The news of the death of my colleague and friend, the harpsichordist Annelie de Man, arrived today in a letter from her husband, the composer Roderik de Man.

In 1987/88, when I was (briefly) doing a composer-in-residence job in the north of England, I started going out with a guy I met there. He wasn’t a student but was that sort of age. He’d left school and was already working. I was cheating on my partner, who lived in another city far away, so I was feeling uneasy about that.