Sunday 18 January 2004

A real day off, to spend drinking tea, mending punctures on my children's vehicles of recreation, that sort of thing.

After I spent Thursday evening feverishly printing out parts, I went to London on Friday to work with Lucy on the Kellie music. The man sitting behind me on the southbound plane made a special point of coughing over all me whenever I straightened my back, so that I now have his cold: a very special thank you to him. Anyway, we had a very enjoyable afternoon working on bowings, dynamics, tempi - the outward pencilled manifestations of more instinctive musical decisions - and generally deciding that the music should go completely differently from the way it went last time we played some of it. This is usually a good sign and shows that our musicianship hasn't deserted us yet, and also that pencil markings are always to be ignored after the event in favour of a more interesting life.

Alison joined us with her new cello later in the day (between concertos with the AAM) - she's kindly agreed to be the orchestral librarian for the project, which involves a lot of pencilling and sticky tape - and then we all went off to Bill Carter's place for a very fine feed involving a large chunk of dead bovine with splendid accompaniments (thanks Bill). Alison and I just stayed sober enough to phone Chris Norman and suggest dates for the Barsanti recording before turning in. It looks like I'll be making or contributing substantially to seven CDs in the coming year, how did that happen? And just when I've decided to embrace amateur status ...

As it happens, I'm now listening to Chris's Flower of Port Williams CD, which gives me a chance to find out how some of the tunes I was playing in New York last weekend should really have gone: 'oh, so that's what that chord was' etc. 

Stuart Eydmann sent me this wonderful picture of old Scottish variety act Billy Crocket and Alec Finlay - halfway down the page on the left, check out the left hand sporran. It's such a relief to know that the melodica has an echt place in the Scots tradition.