Like most other people in Britain I’ve been relishing the sudden quietness resulting from the closure of our airspace because of a drifting cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland. On Saturday I sat in the garden for ages, because it felt so special to be sitting  under the Heathrow flightpath with a totally silent sky (see photo). Well, not really silent, because the birds were singing madly. Their chirping is often masked by planes passing overhead every couple of minutes, but today the birds had the airspace to themselves and seemed to be relishing it too.

Of course, if London were always this quiet, I suppose it wouldn’t be the busy, interesting place that it is. But I think the Guardian’s leader writers are onto something with their suggestion that we could all benefit from one plane-free day every week.

Yesterday a friend was visiting Oxford and sent me this photo of my new book on the ‘welcome table’ in Blackwell’s bookshop. It’s the one with the black cover in the centre of the picture. As I haven’t yet seen any copies of the book in a store near me, I was very happy to see this evidence that someone in Oxford is taking an interest.

It’s amazing what the arrival of a box of organic vegetables and farm produce can inspire. Hours after taking delivery of our box, Bob had made this superb quiche with courgettes, aubergines, leeks, olives, garlic, rosemary, crème fraiche and home-made pastry. Here it is, just out of the oven. The glorious yellowness of the custard is due to the organic eggs.  We keep wondering if we should persevere with organic vegetables, which are not cheap, but on days like this it definitely seems worthwhile.

The Florestan Trio has a new website built by the same brilliant guy who designed mine.  Take a look by clicking here!

My piano tuner asks whether I’m happy to keep my piano at the usual pitch, A=440. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?

Well, he says, some British orchestras are now asking for pianos to be tuned at A=442 Hz. Now that there’s so much musical traffic between countries, we’re under pressure to adopt ‘European’ tuning, and for a long time mainland Europe has used an ‘A’ a touch higher than ours. One of our big London orchestras recently bought a batch of percussion instruments all tuned at A=442, thus committing the whole orchestra to this pitch. ‘What does the Wigmore Hall use for its pianos?’ I ask. ‘A=440.’ ‘Then that’s what I’ll have’, I say happily.

Apparently there’s constant pressure from certain quarters, particularly string players, to raise the pitch because it makes instruments sound more brilliant. But is there any reason for pianos to fall in with this trend? It seems not. Is it really necessary for pitch to rise and rise, like inflation? As pitch goes up, instruments eventually have to be modified or re-built to cope with the extra pressure. It seems like a vicious circle.