Every old sock meets an old shoe

Just after lunchtime today, I drove to Enfield to deliver my pitch. They've been filming the drama in a big old Victorian school up there, and when I arrived a group of children on scooters were bombing their way through the school hall, screaming wildly, followed by the actress Sue Johnson. Unfortunately, circumstance dicated that I was forced to play what I'd written on a laptop, which felt like about the worst way to showcase my work. I could barely hear the music over the whirring of my computer and I’m not sure the response to it could have been more lukewarm! I guess you win some and you lose some. Incidental music is a strange beast. It’s either right or it’s not. You get it or you don’t, and I suspect on this occasion, it was someone else’s turn to hit the nail on the head. Still, I’ve seldom laughed as much as I did in the studio yesterday, and it's important to embrace any opportunity to have one's work recorded.

So, it's out of the bubble and back to the grindstone. I think tomorrow I may well go to Greenwich to have a look at the maritime graveyard there. I've officially used up all my cemetery quotes, but still have two movements left to write. Seeing as the work is continually pushing me towards thoughts of wide expanses of water, I can think of no better graveyard to visit than this one. I have to say, I'm tired of writing the requiem now. I need to get to a stage, rather rapidly, where I can stick the first draft in a bottom drawer, and return to it with a fresh, objective pair of ears. I've written close to an hour's worth of music, and my brain is fried.

We went to Stingray in Kentish Town for tea today and had their Prix Fixe as a sort of “tomorrow the regime changes and I get fit again” gesture. When you’re a freelancer you crave routine; even just the routine of going up the hill to the village to write at 9am every morning becomes a form of pilgrimage. Too much time spent bouncing from one weird, unstructured day to another can end up being incredibly unsettling. It makes me feel like a drifter, which is the most dreadful thought of them all...

When I first moved to London, I lived in Hackney with my friend Jo and her sister. At one point, a bloke in his 30s moved in with us. He was an (unsuccessful) actor, had crazy shoulder length curly hair and used to pay his rent in cash, which he took from a sort of roll of money that he kept in his pocket. I remember being utterly horrified that someone of his age could have such a rootless existence, and that, at the age of (I guess he was no older than about) 34, he would not have a mortgage, or any desire to live like a grown up.

I’m now 37, and I don’t have a mortgage, or a pension... I wonder how horrified I’d have been of me!

Friday 16th August, 1661 and an ill-wind was blowing. Pepys went to the Navy office and found the place almost empty. Most of his clerks had gone to the funeral of Tom Whitton, who Pepys described as vibrant young man, and as likely to live as any of the clerks in his office. Whitton had died of the plague - and this was officially the first reference in Pepys' diary to the calamitous disease. “It is such a sickly time both in City and country" he wrote "every where (of a sort of fever), that never was heard of almost, unless it was in a plague-time.” A number of other celebrities of the day had also died, or were seriously ill with “fever-like symptoms.” It would take a while to reach pandemic levels but little did our hero know that within 4 years, something like a quarter of Londoners would be dead.

Across the water

It’s been a long old day and we’ve been in a recording studio for much of it. Heaven knows how Fiona must be feeling, who was in Liege this morning and came to the studio directly from the Eurostar.

We were recording our pitch for a TV comedy series. Heaven knows if we’ll be successful. I assume some of the other writers who are pitching for the same job will have a great deal more experience when it comes to this kind of composing, and home studios designed to better bring it to life at this stage. What telly people like is a nice safe pair of hands, and though I consider mine to be the safest around, I reckon I might be perceived as more of a musicals man. Still, I’ve had a lot of fun in the process, and today, particularly, was an absolute blast.

At lunchtime, four female singers were clustered around a microphone pretending to be a choir of children, which has to be one of the most hysterical things I’ve ever witnessed. I’m not actually sure whether anyone listening would realise that it wasn’t children singing. They were utterly convincing and afterwards, not a single one of them could pick out their own voice within the kosher sound.

The laughter in the studio reached fever pitch with Fiona’s recorder solo... Yes, I scored the work to include a recorder. Why on earth wouldn’t I? It’s set in a school! Anyway, the only recorder I could find came from my parents’ house in Thaxted and seemed to have been partially eaten by a small child... so much, in fact, that Fiona was forced to disinfect it before she dared blow into it. “There’s bacteria on this from the 1970s!” she yelled...

Suffice to say, that, over time, the recorder had lost a little bit of its ability to play in tune, and after one take, which was almost a semi-tone sharp, Fiona uttered the immortal question “should I pull it out a bit?” There are very few people who would find this funny. It's not the sexual innuendo that we were lauging at. In fact, I suspect the only person reading this who will now be smiling is our old friend, Sam. It was the line we’d always hear in youth orchestras coming from the wind section. They’d play a solo - out of tune – and then someone, usually the conductor, would say; “try pulling it out a bit...” referring to the mouthpiece of the instrument, which is how most wind instruments are tuned. Anyway, in the context of a moth-eaten recorder, the line seemed hysterically funny, and Fiona and I howled uncontrollably with laughter, to the extent that the session came to a crashing halt.

