And on it goes. It’s still struggling, but feeling a teeny-weeny bit more solid than it was. It’s reached 2’20″ in duration now and the last bit that I’ve been working on since I got back from Portugal seems to be sticking to the other bit, although I suspect it may need a fair bit of tweaking later on. At least it’s progressing though.

Went into town with my mother to do a little shopping/recon for Christmas stuff. Someone in John Lewis told her about a haberdashery shop in a nearby street (Dering Street for those who are curious) so we went along there and WOW! A whole floor of ribbons! Another floor of bias binding, random feathers, zips and assorted fastenings! They have fabric dye too, fabrics (of course) and a vast array of needles. My mother even found the bodkin she’d been looking for (and the person in John Lewis’s haberdashery department didn’t even know what a bodkin was, which is really rather disgraceful). So joy. I’m going to sneak back there soon to buy some secret ribbon for presents – so many to choose from!

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No, not THAT Bastille Day, but today is the day we finally got to Bastille to have a peek at the opera house. And book some tickets Alas, the opera itself was a little too pricey for our pockets, and the mama wasn’t too keen on seeing Eugene Onegin, so we’ve booked ourselves in for a two-piano concert of Dutilleux and Hindemith on Saturday night. And it’s been a beautiful day – so hot! So much sun! Made the parents very happy after their freezing-cold Sydney winter.

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Very excited! I was hoping to find a composer group in London and this one does – it sounds – pretty much what I want: meetups to talk through new works and problems and occasional special events focusing on a particular topic. Yay!

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Yup. Oil tanks. They’re going to be part of the new development there and this was the last chance to see them before building starts. One of them’s going to be an auditorium – will be interesting to see how that turns out – interesting acoustics! We weren’t allowed to take any photos but I took some hopefully nice shots of St Paul’s etc from the balcony of the members’ loung afterwards. Also went to see the Pop Life exhibition which was pretty interesting.

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at lunchtime. I went the other way along Brick Lane, back towards Spitalfields Market, then turned off and looked at the church close up. They do a lunchtime service on a Tuesday. Maybe I’ll go along someday.

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Djeli’s got all excited and wants to do some bookbinding, so we went off to Shepherd’s bookbinding supplies in Holborn where I actually managed to not buy anything at all – but could easily have walked out with pretty much everything in the shop – so many delicious papers! Djeli got a heap of stuff – self-healing mat, bone folder, two types of glue, paper, all sorts of things. Next stop was Blade’s Rubber Stamps, where I enquired about a Stravinsky-esque rolling manuscript stamp, but alas they don’t seem to exist and they can’t make rolling stamps to order – something about it being very difficult to get the rolling bits. Then on to Cornelissen’s art shop near the British Museum, which I’ve wanted to visit for a very long time. Yum! Again, I could have bought out the shop, but contented myself with a nib holder, a special music manuscript nib (which works better than the one I had in Sydney which blopped on everything – given that music is all about blops on lines, it’s more helpful if the lines don’t provide their own blops!), a calligraphy nib (cos I was already buying the holder and I’ve been wanting to get back into calligraphy but all my equipment’s in Sydney) and – of course – a bottle of ink. I managed to find some waterproof calligraphy ink, which I consider a bit of an achievement Oh – and a daylight simulation bulb too. Then we moved on to John Lewis where I bought knitting needles with which to knit up my mama’s chenille yarn into a scarf, and looked at Anglepoise lamps for future (not-too-distant-future) reference. All in all, a very successful day!

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They conveniently just transferred by SPNM site login and just sent me my new login details, so I went for a wander around the place. Found a few interesting-looking opportunities and sent off a few emails for more detail

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I’ve heard a lot about Tumblr floating round on the internet and it sounded quite interesting as a place for accumulating all one’s assorted randomness in one place. I’m not sure what the potential audience for it would be. I suspect it might be more useful as a way for me to keep an eye on how dull I’m being, but chi.mp didn’t turn out to be particularly interesting or useful and I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with that. Tumblr seems to cover more ground and results in more of a native feel when combining streams from various services, so we’ll see. http://caitlinrowley.tumblr.com.

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After a productive morning’s work and my friend’s physiotherapy appointment, we drove out to Abroath where we had a spectacular afternoon tea at Sugar and Spice – a teapot full of tea, little sandwiches (I had chicken, my friend had ham), simply enormous and amazing scones with superb raspberry jam and cream, plus a small strawberry tart, a raspberry/white chocolate/caramel slice and two shortbread biscuits. We finished our scones and then declared ourselves stuffed to puss’s bow so we had to ask for a doggy bag for the cakes – they looked too good to waste!

And of course a walk was in order to deal with the aftermath, so after buying a few small treats from the sweetshop section for djelibeybi, we wandered along the seafront and up into Arbroath before buying some Arbroath smokies (smoked fish – mackeral maybe? very tasty) for tea and heading home. Lovely!

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I’m staying with a friend and collaborator of mine and she was going to this seminar, Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research?, on practice-based research, at Dundee Contemporary Arts, so I decided to tag along. Some interesting presentations, lots of notes taken. Brain is now some sort of soft, smelly cheese.

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