Holiday Sin

I’m back in Manchester and we had a wonderful day today looking at locations for our shoot which begins on Thursday. The hills around Hattersley are stunningly beautiful, particularly when dusted with a light coating of snow. The heavy sky was a myriad colours ranging from powder blue, right down to a curious milky orange which seemed to cling to the tops of the hills.

Paul and I were joined for the day by cameraman, Keith, who filmed A Symphony for Yorkshire, and has recently transferred to Salford Quays. It was so good to see him again. The last time I was with him, we were sitting on an hotel balcony in Romania, terrorising the locals by pouring water from a great height onto the street below. It was incredibly childish, but it made us laugh like hyperactive children.

We made our way around Hattersley Estate, meeting all of our contributors and playing them the newly mixed tracks. After they’d got over the shock of hearing themselves on their stereos, I think they were all rather thrilled. Keith seems excited about the project as well. I think the Estate reminds him of the place he grew up, and many of the people we’re working with were apparently just like his own family. I hope many people who see the films will feel this way, but if a cameraman inherently understands a project, he’ll shoot wonderful pictures.  

I’m in a less than desirable hotel, which is shame because all of the hotels I’ve stayed in so far in Manchester have been very reasonable. Paul, who booked it, was expressly told by the receptionist that the room had a bath, which is one of the few things I absolutely need when I’m in the same place for an extended stay. Unfortunately, I can only think the woman misheard him and thought he said bathroom, because there’s nothing but a shower here – and a really bad one at that! The other issue – and this is inexcusable – is that the internet is not free, and costs £5 per night. There are no reductions for a long stay, so if I want internet it’s going to set me back £70, as I’m reliably informed it’s not considered to be a BBC vital expense. Holiday Inn Express should feel incredibly embarrassed at this blatant money-spinning scheme. Probably worse than any of this – and no doubt because it’s a Saturday night in the middle of Manchester - the place is heaving with pissed up dick heads.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the hotel design is that you can’t exit the place via its stairs, which simply lead to an emergency door, which is, apparently alarmed. It only has 2 lifts, and it’s ten storeys high, so the lifts take hours to arrive. I shouldn’t complain too much, but when you’re working really hard, it’s vital to have a home from home and plainly this isn’t a hotel set up to function for working professionals. It’s a knocking shop for people on stag dos!

Pepys spent the night 350 years ago composing a song entitled “Gaze Not On Swans.” This is a sentiment that my dear friend Fiona would absolutely agree with. She is terrified of the creatures – and not without reason. She seems to attract them. I remember on one occasion helplessly watching her climbing out of a punt into an overhanging tree because a swan was trying to eat her!

yesterday in Sussex...

Hattersley Loop

I’m doing exactly the thing I promised not to do; namely listening to the Hattersley songs on a loop! We went down to a country estate outside a little village near Horesham to mix them this morning and I’m thrilled with the results. PK, the producer, is a man with an eye for detail, and an extraordinary sense of the space that music needs to breathe. I couldn’t believe how much work he’d done on the tracks before we arrived. It was a pleasure to work with him.

There was a massive flurry of snow last night. In fact, because of the weather, I drove into town to pick Nathan up from work. As I passed through Camden, a blizzard started, which became more and more intense. It got incredibly confusing at one point and I found myself driving the wrong way down Endell Street because I couldn't see through the snow. I reached Nathan’s work to be told that, because of the weather, he’d been sent home early. I tried to call him, but he was already on the tube. I’d gone all the way into town and driven the wrong way down a one way street for nothing! By the time I’d turned around, negotiated a ridiculous set of road works, and started to head north again, the roads were gridlocked. It took me an hour to get back home.

The recording studio where we mixed the tracks today was in a sort of stable block in the grounds of a massive country house which belongs to one of the former members of Depeche Mode. It’s a stunning house, which looked even more beautiful in the snow, particularly as the sun set. We worked incredibly hard, but the studio didn’t have heating. It was so cold, in fact, that at one stage Nathan and I were both sitting underneath blankets. As we pulled away in our car, the temperature gage suggested it was -4.5 outside.

350 years ago, Pepys went to the bookshops in St Paul’s churchyard, where he found a volume called “England’s Worthys”, by Dr Fuller, one of his favourite authors. The book was a sort of Who’s Who of notable English families and Pepys sat and read it keenly. He got so engrossed, in fact, that he completely lost track of the time and was very late home for lunch. He was, however, very unhappy to discover that his own family weren’t included in the list, summing things up, rather sadly; “indeed, our family were never considerable.”

Well, they are now, dear Mr Pepys, they are now...

