Oh, all the things I would do...

I really have nothing interesting to write about. I've done nothing today but purge; four bin liners-worth of purging, in fact, from my bedroom alone. We woke up this morning to find a letter which said we didn't have enough money in our joint account to pay the rent; no doubt a knock-on effect from our having to shell out £600 to have the car released by bailiffs. I’ve only just received the compensation cheque from Haringey Council, so with any luck, that should take us back into the black.

My cold is a little better today. Nathan’s been to the doctor’s to get some antibiotics to help him out of his fifth week of chest infection and I sincerely hope mine doesn’t drag on that long. My voice has gone all squeaky as a result of all the coughing. I sound like I'm going through puberty all over again.

We’re still waiting to collect our car from the MOT place, so don’t yet know the sheer horror of exactly how much it’s going to cost us to get it roadworthy again. Without the car, we’ve been unable to return the lady rats to their owners. We keep peering into their cage to check that the poor elderly rat is still alive. It would be horrible to have to give her back dead, just because we didn’t have a car to transport her in! Fortunately, she was still alive when we last checked.

Nathan showed me a picture today that he’d been sent on Twitter. It was taken by a man who was doing work on the antennae at the top of the Empire State Building, and it's of two workers who were doing work on the building below him. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most vertigo-inducing picture I have EVER seen, but wonderful nevertheless. I’d have dropped my camera, trying to take it, without question. In fact, interestingly, at the top of the Empire State building, all sorts of weird things happen to cameras... something to do with electro-magnetics. I think... Or maybe I've just chosen that word because it sounds plausible to a luddite like me.

Saturday 14^th September 1661, and Pepys was meant to spend the day sorting out his dead Aunt Kite’s papers... but got a better offer. Colonel Robert Slingsby and his wife were in town, and Pepys, ever one to climb social ladders, hired a boat and took them all onto the Thames to look at the King’s collection of four pleasure yachts.  

So should I laugh or cry?

It’s been a very up and down sort of day. Nathan put the car in to be MOT’d earlier on, and got a phone call mid-afternoon informing him that we’d need to spend about £800 making it road-worthy again. I think the phrase is that it never rains but it pours. I almost feel like laughing. This period has done a great deal to make me question the nature of life. If I thought before that there was a great big sentient, beautiful being, keeping a watchful eye over things, the notion has been completely shattered, by a display of absolute randomness. No one will ever be able to convince me that there is a purpose to anything that’s going on at the moment, or moreover that the good guys always win in the end. Most of the people around me have been smacked repeatedly in the chops recently until they can hardly stand. None of this is character building stuff. It’s gone way beyond that. It’s just pointless nonsense now. Surely this can’t be what getting old is all about?

Still, I had another (almost) confirmation of a job this afternoon; this one for a massive choral commission in York next year, which will be very exciting, if it happens (and obviously if I’m paid for doing it!) You gotta love the good folk of Yorkshire; they’ve been incredibly kind to me over the years.

I spent a considerable amount of time this morning sending various emails to various people about various projects, and am thrilled to report that I finished the first draft of my Requiem last night, which feels like a rather momentous achievement. I think I might have been tempted to pour myself a little glass of whiskey had my cold not been doing its best to make me feel like a weeble!

This afternoon – and I suspect much of the week to come was/ will be spent doing a rather large amount of life laundry. Basically, if it doesn’t move, I’m going to contemplate throwing it away, and I won’t be happy until at least 4 bin liners have been filled with the bits of paper and the bad energy that’s been weighing me down all these months. Purging. That’s what I’m doing. Ruthless purging.

The little ill rat that we’ve been looking after continues to worsen. She’s now started to hide herself away in darkened corners of her cage, which surely means the end can’t be far away. She’s still periodically bleeding as well, and today her eyes looked glazed and sad. Nathan had her out for some time earlier and fed her a piece of chocolate, which she seemed to enjoy. I suppose the warmth of his hand perked her up a bit as well. It’s so desperately sad to see a creature with such little understanding of her predicament. “A breath of wind passes over and we’re gone.”

