The cycles of life

It's 8pm and I'm snaking my way through the sticky streets of Fitzrovia. I was meant to be meeting Fiona for a drink in town, but her rehearsal with Placebo was overrunning so badly, that I had my hair cut instead, sat with a cup of tea on the corner of Wardour Street watching the world go by and then returned to Highgate feeling very happy. 

It's humid, though. It's like walking through a dirty steam room in a dodgy sauna. Last night was the hottest night ever recorded in the UK. Thunder rumbled almost constantly. I wanted an Italian-style humdinger of a storm to make things fresh again, but sadly we had to make do with the sound of a permanently grumbling tummy, permeated by tiny little intense rain showers. 

On returning to our car earlier, we realised the back window was open and the rear seat was completely soaked as a result. Still, only in Highgate could you leave your car window wide open and not have the £20 you'd left on the dashboard stolen!

Soho was buzzing. A jazz band was playing in Soho square; three musicians were wandering in circles around the hut in the centre, creating a curious Doppler effect. People were sitting on the grass, undoubtedly with terribly wet bottoms. Puddles of warm rain water sat on the streets, slowly evaporating into the hot air like water in a hair dryer. The smell was intense. The smell of my childhood; dust and blackberry bracken mixed with the unmistakable pungent stench of summer rain. Sassoon summed things up in a passage of his diary which I happened to read today, proclaiming  the smell of earth after rain to be, "the kindest smell that ever came to make me glad."

I continue to lap up Sassoon's diaries. I read them keenly, occasionally noting a turn of phrase or image which had a profound impact on me as a teenager when I first read it.

My carefully preserved hard-back copy of the 1915-18 diary was bought in June 1990 when I was 15. I know this, because a flowery inscription, which I'd proudly written in brown ink tells me so.  The writing reveals all the hall marks of a young lad who felt somehow that he was living in the wrong period. The back inside cover is bedecked, not with pictures of Bros or Kylie Minogue, but with coloured pencil crayon drawings; cartoon cats and flowers drawn by my friend Heather, who died of breast cancer before she was 30, and dark pictures of gravestones covered in poppies and phoenixes rising out of intense fires by me.

Julie asked me yesterday what it was about the First World War which had haunted me for so many years. She'd apparently talked about it with Sam, and decided it was the whole aspect of loss of innocence which had appealed. I'm not sure this can be the case when I consider my uber-innocent fifteen-year old self. Perhaps as my own sexuality began to dawn, this world, where, let's face it, most poets and writers had at least dabbled with the idea of licking the wrong side of the stamp, began to open up in front of me. It felt comforting and romantic. It was the world of Merchant Ivory films; a world where everyone had floppy hair, went punting and appreciated art and beauty in a way that none of my friends at school seemed capable of doing. 

Perhaps it was an era in history which presented me with individuals who seemed to think more like me. People I could recognise. My Grannie, after all, had been alive throughout the conflict. I couldn't get a handle on the Victorians, but Edwardians had electric lights and gramophones and cars. Not so different from us.  I empathised, for the first time, with the men who were needlessly sent to war. It was the first time I'd put myself in someone else's shoes and thought "there but for the grace of God..." And it was MY period. I'd found it for myself, and I could immerse myself in it every time the modern world felt brutal, or I felt isolated. Sassoon would understand me if only he was alive. And I longed to find my own Robert Graves and hang out at Garsington with Ottoline Morrell!

Such a curious thing. And I'm grateful to Julie for asking the question because it's made me think so hard. 

The scary thing about this musical I'm about to write is that it needs to be a masterpiece or the fact that my life has come a full circle to write it will have been without point.