I'm so tired I wanna go home

I’m utterly exhausted. I have a cold and my day seems to have lasted forever. It didn’t help that I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. I was awake until at least 4am with hundreds of little thoughts darting around my head like a game of space invaders. I got out of bed. Put the telly on. Got back into bed. Got out of bed again. Bashed my knee against a piano stool. Trod on something hard and plastic. I ended up in the kitchen going through all the drawers to find some kind of sleeping tablet. I don’t like pills and potions, but I like insomnia even less.

My morning started in the cafe. I sat with a pot of tea, a pile of tissues, and my scores for the Roy Harper gig, which I studied like an A-level student. As I left the cafe, the owner called me over and wrote “timbre” on a piece of paper. He said he’d been arguing about the word's pronunciation and meaning all morning and thought I was the man to provide the answers. He was right, and I bored him silly with my response.

The rehearsal with Roy happened in the Blue Room at the Royal Festival Hall. It sounds rather fancy, but it's really just an airless room with no windows and a table with a coffee pot on it. The RFH (as I like to call it) is a venue that most classical musicians have played in. I've never performed there, which is hardly surprising as I'm not a performer. I did have a dressing room there once when I was helping ballet dancers to act (an impossible task), but I couldn’t find the stage door for toffee. I kept rushing up to people who looked like staff members, and asking where it was, but they all said they didn’t think there was one. It was only when one person said; “oh you mean the artistes entrance” that I understood the error of my ways. A bit of a fancy-schmanzy name for a stage door, if you ask me...

We had a very good session. Fiona has booked some remarkable players. I was hugely impressed by the standard of their musicianship, particularly as they’re having to play in some properly bizarre keys with more flats and sharps than I think it's healthy for a string player to deal with. Roy was incredible. I think we all felt rather privileged to be in his company.

I returned home to find 4 basses and a tenor sitting in my bedroom ready for a choir sectional/ note-bashing session. We certainly have a large amount of music to learn – and some of it is not at all easy... But the rehearsal went well, despite the fact that I could barely talk by the end of it. There’s a great amount of good will within the choir, and people seem particularly excited to be singing the requiem. It seems to bring out the best in them, which is a particularly lovely feeling for a composer.

So that’s about all from me. If I don’t stop working now, I’ll end up a quivering wreck. My glands feel like apples on my neck!

Pepys’ boy servant, the wonderfully named Wayneman, got himself into a rather peculiar situation on this date 350 years ago. It would seem that he’d found some gunpowder, stuck it in his pocket, forgotten about it, lit a match, and set off a mini explosion! Pepys went to see what had caused the loudish bang, and found Wayneman in a cloud of smoke, with burns on his legs and hands from reaching down to his trouser pocket to put the fire out. Pepys quizzed Wayneman about the origins of the gunpowder and was unsatisfied with the response he received. He therefore beat the lad “extremely”, which “troubled him” even though it was "necessary." So the third degree burns weren’t punishment enough?