Middlesex New Synagogue

I got back from Lewes at 4am yesterday morning, so the day was something of a wipe out. I slept in until 11, and then simply stared at the television, wrapped in a blanket, trying to work out why the temperatures had plummeted so thoroughly and why I felt like I'd been boxed by a kangaroo. 

I helped out at another quiz in the evening. As I left the house, I took a tumble down the stairs leading down into the garden. The motion-sensor light has broken, and, in all the darkness, I misjudged where the first step was. Fortunately, I caught the railing and prevented myself from a full on fall, but felt quite shaken afterwards at the thought of what might have been. There are at least twenty steps. 

The quiz took place at the Middlesex New Synagogue in Harrow and I was fairly shocked by the amount of security outside. Great big locked metal gates. I simply can't imagine that happening outside a church, and find it thoroughly unacceptable that the Jewish community in our country feel so threatened. 

The event was utterly charming. It was a charity fundraiser and there were plates and bowls of delicious home made food. There were baskets of tangerines, boxes of chocolate, salads, poached salmon, pickles and the most amazing cucumber slices prepared with salt, sugar, vinegar and dill. They were so delicious that I asked the lady who'd made them for the recipe. When I announced that I was a vegetarian, the salmon was whipped away and replaced with a mushroom flan.

I hope we gave them a good quiz. It felt somehow really important to do so. They were such a lovely bunch of people and made us feel utterly at home. I looked around the tables as people tucked into their meals and wondered how anyone on earth could want to make the people in that building feel the need to barricade themselves inside whilst worshipping. I should point out that Reform Judaism is one of the only official British religions which condones gay marriage. I always feel incredibly at home in a reform synagogue.

I came home, late, and managed to watch a tiny bit of telly with Nathan, who'd been at a yarn festival all day. We're like ships in the night at the moment.

The Lewes bonfires

Sam, Matt and I spent most of yesterday in the East Sussex town of Lewes, observing their famously anarchic bonfire night celebrations. They always celebrate on November the 5th itself, which yesterday fell on a Saturday.

We had brunch in Catford. We ordered the "Veggie breakfast - option four" which arrived on the biggest plates I've ever seen. Literally a whole heap of stodge.

We set off for the South Coast at just before midday. We tapped Meriel's address into the sat nav and were horrified when the predicted journey time flashed up as five hours. I immediately flew into a panic, wondering whether we ought to cancel our plans, and what kind of epic traffic jam was going to hold us up for that long. It turns out the sat nav had randomly decided to give us the journey time for a BIKE ride to Lewes! In that context, five hours felt like a surprisingly short period of time. We were, however, utterly relieved to discover it was only actually going to take an hour and a half.

We arrived in Lewes to find the town buzzing. I've seldom visited a place which seemed in such a state of high excitement. We had cups of tea with Hilary, Rupert and Jago before heading over to Meriel's for a lovely early supper of baked potatoes and grilled vegetables.

We walked into the town via a series of darkened alleyways. The whole town smelt of wood smoke and gunpowder, and we'd periodically find ourselves walking through little clouds of smoke created by be-costumed revellers lighting torches, stakes and wooden crosses in readiness for the processions.

The Lewes bonfire celebrations are organised by six separate societies, all of which represent a different area of town, and all of whom have different dress codes. The most controversial of the societies is called "Cliffe." The members of Cliffe seem to wear their hell-raising reputation as a veritable badge of honour. They're the people who famously burn an effigy of the pope every year and, because of this, are banned from parading in the grand procession. When they pass, the town goes a bit loopy. They walk, like rock stars, whilst those watching lob fire-crackers at their feet!

Meriel is a member of another society called "Southover," who, based on tonight, seem to have but one reputation, and that's for desperate tardiness! What the Southover posse have in their favour, however; is that they get to dress as pirates, monks or smugglers. And the pirates looked very fetching indeed. Meriel was incredibly sexy and sassy in her clobber, which was all plunging necklines and wench-like layered skirts. Fabulous!
To make matters slightly confusing, every society has its own procession (actually three processions), and all of them take place separately, on different routes and without any central document to let you know who is going to be where and at what time. As a result, the whole occasion sometimes feels a little like the performance of certain pieces of modern music, namely that those taking part are having a great deal more fun than those who have come to support them. "This is a local tradition for local people..."

