I sat up until 2am last night putting the parts together for the first two concerts in November.  Being able to print out most of the performance material straight from the computer is a great luxury after years of scissors, paste, Tipp-ex and photocopying.  I managed to find everything except the fiddle parts for the Bocchi cantata, which disappeared after a radio broadcast in August - so I'll have to dig out the old hand-written masters of those.  When I'd finished, the driving rain outside had stopped so I went out to the garden where it was surprisingly mild and calm.  If everything hadn't been soaking wet, I'd have taken a book out and read for a while before going to bed, but anyway it felt inappropriate to be relishing the peace and quiet when our government was raining Cruise missiles down on Afghanistan.

The brochures arrived on Friday and they look terrific - I met Marie this morning, who has come up with an exhaustive and exhausting list of places to put them.  The list of things to be done in the next couple of weeks grows ever longer, and the time in which to do them shrinks just as quickly - the temptation for me in these situations is always to do something totally different, usually making a cup of tea and putting on some loud music in the kitchen.  For example, rather than deal with the many challenges thrown up a week before the Gentle Shepherd performances in August, I decided to go to the gym for the first time ever, and I'm now hooked.  Displacement? 

But today I did manage to talk to Linn Records and the Scottish Arts Council about possible ways to record The Gentle Shepherd (well, let's be honest, possible ways to pay for it), I checked with the National Library of Scotland how long it would take to call up the manuscripts I want to see on Thursday, I found the missing Bocchi violin parts and I marked them up from memory.  Oh yes, and I did half a day's work at the BBC as well, mostly answering some unusually intelligent listener correspondence about film music. There was a mention of our concert series in today's Herald, describing me as ConCal's 'mastermind and harpsichordist'.  I've started so I'll finish.