I'm a-living in a box, I'm a-living in a cardboard box

Hannah pointed something out to me yesterday which made me feel sad and angry in equal measure. Underneath an awning, just up from our rehearsal room, a man lives in a cardboard box. At first glance you'd think his house was just a heap of rubbish, waiting for a bin man, but on closer inspection you realise that it's actually quite a well-made den. I saw him, at the end of last week, fiddling with some tarpaulin and assumed that he was some sort of stage manager creating a prop for one of the many theatre companies who rehearse in the area. He didn't look homeless. But what does homeless actually look like these days? He was actually rather smartly-dressed.

It turns out he has a job. He changes into decent clothes to go into work. He probably has gym membership and showers there every morning. The people he works with probably have no idea that he lives in a cardboard box. And he's not the only one. This is a fairly regular sight in London these days. I hear these kind of stories all the time. Wages are plummeting and because Theresa May and her ghastly right-wing cronies refuse to fund new housing, or provide council properties, rents are getting higher and higher. And because most of the baby boomers have this appalling "we're alright, Jack" attitude about the fact that they all got to buy their council houses, and, as a result can't see beyond their leathery, orange-tanned noses to notice the pain their children and grandchildren are in, the underclass in the UK continues to grow.

...And there but for the grace of god go we all. Nathan and I can barely afford the rent we pay, and it's really cheap by London standards. If we lose our present property, we will have to move out of London. And then what?

What's brewing is major, and I mean major civil disobedience. Mark my words; there will be large-scale riots in the UK within five years. If the government won't listen to anything else, let them feel the bullets flying over the ballot box.

Imagine how vulnerable it must feel to live in a box? Imagine going to sleep at night, wondering if drunks will kick your house down for a laugh, or a car will do some dodgy manoeuvre and back into you? It is an awful, awful thing.

Speaking of awful things: a show is rehearsing at the moment in the same space as us which has child actors in it. They're a rare breed, child actors. They've often got CVs which their adult peers would die for. They also tend to have rather ghastly mothers. The mothers came to pick up their kids yesterday and sat, waiting in the cafe, swapping anecdotes about Henry and Clara and myriad other middle class names. The conversations focussed on work their children had done at top London venues. They were pretending to be pleased for each other, but you could tell there was some serious oneupmanship going on which was leading to bristling resentment. These were the original pushy ballet mums. They were, at once, showing off and feeling deeply intimidated to have met their match. It was uncomfortable to watch two people living their lives so vicariously through their children.

After rehearsals, I went to meet a young actor called Rob Peacock who is singing my song Brass in the Stiles and Drewe Best Song competition. I thought it would be good to introduce myself and put the piece in context for him. Brass is one of those songs which, if you've got the pipes to sing it, can be beautiful and impressive. With some careful acting choices, however, it has the potential to be absolutely devastating. It is, after all, about a First World War soldier who is so distressed he doesn't even know whether he's alive or dead! At the same time it's a song of hope and hiraeth.

Rob is a truly wonderful singer. Great intonation, and, crucially, he has the top pipes to smash the end section of the song. I busked the piano part, apologising profusely for being so cack-handed, and we worked a little on the acting side of the piece. Adding colours. Working our way through the complex and conflicting thoughts which dart through the mind of Alf, the character who sings it. I was very pleased with the way that he responded. He's going to do me proud.

Blunder Woman

Yesterday was a day just like any other day, really. Bank holidays mean very little to people in the arts, so, whilst the cast had their Centrally-imposed day off, which I'm afraid I still don't quite understand, I sat underneath a pair of headphones, orchestrating.

There was a pretty major thunderstorm during the night. I was sleeping with the window open and could hear the roar of the rain, accompanied by a pretty heady smell, which could only be described as one of ionisation. It's a word which I recently heard used in association with the richly perfumed smell of water hurtling over a weir and, whilst I'm sure there's a very specific scientific definition of ionisation which has nothing to do with waterfalls and lightning, it feels like an appropriate word to use here.

