, ‘10 Steps To A Natural Menopause’, is published by Vermilion, pounds 6.99.NOMARCELLED’ARGY SMITHLESLIE KENTON’S menopause was a breeze A natural, drug-free, non-HRT breeze.

It’s a time of celebration where a woman’s creativity until then bound to her biology is set free. The passage we make at menopause – like giving birth – is a profound one which can lead us to discover the real treasures of life.Each woman is biochemically and spiritually unique. So is the inner journey she must make if she is to succeed in her quest for wholeness. Ideally women should stop eating highly processed convenience foods with junk fats and choose traditional herbal remedies instead: things like wild yam (from which many of the drugs sold for HRT were first derived), chastetree, motherwort and black cohosh.In other cultures, the transformation in a woman’s life between the ages of 35 and 60 is considered a journey towards a new freedom. It diminishes a woman’s personal power and takes away control.If only more women and their doctors knew that hot flushes, dry vaginas and early ageing can often be addressed more safely and successfully – and less expensively – by alterations in diet. Plant-based treatments from wild yam or angelica gradually eliminate them – but few doctors even know this. Similarly, sprouting alfalfa will help detoxify the body of excess oestrogens, horsetail tea is rich in bone-strengthening silicon and sea plants like kelp and wakame help build up calcium levels.I object strongly to the propaganda that accompanies the sale of HRT.

No wonder a recent Swedish survey showed that 48 per cent of women who go on HRT stop taking the drug within 12 months.Unlike changes in diet and lifestyle, at best HRT is a stopgap which offers little in the way of strengthening and rebalancing a woman’s body Take hot flushes. This practice makes virtually every woman a “patient”, not only where it may not be necessary but even when it can be dangerous. YES

LESLIE KENTON
NOBODY prepares you for the menopause. Nobody tells you that if you are going to have hot flushes or emotional instability they are likely to be far worse before you stop menstruating than after. Nor does anybody explain that waking at three in the morning filled with sadness or anger is likely to be not some aberration of nature, but a messenger announcing the menopause is near.Because few doctors are trained in nutrition or understand the use of plant substances and natural hormones there are few alternatives for women. Most are immediately put on drug-based HRT.Yet the experience of HRT varies widely from one woman to another. More commonly a woman will feel better for a few months, then report unpleasant side-effects: migraine, depression, weight gain.

Hair by Giuseppe Bulzis at Windle using Bumble & Bumble (tel: 0171 497 2393). Modelled by Aude.Shot at Alphaville studios (tel: 0171 490 8889).. 92 Arndale Centre, Manchester (tel: 0181 991 4759).Cream embroidered bag pounds 33, Billy Bag, Harrods, Knightsbridge, London SW1 (tel: 0171 730 1234).Hair clip, pounds 14.99, Johnny Loves Rosie, Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, London W1 (tel: 0171 375 3574).Embroidered slippers (sizes 2-8), pounds 19.99, Carvela, Selfridges, Oxford Street, London W1 (tel: 0171 546 1888).Photographs by BECKY SMALLMake-up by Sharon Willmore using Cosmetics A la Carte. Olive skirt with leather trim (sizes 8-16), pounds 175, MaxMara, 32 Sloane Street, London SW1. Selfridges, Trafford Centre, Manchester (tel: 0171 287 3434).

It lists lots of useful addresses, such as that for the cosmetic camouflage network (no website but you can e-mail on thropm resources.demon.co.uk), loads of info about eczema – what causes it, different types, info for teachers and so on. And there’s an excellent events calendar which lists meetings up and down the country for related issues.For a bit of light relief, go to www.beautylink where you can turn to Angora “ask me, darlin’” Teasdale for advice. The currently posted problem is about dark circles under the eyes and the answer is really rather good. Angora, bless her, not only talks you through the different causes but also tells you that “Indian women who are prone to dark circles swear by red lipstick”. It has a quarterly newsletter that tells you the latest news on skin issues – August’s details how the British Association of Dermatologists is launching guidelines for GP training in dermatology. This is made up of “an alliance of patient groups, companies and other organisations with a common interest in skin health” – folk such as the National Eczema Society ( www.eczema ), the British Association of Dermatologists and the Health Education are involved. The Erno Laszlo site ( www.ernolaszlo ) went live only at the beginning of this year so some sections aren’t fully up and running yet.

