So, let's get this straight...

Introducing 24 hour licensing of pubs is being done to reduce binge drinking, and not at all to raise revenue.

Which is why it will cost £1905 instead of £10 to apply for a license. And why pubs will have to pay for the cost of the extra policing for all the extra binge drinkers. Who won't, of course, exist...

Amused

... muchly, by Bill Bailey's stand-up act, which the Tivo kindly recorded for me the other day.

Seeing him do "the hokey-cokey" in German in the style of Kraftwerk has however resulted in chocolate coming out of my nose...

Trial by Jury

Right...

By dint of an evening of photocopying, guillotining, several reels of magic tape and a certain amount of gentle cursing while trying to unstick the wrong photocopies from the places they've just glued themselves, I now have a part that I can actually play through, given a following wind. (This means I have finally done one of the six or so things I needed to do today. Sigh.) It does unavoidably become a five-page-wide monstrosity at one place, which might be a problem on an upright piano, but I can always nail it to the front of the piano when no one's looking, I suppose...

Talking of which, I almost certainly won't break any nails at the rehearsal tomorrow (which I've done at all the others I've been at), since most of the remaining longish ones have just broken off while practicing... And I think I've finally nailed the Bridesmaids' Entry, which has been troubling me, and the nice-but-slightly awkward number in D flat. A play all the way through without stopping yielded about three really obviously wrong notes (which I shall try to fix) and one rather dubious passage of about six bars (ditto); I have the next couple of weeks to learn how to play any of it musically. (On the other hand, the audience will be filkers... ;-p )

I also have two weeks to get over my near-terminal stage fright. Before playing in front of lots of people. Umm. While knowing... errm... almost none of them. At the front, being looked at. Eeeeeep. And I have nothing to wear :-( Please don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player...