The first processions of the night are subdued affairs, all linked to remembrance. We stopped for some time outside a church where a fabulous woman in a feather boa read a poem, and a gentleman delivered an impassioned speech about the war dead of two world wars which was brilliant, yet utterly undermined by a sudden gear-shift into the land of Jesus. "God knew sacrifice because he gave up his son for us etc." I don't buy it. Having spent much of the old testament demanding other fathers give up their children as sacrifice, he didn't have a leg to stand on. And if you believe that Jesus was the son of God, surely God, by handing him over to the braying mob was simply saying, "I want you to spend more time back home with me, son!" I think it's deeply insulting and somewhat grotesque to try to compare the deep sacrifice that a generation of innocent young men made for their countries in the First World War with a bible story! I struggle bitterly with the idea of remembrance being linked to religion. One could argue that an atheist giving up his life for his country is a far braver act than a religious person doing the same thing, safe in the knowledge that he's off to a better place. Furthermore, all evidence suggests that there was a dramatic decrease in religious activity in the First World War. The numbers attending front line services literally disintegrated. Sadly, young Tommy felt he was already living in hell, and hearing that God was on his side, simply rubbed salt into an already very open wound.

That said, the Lewes celebrations, though seeming deeply Pagan, are actually there to commemorate the deaths of a set of Protestant Martyrs at the hands of Catholics. Setting fire to an effigy of the pope, therefore is an act of religious defiance and camaraderie, so my struggling with religious content was maybe a little churlish.

Furthermore, once the bloke has stopped shaking his metaphorical tambourine, the moment was able to return to being moving, especially when they set fire to a number of giant poppies whilst a band sputtered its way through Nimrod from the Enigma Variations. There were some very well-thought through, more surprising touches as well. The band played Auld Lang Sine whilst two of the marchers sang that famous World War One soldier chant, "we're 'ere because we're 'ere because we're 'ere..." encouraging us all to join in. There was something so left-field and cheeky, yet deeply connecting about the moment. I felt a genuine sense of one-ness with the Tommies we were honouring. Moving too was the cornet rendition of the Last Post, whilst in the distance, bagpipes, brass bands and screams and cries mixed with hundreds of fireworks, echoeing around the town like a ghostly battle on a not-so-distant front line.


The processions themselves are extraordinary. Scores of people hold huge flaming torches as they march, and others pull metal barrels along the ground which make a terrifying grinding sound whilst spraying embers onto the Tarmac of the streets which end up looking like mystical star constellations.




The processions are watched by scores of people. Even draconian street closures "until 2am" and the much-loathed South East rail's decision to cancel all trains into the town on this, its most important day, weren't able to stop people from attending. Many were crammed into windows overlooking the streets. More were balanced perilously on ledges, telephone boxes, the backs of benches, up trees and lampposts. It's a magical atmosphere. Pop-up stalls sell burgers, beer, chips, and all the other stuff you want to eat on a cold November night. And man was it cold!




I took a thermos flask of tea. I felt very smug. Sam had brought whiskey, which Meriel decanted into a bag which looked suspiciously like a catheter. It was whilst I poured my first cup of the golden nectar (tea, not whiskey) that the first fire cracker was thrown at my feet. When one lands, you get about two seconds before the most awful ear-splitting sound. Matt, standing next to me, saw the thing landing next to me, and started stammering, "Ben, there's a... there's a..." BANG! I'm proud to say that I didn't spill the tea, but Jesus Christ it shocked me! Fortunately Meriel, aware of the tradition, had found us some ear plugs, which immediately went in. A composer cannot mess about with anything which might effect his hearing. Even short term!




