Phosphorescence

We've just spent the day at Julie and Sam's house doing craft and cake. For the record we were fed Lemon polenta cake and strawberries from Julie's allotment, and scones with cream and homemade raspberry and apricot jam. (Just a bit of food porn to get your digestive juices flowing!)

Throughout the day I've been suffering enormously with my left eye. When I lean forward, the pressure is intense, and every time I blink there's a sharp pain. I don't think I like Blepharitis very much.

Craft and cake was fun, however. Abbie and Michelle did cross stitch, Nathan, Julie and Tina knitted socks and Sam was using tiny little needles to knit a beautiful peacock green scarf for his fella. I was craft-less but cheered everyone on. I must remember to take photographs with me next time to stick in an album.

We went to look at Julie and Sam's allotments, which are through a gate and out the back of their garden. Julie has planted all manner of fruit trees and bushes, most of which are under a huge tent frame covered in netting. There are pears, plums, black currents, red currents, tay berries and something called sun berries which I've not even heard of but seem to be a cross between raspberries and blackberries.

Sam grows more savoury crops, although I did notice some gooseberries which looked like they were coming on nicely. The middle of his plot is a riot of poppies and cornflowers, which are actually my two favourite flowers. The whole place was idyllic in the sunshine and covered in bees and butterflies. For the first time in my life I actively wanted my own allotment! Although I reckon I'd only want it for potatoes, carrots and strawberries... And obviously a beehive!

I bumped my head on the corner of a shed and drew blood, which I reckon officially makes me in the wars right now! I also seem to have hay fever.

We watched a programme about fireflies in Japan last night. What magical creatures they are! I understand they only live on fresh water, which makes them even more charming in my view. I've found pictures of fireflies in Germany, but do we get them in the UK? Nathan thinks it's highly unlikely. Has anyone reading this ever seen one? Or a glow worm. Pepys talks about glow worms in his diaries, so they must be a British thing. Your stories please!

I'm lucky enough to have seen phosphorescence. I've probably written this in the blog before, but Philippa, Sam and I were in Nerja in the South of Spain. We went down to the beach at midnight and decided to lie naked on the seashore like fabulous bohemians. We could see a little pool of greenish light about ten metres out to sea, which we initially assumed was something to do with the moon's reflection, but as we lay there watching, it got closer and closer. With one last wave, the green glowing water rushed over us, and for some reason we instinctively all stood up. The water, which by now looked like a million glowing crystals dripped down our bodies and back into water. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most extraordinary displays of the beauty of nature I've ever witnessed.

Philippa drew reference to the event in the screenplay for her exquisite film Little Ashes, in the scene where Dali and Lorca jump from a rowing boat off the coast of Cadaquez and swim in a sea of phosphorescence.

Happy days!

London Road

I woke up this morning looking like I'd done ten rounds in a boxing ring. There was a big puffy bag under my left eye...

I took myself back to Moorfields and it was an entirely different experience: friendly staff, large numbers of doctors on duty, far shorter waiting times. I couldn't believe I was standing in the place which the night before had been like a scene from Apocalypse Now!

I passed the visual test with flying colours, which made me rather pleased. The nerve-wracking bit was the part when you stick your chin on a stirrup and a woman sits opposite, shining different coloured lights into your eyes, periodically saying "look down" and scrawling things on a piece of paper with drawings of an eye on it. She squirted strange coloured drops into my eyes, which made everything a little woozy and yellow, before telling me that she could see a lump and that my eyes had different "pressures." She cleared off to find a doctor, saying, "it's not a big problem, it's a mild problem..." The wait was excruciating. What problem was she talking about? Why did my head feel all woozy and why was everything still bright yellow? It was like being in a sepia photograph.

It turns out that I have a condition! I know! Fancy that! It's chronic, which means it could return at any point but it's not serious, just annoying. It's called Blepharitis and I'm told it's a fairly common inflammation of the eyelids. I've been put on a regime involving warm flannels and weird eye massages which feel like I'm actually pushing my eyes back into my head.

