Today was my first composition lesson… as teacher! I’ve contemplated what it would be like to teach composition many a time, but it’s not the sort of thing you just set yourself up as. Anyway, following my last blog post, a friend asked me if I ever taught, so now we’ve set up a thing where I’m actually teaching! And today was the first lesson. Mostly introductory stuff of course – talking about where he’s up to and what he wants to get out of the experience, but it was interesting (for me anyway!). Raised much food for thought and now I need to work out how to approach the whole enterprise.

Then in the afternoon I went to Kent for a briefing and location tour for a commission project I may be submitting a proposal for with a friend. It didn’t start too well – the sandwich I bought at Gloucester Rd turned out to be frozen in the middle and when I got to St Pancras to catch the train it turned out that the ticket I’d bought was only valid for the slow trains… which left from Charing Cross. By that time there was absolutely no chance of getting to Charing Cross in time to get to Gravesend for 4pm, so I ended up have to pay another £10.10 just to get on the train. The tour was pretty interesting, and I ended up meeting an Australian artist and we got chatting and ended up catching the train back to London together.

But the trip back was not without incident –  seemed to run over something in a tunnel just before Stratford International, then half the lights went out and there was a bit of a bang. We slowed right down and crept into Stratford and then the train just sat there. Then there was another noise, which kind of sounded a bit like they were uncoupling or re-coupling a train carriage. Anyway, we sat there for about three minutes and eventually they started to make an announcement, which got as far as “there has been an electrical incident. The driver is…” when there was a large bang and a flash from towards the front of the train. My new friend and I looked at each other and took a snap decision to bail – turned out the train was suffering from minor explosions going off along the top of it – she saw another one flash just after we left the train. Fortunately, though, it was Stratford which meant it was easy enough to get on the tube and get home, but still… explosions! Not every day you experience that!