In the near future you will be able to answer some questions and get “clocked”, the Laszlo method of telling you if you have a dry, oily or in-between skin Again, you can’t buy on-line “yet, but this may change”. (It’s the same story with all of them – I think they’re looking for some magic formula whereby they can sell online but not piss the big stores off. There are relevant articles from newspapers you can link into and you can also buy the products by sending an e-mail.Regular readers will know that Helen Sher advocates the use of water, as does the man who invented the splashing technique, Erno Laszlo. Good luck.) You can read all about the Laszlo philosophy (and my spies tell me that after reading this newspaper’s profile on Erno a few month’s ago, someone Very Important Indeed asked for more info to be sent to her) and e-mail an adviser with your skin problem.My vote for the most useful site goes to the Skincare Campaign ( www.skincarecampaign /). There is information on acne, the drugs available and their side effects (Helen strongly believes acne and other skin conditions, such as rosacea, can be treated without drugs); what Sher System products can do for you (lots judging by the letters she receives, and I’ve seen them). A really excellent site is Sher System’s ( www.sher.co.uk/skincare).

On the other hand, if you don’t sell him a gun, someone else will. So sell it to him, and stop shilly-shallying around!But is that true? Will someone else always sell him a gun? And even if they do, is that justification for doing something that may lead to bloodshed?Robin Cook writes: I have an idea that will allay your very real and respectable fears. There must always be an ethical dimension in our strategy, and it does you credit to remember it. You might say that guns have more peaceful than violent purposes!But what if he turns out to need the gun for criminal purposes? What if he is really an armed robber in pursuit of his trade? I would then be aiding and abetting a criminal act.Robin Cook writes: Yes, that is a real consideration.

How can a gun be used for peaceful purposes?Robin Cook writes: Oh, easily For target practice For sport For rabbit hunting For starting a race For deterring a burglar As an intriguing paperweight… Then if he shoots his wife, or indeed anyone else, it won’t be your fault.I’m a bit worried about this idea of using a gun peacefully. It is for self-defence, isn’t it?Yes, that’s what he says, but how can I be sure of that ? I mean, who’s to say that in one of these domestic imbroglios he might not in the heat of the moment draw his gun and shoot his wife dead? I’d feel a bit guilty then.Robin Cook writes: Well, what you have to do in these circumstances is get him to make a solemn declaration that he will use his gun for peaceful purposes only and not kill his wife. If he has a violent streak, he certainly never shows it in my presence.

We now know this to be true – indeed a leading Harvard nutritionist was recently advocating a largely macrobiotic diet. But if wholefood has come a long way in the last three decades, so has Mr Sams.Yin Yang closed not long after it opened, but in 1967 Mr Sams also founded Whole Earth Foods, which in the UK helped pioneer the introduction of a mass audience to healthy eating. Once, after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, he bought a radioactivity testing machine to analyse the becquerel levels of imported hazelnuts Officials assured him the nuts weren’t radioactive. The machine said otherwise.
Mr Sams, American-born and educated but a British resident since the Sixties, has often been proved right since. In 1967, when he started Yin Yang, macrobiotics were labelled, by one Harvard authority, the “hippie death diet”, and the FBI raided and closed down the macrobiotic book shop in New York for preaching the message that cancer might be prevented by a healthy diet. Craig Sams is a man of many parts.