Shoe polish and surf boards

I have discovered shoe polish! I had no idea that the experience of shining a shoe could be so therapeutic and gratifying. Last week, a pair of my shoes (with me inside) fell through an icy puddle, and ended up in a hideous pile of yellow-brown mud. I washed the shoes in a bucket of water, left them on a radiator, and thought they were entirely ruined. They were covered in water marks and scuffed to buggery. Three coats of polish and a bit of elbow grease later and they’re gleaming like the most expensive pair of shoes ever made. I’m now going to polish every pair of shoes I own. I only own three pairs, so it won’t take very long. The rest have fallen apart, because all my shoes fall apart... That said, now that I polish them, maybe they won’t... Hmmm

I am thrilled to report that my cousin, Matt, and his wonderful wife, Boo have decided to invest in the requiem. I was incredibly touched, and the news means we’re now we’re at the £3,000 mark – an eighth of the way towards our target.

Ooh, ooh - five minutes after writing this, I received an email to say that we've had another £1,000 pledge. So the requiometer now looks like this...

I was in the post office today, sending more letters to potential investors. The man in the queue in front of me was posting an enormous parcel to Cornwall. Now, sometimes I don’t actually know why I open my mouth. I’m usually incredibly shy, but occasionally it occurs to me to say something to a stranger, and before I’ve thought about it, the words are tumbling out of my mouth. Now, bearing in mind that the package the man was sending was probably less than a 40 centimetres long, can anyone tell me why I asked; “what’s that? A surf board?” The man with the package simply stared at me, astonished. I suppose it didn’t occur to him that I associate Cornwall with surfing. Why would it? The package looked nothing like a surf board and it was none of my business what it was anyway. I felt my face redden as the man with the package laughed in a mixture of confusion and politeness and the person behind the counter simply looked the other way. It was mortifying. I will never address a stranger again! I must learn from these hideous experiences.

A short entry from Pepys on this date, 350 years ago. He spent the day in bed, taking “phsysique” and doing a bit of composition. At one point he promised his wife 20l to spend on clothes for Easter. He would no doubt live to regret the decision. Pepys didn’t like spending money. Not one bit.

Monopoly money

I've spent the day trying to think of people who might want to invest in the requiem. At the moment I'm focussing on corporate sponsors, hoping that a big company might want to give us some money in return for some serious branding on the CDs. I make no apologies. If a multinational company is good enough to bank-roll a piece of art, then the artist is obliged to find a way to give the company something big in return. There are too many people in creative industries who feel they're owed an existence.

It terrifies me when I consider the amount I still need to raise. I suppose it's a bit like buying a house; you stop looking at the zeros, because everything's started to feel like a game of Monopoly. I felt like that in the courtroom last September when the judge kept adding hundreds of pounds to the amount I was going to need to pay. I went into shut down, into denial;  the figures had gone beyond anything that I had in my bank account, so they ceased to have meaning. I think people get like that with debt. What's another thousand pounds when you already owe 20? I guess it's the same process which makes someone go from slightly over-weight to morbidly obese and needing a winch to get out of bed in the morning. I'm already fat... what's another kilo?

I met my friend Marinella for tea and a much needed catch up this evening. We went to the wonderful Rustique cafe in Tufnell Park which is just up the road from where I used to live. I remember it opening, which I'm horrified to discover was 13 years ago. It was so exciting to have a cafe on my street where I could sit and write, and I went there every day for a year.

Marinella was well. She, like most of the successful creative people I know, spent long periods of time out of the country last year, first in Greece and then in Budapest working as script supervisor on an HBO series. It worries me that more and more people in my industry are being forced to work outside the UK. It proves, what I've long suspected; that we just don't really know how to "do" the arts over here. The whole system is messed up. There's no government investment, no tax incentives, no support for young writers, and private benefactors are much more likely to invest in political parties because it gives them a shot at a peerage. What little money there is usually get shared out between "worthy" causes and as a result, written off. People don't see the money-making potential of the arts. I'm presently trying to work out whether this particular rant makes a mockery of my statement about creative people needing to know that the world doesn't owe them a living, but I don't think it does.

I got the tube back from Tufnell Park because it was too cold to wait for a bus. It's bitter out there.

350 years ago, Pepys spent much of the day in his cellar overseeing the shifting of coal from one place to another as part of his refurbishments. He was thrilled with the results: “it do please me exceedingly, as much as anything that was ever yet done to my house.”

