Crafting

Don't laugh, but I've spent the entire day crafting! I wasn't exactly doing it for fun, although it turns out that crafting can be a lot of fun... until the back starts to ache because you're crawling around with bits of newspaper on the floor. I'm trying to conceptualise the front cover of the Pepys Motet CD and have decided to make a series of twenty little boards onto which I'm going to write shorthand characters based on the very first page of Pepys' Diary. I'm then going to photograph choir members peering out from behind the placards. 20 individual portraits. It's going to look amazing.

I went to the art shop in Muswell Hill and emerged carrying twenty foam mount boards, a vat of PVA glue and a shed load of tissue paper, which I used to cover the boards in 17th Century-style papier-mâché, which I bolstered with manuscript paper covered in scores from both Pepys and Oranges and Lemons. The results are charming, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the artistic skills to paint the shorthand onto the cards once they're dry. Pepys had very distinctive writing, and I want everything to look highly authentic, so, Little Welsh Natalie, if you're reading this, I may be heading downstairs in a few days' time with a paintbrush!

Today's calamity was almost certainly dropping my iPhone as I returned from the shops. I've dropped it from much greater heights before, but this time the entire screen smashed into thousands of terrible splinters, which made it impossible to use without cutting my fingers to shreds.

So back to Muswell Hill I went, to visit the dodgy little Turkish man whose convenience store has a sideline in finding solutions for these sorts of disaster. £50, a visit to the gym and another trip up to Muswell Hill later, and I had a brand new screen. But £50?! When I start signing on, that'll be the sum total of my weekly allowance.

I subsequently found out that Nathan's sister had her iPhone stolen today as well. What's that all about? I dunno, Apple discovers it's the wealthiest company the world has ever known, and all hell beaks loose!

Speaking of ludicrous wealth, I sold another Requiem today, thus proving that you wait six months for one sale to come along, and then two come at once. Fortunately this one wasn't going off to France, so a few extra quid will go into the coffers to be split between investors.