Yesterday, I had a meeting with Neil Pickering, who's one of the chairmen of my halls of residence. He's one of the friendliest people I know, always with a smile and something nice to say. He was a resident here as well back in the 50s, and since then he's been the de facto liaison with other former residents. He's often travelling about, and he goes to Malaysia quite often. In fact, he's very active in the British-Malaysian Society. Which brings me to the point: He's organising a concert by several young Malaysian musicians, and I'm going to be one of them!

There will be four musicians in the concert: Jane Ng, a violin post-grad from RCM, May Yee, a piano post-grad from RCM, and Bobby Chen, who's one of the most prominent pianists to have emerged from Malaysia in recent years, and yours truly of course. Now, playing in the same concert as two music post-grads and a reasonably famous pianist (I've heard of him before this, so...) is no joke when I'm the only amateur among the lot! We won't actually be playing together though...instead, we'll play individually one after another. To make things more interesting, the Malaysian High Commissioner to Britain will be there, along with a host of other diplomats and dignitaries.

It's been decided that each of us will get about 15-20 minutes of playing time, and I'll be playing first. So, the challenge for me is to present pieces which are sufficiently within my grasp so that I won't embarrass myself too much, yet solid enough not to seem too flimsy in comparison with the other guys' repertoire. A wee bit challenging, considering that I haven't been practising consistently in months! Fortunately, the concert is schedule for October, so I'll have a few months to try and bring things up to scratch. This will be by far the biggest performance I've ever had to give.

Oh, and the other day I got back a 2000-word review that I had to do last term. The marker's comments were priceless: 'This is really excellent. Also very well presented and easy to read. Thank you for the pleasure of reading it'. :P