Science

The most upsetting thing happened yesterday morning whilst I was sitting in my usual seat in Costa looking out onto the street. An elderly homeless man stopped for a while on the pavement, before very slowly sinking to the ground and lying on the pavement, cigarette still in hand. He lay there for some time, his icy blue eyes staring at the people passing by, all of whom ignored him. Eventually the cigarette fell from his hand and he fell asleep for a while, before hauling himself up again, the dribble dripping from his chin.

He started to cross the road but as he walked, his trousers fell down. He wasn't wearing pants. He tried desperately to pull the trousers back up, but he couldn't reach down far enough. He merely shuffled to the side of the road. People around him laughed. The sight was desperately upsetting. 

I worked until the early afternoon before hot-footing it down to Kensington. I'd been nursing a bruised ego all day, so figured the best thing to do to cheer myself up would be to spend a couple of hours with old friends at the Science Museum. Fortunately, like a chariot laden with beautiful chocolates, my university friend, Tanya had ridden into town with her brood, so all my wishes were granted.

It's the first time, I think, that I've visited the science museum. I may have been as a child, although I think we used to save up Persil tokens and take the train from Bedford to London to visit the Natural History Museum... not that I was ever into museums. I was certainly bored rigid when it came to science. But it was a lot of fun to wander around with the kids, whilst catching up with Tanya and Paul. We realised that T and I have known each other for 25 years. That feels insane to me. We're so old!

The kids were on good form, and it's a great museum. My favourite part was a wall of classic cars all piled up on top of one another. They seemed curiously small. I think perhaps British cars were rather little in the 1950s and 60s.

There were a series of cabinets which were filled with all sorts of 20th Century curios including a load of stuff like cameras, fly-mos, early computers and Chopper bikes which I instantly recognised from my childhood. In a cabinet from the earlier part of the 20th Century, I was very moved to see a 'cello which had been made out of packing crates by First World War injured soldiers during the Battle of the Somme. So many of those soldiers were desperate for music. I've read many adverts placed in newspapers asking people to send instruments to the front line so that the lads could form ensembles. It's actually those sorts of stories which inspired my song, "I Miss The Music" which I understand the Northants Youth Choir are still performing.

What being a writer is like (totally subjectively!)

I was having quite a productive day yesterday. I'd done all the re-writes on Em, been to the gym and was mid-way through a set of notes on Nene, when I received the bitterly unwelcome news that I'd been turned down for yet another grant from the Arts Council. Yet again, the only feedback they could offer was that they simply "preferred another applicant." I can only deduce that I'm personally unfundable in the present world of funded arts. This is the third application I've made to the Arts Council which has been turned down with no feedback offered.

These applications, of course, take the best part of a week to fill in properly, and there comes a point at which you have to acknowledge that you're wasting your time. Particularly if the only feedback you're getting is that you scored a full set of marks and that your application couldn't be improved.

At the moment I feel a bit numb. Numb, and a little bit scared about the future. Demotivated. Fragile. It was my last opportunity for some funding to keep me going through the process of rehearsals for Em.

Funnily enough, as I walked up to Highgate Village yesterday morning, I was thinking about what it means to be a writer and how we're constantly on this exhausting and somewhat unstable roller-coaster, which seems to become more exhausting and less thrilling the older we get.

There are, of course, many things that are wonderful about being a writer. Tuesday was a good day, and only yesterday, I heard from a wonderful woman who wanted me to know how important my music had been to her in a period of great flux.

I get a number of emails and letters like this. And I always respond to them because they mean so much. A writer doesn't usually crave fame or huge wealth. But he does crave the knowledge that what he does matters.

There is, however, a certain type of person who feels obliged to trot out a knee-jerk critical reaction to the work that the writer has often taken months, sometimes years to create. Sometimes this comes in the form of a review. Sometimes it comes from an online troll. Sometimes it's from the mouth of a friend immediately after a show who simply can't help themselves. Criticism is both the life blood of the writer and his greatest enemy. If a writer is not ready to hear criticism, usually because he's not in a position to do anything about, he can loose every ounce of confidence. A writer relies on confidence. He cannot write without it. I don't know a writer who doesn't have issues with confidence.

To me, it's really interesting that this particular understanding is more present in the way that people deal with performers. We know actors have fragile egos, so even if we think that they're deluded and talentless, in general, we (rightly) don't have the heart to say anything other than positive things. Unless we're online trolls of course.

