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If one more person reacts like that, I thought, then I’ll do away with life in civilisation and set-up camp off-grid. Casual superstition—can’t stand it. Leave it to the pros. Take me, a bona fide expert: if Liverpool are playing it’ll be the same socks, the same boxer briefs, a You’ll…

It was the 1998 football World Cup and my parents had bought me the tournament’s seminal hardback guide—a hefty bible of star players, colourful kits and vital statistics. Decked out in Colombia’s banana-yellow strip and sporting a wild mop of blond curls, one footballer captured my imagination above all…

I was 10 when I first attended a chamber music course in the idyllic medieval abbey at Leiston, near Aldeburgh. My family lived in the Highlands of Scotland, and homesickness hit even before Mum and Dad headed back up North. I cried so much that they spent hours in a…

The Wigmore Hall’s backstage walls are adorned with a photographic roster of who’s who in the classical music world. It’s Easter Sunday 2017 – the day of our debut – and these legendary eyes are glaring down in judgement as I apologetically make my way up to the green room.

Just down the Kensal Rise from my London lodgings, I regularly haunt a Neapolitan pizzeria. Their Margherita Parmigiana – a sloppy, smoky celebration of classic ingredients, hung for fun on the house’s signature elastic dough base – is a paragon of human achievement. And so, when my phone vibrated to…

And oomph, that was Banff! We have this joke in quartet that Chris bathes with eternal good humour in the spring of positivity. Faced with the catastrophic or frankly mundane, our cellist usually reacts by outstretching his arms and proclaiming that very day to be the greatest of all time.

Have you ever been to prison? A two-week residency in nigh-on-mythical Aldeburgh is about as liberating as it gets for a young string quartet. It’s Hollywood for classical musicians there, where legends are forged and second violinists get recognised in restaurants. Forget the Circle line, we were chauffeured up to…

We arrived in Paris late Thursday afternoon facing what appeared the cosiest of choices: dinner and a walk in the city, or an evening at Chris’s Aunt’s commodious abode in the suburbs? I have this old haunt you see, the time-warp ‘Polidor’, tucked up the top of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Hemingway…

I was there at the beginning, and thankfully fastened my seatbelt. I hate fairground rides – the screaming, the nausea, the dramatic music before you’re hurled gung-ho with gravity-defying neglect for your nerves and muscles. Living as a string quartet ‘other’ violinist is the proverbial roller coaster, yet I can’t…