Eclipse(ish)

This morning I made Nathan get up at shit o'clock to come with me to Hampstead Heath to witness the 89% solar eclipse. My instinct had been to jump in a car at 6am and see how far North we could drive, but Nathan had a session of physiotherapy at 11am. There's nothing like physio to thwart a gloriously spontaneous act!

Sadly, it very quickly became apparent that there wasn't going to be a sun. My weather app assured me that it would be perfect eclipse-viewing weather, but instead we had heavy, murky clouds and an impending sense of doom!

Fiona, on tour somewhere in the South of England, texted to say she'd got up early especially to see the eclipse, and was sitting in a dusty lorry park wondering why! She plays with a band called Placebo, which one of her Mum's friends wrongly heard as Placenta, and couldn't understand why she couldn't find any tour dates listed on the internet!

So, basically, the eclipse in London was a bit of a damp squib. It was noticeably darker as we walked across the Heath, and at one point there was a tangible sense that something odd was happening. The air felt heavy somehow, as though it were charged with a sort of electricity. At one point all we could hear were barking dogs and birds squawking. I genuinely think they thought it was dusk, and were doing what animals do at dusk before settling down for the night.

As we turned the corner by the men's bathing ponds we could see that people were flocking in large numbers to the top of Parliament Hill. They looked like matchstick figures in a Lowry painting silhouetted against the brooding clouds. Like the people in his famous painting heading to the football match.

We got to the top of Parliament Hill just as the eclipse reached its zenith. There was quite a big crowd up there. 300 people or more. Lots of them were sitting on rugs, looking hopefully into the sky. Lots of Heath People (a distinct breed) had tipped up with their dogs, all of which were going absolutely bananas. We met a charming elderly dog called Poppy, who just wanted to be stroked. It turned out she was the smelliest creature in carnation and we ended up having to wipe our hands on the grass. Everyone seemed in good spirits, however, and there was a lovely community vibe up there. I like the fact the people still want to experience these big events in large crowds. And all of them had obviously decided to do what the Brits do so well: make the most of a disappointing situation. I was proud of us all.

On the way back down the hill, we could feel the skies lightning, and all the birds becoming active again. The green parakeets seemed to be having a particularly pleasant time. Maybe they were being buoyed on by the bagpiper playing in the bandstand. I'd be surprised if they weren't. I've never heard a bagpiper playing with vibrato before. It made for quite an emotional experience!

There's something deeply moving about the concept of an eclipse. I think it perhaps reminds us how vulnerable we are and how transient life is. One moment the sun is there - and then suddenly it's gone.

During the 1999 UK eclipse, I was in Spain, where said eclipse wasn't actually visible. It was an odd day all round as it was also the day I split up with my last long term partner. I sat and watched the television footage of the event in our hotel room, feeling deeply homesick and weeping bitter tears as the veil of darkness engulfed my friends and family. I think the fact that it was brilliantly sunny in Spain at the time made the situation a little more surreal.

I swore at that point that I would one day witness a total eclipse, somewhere the weather wouldn't spoil the fun. There's one in California that I have my eye on in a couple of years' time.

As if the eclipse weren't depressing enough, I got on the tube to be instantly confronted by one of those people who puts the little packets of tissues on the seats with a note which basically says "I'm poor, would you like to buy some tissues for fifty pence?" Ten minutes later, a very jovial chap got on the train with a big portfolio of paintings, which he took out to show to the carriage one by one, charmingly explaining that he was part of an art collective. Of course no one bought anything. To be honest the paintings weren't very good, but I made a pact with myself to buy a painting directly from an artist the moment I have a bit of spare cash.

Anyway, I found both situations extremely troubling. There was something rather "La Boheme" about the painter with his portfolio, and the tissue salesman reminded me of the plight of some of the soldiers returning from the First World War with no jobs other than menial ones which found them walking around tourist spots with trays of ghastly nicknacks which they were forced to sell for a penny a piece.

