Pissing into the wind

As I left the house today, I found a young lad pissing in our alleyway. A great, long stream of urine rolled its way down the incline towards me. I was horrified. That alleyway is effectively our garden. Nathan and I spent an hour sweeping up all the rubbish from it the other day, and this morning I picked up and removed a wet wipe covered in human excrement that some parent had plainly left there after ducking off the main road to sort out a little accident in her son's pants. I live opposite a pub. He could have popped in there for his wee. So I shouted at him: "that's right, mate, piss all over my alleyway." Instead of having the decency to be contrite or apologise, he took the earphones out of his ears and decided to take me on with his plummy, arrogant accent. "What do you want me to do about it? Retract it?" "No. I just want you not to do it again." He stood for a while gasping like a goldfish. "Go on!" I said, "say something erudite and witty as a come back... Go on, I dare you..." His response was as pathetic as it was rude, "why don't you lick it up?" What a twat. I hate young posh blokes who are plainly way too used to getting their way. I was half-tempted to grab piece of paper, soak up some of his pee, and launch it at the bastard's face. Actually what I should have done was follow him home and then pee through his mummy's letterbox.

On my way into central London I listened to Any Questions on Radio 4 and found myself agreeing with almost everything that was said regardless of whether it was said by a Tory or a Labour person (old or new.) I wondered why this was and then realised that we're in such a perilous situation at the moment that politicians are finally discussing what actually matters to people - and actually, if you sweep aside the extremism on the edges of the argument, what matters to us all is the same thing: we want our voices to be heard.

This evening I went into town to film two more sequences for the Pepys film. I've been filming a lot of girls lately and today it was the turn of two of the tenors: Anthony and Nigel. 

We shot Anthony on Piccadilly Circus and found him underneath the anus of Eros looking resplendent in a bow tie. We did one little sequence with the iconic Coca Cola lights bursting behind him (rather like fire we thought) and then took him to a dodgy alleyway behind the Piccadilly Theatre for a bit of grime and underbelly grit. I want the film to look very modern and very much show all the different aspects of London at night. Filming with what looks like a stills camera is brilliant because no one bothers you the way they bother you when you've got a giant film camera. No one comes and waves in the background. No security guards come up and ask if you have a permit to film. And no one beeps their blessed horns!!

We drove across London to London Wall car park near the Barbican where I wanted to film Nigel. It's one of my favourite locations in the world. It's absolutely massive, and all underground: an enormous concrete bunker with the most astounding echo. The sound of a car door slamming reverberates around the place for seconds. Otherwise, it's an incredibly still place. So quiet it's almost deafening. What is, however, most remarkable is the chunk of the old Roman city wall still preserved in the middle of the car park. It's the most eerie sight. The craziest architectural juxtaposition in London: AD60 meets AD1960!