Aside from my friends Ellie and Michelle, we were also lucky enough to be joined by Leanne Jones, who was the original Tracy Turnblatt in the West End production of Hair Spray. Nathan sent out a round-robin text to some of his friends and colleagues this morning when it looked like our choir of children might consist of me and my imaginary friend Ruth the Mong. Anyway, we were delighted when Leanne turned up. She's an Olivier Award winnning actress and she was particularly good at accessing her inner child!

We came home this evening, and I cooked for everyone.Whilst eating we watched a documentary about the Placebo World Tour, which, of course, is what Fiona has been doing for most of the past two years. It's a very beautiful film, and it was incredible to see Fiona playing in front of thousands of people in pretty much every country in the world!

After dinner I played her my Requiem... or what exists of my Requiem so far, and she made some very good comments, including the observation that my movement about Jacqueline du Pre doesn’t feel like part of the overall work. And she’s right. Of course it doesn’t mean that the piece doesn’t work in its own world, but not in the world of my Requiem, which I'm increasingly viewing as a sort of ocean, filled with tiny drowning people who are waving – desperate – but not expecting to be heard. It was quite astonishing, therefore, when I discovered that the last line of the entire piece – purely by chance – has turned out to be the text that I found on the gravestone of a former navy man; “you weathered the storm, reached harbour safely, horizon is peaceful. Ahoy!” And frankly, I can think of no better, or more uplifting message to leave an audience with at the end of what is bound to be a very upsetting experience.

And speaking of great navy men, young master Pepys (for let us not forget that he was just 27 at this stage of the diary) spend the day at the Privy Seal office in Whitehall doing, well, stuff. He lunched with Lady Sandwich, and was able to bring with him the good news that her husband, somewhere off the coast of Spain, had not yet died, and in fact, rumour had it that he'd fully recovered from whatever had been wrong with him. Seemingly trapped wind! Lady Sandwich was unconvinced. In those days rumours were often wrong. For all she knew, he was already dead... The definite good news, however, was that young master Sandwich, who had been close to death the day before, was now showing signs of recovery. The worst was over.

After lunch, Pepys went to The Opera, that swanky new theatre at Lincoln’s Inn, which was showing a new play, The Witts, by Sir William Davenant. The King and Duke of York were there. It had rapidly become the place to be seen, and by all accounts, The Witts was a thoroughly decent play, so no one was complaining.

A little piece of rope won't hold it together

We're at Daryl and Philip's house in Kensington listening to show tunes whilst talking about the sorrowful state of musical theatre in this country. Well, that's what I'm talking about. I seem to be standing on a soap box, spitting vitriol. I didn't know I felt so passionately about the subject! There is no investment in young writing talent over here. None whatsoever. In the States, every university has a programme for musical theatre composers, and every major city has a bursary which helps people who want to write musicals. Over here there's nothing. I spent ten years failing rather spectacularly to get my head above the parapet as a composer of musical theatre, yet in half that time, have made leaps and bounds in the medium of television. It's very wrong! Musical theatre is falling apart...

Otherwise, it's been a very relaxing day, so much that there's very little to report. I slept in late, very late, and then we sort of pottered about, watching telly and eating pasta. I'd love to say I'm more interesting than that, but I'm not. 

350 years ago, Pepys went with the two Sir Williams to see the Duke of York. They wanted to whinge about the state of the navy and the lack of funding which was creating disillusionment within the rank and file. This argument would continue for years to come, and reach crisis point in 1667 when the Dutch invaded the country. 

In the afternoon, Pepys went to see The Alchemist at the theatre with Captain Ferrers. The evening was spent in the company of Sir William Penn (father of the father of Pennsylvania) and a bottle of wine. Lovely.  

Tu as des ailes

I walked to the Caledonian Road with Fiona today. We wandered through Waterlow Park, up Brecknock Road and down York Way, catching up on 6 months’ gossip in the process. She introduced me to a really cool network of warehouses filled with music shops and rehearsal spaces, which I was surprised to know existed. She was buying various cables and pedals for a live gig this evening where she’s playing electric violin with a DJ... She’s so cool.

We walked home via the Holloway Road, and stopped at Amazon Cafe for food. Amazon has been around for as long as I can remember and is famous across North London for the quality of its chips, which are hand cut, and more delicious than anything I could ever describe. The first time I visited the place was over ten years ago, when I was rehearsing a ballet at the former National Youth Music theatre buildings. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t actually in the ballet. For some reason, probably because times were good for the creative industries, it was decided that a director should come into rehearsals in to help the dancers access their inner actors. I made all the right noises – and was thrilled to be given my own dressing room at the Royal Festival Hall for the run of the show - but I was ultimately a huge waste of their money. Once a ballet dancer, always a ballet dancer... and these kids couldn’t even walk without turning their feet out!

