Doug

Whilst sometimes I feel that I live, breathe, sleep and eat cello, I occasionally manage to distract myself with other activities in an attempt to convince myself that there exists a world outside my practise room.

I live in Manchester with my partner Kate and our two dogs Bruce (lurcher) and Joe (fox?) who we rescued from our local dogs’ home a few years ago. Whilst they can, at times, cause an unwelcome distraction when I’m trying to concentrate on some tricky passage of notes (the dogs, not Kate), more often than not I’m glad of the excuse to take them to the local park to chase tennis balls for a while.

I also returned to swimming and yoga lately as a pre-emptive strike against impending mid-life crisis and I’m currently attempting to swim the length of the River Taff (64km) in my local swimming pool, though I don’t expect to reach Cardiff for a few months yet!

As a means of redressing the balance, I try to maintain a healthy interest in more sedentary activities and have long been an unashamed (and pretty skilled) consumer of Nintendo video games, including almost all of the major Mario and Zelda titles to date.

I’m also an avid player of classic board and card games and will put up a reasonable fight at mah jong, bridge, backgammon and chess particularly. I play chess online at GameKnot so feel free to click on the widget on the right if you fancy a game!