A whiff of Milk Tray

Miami is a proper cacophony of sound. It’s not even 9am and the place is buzzing with dissonance. I can hear several motorbikes, lorries reversing all over the place, air conditioning units, the sea, cars horns galore, the bangs and crashes of building work, aeroplanes and a million musac tracks... I’m sure the same is true of London, but I suppose I’m never trying to relax in London! Plus, I suppose, after 15 years in the place, I must have got very good at filtering out unnessary noise.

My ear feels a lot better today. Whether that’s due to the amateur “lavage” I was subjected to, the weird nasal sprays, or the incredibly expensive eardrops that wouldn’t stay in my ear I don’t know. It certainly feels like the US health system is WAY behind the British one. Something I didn’t expect for a moment. For a doctor to poke a stick blithely into a man’s ear he knows to be a composer was perhaps the most shocking aspect for me! Oh well. Life is all about these experiences. Speaking of which, a man has just appeared (abseiling from above) on my balcony. A whiff of the Milk Tray, but sadly I discover he’s just here to clean the windows! These chaps must have balls of steel.

I continue to write the motet. Even here in Miami I’m trying to work for 2-3 hours each day. I'm relieved to say that I feel much clearer about its structure now. There will be 6 linked movements and I’ve now finished the first draft of one of them. Rather eccentrically, I started half way through the piece with the dark, slow third movement, which begins in 1664 with the death of Pepys' brother and runs through to the end of the plague in 1666. I'm sure it will turn out to be the longest of the movements, both in the amount of diary time it covers, and in purely musical terms. Par for the course for an Adagio.

350 years ago, Pepys went to visit Montagu and found the place bustling with well-wishers and sycophants. General Monck had even arranged some of his trumpeters to give him a quick fanfare. Quite when this took place, we can only imagine. Maybe it was as he came down the stairs to breakfast. A sort of 17th Century equivalent to entrance music in a tawdry 1970s American sit com. I hope it was accompanied by some canned applause.

Much of the rest of the day was spent debating politics. People were getting jobs back that they’d had under Cromwell. The ones who'd backed the wrong horses were running for their lives, or desperately attempting to change their allegiances. The great and the good were trying to work out the practicalities of a free parliament. Who would head it up? And what would this mean to everyone else, including Charles II?

Pepys then headed off to a tavern in King’s Street, Westminster, where, with two friends he ate an enormous dinner of “two brave dishes of meat, one of fish, a carp and some other fishes.” He adds that they were “as well done as ever I ate any”. Hardly a surprise for Pepys, whose superlatives knew no bounds. The group then went to another pub, where they drank a few pints of wine. Oddly, for a man who’d been drinking so heavily, he seems to have conducted a full day’s business after this point. Hollow legs, our Sam. Unlike me.