I’ve been in Lisbon, in Portugal for the past week, hence the quietness over here. I’ve not had a holiday like that in a very, very long time. In fact, I think I could go so far as to say that I’ve not relaxed that much in over a decade. But now I’m back. Away from the gentle Portuguese winter sun, back to snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures. That was a bit of a shock to the system!

I took yesterday off, just a sort of recovery moment. I went and had a massage, did quite a lot of sleeping, finished knitting a hot water bottle cover I started before I left, and started on a new scarf (in crazy-coloured cotton chenille yarn) for my mama.

And today I’m working on getting my brain back into composition mode. I’ve read a little more of The Rest Is Noise and just wrote a blog post, A new approach for composers, on caitlinrowley.com about a new site I’ve found called Meet The Composer Studio – there’s some great content over there – have a wander round the videos provided by each of the six composers, and don’t miss Glenn Kotche’s Monkey Chant – brilliant! For comparison you can also creep off and listen to the original Ramayana Monkey Chant over on Ubuweb. Now I guess I should go and actually look at the quintet and see if I can do anything with it!