Making a stand

I try not to think much about posture, simply because it was something that I used to have to think about too often. My mother seems to have spent most of my formative years poking me between the shoulder blades with the injunction to "stand up straight, child", only varied by "sit up straight". The only thing I remember my ballet teaching saying was "head up, bottom in, tummy in", and when I acquired a new violin teacher I remember her opening salvo being "I don't like the way you stand..."

I do sometimes suggest to the fan that his playing might be improved if he didn't hunch over his fiddle while sat on an armed chair, which pins his elbows to his sides. Perhaps it is my aversion to thinking of my own posture that has stopped me realising that if I don't sit up straight then my drones drop onto the stock, and my hands come in close to my body, making me more likely to rest my wrist on the bellows. Not that this moment of enlightenment helped this evening when I found it difficult to get comfortable.

I've been dreaming a lot of my pipes recently. I don't have problems with posture, bellows, wrists or anything else in my dreams. In fact, last night, in a real throwback to my adolescence, I dreamed I could fly, and all the time I was flying I had my pipes in my arms. I'm not sure what an interpreter of dreams would make of this, but I wonder if it's linked to yesterday's session, when I made plenty of mistakes, but did not have one moment of stage fright.