Today I’m struggling with a piece that should have taken an afternoon to write down. It appeared in the mist when summoned, almost on cue and apparently fully-formed, but it has taken another few months to grasp once more the geometry of its form, the ratios and rationality of its quixotic light and shade. The piece is a gift-cum-commission for Edward Higginbottom, at the end of his long tenure at New College, Oxford. It’s a short setting of George Herbert’s Love bade me welcome for unaccompanied choir, and from the moment I started working on it, it was clear in my mind that this piece existed – complete, perfect, and (to me at least) unutterably beautiful and heart-rending.