I woke up to the news that Pam Gilby, the driving force behind the Fleet Singers, had died. The news made me feel incredibly sad. Pam is responsible for commissioning two oratorios by me: Songs About The Weather and The Man In The Straw Hat. She ran the choir with a rod of iron. Woe betide anyone who didn't pay their subs or come prepared to wash-up when it was their turn! I was fairly terrified of her when I first met her, but soon realised that her somewhat spiky, jobsworth exterior protected a deeply loyal heart, which cared passionately about the choir, and the little corner of North West London which she'd adopted as her home after moving here from South Africa in the early 1950s. She will be sorely missed.

I've been somewhat horrified to read about some of the merchandise which is being brought out for the release of the new Wonder Woman film. Wonder Woman, as we all know, is a kick-ass Amazonian. She has a well-etched moral compass and super powers to die for. Who doesn't want a lasso of truth? She's so kick-ass, that she was asked to become a UN ambassador in one of the most eccentric decisions ever made. Apparently, we're so short on female kick-ass role models that we have to dredge the world of fictional comics.

But what is the central piece of merchandise attached to this film about a strong kick-ass woman? A new line of lipstick. That's right: a woman needs to remember to look fabulous when she's dispatching the bad guys.

We watched the first of the live semi-finals of Britain's Got Talent last night. I don't yet know the results, but there was a gloriously awful moment at the start of the show, when the children's choir from Ireland had to start all over again because they "couldn't hear their backing track." In reality it seemed that the track had started midway through, so the choir merely stood like lemons waiting to find their way into a gin and tonic whilst Ant and Dec were forced to run on and mark time whilst everything got reset. The most bizarre aspect was that the backing track clearly had vocals on it, an indication that the choir were either miming or that the sound they make was so weedy and thin, that they needed to sing along to a recording of themselves. And let's hope it was actually their own voices! Ah! The artifice of TV.

Because I haven't heard the results, I don't want to go online searching for the reactions to this particular blunder, but I'd be intrigued to know how ITV attempts to smooth that one over!

Symposiums, Stoneleigh and Gaveston

I had a whole day off from Em yesterday. Rather perfectly, I'd been booked to go up to Northampton to talk about careers in music as part of a symposium organised by the Northamptonshire Music Service. For some astonishing reason I managed to convinced my new friend Michael from UK Jewish Film to come with me because I thought, as proved to be the case, he might have expertise in the realm of film which he might be able to impart.

We started out early and the car journey up to Northampton was speedy. We couldn't park in the music school itself, which was overrun with parents coming to pick their kids up from the various ensembles which rehearse in the morning. We drove up the Kettering Road instead and parked up on one of the streets leading up to the football ground where there are no discernible regulations.

As it happened, we pulled up outside a little artisan bakery called Magee's which turned out to be one of the best bakeries I've ever visited. It's run by a set of lovely young people, and it makes glorious breads and cakes. I devoured a chocolate tart with a layer of salted caramel and a great big blob of honeycomb on the top. It was, in short, magnificent.

Tash appeared as if by magic and took us to another cafe, behind the music school which had something of a Speak Easy quality. It's some kind of former Boot and Shoe factory, and to visit, you have to go up a twisting staircase. It doesn't seem to have much of a sign, so, one assumes, it's very much a spot for those in the know! Northampton would appear to be getting its act together and, later on, upon returning to the original cafe, we bumped into my lovely friend and former desk partner Helen from music school days. She was in there with her wife and baby and told me that there are indeed one or two places like it opening in the town.

The symposium went well. I got to catch up with Beth and Peter I was fairly mobbed, largely by young singers who had been in the Northants Youth Choir when they performed I Miss The Music from Brass. They were all keen to tell me what a great and moving song it was and I felt enormously touched.

