A day off in the middle of the week - amazing. No work in it at all, unless you count a couple of phone conversations, one with Marie about the forthcoming Rome concert, and one with my accountant about the tax position on Concerto Caledonia before its incorporation last year as a company limited by guarantee. I suppose the lesson always learned (or never learned) from these things is that if you're going to have to speak to an accountant, do it sooner rather than later.

My harmonium playing came together in the end - I'd have liked to have done it better, but mastering a new instrument takes time. We were playing Schoenberg's chamber arrangement of Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer: it's terrible adolescent poetry (Mahler's own) but great music, and in the last few bars the harmonium has to play first with the clarinet in a low register, and then with the flute much higher up, and it has to blend with them both. For just a moment, I knew what it felt like to sit in the wind section of an orchestra. On the Friday night cellist Kevin McCrae lent me an enormous white bow tie to wear with my tails - for reasons best known to himself, he had just got a tailor to make him some outsize bow ties, and the first time I saw him wearing one, I laughed so much I couldn't stand up. It was wonderfully funny for no good reason, like Spike Milligan making an entrance in tights full of potatoes.

I spent yesterday back at Castlesound, recording the last overdubs for the McFalls album: electric violins and viola, keyboards and some percussion. And my long-awaited blues harmonica solo. For someone like me who grew up dreaming of making records, there's something very luxurious about having a day in a studio in the country, with a first-class engineer, a Bösendorfer piano, a Hammond organ, and someone else paying the bill. It was hard work, but fun - you can tell I'm enjoying myself when I start running everywhere, too excited to walk. Robert McFall dropped by at the end of the day to see how it was going, and when we played him the overdubs I'd put onto his arrangement of the Richard Thompson song The Great Valerio, he threw his head back and laughed with delight. This was a great relief, as I'd suspected he was going to find them really tasteless and over the top.  He couldn't believe there were just two people (me on piano, Rick Bamford on cymbals) making all that noise - it sounded like half a orchestra.