Wednesday once more. En route to the subway, police in attendance, and my friend Josip the Turkish fruit seller (My BEST friend! as he exclaims on seeing me, but presumably to dozens of others too), along with, Where you BEEN? – I fall for this every time, explaining to him that I have been nowhere, before eventually realizing he also says this to everyone and means nothing by it. Perhaps in Turkish it simply means, How ya doin? – words I also slavishly answer when addressed to me, as though they were a real enquiry.

En route to Linda and Princess and coffee, I greet another urban regular, Moby – not his real name (it’s not Dick, either), which like his face, he prefers me not to disclose – one of the joys of my Wednesdays. Moby is the most dynamic human being I know. He hands out free newspapers, which he will not permit me to identify, with a tireless enthusiasm that lights up your day. He will succeed at whatever he does in this life. He’s a beacon. You could run Manhattan’s electrical grid off him.

One of my pals on the all black armed college security squad is talking to a friend. As I greet them, the friend says, “I figure you for a former hippie.” How so? I enquire. My beard is trimmed, I’m wearing black slacks, business shirt. “I don’t know,” he muses, “but I see you… you know, Woodstock and all that…” “I live in Woodstock,” I tell him. “You see?” he cries. “Hire this man,” I tell the armed guard. “He’s psychic.” Out in Flatbush I find a new story on the bench I’ve been chronicling (see previous updates). The building behind it used to be a bank; it’s being renovated for some other service industry, using non-union labor. Hence the protest.

A lot of things seem dead or dying, here outside the campus as elsewhere in America. Dead bookstore, once a big part of campus life (I went in there last year, puzzled by the absence of customers; a store assistant said the students come in, puzzled, say “Is this a library?” Goodbye bookstores. Goodbye libraries, soon.) Dead Starbucks? Yikes! Let’s hope they’re just renovating. In the background, note our pretty college campanile.

One thing can’t be replaced: need for cash. Give blood. Get cash. Out on Flatbush Ave, there’s my favorite bus, the 103, as weird in its ways as the ghost bus in Harry Potter. It comes from Canarsie, and then leaps onto the Expressway to downtown Brooklyn without stopping. If it ever arrives in the first place. Plenty of tales about waiting in freezing weather for 103s that never come.

My Wednesday, as ever, begins with a journey to Columbus Circle, to breakfast with Linda, my dear agent, and her dog, Princess (currently being taken for walks in a stroller, due to a bad leg). Today there’s no follow-up appointment on the Upper West Side with my no less dear composer-colleague, who is attending to elderly parents. I descend from coffee with Linda to where the huge great absurd basaltic statue of a naked man occupies the lobby of the the Time Warner Building, a naked man with a tiny organ (decorously not shown here) and a tiny head. The tiny head I can understand, since we are clearly not developing intellectually, as a species.

So instead of music with Jimmy, as we continue with our Hollywood musical, I sat for a while in Olmsted’s majestic Central Park, which I’ve been visiting for 65 years – daily at first between 1949 and ’52, when my school, the French Lycee, sent us there every morning (the park was at the end of our block). Its granite outcroppings, as I thought of the star-dusted reefs of rock that surge up all across the park and in upper Manhattan, mica-flecked as if from some celestial sea, have appeared in my dreams ever since. Technically this bedrock is glaciated schist, the ground-down remains of a mountain range a billion years old. Now the mountain range is a series of little bumps. But it’s still strong enough to hold up Manhattan.

Much of the end of the week and the weekend spent in Phoenicia, where my Beethoven play opened on Friday at the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice – a festival truly international (despite its almost comical yoking to the tiny hamlet of Phoenicia in upstate New York) by virtue of the host of internationally renowned singers gathered together by the festival’s organisers, Louis Otey and Maria Todaro – themselves internationally celebrated opera singers – and the no less international classical pianist Justin Kolb. The festival had turned Phoenicia, a sweet one-horse town whose tubing-trips in the Esopus rivers were hitherto its chief appeal, along with the Shandaken Theatrical Society where we performed the Beethoven play, into a sought-after cultural venue and a vacation site of exceptional charm, written up in magazines and newspapers and chosen by travel writers as a top ten destination. (When I first heard the title, Phoenicia International Festival, I recalled landing at Charleston, South Carolina’s International Airport, in its earliest days, when a flight to Raleigh, North Carolina was as far afield as it offered.) Like the Charleston International Airport, the Phoenicia festival rapidly grew into its name, and I feel greatly privileged to have taken part in the past 3 years. This year I persuaded the triumvirate to commission a play from me, one that would use Justin Kolb’s striking resemblance to Beethoven (picture him with a Beethoven wig on that head) combining it with the fruits of a book on Beethoven that Justin had lent me, about Beethoven’s incessant hypochondria. This inspired me to condense the great man’s many doctors into one long-suffering and imaginary figure, and make tender fun of a genius’s foibles, under the title, Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven. Central to the concept was the prospect of Justin playing some of Beethoven’s piano works – a lifelong passion, on Justin’s part – and mixing in dialogue to produce a perhaps previously unknown hybrid: a combined piano recital and comic drama, the drama interwoven into the recital (or vice versa).

To my relief it was well received by full houses, and no one complained (to my knowledge, anyway) that they would have preferred more recital and less of the play, or the other way around. I feel as if I got away with a tightrope walk (made more perilous by the fact that I played the other character, Beethoven’s doctor), and we learnt a great deal, chiefly thanks to Claire, the play’s director, about where it can be very much improved by re-working, for a future performances at other venues. A good prospect! – all we need is a space with a piano in it, plus the maestro and me.