Today is the sort of day that reminds me of a choir trip in the 1980s (B.SF.) when Mr Music-Price and I, along with four other members of staff from the school at which we were working, took the singers to Holland for a week. It was a fine and hugely enjoyable time, facilitating your correspondent with the opportunity to play the organ in the Cathedral Church of St Jan in Gouda, which boasts the longest nave in Europe. After the choir had gone through the repertoire, Mr Price and I played a couple of organ voluntaries. Now I don't know if you've ever performed publicly in Holland, but I don't think audiences are slow to express their opinions about whether they like something or not. So, after I'd finished my performance of a Prelude and Fugue by Vincent Lubeck, I removed my hands from the keyboard (manual, in organ parlance) and my feet from the pedalboard (yes, organists really do play with their feet as well as their hands), I waited for the tumultuous applause. Nothing. Not a sausage. Not a single, solitary sound. Yeah, well. Thanks. I think Holland is flat and their breakfasts are not very nice, either. Still, the Reichsmuseum is amazing, I do concede that. Of course, they all applauded Mr Music-Price's stunning performance of Bach. As if I cared. I had the prospect of giving a speech in Dutch that afternoon to look forward to, and I had carefully rehearsed what I was going to say, having taken a few Dutch lessons beforehand. I have to confess that the reaction from the residents of the old people's home in which the choir was singing was not wholly dissimilar to that which I had enjoyed in the cathedral, but then I was informed that most of the inmates were hard of hearing, so I wasn't too dispirited. One day you should ask Mr Music-Price about our experience in a Dutch supermarket.

Anyway, to return to my opening salvo: on the journey back to the hotel, our driver took a wrong turning on the autobahn, or whatever it is in Dutch, and we ended up travelling half way to Germany. After about three hours of a journey which should have taken thirty minutes, our Scottish colleague, who knew a bit of German (and Dutch, as it happens) observed, as we disembarked from the coach, 'Well! Some journey that was!'

Except that he translated the word for 'journey' into German.

Quite. Enough said. Back on Wednesday.

Goodnight.