Professor Sands

I sat and worked in the cafe all morning, speeding my way towards the interval of Brass on draft two of the script. It's still not right - particularly when it comes to the lyrics (which are very much still just thoughts) - but it's slowly improving .

I was surrounded, as ever, by the great and the good of Highgate. A slew of yummy mummies were lowing, and then I became aware of a ghastly script meeting going on at the next door table, which ended up making me rather depressed. Bullshit was very definitely the order of the day. A very strange and edgy bloke about my age was telling a girl he might be interested in her script for a short film. Half way through the meeting, just after the director had said he could think of a number of Hollywood actors who might like to play the script's central role, she uttered the dreaded words, "can I be honest with you? It's just, I'd quite like to play the main role myself. I've got experience, you see, I studied performing arts at college and I've done a fringe play..." Painful! Any self-respecting director would have given the girl the important "don't run before you can walk" lecture. One look at her told me she didn't have the allure of a film actress. She screamed deluded ambition. I wanted to take her aside and say "if you're a decent writer you'll want this script performed well, and that might mean letting go of your desire to be a star!" But she stuck to her guns and I could see the director backing off...

I went into town to meet Nathan for lunch and stumbled across our resident Highgate homeless man on my way down the steep footpath to the tube. He's taken to sitting underneath one of the railings down there and seems to devour books. There's always a pile of paperbacks next to him. Today he had a rather sad little sign, written on cardboard, which advertised himself as a a painter or cleaner, "or whatever you need, just think of me..." A stark reminder, if one were needed, that we're still not quite out of the woods.

I didn't realise that I'd put myself on a Bank Branch train, and was so engrossed in the world of Brass that I was in King's Cross before I'd noticed my error. I threw my belongings together and leapt onto the empty platform. An eerie woman's voice echoed through the corridors; "Would Inspector Sands please go to the operations room immediately." Round and round her announcement went. Quite why they persist in using these "codes," I'm not sure. Everyone knows that Mr Sands means there's a suspected fire somewhere in the building!

So I tried to look cool and walked as quickly as I could to the Piccadilly line platform. Eventually the announcements stopped, but obviously, I'd spent all my time on the platform in a state of terror, smelling the air for smoke and trying to make sense of the other smells drifting through the station which including a whiff of some sort of petro-chemical, which made me wonder whether "Inspector Sands" was actually the code for "every body run, the terrorists have released poison gas!"

We had lunch in Wagamama. It felt a little fancy, but I didn't feel like I was knocking back the calories, which is important for a man who is now officially losing weight. I've been running every day this week so far.

Nathan is back on stage this Christmas, playing Ghastly Gordon in the pantomime at Wakefield Theatre Royal. I for one am very excited to see him, and further excited at the opportunity to spend a little more time in my beloved Yorkshire. If anyone fancies a trip up there, tickets are selling fast!