A writer pours emotion, love, and a huge amount of small detail into what he does. Writing is, of course, utterly subjective. Some stuff lands for some people and catastrophically fails for others. All writers know this, but if they've spent every waking hour trying to make something which lands, what they don't want to hear is someone saying, "I just don't get it." It's the cruellest, and actually the dumbest critique of all.

One of the most stressful things in this industry is dealing with those who have pots of funds to divvy out to writers, who feel the need to force writers to jump through scores of hoops simply to get their hands on a share of the money. It's known as window shopping within the industry. They ask huge numbers of writers to write song after song on spec, for no payment. If you ask them to justify what they're doing, they'll more than likely say they're doing you a favour by giving you the opportunity to write a song which you might be able to use in the future. Lucky us!

The same people usually also claim to have the super-power ability to tell the worth of a piece of music from a rubbish recording with a piano in a room. We all know they don't, so we invest huge amounts of our own money creating the sorts of demos we feel best reflect our work, knowing that a bad recording of something in the wrong hands can be monumentally damaging.

A writer spends much of his or her day in a world of silence. He emerges from his cocoon, often without the ability to engage effectively with those around him. It often takes a few hours before he feels like a human again. On one hand, we are expected to write passionately and from the heart, but increasingly we are also expected to behave in a manner which has been deemed appropriate by the corporate world. If we cry, we're difficult (unless it's on camera) if we shout, we're difficult, if we panic, we're difficult, if we say no, we're difficult. It is very easy to describe a writer as difficult. The great skill in this industry is being the sort of director or producer who finds no one difficult. This is usually because they inherently know how to deal with the whims and needs of different types of people, so no one feels the need to be difficult around them!

A writer has to deal with rejection on an almost daily basis. He applies for jobs which have already been given to others but have needed to be posted on websites to make it look like rules are being followed. He doesn't hear back from 90% of the jobs he applies to, or the people he writes to. He enters competitions which are won by people who have been asked to apply and then is told too many people have entered the competition for feedback to be offered. He loses out on bursaries because his minority status is not the minority status du jour. 

Paranoia starts to creep in, but we're repeatedly told we shouldn't become jaded or bitter or whinging despite the fact that we feel all these things deeply.

"But you're doing so well," they say, and then the writer thinks about the bucket in his front room which collects the water coming through the ceiling and wonders what "doing well" actually means!

And then you get the people who tell the artist that he's lucky. Or a layabout. Or that the government shouldn't sponsor the Arts. Or that if the job's not paying enough, he shouldn't be doing the work. Or that the sort of work he does should happen in his free time. It's a hobby after all.

The writer doesn't posses the glamour of a performer. People don't really follow writers on twitter. When we try to raise money by crowdfunding, the amounts are desperately pitiful.

When a branch of the arts starts to collapse or stagnate, everyone tells the writers that they must innovate, but when it comes to it, they don't believe the writer they're telling to innovate actually has the ability to innovate, so they approach someone they think is more likely to be the type of person that will deliver what they think the industry will need (or, in real terms, what the industry will fund) but these people rarely want to commit to doing the work necessary to create something that's actually innovative. The truth of the matter is that if we promote good art, we won't need to set out to innovate. Innovation is only effective if it's good.

In short, being a writer is all about taking the hits, finding yourself on the floor, dusting yourself off and starting again. We're like little pieces of elastic. We bounce up and down, following our nebulous dreams. But elastic frays and eventually becomes so worn it simply snaps. Writers have to hope that their elastic is well-made! Ultimately hope is what all writers need.

God love Thatcher

We spent the morning scrambling about. On one hand, I was trying to prepare sound files and scores which would enable Beth and Peter from the music school to hear my Nene composition for the first time, and on the other we were desperately trying to tidy the house so that our guests wouldn't know the sort of visual shambles we've been living in over the past few weeks. At one stage I was trying to wash up whilst listening to my headphones which were plugged into my laptop which was sitting in amongst the dirty plates! I think it was at that stage that I felt things had got out of hand!

Peter and Beth arrived at noon o'clock and, after listing about 97 caveats (in true composer style), I played them the composition. I was terribly nervous. Playing any new piece of music to a commissioner is fairly horrifying, particularly after my experience with the lunatic in Lincolnshire who booked me to write music for her choir before refusing to pay me because the songs I'd written "weren't soulful enough."

Anyway, I needn't have worried. Peter and Beth made all the right noises - very often and with great alacrity - and I'm pretty sure they're as excited about it as I am. As a result of all of this, today has felt a little like the end of term. I'd worked so bloody hard on that composition, that I decided to take the rest of the day off and pretend it was the weekend.

