It’ll be a long time before I achieve this again …

In my run tonight I went further than before (6.4km), with a longer workout time (40 mins), and managed a personal best for the mile (according to dear old Lance Armstrong).

This still isn’t much set alongside my marathon-running colleagues, but it’s now part of my training (ooo errr that sounds grand) for the Evesham Vale 10K I’m going to enter in mid-July. If anyone would like to know more, please get in touch … it’d be more fun to run it with some others.

I guess I need to think of a charity to collect for. Though really I’m doing it just as a personal goal.

… is the number of British towns the average Brit visits in their lifetime (according to the Telegraph). Unbelievably (to me) it continues to say that 1 million of us have never our hometown.

But how many towns are there in Britain? Wikipedia has useful links. From that I make it about 1172 in England, 137 in Wales and 233 in Scotland, making 1542 total. Have I visited more than 30 of them? I would certainly hope so, but I’m not going to try right now. Question is, how many should be reasonable to visit in a lifetime?

Continuing the Jazz Festival reports, I’ll start on a low note. The gig I was most looking forward to — Nikki Yeoh’s piano trio — was cancelled, because there was a long power cut at the Everyman theatre

So instead I sat at the Jazz Marquee listening to the fringe events, sometimes in the sun, sampling drinks from the open-air bar beside the Town Hall. A lovely way to spend part of the bank holiday – free jazz gigs

After turning up 12 hours too early the first time (oops), late last night we heard Don Byron’s Gospel Quintet. No-one knew quite what this would be like, as Don is known for moving through different genres: at least hip-hop and klezmer as well as his jazz roots. This was his first venture into Gospel.

Don Byron

After the first 10 minutes I was despairing, following just free-jazz clarinet with drums, which had nothing I could enjoy or understand. Not even vaguely Gospel.

Thankfully the rest of the quintet then appeared, and got down to the real business. This was 5 or 6 gospel songs from Thomas Dorsey, heavily dosed up with jazz and blues. Fantastic stuff, with fun little mini-fireworks spread throughout, including DK Dyson going scat.

The band were great, and Don gave some opportunity for soloing all round. Oddly, the bass solo was less impressive than the general playing from Brad Jones, which was pacy, and yet thoughtful and very lyrical. Shame there’s no recording of this quintet yet.