From Here to Eternity

I went to the old people's film club on the Uxbridge Road this afternoon to watch a screening of Tales of the White City. It was a moving experience to watch my piece alongside several of its "stars" plus about 40 other local people.

The film club is a very special enterprise. Pensioners from White City and Shepherd's Bush turn up every Monday lunchtime for a lovely buffet and a two-hour film programme projected on a large screen. My piece was followed by a Marx Brothers film.

It was standing room only today. The group meets at vicar Bob's church hall. Bob, of course, features prominently in the film singing about his struggle with epilepsy. I'd visited the group in late February in the process of recruiting people to take part. We played 100 Faces and Songs From Hattersley and a number of key people came forward as a result.

Bob stood up  today and spoke passionately to the group. The poor bloke has had another seizure whilst out jogging and was sporting the most horrendous tick-shaped gash on his forehead. He said the words to his song were going through his head throughout the ordeal. He's always said how important he feels it is to use the misery of his condition for the greater good. He spoke to the group today about the importance of asking for help, be it from friends, religious leaders or professionals, proudly announcing that he'd decided to go to see a counsellor to help him to come to terms with his epilepsy, which I thought was incredibly brave. He spoke honestly and openly and had the group in the palm of his hand. He's obviously a very fine vicar. 

There were sighs and laughs all the way through the film itself. I'm not sure the crowd would have been able to hear every word as the hall has a very odd acoustic which rather swallows up dialogue, but there were certainly plenty of coos of recognition as people noticed obscure corners of the estate which had significance to them, and friends and family members who they hadn't realised had also been a part of the film. 

My films might not reach the largest audiences in the world, but they certainly seem to touch those they do. I felt very proud. And anyone wanting to see Tales of the White City can do so here:

I spent the afternoon working in a cafe in Soho and then went with Nathan to see the first preview of From Here to Eternity, Tim Rice's new musical about the WW2 attack on Pearl Harbour. I was pleasantly surprised. The music was sumptuous and beautifully orchestrated and the performances were strong across the board. It could do with a little trim in act 2, and one of the story threads in act 1 seemed somewhat confusing, but I'm sure all of that will be sorted before the press night. 

I personally think we should be celebrating anything modern and British in the field of musical theatre particularly something which has had a bit of money thrown at it in the shape of a large pit orchestra, a big ensemble of actors and some good-looking sets. It was brave and it was dignified. Congratulations Messrs Rice and Brayson.

In the interval, I overheard two ghastly old theatre queens laying into the show. "Yes, that actor needs to get himself to the gym, doesn't he?Yes, it was really dull wasn't it? What was it that the stage manager you met said about the show? That's right, from here to February! Pnah, Pnah, Pnah..." Mincey, mincey, gay, gay. On and on they went, and I thought, "come on, you nasty homs, this is the interval of this show's first preview performance. How DARE you take great delight in the concept of any theatre piece closing after a four-month run. People have worked incredibly hard to bring it to the stage. It might not be your cup of tea, but don't hope for failure, because if it DOES fail, it will signify another nail in the coffin of the British musical theatre industry and in no time at all there won't be any shows in the West End left for you to slag off, you rancid turd." That's what I thought... And I wished I'd said it to him, and then bitch-slapped him across his fake-tanned face. I hate arm chair critics. I just hope he paid for a full-price ticket! I half expected to see him in the little drinks reception afterward telling Tim Rice what a smash hit he'd written! 

And anyone 

Coming back to earth

We went to the Museum of the Great War in Peronne today. It was informative and clean and in the stunning setting of a castle by a lake  but I've known better museums. I had a strong sense that the place was determined to tell me the story of the war from the perspective of the French, which, particularly in the room dedicated to the Battle of the Somme (where French losses were relatively light) felt a little insulting, particularly when we consider that quite a lot of bloodshed was brought about by French military decisions. It was the French, for example, who insisted the offensive happened in broad daylight. Yeah, yeah, shoot me down, I've developed the true mentality of a Brit abroad. Next I'll be donning a pair of stillies and asking Nathan to hold my hair whilst I vomit. 