I felt pretty wiped out by the end, so treated myself to lunch at Shepherdess Cafe on the City Road, which has to be one of the loveliest cafe's I've ever visited. It looks really eccentric and quirky - like a 1950s road side cafe - but the woman who runs it is something else. I assume she's Greek Australian. There's an antipodean burr to her voice, laced with something Mediterranean. She offered me halloumi when I walked in, so I assumed Greek! She plainly takes great delight in feeding her customers and making sure they have something they genuinely want. I asked for an omelette and checked if it came with salad, "yes it comes with a little salad" said she, "but I'll make sure you get more..." I then heard her shouting through to the kitchen, "Greek omelette - extra decoration." She came back to me; "what about drinky-pinkies?" I laughed hysterically, "just a tap water please." She winked, and talked to me conspiratorially: "Do you want to make it a bit more glamorous with some ice?" "Yes please..." "I'll see that you get a good portion of ice..." She shouted into the kitchen, "water on the rocks and don't spare the rocks!" And then she was off, showing the "delicious gammon" the bloke behind me had ordered to every other table in the cafe! Charming. Genuinely.

I spent the afternoon blowing bright yellow snot out of my nose which must have been a result of the dye that got squirted in. I guess what goes in must come out, but it's an interesting indication of how all of those organs are linked together.

There was a somewhat amusing event on the crowded tube home when an obviously very pregnant lady got into the carriage. I was appalled to see how many people sitting down looked up at her and then pretended not to have seen the bump. In the end, an old lady towards the other end of the carriage got up for her, but as the pregnant woman made her way to the vacated seat, another old lady with a stick hobbled over to it, assuming the seat had been vacated for her. At that point an old man jumped up to give the pregnant woman his seat and she waddled over to that chair just as someone jumped up to give the old man a seat. It was a proper game of underground musical chairs!

We went to the Art House cinema in Crouch End for the first time tonight. It's a fabulous little cinema in an old chapel with a little bar area out front. As we sat waiting for the film to begin, they played Mr Blue Sky on the sound system, and (what seemed like) the entire bar burst into song. It was one of those moments where music links everyone together. People were looking around the space, almost to see if they had permission from everyone else to join in. Some danced. Everyone joined in with the chorus.

We were watching the film London Road, which is utterly extraordinary. Utterly. I never saw the stage show. Nathan did, and raved about it so much that I was convinced I was going to hate it because nothing could ever live up to that amount of hype, and, furthermore because every time I released a film people asked whether it's going to be like London Road, which was sort of okay whilst it was just a stage piece, but when it became a film I ought to have been a little miffed... But I'm not at all because it's magical. Clever. Witty. Complicated. Remarkable. Heart-warming. Deeply moving. I was transfixed from the moment it started to the very last bar of music.

Moorfields and Mountview

I'm writing this blog from the A and E Department at Moorfields Eye Hospital. There seems to be a huge number of people in the waiting room. I could be here for some time...

There's nothing to worry about, I'm sure. I think I might have some grit or glass in my eye, or some kind of infection in the eye lid. Basically there's a pain in the lower left hand side of my left eye, and because it's getting worse I've decided to try and nip it in the bud. It's always difficult to know where to go with eye problems. A GP will either tell you to go away for two weeks and come back if the pain hasn't subsided, or he'll refer you to an eye specialist. An optician would doubtless charge silly money to give you a quick once over.

It turns out the one place NEVER to go with an eye problem is the A and E department of Moorfields Eye Hospital.

The waiting time was five hours! Five flippin' hours! The waiting room itself was packed out, and boiling hot like a terrible sauna, the triage nurse was next to useless and flicked a cheap plastic torch across my eye (the sort you might find in Halfords). He proceeded to write a zero on my form and sent me packing without offering any sense of what might have been wrong. So basically, we decided to go home. Nothing is painful enough to need to be remedied by that dreadful, dreadful, Third World sort of a place.

It's been another busy day which started in a Pret A Manger in Bond Street, where we met Cat and Uncle Archie before heading to an agent's offices where we interviewed a director for the project we're doing in the second half of the year. I wish I could say more, but that's the nature of a top secret project!

We went from Bond Street to Piccadilly to see our friend Emma Fraser performing in her Mountview drama school agents' showcase at the Criterion. Mountview aren't my favourite drama school at the moment, despite my being an alumnus. They've turned down some of the more extraordinary performers from the Brass cast, which seems rather short-sighted, particularly considering the mediocre standard of many of the kids who were on the stage today.

