I spent today just practising at home, something I do all too rarely.  It sounds like a lazy kind of existence, but it's exhausting: at 6 o'clock I fell asleep on the sofa in front of an old video of Henry's Cat, with my daughter occasionally leaning over to prize my eyelids open: "Stay awake!".  Alison rang mid-morning to share that 'it's 11.30 already, and it should sound better than this' feeling, that can set in when fingers won't do what you want them to.

Winter arrived with a vengeance today: howling gales and driving rain.  Marie dropped in to pick up some music this morning, and commented that living in Scotland can sometimes be like living onboard the prow of a ship.  The critic Stephen Johnson said to me the other day that Scotland's weather was tailor-made for the manic depressive.

If, as Bob Geldof once said, the best thing about being in a band is that you get into other people's gigs for free, then one nice thing about making records is that other people give you theirs.  This weekend I acquired the new Cnut album, and a couple of John Butt's solo CDs that he's made for harmonia mundi.  His recording of Bach toccatas and the Schulber chorale preludes is quite riveting, and heartily recommended to anyone with even the most fleeting interest in organ music.  It made me want to relive my student days of getting up early (by 1980s university standards) every morning to play exercises on the piano, and then wrestle with Bach on the organ before classes started.  'Classes' sounds terribly formal - it was much more laid-back than that.

Last night I finally printed out the last set of parts for the November concerts, so no more notational wrangling on Sibelius for me for a few weeks!  What a relief.  

An email from Catherine Bott: she and Julie Burchill are the guests on tomorrow's Woman's Hour on Radio 4 - not together surely?