Peronne itself is a charming enough town with a lovely market place and a smattering of shops, all of which were closed because today is a Sunday. Yawn. That said, Picardy seems to be empty most of the time. The shops close at any opportunity and, with the exception of Amiens which was buzzing, there never seems to be anyone wandering about in the streets give or take the odd old lady holding an obligatory French stick. It would seem that this is one French cliche which was born out of absolute truth! They also serve frogs legs and snails in the restaurants. I thought this would prove to be another myth. That said, I've not yet seen a French person actually eating any of that crap, and wonder if they fill the menus with these "delicacies" so that they can laugh at the silly tourists who want to do things the Gallic way! 

From Peronne we travelled north-west to Arras, one of those French towns with a name that makes you shudder. Those Pals who survived The Somme ended up here, where they were subjected to another absolute blood bath in the great battle of 1917. The object of our stop in this particular town was really just to have a spot of lunch in a pleasant environment, and we sat in a lovely square eating an omelette. I have, as ever, struggled to find vegetarian food here. In fact, I've struggled to find anything which isn't hugely rich. They love their butter and cream and I'm craving simple, rather plain food like soup and pastas.

The weather has been fabulous every single day. The forecasts have always told us to expect rain in one way or another, but, apart from the gloriously misty mornings, we've had nothing but sunshine and powder blue skies. 

We treated ourselves to patisseries from a shop just behind the square in Arras. I had a rather disappointing eclair whilst the others went for more adventurous-sounding things with totally unpronounceable names. 

We ate them at Calais whilst waiting for the ferry to arrive. An uneventful ride across the channel brought us safely home to the UK, and, as ever, I was stirred by the sight of the White Cliffs of Dover. I'm sure most of the First World War "Tommies" returned home via Southampton, but there's something so romantic and welcoming about these particular cliffs. They do welcome the Brits home rather brilliantly. 

So what have I learned from my magical trip to Flanders? Well, I now know there's an artistic community who farm an area of marshland in Amiens. I know how to play bar billiards on account of a brilliant games corner in our hotel bar. I know that British soldiers carved their names on church walls in the villages where they were billeted. We've learned that shell holes weren't always used for killing purposes, but often used as a form of defence and protection (particularly when attacking up hill.) 

I've driven through villages like Corbie where my heroes Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon penned some of their finest poems. I've heard ghostly sounds being carried through electric fences and gusts of wind. I've walked into no-man's-land and stood in shell holes and trenches. I've explored man-made tunnels and recorded the sounds of bells tolling, trees whispering and cathedrals weeping. I can safely say I would never have expected to see, experience, feel and learn so much in such a short period of time, and return to England absolutely ready to write a very fine musical! Wish me luck! 

Nessun dorma

It's been another magical day, much of which was spent in the glorious city of Amiens, the capital of the Picardy Region of France. Amiens was a strategic place in both world wars, and as a result was damaged very badly. Twice. For most of the First World war it was tucked firmly behind the front line, miles away from the danger zone. It was however, hugely significant as the place where trains bringing Allied soldiers to the front lines terminated. Nearly all British soldiers passed through Amiens.

There are hundreds of accounts of the city buzzing with soldiers from all over the world, all trying to buy war souvenirs from locals lads determined to make a fast buck, many asleep under the trees in the Cathedral square. The cathedral itself was a Mecca for soldiers arriving at the front for the first time. Some had never seen a building so impressive. It remains one of the largest Cathedrals in the world. After nightfall Amiens' dark streets were lined with dodgy taverns and  good time girls all ready to offer a sex and booze-starved soldier the chance to spend his King's shilling. 

We headed straight for the cathedral, a hugely impressive place, which was made a little more atmospheric by a British chorus practising for a concert this evening. Elgar and Faure buzzed around the building, drifted to the roof and floated down to the floor a few seconds later, creating the most remarkable tonal clashes. 

From the cathedral we disappeared into the Medieval Quarter, which is a network of ramshackle buildings and bridges climbing over and clinging to tiny canals which flow into the infamous River Somme.