Hurtling down the hill

On the way back from Euston station last night, Nathan and I went tobogganing on Parliament Hill. It’s become something of a tradition for the two of us ever since we were introduced to the joys of midnight sledging by Philip Sallon about two years ago.  I’m always intrigued by quite how much light from the night sky the snow reflects. It’s as though the whole heath is lit by a massive halogen light. I guess it's a fairly worrying indication of how much pollution there is in the sky around us. Nathan’s sister gave us a pair of sledges for Christmas and it was a delight to christen them. They are so much more aerodynamic than tea trays or the lids from council recycling boxes! A fair amount of the snow had already gone, so we had to choose routes very carefully to avoid running aground on patches of exposed grass and mud.  It’s such an adrenaline rush, however; hurtling down a hillside at an impossible speed, the wind rushing through your hair, the fear of death by tree or grassy knoll... I only wished we’d been able to go when the snow was fresh.

When we returned home at about midnight, I found a letter waiting for me on our stairs. The back of the envelope simply read “make it happen” and there was a cheque inside from lovely Roy.  Obviously I was hugely touched, and terribly excited, but I also thought; “Roy knows a shrewd investment when he sees one.” I need to programme my mind to think a great deal more like this in the future. Why wouldn’t someone want to invest in the requiem? It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

So - and this is the really exciting bit - I now get to unveil the new Requiometer. We’re slowly creeping up the ivy!

The temperatures continue to stay at really low levels in London. It's much colder here than it was in Manchester. It was bitter as I ran around Highgate this afternoon, and more than a little challenging. I was trying to avoid the snow and ice, but some roads obviously took a proper pounding, because they’re still entirely covered. There were piles of snow by the side of the road on The Bishop’s Avenue about 5 feet tall.

I spent the day in Colindale Newspaper Library; my final day of research for the Fleet Singers project. I was just looking for a few choice headlines to contextualise one or two of the memories. I’m excited. There’s now a seed of something which could be really wonderful. Quite when I’m going to be able to take a day off between now and never, I’ve no idea. Tomorrow has been earmarked for Requiem funding. I have to be able to think of some wealthy people. The trouble with being a creative person is that one’s friends tend to be similarly struggling!

February 7^th, 1662, and Pepys went for dinner with Lady Sandwich, where they met Captain Hill, fresh from Portugal, who brought news of Lord Sandwich and the most astonishing number of gifts from him including a civitt cat, a parrot, various apes and “many other things.” I dread to think.

Slugs and vegetarians

Being on the road for days at a time can start to play havoc with a person’s food regime. I’m actually in something of a panic today because it’s becoming almost impossible to find decent vegetarian food in Manchester. I’m presently at the train station where I’ve just queued for some time at the Balcony Bar to be told the vegetarian lasagnes had sold out. I asked what other vegetarian food was on the menu and was informed that the only thing I could eat was a cheese and tomato pizza. There were scores of meat and fish dishes available. As I walked out I urged the bar woman to get her bosses to either serve more veggie options, or to keep tabs on the one veggie dish available to make sure it didn’t sell out. She smiled at me like I'd just farted, and thanked me for the feedback.

For some reason, BBC policy seems no longer to include the price of breakfast for a work-related stay in an hotel, so the first thing I have to do each morning is wander around in search of something to eat. This morning I ended up in a little cafe somewhere near the hideous Arndale Centre where there was precisely nothing available for veggies. It surely doesn’t take much to offer a couple of poached eggs or a plate of beans on toast? I asked the man behind the counter if he could suggest somewhere that might sell me a breakfast without meat. He thought for a while before saying, “it’s a bit early, but perhaps you could try the Buddhist Centre...” Surely vegetarianism in Manchester is not so unusual that it needs to be lumped in with an Eastern Religion?

The Co-op on Hattersley is, of course, totally nuts when it comes to meat-free options. I had two rolls and a pot of hummus for lunch yesterday before chowing down on half a tonne of chocolate. The only vegetarian option in the hotel was a thai curry (coriander city) so I ended up with a bowl of soup and Jaffa cakes for my evening meal. Today I had a cheese ploughman’s roll for lunch and a cheese ploughman’s sandwich for tea! My stomach hurts...

That said, I’m also buzzing like a rat in a garden, following an incredibly successful day in the recording studio. I’ve felt like a proud mother hen pretty consistently from about ten o’clock this morning. One by one, our wonderful Hattersley residents came into the studio, brilliantly upbeat, and fully prepared. They sang my songs with vigour and, in some cases, deep emotion. I was so chuffed with them all – and hugely grateful. Yet another major milestone in our project has now been passed. Even Bill, both blind and deaf, did his bit.

