The Artsy Honker

Time: Friday afternoon, 2017-01-06
Location: Southwark cathedral refectory
Tea: Chamomile
Activity: Fixing the end of 'O sweet and blessed country'

In my haste to get to Mass on time beforehand, I failed to bring a pencil with a rubber o it with me, so there was some crossing out to do. I needed to re-write the end of the piece as it was pretty crap before: I'd written most of it previously, then the ending on what must have been a bad day. I'm not entirely convinced it's much better now, but at least it's different, and better in keeping with the style of the rest of the piece; I'll have to sleep on it, and see whether I like it. I'd like to submit this piece for a workshop I only found out about this afternoon; the deadline is 2016-01-09 (er, Monday) at 5pm PST (ah, the timezones help me out here). The piece itself is a setting of my preferred version of the last verse of the hymn "Jerusalem the golden": the one that has "Exult, O dust and ashes, the Lord shall be your part; his always, his forever, thou shalt be and thou art!" in it. The actual original text is many verses longer than what appears in most hymnals and so different versions crop up all the time; I know that S, who I'm considering dedicating this piece to, also prefers the version I prefer, and dislikes the version in the Beastly Orange Hymnal.

No background music in the cathedral refectory, but during busy ties it can still be on the noisey side. The busy times don't tend to last very long though. The windows give plenty of natural daylight earlier in the day, but afternoons can be rather dim. There is some hot food at lunchtime, and tea/cake/etc available the rest of the time. The loo is down a narrow flight of stairs, there is an accessible toilet elsewhere in the building, near the gift shop. It's quite handy for London Bridge station.

After that I went to a stationer, then wrote most of a "review of the year" post, but I am not up to typing it tonight; I'm barely managing to type up this worklog and it's only short (I'm backdating it). I do have a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard, and it might be worth bringing them along on these café excursions for worklog and blogging purposes, though they'd be more than I really wanted to carry. We'll see.