Saturday 14 March 2009

I haven't got a great deal done in the latter part of this week because on Thursday I packed most of my study into boxes in preparation for the chimney being lined yesterday. And then that became rather more complicated when the excellent chimney engineers found that there was an unexpected triple brick wall between our bedroom and the chimney. So until they come back on Monday to finish the job, our bedroom wall is full of holes of various sizes - it looks like it's been the subject of sniper fire, or that it's part of some perverted hyper-chic hotel where the rooms are decorated to look like they're in a war zone, but still have full room service and a mini-bar.  

Nevertheless, I can recommend the exercise of packing a work room into boxes and unpacking it again. It takes a long time, but if you only unpack things that you actually use, you will gain a lot of shelf and floor space. And you have the opportunity to actually clean in all 'those places' that never see so much as a duster from one year to the next. 

But the arrangements for the Tiger Lillies stuff aren't going to write themselves while I'm playing with cardboard boxes. So the one remaining pile of miscellanea will have to wait on the floor for a bit longer.

While the house has filled up with dust and debris, I've managed to do a final mix of our Joe Raposo track, complete with DG's octave violin part recorded on the mic of his MacBook on tour. And on Wednesday, Iain, Mairi and I reclaimed the hornpipe from Handel's Water Music as a pipe tune - I bet it was just another of Handel's many borrowings.  

But now I am sitting at my desk enjoying a glass of the very cheering new Williams Bros beer 'Good Times', which contains elderflower and meadowsweet. It really does put a smile on your face. The fact that Scott Williams showed up on my doorstep this afternoon with a case of the stuff is not clouding my judgment at all. (honestly)

Also very cheering is this piece by Roger Norrington in today's Guardian. His final question is a very pertinent one. Throw traditional music into the equation, and you start considering the prospect of "evidence-based tradition"(!), or more accurately perhaps, a tradition informed by historical evidence. As any historian will tell you, tradition is seldom very reliable when it comes to understanding the past.