Crash!

An article about the Pepys Motet has recently been published on the BBC London website. You can see it here
Lots of people are now getting in touch and registering their interest in performing the work, which is very exciting. I'm hearing from all sorts of people who come from many countries and musical traditions. I love the fact that Pepys has such global appeal.

I had a note from a chap in Dublin, who tells me Dr Luckett at Magdalene College was wrong. Sadly, it seems Pepys didn’t invent the bookcase. I find this a terrible shame, but feel it’s important that the truth is published. Here’s the email he sent:

The oldest surviving bookcases in the UK are those in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, from the late sixteenth century, in other words several decades before Pepys. There are older ones on the Continent and there are older illustrations of bookcases from the Continent and from England. Whatever Pepys invented, it wasn't the bookcase!

I spent a couple of hours at lunchtime today in Highgate Woods with my goddaughter and her mother, Philippa. We drank cups of tea and then had lunch sitting in the open air cafe. Deia has grown up enormously and is now speaking. She says Mummy a lot, usually as she’s running into the corner of a table. It’s astonishing and terrifying how quickly a bruise can develop on a tiny child! We played in the sandpit; well I played in the sandpit. Deia was much more interested in looking at a steel fence, whilst standing on a daffodil.

I would and should still be working, but my music programme has crashed 8 times in the last 10 minutes. I can only hope it just needs a moment to chill out and that the situation will improve when I’ve closed down some of the myriad programmes that seem to be running on my laptop. I know it's a compatability issue, however, and hate the fact that with every new Microsoft prgramme everything you've paid good money for goes out of date. I’ve got homework tummy as a result. Too many bars. Too little time. I'm also upset not to have made the Pepys 350 event tonight at St Olave's Church. They're always such good fun and I recommend them to every reader of this blog. Here's the science.

Pepys wrote a particularly bland and factual entry 350 years ago today. Perhaps he was in a panic after revealing the diary’s existence the day before. Whatever the case, I assume the poor man was bored stiff and suffering from cabin fever. (I certainly know how that feels!) The weather was bad, so no strangers and friends were allowed on board the Nazeby to keep the crew entertained. Pepys, instead, spent the day writing letters to his wife and friends in London and that’s about as interesting as his day got!