My tribe

I've just spent the evening with my delightful friend, Lli. We were meant to be going through her parts for the Pepys Motet but spent much of the evening talking about Wales. Lli makes me feel very Welsh. It's funny; my Welsh ancestry is fairly watered-down, but I have always felt incredibly attached to it. Wales for me is a land of mystery; a place I sort of yearn for, and always have. I attribute much of my musicality to my Welsh Nana who accompanied me on the 'cello whenever we saw her. My teacher always knew when I'd spent the weekend with her because my playing always came on in leaps and bounds.  She made the music make sense somehow. She also encouraged my composing a great deal by turning the nonsense I'd scrawled on pieces of manuscript paper into coherent little ditties. I'm told she once played the piano for silent movies, so improvising was obviously one of her fortes. It strikes me that my ability to compose probably came directly from her. 

Lli adheres to the concept that we all belong to a specific tribe and if this is the case then I feel she and I definitely belong to the same one. We bump into each other all the time, purely by chance, and today, when we decided to meet in Muswell Hill "at about 5pm in Sainsbury's or Holland & Barrett" I had no doubt that I'd find her without the need for mobile phones. And there she was; staring at tomatoes...

The rest of the day was spent working on White City, formatting piano parts and thinking about the demos I need to create for our contributors. I also managed to compose two songs for the production of Much Ado About Nothing I'm helping out with. A busy day, really. It needed to be. May scares me.