Oh no. I'm ill. On Monday night I had the feeling that my body was being taken over by something I couldn't control, then I felt a bit better yesterday morning (but I had Kellie to focus on then). Last night I made the mistake of dosing myself up on paracetamol and having a hot bath, which felt great but successfully conned me into thinking I was fine. And today I'm definitely not: my digestive system has given up completely and my temperature regulation is all over the place. I hate being ill; it's really boring. I hope it's nothing to do with the wonderful Cumbrae oysters I bought in the farmers' market on Saturday and consumed rather a lot of.  

Anyway I'm making very good use of the time spent unable to move, by reading short stories by Alasdair Gray, and slightly more troubling use of the time by sifting through the pile of paperwork that came with our letter of offer from the Scottish Arts Council. Once you've been through it all, the burdens that it places are not actually that onerous, but there are 19 sections of 'conditions of grant', a useful guide to the difference between 'monitoring' and 'evaluation' (personally, I thought 'evaluation' was the job of the critic rather than the artist), and a rather neat credit pack telling you how to use their logo properly. Unfortunately the minimum size stipulated for their logo is 35mm across which on a CD would look incongruously enormous - much bigger than a record company logo. All of this information could easily be stuck up on the web to save on paper, administration costs, postage, and my time spent working out where to file it all. Whatever happened to the paperless office? Am I imagining it, or are government departments and quangos now the only people left who routinely communicate by means of tons of paper in the post? For contracts, fine, but all the ancillary stuff just clogs up life.

Earlier today, I engaged with a load of Shostakovich's film music - I hadn't realised that he'd written over 40 film scores.  The music is wonderful, but for some reason I couldn't imagine myself wanting to listen to it again, and it took me a while to realise why. The recordings had been made like 'classical' orchestral recordings, with a very natural balance and deep sense of perspective. Now that's not how you record a film score, which has to do battle with dialogue and sound effects in the movie - it has to be much more in-yer-face, like a pop record. If it had been recorded like that, I would be spending the next few days listening to Shostakovich and precious little else ...