Thursday 29 January 2004

These diary entries might be few and far between for a while, as the screen on my obsolete but efficient Psion 5mx crashed yesterday. Psions (no longer made) are great machines, but the screens always pack up after a couple of years. Fortunately  I managed to back up the data and retrieve my other diary before packing it off for repair.

"This week I are been mostly" playing Bach with the SCO. I just about stayed awake for the rehearsals (frantically sketching arrangements for our March tour in quiet corners in every idle moment), and then in tonight's performance, had quite a good time, particularly in the middle of cantata 170 for the long duet with Michael Chance, who is on stunning form. The last movement turned into a bit of an organ concerto, at breakneck speed. St Andrews tomorrow.

I'm unusually depressed by this week's news: first, the UK government's survival by the skin of its teeth in the vote on the introduction of variable university tuition fees south of the border, and then today the resignation of the BBC's director-general after the Hutton report. Some loose words by a journalist on the radio at 6am have been escalated into a huge row that will change the culture of broadcasting and journalism in this country; meanwhile, from the bigger story that we were bombing thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, the government has come out squeaky clean. Allow me to register my disgust.