Solar flares

I'm at Julie and Sam's house in Catford doing very little, really. Julie and I have been going over music for the recording sessions we've got coming up over the next month and we're catching up on general news.

I'm in slight denial about how much work I've got to do from now until the end of June. I always knew that the start of April would mark my getting onto a merry-go-round which could end up spinning so fast that I turn into a gibbering wreckage. Now that the ride's arrived, I guess I just have to take a deep breath and jump on! 

This evening we've had a lovely stir fry, a heap of éclairs (Juli'eclairs), copious cups of tea and two crumpets.  Nathan and Julie are knitting and we're sitting under blankets watching a terrible disaster movie about solar flares. What else is a bank holiday Monday for? 

What I really want is a plate of grilled halloumi, but you don't get many Greek shops in the South East of London. I should probably think about going to bed at some point as well. 

I woke up this morning to discover that someone had donated £200 to the Four Colours fund, which takes us to within £65 of our initial target. At first I thought it was an April Fool, but the money still seems to be there, which makes me very excited. 

Our second target is to raise £500 at our music quiz on April 27th, which feels a little optimistic based on the rather small numbers of people who have so far confirmed that they're coming, but I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed. We'll have great fun whatever happens! 

Dachshunds

Easter Day, and we're still in Thaxted, sitting in front of an open fire, putting the world to rights.

We've talked about the BBC, Eurovision, my career and now we've moved onto education. We're in complete agreement that Michael Gove is not just a complete tit, but a complete tit with a dangerous Hitler complex. It's time for teachers to put their collective foot down and stop him before he starts doing experiments on dwarves.

The best Eurovision song by far this year is the Dutch entry; a haunting, quirky little piece sung by a woman called Anouk, which is called Birds. It includes the intriguing lyric "birds falling down the roof tops, out of the sky like rain drops" which I find rather alluring for some reason. You can hear it here.

I have made my first ever actual bet on the contest this year. £20 on Russia (at 16:1) to win. Russia's song this year is all about coming together and supporting one another, which feels hugely ironic in the light of the way they treat gay people over there. I don't want the song to win in the slightest; I just think it will, and if it does, I want the proceeds to go straight to the Four Colours project. Homophobic twats.

We've been looking through my mother's dachshund calendar. She adores dachshunds but doesn't deal very well with photographs which make them look deformed (or more deformed than they already do.) She has, for some time, doctored pictures of ugly dachshunds on calenders to make them look more appealing. This month's animals had necks which she considered to be too long, so she's tried to make collars for them. The results are extraordinary! 

Easter nests

It's Easter Saturday, and I'm in Thaxted watching Doctor Who. We've just been to the local pub for a spot of grub - stuffed mushrooms and a veggie burger - and I feel like a fat banger. 

I spent some of the afternoon creating a little Easter basket for the centre of the dinner table tomorrow. It's very much an ode to my Grandmother, who would have been 100 this year. Grannie was unique, pretty much in every respect. Everyone else gave us shop bought eggs for Easter, but she crafted little nests out of margarine pots and straw, filled them with Cadbury's Cream Eggs and little yellow fluffy toy chicks, and hid them in the garden for us to find. It was magical.

I'm on a bit of a nostalgia-fest at the moment and find myself regularly drifting off into the relative safety of childhood memories. I think, at heart, I'm something of a Luddite and find myself uncomfortable with the speed that the world is turning around me at the moment. In short, I long for simpler times. 

I think a lack of children is possibly complicating the issue, because I don't really have anyone to share these special memories with. Sometimes I think it would be rather lovely to build an advent crown with someone who hasn't been polluted by technology or jaded by complacency or cynicism. 

We take so much for granted these days - good health, relative wealth, knowledge, freedom to express ourselves - that sometimes I think we've lost that sense of magic and awe, in favour of what we know can be downloaded straight into our minds at the flick of a switch. 

I am determined to reboot my brain to allow some of the magic back in. From henceforth, I shall build Easter nests and advent crowns. I shall wander across misty moors, hunt for ghosts and sit by open fires toasting marsh mallows, and any of my friends are welcome to join me.  I need it. I genuinely need to reboot.

