Scansion Nazi

Nathan rushed off to Parson's Green this morning for an emergency ear syringing. He's always suffered from a build up of wax in his ears, and no one ever seems to be able to offer a definitive answer regarding whether syringing - or lavaging as they call it in the States - is good for the ears or not. Whether the procedure is good or bad, the emergency NHS walk-in clinic at Parson's Green is an undiscovered London gem. It's open every day, and doesn't seem to generate the ludicrous waiting times that you get in hospitals.

We had lunch in the greasy spoon when Nathan returned, before ploughing head-long into a mega session on songs from Em, which finally finished at around 11pm. Nathan has an astoundingly good eye/ ear for detail when it comes to music - particularly sung music - and has cutthroat, somewhat dogmatic views when it comes to scansion. The beats in music that words are placed on are of great importance to Nathan. In his view, it's a great sin to sing a word in a rhythm that you wouldn't naturally speak it in. And he's right. So often, in music - across the board from opera through to pop - composers place the wrong syllable on the wrong beat of the music, and this often either leads to misinterpretation of meaning, or the general sense that the character or artist singing the words is of limited intelligence! I'm personally pretty good at avoiding this particular misdemeanour, but every so often, a clanger pops into my writing, which Nathan expunges with alacrity. He's very good at rolling his eyes to the back of his head and giving me a look which says "really? You really think that's good enough?" It's good for me to be challenged.

So, essentially, we sat for eight hours today underneath headphones. And still we're not done. We'll get there, and actually, as a result of the work we did, I'm getting rather excited about Em, and the journey which lies ahead. I think I've written some belting music which will both move and excite the listener. There is, however, a deliberate, yet somewhat hidden double entendre lurking in one of the song's lyrics. It's so filthy that I'm actually not going to point it out to any of the cast in the hope that they'll innocently sing it for five shows, wondering why little pockets of the audience are in stitches! It's one of those double entendres that you have to have a certain kind of mind to notice. Brownie points to the first person who spots it!

We finished work and watched Ru Paul's Drag Race, which is one of my favourite TV shows in the world. It is quintessential cult viewing, ram-packed with catch-phrases which fans of the show will happily quote to one another whilst everyone else stands by and goes "what?!"

Nathan finished knitting a stunning cowl this evening which looks like some kind of primitive art sculpture from the 1970s. It's actually one of the best pieces of knitting he's ever done. It's really textured and three-dimensional and I'm sure it's going to be a very popular pattern. He's sewing the ends in whilst I write this.

Brother Edward face-timed me from Kiev. He's there for the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes. It's that time of the year again! The gay men's World Cup. I can feel my heart pounding at the thought!

Heathy

I spent much of the day working, having woken up rather early after another series of bizarre dreams. My subconscious and conscious need to have a little chat, I suspect, to work out the messages which are trying to get through. In one dream, my mother was telling me off for leaving footprints in soapy suds on a bathroom floor. In another, a random man was wearing a hedge for a hat. Where does that stuff come from?!

I continued to work on the two naughty songs from Em. I'm gradually whipping them into shape, but they're proving to be much wilder beasts than I'd ever imagined.

At 4pm I met my mate Michael at Highgate tube and we went for a stroll on the Heath. It looks absolutely splendid at this time of year. The rhododendrons are in full bloom at Kenwood House. I think they were perhaps the most vivid colours I've ever seen in nature. Hot pinks. Bright reds. Peaches and oranges. Quite stunning.

We walked up towards the old quarry at Sandy Hill, where we were visited by a friendly robin, before heading across to the pergola. I was astonished to discover that Michael had never visited that particular Heath highlight. The wisteria was out and the air was ripe with the smell of the herbs from the garden below. It genuinely is a hidden gem. I wonder if someone would pay me to give tours of Hampstead Heath?

From the pergola we went to the tree with the hole in it. I take everyone there. You could probably find this exact blog post written at least twice a year for the last seven years!

London looked very dirty and smoggy from vantage points where you usually get very clear views. You could barely see the skyscrapers down in Canary Wharf. A thick mauve cloud seemed to be hovering over the city.

We bought picnic food in Marks and Spencer's down at Southend Green before returning to the Heath where we sat, as the sun set, in the field behind the Ladies' Pond, eating cheese and a raspberry trifle. Parakeets flashed through the sky, squawking in that familiar, yet vacuous style. The sun disappeared behind clouds and the air turned very cold, but as we headed back to the car, it reappeared again, through a gap in the cloud, like a giant shimmering milk bottle top.

Best new songs

I woke up to the news this morning that the song Brass, Brass off of Brass, has been nominated for the Stiles and Drewe award for best new song. There are twelve finalists. It's actually the only UK song competition for new musical theatre writing, so it's a huge honour to have made the shortlist. I shan't win. Stiles and Drewe tend to favour the wittier end of the spectrum when it comes to this award. Brass will almost certainly prove too worthy and gloomy for their tastes, but I am hugely grateful for the nod.

