Back from a weekend in Edinburgh and Portie. It didn't rain for two whole days: this is rare at the moment.

First, I must correct an error from a couple of weeks ago: it's the Call of the Cuckoos Tent that meets in the Britannia Panopticon - here is the proof.

Robert McFall wrote last night in his role as guardian of Received Pronunciation to confirm what I'd suspected about a passage from Israel in Egypt, where 'the floods stood upright as an heap' (Exodus 15:8). I'd guessed that in 18th-century London, the 'h' in heap would still have been dropped, hence 'an heap', rather than 'a heap' as in current usage. But if you sing this in Scotland you get 'the floods stood upright as a neep' which although pretty funny, is not really what Handel had in mind. I tried to explain to Emmanuelle that a neep was a humorous vegetable, and she nodded sagely and said 'Ah, je vois' but I don't think she did ... . If you're going to perform the piece in Scotland, do you adopt Mockney accents and drop the 'h', or drop the 'n'? You don't want to sound like one of those BBC newsreaders who say 'an historic' because they think it's correct, and carefully enunciate the 'h'. 

In the mail on Saturday from Fred Frith came a copy of his beautiful new acoustic solo album. It's very cheering, but it should really have an accompanying DVD video to prove that he is actually playing it all just on a single acoustic guitar - you'd never guess.