There! That's filled a gaping gap. 

Brixworth Church

Today I got an opportunity to meet Ian Knauer's Mum, Sheila. She's an absolutely charming woman, but I found myself being constantly surprised by her English accent. Ian seems so American, that it feels a little odd to think of him as half-British, but that is, after all, the reason why he's allowed to live here with Jem. They'd be unable to live as a couple in the States or Australia which is as good a reason as any to be proud to be British!

More curiously, Ian's mother hails from Northamptonshire, up near Pitsford Reservoir, so we were able to talk about familiar landmarks including Brixworth church, which I've long considered to be the most eerie place in the UK. Every time I've walked into the churchyard there, my legs have felt really heavy and my head has started spinning. 

We once had a very good-natured dog who point blank refused to enter the place; all the hackles went up on the back of her neck and she started growling. The poor creature was terrified.  

When I was 18, I travelled there with a university friend on a hot summer's evening. We decided to go for a walk as the sun was sinking in the sky, but as we crossed the stile out of graveyard, we could hear the sound of a fox hunt - bugles blowing and hounds barking - being carried to us on the breeze. "It's not the hunting season, is it?" asked my friend, "I don't know," I replied, "I'm not up on that sort of thing, but I'm surprised they're still rushing about at sunset..."

We went for a charming and lengthy walk down to the bottom of the hill, and returned to the churchyard after dark. As we arrived at the stile, we heard the very same fox-hunting sound, once again being carried on the breeze. Crazy or what?

I took Sheila with Ian and Jem to the pergola on Hampstead Heath, but, for the first time in my life, found it closed; health and safety reasons, because of the snow and ice. It annoyed me intensely, but we got to look at it from the outside, and everyone seemed suitably impressed. 

I then took them to look at the view over London from above the Vale of Health, which I consider to be one of the finest in the city. An enormous fair had been set up on the bridle way there, which looked a little pathetic. A few children were wondering about aimlessly with little bags of candy floss. There are no houses anywhere in the vicinity and I can't imagine how anyone would know it was there, or be bothered to walk to it from other parts of London. It's hardly going to appeal to the dog walkers and cruisers who normally hang around up there! 

We had lunch at the Flask in Highgate, and it was only at this point that I realised today is a bank holiday. Ah! The life of a freelancer!

I'm reliably informed that it is Good Friday, which is the day when this bloke called Jesus, who shares his birthday with Annie Lennox, got nailed to a tree. Well that's what Tim Rice told me, anyway. Mind you, he also told me that Evita Peron was a saint rather than a crypto-fascist, so maybe I should downgrade his oracle status. 

My Mum used to tell me that the sun always goes behind a cloud at 3pm on a Good Friday and I always forget to check. It was quite sunny this morning, and indeed this evening, when Ali Pali from my sitting room window was glowing so majestically that I immediately tweeted the world to tell anyone who could potentially see it to rush to a place where they could. Anyway, the point of that ridiculously long sentence was to suggest that it was indeed rather overcast this afternoon, so God's plainly embraced the concept of time zones. 

Nathan is currently learning Sherry by the Four Seasons for a gig tomorrow. My Mum would be in 7th Heaven, but it's always been one of my least favourite songs. All that shrieking in falsetto. Nasty.  

Tired eyes

It's been another day of writing music, another day spent staring at manuscript paper with my tired eyes itching. I now have the barebones of four songs for the White City project, which is not bad going, I suppose. 

I'm not sure I have a great deal more to write about. I went to the gym and skipped about whilst the pumped-up steroid-popping regulars grunted and gasped in the free-weights room.   When the same men gather in the steam room after their work-outs, all they seem to be able to talk about is drinking beer and watching sport. There's nothing like a stereotype! Do straight blokes genuinely like these kind of discussions, or do they have them simply because they feel they OUGHT to? 