Brass is obviously the title track from the show, and title tracks are really important numbers because they often cement what or who the show is about. I am reminded of a somewhat amusing occurrence at a recent cabaret when a young girl stood up to introduce the "title" song from her show... which had an entirely different name!

Anyway, aside from my utter horror at the political situation in the U.K. right now, I genuinely have very little else to write about. The day has been about doing remedial work on two songs from Em, which, I discovered, needed considerable help when I reopened the files this morning. They're in a much better state as a result of what I've done today although I suspect they're still not quite ready for sign off.

I spent much of the day doing the unspeakable and watching and listening to football commentaries from the 1960s. I'm trying to recreate an authentic account of the 1965 Charity Shield between Manchester United and Liverpool. Sadly, I can't find a recording of that particular match. It was a draw, so I can't imagine that the commentary was hugely exciting, but for the purpose of Em, it needs to be. I'm so unfamiliar with football that I don't even know if fans would be happy with a draw. It strikes me as a rather honourable outcome. I don't think they played extra time in those days or did penalty shoot-outs, so perhaps it happened more regularly. Bobby Charlton seems to score goals in every clip I watch. He was plainly a very wonderful footballer... for someone who looks like the guy from the Hamlet advert!

I had the most vivid dreams last night. In one of them, I was in the Middle East somewhere, but as I walked around, I realised I was being coated with thin a layer of salt or sand. Now which part of my subconscious came up with that?!

Michelle's music

We had a day of absolute mayhem today. There was far too much to do and both of us had ridiculous expectations regarding what was achievable. I plough on through Em, continuously underestimating how much work remains to be done on each number. I drove down to Bexleyheath last night to see director Hannah and we had a lovely meal sitting at her kitchen table whilst reading the entire show out loud. Just the two of us. There was an unwritten understanding that she would try to read the girls' parts and I would read the boys' parts, but it's a fairly girl-heavy show, so I ended up reading my fair share of the fairer sex. There was one scene which has so many characters in it that we basically ended up reading anything we fancied. The first person to open their mouth got first dibs! It was a lot of fun. I adore Hannah and can't wait to get back in a rehearsal room with her again.

So anyway, after a day of panicking, which culminated in me having an hysterical laughing fit as Nathan and I tried to wind a shed load of wool into a manageable-sized cake, we jumped on a tube to Sloane Square and headed to the Pheasantry on the King's Road. At one stage it felt like the Pheasantry was a second home, I was there so often to watch cabarets being performed by friends, but I haven't been there for absolutely ages. I don't really think I go out that much any more!

Tonight's entertainment was really very lovely. It was essentially a night of songs from the golden age of film, interspersed with music by my very talented mate, Michelle. I can personally take or leave covers of songs written by Rogers and Hammerstein, and if I never hear "So Long, Fairwell" from the Sound of Music again I will die a happy man, but I'd travel a long way to hear songs by Michelle. She's been writing now for a sickeningly short period of time, but seems to have a musical theatre sonic landscape fully formed in the recesses of her mind. Her songs all bring out the best in their vocalists. They're very British with a hint of Hollywood glamour and always very still in an impressionist sort of way. Fleeting is perhaps a good word. Misty. Dreamlike. Timeless. I was very proud.

A man got on the tube as I was travelling home tonight. He had quite an impressive moustache, and, instinctively, I gave him the look that I've come to realise all moustachioed men give to one another. It's a look which says, "I approve, and I'm with you, brother." The look is, of course, fairly meaningless if you're no longer wearing a moustache! The bloke must have thought I was insane!

Shower of Scuts

I was very heartened yesterday, whilst sitting in the window of the cafe, to see a teenaged couple holding hands whilst waiting for a bus. They were probably around sixteen and, under normal circumstances, the sight of them together would have been wholly unremarkable. What made it very special was the fact that the "female" half of the couple was either in the early stages of transitioning or gender fluid. There was nothing furtive about their behaviour. They were simply holding hands in a way that suggested they were both incredibly comfortable with each other and the situation they were in. And I'm proud to say that no one was staring at them disapprovingly or even double-taking. And that made me feel very happy. It is astounding to think how far the LGBT community has travelled in the 42 years I've been living on this planet. Perhaps my desire to even write these sentiments down will seem unnecessary and old-fashioned to young people, but I think it's important to remember how far we've come because situations can reverse. History never repeats itself. Man always does.

Theresa May is a twat isn't she? All this "I'm going to be a really difficult woman" shite simply to show the ludicrous UKIP voters that she's more Thatcher than Thatcher. Meanwhile, she's royally titsing off Europe and blowing any chances we ever had of getting a good Brexit deal, whilst blithely and somewhat proudly telling us we've got a bumpy ride ahead with a sort of "you asked for this" smirk. "Mummy doesn't want to hit you, but you've forced her to." Poor Mummy.

