on the plane north from London

Yesterday was very busy, so busy that I didn't manage to fit in a meal at any point. The upshot of all of this is that when Mira Nair's movie Vanity Fair comes out in September, the first sound the audience will hear will be me trying very hard to play the piano comprehensibly while slightly drunk.

I seemed to spend most of the morning on the phone, delegating details, like heat light and music stands for the Kellie recording sessions, confirming start times, postage for sending out flyers, and fitting in some exercises on the piano as well to get my fingers ticking over. My mobile continued to ring for most of the day.

Once in London I dropped in on the BBC to pick up Tommy Pearson and cadge a lift to the Vanity Fair recording session, so he could interview the various participants for Stage & Screen. This led to at least two fortuitous meetings: one with Fiona Talkington where she told me that they've plugged our gigs on the BBCi site, and one with a copy of SADN left lying on someone's desk at Radio 3. There's nothing particularly exciting about finding one of your CDs on someone's desk in itself, except that the case was bashed in and in chinagraph pencil someone had emphatically put their name on it in big letters so that they would get it back. In broadcasting offices, smashed up CDs with lots of things written on them are the ones that get played: pristine copies have probably never been taken out of the jewel case. So that was quite cheering.

From there we left for Henry Wood Hall (listening in Tommy's hired Mercedes to the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which reminded me of the Dixie Dregs - if I had a real musical education it would be the other way round of course) and I made friends once more with Finchcocks's 1801 Broadwood piano. This time it had only been moved into the hall that afternoon, so it stayed in tune for about 2 minutes at a time. While Bill Dow was retuning for about the 6th time, to accommodate the key of B flat minor, I wandered back into the control room: 'temperament, eh?' Mychael Danna's reply: 'Nothing is in tune. It's like marriage: a series of compromises that works. You start out thinking that it's all going to be just intonation, but you end up happy with equal temperament'. Or quarter-comma mean tone of course.

This was the very last session for the movie (everyone hopes) so before the final cue to be recorded, we opened a collection of bottles of beer. Now, as I mentioned above, I still hadn't managed a meal at any point and it was about 9pm, so the bottle of Old Peculier went straight to my head and I had to concentrate very hard indeed not to screw up on the Steinway in the opening titles. Anyway, when the film makes it to cinemas, whenever Reese Witherspoon plays the piano or is accompanied singing, it's really me. Just so you know.
After a little more drinking with the crew, I made it back across Trafalgar Square (almost deserted on a beautiful night) to my hotel. This morning had one of those perplexing London hotel moments: you feel for the staff really, they're being paid peanuts, they don't have a great command of the English language, it's not their fault. But I hadn't eaten properly for a very long time, and when I returned from the breakfast buffet, someone had, unbidden, put milk in my tea. I think I'd asked for toast.

Anyway, since then I've got on a cancelled Heathrow Express train (I thought the point of using the most expensive train service in the world was that it would actually run, but no) and sat around waiting for my flight, which is late. I'm tired.