Approaching Armageddon

There's a whiff of Armageddon in the air tonight. It's been raining in Newcastle all day, and they say the worst is still to come. There are flood alerts across the city. My taxi driver just showed me a list of jobs he'd had to cancel because it wasn't worth his while trying to reach Sunderland. I can hear the sounds of sirens in all directions. 

Muggins here is trying to get back to London via the bits of the country which are presently being hammered by rain. I hear The Ouse has burst its banks at York and the hospital at Northallerton has been evacuated. Both of these places sit rather squarely on the railway line which separates me from my home. 

Many of the trains out of Newcastle have been cancelled, including the train to Birmingham. This could be a very long night. 

Bizarrely, the train which pulled into the platform we were expecting the London train to arrive on (more curiously at the time we expected it), is apparently the wrong one! A lot of train guards are rushing about telling us not to get on board... It's mayhem. 

It was mayhem in my dream as well last night, which saw me, and my friend Nicky Drake attempting to single-handedly defeat a police state! I shan't go into details... 

Today we've been doing a rough edit of the 100 Voices film. A rough edit is a bit of a luxury by most people's standards, but in order for Andy to do a final mix of the music, we have to know exactly which takes we're going to be using. It's a complicated business. The score is thick with words and every time one of the contributors goes even slightly off my carefully worked out spoken rhythms, the time needs to be made up elsewhere! 

Fitting all 100 people's words and faces into a 6-minute film has been incredibly complicated, and if I had my time again, I'd probably add another minute to the piece so that we could have enjoyed looking at some of the contributors for slightly longer. The average screen time for each face is currently just 2 seconds. 

I am finally on the train, which means I can eat my subway sandwich. Wish me luck, and if you're out and about on this dark and horrid night, please drive carefully.