I went to Old Street to sit in a cafe with Philippa. We sat opposite each other writing, periodically chatting and eating butternut squash soup. Before parting we walked up to Arnold Circus, that rather curious bandstand on a hillock in the centre of a late 19th Century social housing development. It's definitely one of London's most curious locations. Philippa tells me it's situated at the end if the "Strand" ley-line. It certainly has a very curious atmosphere and acoustic, which is enhanced by the tall, red-brick mansion houses which surround it on all sides. If you stand in the middle, and sing, one particular pitch rings out far louder than the rest. Funnily enough, this particular pitch is bang in the middle of my speaking range, so as we were chatting, I kept hearing certain words echoing and reverberating in the most surreal manner. I started humming the note in question and it created an almost singing-bowl-like effect. It would be a perfect place to meditate if it weren't for the gangs of Bengali yoots hanging about with looks of mischief plastered across their faces.

I came home and worked like a crazy horse. In fact, it's 10.15pm and I'm going to work some more. Nothing like an eclipse to make you reappraise your life!

Buying and selling

I became a prisoner in my own home today when I woke up to discover that Nathan had not just taken his own set of keys with him to work, but my set, AND the spare set from the kitchen draw! How this managed to happen is a mystery. I imagine his pockets were positively jangling with the sound of keys when he left the house. People must have thought he had a tambourine hidden in his jacket pocket!

I made the most of being housebound, finishing the second draft of the eleventh draft of Brass, tidying up scores for A Symphony for Yorkshire and even getting half an hour of 'cello practice in. My fingers tips, as a result, are grey from the metal of the strings and threatening to blister. It's amazing how one's body loses its stamina for such things.

It turns out that leaving the house would have been a big mistake in any case. When I finally went out, it was absolutely freezing. Proper wintry. And I was only wearing a suit jacket and a waistcoat. (Well, obviously a shirt as well, I'm not a stripper...) I don't know when we can expect spring to arrive, but it was certainly here by this time last year, when we were busy filming sequences for Our Gay Wedding, bathed in sunshine and cherry blossom.

This evening I went to The Menier Chocolate Factory to see a new show by an American friend of ours. I left myself an inordinately large amount of time to get down to London Bridge, which turned out to be a good move because the tubes were mega messed up due to an "earlier fire alert at Kennington" which apparently meant they had to "regulate the service."

The show at the Menier was called Buyer and Cellar, and told the (mostly) fictional tale of an actor who is employed to work in an Olde Worlde shopping mall in the basement of Barbra Streisand's Malibu residence. It's fictional because we don't actually know if anyone works down there, but the startling part is that Streisand genuinely has a Olde Worlde shopping mall in the basement of her home! I've seen pictures of it on the internet. She has a doll shop, a sweet shop, a gift shop and a clothes shop filled with dresses she wore in various films and Broadway shows. None of us, I suspect, will ever know what she actually does down there, but this one man show makes a number of brilliant and entertaining guesses.

It's witty and painful in equal measure, and really rather moving in places because it paints Streisand as a bit of a damaged loner, trapped in the castle her fame has forced her to build around herself.

The show is performed - brilliantly - by Michael Urie, whom English people will know as the brilliantly camp and morally dubious assistant in Ugly Betty. It's a dazzling display of comic timing, energy, commitment and focus.

It's definitely worth a watch... particularly if you're gay, or a Streisand fan, or Jewish, or, all three.

We hung out afterwards with the cast and crew, most of whom are American, with their remarkable can-do attitudes. Every time I find myself in the company of leading Broadway figures, I'm reminded why we don't do musicals well over here. We just don't respect the art form well enough.

Back to the grindstone

So Les Mis is 30 years old? I find that rather astonishing. I think I remember when The Mousetrap was 30 years old and that seemed ancient! They're presently running a campaign with a series of cast members looking suitably dramatic and glum, under the banner "thirty years on." I keep wanting to scrawl underneath, "and still no one's smiling!"

I had my first day back in the work place today, directing a corporate film about diabetes. Only I could walk away from a situation like that wondering if I myself have type two diabetes! It's certainly something which is not unknown in my family, and, as I learned today, it's very definitely a hereditary condition. Then again, I'm a fully fledge hypochondriac, so any statements I make about illness must be taken with a healthy pinch of salt.

The woman I was interviewing today was so so lovely, with big kind blue eyes. I instantly took to her and hope I've done her story justice.

We ended the shoot in a little park around the corner from her house, which she described as a "rec," a word I've not heard in many years. I instantly remembered The Rec in Higham Ferrers. "You gooing down Rec, Chunkas?" We used to ask. I relayed my memories to our contributor, who said, "why do they call them recs?" "Rec is short for recreation ground!" I said. "Oh" she replied, "I always thought it was spelt "wreck", and it confused me because I thought our rec wasn't really a wreck at all!"

