Worthinging

I'm in Hove, in Fiona's flat, except Fiona's in Madrid. 

I've been with producer Paul all day in Worthing, slowly working our way through the requiem recordings, choosing the best takes, and lining them all up next to one another. Sometimes we select the best bits of two takes and splice them together. It's a fun process, not without its ups and downs. Sometimes you realise what you thought was good enough really isn't, and then the process becomes about trying to work out how best to cover up the mistakes; a bit of reverb goes a long way, but at least one sequence will need to be re- recorded. You live and learn. Recording anything, no matter how experienced you are, is always a massive learning curve. 

Here's an astonishing thing... Did you know that Ryan Air now charges £75 to take a 20kg bag on a plane? Is that, or is that not, in the words of Gem, "truly outrageous, truly, truly, truly outrageous."

Mr Pepys had his first ever mathematics lesson on this date 350 years ago, and started to learn multiplication tables for the first time. It may seem almost incredible that a man of Pepys' level of intellect had been through Cambridge and never learn maths, but it was a new science in those times, one which Pepys would champion in later life.