It's been difficult to get back into the swing of work after a pretty much showbiz-free holiday.  It doesn't feel like I've got going again yet, and I'm starting to feel a bit like a writer, finding endless things to do to avoid the growing pile of work.  I installed more memory in my computer yesterday (OK, I know that's not exactly rocket science and it only took 5 minutes) and passed on a load of Clerk and Kelly material to the Scottish Music Information Centre.  How things have changed since 1994 - to get the Clerk pieces that we recorded then, Alasdair had to come over here and go through boxes of old paper from my attic to find clean scores and sets of parts, and now he has to photocopy them, bind them and send the originals back to me.  To obtain the Kelly material that we performed last November, I email him one tiny Sibelius file for each piece.

Today I spent mostly on administrative things: booking flights for next month's viola d'amore extravaganza, working out the schedule for the recordings that start this weekend, and starting to put together budgets for the ConCal year ahead.  I also managed to practise some Hindemith, listen (twice) to a rather fun CD of a gig of early Scots and Irish stuff that Thomas Tallant's just sent me from Knoxville, Tennessee, and talk to Ben Parry of the Dunedin Consort about a possible collaboration. Maybe I've been quite busy after all.

Having just plugged the last few numbers into the spreadsheet for a New Year's Day performance of Messiah, I'm now looking at it and thinking '****'.  Marie is off at the Scottish Arts Council today - we'll reconvene on Friday, look at the figures and toss a coin to decide whether to laugh or cry.

Last Friday I went into the little Classics in the City CD shop in Glasgow's Candleriggs, in search of Rob MacKillop's new CD of Montgomerie songs with Paul Rendall.  Sure enough, he had one in stock (buying a CD marked ©2002 on 11 January is pretty good going), along with the newly-released Naxos recording of Muffat Concerti Grossi 7-12 and, of course, all three of our recordings (didn't buy any of those).  It's only a tiny shop, but the stock is amazing - carefully chosen back catalogue that's worth listening to, rather than the same old stuff the major companies are touting, and a good stereo system with a comfy chair and shelves of magazines and record guides. And he stays open late when there's a concert on round the corner in the City Hall.  I only mention this because in the last two years Scotland's two main independent bookshops (John Smith and James Thin), both substantial companies with an 18th century heritage, have gone bust, unable to meet the competition from Borders, Waterstones and the rest.  For all their faults they were shops of character.  You can go into a Borders or a Virgin or Tower or HMV in any town, and see almost identical stock: those few records that what remains of our classical record industry thinks are commercial.  I hope Classics in the City makes it - I'll certainly be back.