OK, so I’m still labouring under a black cloud – it’s been a pretty crappy day – but I’ve managed to pull off some small achievements – went for a walk and managed to get to Boots in time to buy essentials for Edinburgh (most notably mouthwash – the abscess on my tooth is playing up again – really need to go back to the dentist and get myself referred for that root canal she threatened me with last time. Oddly, am resisting this. How strange). I walked back via the station and picked up my tickets for tomorrow and felt a little better for the exercise. I had a brilliant idea for solving the train-snack issue which Tesco had been unable to provide a non-sugar-or-preservatives-overload answer to – and ended up making a pair of little apple crumbles, one for tonight (YUM!) and one for tomorrow. I finished packing the dishwasher and have actually run it twice AND done two loads of laundry. My bag is about half-packed. And I’ve ruled up the remaining pages needed for me to work on the orchestral arrangement on the train tomorrow – straight lines plus moving train is never a happy combination. Something has to give and it’s usually the straight line.
Oh, and I finished reading The Betrayal of Richard III and have greedily started in on The Daughter of Time again. Betrayal was a really excellent book – easy to read, enough detail to give the author’s arguments weight; not so much as to bog one down. I particularly liked that the final, tiny, chapter was devoted to possible answers to the Princes whereabouts if they weren’t actually murdered at all (which, given the lack of evidence for the murder ever having taken place at all, seems likely) – really quite fascinating. I think I’d recommend it to pretty much anyone as a first step to finding out more about the whole issue – short, detailed, easy to read. And this edition is annotated to bring certain facts up to date with current discoveries without interfering with V.B. Lamb’s excellent writing style. I think this book could be very useful in pulling together the synopsis for the opera, but I’m also looking forward to reading a more detailed volume too. Guess I should order that…