Anyway, it was nice to be back in a work-shaped saddle, even though it was just for one day...

I came home and we had chips and a halloumi and salad in pitta for tea whilst watching the Big Painting Challenge. I'm beginning to rather like the artist Lachlan Goudie who is one of the experts on the show. I initially thought he was a little on the dour side, but latterly he's shown himself to have a somewhat sensitive, kind disposition.

I know nothing about painting, however. I don't understand how to appreciate visual arts, and certainly have no aptitude whatsoever when it comes to drawing and such. I do like watching painters at work, however, in the same way that I like watching anyone whose skill set is so far removed from my own.

The Big Painting challenge is a funny old format, which rather proves, in my head at least, that painters have a tendency to be slightly antisocial, somewhat sour-faced loners. The "life and soul of the party" contestants on shows like Sewing Bee and Bake Off all seem to get along famously, and be genuinely upset when one of their number has to leave. The painters are a great deal more self-centred and mono-syllabic in their interviews, and I've not yet heard one of them praising a fellow contestant's work, even in the fake way that you get on The Voice, which, come to think of it, is even more ghastly!

RTS

I ended up in Farringdon today, which is a part of London completely off my radar. It's not an unpleasant corner of the world. It's a little overfilled with advertising execs for my liking, but it's quiet and interesting-looking, with quite a lot of early Victorian buildings clinging to winding roads. The tall concrete tower at Barbican, by contrast, looms large in the distance, like something from A Clockwork Orange or 1984, reminding us never to get too complacent!

The last time I came here was in 2010. I was meeting a solicitor from the MU to talk about a hideous court case I got myself embroiled in. The memory of it still makes me shudder. Sadly, it's one of those ghastly life-events, the memory of which gets triggered periodically by women with mad eyes, or anything to do with the city of Leicester. I met the MU solicitor in the Starbucks in Farringdon and she talked me through some of the things I could expect to happen in the courtroom. She'd never have been able to predict the madness that actually occurred! When I arrived at the courtroom for the hearing, I was greeted by an entire choir, who stood on the steps, hissing music at me as a show of solidarity with the conductor I'd been forced to take to court for telling me the music I'd written wasn't soulful enough for her choir to sing! Funny old world, isn't it?

This evening we came to the RTS awards. We were in the same ballroom as the last awards ceremony we'd attended, in an almost identical spot, eating an almost identical menu.

We were up for the best arts programme and were seated on a table with our rivals in the category, none other than Grayson Perry, who rather deservedly beat us with his extraordinary Who Are You series.

There were about sixty thousand awards to sit through. Ours was up really early in the evening, so for the rest of the night we sat back, ate chocolates and counted as the huge glut of awards on the table disappeared one by one.

It was a proper star-studded occasion. As we entered, there was a huge press scrum going on with people like Sheridan Smith, Russell Tovey and Claudia Winklemen standing in front of an enormous board covered in the RTS logo.

Afterwards we met the other losers in the category, namely the makers of the BBC's Messiah at the Foundry, who proved how small the arts commissioning world is by being 1) The lovely Tom Service, whom I was at university was and 2) the equally charming Ben Weston, who was brought in to mentor me for a period when I made A1: The Road Musical. It was genuinely lovely to see them both again. They were similarly gracious losers. We were all gracious losers. That's what happens when the right programme wins! Bravo Grayson... Or that should be Clare, as she was dressed in a beautiful swishy frock tonight.

How do you pay tax on nothing?

It's 10.30pm and I'm only just returning home. I left the house eleven hours ago. I felt a very strong sense of a universe shifting this morning when I got up. The effort I've been putting into networking and job hunting finally started to reap dividends with a few little nibbles whilst I sat at the kitchen table this morning, calmly working my way through the eleventh draft of Brass. I actually made a couple of mini-breakthroughs in the Brass department as well, so by lunch time I was actually feeling fairly buoyant.

