Thursday 27 November 2008

My cold still hasn't gone away, so rather than venture out into the weather (which isn't that bad actually) I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by the bits of paper which explain the ConCal company accounts, making sure that there's nothing missing before I send it all off to our splendid auditors. It's effective punishment for a whole year's worth of hurried or incomplete record-keeping, where the explanation of an unlikely amount of money could be on a scrap of paper hiding in an envelope, or in a spreadsheet filed under the wrong year, or in an email now cowering in 'Sent Items' after a moment of carelessness with the mouse. Must do better. 

On Tuesday I sat with my laptop on the train to Edinburgh, for a meeting with Jonathan Mills and Matthew Studdert-Kennedy. On Jonathan's recommendation I've since been listening to Géza Anda's recording of the Bartók piano concertos, which impressed me not so much for the piano playing as for the raucous racket that the WDR wind section make: a reminder of the days when all orchestras didn't try to sound the same.

Yesterday I wound up at Barnaby and Elinor's for lunch: I'd called him from the train and it seemed easier to carry on our conversation by biking the couple of hundred yards to their house from the station rather than going home and calling him back. My notebook is now full of ideas from the two days' meetings that I will have to bash into some sort of coherent shape in the next week or so.  My brain was already a bit pummeled by about 2pm, so it was welcome relief to get a message from DG in Halifax saying that the Moneyville household (Kirsty, Ethan & co.) had finally got around to joining skype, so we celebrated this with a long and silly four-way conference call including all of Vortex 3, various related family members and a ukelele.