Inventor of the Herbal Burble soft drink, once-contributor to Oz magazine and founder of Yin Yang, London’s first macrobiotic restaurant, he takes his guardianship of good food very seriously indeed. They are based on European rules but no other European country is said to be implementing them so harshly. If these reforms go ahead, producers say, the dream of a local organic economy, supplying meat on a small scale to high street butchers and farmers’ markets – not merely on a large scale to the supermarkets – could prove stillborn.. The Government is introducing new veterinary inspection standards for abattoirs that will, the organic movement argues, result in the closure of hundreds of small local slaughter houses and may make it impossible for many smaller farmers now considering the switch to make a living. So it’s perhaps not surprising that a chicken which forages for its food and picks up a range of trace nutrients from grasses and soils will taste better than one living virtually immobile in a battery unit and subsisting on standardised feed.It’s not all rosy for organic producers, however. The taste of meat, he says, has been shown to improve with age, but conventional meat producers slaughter their animals young It’s also dependent on diet and exercise. Much mass- produced meat, complain the cognoscenti, tastes like polystyrene.

By contrast, Mr Kennard speaks of vanished delicacies such as “salt-marsh lamb”, so- called because of the wild marshland herbs the animals fed on while grazing. Concerns about antibiotic residues in conventionally produced meat look certain to fuel further growth.Although, as Mr Kennard says, there’s not much magic or mystery about organic meat – it’s the way livestock farming used to be, before it began relying on drugs, chemicals and factory units – the legal definitions introduced by the EU in the early Nineties have given the market stability and confidence, and they have also persuaded the supermarkets that organic meat is here to stay.But for many meat eaters, it’s the taste that seems to matter. It’s the industry’s boast that BSE has never occurred in an animal reared on an organic farm, and the BSE crisis is one factors driving consumer demand for organic meat, which is in turn driving the supermarkets to demand it. He hasn’t regretted his decision to go organic: during the past three years his business has been growing at an annual rate of 60 per cent.Organic meat represents a tiny fraction of the organic market – five per cent, according to the Soil Association’s organic food and farming report, compared with 54 per cent for fruit and vegetables – but it is busy catching up.By next year, compared with 1997, organic beef output will have more than trebled, lamb production will be up nearly sevenfold and pig output will have increased more than ninefold.The reasons for the growth are not hard to come by. From his base at Graig Farm in the Welsh hills near Llandrindod Wells, he supplies retailers and also operates a mail order and delivery service, specialising in a range of high quality produce from Speckles and Derbyshire Gritstones (breeds of sheep) to what is said to be the world’s first organically registered wild fish, imported from the British island of St Helena in the south Atlantic. But his favourite reply was from an elderly lady and it concerned his chicken. She declared that she hadn’t tasted anything like it since 1943.”We’re quite proud of that letter,” he says.
Mr Kennard is one of a rapidly growing band of producers who have realised the potential of organic meat.

MARK JAMES, who yesterday boarded Concorde with the least experienced European Ryder Cup team to fly supersonic to the States since Tony Jacklin started the tradition in 1983, will not guarantee every member of the side gets a match prior to next Sunday’s singles, writes Andy Farrell. MARK JAMES, who yesterday boarded Concorde with the least experienced European Ryder Cup team to fly supersonic to the States since Tony Jacklin started the tradition in 1983, will not guarantee every member of the side gets a match prior to next Sunday’s singles, writes Andy Farrell.

“Of course I want to try and get every player a game prior to the singles,” James said, “but I will do whatever is best for the team.”
Over the next three days of practice at the Country Club of Brookline in Boston, James has to weld together a team full of newcomers, and whose leading two players are unhappy with their games, into a force to take on Ben Crenshaw’s star-studded line-up in the 33rd Ryder Cup starting on Friday.
The Americans are smarting from defeats in the last two matches, and to the International side at the Presidents Cup last year. But they have an injury doubt over Davis Love, who was told to rest for the last two weeks after suffering from a pinched nerve in his back.
James, although not publicly saying so, must turn around the form of his two most experienced players in quick time. If a product contains between 70 and 95 per cent of organic ingredients, it can be labelled “Made with Organic Ingredients”, with the actual percentage listed.Yet arguments have always raged about what constitutes organic produce. The Soil Association is the major standard-setting body; the others are the Organic Food Federation, Organic Farmers and Growers, the Biodynamic Agricultural Association, the Scottish Organic Producers’ Association, and Irish Organic Farmers and Growers.Under EU law, processed foods described directly as organic must have a minimum of 95 per cent organic ingredients by weight. In the UK, the Register of Organic Food Standards (UKROFS), which is part of the Ministry of Agriculture, oversees the bodies charged with the task of setting standards and certifying that products comply with the regulations.

