Ravel

Today's been about formatting music for Brass. There's lots of it, and I'm not in a position where I'm able to do it very well. I do wish there were another week before rehearsals, so that I could sort everything out properly, and give some serious consideration to the songs I've not yet written. Still, it will be what it is, and I can only do what I can do. Once this week of rehearsals is out the way, I have the time to finesse everything.

I went to a lunchtime concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields with Ted and Ma Thornhill today. I haven't seen Ted's Mum for years, and she looks incredibly well. We talked about the old days; the days when Ted and I roamed the Midlands as teenagers searching for crop circles and haunted woods. Ted used to drive an enormous brown estate car, which was big enough to carry an entire string quartet and their instruments, so that became our busking wagon!

Joan wanted to hear all about the wedding and at one point joyfully corrected me when I referred to Nathan as my "partner." Old habits die hard. It feels so peculiar to use the word husband. Both exciting and wrong!

The concert was brilliant. The programme was violin sonatas; first Brahms and then a glorious work by Ravel, which I found particularly thrilling. Yolanda Bruno was the soloist and she's a damned fine player.

Ted and I immediately slipped into our teenaged music school parlance. The leader of our orchestra back then was called Helen Whitehurst. She was better than everyone else, and was a bit of a hero to all of us. Half way through the concert, just after Bruno had effortlessly got her fingers around the most astonishingly dexterous passage of music, Ted leaned over and whispered in my ear; "she's better than Whitehurst!"

We had lunch at Soho House - soup and chips - and then I returned home to continue formatting music.

This evening, we finally got an opportunity to sit down and open our wedding cards. All sorts of glorious words jumped out at us. My dear friend Sam Becker's letter made Nathan (who was reading it aloud) burst into tears, and I couldn't get beyond the first paragraph of Sally's card. She'd copied out a passage about love from Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Sally lost her beloved husband, Ben last year. The thought of someone so beautiful in every way being subjected to so much pain fills me with desperate sadness and the words she'd written completely finished me off.