But am I an Eng or a Brit?

I'm a little bit stressed as I head home from the studio tonight. We've been working extremely hard, and our ears are tired. You get to a stage with mixing when nothing makes sense any more. You hear little details over and over again and become so obsessed with getting them right that the big picture starts to go out of the window. 

The stress is compounded by my not knowing what's happening on the Symphony for England front. I keep being told that there are developments, but no one seems to know whether these are positive or negative. It's doing my nut! Trying to focus on something as important as mixing a track, with this uncertainty nestling in the background, is proving almost impossible.

I rather suspect that everything is boiling down to the fact that our work focusses on England rather than Britain. The Olympics are all about team GB and not team England. But let's not forget that London is the capital of England, and that there are many people in this country who are proud to call themselves English. If the olympics were in Glasgow, would people worry about anything as specific as A Symphony for Scotland, I wonder? Would a Welshman ever describe himself as British? It's an interesting debate...

On the bright side at least my rat loves me... Rather too much as it happens... He's started to hump my arm! O miserere! 

Nathan thinks it's because I'm hairy like a lady rat, but can there be anything as excruciatingly embarrassing as being raped by a gay rat? Is it my fault? Is it something I did to him when he was a child? Did I love him too much? Did I lead him on? Did I not see the warning signs?

To make matters worse, I'm told that a gentlemen rat tends to lock onto his lady, pre-coitally, by sinking his enormous teeth into her neck. It's a brutal occurrence, which the females unsurprisingly hate. It leads to terrible fights. It's therefore not surprising that just before my mortifying dry-hump gets under way, little Pol digs his teeth into my arm. It's painful and it comes with no warning. What am I to do?

Friday 15th February 1661, and Pepys spent the entire day doing his accounts. He was thrilled after he'd totted everything up to discover he was worth an incredible 350l. What I find most bizarre about Pepys is that it was only within the last few years that he'd learnt how to do maths at all. In the 17th Century, maths was generally not taught in schools. Bliss!!