Organic farmers place the emphasis on soil health, rotating crops and using animal manure. Animals are reared without the drugs, antibiotics and growth-promoters that are now routine in conventional livestock farming. Animal welfare standards are high – animals have access to fields and generous space inside. Not only is organic food free of genetically modified ingredients but certain processes, such as irradiation, hydrogenation and fumigation, are also banned.Much of this is now governed by law, specifically an EU regulation of 1991 which built on existing schemes, and enforced by trading standards officers. Panthers had beaten Cardiff Devils 4-0 at home on Saturday, but were soon behind on Sunday when Denis Chasse netted the first of a hat- trick.

Other strikes came from Todd Goodwin (2), Todd Kelman, Kevin Riehl and P C Drouin.In Cardiff, the Devils and Ayr Scottish Eagles settled for a point apiece from a 2-2 draw after overtime. The Soil Association, Britain’s main organic certifying body, is currently trying to decide on a code for the health and beauty business, particular products like herbal medicines and supplements, which would for the first time determine what can and cannot be described as organic.
In food, organic means that no artificial chemical fertilisers and pesticides have been used in production. And with anything organic now apparently able to command an enthusiastic consumer response and a sizeable market premium, the word needs protection. It has come to signify not merely how a product is produced and manufactured but a way of looking at the world. So what is exactly is an organic product?

Health and beauty is one of the areas where until now nobody has thought it necessary to say what we mean by organic But “organic” has turned into a highly charged word. You can even buy a shampoo of that name which promises to penetrate your hair roots with ingredients “essential in nature for true shine”.

Look at the label, however, and you will stumble across a bewildering list of largely unpronounceable chemical ingredients. Organic is a word whose time has come. The world No 1 has not played for the last three weeks, having won twice, at the USPGA and the NEC Invitational, in the previous three weeks.
But, remembering four years ago at Oak Hill, when he did not win a point, Crenshaw said: “I took a few weeks off before Rochester, and I wasn’t much help I didn’t pull my weight.”. Along with Padraig Harrington, playing in the BC Open, and Parnevik, Garcia was already in America, although his charity event last week was cancelled due to Hurricane Floyd.
The severe weather also disrupted the BC Open, but only three US players had taken up Crenshaw’s urgings to play their way into the match Many decided to rest, including Woods. Any thoughts that the 19-year-old Spaniard was not ready for the most pressured three days in golf were dismissed when Garcia won the Irish Open, his sixth tournament as a pro, and then chased Tiger Woods all the way at the USPGA.
While Olazabal may team up with Miguel Angel Jimenez, Garcia could play with Jesper Parnevik. All European teams tend to be greater than the sum of their parts,” he added.In Sergio Garcia, however, Europe might find a new talisman.

His companions, a motley bunch, include George Clyde (Simon Baker) and the black slave he freed, Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), nominal leader Black John (James Caviezel) and a mad-dog gunman named Pitt Mackeson (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). The early stages of the film are occupied with swift and unheroic blasts of violence.More pertinently, it’s a war between neighbours, which Lee conveys with a fine economy of touch and poignancy of detail. When Jake and Jack return to camp after their latest scrape they notice a group of chained Union prisoners, one of whom calls out to Jake – they knew each other as boys. Jake secures the man’s release, on the condition that he takes a message to his superiors offering an exchange of men. They wore their hair long, favoured dandyish duds and murdered with a savagery remarkable even in those unforgiving years.
The film’s focus is the coming-of-age of Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and his best friend, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), who join up with the bushwhackers after their lives are torn apart by Union forces. Ride With The Devil is based upon a novel by Daniel Woodrell and bears the hallmarks of epic.

