Renoir's sky

It's been one of those days when everything moves at a lightning pace. The list of things to do grew faster at the bottom than I could tick things off from the top, and we skated through the day, dealing with one pressing need after another. It was high octane!

Things kicked off with the rather good news that the Arts Council has given us a little grant to film a music video for one of the songs from Brass. This is particularly exciting because it will give us something to use when publicising our CD release and hopefully mean that more people in the world will want to engage with the Brass. Today's task was to make the first tentative steps towards booking locations and trying to fix a date for the filming that most, if not all, of the cast could do.

At about 11am, just before we were due to leave the house, I realised, in something of a panic, that the competition for which I'd recorded my Shakespeare setting with Julian on Saturday, had a closing date of today! I'd previously thought I had ages, and am incredibly relieved that something in me made me check. Of course, as with all these competitions, there were things which needed to be sent in with the MP3, including the sheet music with chord symbols attached, which is a slightly odd request, but rules is rules. So I hurriedly added chord symbols to my score, formatted everything so it looked vaguely nice, and sent the email into the ether. I hate it when you don't get an acknowledgement. There's always the dread that the email has got lost in transit, disappearing with all your hopes and dreams.

We met Fiona for lunch in Renoir in Kentish Town, which has gone right up market with fancy menus, gluten free cakes, soft lighting and potato wedges instead of fries. Our time together was all too brief. She was heading to Goodge Street to have a pair of boots mended and we were rushing to Gospel Oak to meet Lil and Cat with whom we shared a taxi to Regent's Park, where, rather bizarrely, we met Uncle Archie, and got into his car to drive to Sky TV for a meeting. Sky TV owns a sort of epic village-sized self-contained campus somewhere out towards Heathrow.

The car journey there was hugely amusing. We were all crammed into the car like little like sardines, and the seat belts in the back kept going into crash mode, which meant Nathan and Lil were periodically being throttled! At one point there seemed to be a danger that the car door wouldn't actually close with everyone inside. Cat told us that she'd fallen out of a car door as a three year old in similar circumstances, which made me laugh hysterically, largely because I remembered a school exchange trip to Germany where the door of our mini bus opened as we were going round a corner, thankfully at a very slow speed because two children on the back seat slid out! I don't remember it being too much of a crisis at the time - there certainly wasn't a law suit that I'm aware of - so I'm actually beginning to doubt my own memory.

Anyway, the meeting at Sky went well. Everyone was very friendly and rather pleased to see us, which I see as a rather good sign. The project is a terrific one, and I desperately hope it flies.

We came home via Central London where we discovered that Nathan's computer's storage device is a great deal more broken than we'd first imagined - or at least hoped. No one knows if it's even fixable, and it could be two weeks before we find out, which, if it weren't for the discovery that Joseph, our studio engineer, had kept his own copy of the Oranges and Lemons choir sessions, would have landed me firmly in the doo-doo for my mixing session on the piece next Monday!

So, we deposited Nathan's device at a repair shop on Tottenham Court Road, and headed off to the Apple Store in Covent Garden, where I spent an obscene amount of money on another storage device and a replacement computer cable for one that broke during whatever incident took out Nathan's storage device.

Someone stood up for me on the tube on the way home! Can you imagine?! In fairness I was resting my weary legs by sitting on the floor of the carriage, so he may have thought I was either disabled or mentally unstable. Nathan is fresh-faced and shaven at the moment, and I've got a big white beard, so that may also have contributed; in fact, I was slightly worried that the people at Sky might think Nathan was my son rather than my husband! Fortunately they'd all seen our wedding, so assumed he was my toy boy instead!

We came home, gobbled down some food, and then I jumped in the car and drove to Joseph's house in Dalston where all the necessary vocal tracks were transferred to my new storage device. Problem solved.

I've come home with just enough time to watch a QI semi-final before bed. Now that's a packed day!