  

The pennies continue to roll into the Four Colours charity recording pot. It's more of a trickle than a roll, especially when I compare our pathetic search for £1000 against the marvellous Bitter Ruin, who reached their enormous target of £20k for their next album in just 15 hours. Amazing for them and much deserved, but it just goes to show how little known The Rebel Chorus is in the big wide world. I wish I were the sort of person who knew how to schmooze! Maybe I should plan some notorious political crime and get myself sent to prison for a few years. That's enough time to write a pretty decent symphony, I reckon.  

If anyone reading this blog suddenly thinks, "oh, I was meaning to sling that lovely charity  project a crafty fiver", it's still not too late. 

http://wefund.com/project/four-colours/p57229. 

Or just go to www.wefund.com and search for Four Colours; the name of the EP we're recording. 

We've got about three hundred pounds left to raise, so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Ian Drury

I went to bed feeling pretty lousy last night. I think the massage drew all sorts of toxins out of my system and I fell asleep genuinely wondering if I was going to see the dawn!

I woke up instead feeling refreshed and, for the first time in an age, without pains in my shoulders. If only I could afford more regular massages. I think my generation is getting to that stage now, where we can't take our health for granted any more. 

I worked in the cafe all morning, listening, with one ear, to the Highgate  mummies and their First World crises. One was really worried today about the lack of nuts in her porridge, and a few days ago I was party to a hellish conversation: After asking for her sandwich to come "deconstructed", one woman said to her friend; "Daisy-May's just bought an iPad!" "Really?" said the other one, "Tilly's not allowed to buy anything. She's just bought herself a horse."

I mean, Jesus Christ...

I wrote a song for the White City film this afternoon seemingly via a process of osmosis. A lot of these songs seem to be writing themselves, which either means I'm entering some kind of Imperial period, or that I'm simply coming up with a load of absolute rubbish. I cried my eyes out after singing it through, which is about the only gage I have that I've written from the heart. Vital for me. 

Mind you, I cry at everything these days...

Today's song was about Frank, who wants to sing a love song to his partner of 40 years. Tomorrow will find me diving into the back catalogue of Ian Drury to find inspiration for a song about epilepsy! Sometimes my life feels really rather surreal! 

Massage

You must excuse me if this blog entry makes little or no sense. I've just spent the last hour being massaged, and I feel like a big floaty, floppy, dreamy, soggy, spinny mess. 

The set of stairs which leads up to our front door has recently become perilous. The weekend's snow has turned into glass-like ice, which is almost impossible to walk on. I mention it here because making my way up them in my present state was about as silly as going for a dip in a piranha-infested river. 

I drove to the massage; it's only round the corner, but a fifteen-minute walk afterwards could well unstitch all the good work. What I need is a bath and a good sleep. 

As I motored down Muswell Hill Road, a very silly woman ran across the street in front of me. It's fairly typical London behaviour. We're all guilty of doing it sometimes; the car's not driving fast and you assume that its driver won't want to run you over and will put his foot on the brake accordingly. A lot of Londoners aren't drivers, however, so the split-second decisions they make in this regard are potentially costly. Particularly when it's dark and icy. I very nearly hit her because the car wheels skidded as I slammed the brakes on. The car behind me was also forced to brake suddenly as a result of her pavement-to-pavement dash. The pedestrian gave me such a dirty look, so much that I really wanted to get out and give her a lecture on stopping distances in icy conditions, but decided I didn't want to be worked up for the massage. It was deeply irresponsible behaviour on her part, however, and I hope she learnt something from the episode I've half a mind to strip her of her cycling proficiency badge, although, quite frankly, I'd be happier if someone taught her that bubble perms belong to, and should remain at all times, in the 80s!

Abbie came over today and we recorded a demo vocal of Four Colours for our soloist to use as a learning tool. Abbie sang beautifully and we nailed the tracks in about an hour. 

I heard today that an amateur choir in York are planning to perform Yellow in July. This makes me feel very happy indeed. It's a work which deserves to take off. Particularly with its history. 

The rest of the day has been spent working on the White City project, composing music for Norma's song, which is about fostering children. I defy anyone to remain dry-eyed through this one. Norma is one of life's saints, and the song is literally writing itself. I mean figuratively writing itself. I'm holding the pen. I think.