It’s a grand panorama of love and war set on the Kansas-Missouri border, yet its heroes are not at all the traditional embodiments of courage and nobility one might expect. Being a director who likes to stand at an angle to his subjects, Lee has chosen a story about bushwhackers, a renegade band of paramilitaries who fought for the Confederate cause. “I grew up watching martial arts movies, so they’re in my blood, but getting them on screen is a different thing altogether. The wire work,” he grimaces, “You know, making people fly?”As usual, the director has set himself an impossible task Still, if anyone can make actors fly, it’s Ang Lee.. The Taiwan-born director Ang Lee can’t be faulted for ambition. Following his trilogy of domestic comedy dramas (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) he went on to explore Regency England in Sense and Sensibility and Watergate-era US in The Ice Storm.

Different as they are in period and setting, his films share common cause in their delicate notation of social codes and the underlying passions those codes are intended to check. Never likely to cover the same ground twice, Lee and his screenwriter, James Schamus, have taken on the weighty and still emotionally fraught subject of the American Civil War. For now, though, he’s heading back to where he began with the Beijing-based samurai movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.Three months into a five-month shoot Lee’s struggling with the fight scenes. It took me years to get back my sense of self.”That has worked, of course, to his advantage. The great thing about Lee is his ability to put himself into different places and times with an uncanny historical and emotional accuracy. Then again,” he adds, “I do try to avoid being black and white. When I grew up in Taiwan,” he continues, “it was the most anti-Communist place in the world Everything to do with Communism was banned.

Then when I went to the States and started to read Communist books it was a big shock to me after all those years, to discover we were the bad guys My whole value system was turned upsidedown. Boot camp followed in which the cast had weapons training and were fed period snacks such as salt pork bacon. Maybe, I suggest, his mixture of rehearsal and history seminars was a way to sneak a little of his father’s education into the entertainment business.”Perhaps subconsciously I suppose I can be a bit preachy at times Not only to the actors, but maybe with the audience as well. While it’s not difficult to picture Lee dancing with his cast in Sense and Sensibility, it’s harder to imagine the softly-spoken director down on the range for Ride With the Devil.While Lee never went bareback riding with the boys, he did take them paintball shooting, before giving them big folders of American history to read.

We were like young gymnasts who throw their bodies around without any thought of hurting themselves. And what Simon and I didn’t know in the late Seventies enabled us to take all sorts of risks which we would both think very carefully about now.”

There can be practically no risk that Ed Smith, who’s just stepped down as Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, took with its former conductor Simon Rattle that didn’t pay off. We were like young gymnasts who throw their bodies around without any thought of hurting themselves. And what Simon and I didn’t know in the late Seventies enabled us to take all sorts of risks which we would both think very carefully about now.”

“There was no fear. “There was no fear. During the period 1992-96 in Scotland 69 people were found guilty of killing their partners: 40 males and 29 females. More than 30 per cent of the female perpetrators received non-custodial sentences amounting to admonishment or probation; the proportion of males receiving such sentences was 7.5 per cent.

Among those receiving custodial sentences, nearly 50 per cent of females were sentenced to four years or less; fewer than 10 per cent of males were similarly sentenced.
I would be surprised if patterns of sentencing by the courts of England and Wales are very different, not least because of the conclusion in Home Office Research Finding 58 (1997) that in these courts, violent offences are dealt with in such a way that “even when other factors such as previous criminal record, seriousness of offence and type of court were taken into account, women were less likely to be given a custodial sentence than men”.PHILIP PERCIVALGlasgow. It is no way to treat the poor and vulnerable.MURIEL TURNER(Baroness Turner of Camden)London NW6. Sir: While I agree with Natasha Walter that Zoora Shah’s life- sentence for killing her partner seems harsh in comparison to the six- year sentence passed on David Hampson (Comment, 1 November), one case alone cannot support her contention that the judicial system is prejudiced against women. At least in Scotland, figures provided by the Scottish Office suggest the contrary. There has been little discussion of the way in which the contributory principle is gradually being eroded and replaced by benefits dependent upon means-testing.For some reason, this is regarded as “modernising”. But means-tested benefits have a low take-up and are expensive to administer Many claimants find the process humiliating. Yet the benefit being removed is a contributory one, based on the National Insurance contributions of the deceased spouse.