350 years ago, and Pepys’ Aunt Kite died. Aunt Kite was actually called Julian; I guess a bit like Julian of Norwich, that other famous girl called Julian. But it’s a strange name all the same. Imagine calling your daughter Julian these days? You might as well call her Roger, or Frank. Pepys spent the afternoon on the Thames with his wife, “in pleasure” before mooring up at the Sun in King’s Street which was his favourite bar. He called it Old George’s after one of the bar tenders. It was there that they ate “as much as they would of a hot shoulder of mutton,” which sounds horrible.

Is it only a storm approaching?

I went back to Costa Coffee in Highgate today to spend the morning writing. It felt like I was visiting an old friend. Much was made in the court case about the fact that I write music on a computer in cafes, which apparently precludes me from writing music that is suitable for the human voice. So it was with great a great sense of triumph that I entered this morning. I poured my anger onto the page with relentless bars of drumming and dissonance! It’s not much fun to lose a court case, but at least it's creatively inspiring!

My cold is now in full throttle. I feel like I’m perpetually swimming under water, and find myself particularly effected by low vibrations like lorries, which rattle around my head like small earthquakes.  My voice has dropped an octave, and I woke up this morning coughing like a maniac; a horrible dry, tickle, which threatens to give me some form of brain injury.

I sat opposite a woman today who was moaning prolifically about the fact that she had to go on a speed awareness course. Apparently, the people who run these things are right “fascists” because they don’t allow you to miss them if you have young children who it’s inconvenient to leave with someone else. I think she might have been guilty of misusung the word "fascist," but I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and continued to eavesdrop. As she whinged away in her Sloanney tones, I began to despise her. She was plainly a wealthy woman, with little to do in life, but sit in cafes and drive too quickly. She obviously believes the world should treat her with the respect she was born expecting. In my view, you do the crime, and then the time, although my recent "double whammy" experience of the English justice system partially throws that argument to touch. Anyway, she was holding a baby, and absolutely repulsed me at one stage by suggested it have “a quick slurp,” before lopping her breast out and allowing said kid to get slurping. I've never heard such a repugnant term used to describe breast feeding and hope I never shall.

I came home after just one cup of tea. I normally have two – but I spun this one out, allowing it to go cold and horrible for the sake of saving another £2 to put in the pot. Life is good. I'm now 100th of the way there! In any case, I was drinking way too much tea, and regularly coming back from the cafe at lunchtime all jittery and needing constant loo breaks.

It would appear that my next job has come through, oddly in the form of an email which arrived whilst I was in court. All being well, I shall be working for the BBC in Manchester, making a short musical film about the troubled Hattersley Estate. I’ve been asked to write something dark and intelligent, which will be a lovely change from the celebratory films I'm normally asked to make.

During a journey along the Thames 350 years ago, Pepys saw for the first time King Charles II’s new pleasure boat, which was called The Bezaan. It had been built in Holland. It was sailing down the river, rather proudly, flanked by a pair of gondolas which were, apparently, very rich and fine.

Pepys called in on Lady Sandwich and found her out of her “child bed”, which he was pleased to see. Childbirth in those days was a hugely dangerous hobby!

He spent the afternoon, yet again, trying to sort the finer details of his Uncle’s Will, and at one stage was forced to meet relatives in a pub on Shoe Lane called the Gridiron; a place that he was ashamed to be seen going into.

He returned home by link and called in on Sir William Batten to be told that all the jolly japes involving Sir William Penn’s beloved tankard had gone down as well as a pot of sick at a party! I'm not surprised. Since when was it amusing to kidnap a silver cup?

Thank you for the music

I woke up this morning with a full-on cold. I'm coughing all the time and can't hear out of one of my ears! Raily and Tanya were with us last night, and we must have stayed up pretty late 'cus I woke up at 10am, feeling like I'd been run over by a brick-filled wheel barrow. There was a mini crisis in the night involving one of the female rats who's been staying with us. I think she's had some kind of major haemorrhage because her cage looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. There was blood everywhere and the poor thing was limping around trying to wash herself clean. I think her plight brought out the maternal instincts in Raily and Tanya, because they immediately leaped to action stations and started helping with the clean-up operation. Poor McCann Rat is definitely not long for this world, but she seemed a great deal chirpier this morning, which makes me think we might be able to give her back to her owners in a cage rather than a freezer bag!

