There’s a very beautiful, but very smelly dog sitting next
to me on the train to Newcastle today. He belongs to a rather arty-looking
woman from Durham who also has two slightly unruly children. It’s what happens
when you bring your kids up on a diet of pumpkin seeds and rainbows.
The kids are climbing the walls – they’re far too used to
long walks in the countryside to be cramped into a train carriage. Middle-class,
ruddy-faced Mummy has just taken her iPad out in an attempt to occupy the
children. For some reason they’re watching Monkey Magic on a loop. I would have
thought a pair of headphones might have been a nice touch to prevent the rest
of the train from having to listen to the dreadful grunts, yells, thwacks, thuds
and clangs of the incessant fight sequences on that particular show. I hated
everything but the theme tune as a child. As an adult I’m almost climbing the
walls.
The Mummy keeps talking to strangers on the train saying, “could
you ask for a better dog? He’s so well behaved...” No, love, he smells like
shit. A better dog would smell more pleasant. “I thought he might be smelly”,
she’s just said to the bloke opposite, “but actually I think the children are
smellier...” Heaven preserve me!
The man opposite has the names of all his children tattood
in giant letters on his forearms. It’s basically a list of pop singers; Adele,
Kylie and Robbie. I only know they’re his children rather than his favourite
pop artists because he’s using the word Adele to get his daughter’s attention.
His head looks an over-inflated balloon.
Nell emailed today to say that we’d found the last two
participants for the 100 Faces project, our 98 and 99 year-olds. Trying to find
someone who was born every year since 1912 has provided us with the most
complicated jigsaw puzzle, which must have nearly killed Nell, who has literally
worked around the clock to sort everything out. I am hugely grateful to her. It’s
funny how this project is suddenly upon me. It’s very different to other pieces
because the sound and visuals are being recorded at the same time. Even the
music side of things was over in a flash. I would usually spend days in a
studio layering instruments up, but when you use an orchestra, everything gets
recorded simultaneously in a 3 hour session.
That said, and largely as a result of everything I’ve just
written, this week is probably going to be murder. One hundred people, all with
different needs and skills will need to be filmed in the space of six days. By
Sunday we’re all going to be quivering wrecks.
Nathan is in Vienna. He’s just sent a text to tell me he’s
been visiting the room where a six-year old Mozart once played. He found the
experience emotionally overwhelming, saying that the space made it so easy to imagine
an 18th Century scene, that he almost didn’t want to bring himself
back into the real world.
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