As if to compound my sense of optimism, three letters came through the post from the Jobseeker's Allowance people, reminding me that the £0 they'd paid me in the month that I'd attempted to sign on should be classed as taxable income. Great. I'll tell my accountant to make sure that my yearly income is adjusted by £0. Quite why there's no one in these offices who can point out what a silly waste of paper sending these sorts of letters is, I've no idea. And that someone thought it wise to compound the problem by sending the letter in triplicate almost beggars belief! Frankly, if you're looking to save money on the benefits system in this country, instead of taking benefits away from people who can ill afford to lose them, I'd suggest a little look at how many useless, functionally illiterate people wander around these DSS offices and how much pointless admin gets sent through the post by computers. It's disgusting really.

I went into Central London this afternoon to meet an old friend who is running a corporate filmmaking company. When I first worked with him he was about 22, and we all knew he would be a millionaire at least by the end of his life and probably a great deal sooner! His offices - which are in Covent Garden - are absolutely stunning with edit suites and wooden floorboards and fabulous views over Neal's Yard. I felt like a proud mother when I walked in! He's married now and has a house in Ealing. A proper grown up.

Nathan and I had a late lunch together at Stock Pot. I had a blueberry and apple pie whilst Nathan had the spaghetti bolognese he always eats in that place!

From Central London I took the tube to Belsize Park and walked down past the Royal Free (dodging Ebola patients) to Gospel Oak for a rehearsal with the Fleet Singers. It was their last practice before the concert on Sunday and things are slowly coming together. I was particularly proud of the tenors and basses today. The altos rather disappeared into their shells again, which was a shame, because when you coax them out, they're capable of making the most beautiful sounds. They'll get there!  They just need an injection of confidence.

I walked most of the way home. That part of town is a bit of a tricky place to get to via public transport. I would have walked even further, but the Heath looked a little murky and I was carrying a computer, so opted to take a bus from the bottom of Highgate West Hill up into the village, from whence I walked down the hill and back home.

Victorian dictionaries

We've come to Thaxted to see the parents and are currently in the sitting room lounging in front of a gloriously cozy open fire, whilst Nathan and my Mum frog a knitted lavender-coloured cardigan. I'm always horrified when I see people ripping knitting apart. I think about all the hours that have gone into creating the garment, and seeing it as wool again feels somewhat sacrilegious. My Mum says I'd never have survived in the 1950s, when people were forever knitting jumpers and ripping them back again, out of necessity mostly, but also because everyone in those good old days was obsessed with making do and mending.

It's Mothering Sunday, and Facebook is full to the brim with people writing tributes to mothers that are, mothers that were, and mothers that never will be. I'm slightly cynical if I'm honest. I don't understand why we need a single day to remind us of our mothers. I personally think that every day should be Mothers' Day, and that needing a dedicated twenty-four hour period to assuage our guilt for not being attentive during the rest of the year is fairly tragic. I also think the whole thing has become a little too commercialised. My Dad said he was in Sainsbury's this morning and had never seen so many people walking around with cheap bouquets of flowers.

Nathan and I stopped by the side of the road outside Thaxted and picked a bouquet of wild daffodils to give to my Mum. They look lovely in a vase by the fire. Much nicer than a cheap bundle of carnations from Kenya.

My Mum has only just discovered that a "muff" is not necessarily just something you knit with wool. She has reminded me of my Grannie, her mother, who had a best friend called Betty Wanklin whom she went on and on about. We used to encourage her to talk about Betty Wanklin, particularly after it turned out that Betty Wanklin had a dog called Tosser. My Grannie spent a whole afternoon on one occasion doing impersonations of Betty Wanklin shouting the word Tosser, without realising why the ever-growing group assembled in front of her (who kept asking her to tell the story again) were having absolute hysterics!

We had something of a nostalgia fest in the evening, talking about school days and the scrapes I seemed to get myself into on a regular basis. My Mum reminded me about the little crusades I went on, which on one occasion saw me removing myself from school assemblies on the grounds of being an atheist. It caused mayhem. On one occasion my mother was called in by the head teacher and told that I was the most dangerous student in the school. A bit of an over-exaggeration, I suspect, but I was a fairly militant child!

The day ended in the presence of a Victorian dictionary, which we dipped in and out of, looking for beautiful and comic old-fashioned words. I rather liked the word "besprinkled." His hair was besprinkled with grey!

As the embers in the fire started to die we left Thaxted to wend our way back to London.

