Flashing lights

There was a Mediterranean-style mega-storm in North London this evening. We arrived at Highgate tube from Central London and walked out into the mother of all rainstorms. For the next hour, lightning filled the sky around us, flashing every three seconds like a crazy 1990s rave.

A level of comedy was added to the proceedings when the lightning somehow managed to effect the speed camera just up the road from us, which decided to flash every car which drove down the road, regardless of the speed they were travelling at. At one stage lights were going off every were you looked!

We'd been in Central London to see the screening of the first episode of a rather moving BBC drama, beautifully written by Patrick Gale and called The Man in the Orange Shirt. The first episode is set in the late 1940s, which is a period that very few writers actually write about. Our knowledge of the decade is usually limited to stories about the war. I've often wondered what the period immediately after the war was all about. Pre "new look". Pre Festival of Britain. Pre rock 'n roll. I guess it was simply a time when people wandered about in the ruins of the war, trying to work out what on earth had just happened! The forgotten years.

The rest of the day has been spent trying to recover from Israel. I did some basic admin, formatted a pitch and pottered about a bit. We had lunch in the cafe - beans on toast - but the beans were obviously cooked in a pan which had had washing up liquid in it, because they tasted all perfumey and rank. Tomorrow the hard work begins again.