We left Meriel, who was preparing herself to march in the main procession and stationed ourselves at the bottom of the Main Street, somewhere near the river, to watch the various different societies marching past. Each society has its own "fire pit" where they burn their own giant effigy of someone - either in deference to them, or as an act of defiance. The effigies are enormous. Fifteen feet tall, perhaps bigger, and they are carried through the streets as part of the processions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two societies had chosen to burn Donald Trump, and, as he passed, boos rang out. I'm proud to say that Meriel's crew burned the ghastly Theresa May and the simperingly vulgar Boris Johnson as a finger up to Brexit. Let the Daily Mail call them the enemies of the people. I would have personally burned them on a bonfire consisting of every copy of that particular newspaper, and probably every one of its ghastly, fascist readers. If you're reading this blog and you read the Daily Mail and you're offended by these comments. Good.




It was whilst we waited for the various societies to pass that the evening started to wear a little thin, primarily because there was a genuine sense that no one had a clue what was going on. Anarchy is one thing, but it's surely exciting for those processing to have a crowd to cheer them on, and, at a certain point, when we still hadn't seen Meriel's society, the marching stopped, the crowds dispersed and all the stewards on the streets, when asked, told us "the main procession is over" (apparently the "main one" was Cliffe) and that they didn't know if any more processions were coming through. We instantly got into a panic. Perhaps Southover had changed their route? Perhaps we'd missed them and would therefore be missing their fireworks display. We only had the Southover programme, which had very vague timings, and no map to show us where the streets they said they were marching along actually were. To make matters worse, because each society randomly has its own programme, there was no sense of the order in which societies were marching.




At this point, two young Indian men came over to us and asked us what on earth was going on. "Are you celebrating winning the war?" They asked. (They know the Brits too well!) We floundered. Every thing we said sounded ludicrous. Try explaining all of the above to someone who isn't British!




We walked, at speed, up a seemingly deserted High Street trying to find Southover, but could find no sign of them, so immediately took ourselves to the field where Southover were due to have their bonfire and fireworks display. We joined a group of very cold, very confused and increasingly angry people. We could tell that all the other societies were already having their displays. We could see giant rockets exploding over the trees in different parts of town. Our feet froze, and collectively, five hundred or so people lost the will to live. I spoke to the woman whom I'd handed my ticket to and asked if the procession had arrived, "what procession?" She said. "The Southover procession." She looked blankly: "quite a lot of people have arrived." She said. "A big group arrived earlier." "Were they wearing costumes, and carrying a giant effigy and hundreds of burning crosses?" "No." It was very odd to discover that the officials knew almost less than we did!




It turns out that Southover, and one other society had been held up at the start of their march by the police who were arresting scores of people. If that happens, it's vital to let the police and stewards in other parts of town know what's going on, so that the crowds can be patient. It's about managing expectations...




Sadly what actually happened was that the crowd at the fire side turned sarcastic and then downright nasty. By the time members of the society turned up, there was booing, and jeering. We'd waited in the damp and cold for the best part of two hours, and noticed all the other displays taking place. One woman looked longingly at the fireworks bursting a mile away and said wistfully, "all those other people having fun..."




Instead of getting on with it, the Southover lot arrived and started throwing firecrackers into a dustbin. A middle aged woman turned to everyone around her, "all they're doing is lobbing things into that dustbin." A man shouted out, "you need to aim for the sky!"




Eventually, a somewhat bedraggled and sad-looking parade of people arrived. I think they'd had the love for the occasion kicked out of them by marching along empty streets, and were completely perplexed by the somewhat hostile response they were getting at this, the great climax to their year of planning. A group of drummers walked passed and the crowd angrily shouted "drum, you bastards" - desperate for them to give us a sense of the pageantry we'd come to witness. When they finally did start drumming (heaven knows why they weren't already) the crowd started shouting, "now drum faster..." It was a sorry affair.




