Today has been filled with dramatic events but, alas, not really a lot of work.

The first dramatic event was that I found out that Carrion Comfort has been chosen as one of 10 (out of 16) pieces to be workshopped by London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra on my birthday, 31 March. I can’t wait to hear what the orchestra makes of it – hope it’s not too hard…

Secondly, I made some little tweaks to Nest and sent it off to the performer. She had a question about trills which resulted in needing to clarify the notation a little, so I did that in the evening. Hopefully it’s at its last version now. I’ve laid it out ready for binding as I’m thinking of offering the participants of my little commission project the option to receive a bound copy of all the scores created. That might be fun.

Thirdly, I managed to concuss myself. Fortunately just a little bit – hit my head rather hard on the badly designed cupboard that juts out with a sharp corner directly above the dishwasher – but it effectively wiped out the afternoon for real work as I felt quite woozy and couldn’t make my eyes focus properly for more than about 5 seconds at a time. Seems to be mostly better now. Just feeling a little fragile.

So, counter to the plan, I wasn’t able to start on either the piano/organ or harp piece this afternoon. But I didn’t want to waste time either, so I did a bunch of listening and came up with a plan for the slide guitar piece. I won’t reveal it here because I’m running it past the performer to see if he’s cool with the concept but it was good to be devoting some time to thinking about that one as I suspect I may get totally caught up in the intricacies of writing for slide guitar if I try to write a fully-notated piece, but doing something that’s 100% graphic score seems a bit of a cop-out.

I also found, and attempted to apply for a job at Collaborative Arts Network, except that when I clicked through to apply it said the job wasn’t available, even though the deadline was 14 February, and I completely failed to find current contact details for them anywhere on the web – the best I could do was an email address, which bounced. Apart from that I found the Director on LinkedIn. He may be my only chance! Of course, it’s entirely possible that they just found someone they already knew, but it does seem odd, so I feel I should pursue it.

Lights are still out across half the flat – D went to Robert Dyas today but didn’t understand that Djeli wanted him to buy fuse wire as opposed to just fuses, so I have to go out tomorrow to get the right stuff and take the fuses back. Hopefully tomorrow evening there will be light.

Oh, and yesterday’s bread which had seemed such a disaster turned out to be nothing of the sort. True, it’s not as light and airy as one had hoped, but it’s still perfectly edible and delicious. Looking forward to having another go with this flour (Dove’s Farm Malthouse)… when it’s not snowing!