A Good New Year to everyone, unless of course you think UKIP are a good idea, in which case it’s probably better that some gentle form of crisis befalls you, to bring you to your senses early in the year. Today I’ve been reading this account of how exciting Scottish politics has been in 2014: as predicted in my blog of 5 January last year, my office door does indeed now carry a ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Yes’ sticker, but I hadn’t guessed that the losing side in the referendum would seem to have easily won in terms of voter engagement, and in optimistically looking to the future. We’ve seen an alternative to the top-down control of the ‘big parties’ in action, and it actually works. It’s fascinating.

What I should have been blogging about here, and would have been if I hadn’t been tweeting about it all the time anyway, is that our Purcell album is in the very final stages of completion. I’m just waiting to see the final version of the booklet, and it is sounding really rather brilliant, if I say so myself. I don’t think everyone will like it (I genuinely look forward to the early music police giving it a pasting), but the combination of our musicians using their ears with some very daring singing is really striking, all captured lovingly in Aldeburgh back on 1 April 2013 by Matt Parkin and mixed with his usual great sensitivity by Calum Malcolm. And Joe Davie made us some great paintings …

We’ll post a sneak preview track or two soon, before unveiling the whole thing in March.

This year’s main ConCal project will be our reimagining of Nathaniel Gow’s fiddle band, for which I hope to spend January choosing tunes. We have a wonderfully diverse collection of Scotland’s fiddle players taking part in this, and at this point I really don’t have much of an idea what it will sound like, but knowing that the right people will be in the room is enough. When we did Revenge of the Folksingers we didn’t even know what the songs were on the first day of rehearsal …

But for the next couple of weeks I’ll be a bit preoccupied with preparations for the opening night of Celtic Connections and the live version of Martyn Bennett’s Grit that Greg has been planning for, well, years actually. I don’t think I’m the only person who said “I’ll play in that, anything you like”, and now I’m trying to work out just how many virtual instruments my iPad mini can cope with simultaneously, while also listening to the album in forensic detail to doublecheck the actual notes. Fortunately Grit repays this kind of close listening many times over. Yesterday afternoon I was trying to disentangle just what Martyn had done with the Gregorian chant samples in Blackbird, so that the choir can reproduce it live. And I’m still slightly nervous about being entrusted with Kirsten’s piano improvisation in Wedding, but it’ll be fine: it’s also a great reason to insist on Glasgow Royal Concert Hall giving us an upright piano to use rather than one of their Steinways (I enjoy turning down concert halls’ expensive pianos very much).