Acarnage!

As I walked towards Highgate Tube today, an extraordinary thing happened... I was machine-gunned by acorns! It's obviously the period of this year which Mother Nature's designated for the acorn drop, and a memo must have gone round to all oak trees. To ensure speedy shedding, high winds have been ordered and the trees are all going for it. I've never known anything like it. It was like something from a Hitchcock film!

My mistake was halting at the entrance to the tube to finish writing a text. I must have been hit about four times, but there were acorns dropping all around me, making a sickening popping sound on the ground. And let me tell you something. Acorns sting when they hit you on the hand! Someone call health and safety!!

I spent much of the day formatting scores for the fifth movement of the Pepys Motet, which has to be the most over-worked composition I've ever written... And yet still I find mistakes! In fact, I found rather too many today, some of which I felt sure I'd remedied in the past... And then, at 6pm, the penny dropped. I was formatting a previous draft of the blinking piece. Ahhhhhh! That's the equivalent of a computer crashing on un-backed-up material. A full day's work wasted! Extraordinary.

I went into town for lunch at the Stock Pot with Nathan before a meeting with a group of people who are wanting to put on a charity gala for the Kaleidoscope Trust. They're looking at the first week of December, which could well prove problematic in terms of performer availabilities, and for that matter, audiences. The run-up to Christmas is already blocked out in a lot of diaries. It's also a highly lucrative period for singers and musicians. I avoid December like the plague!