Aftermath quiche is accurately used: Dame Edna’s recipe for leftovers.. Sir: Donald Macintyre is right to draw attention to the comparative lack of interest in the Government’s plan to remove the right to widows’ pensions (“Brave move, Mr Darling Pity you may not succeed”, 2 November). The Government’s case is that it is equalising rights between widows and widowers. To do so, it is removing the right to a pension for widows and replacing it with a bereavement allowance, payable to both sexes for six months only. In the Lords I made no progress with a series of amendments to try to restore widows’ pensions, but a number of us did succeed (against Government opposition) in increasing the period of the allowance from six months to two years.
The Government’s policy represents a massive transfer of resources from women to men, but this has gone largely unremarked in the media. It is, via Old English, from various Teutonic words of a m root for mow.

I lost my studio – stayed pretty intoxicated for eight years I learnt, though… things that still keep me alive.”Even before this collapse, the glory days for Penn and Oldham were almost done. It was Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination, and the black riots and militancy it sparked, which laid them low. The unlikely bond between races that had forged Southern Soul bent and broke. “It was nothing you could write down, or see in a paper,” Oldham says sadly “It was just in the air I was the last one to understand it I wondered why it was, because I’m the same. He was “saved” in 1981 after extreme behaviour in the wake of his hit- making almost dragged him under “I was ’saved’ as a child,” he says.

“But I went as far as I could, and I just about died, before I found a way back to the church house. In 1969, I’d gone out on my own, left American, and built my own studio I figured I had it made. I had a lot to learn.”In the Seventies, there were a lot of parties, but not a lot of songs Whole lot of first lines, and no verses. When they wrote a No 1 for the future Big Star singer Alex Chilton’s Box Tops, a second chart-topper was demanded – and delivered.”I was tuned into Top 40 radio, and I was tuned into R’n'B radio,” says Penn. “I had ‘em both in my sights, just like a kid sitting there with a gun. And I would try to think, wherever they are, go somewhere else.

That’s always been my philosophy for producing or songwriting, because it just ain’t much fun running with a bunch. You get trampled.”Like other Southern musicians of his generation Penn has had to wrestle with the mixture of godly and godless in R’n'B, with its Gospel roots. “I thought, I haven’t had this much money since I picked cotton. So I stayed in bands.” He met Penn in a studio in Florence, Alabama in 1965 They wrote together day and night and success was swift They became a hit factory. After Ray Charles, I didn’t care about white music for a long time.

Nick Cave – to whom his vocals have justly been compared – seems like a laughing hyena next to him Think of a more downbeat Tom Waits with a bad case of ‘flu. Backed by sparse, twangy guitars, shifty percussion and vocals from ex-Pale Saint Colleen Brown. For a band struggling to make themselves heard over the bar-room chatter, White Hotel could shake you to the core.Low, whose cracked and craggy features look as though they could have been carved from the Appalachian mountains, was on sublimely funereal form. SOMETIMES, THERE’S nothing more satisfying than self-pity. It’s like looking in the mirror after you’ve been crying and admiring your state of disrepair, or listing your reasons why life is not worth living in front of a sympathetic audience. Ken Low, guitarist and vocalist in White Hotel, was positively wallowing in it, rocking back and forth on his chair and inviting us to share in his psychodrama. Indeed, the world was weighing so heavily on his shoulders, he couldn’t even bring himself to stand up.
His distant rumbling tones were sometimes so quiet you had to press your ears against the speakers to hear anything.

