Viral

I wrote the first minute of music for the Nene composition yesterday. The first incarnation of the composition, the one which will be performed at the Albert Hall, needs to be twelve minutes long, and, for some reason, I started writing it at the three minute mark. I've staggered through to the end, and am now back at the beginning, terrified that it will be like that famous bridge, which they started building at the two ends, which ended up not meeting in the middle. I'm presently cruising along in E major at a fast four four tempo, yet, within a minute, I'll have to have worked my way towards D flat major and a 9/8 time signature. I think this is what Nathan would call backward engineering!

My Coventry Market film continues to go a bit viral after Harry Hill's fabulous parody of it last week. Rufus Hound, Lorraine Kelly, Jennifer Saunders and him off of Muse have all tweeted about it. I think the majority of people still think it was made in the 1980s as some sort of advert for the market, and are probably slightly unaware of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the original film, which was only ever made as a celebration of eccentricity. My attention was drawn to a tweet today from a woman who simply wrote, "my husband has made the Coventry Market song his ring tone." She'd included a meme of someone bashing his head in a sort of "doh" way. The film has had about 30 thousand extra views in the past week. Perhaps it will catch up with his sister film, Tyne and Wear Metro the Musical.

I spent the day today doing admin. We have a read through of Em tomorrow afternoon and it's been a veritable nightmare to organise. Hannah Chiswick (the director) and I are pulling in all sorts of favours to make it happen, and people are bending over backwards to help us, but it's a heck of a lot of work. I was so frantically busy that I realised, at 4pm today, I was still half-dressed, hadn't eaten anything, and smelt of fear! I instantly had my second bath of the day.

This evening I did my third quiz as a quiz master. This one was in a school in Woking, and, after a bit of a nervy start, I felt it went rather well. I think these things are all about finding the sort of quiz master you want to be. There are all sorts of options. You can be schoolmarmish, authoritative, one of the lads, smarmy, charismatic, charming, geeky. I think my schtick is more likely to be on the sardonic spectrum. I enjoy the work enormously. The people I work for are all exceptionally charming and right at the tops of their games within the quizzing fraternity.