I went to see Philippa, Kate, Gob and Deia today. The adults were all utterly exhausted and took every opportunity we could manufacture to sit down with a nice cup of tea. Deia, however, had different plans, and we played a rather large amount of hide and seek. There were baked potatoes for lunch on a kitchen table covered with jigsaw puzzles and early autumn leaves which were being collected for a collage.

I went through some of my photographs with Phil, and discovered this stunning detail on one of them. It's her and Deia at the Uffington White Horse last weekend, and for some reason I hadn't noticed it before. I think it's one of my best, so enjoy...

I went from Columbia Road to Northern Essex to see the parents. They took us for a lovely meal in Saffron Walden and we retired to Thaxted afterwards for tea and scones and a chat with an apiarist called Stuart who made Nathan and me realise  how lovely it must be to keep bees.

It's almost impossible to comprehend that it's now 10 years since 9/11. It really does feel like yesterday. We were rehearsing Taboo at the time and I remember the sense of sadness and disbelief as though it were yesterday.

September 11th, 1661, and Pepys spent the day wandering around London, talking to various lawyers and learned men about his Uncle's will, which was still not entirely sorted.

He called in on one Dr Williams, who took him into a garden where, we're told, there was an abundance of grapes. There was also a dog which had been trained to kill the cats who regularly appeared in search of the pigeons Dr Williams kept. The doctor was obviously an eccentric individual who  carefully buried every cat that had been killed in this manner. Apparently the tally stood at around 100. One assumes there were rather a lot of cats in London in those days!

In the afternoon, Pepys went to the theatre, despite having recently promised his wife he'd only ever attend in the future when she was with him. One assumes he confessed that his perpetual search for pleasure was stopping him from doing his job properly and, like a loyal wife, she told him she'd keep an eye on him. He didn't like the deception and, as a result, hated every minute of the play!

Crazy world

At 4am this morning a text message arrived with a photograph attached. The same photograph was sent again at noon today. It's come from a number my phone doesn't seem to recognise, and it's a very peculiar picture...

Can anyone tell me what this is all about? Is there some message I need to be reading into this? Who are the strange people on the photograph? Who's the polar bear? And more importantly, what on earth does it all mean? I think it looks like a still from a Christopher Guest film...

Today, like most of last night, was spent at the Queen's Theatre taking photographs of Matt's last few performances playing Thernadier in Les Miserables. I had been given carte blanche to roam wherever I wanted in the building, and at one stage even crawled into the orchestra pit so that Matt could demonstrate his entrance through the trap door in "One Day More." It was terribly exciting.

I was behind the curtain just before the show went up, and was allowed to stand in the wings and photograph the action on stage. I don't think you can really claim to have lived until you've stood within 5 metres of Caroline Sheen singing I Dreamed A Dream. I got a little flutter every time the revolve stage deposited someone else on the wings next to me. It feels so wrong to be standing on the edge of a stage where a live performance is taking place. One trip, one loud sneeze, and the experience is ruined for the audience.

Everyone was, nevertheless, incredibly gracious, even when I found myself standing on their dresses during the stage-side quick changes! There weren't stage managers rushing about to tell me to watch my back every five minutes. I was trusted simply to get on with what I was doing.

I'm now heading back to Highgate to start cooking. Tanya and Raily have been staying with me this weekend and we're going to have a lovely night in. I'm cooking tagliatelle.

The savings continue, but sometimes it's hard to make judgements about how much money I would have spent under normal circumstances. Matt bought me lunch, today, for example, probably because he knew I was poor, but does this count as money saved? Would he have bought me lunch anyway?

September 10th, 1661 was a rainy day, and Elizabeth and Pepys spent the day dodging showers and walking through sticky, muddy, often impassable streets. They wanted to buy a chest, so went to Wood Street near Cheapside.