Peter wanted to take us out for lunch so we went to Highgate Woods, a spot which seems to surprise and delight all of the out-of-towners I know. There's a really lovely cafe in the middle of the wood which does a wide range of healthy food, the vast majority of which is suitable for vegetarians. The portions are large and delicious and it's a genuinely lovely place to sit and while away the hours whilst dog walkers and women with strollers mill around on the glade nearby.

I took myself off to Spitalfields in the late afternoon to meet my dear friend Ted for a quick drink. It was his birthday and I was keen to catch up with him and his partner, the delightful Gersende, who glows even more than usual now that she has a baby in her tummy. We sat in a little tapas bar and filled each other in on about six months of news. They're currently trying to decide on a name for their child, which they'd like to be French (like Gersende) without sounding horrible when pronounced by Brits. It's a fairly tall order!

I sat on the tube home and read a particularly graphic account of the awful events on the Leningrad Metro, horrified at myself for feeling a clench of unease when a Muslim man in full prayer regalia sat down opposite me and started muttering obsessively to himself. I'm sure he was praying rather than mad, although many would argue that one triggers the other. Praying leads to madness or madness leads to praying: take your pick. Whatever was going on in his head, I felt hugely angry for allowing myself to be frightened by him. I'm pretty sure many people reading this blog will take great issue with the fact that I'm being honest enough to write this stuff down, but you can't whip fear out of someone.

I have a feeling that the ghastly logo for Haringey Council (note they no longer call themselves Harringay 'cus that's like, gay) was designed by the same charlatans who did the London 2012 logo. There's a similar tragic cheapness about both logos with their angular writing which might have been done by a ten-year old child in a junior school exercise involving sellotape and poster paints. It cost £86,000 to design.



So, Theresa May is on a little tour of the countries we're going to have to trade with post-Brexit, many of which, of course, have terrible human rights records. You want immigration curbed? Let's chuck out the Europeans and replace them with essential workers from China and Saudi. But for a laugh let's not tell any of the Europeans over here that we're going to screw them over. It's their fault for smelling of garlic, goulash and, like, really nasty cheese. All hail the awesome Sun newspaper for showing a picture of the Rock of Gibraltar today, swathed, as it should be, in a British flag with the words "Up Yours Señor" written on it - obviously without the tilde. Why use a tilde? We're not in Europe any more, we can ignore all that tragic foreign shit and hopefully get their backs up so much that there'll be a lush war that we can win because we rule the waves now we have our sovereignty back. God save the Queen, yeah? I wanna go back to the 80s when Thatcher, god rest her beautiful soul, made this country great and got rid of class and shit by selling off all the council houses until only unmarried mothers could live in the few she'd left us with. She made us all get off our arses didn't she? She gave the Spice Girls their sense of entitlement. She proved you didn't need talent to be famous. That nice Theresa May bird's got cracking legs hasn't she? She reminds me of Thatcher. Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime (immigrants, Jews and gays.) Let's hope she's got some secret plans in place to send people with AIDS to concentration camps. Stoning the gays to death in Saudi? Not a problem. As long as they trade with us. So much better than straight bananas. Yeah yeah. Gibraltar, man. Makes me proud to be British. Where's Gibraltar again?

Academy showcase

I'm working to a mega-deadline at the moment which involves finishing the Nene composition by noon today when I'm due to play it for the first time to Peter and Beth from the Northampton music school. I worked all day and night on it on Sunday and every second of yesterday similarly ensconced under a pair of headphones. It was not the greatest day, therefore, to wake up, half deaf, with my ears full of wax. Without wishing to go into too much gory detail, I spent a good ten minutes at the start of the day with a series of cotton buds attempting to alleviate the problem. The results were as satisfying as they were astounding! This morning I shall need to do something similar...

I've reached the point on Nene where it feels like I'm going mad. I'm working in such a level of detail that I've started to lose objectivity. This usually means it's time to put it away for a few weeks and throw myself back into the world of Liverpool in 1965. It's actually rather nice to be able to oscillate between projects for this very reason.

