Tirade

Oh my god, the noise!

I have sat in Cafe Nero for 5 hours straight and with the exception of a short break when Fiona popped in for a coffee and a chat, I have been writing all that time. The great news is that I have now cracked the fifth movement of the motet. The dreadful news is that I seem to have spent the entire day surrounded by children from Highgate School. I don’t like privileged children at the best of times but the volume levels have been rising and rising for what seems like the last two hours... When one shouts, they all shout and before you know it, you want to throttle the living adenoids out of one of them; “oh my god, oh my god, totes mcgotes, oh my god, daddy, daddy, horse, daddy, oh my god, Easter, ya, ya, daddy, horse...” Pinch, punch the first of the month!


A creepy regionalist has launched a tirade against me on You Tube and all over the Internet. He seems to think that a symphony for Yorkshire shouldn’t be written by a card carrying Midlander. I sympathise with him. I didn’t think that someone from Surrey should be running the Northampton Derngate but I have to acknowledge that he’s doing a good job; probably a lot better than the one I would have done. He’s not from Northampton but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the Northamptonshire folk. I love Yorkshire. I spent three magical and incredibly formative years living there and fell in love with everything to do with the place. One of the regionalist’s arguments against the BBC project seems to be that we don’t need a new Yorkshire anthem. We have Scarborough Fair and Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At. Both, of course are untouchable, beautiful, stirring songs, but Ilkley Moor was written by a shoemaker from Canterbury and Scarborough Fair is a bastardised Scottish Folk tune. Oh the irony...

Sunday 1st April, 1660, and the boats continued to be anchored off Gravesend. Pepys made another 30 shillings for putting in a good word for someone, heard a pretty decent sermon on board ship, supped in the Captain’s cabin and then went to bed!