Proud as punch with some of the Hattersley folk

I’m now on the train, heading back to London. A lump of a woman with a fat arse and a deeply irritating Nigerian accent is droning away on the phone. She seems to be alternating the words "God" and "Jesus" with frightening alacrity – and certainly isn’t using the words in vain! She has already come out with a veritable stream of homophobic abuse regarding the “sins” of gay marriage, and prostitution. How wonderful it must be to be so profoundly smug - and so fucking fat. I feel very sorry for the man sitting next to her, who's been squashed into the window by her enormous intolerant folds of lard. She’s a slug in a red blouse. I’m sure Jesus will be thrilled to have her back in the fold. I wonder if she’ll move with more speed in heaven, 'cus following her down the train carriage was like waiting for bleedin’ Godot!

February 6^th, 1662, and Pepys spent the morning practising music before heading down into his cellar to see how the alterations were going. Amongst other things, he was having a new door fitted, and was very pleased with its progress. He worked all afternoon at the Navy Office (after being trimmed by a barber) and went home to examine his testicles, which he was relieved to see were less swollen than the day before.

Werneth Low

I returned to my hotel room about 10 minutes ago to find it being cleaned. 5pm on a Sunday night feels like a funny time to be cleaning a room, and when you’ve been working all day, it’s more than a little irritating to get back, desperate for a bath, and have to sit like a lemon in the foyer. I also find the whole thing quite embarrassing. It's bad enough to think the cleaners might judge me based on the clothes I’ve left on my bed and strewn across the top of my suitcase, but it's even worse to think that they now have a mental image of me. I’d much rather those things happened entirely anonymously!

We’ve been on the Hattersley Estate all day working with Jean, Jean and Bill who all have solos which they're going to be recording in the studio tomorrow. They all did really well, although we struggled a little with Bill. The poor bloke is 80 years-old and both blind and almost deaf. I’m not quite sure why I thought he’d find learning a brand new song so easy, but I’m having to hastily organise a few plan Bs if various sections of the piece prove too much for him. We’ll get there.

The snow had largely melted in Manchester this morning, so we decided to brave going up onto Werneth Low, a hill which is said to have extraordinary views of the Hattersley Estate. Hysterically, when we started to climb the hillside, we found ourselves disappearing into a cloud, and from the top all we could see was mist, plus the odd child with a toboggan! It reminded me of a similar experience whilst working on A Symphony for Yorkshire when Alison and I left Leeds on a beautiful sunny day to explore a location on the Yorkshire Moors, and found ourselves in such thick fog that all we could see of its world famous view was the bench which looked out over it!  Producer Paul has been driving the BBC van like a trooper all weekend. He's a hardy Derbyshire lad, who's been on snow-driving courses, so I've felt very safe.

beautiful views over the estate...

Yet again, I have tea pouring out of my ears. Whenever you enter a house in Hattersley, it’s the first thing you’re offered, followed by whatever food they have to spare in the house. My love affair with the place continues. Today we went to visit a gentleman with an amazing collection of cine films from the estate when it was being built, including images of a pair of children running towards one of the mobile shops that used to serve the place, and coming back with handfuls of sweets. The images were grainy, a little fuzzy and a sort of browny-orange colour. He kept apologising, but the quality of the pictures simply added to their inherent wistfulness. they could have been shot specifically for the song I’ve written, which I hope has a similar sort of romantic and nostalgic quality. I was thrilled.

I was less thrilled to see, in the centre of Manchester this morning, a Japanese lad with a surgical mask strapped over his face. Am I the only person who finds this behaviour slightly rude? I’m sure he’s simply trying to protect himself from pollution, and would, no doubt, do the same thing in Tokyo, but sadly it comes across as though he’s trying to avoid British germs and this makes me feel uncomfortable. It looks sinister. Perhaps it’s just another symptom of my latent xenophobia, but I wouldn't go to Dubai and take my top off, because I know, by doing so, I'd offend the locals.

February 5^th, 1662, and Pepys went with Sir William Penn and his wife to the theatre to see a misogynistic play called Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, which was apparently acted very well. They arrived at the theatre early, so went to a nearby pub for some Rhenish wine and sugar. Pepys seemed more interested in ogling women than watching the actual play. He was particularly enthralled by Lady Castlemaine, lover of the King, and renowned beauty, who'd recently got over some kind of sickness (one assumes small pox, because she became a great fan of black patches.) In Pepys' words; “notwithstanding her late sickness, [she] continues a great beauty.”

One assumes that Pepys' private parts caused him a little bother before bed. The diary translation I’ve been forced to read today is based on a Victorian translation which tends to edit out any mention of anything remotely sexual; “so home and to bed, putting some cataplasm to my . . . . which begins to swell again.” A few months before this date, Pepys was suffering from a swollen testicle. There. I’ve said it.