on the 0900 train to Edinburgh, with a bike
I'm starting a few days of being a professional musician (in as far as a musician is someone who makes sounds - regular readers will know better than this). OK ... pretending to be a professional musician by sitting in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for Emmanuelle Haïm.

On Thursday I somehow made it along the flooded railway lines to the Queens Hall just in time for Barb Jungr's gig, and was very fortunate to meet Caroline from Linn Records in the box office queue, as she had a spare ticket. Barb had arranged a ticket to be put aside for me, which possibly explains the bizarre email I got from Assembly Direct on Tuesday night, full of marketing BS about "taking advantage of all the opportunities that are presented" and inviting me to register as a promoter on their website so that I could be entered on their database and my "ticket request would be processed". Um ... no.  I hadn't requested any tickets, I'm not a promoter, an artist invited me to her gig. It turns out that if I'd actually filled the thing in, I would probably have had to pick the ticket up on the other side of town, which would have been impossible anyway given that all the trains were running late. But the end result of all of this is that the promoter gets more ticket revenue at the expense of the artist's being able to invite people to their own show. If anyone makes any money on the Edinburgh Fringe, I think we can see who it might be.

Anyway, Barb was great and I came away with a much better idea of what sort of songs we might try and tackle together. I also had a very useful chat with Darryl, gave our board member Sandy Matheson his copy of our new single, and drank some of our neighbour Scott Williams's fine beer at the bar: the Queens Hall has the remarkable good taste to stock the Williams Brothers' entire range.  On the way there it was very cheering to see the posters for the Tiger Lillies' Seven Deadly Sins show "the filthiest show in town" which I must make sure I attend before the festival is over.

I picked up lots of nice things from the picture framers yesterday and then had a really good laugh on the radio with Vic Galloway - you can hear us being stupid and childish for the next few days here. And before going to bed I went out to the garden, lay down on the trampoline, and watched the shooting stars overhead - quite spectacular, I've never seen them so clearly.

later
I need to get some more experience of cycling in Edinburgh's New Town if I'm going to be any good at it. Cobbled streets are very pretty, but cycling up steep cobbled hills in the rain isn't much fun.  I stopped off at that haven of civilisation, the Book Festival, to pick up the rest of the family on the way home; we didn't see the Prime Minister though.