Cabin fever

I noticed earlier that Josh Widdicombe is currently doing publicity for his new sit com, which follows in a long line of slightly arch TV comedies featuring well-known comedians play heightened versions of themselves. Miranda, Simon Anstell, and the cast of Catastrophe, have all used their own names as the basis for fictional characters. It sits a little uncomfortably with me if I'm honest. It's one thing to tell a life story but quite something else to turn yourself into a character and place yourself in a variety of bizarre and ludicrous fictional situations. I have to ask myself what the purpose of doing this actually is? It's almost as though these comedians are acknowledging that they can't act for toffee and therefore that, in order to perform well, they need to "just be themselves". Except they're not being themselves are they? So why not just invent a character name and give acting a bash? I mean, Miranda always plays Miranda... Even when her character isn't called Miranda!

I have cabin fever again tonight, having sat, yet again, for twelve hours under a pair of headphones at the kitchen table. There's not much else to say, other than that I'm rather enjoying Adele's new song, Hello, which I see is at number one in every country in the world. That's pretty good going I'd say!

Requiem

There's not a lot to say about today. I got up. I had a bath. I ate some Shreddies. I sat at the kitchen table and worked hard all day. I made posh cheese on toast for lunch. As a little teaser, I've been working on a song about roller skating! Let your imaginations soar! (I certainly had to!)

Dear Jeremy from the NYMT has been leaving cryptic and tantalising messages on the Brass Facebook group all day about, one assumes, the possibility of more activity on the show front in 2016. The former cast are going wild trying to work out the meaning of what's been said, joining up the dots and contacting me in the hope that I'll spill the beans despite my not having any beans to spill! It would certainly be lovely to see the show on stage again in 2016.

I'm racking my brains to think of something else to say other than that I happened upon the song "Requiem" by the London Boys today. It has a nasty habit of cropping up on You Tube when you do a search for the London Requiem, and I've tended to avoid it... until today. It turns out the song's a right old blast from the past. Check it out on the link below if you're aged from about 38 to 44!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uogfIXLq6io

The London Boys were a German (and male) version of Mel and Kim. Ethnically non-descript, they wore wide-brimmed hats and multi-coloured jump suits and had all the same, slightly louche moves. I think they used to specialise in one-handed Arab springs and crazy acrobatics. Mel and Kim didn't do that. Anyway after seeing the video for Requiem, curiosity got the better of me and I had a little read about them on Wikipedia. It turns out they were both killed in the same car accident, somewhere in the Austrian Alps. The tragedy also killed one of the duo's wives and left their child an orphan. Hideous business.

Well that's a downer, isn't it?

Quick joke.

Q - What do you call a poodle with no legs?

A - A sponge.

Soggy

It's 11pm and I'm frying some potatoes for tea. Anyone confused by the fact that we tend to get up at 9am most mornings will suddenly realise that our hours are completely cock-a-hoop! We finish work at 10pm these days. It's a bit insane.

It's not all work. We had a pleasant little sojourn in the rain with our lovely new Italian friend whom we met at the Prix Italia. She was working as a translator on the awards and we were placed in her care for the day. She looked after us fabulously well, so we thought we should repay the favour when we heard she was passing through London.

It turns out she's the biggest Queen fan in Italy, so was off to a massive fan convention at Pontins in Southport. It sounds like they're going to have an amazing time. What a wonderful experience to share your love of a band with a whole group of people who feel the same way. I've hitherto thought the idea of these gatherings was at best eccentric and geeky and at worst, a touch tragic, but actually, the more I think about it, the more I think it would be a lot of fun. There are quizzes, games and dancing with like-minded people... I mean, what's not to like?

Anyway, we thought we'd take her for a lovely stroll on Hampstead Heath, stand on Parliament Hill and look down at the city lights twinkling in the Autumn air. Sadly it rained like I've not known it rain before, so we got in the car and decided to drive her around the perimeter of the Heath instead, instantly getting caught up in a sensationally awful traffic jam. We limped our way through Gospel Oak and South End Green, but the poor girl couldn't see anything out of the misted-over windows and whenever she unwound them, she got freezing cold and horribly wet. All in all it was a fairly miserable experience! I swear London is broken!

We tried to get out of the car twice in the hope that our friend might be able to get a little sense of how lovely the Heath is. The first time, we were driven back by sheeting rain, the second time my foot and ankle instantly vanished into a muddy puddle. This part of North London is so incredibly beautiful but really all our friend saw tonight was condensation and red tail lights! Boo!

The rest of the day has found me under headphones, developing my tinnitus and attempting to prep music documents for our workshop week which starts on Monday. I got awfully behind, and then made up a lot of time. The one thing Nathan and I are brilliant at is meeting deadlines!