We took a hugely eccentric excursion into the "Hortillonnages," which can only be described as a series of allotments floating on marshland. A chirpy local took us through a network of tiny river channels on an electric punt.  We floated past hundreds of gardens 

lined with the brightest flowers and the biggest vegetable patches. I have seldom seen such large pumpkins! The place is filled with wildlife. We saw kingfishers, herons, cormorants and scores of butterflies. I'm genuinely not doing the place justice. The experience was deeply calming and green, oh so green. 

We came back to the hotel and Nathan and I went on a little adventure to find Bus-L'es-Artois, the village just north of Albert where the Leeds Pals were billeted in the weeks before they went over the top. I'm not sure what I was expecting from the place. A few old buildings. A little monument to the Pals which I knew had been erected somewhere in the village...

We headed for the church. I'm not quite sure what prompted us to walk around the back - sometimes, it seems, I have a homing instinct for these sorts of things - but we found, scrawled into the walls, ancient graffiti, most of which was in English and marked with that magical date, 1916. Some of the graffiti listed a name and a regiment. Some names were simply marked with the letters "RIP."

As we emerged, somewhat stunned, from the churchyard, a man appeared from the house opposite and came running over. He didn't speak a word of English. We have a pitifully small French vocabulary. We asked him where the Pals memorial was. He told us it was down the road on the tiny village green. We explained that we had a great interest in the Leeds Pals. He asked if we had five minutes and indicated for us to follow him into his house. He led us through the front room, past his wife and a son and a strange yappy dog who tried to jump into my arms and into the garden where he unlocked a little shed. 

...And what magic met us inside. At first glance I saw that the walls were lined with hundreds of shell cases, machine gun magazines and curious pieces of rusty metal no doubt dug out of local fields... But then my eyes became accustomed to the place. There were tins everyone. The first that caught my eye was a large Tate and Lyles golden syrup jar on a shelf with an empty pot of Mackintosh toffees and load of biscuit boxes. There were cigarette tins, porcelain jars, empty Guiness bottles, Sheffield-made spoons, forks and knives, empty mess tins and little pill boxes. These were the little things which the Pals had left behind. No more than bits of rubbish to them, but of deep significance to me. I felt so privileged to be picking them up, running the objects through my fingers and trying to feel their energy. 

We left the little shed almost shaking. The man asked if we'd like to see something else and we followed him like love-struck puppies. 

He led us next door and opened the door to an enormous barn. "Dormir" he said, "Leeds Pals dormir." And there it was, the place where some of the Leeds Pals had slept 100 years before, and it had plainly barely changed. A hayloft, ancient wooden beams, ladders and barrels against the walls, straw on the floor. 

This felt like the most important by far of all the sites I've had the pleasure of visiting over the last few days. For the first time I'd made a truly human connection; a connection which felt every bit as momentous as the time I got to hold Pepys' diary at Magdalene College in Cambridge. The experience of standing in that barn this evening will never leave me. 

As the sun set, we drove back to Serre to say goodbye to the Pals and my Great Uncle. We walked into the field behind cemetery number 3, the spot where the Pals clambered into no-man's-land, and we watched the sky darken. Crows and starlings flew around. Lights on a distant wind farm flashed and twinkled. The occasional sound of a gun, or perhaps a bird-scarer, echoed from the dark trees, and then, as we re-entered Queen's cemetery, a curious sound was carried to us on the air. The sound was like a blast of heavy gun fire. Neither of us could work out where it had come from. It wasn't so loud that we ran screaming from the spot, but it was significant enough for us both to say "what the hell was that?" Perhaps it was an ancient memory. A time slip. An endless echo of the incomparable din of the Somme. 

At the same time the sound of very distance traffic (I think) sent a pitched whistle to me on the breeze; an A. A few seconds later I heard a C... The start of an A minor chord. For a few perfect, magical seconds, the two notes oscillated and then sounded briefly together. I would be utterly foolish not to use what nature delivered to me in such an awe-inspiring package, so watch out for a sequence in A minor! 

As we left Serre, Nathan called out to the men lying in the graveyard that I was going to honour them with some very beautiful music. Gosh, I hope he's right... 

Ghosts

Today started with the Simpsons in French! I switched the telly on very briefly whilst waiting for Nathan to shower and was highly amused to hear a passable impression of Madge - chronic nodules and all - Speaking French! 

