Kate, Tori, ABBA

We're speeding up the Victoria line from the King's Road where we've just watched Abbie doing a wonderful solo cabaret. She really was delightful, and very excitingly gave I Make The Shells from Brass its first public performance. She sang it beautifully and made a true emotional connection with the material. I was very proud.

She was pretty brilliant throughout the set but gave a couple of world-class performances which included a stoic rendition of Send In The Clowns and a deeply emotional performance of a song from Lord of The Rings, which she dedicated to her father who is currently rather ill in hospital. Nathan and I were in bits by the end.

Julie Clare and Little Michelle joined her on stage for a couple of guest slots. It's difficult to imagine three more different voices, but they blended together wonderfully. That'll be the work they've done together in the Rebel Chorus! Michelle has started to amaze me vocally. Something very special is happening there.

We've been in central London all day today, having hair cuts, doing shopping things, collecting rings, thinking all day that we'd be heading home at some point, but eventually acknowledging we were out for the duration.

The whole press and marketing campaign for the musical is in full swing. We're doing all sorts of telephone interviews and there's even a trailer being screened rather regularly on Channel 4. It features Shirley Bassey singing The Impossible Dream. It won't do anything to convince doubters that our show is anything other than camp nonsense, and as a direct result, the back-lash has already started on Facebook and such. It's a little hard not to care. You just want to shake the haters and say; "at least wait til you've seen it..." But then again, if they're complaining now, they're lost causes, and my work has always been like marmite. You hate it or you love it. Nothing could top some of the things they said about my Metro film, which was, I'm told, "the worst thing to happen to the North East since Thatcher" and "written by a gimp." If you're gonna diss, diss with class! Until you can come up with an insult wittier than the first of those two, I'm not interested!

I had a column in the Independent newspaper today, which was a little surreal. It says a fair amount about the quality of my friends that not one single person I know actually spotted it!  Our piece in the Standard, by contrast was spotted by the world and his wife!

We spent this afternoon in the edit suite looking at more sequences; primarily the messages of good will which have come in from famous people. The list is rather astonishing. I won't go into too many details but the most exciting for me, apart from a message from Sri Lanka, was Tori Amos. I actually flushed bright red when I saw it. There she was in front of a grand piano; an absolute heroine of mine actually saying my name. Gosh, there are few things in life sweeter than that! If this whole thing falls flat on its face, I'll always have the memory of that video clip!

And guess what? This Saturday is officially world ABBA day. How's that?! We're getting married on world ABBA day! The world's two biggest ABBA fans are marrying on world ABBA day. God officially loves the gays!

To make matters even more exciting, Kate Bush is playing live this summer, and I have a ticket!

Can life get much better than that? All we need now is to win Eurovision!  Yeah, yeah. In my dreams!