"Know, oh seeker, that every man knows his own coast best... but the sea is not peculiar to each region and when you are out of sight of the coasts, you have only your own knowledge of the stars and guides to rely on"

(Ahmad Ibn Majid - writing in the late 1400s)

Happy 300th Birthday Dr Thomas Arne!

On pew, I sit. For the first time I am in St. Mary's Church, Stoke Newington (not far from my East London home) - a building most-glorious in its gothic illumination at night.

It is 6.30pm Sunday, and I am here for the 300th Birthday celebratory concert by Linden Baroque Orchestra.

Dr Thomas Arne, now 300, was the most successful song writer of his day, and produced a sound that today feels regal, gallant, and to many ears "typically English".

Electric connection with this music came for me in Steven Devine's solo in the Harpsichord Concerto (No.5 in G). The notes fell like crystal rain, and I imagined myself pushing aside curtains of beaded glass and entering a palace of fine diamante. Fine diamante?! - djinn kitty, kitty djinn (I inwardly balked) you cannot compare English baroque with that most pedalled ingredient of democratised jewellery!

Yet, I could. In the mid-eighteenth century, Dr Thomas Arne was a most popular and commercially successful feature at London's pleasure gardens - unmissable hubs of cultural entertainment where all of London irrespective of class gathered. At the famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone (and others), Londoners delighted in varied and eclectic programmes of song, glee, chorus, sometimes opera, alternating with overtures, symphonies, and concertos. The old mixed with the new, and there was much pastiche. Thomas Arne was central to this pastiche - he prepresented the new, the shiny. His songs often plumped out programmes and drew in the crowds (yet represented a most popular choice of "taste" - that great C18 value). Pleasure-garden gatherers might've enjoyed a solo song by Arne (like 'The Lover's Rencantation' we heard this eve) followed by a symphony. In Thomas Arne we can find a fine, glistening, democratised crystal, that sparkles and sings, and mixes with the party atmosphere and brings pleasure to many. Diamante!

This great and interesting historical music was brought alive by Linden Baroque Orchestra, who specialise in performing Baroque music on period instruments (find them on facebook). The music was accompanied by a programme written with wit and dexterity - the care in fine writing and precision of information added a grace to the proceedings and warmed this damp-cold January evening with a sense that you were somewhere most interesting and special.

UK premiere of 'Kashf' / Q&A with Director Ayesha Khan

(@ the UK's first Himalaya Film Festival, currently on in London)

Kashf - The Lifting of the Veil is a fascinating exploration of questions of destiny, and takes us into the worlds of Sufism (the mystical heart of Islam) and Lollywood dreams.

I especially liked the style of it - it felt very fresh, raw, and all the more so for hearing from director Ayesha Khan of the "guerilla-style" film-making process. Shot in 28 days on a very low budget, the result was a genre-bending fusion of camcorder documentary, Lollywood cinema, and 'conventional' film crew work (although the crew later appear on screen as cinema audience!).

A young man returns to Lahore, the city of his birth, and begins to uncover mystical circumstances around his conception and the promise his mother made to a Sufi Pir, that in adulthood he would take the Sufi path. Meanwhile, his cousin is also being drawn into another established tradition in Lahore's culture as he pursues his calling to be an actor.

With dream sequences and hallucinations, magic realism is a strong element - reality is explored through apparent non-reality, and the physical and metaphysical merge. A most interesting aspect of this upturning and unveiling is Director turns Actor, as Ayesha Khan literally melds onto the screen and becomes a major presence in its landscape.

As the pull on our hero towards his spiritual destination becomes irresistibly and irreversibly stronger, he is told: "you have to acknowledge you're on the path." This film is about facing up to destiny, and meeting it, and is about the quest we each face to find out who we are and why we are here.

I enjoyed that this film took me to the streets and doors, and sometimes behind those doors, of Lahore (the green door is a strong motif in the film). Ayesha was just great too - I admired that she had made the film as an experiment: rather than go to film school, why not just try to make a film? And I admired her a m a z i n g l o n g hair!