hotel room, Ottawa
We only had an hour's rehearsal and sound check scheduled for last night's gig (and we got less than that, because we had to wait for the Vienna Piano Trio to finish their encores), so I spent the latter part of the morning asleep here, and did my ironing. We all met up for a cheap but effective Lebanese meal mid-afternoon and headed to the church early. James and Andy had been driving the 20 hours or so over from Nova Scotia with the harmonium in Chris's beloved old Mercedes, Annabel (300 000 miles on the clock), and had got stuck near Montréal when the starter motor gave up the ghost. So one helpful midnight mechanic and not much sleep later they were here, tired. Then when we got to the church where we were playing, what should we hear from a downstairs room but the sound of Dvorak Bagatelles played on two violins, cello and ... harmonium. There had been an ideal instrument at the venue all along. It's not something a harmonium player really expects to find. 

The concert was lots of fun, to a big friendly audience, who were on our side throughout. I got them to sing Happy Birthday to Chris to get some audience participation going early. And they laughed heartily on cue at all my feeble jokes. The harmonium and Steinway D were fine, and the 4 manual Casavant organ did a nice turn in Chris's tune 'The Flower of Port Williams'. Everyone played great - as I said at the time 'it's wonderful to play in a band that doesn't speed up' - but the star of the show was undoubtedly Simeon, whose percussion solo brought the house down. He even got a cheer for moving onto the cajon halfway through. And at a chamber music festival. 

We went to the Manx bar afterwards, where the Polaris barbershop quartet struck up in the middle of the pub and entertained us royally - we got them to sing Chris Happy Birthday too of course. 

Over the course of the day the back of my left hand has changed shape, as a result of a spider bite I received in last night's concert interval: which serves me right for going outside at dusk to photograph the sunset really. I now have no visible knuckles or veins, just a large bulge three inches across, radiating heat. At least today it's gone down far enough for me to able to make a fist again.

Which brings me to today's adventure. Our concert was at 2, and something told me that the morning might be stressful, so taking no chances I had a steak for breakfast (for the price of a couple of pints of beer at home). Sure enough, Jamie our venue manager greeted me at the hall in the University of Ottawa with the news that we had no tuner (off sick). He went off to work his way through his endless list of tuners' phone numbers while I practised Geminiani to pass the time. Jamie (Blachly, on gamba this time) appeared soon after, and eventually so did Chris, and we were just getting down to work when the other Jamie came back with a tame tuner. So I sent the guys off for lunch. 

After ten minutes the tuner (poor guy - it had dawned on me by now that he was a piano tuner and had probably never seen a harpsichord before) had taken the jack rail off, jammed the action, and was turning the pin of a 4' string while playing an 8' one. By this time his hands were shaking and he was clearly terrified. Hmm. 'Let's be realistic about how long this is going to take you' I said. 'Why don't I do it?' And I started putting the action back together and did a quick touch-up job. The number of North American gigs I've done with dodgy harpsichord tuning still outnumbers the well-tuned ones by a factor of at least two. 

OK, so perhaps we could rehearse now. Nope, Chris and Jamie had gone out to get some lunch by this time. Oh well. By this time the audience were queueing round the block to get in. 

The gig itself was fine. It did feel strange to play a straight chamber concert to rows of quiet respectful people though. As Chris told the audience in the church the night before 'just remember, rowdiness is part of God's plan'. I didn't feel like playing the Duncan Gray variations to such an atmosphere, so I told them it was too cheap a piece for such a classy audience and played Geminiani instead. They seemed to like it, and we sold vast quantities of CDs afterwards, signing copies for half an hour.

I came back here exhausted for the adrenaline comedown, with food and beer from the shops across the road. I've been listening to old XTC singles here in the hotel for the last couple of days. Perhaps it's because I'm playing loads of Scots music anyway, but I often find myself listening to self-conciously English music when away from home: Robert Wyatt, XTC, Richard Thompson. It seems to remind me of home. Spare me your theories of the effects of cultural imperialism please.