It was dark by the time that Pepys started to head home, and in the absence of any link boys - young lads who carried lanterns through the streets for pennies - he was forced to buy his own (lantern that is, rather than link boy.) Part way home he found a boy to do the job for him, and rewarded him with the lantern when they arrived home

To be alive and feel the sun that follows every rain

The tonic for the misery of yesterday was definitely going to see Julie in cabaret on the King's Road. She was wonderful; incredibly focussed and very charming. I was particularly thrilled when she performed one of my songs, dedicating it to me by saying "he might need reminding what a great composer he is, 'cus he's had a really shit day!" I wept profusely. 

We got home very late, utterly exhausted, and probably still a little drunk, and I fell asleep on Nathan's shoulder whilst watching an episode of Scrubs. 

Today begins the process of finding the £2,500 I now owe The Choir Invisible. I have borrowed some money from my father, and will pay him back by making a giant piggy bank which I hope to slowly fill with money. 

The aim is to make small, regular cut-backs. Today, for example, I am taking the bus into town instead of using the tube. This will save me £2. I didn't buy a cup of tea in Costa before my meeting, and waited instead until the meeting itself, thereby saving myself another £1.70. I will put £4 in the pot tonight which will soon become £8... And, perhaps within the next 12 months, the target will be reached; considerably sooner if I find myself back in work in the meantime. I'm excited, and have decided to create another totalizer to show my progress! 

The process of moving on is a fascinating one. Obviously I'm up and down today. I've cried a few times, laughed a bit, been angry, been stunned.  I have, however, been besieged by positive messages from friends and family members, which makes me feel very blessed. At the end of the day, in fact, at the end of every day, I return home to Nathan. It is amazing how good it feels to be part of a team. All sorts of things can be thrown around a courtroom, the truth can be massaged, what happened can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but the  indisputable fact is that I am loved, and that's good enough for me...

It was announced yesterday that the government have taken a tentative step towards equality in the field of gay men giving blood. An imminent change in the law will mean that a gay man can now give blood - wait for it - if he hasn't had sex in the past year! In the past YEAR?!! And that includes oral sex! No gay man would leave it for a year without having sex! Imagine if they made a blanket ban on ANYONE who's had sex within a year giving blood.

And yet a heterosexual man who regularly sleeps with multiple partners without using a condom is still allowed to give blood as often as he chooses! In my view the blood screening process is either effective or it's not. And more importantly, a gay man is either equal or he's not. These baby steps towards equality make me feel very angry! 

Matt is leaving Les Mis tomorrow and has asked me to come and take pictures of him warming up and getting ready backstage, which is exciting. These kinds of environments are brilliant for photography. Actors like having their pictures taken, and there are always atmospheric pools of light, crazy props and shabby brick walls hanging about which give the images a timeless quality! 

350 years and one day ago was a Sunday, and Pepys, as usual, went to church. When he returned, he found his new maid, the wonderfully named Doll, so fast asleep that she couldn't hear him knocking on the door. In the end, Pepys' boy, Wayneman, was send through a window to let him in. 

Pepys retired to his study and got busy with his accounts, discovering, to his great pleasure, that he was worth a massive £600. He was, however, worried about the large amount of time he'd recently spent pleasuring himself with trips to the theatre and drinking binges. Once a puritan...

Worried he might have been, but the very next day he was up to his usual tricks, drinking so heavily that he couldn't do his business and had to go for a long walk to sober himself up, which became, you guessed it, a trip to the theatre. He saw Tis Pity She's a Whore "ill-acted" but was thrilled to find himself sitting next to a "most pretty and most ingenious woman." 

He went back home, and then immediately out to a pub with the two Sir Williams, one of whom drank himself into a coma, as a band of very fine fiddlers played on. 

Like a roller in the ocean, life is motion, move on...
Like the wind that's always blowing, life is flowing, move on
Like the sunrise in the morning, life is dawning, move on
How I treasure every minute, being part of, being in it, with the urge to move on

So at last you're free!

Very drunk! Lost the court case. Very surreal experience. Now I have to find £2,500, which I don't really have. Hugged Sally at the end 'cus God knows it's been hell for her as well. 

I'd love people to have a listen to Ubuntu, which is one of the songs I wrote for the project. 

Www.benjamintill.com/ubuntu

Enjoy!!