Formatting

We worked from 10am till 10pm today, putting final touches to the first draft of the script for our secret project. I call it a draft. It's really just a splurge, and as we read it through today, we kept looking at each other embarrassedly and saying, "yeah, we'll have to revisit that..." The trouble is that important people need to read the script, and they have to know that we're making progress, so we were forced to deliver it way earlier than we might otherwise have done.

Nathan cooked tea whilst I worked and then, after we'd sent the document off to the necessary people, I did another couple of hours on Brass, slowly working my way towards the first pass of this whole new set of scores I've been asked to format. They're not the worst things to need to deliver. Essentially I've been asked to create a "vocal only" score, which is a copy of the sung music, minus any piano accompaniment. I thought everybody rehearsed new shows from a piano score, but Nathan tells me that most of the West End shows only give the cast a copy of the vocal only parts. They are, of course, cheaper to reproduce because there are far fewer pages.

So, of course, this all means that the pressure is on me to make the document look attractive. People will actually be using it! Boo!

We woke up this morning in some sort of monsoon, which basically destroyed any notion we might have had about walking to work, staggering instead to the car with a couple of flimsy umbrellas, and the rain water pouring into the ripped seams of my ruck sack.

Nathan pointed out today that we're very "make do and mend" types. All our clothes have holes in them, our crockery is all chipped and mismatching and we've recently reconstituted a ripped bath bringing it back to life as a pair of highly absorbent tea towels. I recently left a pair of boxer shorts at my parents' house which my mother actually threw away because she was so ashamed that her son was wearing them. I'm actually wondering if all of this makes us tramps...

We watched the results of Strictly this evening and I was thrilled to see the ghastly Jamelia down there in the bottom two. The look of shock on her narrow-eyed, bigoted face was well worth my not being able to reach for the remote control quickly enough to move her on. I've no idea how she danced in the dance off. Plainly I fast-forwarded that bit with a look of triumph on my face...

In the spare few moments that I've had today I've been trying to deal with my online spam problem by unsubscribing myself from email lists. The jury is out as to whether or not this exacerbates the problem by allowing the spammers to know that your email address is a valid one, but when my junk mail started to top 200 per day, and I started to miss actual emails because they were buried in piles of nonsense I had to do something. At points today I was receiving two spam emails per minute! It's horrifying.