At that point, a man dressed as the pope appeared with two people dressed as acolytes of some description and they stood on a scaffolding platform whilst all the members of the society throw firecrackers at them... Over an interminably long period of time. It was fun for a while. The stakes are high. The papal trio were literally sitting ducks, dodging balls of fire, but the crowd was damp and fed up and we just wanted to go home. And, yet again, it felt like we were watching something which was for the benefit of the members, and not for those of us who'd paid £5 to see something special. And then the fireworks happened. They were all coming from behind a set of trees, so quite a number were obscured by a darkened silhouette. They lasted all of five minutes, the crowd stood, waiting for more. None came. And then people headed home. A bit nonplussed, really.




It was a sad end to what, with a little more planning and communication could have been the most magical evening.

Warwickshire

I woke up this morning in Sutton Coldfield feeling a little nostalgic and emotional. It's something I often experience in the Midlands. I imagine my younger self, and that, inevitably, comes with a degree of self-evaluation. Would I recognise the person I've become? Would I consider myself successful? Would I believe I'd ever reach the tender age of 42? I guess it didn't help to discover that the hotel I was staying in was where my Auntie Winnie had had her 100th birthday party. Cut me open, and I bleed the blood of almost every location in the Midlands, and the older I get, the more important that blood becomes...

It struck me that, considering the mood I was in, the best thing I could do would be to take myself home via Stoneleigh, the little Warwickshire village where my Grandparents lived for the entire time I knew them. The place is ram-packed with memories and it's a place which, thankfully, changes very little as the years roll past. It's an ancient village which sits underneath a rather beautiful, terribly English hill. Between the hill and the village runs a river, which is so clear you can see every last lime green reed, glowing in the sunlight, being buffeted by the fast-flowing water. There's a little bridge which is perfect for Pooh Sticks. Weeping willows bow down to the river's edge.

A water meadow separates the river from most of the houses. Years ago, a consortium of residents purchased the land, thereby making it impossible to to build on.

The little (I think Norman) church sits in the middle of the field. And it's there where my Grandparents are buried. It's being renovated at the moment, so is surrounded by scaffolding, imposing fences and huge signs which inform passers by that trespassers will be prosecuted. I couldn't go in as a result. I'd like to have gone in. It would have reminded me of midnight masses, and the concert that me Ted Thornhill and our mate Tom did there when we were 17. We played string trios. I remember playing the Four Seasons. On one of the walls sits a war memorial with thirteen names on it from the Warwickshire Regiment. All killed in the First World War. Probably on the Somme. Thirteen names, from a village with no more than 100 houses. Do the maths.

An oak tree planted for my Grandparents is growing proudly in the meadow by the gate to the church. In a hundred years, no one will know who Girl and Harry Garner were, but the tree will keep growing. And the tree will know.

I visited the grave and had a chat with them. They weren't hugely talkative, but I think they were wearing ear plugs to muffle the sound of building work!

I took myself on a walk around the village. There's very little to it. A little lane scattered with timber-framed houses. The village club is still there, but there aren't any pubs. I walked past the old shop. Grannie used to give us a handful of 2-pence pieces from a copper jar hanging from her kitchen shelves, and we'd go to the shop to spend it on penny chews. A sign on the door of the house where the shop once was says "The Old Post Office." I still remember the way the place smelt inside. The aroma of sweeties, newspapers and past-their-sell-by-date-synthetic-cream-doughnuts.

I remember when the "Old Forge" (which now deals in stoves and fireplaces) was an actual blacksmiths. The building hasn't changed. It still sits underneath a large horse chestnut tree, which had shed most of its leaves into a big fiery semi-circular hearth rug. The old red phone box in the village now houses emergency life saving equipment, including an "automated external defibrillator." There's probably an interesting book to be written about the way that people have repurposed these quintessentially English, yet utterly obsolete objects to reflect the nature of the places in which they live. I've seen lending libraries, internet hubs and tourist information centres. A defibrillator is new on me, but probably says all you need to know about the population of Stoneleigh!

