To moustache or not to moustache

We've finally reached the time of year where the ash tree in our back garden bursts into life. Since the hideous council forced four of the trees along our alleyway to be felled, in order to save a Victorian wall which was knocked down anyway and replaced with a fence, our tree has been the largest in the neighbourhood. Go tree!

Anyway, it eventually loses its leaves in December which is incredibly late, so I suppose it's only right that it bursts into life a little later than its friends. The window in our kitchen is enormous, and right now, all I can see through it are little tufts of fresh, minty green. Sadly they're not as reinvigorating this morning as they might ordinarily be. I am exhausted, and can barely keep my eyes open on account of having been awake through much of the night tossing and turning about the sheer amount of stuff I need to achieve on Em. I got up in the night and wrote from 3am to 5am. I'm not really complaining as it was quite a good, intense period of woke, and, anyway, who wrote the book which insists a writer keep the same working hours as a civil servant?

The problem I'm having is that the last song I have to write for the musical is bigger, fuller and longer than I'd hitherto imagined it needed to be. Because of this I need time for it to settle and I'm just not hugely time rich at the moment. What is it with deadlines that makes us always want a week more than we have? I don't think I've ever reached a deadline and thought "yep, that's hurtling towards me on the horizon and I feel good about the place I'm in!"

In other news, I've shaved off my moustache. It was an agonising decision which I took about a week trying to make. Ultimately, these curly moustaches are quite a faff to maintain, and I used to get incredibly frustrated with it, particularly towards the end when I kept mistakenly pulling out the hairs from the right hand wing, which had the effect of making the moustache even more unmanageable. I guess I'd also started to wonder whether people perceived it as a bit of a comedy or "try hard" statement. I saw a couple of pictures of myself looking like a cross between a basket ball and a walrus and ultimately wondered whether the look was working for me! Yes, of course, I'll miss people coming up to me in the street and complimenting me, and part of me thinks the moustache gave me back the somewhat bohemian vibe I'd lost when my hair lost the lustrous curls it had when I was a young man. But it was ageing. And it was bright orange. And even though I still keep raising my hand to my face to twirl and tweak it, I think it was the right decision to get rid of it. For now.

Those who knew me before the moustache will undoubtedly barely notice. Those, who have met me since, for whom the moustache is a defining feature, will find it very odd. The lady who served me in Costa yesterday said, "are you still drinking tea now that you're an entirely different person?!"