Friday 22 July 2005

Yesterday turned into a bit of an adventure. I got up at 5am to fly to London, a flight which was admirably hassle-free. Clearly enough people haven't yet realised that flyglobespan.com now fly Glasgow to Stansted, so there was no check-in queue at all (or on the way back - a miracle), the plane was half-empty, the staff were friendly and the seats were very cheap. Hooray. I met Alison in Walthamstow and just as we were about to rehearse, Katherine rang to tell us that news was breaking of explosions on the tube. So we kept a radio handy for updates and got to work, not quite sure whether we were going to get to play at the end of it.

Eventually we set off early, and got to Broadcasting House without much trouble. Sean was great fun as ever: if you stop to think about it, playing difficult music in an acoustically dead radio studio live on air without warming up, and being interviewed as well, is potentially stressful, but it was great fun and I had the presence of mind to plug our forthcoming Lion CD and say 'arse' three times, which I haven't  done on Radio 3 for a few years. You can hear the whole thing on listen again until Thursday: we're about 1 hour 40 in. Oh, we played quite well too, I think.

Afterwards, a walk across Millennium Bridge in the evening sun to Bankside for Matt Wadsworth's birthday party, with a backdrop of the sunset behind St Paul's. Katherine beat the bomb alert at St Albans to make it in, and Gary Cooper and I reconstituted our mutual appreciation society and promised to play fortepiano duets in summer 2007 (we've been offered a gig already). Then a very fast journey back to E17, as the roads were deserted and our bus driver was clearly enjoying the chance to throw a very large bus around central London at speed.