I'm sitting in the garden enjoying the evening sunshine, listening on headphones to last night's work. I was down at Finesplice yesterday to listen as Ben Turner mastered Spring Any Day Now for its imminent release.  It's a very enjoyable process, as Ben's ears are attuned to all sorts of things that I'd never notice, and the end result of all his subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks of level, EQ and compression is always that everything sounds much more exciting than it did before. So by 1 a.m. or so, I was thinking how much I like this record.

One of many things I haven't yet got around to doing in the last few months, is writing a paper on cello parts in 18th century Scottish music. We know that fiddle and cello alone was a common combination to play for dancing, but we don't really know what the cellists played.  I think there are a few clues in the some of the surviving printed basslines of the period, but I need some more hands-on experience and I've been looking to talk to some cellists who've had a go. Now it just so happens that Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas (who've been working for a while on that very combination) are over from the USA playing a concert tomorrow in Edinburgh, but I can't go because I'm in a rehearsal.  Anyway, I only mention all this because I looked up from my sandwich on the plane from London this morning, and who should be walking past in the aisle stretching his legs but Alasdair. So we had a chance to catch up and compare current enthusiasms at baggage reclaim, and I got to meet Natalie after all - still haven't heard her play though ...

I haven't had time for diary entries for a while, as I've had a couple of weeks' holiday, and then last week was spent frantically catching up with all the things that urgently needed to be done: writing funding applications to trusts for the March tour, learning tunes for next month's Edinburgh Festival gig with Lisa Milne, Paul Anderson and Wendy Stewart, and preparing for last week's board meeting, which left me feeling more optimistic than I'd been previously. As Richard Chester put it, 'for a company with no money, we're doing an awful lot'.

In the Edinburgh concert I'm going to play fortepiano and harmonium, so as of today Paul Moore's wonderful harmonium has taken up temporary residence in my study. Don't think I'll be able to keep my hands off it for long.