I'm proud (and greatly relieved) to say that Emma shone. She played sax. She sang beautifully. She got laughs. She acted well. I overheard people talking about her in glowing terms... Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Many of the other performers were, well, just a little bit unremarkable. There were far too many songs performed in cod, rather nasal American accents for my liking. There were no book scenes. Just song after song sung in that generic "off Broadway" manner, which prevented many of the performers from standing out. I see it every time I go to a cabaret. The cookie American accent gets dusted off and, as a result, there's an immediate disconnect with the material. I take it for granted that all actors can sing in an American accent. I want to be presented with something I'm not expecting when I go to a showcase. There was no grit. Nothing edgy. I didn't hear a single regional accent. Just blandness, really. If that were an audition, I'd have written NFM (not for me) at the top of pretty much every page. I was hugely disappointed. 

...apart from with Emma, who was wonderful. And if I'm honest there were at least two or three others who did themselves proud, so it wasn't a complete wash out!

We walked from Piccadilly to Oxford Circus to drop off some CDs at the BBC before walking to Covent Garden to pick up my computer from the Apple Store. I was rather impressed by the speed with which they dealt with the repair and the handover of the repaired machine (which has a replacement screen.)

We came home and I went to the gym before settling down to do some more work on the synopsis of Em.

And then my eye started hurting a lot, so we went to Moorfields, had the horrible experience I've outlined at the start of the blog, discharged ourselves and came home feeling annoyed with ourselves for going on such a wasted journey.

Moorfields: sort yourselves out. You're a dreadful shambles.

Postman's Park

Don't you just hate stupid people? I particularly hate stupid people whose job title includes the word "genius." At 10am this morning, I queued up outside the Apple Store in Covent Garden in the hope of being able to bag myself one of their oh-so-prestigious walk-in appointments. The doors opened and people literally started elbowing each other out of the way and running up the stairs. I half expected to find a set of cheap designer wedding dresses on the upper floor, but actually what I found was another blinkin' queue!

When I got to the front of the queue I explained, as I have to perhaps twelve Apple employees, that I was in the middle of a commission and that I was desperately hoping that we could find a way for me to be without my computer for as short a time as possible. "Well our turnaround time here is 3-5 days" said the man. I told him I understood that this was the case, but that other staff at Apple stores had told me that I might have been able to bring the computer in when it was expected to reach the front of the queue, rather than to have it sitting, unused in some warehouse. I explained that several people had told me that the part I needed replacing would be in store, so it was likely to be a same day fix. "If you bring your computer in at another time it will still be a three day wait. All our customers are treated the same. You can't jump the queue..." "I'm not asking to jump the queue" I said, "I'm simply trying to establish whether there's any way I could keep the computer whilst it's queueing." "It doesn't matter when you bring your computer in, it will still be a 3 to 5 day wait..." He plainly hadn't listened to a word I'd said and I was obviously wasting my time trying to negotiate with him, so I found myself saying something that I don't often say in these situations... "Never mind."

So, anyway, I was sent away and told I'd receive a text when they were ready to see my computer, so I sat in a cafe, where the delightful Eastern European lady behind the counter engaged me in conversation about how curiously empty the cafe had been today: "usually we have queues right out the door..."

I received the promised text and returned to the Apple Store where my trust in humanity was restored by a lovely chap called Rico, who listened, sympathised, experimented and then told me he could get the computer fixed by tomorrow; "it would have been today, but lots of people are off sick. It's something that tends to happen when the weather starts to improve..." I can certainly cope with a couple of days without a computer. I've got pen and paper, after all... And an iPhone.

I went to the gym before lunch on my way back from town and ran a lot and swam a bit. I was going to walk home up the hill to Highgate, but I got too hungry!

I dived back into "Em" after lunch, and started hacking the first draft of the synopsis apart, cutting most of the last four pages because they seemed to take the piece in a new and somewhat rambling direction which felt unnecessary, even though large chunks of it were fabulous. There's a saying in this industry: "sometimes you gotta kill some of your darlings so that the rest of your loved ones can breath." In my experience they're far better killed off at an early stage, than by a producer on the last day of rehearsals!

I came into the City this evening to sit in on a rehearsal of an amateur choir. It was incredibly windy, and within about five minutes of exiting Moorgate tube, my eyes were full of grit and bits of plane tree!