This afternoon I should have been at an award ceremony, but, despite being nominated for something, I didn't go. I didn't go for a number of reasons. The award was for Beyond The Fence, which I consider to have been such a damaging experience that any mention of it makes me recoil like a frightened animal. Believe it or not, Nathan and I still haven't watched the filmed version! The other reason why we ultimately decided to steer clear was that the award was voted for by the public, so essentially, it's a popularity contest. The award will go to the person with the most number of Twitter followers rather than the person who did the best job. Award ceremonies are awful enough without knowing you don't stand a hope in hell of winning an award! Besides, even if you do win, people are always far more interested in what Devina McCall is wearing to say well done or make you feel anything less than a terrible smell! If you genuinely want to feel like a nobody, get yourself nominated for an award! I'm still not sure I've ever forgiven Grayson Perry's wife for asking me if I wanted to be photographed holding one of the awards that her husband beat us to! Priceless!

So instead of going to the ceremony, which was this afternoon, I stopped off at Toddington Service Station and did some writing. Em is set in the 1960s, and I couldn't think of a more appropriate 60s location than a service station on the M1. Peel back the layers of plastic and tatty-looking fake chrome, and you'll find a building which epitomised the glamour of the motorway age. I sat in some sort of ghastly atrium and watched the clouds outside darken.

By the time I'd reached London, the rain had arrived and I might as well have swum my way from the car to the house. All this made the hour I spent in bright, beautiful Warwickshire sunshine seem all the more special.

Brummy

I walked into Muswell Hill this morning, through the glorious Highgate Wood, which resembled some sort of film set. Blue skies, bright, dusty shards of sunlight bursting through gaps in the yellow trees. You get the picture. I've written about autumn so many times in this blog recently that I've run out of suitable adjectives.

I was specifically heading to Muswell Hill in search of a cafe with wifi on account of our router at home going down. Today's the big day when we switch to high speed cable broadband, and the old one needs to go before the new one can arrive. I'm not sure it's going to make the blindest bit of difference to our tragic technical situation, but I'll try anything once. Apart from child birth. And meat. Or fish. Or, in fact, anything with a face or a mother.

Muswell Hill is the only place in my part of town with a Starbucks. Whenever I sit down to write in a Starbucks, my computer is bombarded with irritating offers of free wifi, so I thought I'd take finally them up on it. I ordered an English Breakfast tea, and paid for it whilst the lady behind the counter opened hundreds of drawers with a panicked look on her face which said "this won't end well!" Turns out they'd run out of tea. Yes, that's right folks: no tea bags in Starbucks! She offered me Earl Grey. I said I'd rather she hit me repeatedly with a moth-infested flannel, and that was the end of my little mission.

Actually, I found a much nicer cafe down the road with free wifi which seemed a little less chain-like. Sure, the man who served me had teeth which looked like cloves of garlic, but he was very friendly and brought my tea to me. All for considerably less money than in Starbucks. Lesson learned. I shan't rush to Starbucks again. 

I took the bus home. I was in my own world, so didn't notice for a while that we'd stopped whilst the driver attended to a child who was throwing up on the pavement outside. It was a vaguely comic sight at first, until the little lad's legs gave way. The poor thing was obviously in rather a lot of trouble. I felt so sorry for his Mum who was fiddling about with wet wipes and a bottle of water from his lunch box. Who'd be a parent, eh? It must be simply terrifying when your child falls dramatically ill like that. I hope he's okay.

I read an awful report a few days ago which basically said that bands, musicians and actors who want to tour or play in venues in Europe will be brutally hit by Brexit to the extent that it could well end up being unprofitable to do so. Nathan, of course, has earned a few decent crusts by touring Europe with various ensembles, and I can't believe all that is in jeopardy. And if anyone reading this (who voted Brexit) is presently burying their head in the sand thinking it'll all be okay: wake up and smell the coffee, have the guts to say that your decision was misinformed and get out there and lobby for a brighter future. In Europe.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/nov/01/brexit-music-british-bands-eu-referendum-touring-europe

I drove to Birmingham this evening. I always forget quite what a lengthy drive it is. When I got in the car, the sat nav predicted a 3 hour journey. The M1 was chockablock and I crawled along. I'm not sure when they're going to stop titting about with that blinking motorway.

