The triangle

Today was meant to be my last day in the recording studio working on Em. Music should, by now, have been fully mixed and heading off to Scotland for mastering. Obviously I knew this wasn't going to happen, which is why I haven't booked the album in for this crucial next stage. You learn to take one step at a time in a recording studio and never to give yourself unrealistic expectations in terms of delivery dates. Who was it who once drew a picture of a triangle for me, with three words written at each of the corners? "Cheap. High quality. Quick." The point of the diagram was to show that any two corners of this particular triangle in combination would always block out the third. So, you can have something which is high quality and delivered quickly, but it won't be cheap, you can have high quality and cheap, but it won't be quick and you can have cheap and fast but it won't be high quality. In the case of Em we're aiming for cheap and high quality, so delivery won't happen any time soon!

Actually, I think we may need as many as two extra days in the studio, which is a bit of a bummer, as studio days are really expensive. At the same time I can't deliver something which is not as brilliant as it could be, simply because I've skimped at this final stage.

On the tube this evening I had to deal with a man who was so blindingly drunk that he was, in my view, a danger to himself. Watching him, and the way that people were interacting with him, I was suddenly struck by how people have a tendency to leave men to simply get on with it when they're in obvious peril. I'm fairly convinced that a woman in the same state of inebriation would have been rather speedily rescued. Maybe there's a sense that a drunk man would potentially get violent. I watched as the guy lurched, like a pinball, from one side of the corridor to the other, and then as he slipped down a flight of stairs, only narrowly avoiding losing his footing entirely and therefore injuring himself really badly. When he started listing towards the track on the platform itself, I was forced to intervene, grabbing him by his arm and steering him to the wall.

I asked him where he was going and ascertained he was heading for Marble Arch, so got him onto the tube. He folded up like a little piece of origami once inside and I was forced, yet again, to grab his arm to stop him from toppling out of the tube when the doors re-opened. I forced him to look into my face and asked if he was okay, and explained to him that he needed to be extremely careful when he got off at Marble Arch because I wouldn't be there to keep an eye on him and he was very drunk and likely to hurt himself if he didn't try very hard to sober up. I asked if he knew where he was heading and he seemed to, so I said he needed to try very hard not to walk into the roads because even though his legs were behaving like rubber, he wouldn't bounce like rubber.

He seemed touched and tried to give me his card but couldn't make his fingers work to pull it out of his wallet. It was a sorry sight. I hope he made it home.