Am I the only one who doesn’t like flying? I guess one of the intractable problems I face, is that I really feel that I am the one in the right about not liking it! The entire experience, from being woken by the 5.30am by huge jets that boom over our heads in London, driving to the airport and being charged hundreds of pounds for parking a car for a matter of days, queuing for a bus with too much luggage in the freezing cold at a stop unimaginatively named C6, standing until your legs are aching from a half hour's wait to check in and then finding your are in the wrong line, your wrists white from clutching anxiously to the wretched cello ("Oh! no, sir, I don't care whether or not you've bought a ticket, we can't accept your guitar on board Easyjet, it will have to go in the hold"), sitting around in arcades listening to ghastly piped music, surrounded by shops offering the most depressing aspects of modern consumerism, queuing for security, (Oh! no, sir, you can't bring that guitar on the plane, it has to go through excess baggage"), queuing to show your boarding pass, queuing to hand over your boarding pass, queuing to get to your seat which gets me into a bad temper and gives me a bad back, being pushed into extremely close proximity to people I don't know and certainly don't want to know, squashed into an ill-fitting seat stuffed with so little padding for support that it feels for all the world as if one is perched on a toilet seat, sandwiched between two sweaty, overweight businessmen who immediately take all the elbow room, then locked, yes locked, into this low-ceilinged metal toothpaste tube with stale, recycled air containing every bug known on the planet, a cold hiss bombarding your bald head from an adjustable nipple above you which won't turn off, immediately being told, before you've even moved an inch, what will happen when there is an crash which you have no chance of surviving or how to survive when there is no cabin pressure, God forbid, then taken up to 30,000 feet at a speed in excess of 600 miles an hour, with the opening movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik playing every time the plane shudders and stalls, the lift-off an action of extraordinary violent motion, extreme noise, shaken around like a roller-coaster ride with your popping ears half-deafened, the next insult a display of poisonous plastic food, charged for drinks and getting your change in a useless bloody foreign currency, having to wait half an hour before you can walk up a vibrating hill to the lavatory where there is not sufficient room to turn around to wipe your bum and the previous occupant has left pee all over the seat, and just when you try to get over your first panic attack, the captain comes over the tanoy to remind you that you are traveling close to the speed of sound at some unearthly and unnatural height, and then that's if you are lucky enough not to have been flown into a tall building. And when I think of it, I'm usually traveling to a country where I can't speak the language, I'm worried about the forthcoming performance, I will invariably get ill, and I realise that I don't really know my colleagues at all. Am I am really expected to enjoy this all as if it a privilege? Is this all a sick joke? What on earth can make this atrocious lack of dignity acceptable, apart from the very singular, unassailable truth that it's quicker than any other form of transport. It’s the traveling, not just the arriving, that is important. Why is contemporary society so obsessed with speed of travel? On board a boat, a living, interacting community, you can wander up to feel the salty sea spray on your face as it wafts up to the high decks, you lean over the rail and observe wonderful sunsets to the wondrous sight of dolphins jumping in and out of the wake, the view of cities nestling under hills, with fishing boats wending their way back to port, gulls magnificently riding the updrafts. When going by train, car, boat, bicycle or (my favourite means of transport) walking, one gets the reward of arrival after the richness of the travel. Whilst walking, the brain slows down to a measured pace, the body matches the physical demand, and somewhere between the two it feels like this was how we were designed to be. Every hour of walking takes on the character of the surrounding environment, changes in the weather, the dynamic of one's human companionship. How can the miserable, sterile, dismal experience of flying compare? And that's quite apart from the foul ecological implications of airline use, the unsustainable millions of gallons of fuel being burnt high up in the skies, as these gross, noisy, ungainly metal monsters crash about, pouring their waste on the fragile ecology below. Yes, the views from the skies may be breathtaking, but how many even bother to look out the windows? The whole emotional atmosphere inside the aircraft is one of ennui, stagnation, mediocrity. Only our generation have accepted all this without question. If I were to take you high up above the Alps in a hot air balloon, when you looked over the side, I guess you would have a greatly heightened sense of vertigo, and that would be entirely understandable; the feeling would be caused by your body's desire to protect itself from danger. All fear creates tension, be it physical and/or mental. When I am on a plane, I can't help thinking that I am one of the few who is truly aware what is happening! I am over-excited, overwhelmed by the immensity of the experience of soaring higher than the most audacious bird. How can they