I haven’t blogged for some time. It’s been busy and I’ve started three blog posts but haven’t had time to finish them. So this morning I thought I’d try something new - speed blogging! Sounds like some kind of dodgy online challenge doesn’t it? My longer blog posts don’t take too much time to write and they can be spread out over a few days, or weeks as is the case at the moment. What does take time is the photos and editing, which can go on for a few days after publishing a post.

Blogging can be a great way to attract traffic to a website and to please that search engine, and I love written expression. It feels like a safer way for me to communicate as a lot of the time I can’t articulate my thoughts into sentences fast enough. I used to avoid saying what was on my mind but blogging has taught me to better express myself.

This week is one of the busiest so far this year and is the polar opposite of how my life was a year ago. Tonight I’m playing offstage harp for Opera North’s Tosca in Leeds, so I leave at 4pm, play around 2 minutes worth of music and I get home just before 10. It seems crazy that that minute moment of music involves so much time and effort. Tomorrow is a lunchtime chamber music recital at St Paul’s at Huddersfield University followed by a Q&A session around being an orchestral musician, chamber musician and freelancer. It will be an interesting challenge to push myself out of my comfort zone. I’m not a natural public speaker (see above) and I’ve even volunteered to introduce our last piece, Pastorales de Noël by Jolivet. Then I can come home and be ill for an hour as I’ve got a cold, and we get into preparation for Friday, which is the really big one this week - playing the pit part in Tosca.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve always wanted to play Tosca and I set an intention not so long ago to do that. Here we are, the moment has finally come. Saturday and Sunday I get to cover Merry Widow by Lehár, that’s less stressful as I did it when I was in Cape Town and had a decent amount of rehearsal on it. I was hoping for a quiet day off Monday but I might have a rehearsal now. That’s as far as I can go in my head without it imploding.

It’s great to be busy. If I could change one thing, it would be the amount of practice time - I would like to quadruple that! My phone stopwatch is ticking and I need to add photos and edit this. I’ve also vowed not to revisit this post and tweak it - my next challenge is learning to let go.