PRS saviours

I'm sightly running out of things to write about in my blog at the moment, because, as we sink further into rehearsals, the days have started to meld into one another. I get up, way too early. I take the tube down to Borough Station. I buy a ringed doughnut. I walk to the rehearsal rooms. The creative team work. I sit at a variety of tables, headphones clamped to my ears, half in the world of orchestration, half in the business of the room.

I think the hot weather melted everyone's brains yesterday. Rehearsals were incredibly slow going and, on the tube, everyone seemed particularly grumpy, crammed in like sardines to the boiling hot carriages. An all-pervading smell of damp clothes and anger wafted through the carriages. It was so intense that it seemed to take on the form of a visible haze.

I am thrilled to finally be able to announce that the PRS Foundation have saved the day and offered me a grant to maintain me financially as we rehearse Em. Words can't really express how grateful I am to them. Readers of this blog will know that I have struggled enormously for the past year whilst writing Em with absolutely no help from any one. Fund application after fund application was rejected and the savings dwindled. It reached a crisis point about a month ago when I thought I was going to have to get a part-time job simply to fund being in rehearsals. Of course, now that we're into rehearsals I realise how utterly impossible it would have been for me to have been simultaneously working another job, so I can say, without a word of a lie, that the PRS Foundation has absolutely saved my bacon. When I found out, I actually cried. With absolute relief. Obviously it's a relatively humble grant, but it gets me out of trouble for now.