I had hoped that  would be able to get to Manchester for an early rehearsal of the piece I've written for the Hallé/BBC Philharmonic Mahler cycle  - it's a setting of Wordsworth called 'Crossing the Alps' (from The Prelude) for unaccompanied chorus (well, not quite unaccompanied - it includes an organ pedal, for safety's sake), to partner Mahler 2 (I was briefly tempted to use the full orchestral forces, but fun as it would have been to have ten horns, repeat performances would probably be a little more unlikely than they usually are).

In the event all I've had is a phone converstion with Ralph Allwood, who's rehearsing the Hallé Choir (Markus Stenz will conduct the performance), which was reassuring : I know how good the Choir is, but you have to remember that they are all amateurs, and not push them too far (I think the piece may sound rather like Strauss . . .). But the thing that's surprised me is the amount of media interest in this cycle - a clever move on the orchestras' part to start the celebrations early in 2010, the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth, rather than wait for 2011 and  the centenary of his death. Too much Mahler overall, I fear. (The Concertgebouw started even earlier - they asked me to orchestrate Mahler's 1876 Piano Quartet, which kicked off their events last November.)

I've written a paragraph which went into The Observer, plus notes for the perfomance, and had numerous requests for interviews (only one of which I was able to do - there seems to be an obsession with doing these things live, which is hardly convenient, especially if you're trying to bring 3 composers together, as Music Matters hoped). And I was supposed to do an interview with the Nottingham Evening Post (the piece gets taken to Nottingham after the Manchester perfomance) but because they haven't got room in the weekday edition I've been asked instead to write a piece for their series 'My Perfect Weekend' (large amounts of alcohol, ideally). Since that sounds about right for a blog, this is what I've written, with the hope of following it up here with a report on the performance, now only 2 days away.

More years ago than I care to admit to  - when I was at Nottingham University in the mid 1960s - my ideal weekend would have been spent largely at the movies. There was a big choice of cinemas in and around Nottingham in those days (does the Byron Hucknall still survive?) as well as an on-campus film club, and I would sometimes see as many as 10 films a week.

That particular passion hasn't lasted, although one that long predated my time in Nottingham, a hopeless devotion to Leyton Orient (where my dad first took me when I was six years old), still means that Saturday afternoons are often spent at Brisbane Road (I did watch Orient play - and lose to - Forest at the City Ground on the few occasions we were in the same division).

But weekends are generally, for me, part of the working week. As a composer, you don't do office hours and Saturday and Sunday consequently don't feel like days off. So while I feel I should say that my ideal weekend would be spent in Venice, or Amsterdam (my two favourite European cities), I'm not really happy unless I get at least some work done.

So the perfect weekend would have to include at least a dozen bars of music that I was satisfied with (at the moment I've been working for two or three weeks without a single successful bar!). I work quite a lot of the year in Somerset, surrounded by fields, so a walk, preferably in bright sunshine, would be essential. If my increasingly creaky limbs were up to it, a game of tennis would be a bonus, although there probably wouldn't be time to get to the tennis court in the South of France we were able to use during last summer's holiday - surrounded by mountains and overlooked by hang gliders.

I ought to say that a concert should be a part of this weekend : if it were, it certainly wouldn't include any of my own music, or I would spend too much of the time biting my nails. Perhaps an hour long concert (without an interval - they always get in the way) would fit the bill : preferably a blend of old and new.

But the most important thing would be a family meal, on Sunday evening (we never have Sunday lunch - what are you expected to do in the afternoon?) This has been a family tradition since long before our children left home, and they often join us to round off the weekend with a roast and a few good bottles. The simplest of pleasures are always the best.