I was in Brum for a quiz. And when I say Brum, I mean Sutton Coldfield in a spa hotel in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. To cap it all, I've been put up in said hotel, which feels abnormally decadent. It's quite a fancy room, although there's no bath, and there are two single beds instead of a double. There's a massive TV, though, and one of those fans/ heaters which is a big old circular ring that you can put your hand through. I've had a lovely cup of tea, a free biscuit, and I'm just about ready to sleep.

The quiz went well. Quiz master, Jack was blindingly good, and, with 24 teams, and a quiz which deliberately went at high speed, I was kept on my toes. We were joined for the evening by a lovely chap called Mark who's actually writing a book about quizzes. He's a very interesting character who's plainly a literally equivalent of, well, me! He wrote a book about taking busses all the way from John O'Groats to Land's End and loves quirky facts and figures. Now I want to make a TV musical about taking busses from John O'Groats to Land's End!

Side Show

It never ceases to amaze me how fragile London's transport infrastructure is. One little road closure somewhere in the capital has knock-on effects in ever-increasing circles elsewhere. At the moment, for example, the Holloway Road is closed by Upper Holloway Station. Because there's a network of ludicrous one way streets in that part of town, the official diversion takes drivers two miles out of their way, via hundreds of sleeping policemen, through Tufnell Park and back up to the Holloway Road. Frustrated motorist are doing anything they can to avoid the knock-on chaos which stretches all the way up the Archway Road beyond Highgate. As a result, all the back streets around our house are chockablock, to the extent that it took me half an hour to drive back from the gym yesterday, a journey which ought to have taken less than ten minutes. Today I got entirely trapped by scores of cars driving down a narrow road which I wanted to drive up. The looks of entitlement on their little angry faces were a picture. One guy shook his fist at me because he didn't think I was reversing back down the road (to let him pass) speedily enough. Obviously I immediately slowed down and shook my middle finger back at him, smiling sweetly. There's nothing like a berserk driver wanting to show you how busy and important he is to make me realise how little in a rush I am. From my bedroom, all I could hear were the sounds of car horns beeping angrily into the sonic distance...

This evening we went to see Side Show at the Southwark Playhouse. I find myself increasingly impressed by that particular theatre. It feels rather New York Villagey. It's got a brilliant bar and cafe and it always stages such interesting musicals. It's basically the home of new British musical theatre. It's got a brilliant 60s-esque sign over the door: the words Southwark Playhouse spelt out in giant metal letters filled with lightbulbs.

We arrived in the aftermath of some kind of occurrence. The front door was essentially smashed up on the pavement outside the theatre, and a group of bemused theatre queens were staring at the mess. Inside, a man was looking rather shell-shocked. He'd apparently bumped into the door with his glass of wine and the whole thing had shattered everywhere. The oddest thing was that the wine glass had survived the impact. He'd obviously caught the glass in the door at it's weak point and the whole thing had exploded. All very exciting...

The show itself was well worth the ticket money. The two leads, Laura Pitt-Pulford and Louise Dearman play conjoined twins who escape a freak show to become... well, über freaks! It felt as though it might have been a true story, because the piece suffers a little from what happens in all bio-pics, namely that there's never a particularly tidy through-line, or a convincing end or moral to the piece. It was also a tad chintzy. If I'd set that particular story to music, it would have been a darker, edgier affair, but it's an American show, and the Yanks don't do that shit, so you take mawkish sentimentality, cruddy lyrics and sanitised grime with a pinch of salt.

All that said, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. The performances were exquisite. Dearman and Pitt-Pulford have two of the finest voices in the West End at the moment, and acting chops to match. The set was stunning. The costumes were lovely. And the band played beautifully. The show was directed by the wonderful Hannah Chissick, who directed Brass this time round, and I'm proud to say she did a marvellous job. The piece was staged in the "three-quarters round", which means the audience sits on three sides of the acting space. It's a really difficult space to work with, because, as a director, particularly if you have a large cast, you have two choices: either to keep everyone constantly moving, or to play an intricate series of angles in the space, which mean no one in the audience is having their view of the main actors blocked, and everyone gets to see someone's face at all times. Hannah managed all of this with great aplomb. Tick. Tick. Tick. Bravo all.

