Two for the price of one...

Two blogs in one today because yesterday's, for some reason didn't post! Aren't you all lucky!

Tuesday 17th June 2014:

I'm currently working on one of the newer songs from Brass. It was actually one of the first songs I wrote for the musical, and, after playing it to Nathan, who wasn't entirely convinced, I rather hid it away to the extent that it was never rehearsed during the Easter period. I am hoping a bit of a shine and a buffer will breathe new life into it. I'm falling in love with it again, so with any luck, it will meet the standards of the thirteen other songs I've so far orchestrated.

I went to the osteopath and then to the gym and was astonished to hear, instead of banter in the changing room, a full on improvised rap from a group of lads. It was really quite impressive. The content of said rapping was offensive in the extreme; lots of derogatory references to women, very much the terrain of most raps, but the rhymes weren't bad, and the guy who kept piping up with little snippets of melody had a great voice. Such a shame they weren't rapping about politics or something more interesting. Calling women whores, or more accurately "hos" is so 1998. When will these sort of men come out of the dark ages?

I did two hours in the cafe at Tufnell Park before walking up the hill again to Highgate. There's a moment when you're half way up when you see the church in Highgate nestling behind a bank of trees, almost as though it were at the peak of an impenetrably tall mountain... A mountain you realise with horror you're about to climb!

Wednesday 18th June:


I read today about a very special school in Borneo, where baby orang-utans who have been abused, abandoned, put in cages or lost their parents in the wild, get to learn the skills they need to be returned to their natural habitats. One of the saddest sights, according to the journalist, is a pair called Rocky and Rickina who refuse to be separated and were found hugging each other over the dead body of their mother who'd been killed in a machete attack. Too too sad. I sat on the top deck of a 134 bus trying to hold back the tears.

I have needed to keep the windows closed today as a result of the terrible stench which is coming from the alleyway behind our house. I finally managed to catch our neighbours on Saturday, and, on inspecting their garden, it immediately became clear that the water damage is being caused by a faulty water pipe. Heaven knows what the pipe is carrying, but it has obviously cracked underground. The stench is either rancid water or something a great deal more sinister. It's certainly getting worse.

Vinh at Haringey Council (yes that is the name he gave me when I called this evening) informs me that the matter is not an emergency. I agree with him at this stage, but should the wall collapse, or if someone gets ill as a result of raw sewerage pouring into our alleyway, then an emergency will certainly have occurred and every single person who I've contacted about the issue will need to stand up to be counted. Why is it that people are so unwilling to take preventative measures? I basically loathe Haringey Council with every fibre of my body. They have put us in a hopeless position where we are powerless to do anything. And yes, I know that no one's died, and that orang-utans are being ripped from their mothers arms in Borneo and that I'm a First World NIMBY who likes to moan and whinge, but I'm not enjoying the stench of shit which is floating around my house and don't see why I should pay vast quantities of council tax to a group of people who point-blank refuse to help me!

And here endeth the whinge.

The rest of the day had been spent working through the fourteenth arrangement from Brass. I'm still not quite happy with the end of it, so might take a look at something else whilst it seeps through the various uber-cluttered caverns of my brain.

A woman on the tube today was wearing a jump suit, complete with mini-belt the like of which I've not seen since Sheena Easton sang 9 to 5. The effect was something along the lines of a draw-string bag, and I wondered how much of a fashion victim you have to be to actively want to make yourself look like a sack of spuds.

Our bath is leaking water into downstair's flat. Our landlord keeps sending plumbers round, but none of them seem to be able to get to the root of the problem.

With the issues we're having with the alleyway wall, it seems there really is something in the water. Oddly, I dreamed about floods last night. My friend Julie and I had to push her car through a country lane which had become a river and then we were visiting a deserted village on the Isle of Wight which had been evacuated due to coastal erosion! Imagine being in my head!