Power walking

I met an old, very dear friend today for a power walk on Hampstead Heath. Gruelling schedules for us both meant we only had an hour to hang out, so we met at Kentish Town and powered up to the top of Parliament Hill and back down via the men's pond. We even managed a quick cuppa in the cafe. It just shows what you can achieve in an hour if you put your mind to it.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather. It rained all morning, and all evening, but for that hour, the skies cleared, the sun burst through the clouds and the rain on all the trees shimmered like rhinestones.

We talked as fast as we walked, catching up on something like twenty years of memories. She looked well. My beard, I felt, rather self-consciously, must have looked very grey to her. She told me to relax. Her hair was sponsored by Pantene: Same colour as Davina McCall, apparently. My shoes squeaked. I felt a bit odd about that as well. Funny the things that suddenly matter when you haven't seen someone for so long.

We're exact astrological twins. We were both born on August 8th, 1974, so neither of us get to whinge about getting old. We're in it together. She has two children and lives in Wellingborough. She's posh. Her son's friends tell him it's not cool to be posh in Wellingborough. Fortunately she was once spotted shopping in Aldi, which means she's not posh after all.

We talked about the music school in Northamptonshire. We were in the same choir and she told me about a lot of people I hadn't thought about in an age. There was one group of lads at the music school who were older than us. It always seemed to me that they held the world in the palm of their hands. They were startlingly cool. Brilliantly musical. The kind of lads we all assumed would just become fabulous. They'd be leading jazz musicians, or play in rock bands, or become prime ministers.

..It turns out that life was a little cruel to them all and they struggled immensely.

We talked a lot about what it means to come from Northamptonshire, with its slightly inward-looking mentality. I hear so much talk about equality these days, usually in relation to ethnic minorities, but it struck me today, after our little chat, that the most disadvantaged people in this country, aren't necessary the ones who live in sink estates in London... Actually, it's the kids who live in small towns miles away from opportunity, and more crucially, miles away from aspiration. If you live on a London Estate, there's probably a theatre within a mile. There are fancy houses you can look at and say "one day." There are clubs, and initiatives.

If you come from Northamptonshire and you're white, people will assume you're middle class. The accent there isn't easily identifiable so society will assume you're rich. And yet the nearest theatre to where I grew up was 20 miles away. The nearest cinema was five miles away. If it weren't for the music school I would have lived in a cultural vacuum.

If a kid from Northants does well at school, he or she may well get into a university, but straight away (and this definitely happened to me) will find themselves potentially hugely intimidated by what Alison today described as "London confidence." The kids from the cities always seemed to know more about everything. They'd been there, done that, tried that, had that. Their godparents were people like David Jason. Their parents were academics, painters, actors... They talked in slang about things like drugs. They oozed confidence.

The ones who'd been to public schools were even more confident, and even the ones who'd come from London estates had street smarts, which gave them a certain intimidating je ne sais quoi. It would have been extremely easy for me to have gone under and, sadly, it seems that many of my Northamptonshire contemporaries, people far more talented than me, were swallowed up by the system and spat out.

So, actually, if you're looking for people to try to encourage in life, perhaps it's worth occasionally looking to little towns and villages across the country which are sometimes more difficult to escape than any skin colour, poverty-stricken background, gender or sexuality.

Epic fail

Another epic day, which started first thing with a visit to the osteopath. It's been a while since I was last there, and in that time I've endured a fair amount of stress which has led to some serious back issues. The whole of my mid spine had gone into lock down and made a hell of a racket when subjected to some "cavitation" which I prefer to describe as a load of weirdly "popping and clicking."

The procedure had a very odd effect on me. As I walked away from the clinic I got a bit tearful and then, when I went into a local Starbucks, I started laughing hysterically. I asked the woman behind the counter if tea came in a pot and the look she gave me was so odd that it triggered uncontrollable giggles.

I worked in Borough for a few hours before heading to Camden Town to meet Nathan for lunch. I decided to go for a quick pee in the public loos opposite the station, which turned out to be a fairly bad decision. I was feeling quite jolly, so was singing merrily as I skipped down the steps into the loo. Unfortunately, I underestimated the number of steps and fell down the last two, which caused me to lose my balance and land in an ungainly heap about a metre shy of the urinals! Obviously I found the epic fail hysterically funny but the rather dodgy-looking men hanging about in the loo were not amused!

