After being inundated with expressions of interest regarding Gordon Duncan’s smallpipes, a spokesman for the Gordon Duncan Memorial Trust asks that no more offers be sent. The successful purchaser will be notified shortly.
One of the UK’s leading virologist professors – he is also a piper – features in a free online music performance on Thursday. The performance features eight health professional data researchers who are also musicians and who will be performing music created from their own COVID-19 experiences.
The show is an initiative of the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) based in Manchester, England.
Professor Calum Semple OBE, features on the programme. Calum is Professor of Child Health and Outbreak Medicine & Consultant Respiratory Paediatrician at the University of Liverpool and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. He is a piper and was featured on Bagpipe.News last year.
Calum is also the Chief Investigator of the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC4C), a UK-wide consortium of around 200 doctors and scientists from 350 hospitals who are committed to answering urgent questions about COVID-19. Outputs from the consortium have informed the UK government’s response to the pandemic. It is one of the largest COVID-19 projects in the world.
For Calum, the show is about coming together to play, in the same way the consortium came together to respond to the challenge of the virus. The show is called The Awesome Machinery of Nature. The performance will be followed by a recorded discussion.
• Watch the performance by clicking here on Thursday.
The 2020 event held to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of St. Valery was repeated yesterday (Saturday 12th).
Poppyscotland, Legion Scotland, RCET: Scotland’s Armed Forces Children’s Charity and 51 Brigade joined forces again to mark the anniversary. The battle’s anniversary will now be marked formally each year.
• NB, in its statement, PoppyScotland claims last year’s event was “was the largest remote mass piping event in history with more than 450 people registered to take part.” We would like to point out that this is not the case. The largest event of this nature was the 2018 ‘Battle’s Over’ piping event held to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War.
Around 3,500 pipers worldwide participated in this remote mass piping event, which was co-organised and promoted by the Piping Times magazine and the College of Piping in conjunction with Bruno Peek of Great Yarmouth, England.