Panic in their hearts. Anger in their souls.

I've had a shockingly frustrating day. Isn’t it so often the case, that when you’re back is up against the wall, everything manages to go brilliantly wrong! My music software keeps crashing and getting little glitches which make writing music almost impossible. It’s genuinely one problem after another. Sadly, the customer service department for Finale Allegro is in the US, and opens at 8.30am CST, which means I'm utterly helpless until after lunch. The positive aspect, of course, is that I’m dealing with American customer service, which is universally ridiculously good. They’re polite, incredibly knowledgeable and terribly eager to help, but I've spent what feels like the whole day on the phone to them. Generally speaking they ask me to send the problem file over to them, and then they go away to try and work out what’s gone wrong. This leaves me twitching and twiddling my thumbs and getting myself into a panic, which intensifies and makes my stomach churn, which starts to give me a pain in my side, which makes me even more nervous, and so it goes on...

I suppose all I can do is what I can do, but I can see all the music I need to complete by the end of the month stretching out in front of me like some kind of weird manuscript-coated roller coaster shooting deep into the clouds. One bar at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time. In two weeks time, I’ll look back on today and wonder what the fuss was all about.

I’m going to York tomorrow to record rehearsal sound files for the Ebor Vox project. The last time I recorded sound files was almost exactly two years ago. They were called vocal files in those days, apparently. It could well have been Good Friday. I was holed up in a farm house in Leicestershire with two women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, one who was so stressed that all the blood vessels had burst in her eyes. I had a stomach virus. Nathan ended up singing soprano, and alto, whilst the two women looked on, panic in their hearts, anger in their souls.

April 3^rd, 1662, generated the shortest ever diary entry from our hero.

At home and at the office all day. At night. To bed.

(Rather than...?)