Off today to London to interview Andrew Comben, the new Chief Executive of the Brighton Festival for On Track magazine. He hasn’t yet started the job, and is still working in the Wigmore Hall. I had to zoom up to the smoke. Quite nice to lurk in the west end and rubberneck at, for example, a young woman preaching in the street at Oxford Circus, looking like some office executive who’d taken an odd turn in life.

I haven’t done a formal interview for a while, so I made sure I was well prepared. I read up what could be found about him on the Internet (which makes you feel a bit of a stalker) and made mind maps to work out the question areas. This means, should your swinish recorder gives up the ghost on the train journey into London, you can actually scrawl your notes directly onto your mind maps too without looking like too much of a chump.