The worst quiz in the world!

We did a morning's work and then drove up to Thaxted, where we spent the afternoon drinking tea and eating cake. It was a chocolate cake. My Mum was sporting a burn on her neck. How did she burn her neck, I hear you ask? Answer: by "listening" to the cake as she took it out of the oven to see if it was baked... How else?

We went to a quiz this evening with Helen. Our team brought the average age of the room down by about fifty percent. Looking behind us was like witnessing something from the film Cocoon. There was more than a whiff of pear drops and lavender soap hanging in the air.

It was, without question, the most stressful quiz I've ever been to! We weren't allowed to sit around tables, and were told instead to sit in rows. Half of our team was ushered to the row in front.

The quiz took place on an overhead projector. Every round was a visual round, which was actually a lot of fun, but as the quiz went on, and the time ticked by, it got faster and faster, and, as a result, more and more confusing. 

The quiz master was a woman with a stentorian voice who was being assisted by her husband and parents. As the quiz developed, her face got redder and redder, and she kept ringing an incredibly loud hand bell to get the attention of the room. She was obsessed with the notion of us all "having fun." Before the quiz started, she came up to me and said, "I understand you're a professional quiz team? Well you're not to be too clever today. You're to have fun instead." We're not a professional team. Not in the slightest. I have no idea what gave her that impression. As the photographs flashed past on the screen, at ever-increasing speed, she'd say, "we're going faster, because it's fun." We could smell the fear in the room. Several old people wet themselves and we could hear the sounds of false teeth falling out and replacement hips clicking.

I placed a bet that the quiz master would have a total melt down by 8.45pm, and sure enough, right on the button, she started ringing her bell like a loon, and shouting aggressively, "a lot of people seem to not be understanding rules of this quiz, so it's CLEARLY my fault."

She kept shouting at her "mummy" who was staggering around the room collecting papers and seemingly getting more and more squiffy. "Come on, Mummy. You're ahead of yourself, Mummy... These people need to have FUN, Mummy!"

Daddy didn't seem to know what was going on, either, and kept standing in front of the light of the overhead projector, casting a black shadow which covered the entire screen, whilst shouting "I can't see... it's too bright."

When she gave us the answers, a considerable number were wrong. She mistakenly told us, for example, that the most recent Year of the Dragon had been 2016 (rather than 2012, which was the correct answer.) When I piped up to let her know, she said "oh, it doesn't matter, it's all fun." "Will we get the point?" I asked. "No," she said, smiling sweetly. Fun, fun, fun...

Whilst giving the answers, she kept saying, in a rather chipper voice, "now put your hands up if you got that right..." But every time Nathan put his hand up, she'd say, "oh YOU again. You're just a show off!"

Helen turned to me at one point and whispered, "this is fraught - my nerves are all a-jangle."

We won. The room booed because the rumour had gone around that we were a professional team. We gave our prizes (or what Helen hysterically described as "presents") to the losing team, who'd sat behind us, copied all our answers, but somehow managed to score more than 100 points fewer than us. At every opportunity they'd moan, point at us, and say, "they've got eight on their team..." We weren't breaking any rules. We were allowed to have teams of eight!

Despite all this, and probably because of it, I laughed almost continually through the evening. Despite the fact that being told to have fun is one of the most stressful things in the world, I had the most fabulous time.

A mushy wet mess

I was that bloke today. You know the one: He drifts and ambles along the street, not really knowing what he's doing, typing into his mobile phone, being utterly indecisive. I've felt clumsy and utterly disengaged from the world. I could hear people around me sighing and huffing when I got in their way. I went off a curb at one point, much to the great amusement of a passing stranger. Perhaps there was something in the air. The lady in Costa gave me a jug with no milk in it. When I took it back to the counter, she laughed like a maniac.

I went to the Royal Court Theatre today and was immediately bombarded by a flood of memories. I'm ashamed that say that the last time I saw something in that particular theatre - the jewel in the crown of new writing - was 15 years ago, on September 11th, 2001. It was the evening of 911, and we thought the world was coming to an end. There was a line in the play that night where someone said "I don't know why we don't just get a bomb and blow them all up" - or words to that effect. There was an audible gasp from the audience. Little did we know then how the ripples of that particular event would reverberate through history...