The church that the choir (who were excellent) were rehearsing in, is right next to Postman's Park, which is one of London's hidden gems. Postman's Park is located on Little Britain (yes there is a road in London which shares its name with that irreverent TV comedy show starring my mate Matt.) It's what city dwellers might describe as a "pocket park;" no more than about an acre in size, with a beautifully manicured lime-green lawn protected by a number of ancient conker trees. What makes the park interesting - and a little surreal - however, is its wall commemorating acts of heroism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. These glorious enamelled tiles all feature lengthy inscriptions, which tell the tales of those who died attempting to save the lives of others... Perfect fodder for the Victorian era which placed a great emphasis on dying a "good death." The language used on the plaques is pompous, and really quite amusing to our 21st Century ears. In fact, one of the plaques is featured in my London Requiem and describes the death of a young Jewish lad in the East End who rescued his brother from the path of a tram. His final words were said to be; "mother I saved him but I could not save myself."

Another plaque is dedicated to "Sarah Smith, Pantomime Artiste, at the Princes Theatre" who "died of terrible injuries received when attempting, in her flammable dress, to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion. January 24th, 1863." A little bit more research reveals that Smith was actually a 17 year-old ballerina, that the accident happened live on stage during a performance, and that she managed to save the life of the dancer whose aid she rushed to. Brava Sarah!


The rest of the plaques follow a similar formula. Some of the the martyrs died rescuing children from icy ponds, some were struck by runaway trains. Many of the tales beggar belief!


I had no idea Postman's Park was so close to the Barbican, as I've always accessed it from St Paul's. It's amazing how London can be such a jigsaw; a single piece links up so many different locations, which hitherto seemed unrelated.

Crapple

I did a morning's work today on my new show, which has the working title, Em. I like my one-word titles - and am going for the record of the shortest ever musical title. I'm reliably informed by people on the internet that there are no one letter musical titles (although I'd happily be proved wrong by anyone reading this.) The jury is out as to whether we can include Jason Robert Brown's 13 as a two-letter title. I guess there's also Nine, but I've never seen that written in numerical form.

A title, I believe, should be as unpretentious as possible, and, at the same time, say as much about the show as it can. The story I'm telling is about a girl called Emily, whom everyone calls Em, so the title feels appropriate enough.

I had to go into town to visit the Apple Store in the afternoon. My computer is faltering. There's something wrong with the screen and customer services hadn't provided me with the greatest number of options to remedy the situation speedily. Sometimes I feel that Apple are too busy feeling you should be grateful for choosing them to be that fussed when something goes wrong. It took me the longest time to find a contact number. It obviously didn't help that I was searching for Mac makeup by mistake!

When I arrived in town, Nathan informed me that "backing up" my computer was a process which involved something called Time Machine, rather than the simple act of saving files individually onto my LaCie drive which I'd hitherto been doing. So I sat, first in Stock Pot over lunch, and then in Starbucks, backing up 241GB of previously un-backed up material. It took two hours. I felt like a little old man whom the world had passed by, and was particularly embarrassed to have to walk down the street holding the computer open everywhere I went.

The highlight of the day was sitting on the platform at Highgate station and one of the lovely staff members there making a point of coming up to congratulate me for being on BBC Breakfast on Sunday. "I don't want to embarrass you" he said, "but I did want to say well done for the award... I said to my fiend, "I know that person..."

I called in on Jeremy in the late afternoon to sign a copy of Brass, and discover that we've already sold approaching 200 copies of the CD, which I consider to be very good news.

I went from Pimlico to the Oxford Circus at 7.30pm. It turns out that getting your computer fixed by Mac involves a series of lotteries. When I turned up at the store this evening one of the pretty people who waft around in T-shirts informed me that I would need to join a lengthy queue, the purpose of which was to discover whether I'd be seen today or have to come back to queue another day. I pointed out that it seemed a bit "Russia c. 1982" to have to queue for such a nebulous purpose. He had a walkie-talkie: perhaps he could establish whether or not someone was likely to be served before they stood in such a long queue. "Oh, they don't tell us anything" he said, "would you like to talk to a manager?" I nodded and he trotted off. Whilst he was gone, lots of the other pretty people in T-shirts came over and asked me if I was okay, which I thought was a bit of an inflammatory question to be asked by someone powerless to do anything but waft. Ten minutes later the original wafter returned and said his manager would be over in "like ten minutes." Having spent an hour on the phone to Apple in the early afternoon and then more time speaking to several of their "approved suppliers" none of which could help, I'd officially run out of patience, so took my phone out, started filming and asked the pretty boy to repeat what he'd just said. The camera coming out was like a red rag to a bull and he immediately scuttled off to tell what turned out to be an off-duty manager that a disgruntled customer was doing the unthinkable and filming inside an Apple Temple!

