Red, white and green

It’s incredibly cold. I’ve just had to turn the heating on. Usually, I’d simply put a jumper on, but I can’t find one! I’m absolutely wiped out. I didn’t sleep well last night. I drank a cup of tea just before bed, which wasn’t particularly sensible. I drifted off to sleep, and then woke up with a start and then it was telly-a-ho for much of the night!

Last night a small group of York-based singers gathered in a recording studio to make a demo of all the individual parts for the anthem I’ve written. It all went very smoothly, but predictably, we ran out of time. It also struck me that everything was a tone too high. The brass band had a rehearsal on the piece last night, and oddly, they too feel it’s a tone too high, so the decision has been made to drop the key. Unfortunately this means we have to start all over again with the recording, which I might have to do in London as it’s very expensive to keep training me up to York, particularly at short notice. Still, it’s worth it, as I think the excellent soprano who joined us yesterday was slightly perturbed by the concept of singing a top B flat! Writing a top B flat was not very community-spirited of me! It’s a luxury to hear some of the very people singing the music who will be performing it in July, and it’s spurred me on to re-write a few of the corners they seemed to struggle with.

The Queen was in York this morning, in fact, she was due to arrive in the train station the very time that my train was due to leave. Micklegate was absolutely heaving with people; all waiting patiently with their little union flags. Use them whilst you can, I say. When Scotland leaves the union, we’ll have to have a serious redesign. A Blue Peter competition, maybe.  I favour replacing blue with green to represent Wales. A red, white and blue flag is so 19^th Century!

I sat in the train station waiting for my train with a cup of tea. The two girls on the table behind me were students at the university. I was fairly astonished by their conversation, which had, understandably turned to the Queen and the concept of royalty. “I quite like that we have a monarch” said one, “there aren’t many countries in the world with a monarchy are there?” There was a pause. “I can’t think of any” she said. “Spain. Spain has a king.” “I don’t think so,” (The other one finally piped up.) “Are we the only country with a Queen? France doesn’t have a queen, does it?” There was another pause, and then from nowhere... “India” one of them said, “India’s the sort of country that would have a Queen.” And then, the ultimate line dripped out of one of their mouths; “people are really jealous of the Queen, aren’t they? The Americans and the Australians all wish they had one.” I feel obliged to point out that these girls were UNIVERSITY students, not two six year-old girls in a special needs class! Sometimes I worry that the intelligence levels of students has almost dropped through the floor... Or maybe I was that dense when I was a student. Maybe I’ve just accumulated a lot of knowledge since leaving? I remember Fiona having to explain the concept of Karma to me when I was in the Upper Sixth. I felt even then that it was something I should have known...

Here's a question. I've just been on google analytics to look at my website stats, and I seem to have a large fan base in Leicester. Why? I've never worked in Leicester... I've only ever been to cout in Leciester!

350 years ago, Pepys did a spin in the garden to gossip with the influential Sir George Carteret about Sir William Batten, who Pepys was beginning to loathe and resent. In the afternoon, a workman turned up to discuss the idea of adding more floors to the houses within the Navy Office complex. Pepys almost permanently had builders in. This really was the age of home improvements.

My first piece of art

It's apparently been snowing all over the north of England today. People on the Yorkshire Moors have been trapped in cars, and thousands are without electricity. I'm in York, but there's no sign of anything untoward. It's cold, though. Stupidly cold. I nearly had to buy a scarf. The Queen arrives here tomorrow for some kind of official visit. I'm worried I'll never escape! 

I bought a painting today. I went into a little Greek barber shop to have my hair cut in a bit of York that I don't know very well. There were, rather unusually I thought, paintings for sale on the wall. There were a series of acrylic images of an apocalyptic blood-orange sky, with a little house sitting on the top of a perilous-looking cliff top silhouetted in the foreground. Each of the pictures was similar but different, and each of the houses had a little sign outside which simply read "for sale." I kept staring at the images. They really spoke to me. They tell a tale of hope  against hope, I guess. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting on the top of a mountain in front of a burning sky, trying to flog my wares. I still do it. Against my better judgement and against all the odds. 

The painting cost £80. I'm sure the artist barely covered his costs. 

