8.30am at breakfast 
I suppose when we arrived at 1am last night we should have taken it as a bad omen that the hotel reception was covered by full riot-control metal shutters.  A wedding party will still well underway, so the lack of any effective soundproofing in the rooms (mine anyway) lent the night a near-constant soundtrack of various guests in assorted states of alcoholic dereliction.  Readers outside Scotland may find the notion of the archetypal Scottish drunk amusing, but the reality isn’t much fun. And I wasn’t asleep much either.

Still, things are now looking up, as the chef’s just delivered some Arbroath smokies to my table.

10.30pm
The Lily Room, Ardkinglas House: in bed
I seriously unravelled this morning after having to tune another harpsichord: one of the reasons that I prefer not to tune if at all possible (we couldn’t find anyone reliable who was free for these gigs) is that being the tuner as well as a player keeps you away from the rest of the band. You don’t get to share in the communal pre-gig or pre-rehearsal conversation, or the food: I had the smokies to myself this morning. So you can start to feel isolated pretty quickly.  If there's no alternative, I don’t mind picking up the extra jobs and dealing with this, as long as everything else is working OK. But when other things start to go wrong and I’m at full stretch then it starts to become impossible. And today I didn’t deal with the stress very well at all.

Somehow despite everything we played quite a good gig, the audience were definitely up for it, bought lots of CDs, and to cap it all Michael Marra complimented Chris on his singing afterwards.  We were unprepared for the audience’s enthusiasm though, and managed to get ourselves stranded on stage at the end without a encore, so we crashed our way through The Arses set with an air of slightly alarmed desperation.

Simon Chadwick showed us his amazing harp afterwards too.

When we got here we were greeted with an excellent dinner in the dining room with David, Angela, Isabella (Sophie was asleep) and their Finnish visitors. It's always a treat to be outnumbered by Finns.

some views of Loch Fyne in the 24 hours we were there