The off-duty manager was really heavy-handed and threatening, although before laying into me he did make it clear that he was off duty, which I took to mean I needed to feel incredibly grateful to him for telling me off in his spare time. He told me, very aggressively, that if I didn't delete the film I'd just made, he was well within his rights, by Apple law, to refuse to cooperate with me. I asked him to show me evidence that filming was illegal in the store. He told me he didn't need to. It was horribly unpleasant, but it did the trick, because a manager, who DID understand customer service was dispatched immediately to talk to me. He kept things pleasant and chatty and, more crucially, listened to me.

I made a point that the distribution of staff in the store seemed all wrong. There aren't enough workers there to meet the demand of customers who need their computers and phones repaired and way too many pretty people in T-shirts with no discernible skills, or more accurately, no discernible ability to help. "There's staff members here who just seem to stand there being" I said. He quite rightly immediately tried to justify their presence. I pointed over the balcony at a group of five staff members in a circle doing nothing but chatting to one another. He took my point, got very embarrassed and immediately dispatched someone else to tell them off.


So the gist of my chat with the nicer manager was that booking an appointment with a Mac engineer is a lottery which can't happen for at least six days. My only option for a fast turnaround is to come back into the shop at 10am tomorrow and hope that not too many customers are in the store to take advantage of a "walk-up" appointment system. They won't stay the world's number one computer provider for long with repairs procedures which are based on lotteries of this nature!

Teddy

I started working on the synopsis of my new musical today, in amongst writing half a tonne of emails to people who'd kindly got in touch to say that they'd seen me on the news yesterday morning. I'm genuinely shocked to discover that anyone was awake at 9am on a Sunday, but it's great to know that so many people were watching.

This afternoon, after going to the gym, I took myself down to South Kensington to meet Uncle Bill and her son, Jago at the National History Museum, which I realised I'd not stepped foot in since my extreme childhood. The brontosaurus skeleton which snakes its way through the main hall is as iconic and impressive as it ever was. It seems to me a great shame that it's destined to be replaced by a giant whale. That said, I have no concept of the actual size of a blue whale, so perhaps it will open my eyes to something extraordinary.

I was a little perturbed to find policemen holding guns standing on the street opposite the museum. Great big modern black rifles and little hand guns strapped to their thighs like something out of an action movie. Police carrying guns is not normal in the UK, or at least it wasn't until relatively recently, and I still find it a somewhat troubling sight.

We walked with Jago from the museum to Hyde Park, where we visited the Lady Diana Memorial Fountain. It was horrible and grey - the weather and the fountain, really - but little Jago changed into his shorts dipped his feet in the water and had a fabulous time watching feathers and sticks being carried in circles by the fast-flowing water.

A man in high-viz was there to ensure that no-one actually paddled in the fountain, despite that being the architect's very vision for the monument when he designed it. Too many people were apparently slipping on the concrete, so a ludicrous health and safety law was invoked and hundreds and thousands of pounds of tax payers money has subsequently been ploughed into staffing the fountain. Yawn...

One of the trees in the complex was shedding a substance like cotton wool, which, when the wind got up, was blowing around in the air like a snow storm. Frankly, at one stage it got so chilly that I began to wonder whether we were experiencing an actual blizzard!

We had noodles for tea, and then I took the tube to Southwark, crammed like a layered sardine into the carriage. The rush hour in London is brutal.

Still, I got to walk down Union Street to Borough this evening, which is a surprisingly charming walk in a somewhat eccentric part of town, filled with Victorian warehouses and curious little red brick buildings with archways leading to courtyards stuffed with cafes, junk shops and 1950s placards. It's like stepping back in time.

Speaking of which, this evening we saw the show Teddy by Dougal Irvine and Tristan Bernays at the Southwark Playhouse. It was produced by our mate Jim Zalles, known to my Mum as Christmas Jim on account of his having come to Thaxted for Christmas about five years ago.

