Anyone who thinks musicians get paid a lot for a couple of hours on stage really has no idea.

In the course of this week, I’ve been doing festival applications for The Filthy Spectacula; organising gigs for The String Project; catching up on recording and filing music expenses (joys of self-employment); going through my part and the score to Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco with a fine-toothed comb so that I can lead the orchestra for it a week tomorrow; learning new Filthy Spectacula songs so we can go from a half-hour set tomorrow to a one-hour set a fortnight later; keeping a close eye on music job/dep adverts because they won’t stay unfilled till I ‘have time’ to apply; joining the Musicians’ Union; getting a network railcard to reduce travel costs; trying to help keep up band social media/comms presence; going to rehearsals … and somewhere in the middle trying to make sure I sleep, eat, wash and do my desk job, seeing as even with all this hustling the lion’s share of my income doesn’t actually come from music.

The observant among you will have noticed there wasn’t much practice in there. This is an irony I’ve written about before, that trying to get paid to play music in public is a fairly good way to spend less time actually playing (especially in private).

On the plus side, having so much music work to do is at least good excuse for having less time to write about doing music work. Sorry it’s been a while!