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I’m really tired today; probably because we’ve had a day off from filming. If it were up to me I’d have spent the entire day in bed, but unfortunately our faintly ludicrous schedule means I'm back in the recording studio working on the final mixes of the music. No rest for Alison either who has spent the entire day injesting the rushes from the many hours of footage we've already shot. I have to confess to having had my fill of these compositions now! I’m unable to tell whether what I’m hearing is any good and I’ve long since lost the ability to make any informed decisions! They might be good. They might be bloody awful. My mind is now firmly planted in the land of images. It's one of the drawbacks of working both as a composer and a director. At a certain point I need to firmly shut one door and open the other. In all of the projects I've worked on like this before I've not yet been required to retrace my steps and return to the music, and my mind just won't deal with what it's being asked to do! Thankfully Hazel and Simon seem to have a good understanding about what's needed and what still needs to be done, so I am sort of leaving them to do their thing and just occasionally chipping in with my slightly addled thoughts.


Every time I stop, I just want to fall asleep, however. I so badly need a rest, but the next opportunity for one seems to be a week on Saturday, which at the moment seems to be a rather long way off! In the meantime, my skin is falling apart, I’m almost constantly dehydrated, my bones ache and I’m cramming more and more rubbish food into my body, just to get those little false rushes of energy as and when they feel neccessary..

I'm spending rather a lot of time obsessing about the weather, particularly for Saturday’s shoot. We’re currently expecting “heavy rain” in Leeds, which isn’t going to be much fun whilst we’re stuck on a roof with a rock band, trying to get epic shots of the city!!

But really all I want to do is sleep!

July 8th 1660 was a Sunday, and Pepys went to worship at Whitehall Chapel, writing, “here I heard very good music, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing-men in surplices in my life.” Cromwell, had, as I wrote some time before in this blog, banished all organs from churches in the country, stating that they were “illegal in the worship of God.” Simultaneously, paintings, idolatry, Latin texts and by all accounts, anything that wasn’t simple whitewashed walls were also banned. After the restoration organ makers were in great demand and in fact it wasn’t until the early 19th Century that some parish churches found themselves with replacements. Thrilled as he might have been with the music, Pepys didn't enjoy the content of the sermon, which was toadying in the extreme to the King; “I did not like that Clergy should meddle with matters of state”. Quite right.