Glassy rivers

It's my birthday! I've been in Hackney all day editing the fourth in our suite of films for the Space. Curiously it is also the editor, Hazel's birthday, so when I arrived, Penny handed us both a little Olympic souvenir gift. We ate egg sandwiches for lunch made from the most delicious home made bread. Penny's house always smells of freshly-baked bread. 

This evening I went to Thaxted with Nathan and Helen, and we sat for hours lapping up passages from my Mum's extraordinary diaries. Now I know what my Mum had for dinner the night I was born; an apricot trifle! 

We stopped off on the journey home in Grantchester Meadows and recorded my fourth set of composer's notes for The Space project by moonlight. The air smelt of aniseed and budlia. As I finished talking, a magical mist descended and hovered above the glass-like river. 

Earlier on I received some very sad news via my mother. My brother's best friend at school was a lad called Scott, who died today. He'd had cancer, but my brother, who went to visit him a month ago, seemed to think that things were looking fairly positive. Scott was talking about the future and seemed fairly upbeat. Life can be so intolerably cruel sometimes. I shall remember him fondly. 

August 8th, 1662 and Pepys went to Woolwich and then Greenwich to look at different types of hemp, one assumes seeing what sort would make the best rope. The diary entry goes on forever, Pepys reporting in every detail a rather pompous pseudo-philosophical  conversation he'd had with his superior William Coventry. Deeply yawnsome.