I looked out of the window and saw that it was surprisingly misty, which felt so appropriate that I began to get impatient to leave the hotel before the sun burnt through.

We went first to a place called Lochnager Crater, an enormous shell hole, just East of Albert, which was created by the Brits two minutes before they charged over the top on July 1st. The explosion was the work of British miners who carefully tunnelled underneath the German front line, and detonated a tonne of explosives. At the time it was the loudest sound ever created by mankind and it blew the Germans to kingdom come. 

The men going over the top in that area were the Grimsby chums, who have the distinction of being the only Pals regiment to use a different suffix. They reached the enormous shell hole and dived inside for cover, in the process becoming sitting ducks for friendly fire. Like many other Pals battalions, they were more than decimated in just a few hours. 

The place looked sad and desolate in the mist. We parked next to an enormous pile of turnips. The farmers here tend to trustingly leave their root vegetable crops by the sides of roads. Since arriving here we've seen countless heaps of turnips and potatoes. 

Perhaps it was the weather - the mist, the watery sun - but this was the first place we've seen in France which seemed to buzz with an atmosphere. It was felt almost heavy with sadness, a sort of hopeless anger, which 100 years hasn't quite dissipated. Inside the crater, thousands of paper poppy leaves flapped in the early morning breeze, tossed in over the years, no doubt, by relatives of the hundreds of men who died here. 

If anything the mist became more intense as we drove along the single track roads towards the village of Serre. It was like some kind of dream sequence; a half-world of ghosts and daemons. Periodically a grey shape would loom out of the whiteness. Sometimes it would reveal itself as a monument or the tall cross of a British cemetery. Other times a farm building would appear instead. Here a tractor. There a car. The spiky maize crops which fill most of the flanders fields flashed past in silhouette on both sides of the road. 

Serre is the reason I'm here. This is where the majority of Pals regiments, including my men from Leeds, went over the top on 1st July, 1916. I'd studied the maps. I knew where their front line trench was. I knew what it looked like in 1916. I'd imagined what it might look like in 2013. As we parked up outside Serre cemetery number 2, and walked up the footpath towards the 3rd cemetery (where the Pals went "over the lid") all that remained was for me to process all the information I'd consumed and relate it to the bleached-out landscape which was confronting me. 

Standing on the edge of a field, staring up the hill towards the village of Serre (their destination on that fateful day) it immediately became clear that they didn't stand a hope in hell. You don't need to be a First World War general to realise it's absolutely nonsensical to attack up hill. My father became hugely angry. My mother became sad. Nathan experienced horror. I felt a mixture of all of the above. 

In a wood, which used to be four copses named after the apostles, there's a memorial park to all of the Pals battalions, many of whom were stationed in this part of the front line. The Accrington Pals have an enormous monument. The Sheffield Pals have a brick-built shed-like structure. The Barnsley Pals and the Bradford Pals are both represented with plaques, but no monument to the Leeds Pals exists. This makes me angry. Hugely angry. And it's something I WILL change if I achieve nothing else in my life. 

I took myself to the Queen's cemetery, a tiny little English cemetery in the middle of what would have been no-man's-land. It is here that Lieutenant Morris Bickersteth is buried, one of my favourite Pals, if such a thing is possible. Bickersteth kept a diary and wrote many letters to his parents, so it is through him that I have learned much about the way things were. I stood at his grave and read the letter he wrote to his parents "in the event of his death." In the letter he tells them that he doesn't fear death and that he'd be waiting for them and loving them as they read his letter. My mother cried. 

I sat on a bench and stared at a spider's web covered in a thousand tiny droplets of dew, which looked like beautiful jewels. Jewels, I guess, which mirrored the tears dripping down my cheeks.

As we drifted around, we'd periodically find ourselves in the middle of a guided tour, usually a British school group. One hears all sorts of snippets of conversation in these instances. Standing in the beautiful Luke Copse cemetery, for example, we heard the story of a group of Pals who'd been dug up and reinterred in one of the official cemeteries. When they were uncovered, it was discovered they'd been buried arm in arm; a whole group of men. Pals in both life and death.  

