There is a hedgehog that scurries around the garden in the middle of the night, a cat that sits under the tree in the afternoon, swifts that scream delightedly over the houses in the early evening, quiet in the mornings, calm in the evenings, and a distinct lack of the thunkthunkthunk from any netball court – Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Shepton Mallet any more. Yes, the move is done and we are in, the house better in every way than even our most excited expectations, even if we have little in the way of furniture and most rooms smell of Ikea and flat-pack panic. The hard work, though ..read more

The main focus of the past week has been the house moves, and the fourteen-hour shift I put in yesterday is the main reason that this entry is a little later than I had wanted it to be. However, we now do feel as if we are at the stage where things are in place and ready for the great get-out on Thursday. It is about time too, as this morning represented all the reasons why we want to leave – road drilling at 7.30, the basketball court at 8.30, and then the police knocking at the door to ask if we had any information about “an incident” last night. Then, to top things off, two dogs went banana ..read more

It was another good week for the writing, and a good week for the writing tends to mean a blog post on a Monday. That is a few weeks in a row now, so it really does seems as though things are clearing up and I am genuinely able to get back to the manuscript, genuinely able to churn out some constructive stuff as well. Things continue to be packed into boxes in the house, and with a bit of luck we will be exchanging on both sale and onward purchase within the next day or so, which will leave us with a couple of weeks to sort out all of the logistics of moving. With a bit of luck we will be able ..read more

Last week was the most productive week for composition that I can remember having for at least a year, and it is definitely no coincidence that the whole madcap house upheaval seems finally to be showing signs of coming to a close, as discussions have moved on from legal ins and outs to covering dates for exchange and completion. There is still a significant amount of ‘stuff’ to put into boxes and get out of the house, but hopefully those days of trying to find certificates for whatever building work was done before I even owned the property might now be behind me. On Monday I met with the con ..read more

Thursday, 30th May 2024. There it is. I was up at five o’clock and spent a couple of hours tinkering with some very small details in the symphony, removing a comma here, popping in a double bar there, and lengthening a couple of phrases by a triplet quaver, so about a third of a second, but it all comes out in the wash. By eight o’clock I had done the things that I normally leave until last – dedication, copyright notice, date of completion. Note that last one, the date of completion. So, apart from correcting whatever errors might be found in the score and whatever missteps I might have made ..read more

So yet another month goes by between posts, even though I tell myself constantly that I should be appearing here more often. Resolutions, eh? Anyway, despite the silence on the blogging front there have been many things going on in the background, the most important of which is that the symphony now has a date for its first performance – Sunday, 21st July – although you will have to be in Italy to hear it, as it will be part of the offering for the Anghiari Festival. The programme has yet to be 100% officially confirmed, but this is as close to secure as can be, to the extent that the conducto ..read more

I made some progress on …our light is here… during the week, which was definitely a positive step, and I feel much better with the piece now that I have taken the two “movements” and swapped their order around. Somewhere in all the fog of the sketches and the doodles and the crossings out there is a structure that will work and make sense, but it is still taking a while to discern exactly what it is. I have been slightly hung up on the question of how to get from one section to another, whether to make it a steady but inexorable change of material or just to stop and start again. There are tim ..read more

Hmm. Another very, very long gap between entries but, yes, I am still here and still writing a little at a time. All of the paraphernalia of the house move has been rumbling on and is still a little overwhelming at times, and the sheer amount of admin and disruption that it has caused has meant that sitting down to anything like regular work has been difficult. This is likely to continue at least until the summer, though the signs are that everything is pointing in the right direction at last and that we are definitely nearer the end of the journey that the start. Still, bumps in the road and ..read more

It has been a long time since I have posted regularly on this blog, but it has also been a long time since I have done any regular composition. Since the middle of last year I have been strapped into the rollercoaster that is The Big House Move, something that began as a notion, became an idea, developed into a plan, and then became a full-on adventure/nightmare, and which has, over the past few months, taken up almost all of my free time and energy, both physical and mental. Without going into too many boring details, this grand plan involves the buying and selling of three houses (don’t ask ..read more

So here we are again after a decent pause, and it is probably about time that I caught up with everything that has been going on in the past few weeks or so. The run up to Christmas was frenetic, made all the more hectic by Christmas Eve being a Sunday, but in the end everything worked out well despite the fact that I genuinely felt that I was playing Hark, The Herald on autopilot by the end of it all. Early in the afternoon on Christmas Day I hit the road and headed home, eventually making it back in the early evening after dropping in to see some friends, and then switched off for a bit. On ..read more