Monopoly money

I've spent the day trying to think of people who might want to invest in the requiem. At the moment I'm focussing on corporate sponsors, hoping that a big company might want to give us some money in return for some serious branding on the CDs. I make no apologies. If a multinational company is good enough to bank-roll a piece of art, then the artist is obliged to find a way to give the company something big in return. There are too many people in creative industries who feel they're owed an existence.

It terrifies me when I consider the amount I still need to raise. I suppose it's a bit like buying a house; you stop looking at the zeros, because everything's started to feel like a game of Monopoly. I felt like that in the courtroom last September when the judge kept adding hundreds of pounds to the amount I was going to need to pay. I went into shut down, into denial;  the figures had gone beyond anything that I had in my bank account, so they ceased to have meaning. I think people get like that with debt. What's another thousand pounds when you already owe 20? I guess it's the same process which makes someone go from slightly over-weight to morbidly obese and needing a winch to get out of bed in the morning. I'm already fat... what's another kilo?

I met my friend Marinella for tea and a much needed catch up this evening. We went to the wonderful Rustique cafe in Tufnell Park which is just up the road from where I used to live. I remember it opening, which I'm horrified to discover was 13 years ago. It was so exciting to have a cafe on my street where I could sit and write, and I went there every day for a year.

Marinella was well. She, like most of the successful creative people I know, spent long periods of time out of the country last year, first in Greece and then in Budapest working as script supervisor on an HBO series. It worries me that more and more people in my industry are being forced to work outside the UK. It proves, what I've long suspected; that we just don't really know how to "do" the arts over here. The whole system is messed up. There's no government investment, no tax incentives, no support for young writers, and private benefactors are much more likely to invest in political parties because it gives them a shot at a peerage. What little money there is usually get shared out between "worthy" causes and as a result, written off. People don't see the money-making potential of the arts. I'm presently trying to work out whether this particular rant makes a mockery of my statement about creative people needing to know that the world doesn't owe them a living, but I don't think it does.

I got the tube back from Tufnell Park because it was too cold to wait for a bus. It's bitter out there.

350 years ago, Pepys spent much of the day in his cellar overseeing the shifting of coal from one place to another as part of his refurbishments. He was thrilled with the results: “it do please me exceedingly, as much as anything that was ever yet done to my house.”