You never know who you're inspiring at these sorts of events. The right thing said at the right moment in time can be absolutely vital when it comes to shaping the career paths of young people. The bottom line is that careers in the arts are really difficult, but it's not for me to say that. If you're tenacious and you work hard enough, you might just scrape a living. Who am I to kill dreams? Many of the young people, as you might expect for Midlanders, were under-confident and painfully shy. It makes me want to weep. I wondered how some managed to function on a day-to-day basis. I hope a few of them will have taken something away with them. A little pearl of wisdom which changes their outlook somehow. 

The symposium finished at 5, and I took Michael off to Warwickshire to buy him dinner to say thank you, but also to take him on a little tour of Em locations which I wanted to take pictures of to show the cast.

We went first to Stoneleigh, visited my grandparents graves and had a glorious early evening walk across the windy hilltop which looks down on the village. I was sort of hoping the bluebells might have been out in the woods up there but it's too late in the season. Em has basically stolen my spring from me!

From Stoneleigh we drove to the Saxon Mill, which features in one of the lyrics. It's where I'd chosen for us to eat. We had a little time to kill before our reservation, so decided to go in search of a curious monument in a nearby wood which marks the spot where Piers Gaveston, lover of Edward II was murdered by barons. I remembered visiting the place about 25 years ago, on a frosty Boxing Day with my brother and his girlfriend at the time. There's a picture of me there, in a great big, somewhat pretentious cap, taking everything incredibly seriously. Attempting to commune with God knows whom. 

Anyway, it was always a little bit hard to find the monument, but these days it's almost impossible. The wood is essentially surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and the only access to it is through a field which is marked as private property in enormous letters. I actually think it's quite a shame. It's an important monument for the LGBT community and I would have thought local villagers might at least have wanted to create a designated path through the field so that people can take a look.

It's also quite an unusual monument in that is was created by Victorians, seemingly as a sort of warning to people who might be getting ideas above their station. "In the hollow of this rock was beheaded on the 1st Day of July 1312, by barons lawless as himself Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, the minion of a hateful king, in life and death a memorable instance of misrule."

It's a curious thing. It's a very large monument, perhaps twenty feet high, with a huge cross on the top of it. But why spend so much money on a monument to a hated person? And then why let it fester, unvisited, in a wood. Nothing makes sense...

The approach to the monument is deeply eerie. You walk through dark trees and a curiously heavy atmosphere hovers above the ground. It's very surreal. We were both really affected by the place. It has really dark energy surrounding it.

We ate at the Saxon Mill, taking a little stroll towards the spooky ruined house at Guy's Cliff as the sun set. A little bit of Googling reveals that the house was built in the 18th Century on the proceeds of slavery. It's the most amazingly ornate building with Juliet balconies overlooking the dusty Warwickshire countryside. The house was used as a hospital in the First World War and a children's home in the Second one. It then fell into disrepair and was badly damaged by fire when filming on a Sherlock Holmes movie went pear-shaped. These days its ghostly form merely hovers over the river so the likes of me can dream about what we'd do to it if we had all the money in the world!

We went home via a darkened Leamington Spa, where I took a picture of a house on the corner of Gas Street, where I imagine one of my characters to have come from...

And just like that we were on the M1 again and the little trip to Warwickshire was but a golden memory.

Pigeon whisperer

I saved a pigeon yesterday morning. I arrived at rehearsals and found something of a commotion going on in the reception area. The man who lives opposite the studios feeds the local pigeons with bread, and huge numbers of them congregate on the street outside. One of them must have been spooked, flown into the reception area, and, when everyone started panicking, darted away to the darkest place he could find to hide, which was was the tray in the photocopier above where the paper is stored. The poor thing was terrified.

Now I have great form when it comes to pigeon whispering. I tend to think that animals just want you to stay calm and maintain eye contact, so I went up to the photocopier and chatted with my new friend until he seemed calmer, at which point I gently put my hand into the tray area and started to stroke him gently. He responded well and went into some sort of torpor, which meant I could gently cajole him out of the confined space, eventually to a point at which he sat on my finger and I was able to carry him to the door and let him flap away to the relative safety of the harsh streets of Borough.