Folks, it's a tremendous show! Genuinely. Get yourselves down to the Playhouse to see it before it sells out. The piece, set on the Walworth Road and scored for two actors and a rock 'n rock band, is about the edgy underground Teddy Boy culture in London in the late 1950s. The two actors play a variety of roles as seen through the eyes of a pair of teenagers, whose love of the American rock star Johnnie Valentine turns them into Bonnie and Clyde figures, running riot amongst the bomb-damaged buildings and deprivation of the post-war capital. Both actors are extraordinarily powerful. Joseph Prowen is sexy and charismatic and stalks the stage like Elvis on acid whilst Jennifer Kirby fizzles and pops like a fire cracker in his tall-quiffed shadow. The script could have been written by a Cockney Alan Ginsberg.

The rock band, playing Dougal's energetic and hugely authentic-sounding songs, are a four-piece of brilliant oddballs who play the music from memory and inject large doses of Viagra into the on-stage performances. Everything just works.

The show ends and the stage immediately becomes a pop-up bar. The band continues to play and the audience, many of whom are dressed in 50s clobber, start to dance. If you like burlesque, 50s underground culture or rock 'n roll, book your ticket, dress up, and you'll have a ball!

BBC breakfast

I got up with the lark this morning and made astonishingly good progress to the BBC in Salford. It was quite a pleasure to be driving along the M6 so early on a Sunday with not another car in sight and the sun glinting in the wing mirror.

I arrived at Salford Quays, ludicrously early, to find Media City bathed in yellow sunlight but utterly silent and looking like something from 28 Weeks Later. I wondered across the bridge to the Lowry in the vain hope that I might find some kind of coffee shop open, but, as you might expect on a Sunday morning in the sticks, all was still but for one or two besuited security guards and a man with one of those floor polishers with the giant revolving discs of fabric. So I sat myself down on a marble bench and watched the world going by. Or would have done, if the world weren't asleep!

The interview went incredibly well. I have no idea who the two presenters were, but they were very friendly. I talked about the show's story whilst young Ben talked about playing Alf, mentioning in passing how difficult life would have been for a gay First World War soldier, which triggered a rather horrific tweet: "BBC breakfast is talking about the war! Not the D Day anniversary (yesterday) but about poofs in WW1. Utter utter c**ts as per usual."

Who said that homophobia was dead?! Mind you, you actually have to feel sorry for a bloke like that... The next tweet down the line from him went as follows:

"First halal meat now they want to put vitamin D in my bread.
How much longer are we going to bend over for #Muslim ragheads?"

And I thought I was an angry man!

Andrew Nance, the other member of the Brass cast on the sofa with us, was asked a rather tricky question about cuts in the arts which threw him temporarily, but he pulled it back like a true pro. We had some lovely messages from strangers and friends afterwards, and I'm told there was even a little spike in CD sales, so everyone's a winner... Except our homophobic friend with the chip on his shoulder. He'll never win in life...

If you still want to buy your copy of the album, go to www.nymt.org.uk

We had breakfast afterwards at a Harvester in Salford Quay, and I got to chat to Ben's adorable Mum, who very kindly paid for the food. I'm not sure I thanked her... So if you're reading this... Thank you!

I drove home, fighting the will to fall asleep at the wheel. It's a long old drive from Manchester to London. I played music as I drove, working my way through all the songs in my iPod which began with W and Y. This process provided me with a wildly eclectic selection of music including Vaughan Williams, Eurovision, Lo-Fang, Hurts, ABBA, Kelly Clarkson, Roy Harper and PJ Harvey. Imagine what it must feel like to live in my iPod!

I got back to London and immediately jumped in the car again, this time with Nathan, Abbie and Ian. Our original plan was to head off to the Dunstable Downs for an impromptu picnic, but as we hit the M1, we suddenly realised it would be nicer to go to Thaxted and picnic in my parents garden, so that we could take Abbie to the church she's always wanted to visit just outside Great Sampford where many of the windows and doors are marked with eerie 17th century carved symbols to ward off witches. It's an astonishing and unnerving sight. This area was the stomping ground of the witch finder general, so these symbols actually tell a story of mass hysteria, which makes them rather tragic in my view.

We walked around the fields behind Thaxted as the setting sun melted into the straw fields. Everyone's hay fever was triggered, Nathan's particularly, but I got incredibly sniffy as we drove home.

The highlight of the day was almost certainly leaping around underneath the windmill, taking silly photographs with lens flares, silhouettes and sunsets until it got dimpsy. A long and perfect day.