My first job was working as an usher at the Royal Court Theatre. I worked there in 1996 for a few months before the theatre closed down for refurbishment and we moved to a temporary home in the West End at the New Ambassadors Theatre, where I worked for another three years. I stood in the auditorium today looking at the back wall. The last time I'd seen that wall was in a production of a play called The Lights, which was the last play they performed in the theatre before it closed down in 1996. Ian Rickson directed, and they turned the theatre upside down and inside out for the show. The audience sat on the stage and all the action took place in the stalls of the theatre, where the seating had been removed. As a result of all of this, front of house was back stage and the audiences were forced to enter the auditorium via the stage door. As a result, we got to know the actors on that show really well. Emily Mortimer was in the cast. She was so charming. There was a sequence in the play where the actors went to the back wall with sledge hammers and genuinely knocked great big holes in it. I don't know how they got away with that particular coup de theatre from a health and safety perspective. Different times. One day I'll write about the "installation" out on Sloane Square which the ushers of the theatre oversaw for a bit of extra cash. The installation involved a huge sandpit, a tonne of feathers and a tidal wave of water which smashed out of the paddling pool, drenching the audience in water. At that point someone screamed, "there's live wires everywhere. Run!!" And with that, the entire audience ran for their lives, leaving a mushy wet mess of sand, polythene and chicken feathers. That's art with a capital F.

I was at the theatre today to discuss Sir Arnold Wesker's "life celebration" which happens there on Sunday.

I came into town and had lunch with Nathan. I could barely string a decent sentence together. He asked if I had a brain tumour.

Young Harry met us, just as we finished eating, so we walked into Soho and had a second lunch. Well, I ate a pudding and had a lovely cup of tea. It was genuinely great to see Harry. He's conducting a concert version of Brass in Birmingham in February, so if you're a Midlander and didn't make it down to the show this summer, I urge you to go and see it. It ought to be a stupendous night.

I went to the gym very late tonight after learning that it closes these days at 11pm. It felt very peculiar to be there so late at night. There's a very different breed of people who hang out there at that time. The experience gave me a whole new lease of life, and I came home and took myself into the loft where I wrote music for another hour whilst Nathan knitted a hat shaped like a pumpkin.

Time flies

I spent all of the morning sweating over an application for the Arts Council. I have literally crossed every t and dotted every i. If this one fails I'm going to change my name to Benjamina Ng and sign my name with a bloody stump!

The afternoon was spent writing lyrics and creating musical material for Em. At the moment I'm just trying to get stuff down on the page. I can slowly develop what I've written over the course of however long it takes. I would like some structure in my days, however. The joy about my application to the Arts Council is that it would pay me enough money to carve out a (very) humble living into next year. I could do with that right now! I need to take the pressure off myself. Worrying about money is excessively damaging to creativity.

I found out late tonight that today marks the 7th anniversary of a friend of mine's death. I used to hear older people saying that they didn't know where the time went and always assumed they were being over dramatic, but where I look back on that time and see a very different person, doing very different things with his life, I don't quite understand how it can have been seven years ago. I was at Julian's recording studio when the news came. We were working on the soundtrack to Watford Gap: The Musical. The news was so shocking that I managed to get lost on my way to Matt's house, where we all gathered together to make sense of things.

This evening we made more biscuits and I'm proud to say that they didn't burn. They tasted good too. Short. Crunchy. We decorated them with lemon icing, dried cherries and chocolate. Delicious! Good old Bake Off!

Failure!

I went to the chemist today to buy some cold and flu remedy. The lovely Scottish woman who works behind the counter has been there for yonks and I know her well enough to always smile in the street. I explained that I had a nasty cold and wanted it to go away and asked what she recommended. She looked at me a little suspiciously: "nothing's going to make it go away..." "Oh I know," I said, "I'd just like to mask the symptoms a bit so I can get on with the rest of my day without feeling pathetic..." "Are you taking any other medication?" She asked, eyes narrowing. "No." "But you came in here recently. What did you come in for?" "I don't remember. It won't have been drugs... Perhaps it was talc or deodorant... I'm afraid I can't remember." She looked at me, unconvinced, and I instantly felt like an addict. In retrospect, I now remember that the last thing I bought there was Gaviscon, and before that, a nit comb to comb my moustache. I'm hardly an over-the-counter flu-remedy junkie! This must be what it feels like to live in a small town! 