As for the shower of inadequacy which faces her from the other side of the House of Commons, well, there really are no words. Dianne Abbott is like some sort of cartoon parody: the hopeless drudge who thought she'd never be loved, who finally bags herself a man, and then wants the world to watch her snogging him. Sadly the world simply watches the dreadful scene with a mixture of amusement and horror. The interview where she was trying to guess how much policemen cost was beyond excruciating.

To moustache or not to moustache

We've finally reached the time of year where the ash tree in our back garden bursts into life. Since the hideous council forced four of the trees along our alleyway to be felled, in order to save a Victorian wall which was knocked down anyway and replaced with a fence, our tree has been the largest in the neighbourhood. Go tree!

Anyway, it eventually loses its leaves in December which is incredibly late, so I suppose it's only right that it bursts into life a little later than its friends. The window in our kitchen is enormous, and right now, all I can see through it are little tufts of fresh, minty green. Sadly they're not as reinvigorating this morning as they might ordinarily be. I am exhausted, and can barely keep my eyes open on account of having been awake through much of the night tossing and turning about the sheer amount of stuff I need to achieve on Em. I got up in the night and wrote from 3am to 5am. I'm not really complaining as it was quite a good, intense period of woke, and, anyway, who wrote the book which insists a writer keep the same working hours as a civil servant?

The problem I'm having is that the last song I have to write for the musical is bigger, fuller and longer than I'd hitherto imagined it needed to be. Because of this I need time for it to settle and I'm just not hugely time rich at the moment. What is it with deadlines that makes us always want a week more than we have? I don't think I've ever reached a deadline and thought "yep, that's hurtling towards me on the horizon and I feel good about the place I'm in!"

In other news, I've shaved off my moustache. It was an agonising decision which I took about a week trying to make. Ultimately, these curly moustaches are quite a faff to maintain, and I used to get incredibly frustrated with it, particularly towards the end when I kept mistakenly pulling out the hairs from the right hand wing, which had the effect of making the moustache even more unmanageable. I guess I'd also started to wonder whether people perceived it as a bit of a comedy or "try hard" statement. I saw a couple of pictures of myself looking like a cross between a basket ball and a walrus and ultimately wondered whether the look was working for me! Yes, of course, I'll miss people coming up to me in the street and complimenting me, and part of me thinks the moustache gave me back the somewhat bohemian vibe I'd lost when my hair lost the lustrous curls it had when I was a young man. But it was ageing. And it was bright orange. And even though I still keep raising my hand to my face to twirl and tweak it, I think it was the right decision to get rid of it. For now.

Those who knew me before the moustache will undoubtedly barely notice. Those, who have met me since, for whom the moustache is a defining feature, will find it very odd. The lady who served me in Costa yesterday said, "are you still drinking tea now that you're an entirely different person?!"

Too much coffee?

The Highgate kids are back at school in force today, chirping and chattering in the cafes in their ludicrously plumby accents. This morning's topic of conversation was what syndromes and conditions you needed to claim you had in order to get a degree of lenience in exams. Top of their list of easy things to fake was ADHD "too much coffee and you're basically there" followed by dyslexia, "everyone knows you just need to say that the words are floating about on the page and you get all sorts of perks." They continued, "depression is a good one cus they can't really argue with that." On and on they went in those tidy little accents which told me that it doesn't actually matter what they get for their exams: their schooling up in the village is merely preparing them for a life of ease. I don't remember ever being able to afford to sit in a cafe during free periods when I was that age. Tammy and I used to go down Kwik Save to buy sweets to surreptitiously eat during A level geography, but sitting in a cafe would have seemed a considerable luxury. There might have been a kettle in the sixth form common room. That was about as decadent as it got!

I worked all day yesterday. As usual, it felt both virtuous and ludicrous to be working on a bank holiday.

In the evening, we went to dinner at Michelle and Ben's stunning new house in Hatfield. Abbie and Ian were also there which meant there were three couples: one in their twenties, one in their thirties and the old boys in their forties. The odd thing about being in my forties is that I don't feel any older than I was at 22. I feel wiser, maybe, and perhaps a little bit more cynical as I see variations of the same initiatives and moral panics coming back round on ten year cycles. Bizarrely, it was the youngest couple there who were the proper grown ups with a proper house and a proper mortgage.

Their house is built in the 1960s chalet style, a type of architecture based on bringing as much light into a space as possible. They have the most beautiful sitting room which takes up the whole of the first floor of the house. Stunning lime green light poured in from the outside through floor-to-ceiling windows.

The only drawback, it seems, to living in the commuter belt seems to be having busy-body neighbours who complain about the sound you make when you walk up and down flights of stairs, and the type of washing line you have in the garden. Apparently all this stuff needs to be "Street approved." I just don't think I'd be able to deal politely with that sort of thing. Life is definitely too short. I may have to stay in London for a few years yet. Mortgage or no mortgage!