It was also lovely to see young Jordan from the NYMT, who was the assistant director on the show. I don't know how that piece of knowledge passed me by, but it's always an immense pleasure to see him. He brings out the very worst in me. And I in him...

More stars...

There's frost in the air tonight which felt very romantic as I left the house until I noticed that someone had shat down our alleyway again! A great, big runny turd which has showered as much of the wall as it has the tarmac. I suspect it might be time to force the council to get involved. The big problem is that no one seems to own our alleyway, so it's very easy for the council simply to wash their hands of it. People wee down there most nights...

I went to the Heath for an early morning walk to clear my head and photograph the stunning autumn leaves this morning. It was all rather romantic: dog walkers and joggers disappearing into a light mist. Everything white and grey but for the beautiful, technicolor trees, which, I heard yesterday, due to the specific weather we've been having of late, are more colourful than they've been for many years. They went to a botanical gardens on the news to prove the point.

With every gust of wind, huge swirls of leaves were raining down, paragliding to the floor in a scooping motion. The carpets of leaves under the trees were like thick Persian rugs.

I came home and worked a lot on one of the songs from Em. It's called A Little Balance, and because the character who's singing it is in no way balanced, I've written it in an ever-changing time signature, which mostly oscillates between 4/4 and 6/8, which is somewhat new ground for me, but, I feel, after the success of the Brass excerpt on Sunday night and the way people are still talking about the show, I have a duty to keep raising my game. 

Sunday's concert garnered a 5* review: "Particularly successful were medleys of songs from Jason Robert Brown’s 13 – written for NYMT and introduced by the composer himself, in his typically droll manner – and Benjamin Till’s Brass, the latter reaffirming in my mind this show as the musical theatre highlight of the year." Just to be mentioned alongside Broadway legend, Jason Robert Brown is exciting enough, but to be compared favourably to him kind of blows my mind. People have sent some lovely private messages to me as well, including one of the cast's Mum's who says Brass changed her daughter's outlook on life. I feel sure it's a special show. It just needs to find that slightly wider audience...

Hallowe'en

It was hallowe'en yesterday, and, I'm told, for the good folk of Wales, it was the hottest Hallowe'en ever. I'm not sure I was particularly aware of it having been mega hot in London, or even hot for October, but then again, I was indoors most of the day.

I worked in the village in the morning, finishing another pass on Em, which I'm ready to call Draft One. It now has flow and is formatted properly and I won't feel embarrassed to hear it read out loud, but I know it's not there yet and will need to keep developing. It's definitely ten minutes too long. What's good is that I can now put the script away for a while and focus on writing songs. This will enable me to revisit the script with fresh eyes at some point later down the line.

I spent the rest of the day working on an application. I'm applying for a somewhat humble grant which will mean I'm able to focus on Em for a few months next year without having to worry about the rent. The grant body are apparently making musical theatre a top priority, after realising they haven't funded enough of it in the past. Good news for musical theatre writers. Great news for musical theatre writers from minority backgrounds.

When Nathan got back from work, we took ourselves off to Muswell Hill where we made our annual pilgrimage to the pumpkin shop on the Broadway which was literally teaming with the little orange things. This time last year, there was next to nothing left, and that's obviously something they'd decided to address, but over-compensated. I felt rather sorry for them, because, in the UK, pumpkins are next to useless after Hallowe'en. They're going to have to throw an awful lot away. We don't really use them for soups over here, and because everyone this side of the Atlantic is aware that pumpkin pie tastes like fart flan, it's not really taken off. The Americans, I think, have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, so the little critters have a longer shelf life. If the Gilmore Girls is anything to go by, they decorate their "ye olde worlde" streets with pumpkins for weeks on end!