The Pessimism and Occasional Optimism of Juvenile Adulthood

Being a student in a city, my thirst for absorbing culture and the arts at large can only be satisfied by immense value for money. With this characteristic in mind, the bombardment of Facebook Ads for a £6 Scottish Symphony Orchestra (SSO) performance seemed to appeal to the appropriate quadrants of my brain. So I went, and compiled my thoughts on the event into the following paragraphs. The focus of the concert was on Sibelius, a man most famed for giving Finland a sense of cultural independence in an era of Russification. Yet we the audience (made up almost exclusively of people with either spotty faces or grey hair) were also treated to other composers in what soon became a Sveccoman smorgasbord of music flying in the face of so many former lockdown limitations.  The entree was a short brass rendition of Bach's 'Es ist genug' followed by Magnus Lindberg's 'Chorale', which took inspiration from the piece which preceded it. Both carried a world-weariness to the...

Cycling is a delightful sport, able to highlight the beauty of our natural surroundings, whilst also enabling us to take pleasure in the intense, unparalleled suffering of our favourite athletes. Nominally a team sport, it carries hundreds of individual stories each encased within a race, and dozens of different narratives and micro competitions that can intrigue and amaze. I'm therefore being flippant with the title of this article, though it also isn't wrong. For whilst 2021 was the year that Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic reinforced Slovenia's sporting superiority in three week races, it was also a year of redemption, reinvention and glory for those whose recent records have been hampered by illness, injury or the mundanities of domestique duty. It is a pity that we never witnessed Roglic and Pogacar going head to head at the greatest race of them all, with crashes and abandons depriving Pogacar of his two fiercest rivals in Roglic and Geraint Thomas, a man whose recent...