A curious thing happened at Serre cemetery number two. I'd taken the family in to see the graves of some more of the Leeds Pals. My Dad disappeared for a while to commune with the graves of men from the Warwickshire Regiment. My Dad is Warwickshire through and through (with the exception of a large dose of Welshness) and walked through the graves looking for people with familial names he recognised. 

Curiously, on our way through Northern France yesterday, my mother had turned to my Dad and asked him if he'd had a chance to look up one William Mabberley on the online army records. My dad had forgotten about it, but it seems my mother's Great Uncle, who was never really spoken about, had been in the army and was posted to India just before the First World War. The assumption was that he'd probably died during the course of the First World War. Mabberley is, of course, a somewhat unusual name.

Imagine our shock, therefore, when my father found the grave of a W Mabberley in one corner of the cemetery. He was part of the Warwickshire regiment. Surely, it wasn't possibly that we'd stumbled upon my mother's Great Uncle purely by chance? 

We typed W Mabberley into a military graves website search engine and were rather surprised to discover that only one W Mabberley had been killed in the First World War. He was, indeed, buried in Serre Cemetery Number Two, and the W stood for William. With the Warwickshire link, it is almost tantalisingly conceivable that this grave, which we found purely by chance, in one of many thousands of British cemeteries, could belong to my Great Great Uncle. How astonishing is that?

From Serre we travelled to Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland memorial. This is the spot where a huge number of Canadian troops lost their lives on July 1st, 1916. The trenches have been left almost exactly as they were during the war. Nature has taken her course, of course. The barbed wire and war detritus has long since decayed or been removed and the trenches themselves are now covered in grass. Yellow and cream butterflies drift in pairs across no-man's-land, birds sing charming songs from the poplar trees. It's all rather tranquil, but there's a strange kind of electricity floating around the place. My mother commented on it first. It gave her a strong sense of being at one with the universe. It made me want to cry! 

What has struck us all is the complete, or seeming complete lack of German war graves. They must be somewhere. Millions of Germans died in France. They were all given decent burials. There must have been huge numbers of relatives wanting to see their loved ones, but where did they go? Where DO they go? Where are their loved ones buried?  

After lunch we took ourselves to the Thiepval Memorial, which is to men who were registered missing during the Battle of the Somme. 72,000 men were never found. That's 72,000 men whose relatives waited in vain for their return. 

We watched a little film in the associated visitors' centre and they showed a roll call of photos of some of the men who never returned. Their images were accompanied by Elgar's Nimrod. Perhaps it was the music - when I hear Nimrod I instantly feel sad at the thought that I'll probably never  be able to write music of such astonishing beauty - but I think seeing the actual faces of those who went to war and simply disappeared  had a very profound effect on me. You could see their characters; the jokers, the intellectuals, the artistic ones. Men who, like our friend Ali's Great Grandfather, Richard Snodgrass, never fulfilled their potential. 

Back at the hotel, Nathan created mayhem with a group of Dutch tourists by knitting his Sanquhar scarf on the terrace. Surprisingly for Dutch people they couldn't speak a word of English, but they knew good knitting when they saw it, and everyone wanted to have their photo taken with him.. And it! 

We went into Albert for supper and found the place almost deserted. And on a Friday night? Where do the good folk of this town go of an evening? Plainly the answer is "somewhere else"! Perhaps they're all ghosts! 

French letters

Today has been an extraordinary day, which started in North London and seems to have ended in a little market town in Picardy called Albert. 

It's been a day of beautiful weather. A day of ambitions fulfilled, wonderful food and heart-stopping sights.

The trip down to Dover was surprisingly uneventful. We picked the parents up from Liverpool Street, just as the City was turning from an eerie ghost town into a hustling, thrusting, get-out-of-my-waying money making machine. 

We had hot chocolate at Medway services and literally sailed straight onto the ferry, just as the sun burst through the clouds. 

Full marks to the P & O staff who went out of their way to help my Mother in her quest to find a watch she'd fallen in love with which had a lovely blue strap but didn't seem to be in stock. It's a long story, but  it ended with the manager of the duty free shop searching the ferry to find my mother to tell her, if she wanted it, she could have the display model. That kind of customer service requires big thanks and I spent ages filling in a form with the suggestion that all the members of staff be given bonuses!

