Beaches and sinks

As my Dad would say: this is just the ticket. I'm currently sitting on Hove beach. The sun is melting into a cloud, the shadows are long, the grey sea is calm, the shingle looks like amber. The white buildings of Brighton are glowing Easter yellow.  A curiously-shaped boat out to sea makes it look a little as though the funfair at the end of the pier has floated away. Everything feels rather perfect. Calm and still. I've sat on this beach many times in my life. On the hottest and coldest days of the year and pretty much everything in between.

I left the house and returned home a grand total of three times today. Desperate. On the third occasion I got as far as Archway before having to turn around to collect something else I'd forgotten; a true indication that my brain is in melt-down with way too much to think about.

Every time I turned around, the likelihood became ever stronger that I'd get trapped in the rush hour at Victoria station and sure enough, I ended up sandwiched in a train carriage like a little morsel of cheese on the floor by the kitchen bin!

The purpose of my visit to Hove is to spend three days with the lovely PK working on The Pepys Motet recordings we did like ten years ago, and to start the new project, Invisible Voices, which I shall be writing in tandem with Brass for the next few months. We've collected a fair amount of testimonial from LGBT people in Commonwealth Countries, and I'm going to try quite an unusual process when it comes to glueing them all together, which will hopefully be right up PK's strasse. I think I'm not wrong in saying that PKs favourite kind of music is no music at all. I, on the other hand will happily throw the entire kitchen sink at a piece of music to see what sticks. It'll be fun to get a bit more sparse!