A few things I have learnt recently: 1. my son looks great in a kilt; 2. one of the finest breakfasts in existence is party left-overs, provided you weren't at the party concerned; 3 - parenthesis to 2. Especially trifle; 4. I like reading books with pictures in.

Anyway, it's been a while since I wrote anything here, so time for some backtracking ...

The Red Red Rose CD now has a scheduled release date of 26 July 2004. It should be edited by the end of May. There's still some discussion to be had about the running order, and indeed the running time. About 20 minutes' worth of music was left on the metaphorical cutting room floor during the production of Spring Any Day Now: listening back to the rejects now they're not that bad, but they just didn't fit with the other stuff, or they lacked that last degree of 'convincing'-ness. I'd like to throw away quite a bit of The Red Red Rose, but the record company are understandably wary of releasing a CD with a short running time. We'll see ...

There's been a steady stream of nice emails, mostly from fellow musicians, about SADN, which is quite satisfying: the critical acceptance of your peers and all that. Work on the sequel is well under way now, with most of the material recorded. I have RRR and the Kellie disc to attend to in the meantime, and this one (SADN II for want of a better working title) involves slightly more complicated 'production' than usual. But I found time yesterday to listen to some session tapes, which were very entertaining indeed. 

Meanwhile I've been half- listening to Paolo Pandolfo's recording of the Bach cello suites on the gamba, which I was given months ago, and could never quite bring myself to stick in the CD player. I'm using it as kitchen background music which works rather well - I used to know the cello suites in some detail but now they seem only familiar. It's great playing, like having someone in the next room that you can eavesdrop on from time to time, rather than someone grabbing your jacket to get your attention. Or maybe that's just because I'm listening to it on the crappy little ghetto-blaster I found on top of the microwave in our holiday cottage.

Last week Catherine Bott sent me a CD of a concert we gave four years ago, which was edited down for a lunchtime concert broadcast by the BBC. My solo Haydn sonata on the fortepiano hit the cutting room floor, and it was interesting to hear it after all this time - some quite exciting stuff if I say so myself, but I wish I'd taken more time in the Presto rather than careering through it without taking the time to look at the view - nerves probably. 

Also last week I found myself with an hour to kill in Possilpark while my daughter was at a doctor's appointment. Possil has a reputation for being one of the drug capitals of Scotland, such that minicab firms refuse to go there ('sorry, we don't have anything in that area') and black cabs say they'll send someone and then just don't. But Possil has a grand Victorian public library, complete with torch sign outside, and I sat in there with the only three other readers in the place, happily engrossed in pictures of Alexander 'Greek' Thomson architecture and Oscar Marzaroli's photos of Glasgow life from the 50s on. I came out feeling better educated. I wonder how the library matches up to its current local authority targets. I wonder what those targets are. Does 'offering citizens the opportunity to feel better educated' feature? Possibly. I can never decide whether it's delightful or a tragedy that Glasgow is full of people in lower-skilled jobs who have a huge breadth of knowledge. Ms Bott always manages to get rides with literary-minded taxi drivers here, and I'll never forget an impromptu discussion about James VI/I's court composers (particularly the Ferraboscos) with a removal man at the end of his shift in a Partick pub some years ago.

A few years ago my holiday reading would have been volumes like 'The History of Piano Pedalling' or 'Perspectives on the Inverted Mordent'. This week I've been indulging my holiday pastime of devouring comics, especially Alex Robinson (Box Office Poison) and the excellent Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve - more subtle than Daniel Clowes I think, but in the same emotional ballpark). I've also been ploughing through a recent translation of the Brothers Grimm tales for a compensatory dose of patriarchal revenge and prejudice, and Mary Anne Alburger's Scottish Fiddlers and their Music, which I should have read years ago and didn't. Shame on me.

And I'm toying with the idea of arranging Steve Morse's Broad Street Strut for the quartet. When I was introduced to the music of the Dixie Dregs as a student, I thought it must be the most exhilarating music to play that there is.