So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

As I walked down to the Tate Modern – through St Paul’s churchyard and over the Millennium Bridge – I thought about the slim collection of ideas I’d been half-heartedly kicking about for the past few days. I noticed some of the detail in the stonework on St Paul’s – decorative curls like leaves wrapping around something – and suddenly it all started to fall into place – from the thickets of the Cy Twombly Dionesian paintings I saw at the Tate on Sunday through ideas of enclosure, safety and security to claustrophobia and oppression, it all started to come together at last. Of course, it’s still got a long way to go and I haven’t even got notes on paper yet, but at last I have a direction to go in!

We had lunch at Paul by St Paul’s, sitting outside in the sun.

The Da found a painting by Cy Twombly that I hadn’t seen before, which he didn’t much care for but which kind of blew me away – huge swirls of bright red paint on an oatmeal-coloured background (sort of the colour of our walls – wish Twombly’d come and do something like this on them!). And the paint had been allowed to drip down from the top of each loop, so it was a bit like standing inside a thicket of fiery willows. LOVED it.

And then we got home far too late and I proceeded to cook a roast paprika & lemon chicken (which took far longer than it ought thanks to the vagaries of this oven) with roast potato, sweet potato and garlic, followed by homemade chocolate cake with extra thick double cream. The masses had to wait a long time for their dinner but ultimately they seemed to think it was worth it.

But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).

And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.

I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…