The hairy lad at school

Has anyone seen the advert for Asda on the telly at the moment? The one about the werewolves? Do people even watch adverts these days? Anyway, I'm not one for understanding levels of subtlety, but I believe the premise of the advert is that there's a vey hairy family - probably a family of werewolves - and one of them says "I don't want to be a werewolf for Hallowe'en." Does this mean Hallowe'en is the only time this family gets to be themselves because they're all so hairy? Or because they actually ARE werewolves and Hallowe'en is the only time they can go out in public? Whatever the case, they go shopping for costumes at Asda and the lad selects something very odd and tells his Mum he's now some sort of ninja. He looks at his Mum rather tragically at the end and says "are all Ninjas hairy like me?" His Mum, who is also hairy, says "only the most beautiful ones like you." And the lad smiles proudly.

It's a terrible advert really, but it makes me feel a little sad, and for ages I couldn't work out why this was until it struck me that I had been that hairy lad at school! I hated being hairy so much. The kids in my class seemed to think it was hysterical, and I got called every name under the sun to the extent that I once tried to shave my feet after the games teacher sent me back into the showers after rugby because he thought the hair on my legs was mud! I was twelve. He made me strip off in front of all my class. At that point people started calling me "gorilla boy."

It's funny how you suck all that stuff in without realising. I've always been a little ashamed of my hirsuteness and, in a funny sort of way, that awful Asda advert has made me realise why!

I walked up to the village today to write in Costa Coffee. I'm focusing on another pass of the script and lyrics of Em this week for a potential early-doors read through at the start of November. I'm never particularly sure that read throughs tell a writer a great deal that he don't already know about a script. Unless those participating are brilliant sight readers, you never get a sense of the pace of what you've written and that experience can be quite frustrating.

Speaking of frustrating, the atmosphere in Costa was really rather lovely until the place became a crèche! Babies, toddlers and Mummies with babies and toddlers can be terribly noisy and incredibly boring. One little girl decided it might be fun to emit a scream, which, like an air raid siren on helium, got higher and louder in an ear-splitting, violence-inducing manner. It went on so long that I was half tempted to chuck an oboe in her gob and compliment her on her breath control. I left the cafe an hour earlier than expected and walked home down the hill, following a woman who either had rickets or had spent rather too much time in her life sitting on horses.