Rehearsals went really well yesterday, but for an awful moment at 5pm when we were suddenly informed by the powers that be that we weren't allowed to rehearse on the coming bank holiday, which is a huge set back. Finding out so late, when we'd decided not to rehearse on a Saturday knowing we were doing Monday was enormously frustrating. We ended up being made to feel a little like naughty school children for calling the rehearsal in the first place. The weirdest thing of all is that no one has actually explained to me why we can't rehearse. The theatre industry, in my experience, never stops for anything as pesky as a bank holiday. 

Still. Onwards and upwards. Perhaps three days off will be good for the cast.

PRS saviours

I'm sightly running out of things to write about in my blog at the moment, because, as we sink further into rehearsals, the days have started to meld into one another. I get up, way too early. I take the tube down to Borough Station. I buy a ringed doughnut. I walk to the rehearsal rooms. The creative team work. I sit at a variety of tables, headphones clamped to my ears, half in the world of orchestration, half in the business of the room.

I think the hot weather melted everyone's brains yesterday. Rehearsals were incredibly slow going and, on the tube, everyone seemed particularly grumpy, crammed in like sardines to the boiling hot carriages. An all-pervading smell of damp clothes and anger wafted through the carriages. It was so intense that it seemed to take on the form of a visible haze.

I am thrilled to finally be able to announce that the PRS Foundation have saved the day and offered me a grant to maintain me financially as we rehearse Em. Words can't really express how grateful I am to them. Readers of this blog will know that I have struggled enormously for the past year whilst writing Em with absolutely no help from any one. Fund application after fund application was rejected and the savings dwindled. It reached a crisis point about a month ago when I thought I was going to have to get a part-time job simply to fund being in rehearsals. Of course, now that we're into rehearsals I realise how utterly impossible it would have been for me to have been simultaneously working another job, so I can say, without a word of a lie, that the PRS Foundation has absolutely saved my bacon. When I found out, I actually cried. With absolute relief. Obviously it's a relatively humble grant, but it gets me out of trouble for now.

You can't win!

I'm becoming increasingly exhausted, which means I'm alternately finding things hysterically funny and then really not funny at all! There is just no time off and it seemed yesterday that every time I put my headphones on to do another few bars of orchestration someone was nudging me or calling me over. It was all hugely important stuff, but it doesn't exactly help the writing process. I've woken up today with a hot face and a tickly cough which tells me it's eyes down for another bout of illness. Hurrah.

We're still hurtling our way through Em and yesterday we set another production number with choreographer, Matt, who is lightning quick. I think the cast are at a stage where they're panicking about the steady supply of new musical material they're being handed. Sadly, it's part and parcel of working on a new show. Nobody knows the nature of the beast. I was asked to write an ensemble-heavy piece so that everyone has plenty to do and, in a musical, having a busy show usually involves singing! At the same time I've got people coming up to me asking for more to do and complaining about periods of rehearsals where they're not being used. You just can't win with actors!

I overheard two older ladies on the tube talking about the Manchester attack and one of them uttered the quite outrageous comment that she felt the authorities should "lock these terror suspects up first and then find the evidence." Great to know that people have such a fabulously clear understanding of Western democracy! The bottom line is that everyone wants the justice system to suit their own purposes. The death penalty is bad! Except for dirty paedophiles. All immigrants should leave the UK! Except the nice man who does my dry cleaning. We hate the Muslims! Let's kick out the European people from our country...

It's very very hot in London at the moment. I just walked past a woman who was wearing an enormous pair of mirrored sunglasses. I can't imagine how irritating talking to her would be. You'd just end up looking at your own reflection. I bet she attracts a shed load of narcissists.

Trapped in an alley!

I was astonished to wake up this morning to the news that, in the wake of the dreadful events in Manchester, people are taking to twitter and inventing relatives who were in the MEN Arena last night simply to get social media hits. I'm somewhat ashamed to live in a society where people would value social media so much, that the truth of what they're writing becomes of less concern than the number of hits they're generating. What is the point of fake news? What makes someone want to make news up? It all seems very bizarre to me.

