Tyneside-to-Sydney...

August 2004: Our son having finished his GCSE exams, we took the opportunity to have a long holiday in far-away Australia, our tour ending in Sydney. We went to the Opera House Concert Hall for a matinee concert by the Sydney SO of Brahms and Bartok. The piece played as an encore was unfamiliar to me, and afterwards on the quayside I approached another middle-aged couple and asked if they knew what the piece was. (Albert Reimann's Elegy - not significant to this story...) After discussing the concert we were Inevitably asked, (it seemed to happen every day Downunder), 'Where're you from?' 'England - Nottingham', I replied. 'Ah - I thought I detected a Geordie accent' said our Aussie music-lover. Now I'd been born in West Monkseaton near Whitley Bay in 1946 - father was a Geordie, mother was Cumbrian - and apart from a 15 year spell in London, I'd spent most of my life in the East Midlands, and my accent was, I thought, standard RP and (sadly) devoid of any regional accent. I explained all this to the woman, and it turned out that not only were we the same age, but that she had grown up in West Monkseaton too and gone to the Bygate Infant and Junior School, and that we had been in the same class; almost simultaneously we shouted out the teacher's name: Miss Hindmarsh. It goes without saying that we both expressed a liking for Brahms' First Piano Concerto and the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra... Michael Browne