Some Personal Development

Just before Christmas, the group of beginner cellists that I have been playing with for over a year, Oxford Cellists, took part in a tango workshop. We played a selection of tangos whilst dancers performed. Below are a couple of photos from that lovely evening. To me dancing the tango seemed a lot harder than playing the cello.

http://www.facebook.com/oxfordcellists

Photo: Julia Diamantis

Photo: Julia Diamantis

In January, I found myself on a coach to London to enrol as a doctoral student at the Institute of London. This is, pehaps, the end of the beginning as Churchill said, of a process that started a year ago with the birth of this blog. One of my first entries was about becoming a 'fully cooked person' and doctoral studies is as much a part of that for me as my cello playing.

"When someone is described as fully cooked I think it means they have experience and knowledge, and they have learnt much. It's sort of the opposite of saying a person is a raw beginner - that they are 'uncooked'. I suppose it's strange to talk about oneself as nearly fully cooked, or almost ready to serve. I don't know why I have always used this term to describe myself and other people, nor do I know where it comes from. The connection to food is a useful one though. Quite often you meet a person for the first time and they appear to you to be an adult, grown up and mature. Then, as you get to know them better, you realise that actually they are not that at all. They are like a pudding taken too early from the oven. It looks cooked on the outside but inside it's still got a way to go before it's ready. This happens the other way round as well, when you meet an incrediby sage young person, who you expected to be inexperienced in life.

I'm not saying it's disappointing to find that people aren't fully cooked. Becoming a cooked person takes a long time for some people, maybe a lifetime." Georgina Dalton, February, 2012

Institute of Education, London