Sit com

I've been rather dreading today; nervous all week that the Pepys altos session would go as badly as the bass one.

I hauled myself out of bed, bright and early, and took myself to the post office to send a letter to Arnold Wesker. Fiona's mother sent me an article from The Times about him last week which I'd found inexplicably moving, so thought I'd drop him a line to see how he was doing. It's always good to get a letter isn't it? My mother always used to say "if you feel lonely or sad, send a letter," although I seem to have almost completely lost the ability to write! My writing looked like a little spider had walked through a puddle of ink and then run across the page.

I did a couple of hours on Brass at the cafe. It's fairly addictive and I'm enjoying the process of writing in detail immensely rewarding. I also enjoy the environment of the cafe. It struck me today what an extraordinary sit com this particular cafe would make, filled with the eccentric characters who people the Archway Road.

I sat on the tube to Clapham opposite a ghastly fat, sly-eyed Eastern European woman, who was wearing a bag-like T-shirt with a tiger on it. She had a baby under one arm. An older girl, maybe eight, was sitting next to the woman. She had a sallow face and deep-set eyes and was plainly terrified of the older woman. Every time she tried to speak, the woman (probably her mother) told her, aggressively, to shut up. Every time the baby dropped something, the young girl  immediately picked it up with a look of terror on her face.

How awful to grow up frightened of your mother, having to learn life's lessons from a woman who doesn't smile, a woman who treats you like a slave, blames you for everything, and probably smacks you when you don't please her. I stared at them for some time trying to work out how a situation like that could have developed. And I felt really sad.

The session with the altos was a blinder. Thank God! We ended on time and by the evening had well and truly hit our stride. Everyone was listening to one another intently and it felt as though all five singers were breathing and thinking as one.

It got a bit hairy in the middle; Movement One took longer than expected - it always does - but everything else was marvellous. We had proper breaks and everything!

I'm shattered however, and can't wait to get home. Unfortunately we lost our umpteenth tenor today for next Sunday's session, annoyingly someone who initially said he was free and then seemed to change his mind, no doubt whey he decided he was far too important an artist to deign to do a session for love rather than hard cash! Obviously it's no skin off my nose if somebody can't do a session, what annoys me is the loss of three days of "finding tenor time" because no one thinks it's important enough to get back to the composer to say the person he's  been assured is happy to do the gig, for whatever reason suddenly can't! Ho hum. Just one reason why the life of a creative can be a little hard.