My one little non-Nene related activity yesterday was a trip down to Euston to see the graduation showcase for actors from the musical theatre course at the Royal Academy of music. It was a satisfying show, with songs beautifully orchestrated and performed by students at the school, under the more-than capable baton of Peter McCarthy (who actually conducted our wedding.) A rather large cohort of performers were doing their thing, bordering perhaps on slightly too many, so, unlike the Trinity showcase, I didn't get great a massive sense of their abilities across the performing spectrum. What I do know is that they're all wonderful singers, both individually and as an ensemble. In fact, as an ensemble, they make an incredibly exciting sound. They should form a choir! I'm pretty sure that the vocal training these kids are getting at the Academy is second to none. I rather liked the fact that many of them felt classically trained. None of them did any dialogue, however, so it was a little difficult to gage whether or not they'd be able to actually handle text. These showcases are such a lottery. If you end up with a dud song or you're off your game for that single hour, there's a high chance you'll be kissing your chances of finding an agent goodbye. It's really brutal. Mind you, it's a deeply brutal industry, so why sugar cote the shit sandwich?

Ex-Brasser, Jack Reitman, whom I was essentially there to cheer on, did a great job. I was very proud. I was also pleased to see another Brasser in the pit orchestra in the form of young Steve who has played French horn for pretty much every performance of the show. His playing is absolutely superb. I think there's very little which can beat the sound of a well-played French horn. Obviously apart from a well-played 'cello or violin. That sort of goes without saying...

So that was my day. I finally finished writing at midnight at which point I instantly fell asleep... Hence writing this this morning before going into overdrive on Nene to prep it for its unveiling at lunchtime. Wish me luck!

Gilbert Baker

I learned with great sadness yesterday that Gilbert Baker, the designer of the LGBT Rainbow flag, has died at the age of 65.

The rainbow flag has been an incredibly important symbol for me throughout my life. In the 1980s and '90s, it meant safety. If I saw the flag flying outside a bar, or displayed on a card or sticker in a coffee shop window, my heart leapt for joy, because it meant I could be myself. It meant I wouldn't have to modify my behaviour, or put up with judging looks and raised eyebrows. The beautiful thing about the flag is that it's used by my community the world over, so weather you're American or British or Chinese or Nigerian, if you're gay, and you see it, you know you've found your family.

One of my pet hates is the rampant homophobes who disguise their distaste for gay people by saying, "why should a rainbow be just about gay people? It's really unfair that the gays have hijacked it to mean something political, beyond the realm of peace and beauty." What few people seem to realise is that the LGBT rainbow flag only has six colours in it. Violet is missing. It therefore can't be confused with the peace symbol, or anything an old hippy might collect alongside unicorns and snow globes!

Baker designed his rainbow flag, in San Francisco, in 1978. Some say he was inspired by Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow. It was initially conceived as an eight-coloured flag, with a vibrant pink stripe and a turquoise one where blue would have been on a conventional rainbow. Each colour had a meaning. Pink represented sex. Red was for life. Orange was for healing. Yellow meant sunlight. Green meant nature. Turquoise represented art. Indigo represented harmony and violet was for the spirit.

The hot pink was almost immediately removed, due to fabric unavailability, and to prevent the centre stripe from becoming obscured by a flag pole when hung (which apparently happens to flags with an un-even number of vertical stripes - who knew?), the turquoise was dropped and violet was replaced by royal blue.

And there we have it: the potted story of our much-loved rainbow flag. Gilbert Baker, I salute you. Your flag has meant much to many. Your legacy is assured for years to come.

Eric Gill's Ditchling

It's been a really rather wonderful day. It started altogether too early with a car journey across London and down to Catford, where I met Sam, Julie, Matt and Bal for breakfast in a greasy spoon. Catford is definitely on the up. The spoon is sandwiched between a delicatessen and a hipster cafe. I have no doubt that these new, fancy places will be subconsciously doing their level best to push the rents up for the ordinary man! Greasy Spoons will soon be a thing of the past.

Sam, Matt and I jumped into the car and drove down to a little village in East Sussex called Ditchling, which, it turns out, is rather well-known as a centre for folk arts and calligraphy. The story of the village as a mecca for the arts goes back to the somewhat controversial sculptor, Eric Gill, who set up a sort of bohemian commune on a heath above the village, which attracted a set of acolyte artists, many of whom also converted to Roman Catholicism. They wore smocks and shared an interest in fonts (of the lettering variety rather than the churchy kind.) As usual, I'm brutally over-simplifying the facts. A great many people think that Gill's highly unorthodox and controversial lifestyle overshadows his genius as an artist. I personally think it's a little unfair to judge the man through a 21st Century moral lens. A great many early 20th Century bohemians were attempting to smash down the constraints of the prudish Victorians. We applaud them for breaking certain boundaries, which include experimenting with sexuality and drugs, but condemn them for other practices, which time has defined as unacceptable. The fact remains that his sculptures are remarkable.

