Blame Canada

I wrote to the agent who deals with Anthony Minghella’s estate today to see if the rights were available to turn the film Truly, Madly, Deeply into a musical. They’re not. Boo!

There’s a very peculiar light in the sky tonight. The clouds are glowing a sort of peach colour but everything else has a murky yellow vibe. Like the nicotine-stained walls of a pensioner’s bedroom.

At some point soon, the Kyrie from The London Requiem will be blasted across Canada on CBC’s In Tune show. It’s a very exciting thought. The Northamptonshire Youth Orchestra visited Canada on an exchange trip in 1992, and it was amongst the most exciting experiences of my life. We stayed in a city called Burlington with a chap called Tahir, who could drive and had a car and took us on all sorts of adventures. We saw wild racoons, did an emergency stop for something like an armadillo, and partied until the wee smalls on most nights. I fell in love with Canadian culture. I loved the art galleries, the alternative shops, the people and the way that everything felt so clean and grand.

On the way home, our aeroplane engine exploded on takeoff from Toronto airport, and we had to do an emergency landing on foam. I can still remember the deathly silence on the plane when the pilot said; “ladies and gentlemen, some of you may have heard the explosion, but we no longer have the use of one of our engines and we’re going to have to make an emergency landing.” A little old lady next to me must have seen the look of terror on my face, because she very calmly took my hand and said, “we’ll be fine, my darling, we’ll be fine.” And we were.