Ballet dancers are a funny old breed. They retire probably earlier than members of any other profession, with absolutely wrecked bodies, and then have to retrain as physiotherapists and stage managers. One of the male dancers actually became a porn star. Rehearsals are conducted in absolute silence, and having come from opera, where the choruses behave like six year olds with ADHD, I found the lack of noise almost sinister. The choreographer was the only one who spoke – and that was only to calmly say; “I want a grand bouffant, followed by a passe l’aspirateur, a poisson rouge and then a fait la plait” whereupon, in absolute unison, a group of dancers would sort of float across the room like glorious winged beasts with a routine that would have taken a West End chorus the best part of a day to rehearse. My job was to then go in and say, “now, to make these utterly pointless steps seem more like acting, how about you try to think of something really sad... Imagine someone’s told you you’ll never go on point again... Or that Rymans have run out of tissue paper...” (genuine gasps of horror)

Anyway, to get back to the narrative, whilst rehearsing said ballet, one of the dancers came bounding in one afternoon to inform us that she’d been to this amazing cafe called Amazon where the chips were to die for. She’d had a huge plate of them, she told us, alongside a delicious omelette. I couldn’t quite believe a ballerina had been eating anything other than tissue paper, and kept an eye on her all afternoon to see if she was rushing to the loo for a sneaky vomitting session, but she genuinely seemed to be one of those people who could eat, and more bizarrely, dance on anything.

August 13th, 1661, and young Edward Montagu was still rather gravely ill. Suspecting small pox, his mother, Lady Jemima, immediately dispatched her other three boy children to Pepys’ house. One assumes the girls were left to fend for themselves. After dinner, Pepys went to see his father, who had returned from the country. The two men discussed Pepys’ sister, Pall, who, it had been decided, was no longer welcome to stay with Pepys as his servant. Poor girl... not even useful enough to be her own brother’s servant. Pepys’ father was rowing bitterly with his mother, who had, apparently, turned into a “very simple” woman. This diary entry is utterly misogynistic!

There was a big family meeting in the early evening, with various uncles and such, coming together to read Uncle Robert’s will and thrash out some form of compromise in terms of divvying up the money.

We got the job sussed?

Fiona is back in town, and it was lovely to see her for lunch today. Her hair is a great deal longer than it was the last time I saw her. We ate, with Nathan, in my favourite greasy spoon on the Archway Road. I go there as often as I can for poached eggs and mushrooms. Fiona has been touring in Germany with Placebo this week, and I think too many nights on the tour bus have taken their toll. She retired for an afternoon nap.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a pitch to write the music for a TV comedy series about a school. The pitch involves writing a theme tune and incidental music for a number of scenes. Writing background music is always a challenge because it requires a completely different set of skills, the most important of which is mathematics. It’s all about timings; working out what time signature and tempo something needs to be in, so that a certain visual moment can be underpinned with an appropriate passage of music. I therefore spend long periods of time with a stop watch surgically attached to my hand. This kind of writing is often about creating music which has no function other than to simply create a mood, and this is a real skill. Sweeping melodies are usually way too distracting for TV music, and I love to write a nice melody. It's also a British comedy, and British comedies don’t tend to use that much music, so there’s very little for me to cross reference. It's one heck of a challenge. Still, after a few days of high-level anxiety, I think I finally cracked it today. I couldn’t have done it without Nathan, of course, who has actually learnt a new computer programme simply to help the process go more smoothly. I do not deserve him...

Because of all this, I've been living a rather hermit-like existence. I wake up and walk into Highgate Village to do a morning of writing, and then come home and write some more. It's a never ending cycle and I must remember not to drink too many cups of tea, which are apparently bad for my voice, alongside pretty much every food stuff that I really enjoy, from vinegar, through pasta sauce, into dairy produce. The voice specialist I saw yesterday was hugely apologetic when she told me that white wine wasn't very good for me, but no pasta sauce? No cheese? No vinegar? Come on!

Fans of Fisher Price nostalgia will be please to read that I've now moved four of my new plastic figures into an aeroplane. They went on a day trip this afternoon to the sofa and have now returned to the book shelves, where they seem to be sitting patiently inside the plane ready to alight. The blonde woman, the one we used to call Sally-Anna, is plainly a drunk, and finds it very difficult to sit upright in her seat. It’s what happens when you realise you’re set to spend eternity wearing the same dress and sporting a timeless, peroxide blonde 1960s hairstyle!

Away home. Looks like the plane's been flying through some volcanic dust clouds...

