Yup, I've been too busy to write diary entries for the last few days. On Sunday and Monday we were on a family outing to London so that I could be Susie's PA and media agent at the announcement of Michael Rosen as the new Children's Laureate, with her nomination being read by Shami Chakrabarti. What a treat. And plenty of time to hang out with her uncle and cousin (and find out how the next series of Skins is coming along).

On Tuesday Alison came up to Glasgow for the ConCal AGM and board meeting: an unusually long one, helped along with lots of food and some nice wine. By the end we were receiving excellent advice on a range of subjects from our board members, so I hope we managed to write it all down somewhere in our collaborative minute-taking.

After a week and a half of trying to shake off the end of a cold, yesterday I was feeling well enough to get back on my bike. There's something very satisfying about cycling along with full panniers, especially when many signed copies of the company accounts have been replaced with Aberfeldy oatmeal and Grimbister cheese.  

As a union member, I'd been looking forward to voting in the election for the next deputy leader of the Labour party, but when the voting paper arrived, there is a box that you have to tick declaring that you agree with and support the party's policies. Oh. I was hoping to vote for someone who might influence the policies, not sign up to whatever is being undertaken on the people's behalf at the moment. That went in the bin.   

Still no sign of the Lion CD here, despite our UK copies being despatched from across the ocean last week. I think the most sensible course of action is to set a release date for sales in mid-July. If any arrive before we go to Orkney next week, we'll sell pre-release copies at the gigs there. A great excuse to go to Orkney at midsummer, don't you think?

Andrew appeared on the doorstep first thing this morning for our last pre-St Magnus preparation meeting: I'd just got back from taking the kids to school when the phone went: 'Is it too early to come round now?' 'Well, where are you?' 'Outside.'

Today was my proper wood-shedding day to finish my first trawl through all the music for the four Orkney concerts. And there's a lot of it. Special thanks to Mark Summers for sending me Sibelius files of the Scketky quartets. But the most fun was reading through Bach's Suite no.2 from a completely clean score, with none of my old pencil markings in it. And what I read wasn't what I was expecting at all. I found all sorts of things in the suite that I'd never heard before, just from giving proper consideration to what Bach wrote. So many of his markings are in French, for one thing: that's no accident.  Then Alison came over to play through her Janis Joplin bits, and we decided to run away from work for an hour or two and go for a short and windy walk in the hills.