We had a final set of auditions for our mystery project this afternoon at Cecil Sharp House. They went well. I think we all feel very chuffed. I love being in that building. It has such an extraordinary atmosphere. The folk song library in there is my favourite spot to hang out. They have books and books of manuscripts, all edited and compiled by those amazing blokes on bicycles like Butterworth, Sharp and Grainger who toured the country in the early 20th century, transcribing regional folk songs which would otherwise have disappeared for ever. They're my great heroes and it's such a privilege to rifle through their work. Two of the key melodies from A Symphony For Yorkshire were discovered in this process.

From Camden, we headed West to Turnham Green to the hallowed corridors of the Arts Educational School, where a group of recent graduates from the drama school were kind enough to read through the latest draft of our script so that we could hear it in the mouths of actors. It was a hugely worthwhile experience, particularly when, at the end of everything, we were able to get their feedback and find out what they they liked and what they weren't perhaps so sure about. We've not nailed the ending yet. That's for certain. But everything else feels in pretty good shape.

We went to the pub for a debrief after the reading and discussed what we're all going to be doing next week which is a sort of workshop week for the project which we're all getting very excited about. There is, however, a frightening amount of stuff to do between now and then. The difference is, I no longer think it's impossible!

Conveyor belt

We had the lovely pianist, Katharine up in our loft again this morning. That sounds rude doesn't it? I assure you that we were merely working our way through a huge amount of musical material. It was like a production line. I sat to Katharine's right, feeding manuscripts onto the piano's music stand, she played the first few bars, and if it was no good, we'd move onto the next piece... We imagined a little conveyor belt dropping the music into a mini-furnace if it wasn't of a high enough standard. Remember the conveyor belt on the Generation Game? When you look back on the rubbish little things that used to troll along between those curtains, you wonder how on earth we've reached an age where game show contestants can win a million pounds... "A Kenwood Chef... A teas-maid... Crystal champagne glasses... A cuddly toy..." 

I think I'm right in saying that rules were introduced in the seventies and eighties to cap the sorts of prizes people could win on British TV game shows. "Let's have a look at what you could have won!" A Blankety Blank cheque book and pen, that's what!

I got immense cabin fever this evening and took myself down to Kentish Town for a swim in the soon-to-be-dismantled pool at the gym. The mists were swirling rather violently. In fact, I could see so little that I had to unwind all the windows and the fog actually started creeping into the car. I kept seeing long feathery fingers drifting past my face. It was weird. Of course the mist was nothing like as bad down the hill. The weather in Highgate always seems to be a little more extreme than it is in the rest of the city.

Driving down Southwood Lane was like being in a scene from Close Encounters. Periodically a set of headlights from a car heading in the opposite direction would turn a pedestrian into a strangely-shaped silhouette surrounded by fuzzy white halo. Highgate Village looked a little "Jack The Ripper" and the Heath was bathed in the most bizarre blueish light.

I go to bed tonight thinking, for the first time in an age, that things might be going to be okay. We had a good chat about our contracts. We surged forward with the script. I did some good arranging in the evening, and I think I might actually manage a good night's sleep tonight, although, at 10.30pm, we've only just sat down to eat our tea, so I might have a bit of a full stomach when my head hits the pillow.

Swirling mists

It's been an epically long day. We did at least have a lie-in, which was a proper treat. We also had breakfast in bed whilst watching last night's Strictly Come Dancing on an iPad with a bowl of cornflakes on our laps.

From noon today, until midnight, we sat at the kitchen table working on the script for the secret project. It's been utterly gruelling and not at all how I'd like to have spent my Sunday, but needs must. I was desperate to go outside all day. A really magical light was pouring through the window. The sun was defiantly shining but at the same time the mist appeared to be really thick and shining like sheets of silver behind the trees. It was most unusual, like something from an episode of Robin of Sherwood. I swear I could hear Clannad music! I was hoping Herne the Hunter would rise out from behind next door's bicycle shed.

We went for a late night walk through Queen's Wood, the little piece of Highgate which looks like Narnia, with its Victorian lampposts and curiously gnarled trees. The mist was extraordinary and wrapped itself around us like a million tiny feathers. It smelt like chlorine and made everything sound muffled and muted. A little like the acoustics you get on a snowy day. I bloody love autumn!

We came home from our walk and watched the results show from Strictly, horrified once again to see Jamelia being saved in the dance off. My only consolation is that every time she ends up in the bottom two, she receives the message more loudly that no one out there likes her very much, and after a while that's got to start grinding you down. As she said today in her faltering little "pity me" voice; "I've come to the conclusion that the public don't like me..." That's 'cus you're an unrepentant homophobe.

Don't worry, love, when the judges finally see sense and vote your sorry little tush out of the competition, you can go back to your coven of witches on the Loose Women panel and blame the gays for your downfall.