I found out the somewhat unwelcome news this afternoon that I'd been turned down for a key grant on account of my not passing the eligibility test. I discovered the information mercifully early, less than a week after putting the application in, which means I can remedy the problems and immediately reapply. I'm very relieved that I checked my emails because the communication telling me to go online to check the status of my application was so innocuous and informal, that I could very easily have waited two months before contacting the funding body to find out how I'd done. Small mercies and all that...

So tomorrow, cold or no cold, I'll have to hit that particular ground running. I have to keep telling myself that public funding is a game we all have to play. Decisions are rarely based on perception of talent and usually to do with making sure the right boxes are ticked with the preordained appropriate pen pressure. Even the process of ticking the box will often feel counter-intuitive, but art is so unquantifiable you sometimes have to merely tick the box which is closest to the truth. Hence why I always tick "white other" for my ethnicity! The only trouble is that you sometimes find out the hard way that you're writing with the wrong ink... Today, for example, I had to make the choice between sending my musical theatre application in the direction of the music or the theatre team. I picked music, but a bit of digging with a few contacts ascertained that I'd made the wrong decision. Musical Theatre is more favourably looked upon by the theatre team. Who knew?

Actually, I should have known. There's not a genre of conventional music from pop to grime to folk to modern classical music which doesn't consider musical theatre to be an (exceedingly wealthy) artistically poorer cousin. This is only slightly better than the situation with theatre exponents, who also see musical theatre as a cliche-ridden, somewhat cheesy, impoverished art form. My role in life is to change all that!

The light on the Heath

Today started, rather surreally, in the bath, listening to the live stream of an early morning gig by goth rockers, Placebo. Plainly, I wouldn't normally kick things off with indie rock, but Fiona plays and tours with the band and sent an early doors text to say she was going to be on the radio, so I tuned in. I was rather pleased that I had. They're a really tight band, they make an incredibly exciting sound and front man, Brian Molko was making some wonderfully sardonic quips. It was just so bizarre to be listening to them with my bowl of Frosted Shreddies. And PS - Frosted Shreddies are minging. We bought them by mistake and it's like eating Stevia-coated cardboard. They have the after taste of Diet Coke. Thank God we're nearly through them!

I've been slowly coming down with a cold all day. I woke up sneezing, assuming I had some sort of bizarre Autumnal hay fever and was perversely quite relieved when I started to get a sore throat, dry lips and a hot forehead!

I don't feel I've achieved a great deal. I worked on Em, I practised the piano, I went to the gym, I did a shed load of admin relating to an agent I'm about to sign with...

Fiona met us in the early evening, and we had a somewhat magical stroll across the Heath. Standing at the top of Parliament Hill as the sun set was a proper treat. We took photographs with the mirrored back of Fiona's iPhone reflecting the sun and generating massive flares across the camera lens. The glass buildings of Canary Wharf on the horizon were glowing, first orange, then red, and then a sort of pinky-mauve. At one point we joked that they looked as though they were on fire. I took a picture to send to Brother Edward to see if the buildings looked as luminous in close-up. He was in the middle of a Spanish lesson at the time, but agreed that the photograph had made the buildings look rather beautiful.

We walked down to the toy boating lake where they've been doing extensive landscaping over the past year to create a set of ponds which wouldn't cause a catastrophic flood should an abnormal amount of rain fall on the Heath in a short period of time, as happened in 1975, when the ponds turned inside out and flooded scores of neighbouring houses so badly that people actually drowned in their basements!

What they've done is really very attractive. They've made one of the ponds a great deal larger, and created an island with trees on it which used to be by the side of the pond. It's going to be a wonderful safe haven for wildlife.

We had a lovely tea at the Turkish restaurant in South End Green. There was much hellim (which is the Turkish equivalent of halloumi) and borek, which, in Turkey, has an unpronounceable name, with far too many letters in it!

New writer's platform

I've been in Victoria all day today, rehearsing, and then performing, the National Youth Music Theatre new writer's cabaret, which took place at St James' Theatre. It was such a wonderful event. I am so grateful that the lens is finally being turned on British musical theatre writing, and tonight's concert featured new music from both sides of the Atlantic, including four songs by Jason Robert Brown, who was present in the audience - much to the great excitement of the performers. 

Hearing songs by living American and British writers on the same bill was fascinating. I'm very pleased to report that the Brits held their own. I'm pretty sure, however, that the American composers will all be seventy times wealthier than the Brits... but that's another story, and it's too late to get into that!

The evening was a total sell out. It was literally standing room only. I brought Matt with me, and we sat on the front row.

