Child prodigy

I took a melatonin tablet last night, which has done wonders for my jet lag. Whether tonight will find me tossing and turning all over the place I've no idea, but I woke up feeling very perky at 11am after twelve hours' sleep.

Being back in London is a trial. It's done nothing but rain and there were autumn leaves on our car bonnet. I knuckled down to admin, applied for a job and moped about feeling a bit flat before heading over to Michael's to pick up and go through some music. I'm singing in a synagogue on Saturday as part of a choir and because we're singing in Hebrew, I need to be as prepped as possible. There's a heck of a lot of material to learn. It's not like a Christian church with a couple of hymns and a few set numbers. There's pages of the stuff, some of which is written in old Hebrew so a number of the vowel sounds have shifted, which makes it doubly confusing! So I'm essentially learning the rules of a language as well as a shedload of dots which I think can only be described as a steep learning curve. Of course, the more I sing, the more repetition I'll start to notice, both linguistically and musically, but until that point it's all a little bewildering.

There's really not much else to say for the day. I've started a health and fitness regime and, after the rain, there was a glorious sunset which made me feel a little more positive. I was also not caught by a single traffic light or jam on the North Circular, which has to be some sort of record.

I listened to an interview earlier with a young girl called Alma Deutscher who is being described as a Mozart-like child prodigy. She plays violin, piano and composes, all to an exceptional standard. She's very sweet, but fairly odd. She seems to be English but speaks with a German accent. I'm told she wrote a violin concerto at 8 and an opera at 11. She's twelve now, and carries a pink skipping rope around with her for inspiration. She wanted to write an opera because she liked red, velvet curtains. The music all sounds very Mozartian but it is remarkable for her age. It's just all a bit freaky. How does a kid get like that with so few hours in a day? And how on earth will she develop as an adult?