all just sit and read their vacuous magazines, snore, vacantly watch violent Hollywood movies, stir stagnant coffee whilst I am looking for twenty golden angels flying in formation, or dragons teaching their young to loop the loop over occluded mountain tops? Everybody seems to cope by suppressing their feelings, their intuition, about what is really going on - they wouldn't feel quite the same if they were strapped on the outside of the plane, would they, now? It's as if there is a collective suspension of judgment going on. It all breaks down suddenly, of course, if there is substantial turbulence. The thin veneer of civilized behavior drops; you are satisfied to discover that most of the passengers on the plane were terrified all along, just like you. I remember when I was on board a plane traveling to Greece over the Alps with about 200 Saudi ladies on board, Harrods shopping bags by their feet, chattering away in Arabian when we violently dropped several hundred feet, all at once. Trays and cups flew in the air, baggage fell from the overhead lockers. Complete panic and pandemonium broke out. Paradise Lost. The ladies screamed and wailed, terror rent the air, there was a grinding of teeth, the clinking of rosary beads and Hail Marys merged with ancient Eastern incantation.....and, Why? Oh Why, shouldn't we panic? How else should these ladies have felt when only a matter of a few years ago, their great-grandparents were riding around on horses in the desert, bartering over camels and silk, and now, without explanation, they are expected to take the ride miles up in the sky, like a fairy tale from the Arabian Nights, without fear or discomfort. I realise that when steam trains were invented, passengers felt intimidated, terrified in the same manner, which we now find laughable, but there is a fundamental difference between training and flying. Firstly, one has the option of getting off a train at frequent stops. You can walk around, see the fields flashing by, and the carriages are less claustrophobic than the confined passenger space in a plane. If you feel ill, or something goes wrong, pull the emergency cord on a train - it will stop. Ask the stewardess to stop a plane in mid-air and you will be forced in a white jacket, injected with valium. And then there's that chilling announcement: "Is there a doctor on board the plane? If so, would he please make himself known to a member of the cabin crew?" Yes, someone is having a heart attack, but nobody is going to make a fuss. We are still going to fly on to Tokyo, because it's too expensive to land in Russia. In any case, the poor bloke looks like he's on the way out in any case. But, seriously, underlying all this, for me, is the belief that the technology which allows us to reach the limits of our atmosphere, or explore outer space, is not necessarily of universal attraction, or even benefit, to mankind. The evaluation of progress in the nature of travel should not be defined in terms of speed and facility alone. With the monster of globalisation let loose on our planet, it is not just digital technology, financial manipulation, that serves the speed of the subjugation of the many by the few. The ridiculous over-movement of humans over the surface of the planet destroys local markets, decimates cultures, annihilates languages, spreads disease and is entirely unsustainable. The cross-fertilisation of ideas and intellects is hardly the object of most human travel. It is more about the exploitation of low-wage economies, mass-market holidays which promote and export the most hideous extravagant, decadent lifestyles to the ruination of some of the most beautiful spots on the planet. Virtually everything I can think about flying is odious. But at the end the day, when I talk to my doctor about loathing it, he simply looks at me right in the eye and said, "Well, if you hate it that much, the answer is simple. Just don't do it!" I think that he might well be right. I'll just retreat back into my bed and curse the invention of the wheel. Justin. WHY THE "LOCRIAN" ENSEMBLE? When, as four young and enthusiastic string playing students, we formed a string quartet at the Royal Academy of Music, we called ourselves the Lydian String Quartet for our first few recitals. Unfortunately we found that the name had already been taken, so we altered the name of our group to the Locrian String Quartet. For ten years, this group played and worked together most successfully, and we were the resident quartet at the University of Hertfordshire. When we decided to disband so as to pursue other musical directions (and to earn some money), I continued to be approached for concerts, so I started the Locrian Ensemble. I cheekily approached the best string players I could find in London, many of whom were working in the studios, playing music for televison and film. They were delighted to be asked to play chamber music, and the Locrian Ensemble was born. The name LOCRIAN is taken from the music theory of ancient Greece, and is a musical mode or diatonic scale However, what is now called the Locrian mode was what the Greeks called the Mixolydian mode. The Locrian mode was of mainly theoretical importance in classical music before the 1850s because of the large amount of dissonance created within the scale and its corresponding chord. It was sometimes referred to as the Devil's scale. In more recent musical pieces, the dissonance or musical imbalance created by the Locrian scale and chord have fallen back in favour (especially in Jazz) in order to create a sense of large tension.