Cheerio

I went to Abney Park cemetery to work out where we're going to be filming sequences next Sunday. It was a beautiful sunny morning and the place was full of twittering birds and strange little rodents rushing around in the undergrowth. As a direct result of the London Requiem (which was a musical setting of inscriptions I found written on gravestones over the course of about three weeks' solidly wandering around in cemeteries like some sort of daylight Vampire) I no longer feel uneasy in graveyards. In fact, I find them incredibly calming places.

Abney Park obviously holds great significance for me as it's where The London Requiem received its premiere, in 2012, at dusk, in amongst the gravestones. It was a hugely magical experience...

Anyway, I had a charming walk there this morning and have chosen the locations where those sequences of the film will be shot.

I had a lovely nostalgias-fest on the way home, listening to music by the band Renaissance. The song Northern Lights has triggered a memory from my childhood which I'm still trying to place. A good chunk of my extreme youth was spent on a sort of commune on the outskirts of the Bedfordshire town where we lived, and I think the song reminds me of that period somehow.

I came home and started to put together a call sheet for the shoot... Somewhat hindered by not having photoshop on my computer, and not being able to work out how to change the placement of a pin on googlemaps to show people exactly where to go. It turns out that postcodes aren't always that specific... Even in London.

At lunchtime, the mastered version of Oranges and Lemons came through from Denis, who does his work from a house in the tranquility of the Isle of Skye. I've always liked the fact that it's possible for one of my songs to disintegrate into the ether and reemerge for a good polishing on the Isle of Sky... It was rather surreal to sit listening to the piece on headphones whilst I ate my spaghetti on toast for dinner, but the track sounds amazing, and once I'd started listening, I couldn't stop. I'm incredibly pleased with Denis' work. He complimented the piece as well, which is always a good sign.

I started storyboarding the film this afternoon, which involves drawing a sequence of inexcusably dreadful pictures to represent the shots I want to feature in the film. I cannot draw. Not for toffee.

This evening we said goodbye to Jem, who takes himself off to the States for a new life tomorrow morning. We had a little meal in Pizza Express with a few of his closest London-based friends, hugged him goodbye, and, well, that was that. We shall miss him bitterly; a kinder, funnier, more talented, more generous man you'd be hard-pushed to find.