Organs and Suzy Qs

I worked for a large percentage of the day after allowing myself a rather glorious lie-in. I've started staggering my way through the new draft of Brass for a second time, focussing today on the opening sequence, which is entirely different to how it was in Leeds last summer.

I applied for three jobs in the late afternoon before heading off to Crouch End to pick Julian up from his Misses' vicarage. Our task today was to record the organ for the CD version of Oranges and Lemons and we were doing so at the Swiss Church in Covent Garden.

Heaven knows how I managed to park on Endell Street, literally outside the church, at one minute past the time when it became legal to do so. Maybe there is a God after all, because it meant we could unload all Julian's recording equipment without any hassle. As we unloaded, a poor bloke tried to park in the space behind me. I felt for him. I genuinely did, because, like me, he wasn't the best parker in the world. What surely wasn't helping his confidence, however, was the group of twenty lads standing outside the pub opposite, who were jeering and cheering every time he reversed the car to have another crack at getting into the space. I imagined myself in that position and decided I'd have given up long since and found a spot which wasn't being so brutally scrutinised!

The Swiss Church is a stunning eighteenth century barn of a building with a tall, arched atrium roof and the most serene four-second echo.

The organ itself is Swiss built (of course) and brand new, which means it's perfectly in tune. To make matters even more perfect, our organist, Peter, is a very fine player. I sat in the organ loft whilst he played. In fact we shared a stool, I turned his pages, and on one occasion got to pull out one of the stops, which gave me almost as much joy as rubber stamping my husband's hospital letter on Thursday afternoon with the words "hard of hearing."

Peter changed shoes before starting to play, curiously into a pair of black brogues which looked almost identical to the ones he'd taken off. They looked a little like tap shoes from a distance, so I was half hoping for a quick Suzy Q before we got going!

Of course I know nothing about organs (pfnah pfnah) and was actually quite embarrassed when I saw the subtle modulations Peter was having to make to the music I'd given him. I've never had the opportunity to study a church organ before, and ask questions about the two keyboards and the octaves one is expected to write in. I learned much.

The only thing I couldn't apologise for was the ludicrous keys that Oranges and Lemons finds itself drifting through. That's the fault of the church bells themselves. Here's a fact for you... All church bells, depending on their size, ring in different keys. The biggest (and therefore lowest) bells I recorded whilst working on Oranges and Lemons were hanging in the tower at Mary le Bow church. This particular set of bells ring in C major. In fact, the bell you hear ringing on at the end of the composition is the iconic Great Bell of Bow; a fruity bottom C. The bells in other churches were in keys ranging from C sharp major and every semi-tone up to E major; so I had to be incredibly inventive when it came to key changes, to ensure that every bell we recorded was featured in the piece. And that meant regular visits to somewhat ghastly keys! The organist maintained he'd never played a B sharp before!

I was hugely excited and proud to walk into the church and hear the enormous beauty of an organ playing music which I had written. I haven't had a kick like that since hearing the carillon at York Minster playing the opening of the Adagio from A Symphony for Yorkshire.

The session went incredibly smoothly and quickly, and we were done by 9pm. We de-rigged and I drove Julian back to Crouch End, before hot-footing it to Canary Wharf where Brother Edward, Nathan and Sascha were eating lasagne and watching the final of the Melodiefest, which is the annual mega-competition which the Swedes use to chose their song for Europe. I'd like to point out that Sweden has placed in the top five at Eurovision for as long as I can remember, largely because they take their selection process so seriously.

British Eurovision fans are up in arms about the apparent under-hand nature of our "selection" process. We don't know who judges the entries, nor do we know the criteria they use for judging the songs. None of the entrants are given feedback.   To relegate the unveiling of the song to something which happens on the red button when the Melodiefest is one of the biggest shows on television demonstrates quite how complacent the BBC have become. And frankly it's insulting to the hoards of British Eurovision fans who are sick of doing badly every year.

I'm told the trick is to hit the BBC with a carefully-worded freedom of information request in the hope of shedding some light on their apparent shady processes. The tragedy with freedom of information requests is that the BBC can actually refuse to answer certain questions, which, of course makes a mockery of the notion of freedom of information. That said, the more questions they refuse to answer on the subject, the more of a stitch-up their process seems and the more we can demand more transparency in the future.