On the way up to York, I found myself in a train with an immensely charming guard.  His name badge said Stephen Sheard, and I'm naming him because I want people to seek him out if they see him on an East Coast Mainline train. He is an absolute credit to his employers; full of compassion, very chatty and hugely witty. As we pulled into Doncaster, he said over the train tannoy, "unfortunately my mother-in-law lives in this part of the world, so there will be dark clouds and a considerable amount of rain as you leave the train. Make sure you don't slip on the platform!" Old school, but funny.

Five seconds later, he arrived with a pair of fun packs for two of the kids in the carriage.  It doesn't take much, but it can make a massive difference to someone's day. 

350 years ago, Pepys went by barge to Deptford to "pay off" various ships. His diary entry ends with a somewhat chilling comment:

"I was much troubled to-day to see a dead man lie floating upon the waters, and had done (they say) these four days, and nobody takes him up to bury him, which is very barbarous."

Panic in their hearts. Anger in their souls.

I've had a shockingly frustrating day. Isn’t it so often the case, that when you’re back is up against the wall, everything manages to go brilliantly wrong! My music software keeps crashing and getting little glitches which make writing music almost impossible. It’s genuinely one problem after another. Sadly, the customer service department for Finale Allegro is in the US, and opens at 8.30am CST, which means I'm utterly helpless until after lunch. The positive aspect, of course, is that I’m dealing with American customer service, which is universally ridiculously good. They’re polite, incredibly knowledgeable and terribly eager to help, but I've spent what feels like the whole day on the phone to them. Generally speaking they ask me to send the problem file over to them, and then they go away to try and work out what’s gone wrong. This leaves me twitching and twiddling my thumbs and getting myself into a panic, which intensifies and makes my stomach churn, which starts to give me a pain in my side, which makes me even more nervous, and so it goes on...

I suppose all I can do is what I can do, but I can see all the music I need to complete by the end of the month stretching out in front of me like some kind of weird manuscript-coated roller coaster shooting deep into the clouds. One bar at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time. In two weeks time, I’ll look back on today and wonder what the fuss was all about.

I’m going to York tomorrow to record rehearsal sound files for the Ebor Vox project. The last time I recorded sound files was almost exactly two years ago. They were called vocal files in those days, apparently. It could well have been Good Friday. I was holed up in a farm house in Leicestershire with two women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, one who was so stressed that all the blood vessels had burst in her eyes. I had a stomach virus. Nathan ended up singing soprano, and alto, whilst the two women looked on, panic in their hearts, anger in their souls.

April 3^rd, 1662, generated the shortest ever diary entry from our hero.

At home and at the office all day. At night. To bed.

(Rather than...?)

From a twinkling star to a passing angel

As I walked to the tube this afternoon, I was reminded that British eccentricity is not yet dead. My travels around the country often find me talking to people about characters from the past who have somehow defined an area in a specific era. Playwright Arnold Wesker, for example, talks about the man who used to wheel a pram around Brick Lane playing cracked Yiddish records on a wind-up gramophone, and there was the woman from my own childhood who used to throw bricks at motorists driving along the A6 through Higham Ferrers. Their only crime was apparently making her windows dirty. One day she was carted off by the authorities and we never saw her again. I often think that mass media has done a lot to iron out the kinks in society and left us with people whose raison d'etre is merely to fit in.

Highgate still seems to generate the occasional odd ball, however. As I walked to the tube, I noticed scores of tiny paintings on the pavement and realised that a young artist called Ben must have paid us another visit. Ben has dedicated his life to miniature art. His canvasses are pieces of chewing gum ground into the pavement. He'd be arrested for defacing council property if he painted straight onto the Tarmac, so he paints on the chewing gum that people spit out instead. The pictures are very detailed, and in order to paint them, he has to almost lie on the floor. My friend Ruth thinks this is so that he can look up the ladies' skirts.

chewing gum art...

As I admired Ben's artwork, I almost walked into another local eccentric. I've written about him before. He's the man who goes through the dustbins. I don't think he's homeless. One assumes he simply looks for things to recycle. He must have some success, because he roams the streets of Highgate at all hours dipping his fingers into the dustbins and recycling boxes and pulling out all manner of bits and bobs which he carefully places into carrier bags. It can be quite disconcerting to find him rifling through your bin liners. I dread to think what he's pulled out of ours, but he's harmless enough. As I passed him today, with his hand deep inside a council bin, he was singing very happily to himself. I liked that he was happy. I wonder what happens in the summer when the bins are filled with wasps.