I tried to leave my house this morning, but, ever since the bastard at the other end of my terrace decided that one of the entrances to the alleyway we use to access our flats was his to fence off, we've had to deal with the fact that there's actually only one way out. I'd always imagined how awful it would be if one of the houses further up the hill caught fire, or if there was some sort of gas explosion, because if anything blocked off the very small entrance to our end of the alleyway, we'd be royally shafted.

And so, this morning, I came to understand quite how shafted that was, when, at 8.30am, I stumbled upon a set of comically awful builders who were trying to get some sort of heavy machinery down the footpath. The machinery had become stuck and access to the street was entirely blocked off. "How long will you be?" I asked. They shrugged, "ten minutes?" "But I have to get to work!" I said. Another shrug.

I stood, somewhat helplessly, for some time, until a man came sauntering up the alleyway behind me. "Do you want to come through my shop?" He asked. He then led me back down the alleyway and into the garden of our next door neighbour's house before ushering me though his shop, which, incidentally, sells baths.

The commute into rehearsals seems to be getting worse. I think perhaps I'm leaving later every day, and therefore making myself more and more likely to encounter the rush hour crush. It's hot, smelly and sweaty, and commuters are brutal to one another. There's rage just underneath the surface in all of them. And on the days after terrorist attacks it feels so profoundly counter-intuitive to be shoved in cattle trucks darting underground like that.

A homeless man passed through the carriage this morning. Begging in this manner has become quite the fashion in the last ten or so years. In the olden days it was passive, doe-eyed Romanian women with cardboard signs or curious little packets of tissues, but these days, people are far more confrontational. They get on the tube and make announcements, pleading for compassion, usually asking for a few pence for the cost of a hostel for the night. It's always incredibly sad but also such a regular occurrence that it becomes utterly impossible to engage with. I, like most of the other people on the train, bury myself in a newspaper or a computer and fundamentally reenforce the homeless person's lack of self worth. One of the dreadful things about living in a city is that you're often forced to leave your compassion at the front door because the energy you require simply to remain sane in the dog-eat-dog world requires every last drop of energy. Engage with those around you and you become furious, so most simply attempt to zone out.

I was, however, somewhat surprised to see today's homeless person attempting to beg in a carriage which was so full that he was physically having to push people aside in order to pass through. Surely, there are more productive times of the day to beg?

Rehearsals for Em took off big time this week after the arrival of our choreographer and our new musical director, Ben, who worked with me on the original production of Brass. It's been such a thrill to have him back in the space, and he's been making all the right noises about the score, which, I realised today, is such an important thing for a writer to hear. There's always the little voice in the back of one's head which tries to tell a writer that he's not very good.

It's a very happy rehearsal space. Hannah is a brilliant leader and the only tensions so far have been inconsequential and about silly things like photocopying. It turns out that our choreographer's partner actually knew my Grandmother. Rather well as it happens. They lived in the same tiny Warwickshire village. In fact, I vaguely remember him from my distant childhood. It's these sorts of coincidences which remind me that this is a project worth doing and a piece which will have great meaning to people.

Today I worked as an accent coach, teaching two of the cast how to speak in a Northants/ Warwickshire accent. Apparently the vocal coach had told them they could just speak with a posh "neutral" voice to represent Midlands-based characters, which made my blood boil so much, that I stepped in and delivered a little master class of my own. It struck me today quite how bizarre some of the vowel sounds are in that part of the world. They always seem so natural to me, but when you start trying to get someone saying the "u" in words like Rugby and funny or the "i" sound in "like", you realise there is nothing similar anywhere else in the UK. Unfortunately, once I start talking like that, I find it quite difficult to stop! I was hugely impressed by the ears of the girls working with me. Lizzie in particular, did a sterling job and we have a New Zealander called Niamh whom I think is also going to crack it. I keep meaning to tell them what good stead it will set them in when they audition for Kinky Boots. Which is set in Northampton, by the way. Not that you'd notice by listening the accents most of the cast choose to talk in!