The musical line-up for the evening was strings, piano, drums, bass and guitar, and all of the composers scored for different combinations of those instrumentalists. I think I was the most decadent with my song, Em, which used pretty much all the players. It's quite a rock number, which seemed to surprise people. Ben Mabberley performed it stunningly well - singing the high notes exquisitely well. And boy are they high notes!

Laura sang my other song, Warwickshire, which was scored for slightly smaller forces. It seemed to go down incredibly well. The woman sitting next to me, who didn't know me from Adam, suddenly burst into tears about half way through. Laura herself squeezed out a little tear right at the end... so beautifully timed.

I enjoyed every song in the line-up, but particular kudos has to go to Maltby and Donnelly for their new song about Victorian algorithmic pioneer, Ada Lovelace, which charged through the venue like a glorious piece of Steam Punk, and Dougal Irvine's thrusting songs from In Touch.

All in all, a wonderful night. We came home and watched Strictly on catch up, and was incredibly saddened by Anastacia revealing that she'd torn the inner scar tissue from her mastectomy. The poor woman looked devastated. Breast cancer is a big thing in my family, and I hate to think of anyone being reminded of the pain of their experience in that manner.

Humpty

I walked past a woman today who had ankles like pillows. I can't imagine how that can have happened. She wasn't particularly large anywhere else. I was genuinely intrigued. They were gleaming white like Tippex, stuffed into a pair of socks, and they wobbled as she walked like a blancmange. There's not a great deal more to say on the subject, other than that I hope she's managed to make use of them in some way. She seemed to be walking unaided. If she tops and tails with her husband in bed, perhaps he won't need a pillow of his own...

I came into central London to meet Nathan for lunch and visit the Molton Brown store. I found a little tester bottle of their "Tobacco Absolute" shower gel at the gym last week and thought I'd try it out for a laugh. I very much like the smell, and have decided to buy myself a large bottle. So I went into town for the Molton Brown experience which is incredibly chi-chi. There are little sinks in the middle of the shop where you can wash your hands and try out the different hand washes. When you go to the counter you're asked if you'd like to be on their "guest list" which simply means, "are you okay with us bombarding you with pointless emails?" I should have known not to go into town on a Saturday afternoon, however. The pace of the tourists wafting about is insanely slow. Huge crowds of people shuffle along like they've got nowhere to go, and just want to stand in enormous crowds of people getting in the way of everyone with a place to be. It's horrible. Never again!

It's suddenly very Autumnal. I'm pretty sure it feels more Autumnal now than it did this time last year. The evenings feel cold, and this morning, after getting out of the bath, I felt a bit chilly. I rarely feel chilly. Maybe it's because we had a big, last-ditched blast of summer in September. Perhaps the weathermen are right when they say there's going to be 100 days of snow this winter, with temperatures plummeting from November onwards. It's something to do with our dysfunctional jet stream, apparently. Last year similar predictions were made but there was some sort of "lag" which gave us a reprieve. No such luck, we're told, this year, but who can trust a weather man? I love cold weather, though. I love a proper winter. It gets rid of bugs which have no place to be here, kills diseases and means I get to wear a winter coat without over heating. I spend much of my life wondering how to stop myself from overheating!The year I made the Tyne and Wear Metro film we had the coldest snap, certainly in my lifetime. I think it went down to minus 17 in Newcastle where I was. It was so cold, I was having to continually take myself into shops for a respite. And yet all the Geordies were out without coats and wearing their dangerous high heels on the hilly streets at night. The hot water system broke down in the Travelodge I was staying in. That was no joke, let me tell you! It seems like forever ago. I think it was 2010.

We're enjoying watching Strictly this year. I'm particularly impressed by this year's outfits which seem to move rather well. Obviously I shall look forward to Danny Mac dancing. He's an excellent mover. But I'm in two minds about whether he should be in the competition. Part of me loves the fact that he's paid his dues, doing three years in the chorus of Wicked, but the rest of me screams, "you trained at Arts Ed, the top drama school for musical theatre dancers in the country." Unfair advantage over the others? At least the judges are being tough with him. On a related note, I'm quite convinced there's something going on with Mr Mac and his dancing partner, Oti. You mark my words. They're very flirtatious! The first year Oti was introduced as a professional dancer, I misheard her name and genuinely thought they were saying Humpty. Which brings me full circle to the woman with pillows for ankles...