MU rates

What happened to the weather? I thought Spring was on its way, and yet I've been shivering like a lap dog all day. Shivering is about the most interesting thing I’ve done today, however. I had to get up fairly early, despite not having had any form of lie-in for what seems like weeks. I couldn’t sleep last night and got up in the middle of the night to write a load of emails that had been hanging over my head.

I’ve sat at the kitchen table from 9am this morning staring at my computer screen, working on the commission for the Fleet Singers. There’s so much to do and so little time. I’m working around the clock just to get enough of a chunk of it behind me so that I can stop panicking as soon as my head hits the pillow at night and my mind drifts onto the subject.

Every so often I receive an email from someone about the Requiem. Today I’ve been working my way through the business of Musician’s Union rates. It is an absolute mine field. For classical recordings you pay one rate. For pop recordings you pay another. There are bolt ons and add ons. You oay one rate for backing tracks. At one point today I thought I was going to need to pay an extra £4,000 simply because we're making a classical recording. It transpires that, should the work be branded as classical, we might actually SAVE a bit of money, but the amount I was quoted today seemed so low that I’m not sure I can believe it. On and on it goes. Every five minutes I’m pulled into another debate. I go up, I go down. Good news. Bad news. Trust nothing until you've heard it from a variety of sources...

My eyes are so tired that they've started itching. As soon as I’ve written this blog entry I’m going to shut this bleedin’ laptop and try and relax for a few hours before bed.

Wednesday 5^th March, 1662, and Pepys went to a pewterers to buy a poor box to fill with money every time he broke his vows to save money. It’s a warped logic, which surely means you simply end up spending twice the amount, but it's one I fully understand. Pepys returned home to go through his papers, in particular those pertaining to the navy voyage in 1660 when Charles II was brought over from Holland. Pepys ripped up all the unimportant documents, and by the time he’d finished, had filled his closet as “high as his knees.”