Up later than usual having had friends to tea, that exceptional type of old friend that doesn’t care if you haven’t begun cooking when they arrive, and that just muck in.  Which is just as well, as I was still editing short scores for the recording this afternoon at 6pm.  OK,  well, it probably wouldn’t have been such a rush if I hadn’t taken advantage of an otherwise empty house to do some harpsichord practice at around 5pm – having sent the Beloved down to the supermarket for the second time to pick up essential items.  In my experience, you have to grab your chances when they occur.

A quick heads up, then, for Sibelius 5, which is making the chore of producing short scores a whole lot easier than it used to be.  Still unpleasant and time-consuming, but the end product is so much better that is doesn’t seem such a futile exercise.

I am now facing a dilemma, or could soon be, given the state of my throat this evening.  Do I even care if a weekend spent daytripping on the Isle of Wight, and then depping all three services at Chichester Cathedral is going to wreck my voice for the recording?  Does it even matter, as all I will be doing is growling on Alto 2 parts?  Probably.  But frankly the prospect of grubbing about for dinosaur bits on the beach at Compton Point is so attractive that I might just risk it.

Well, after two years’ absence, the Beloved has convinced me to revitalise my blog, luring me in with promises that the new software will help me delete the 350-odd spam messages I was getting per day.  And in the end, blogging does hone the writing skills, and it will keep me away from Facebook and forums.  So I tell myself.

In the intervening years I have won awards, had major back surgery and done all sorts of exciting things, but oddly some things don’t change.  She’s So Fine still isn’t published, for instance.  Not for want of trying on my part, but I got into an argument with the editor – he’d say it was over content, I’d say it was over style AND content.  Dammit, I want the book to mean something, not chronicle some ghastly academic navel-gazing exercise.  Twaddle, I say, to the gravest excesses of cultural studies martinets.

I noticed that I wrote in my blog many moons ago about how happy I was that my article on the Boswell Sisters had been accepted by The Journal of the Society for American Music.  Last September I had even nicer news, that the article had won an ASCAP Deems Taylor award.  I had to go to New York last December to accept the award at a spiffing ceremony – and combined the trip with one to make my kids officially American.  Having never been to NYC before, I don’t know who was the most child(ish)(like) – definitely a perk of the job. 

I also note that my last post prior to falling off the edge of the inter-world complained bitterly about promoters and their lack of enthusiasm for anything different.  Fallen, in the end, only had one more performance at the South Bank Early Music Weekend in 2007, but life has a way of leading on to wondrous new paths.  Because of Fallen, Musica Secreta and Celestial Sirens have been drawn into another nun-esque project, recording the ’soundtrack’ to a new novel by Sarah Dunant, Sacred Hearts.  There will be performances, too.  Could be that I will be dragging out the old habits again, except that this time they will have to be black.  Well, you know what they say – old habits dye hard.

It’s good to be back.