As we drifted into Calais, we were lucky enough to catch an impromptu performance (in the Horizon Lounge) of a Kent-based barber shop choir on their way to some kind of festival in Holland. They sang three cheery numbers and were really very good. As I stood watching them, their faces filled with an absolute love for singing, I thought what a pleasant start to the holiday we'd had.

We blasted through northern France and within seconds were picking up signs for some of the places whose names would turn the most healthy heart to stone. Bethune. Arras. Amentieres. The site of indescribably awful battles. 

Our first stop was Vimy Ridge. I'd been there before, with Fiona, funnily enough the day before I met Nathan. I was surprised at how little I remembered...

I think we were all shocked at our first sight of shell craters. 100 years on. Covered in grass and grazing sheep and healthy-looking trees, but so very obviously a scene of absolutely carnage and devastation. An autumn breeze rustled the trees. The trees murmured tales; rumours even they didn't want to acknowledge. 

At the top of the hill, an enormous,  gleaming white monument stretched into the powder blue sky, so brilliantly white that it made my eyes ache in the bright sun. It is a monument to the 60,000 Canadians who lost their lives in the war. A monument to a country which was somehow born in the conflict. We stood at the top of the ridge and stared out towards Belgium. The horizon was lined with triangular slag heaps.

Human beings will never be able to walk through those forests again. There are still too many unexploded bombs nestling just under the surface . Sheep wander through the trees, munching at the lime green grass, tidying up the mess that man created but is too frightened to reverse.

Electric fences keep us out. Modern day barbed wire. I sat for some time listening to the sound of electricity passing through one particular section of fence. It was a spooky, barely audible rat-a-tatting. A distant sound, like something far away being carried towards me on a mysterious breeze. The sound suddenly sent a shiver through my body. It frightened me and I couldn't work out why until I realised that the noise I was hearing could easily have been the ghostly whisper of First World War machine gun fire. 

We took one of the official tours of the site which are provided by a gaggle of energetic Canadian university students. They're free and hugely informative and include a trip into some of the highly atmospheric tunnels underneath the battle field, which were dug by Welsh miners as a means of transporting troops, providing a safe haven during bombardment and as a starting point for much deeper tunnels underneath the German front line which were filled with bombs and exploded to devastating effect. 

We then had an opportunity to look at some reconstructed trenches in a section of the battlefield where no-man's-land was only 20 meters wide. It was stirring stuff, but, perhaps because the battle was considered successful for the allies, and perhaps because the entire site had been reconstructed, I didn't feel overcome with any sense of atmosphere. The place felt very much  at peace with itself. 

We left Vimy, headed further south, came off the motorway, circled around Bapaume and started heading along the B roads to Albert. And here the scores of cemeteries started appearing. Most of them are surrounded by carefully topiered  hedges and filled with standard issue white headstones in neat little rows. There are staggeringly large numbers of them. Every one made me shudder. 

Here and there, by the side of the road, patches of pock-marked grass remind us where we are. Brown signs read "ligne de front" (line of the front) and give the dates when the Allied front line occupied a particular area of land. The most devastating sign for me was the one which read "ligne de front, 1er Juli 1916", the day the Pals died...

We checked into our hotel, which has an enormous statue of a British soldier outside, labelled "Le Tommie." You can buy all sorts of ghastly things inside, including a snow globe featuring a young British soldier going over the top. The relationship between tourism and horror is a peculiar one! 

We had food in Albert and sat outside a cafe in a beautiful square watched over by the famous golden statue of the Madonna and child which sits on top of the tall church tower. As it got darker, the flood lighting made the statue appear to glow more and more until it began to resemble some kind of heavenly golden angel in the night sky. And you can see her for miles...

And then it occurred to me... This was the very statue which greeted the Pals as they marched into the war zone for the first time. Albert was the first town they encountered which had been badly damaged. There are accounts of them coming across an old clothing factory, covered in broken sewing machines and seeing the church for the first time, which was something of a legend to all First World War soldiers. A shell had dislodged the statue of the Madonna and child and left it hanging at a 45 degree angle from the top of the tower, almost as though Mary were flinging the baby Jesus at the ruined town below. As the war progressed, the statue seemed to hang at an increasingly  gravity-defying angle and a myth built up that when the statue finally fell, the war would end. And to my knowledge, this is exactly what happened! 

