Green around the gills

It's been a thoroughly exhausting day... But things ARE improving. We're going almost mad, and working silly hours with no breaks, but it now looks like we'll manage record five out of the six movements by the end of our studio sessions. Both the folkies and the early musickers managed to get their way through an astonishing amount of music today. They sang beautifully. The early music girls came together to create a sound which was heartbreaking and Jon, who sings tenor in the folk group made two of us cry with his lament; "I being not able to do it any longer having done now so long as to undo my eyes", a setting of the passage in the diary when Pepys plaintively admits that he needs to stop writing because he thinks he's going blind. 

Unfortunately we're going to need to do another session with Nic in the early music choir who appeared looking decidedly green around the gills and promptly spent the session throwing up in the loo next door. I was so touched that she tried to do the session... She even managed to get through one of the movements!! 

Speaking of which, it was Lord Mayor's day on this date 350 years ago. Elizabeth was left at home, no doubt out of her skull on some dodgy medicine, and bedecked in plasters. Pepys took a group of ladies to watch the parades from an elevated position on Cheapside. He felt the pageants were good 'for such kind of things, but in themselves poor and absurd,' so he slipped away to the pub next door having got a taste for wine first thing in the morning with 'some strange and 'incomparable good clarett' that his friend Mr Rumball had given him.

He returned home to discover one Lady Davis had arrived in his absence and locked the door to his beloved roof terrace. It's not said how or why she had a key, but it so incensed Pepys that he immediately went to bed and couldn't sleep all night!!