Guildford Reunion

I'm currently returning from the South Bank, where I've been at Nathan's drama school's 20th anniversary reunion. This tells me that it's also twenty years since I graduated from university, which is a horrifying thought. More horrifyingly, I realise I was also present at Nathan's ten year reunion, which was in a bar just off Trafalgar Square. Back then, ten years seemed like such a long time. Twenty seems a lifetime.

The reunion was brilliantly well-attended. There must have been a good thirty people there, all remembering the good times, looking at photographs of their younger selves and wondering where the years had gone. I'm not sure we'd manage to get thirty York University music students together again after all these years. We'd be lucky to get just two!

We were down in Gabriel's Wharf, an area to the East of the National Theatre which has always reminded me of San Fransisco. There are all kinds of funky bars and restaurants down there, many of them in the sort of wooden structures you find at American piers or wharf developments. They're over-shadowed by an enormous brick wall which has been painted with the life-sized gable ends of a row of colourful cottages, trompe loeil style. These days the paint is chipping off and looking rather faded and worse for wear. When I first came to London it was much more impressive. In fact, I thought it was real!

There was a rather hysterical moment this afternoon when someone engaged me in conversation about gay marriage: "Did you happen to watch that programme on Channel 4?" He said. "There was a gay wedding which was actually a musical. One of the grooms was a composer and the other was the spitting image of Nathan!" In fairness, he hadn't seen Nathan for twenty years, so it wasn't altogether surprising that he hadn't put two and two together. I was going to let him continue, but then I thought how uncomfortable it would have been for him if he'd then said, "bloody awful show..." So I butted in and revealed my true identity. He was somewhat mortified.

I watched the news tonight for the first time in ages. The stories from Tunisia are incredibly depressing. It's said that up to thirty of the dead are British. Quite why, after so many days, information is still quite so sketchy, I'm not sure. I heard a dreadful story about a woman who'd hugged her husband and told him she loved him whilst the gunman reloaded before shooting them both. She survived. Her husband was killed. There she was, lying in a hospital bed, her world disintegrating around her. My heart broke. I wondered how I'd have felt if it was Nathan. I've said it many times before, but the fight against religious extremism is the only thing which would cause me to take up arms. I feel incredibly strongly that this sort of nonsense needs to be snuffed out as soon as possible. I am bored of seeing the parents of these murderers being interviewed, wondering how their precious children can have gone so unbelievably off the rails. It's time for them to take some responsibility. And not just the parents, but the religious leaders as well. There's blood on all of their hands.

The Kids from Fame Again!