Gay Dunkers

I had a meeting this morning at the Musicians Union. Fiona and I are both members of the writers' committee, which means, periodically, we attend events, which involve a group of us sitting around an enormous table whinging about the music business and occasionally cracking inappropriate jokes. The inappropriate jokes are almost exclusively my terrain. Things just pour out of my mouth. Heaven help me when I'm old. Today, for example, an old timer was talking excitedly about an accordion recital. My mind thought, "that sounds a bit dull, I wonder how she made it so exciting?" My mouth said, "was she performing naked?"  Out of the blue. Just like that. Mortifying. 

In my defence I was actually recovering from the shock of eating meat for the first time in my life. A number of boxes of sandwiches and wraps arrived for our lunch and I overheard someone pointing at a box and saying, "the veggie ones are all here..." I chose one at random from the box and ate it without thinking anything apart from that it tasted a bit smoky and weird. At the same time a group of us were discussing how long we'd been vegetarian and I was proudly saying that I'd converted to the dark side in 1982. I realised with horror that it was only the wraps with little green flags sticking out of them that were veggie and that I'd been chowing down on some kind of smoked pig. I laughed it off, of course, saying that I felt like a new man, but secretly I felt sick and sad and my tummy immediately started looping the loop.  

En route to the meeting (which was in Oval) Fiona and I noticed a circular, very tall building on the horizon which neither of us had ever seen before! It's astonishing that a building could suddenly appear which two, generally observant people, would fail to notice going up. After much conversation we decided it was the lighthouse-shaped building in Vauxhall, the one which the helicopter collided into in fog a year or so ago. I'm used to seeing it from the river, which provides a very different vista. I plainly don't venture into the south very often! 

This evening I went to BAFTA to see Carol and Julie's rehearsed reading. Their organisation sets out to promote the work of black and Asian writers in film and television and they do so with great aplomb. I wondered why there wasn't something similar for LGBT people but then remembered that it's the norm to be gay in the Arts! 

Sloppy gussets

I woke up and looked out of the sitting room window to find London in thick fog. Visibility in Highgate couldn't have been more than a couple of metres. It all looked rather romantic. 

Gasping for a cup of tea, I drove up the M1 towards Northampton. The sun was threatening to burn through the mist at every stage of the journey but by the time I'd reached my destination she was still struggling to be seen. 

I walked across Midsommer Common in an autumnal haze, listening to Lana Del Ray. One of the canal boats on the river obviously had a wood-burning stove, because the sweet smell of wood smoke was filling the air so that you couldn't tell where the swirling mist ended and the smoke began. 

The interview with Bernie Keith on Radio Northampton went very well. I was thrilled that he played both Yellow and Blue from the EP - in full - and we must have chatted for a good fifteen minutes. He's very easy to talk to. Very well informed. And he encouraged me to talk about some of my childhood experiences in the county. I found myself recalling a rather traumatic encounter with a group of teenaged lads from when I was about 7 or 8. I'd gone down our little lane on a pair of roller skates, fallen over and grazed my knee. A group of lads, they were probably 15 or 16, came and stood in a circle around me and took it in turns to spit at me and call me gay. I went home feeling reserved. I wanted to tell my parents what had happened, but was sacred that somehow if I acknowledged the cause of the name calling, they might tell me to behave in a more masculine way, which was what the teachers at school said I should do, shortly after I was banned from playing with girls! 

People, of course, will always be scared of homosexuality. Anything different is frightening, but unless there are laws preventing homophobia we'll never be able to change hearts and minds because people will always be able to say that if it's wrong in the eyes of the law, LGTB people can't expect equality. 

By the time I'd emerged from the darkened corridors of the radio station, the sun had burned through and created a rather lovely hazy day. I sat in a cafe for an hour with my old mate, Anna B, who produced my film about Watford Gap. It was so lovely to see her. We talked about her son, Harry, and dreamed up ideas for new films. I had to rush back to London, which felt a shame. I'd quite like to have hung about and caught up with a number of other old faces.