Cloudbusting

I had a massage today, and got chatting to the masseur afterwards, who has spent much of the past year  travelling to Yorkshire and back to tend to his elderly, semi-senile mother. He told me that they were driving along in the car last week and that she'd said to him, "I think me and you will stay friends. I don't think we'll get married." It's both hysterically funny and really unnerving. How genuinely distressing must it be to have your own mother say something like that to you? All I can hope is that his mother is at least happy, and that she's unaware of or unbothered by the confusion which is engulfing her brain. The concept of losing my sense of self is the thing which keeps me awake at night.

The massage was a lovely change of scenery, however, and hugely relaxing despite the fact that I got pummelled like a piece of mutton. There was a lovely moment when I was lying on my back, having my feet massaged, when I found myself staring up at the skylight, watching the sky very subtly changing from blue to black. There was a magical moment when all the clouds floating past were a different shades of pink.

It's 11.30pm and I've just finished work for the day. I was determined to get the score of Oranges and Lemons off to the Rebel Chorus by hook or by crook today, which gives me the rest of the week to focus on music for the Brass soundtrack.

My goal is to have everything done by Saturday so that I can have a few days thinking about Christmas, but I think this is fairly unlikely! I'll probably be working on Christmas Day itself!

Golly. I genuinely don't think there's anything else to say about the day. I am horrified to read the news from Sidney today, and my heart and thoughts go out to Australian readers of this blog. The fact that the dreadful man who was responsible for the terrible events was an asylum seeker, who was given sanctuary in Australia twenty years ago when he fled Iran, just makes the whole thing even less easy to swallow. I've never been prouder to be an atheist!