"It's only light entertainment!"

I spent the morning working at Jackson's Lane community centre, which went from being a delightfully still place, peopled by one or two elderly women who'd been keeping fit and were quietly discussing the horrors of urban foxes, to a hell hole filled with the most horrific children I've ever encountered, who ran around the building screaming whilst turning every single surface into some kind of extended adventure playground. Some of the children were the ugliest kids I've ever set eyes on. Great big jaws and funny foreheads. Is that uncharitable of me? No. It was uncharitable of their ghastly privileged parents to allow them to run riot in an enclosed public space. Take the little bastards to the park and remember that YOU chose to have kids, not the people around you!

On the way back from the gym this afternoon, I listened to a story on the radio which I found very moving. The story concerned an 86-year old lady called Jane Little, who played the double bass in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for an astounding 71 years! She apparently wanted to be a ballet dancer, but didn't have the right feet for point work, so took up the double bass, much to the chagrin of her parents!

Sadly this extraordinary woman collapsed and died whilst playing on stage this week. She was performing a concert of songs from the shows with the orchestra she'd played in all those years. Rather astonishingly, the number they were playing was "There's No Business Like Show Business" which feels about as appropriate as it gets!

We worked late into the evening. I've been formatting and sorting out my composition for the subsidiary of the London Gay Men's Chorus. I had an email from the organiser earlier saying that the choir would prefer homophonic writing over polyphony. In laymen's terms this means that I should try to keep all the rhythms the same throughout the four choir voices and not have any individual parts venturing out too much on their own. Anyway, the good news is that the music I've written is entirely homophonic. The only issue is that when I wrote to tell the organiser this fact, my computer did its ludicrous auto-correct thing and I ended up telling the organiser of the London Gay Men's Chorus that my writing was "entirely homophobic!" Hysterical.

I have been trying to get rid of emails from my new iPhone. Data of this nature, according to Nathan, is taking up way too much space. I do have about 4000 emails lurking in there somewhere. Sadly, they often don't delete themselves the first time I hit the button, so I'm having to go back in and delete them all again. It's ghastly, especially when dealing with emails that are painful to read. I deleted some 500 relating to Beyond the Fence earlier which made my blood run cold. I'm beginning to realise that the project was so traumatic and stressful that my mind has actually begun to filter stuff out! Nathan showed me some videos he'd taken on his phone on a particularly stressful day near Christmas and I couldn't remember even being there! I looked disengaged and haunted on the film. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time around me, but I'm pretty sure my head was somewhere very dark! Talk about First World problems! As Julian Clary used to say when the entire cast of Taboo were screaming at each other in the communal male dressing room, "I don't know what all the fuss is about. It's only light entertainment!"