We met Hilary, Jago, Rupert and Mez in the village, and paid a visit to the little museum which sits by a duck pond in the shadow of the flint-walled church. It's a wonderful little spot, filled with works of art by William Morris, Eric Gill and Edward Johnston, whom, I learned today, designed the iconic font used by London Underground. (I had hitherto thought that the font was the work of Gill, so I wasn't far off the mark!)

We has lunch in a pub in the middle of the village, where the food is overpriced and undersized. We were joined there by my cousin Matt and his wife Boo who live in the village. It was an absolute treat to see them both. The collision of several different worlds slightly blew my mind!

After eating, we took ourselves on a lovely walk along the valley on a path lined with stunning hawthorn blossom hedges which stretched into the distance like a snow-covered hillside and floated in the breeze like confetti.

There was a dirty cream tea at teatime in a tea shop, followed by a little walk around the artists' workshops on the northern edge of the village. I bought a pair of cufflinks to remind me of the day, and we had a lovely chat with a lonely painter whose wife, he told us, had taken her own life four years ago. The poor man hasn't really painted since her death, but says he keeps the workshop going because he loves talking to the customers.

On the way home we called in on Ellie, Allan and their two kids in their glorious new home in Hayward's Heath; a 1960s building in the Scandinavian style with an enormous window which looks out over their garden and the imposing Winnie-The-Pooh-style wood behind.

Ellie's daughters are prodigiously intelligent and wonderful company. The oldest, Rozina (10), is a voracious reader who will literally read anything to the extent that Ellie and Allan are sometimes forced to hide books. I believe she found out about the myth of Santa in some sort of book meant for adults. When asked what her favourite book is, she cited a self-help manual for the parents of 0-5 year olds before adding, "I think there's a gap in the market for a book about parenting 6-10 year-olds."

We drove back to London in a glorious sunset. I dropped the boys off and then headed to Bexleyheath for a meeting with Hannah Chissick about Em. We slowly worked our way through the second half of the show whilst eating biscuits and fancy crisps.

The journey home was a disaster. Just what you need at 11pm! The trouble with London is that if any of the tunnels which go under the Thames go down, or get blocked by accidents, the city goes into meltdown. My satnav was predicting 25-minute tailbacks, so I made an adrenaline-fuelled decision to drive West into town on the south of the river before crossing the river at Tower Bridge. An hour and a half later, I was home. And now it's time for bed!

Quinoa

I worked with Philippa in a cafe in Old Street this morning. I think we could have maybe been a little more productive. I was a little distracted by the music they were playing; old school soul with those really indulgent vocals which hardly blend into the background! I was wearing headphones, and the music seemed to be creeping into them, and rolling around my ears in a boomy, echoey hell zone!

We did about an hour's work before heading back to Philippa's house where she packed a suitcase for a weekend away at her mother's in Wales. She showed me the heartbreaking little bag which her daughter Silver had packed for herself. It's amazing what kids of that age consider special: a little note pad and a pile of pretty plastic jewellery! 

I made dinner. Quinoa, celery, tomatoes, carrots and onions fried with a load of halloumi. Profoundly delicious. We then went off to Silver's nursery where the kids were doing an Easter egg hunt. We used to do Easter egg hunts in the garden of my Grannie's house. My Grannie used to create little nests out of margarine tubs and straw, which she'd fill with Cadbury's Cream Eggs. For some reason they were always more delicious than any of the other eggs we were given.

I'm still not totally sure what Easter is all about. I got very confused last year when I learned about Zombie Jesus. I'd hitherto thought that Big JC flew down to heaven on Easter Day. How was I meant to know that he'd lived amongst us in a creepy undead sort of way for all that time. It's an odd thing to want to celebrate isn't it?

I worked in the afternoon at Jackson's Lane where a number of female opera singers were obviously auditioning for something. I could hear the top notes reverberating around the building like some sort of desperate theramin. I know opera sopranos are hugely impressive creatures but they leave me as cold as ice. Massive vibrato covering up really dodgy intonation. I've never understood why people consider the sound to be so beautiful. It's just loud and high. They were all dolled up to the nines as well, in a way which hardly gave the impression that they thought acting was an important piece in the jigsaw of performance!

I worked till about 7, when I hit upon a moment in the Nene piece which felt like a good place to take a rest. I've forensically made my way through all but percussion instruments from the start until about 9 minutes into the piece. The end will take me a lot longer because everyone's going hell for leather, but I'm probably in a fairly good shape to show the piece to the commissioners next Tuesday if I work solidly on Sunday and Monday.