Speaking of timelessness, 350 years ago, Pepys was told the troubling news that Edward Montagu, the 13 year-old son of Lord Sandwich, was very poorly. Immediately assuming it was something to do with the fruit that he'd fed him two days before, our hero immediately made his way to The Wardrobe (the London residence of the Montagu clan). He found the boy, very ill indeed, but not with food poisoning – with suspected small pox. Even more worrying was the news that Sandwich himself was ill, somewhere off the coast of Alicante. Perhaps he'd spent too many nights clubbing. Pepys went to bed, troubled at the thought of what would happen to the Montagu name if the Lord and his heir both snuffed it simultaneously.

I met a lady once whose husband and son had died on the same night in two different London hospitals; the son of Lupus and the husband of a heart attack. When she heard they were both gravely ill, she didn't know which hospital to visit first. Talk about Sophie's Choice...

Speaking in sympathy

I was back at the Ear, Throat and Nose hospital today, finally getting the opportunity to discover whether my operation in June had been a success. I saw the big cheese, Mr Rubin, and the head of speech therapy, a wonderful Israeli woman called, Ruth. They wanted first to talk about the bad experiences I’d had in the hospital, and in fairness I couldn’t have asked for a more sympathetic pair of ears. The first thing Mr Rubin did was apologise profusely, and with that, the anger I'd been carrying around for weeks vanished in a puff of smoke. It's amazing how effective an apology can be. The ability to apologise – and more importantly mean it – is something that separates the great from the mediocre. It doesn’t take very much, and it instantly defuses tension. Even if the other person is still violently angry, he will slowly simmer down, because shouting at someone who is holding their hands up and accepting responsibility becomes ultimately futile.

I’m afraid it’s something of a generational thing. Mr Rubin, I’m sure, will not mind being described as an upper-middle-aged gentleman. He comes from an age of chivalry; an age where people seem to understand the importance of taking responsibility, not just for their own actions, but for the actions of those who work with them. I learnt a great deal in that meeting; mostly about myself.

Anyway, the good news is that my vocal chords have healed “rather perfectly.” Rubin was extremely impressed, and said that I could take full credit, because he could tell that I'd been conscientious, not spoken for a full week after the procedure, and therefore given the chords the time they needed to heal properly. And with that statement my respect for him grew even more. Earlier on, he'd taken responsibility for the bad things that had happened to me - none of which he was personally responsible for - and now he was allowing me to take the credit when plainly the extraordinary success of the operation was entirely brought about by the absolute skill he showed when removing the polyp from my vocal chords. I guess when you're the best in the business, you have nothing left to prove.

In any case, a large weight has gone from my mind. After the session with Rubin, Ruth took me through lots of vocal exercises I can now do to strengthen the muscles and get me singing again.

August 11th, 1661 was a Sunday, and Pepys went to church at St Olave’s in the morning, before heading up to Clerkenwell for the afternoon service, where, by chance, he was able to look longingly at the renowned beauty, Mrs Frances Butler, who was known in society circles as La Belle Boteler. Butler was the sister of the enigmatic friend of our hero, who Pepys referred to as, M. L’Impertinent. After church, Pepys went to Gray’s Inn Fields – a spot where posh Londoners would take the air and simultaneously exchange tittle-tattle. The gossip du jour was about the king, and it really wasn’t very interesting. He’d been out hunting for stags the previous day, and had been so devastatingly thrusting about everything, that all his horses had been run ragged, and only two or three of his courtiers had been able to keep up with him. A man in his prime... And poor Catherine de Breganza was only 12!

Afraid of what might be

I've just been in Old Street, visiting three generations of my god-daughter's family. It seems they've been having quite a rocky time out east with all this rioting and looting. They burned a car two roads away, and Kate, my god daughter's grandmother, could hear them running through the streets in the night. Terrifying, really. Some of the neighbours were apparently sleeping with pitch forks and cleavers hidden behind their front doors, which feels a little wild west!

There are noticeably fewer people on the streets as I walk towards the tube, and not a second passes when I can't hear some form of siren blaring in the distance. Philippa reckons that the police are using their sirens more liberally as a form of deterrent, which makes sense.

Still, the winds are up, which makes me think we might be in for a storm. This may well be just what we need to send the trouble makers packing. That said, there was considerably less violence last night, so maybe the bubble has already burst. 

350 years ago, Pepys met his new maid for the first time. We will never learn a great deal about her. She was called Doll, and according to Pepys, was dog ugly. Unsurprisingly, it was Elizabeth who hired her! 

Pepys had lunch with Lady Sandwich, before taking a group of society types to the theatre to watch The Devil of Edmonton, which sounds somewhat intriguing. After the play, he hired a coach and took them all back to his house for fruit. Very nice. See, he didn't live exclusively on a diet of meat!