But, just as you adjusted, discordant shafts of sound snapped through your psyche as if in punishment. Some of her earlier compositions were written when she felt the need to conform to a modernist, serial way of writing “I found it easy to conform,” said Wallen “I like numbers and I like manipulating musical material… but I thought it would be more interesting to see what notes I could put together when I didn’t have a rule book.”I remember going to a tutorial and my lecturer asking, ‘how is it possible that you can just pluck notes out of the air?’, but that’s where they belong, that’s where they live They’re not in a box!”John L Walters. One of the festival’s featured composers is Errollyn Wallen, working with locals for “Songs in the Key of Kirklees” and performed by the Kaleidoscope Ensemble (19 Nov), her own 10-piece Ensemble X (20 Nov) and electric cellist Philip Sheppard (22 Nov), who also plays a London date with Wallen at the 12 Bar Club, Denmark St (12 Nov).Wallen’s CD Meet me at Harold Moore’s was closer to pop or theatre music than classical recital but full of the attention to detail that characterises her orchestral commissions. The LJF also dishes up the Irish folk fusion Sin (QEH, 20 Nov); Linton Kwesi Johnson with Dennis Bovell’s Dub Band (RFH 18 Nov) and a Duke Ellington tribute from Mathias Ruegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra (QEH, 12 Nov). There’s no shortage of Ellington memorials at the moment, with new albums by Dr John (Duke Elegant, Parlophone) and Daniel Barenboim (Tribute to Ellington, Teldec).Over at Huddersfield, the performers include Psappha (28 Nov) a student big band working with Louis Andriessen and Steve Martland (19 Nov), the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Cornelius Cardew Ensemble with its 10- minute “pub operas”.

As well as senior figures such as Joe Zawinul (Barbican, 16 Nov) and Carla Bley (RFH 20 Nov), the London Festival takes in Rhys Chatham’s Hard Edge Quintet (Embassy Rooms, 16 Nov) and the ambitious hybrid of Grand Union’s Echoes from Anatolia featuring Sabahat and Cemal Akkiraz (Union Chapel, 13 Nov). ECM’s “Selected Signs” series in Brighton includes the sublime Dino Saluzzi and Eberhard Weber (19 Nov) and Anouar Brahem and John Surman (tomorrow night), while the “Rainbow over Bath” series soldiers on with concerts by Regular Music 2 and Tim Brady (26 Nov), an electro-acoustic music weekend (27-28 Nov) and a chance to hear Howard Skempton’s Hurdy-Gurdy concerto (28 Nov).While Bath and Huddersfield take admirably wide sweeps across several musical types, broadly defined as contemporary, it is interesting to see how “jazz” festivals often have the widest programmes. THE ECONOMICS of music-making and CD manufacture mean that solo albums will always be with us. You can find a CD with almost any kind of solitary expression from hard-wrought compositional tours de force to the sound of someone leaning against an electronic keyboard. Yet making a solo album that people will actually want to hear requires courage, a great repertoire and instrumental mastery that bears close scrutiny. Matthias Ziegler comes close to these criteria: his album Uakti (New Albion) features his pieces for various flutes with draughty adaptations of a couple of Recercadas by 16th-century composer Diego Ortiz.

Beautifully recorded by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Uakti may not be profound or “significant” but it’s a joy to hear someone take pleasure in music-making without the pressure of posterity or Christmas sales.
November is a good month for new music events, with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (17-28 Nov) and the London Jazz Festival (12- 22 Nov), which umbrellas a score of venues and hundreds of gigs. “Simon may have had enough of me, I may have had enough of him and, anyway, I don’t speak German! I’m lucky to be able to break loose and do this but I’m a single man without any responsibilities and I can live quite comfortably without having to earn for a few months I’m off to do what I’ve always wanted. I’m going on a cargo boat to the West Indies with a lot of books, and scores and CDs of Sibelius’s seven symphonies and I’m going to study them, bar by bar, for fun…”. It hasn’t happened yet and I think there’s a long way to go before both orchestras and Regional Arts Boards will feel the circumstances are right. There aren’t enough people with sufficient expertise to contribute in all the regions and there are already signs that the bureaucratic buck is simply being passed from the Arts Council to the regional boards.”At 50, he’s got no intention of retiring yet.