I found out yesterday that my mother's paternal grandfather was Huguenot; one of those religiously-persecuted French Protestants who, for some reason, ended up making really good weavers in the East End of London. All of those fabulously-named streets around Spitalfields like Fournier Street belie their Huguenot past! Curiously, I’ve always been drawn to the architecture of those streets, and perhaps I now know why.  My Great Grandfather always told the world he was a gypsy for some reason. I’d always known he’d grown up in the East End, what I didn’t know was that his surname was Garnier, anglicised to Garner around the time that my own Grandfather came into the world. What with the Jewish blood surfing through my maternal Grandmother's line, I feel almost proud to be working with Rich Mix Cultural Foundation on the London Requiem. Their building is at the end of Brick Lane, and a huge amount of their work deals with communities in that area both past and present. I was there this afternoon. Feeling a renewed sense of ownership.

I’ve just listened to From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel, which is basically the sonic tory of the ABBA song Like An Angel Passing Through My Room. They’ve just released a mega-version of the song, featuring snippets of the various demos they made on the journey towards the band's most stripped-down recording; the only one which featured no backing vocals whatsoever. It’s an astonishing thing to listen to. You hear the song in all its guises; the original Bjorn demo with stupid lyrics, the disco mix, the version with the Thank You For the Music-style piano. It shows the extreme lengths the band went to in search of perfection, and it's an extraordinary lesson to us all. As Nathan’s just said, “anyone else would have simply abandoned the song.” Take eight minutes to have a listen. I urge you. Just before the final demo, there’s a sequence filled with harmonies where Frida simply shrieks pain into what she’s singing. It’s all very distant and very strangely recorded, but it absolutely finished me off. It’s 30 years since it was released, and I still remember the smell of the inner sleeve of the album. The song comes in at 1'40", so do some spooling!

And what of Pepys 350 years ago? Well, he went to a sort of charity gala at the Bluecoats School, which turned into the longest and most boring sermon known to man. He left after about an hour, unable to bear the pain any longer!

In the afternoon, he went with his wife to the theatre to see his favourite play, The Bondman, “most excellently acted, and though we had seen it so often, yet I never liked it better than today.” Pepys goes on to talk about the various actresses who he'd seen playing the central role. Instead of using their actual names, he refers to them by the name of the part he’d most enjoyed watching them act. There was Ianthe and Roxalana. He saw them as creatures, goddesses, not people. Just as I see Frida from ABBA.

And for those of you who don't believe one of the raffle prizes on Saturday night was a sack of spuds... check this out!

Great Cheesecakes!

I took a full day off today, the second in as many days. It's quite unusual for me to have a two day weekend, but it's best to start a new month fully charged. I got back from Thaxted very late last night, having dropped Helen off in Cambridge on my way back to London. I was stopped by police on the outskirts of Cambridge, who spotted that the rear light wasn't working on the car. It's funny, when a police car comes up behind you, with the sirens glaring and the blue lights flashing, your heart always jumps into your mouth, and there's often an all-encompassing feeling of guilt, even if you've done nothing wrong. In the end, having ascertained that I was neither drunk nor carrying drugs, they were actually very helpful. I happened to have a spare bulb, which they were able to fit for me, so we all went aaway feeling happy.

I got back to London at about 2 am. By the time I'd sat at my computer for an hour or so, worrying about various niggly admin issues, it was almost unfeasibly late. When I finally turned in, I couldn't sleep, and I was still awake at 5 AM, listing to the weirdest dawn chorus I've ever heard. I think there was a minah bird in our back garden, doing an impression of a teleporting machine!

We met Fiona for a quick cup of tea in the cafe this morning, before going to the local greasy spoon for poached eggs on toast. The afternoon was spent in Hackney, at Penny's house, who was celebrating a VERY belated birthday. It was also her leaving do from the BBC where she has worked for a staggering 23 years. The best ones are all leaving the BBC at the moment.

On our way East, we saw a man with severely deformed arms, walking down the street with his son. I assume he was a victim of thalidomide, because his hands seemed to emerge somewhere near his elbow. The young son was very proudly reaching up to hold his dad's hand, and the sight moved me enormously. The protective touch of someone's hand is warm and comforting, no matter how it looks to the rest of us. I hope the son never hears the world being cruel about the dad he plainly idolises.

We went to brother Edward's this evening, to watch crappy telly, and eat wraps. We also took half an hour to listen to a number of the entries for this year's Eurovision Song Contest. I think, on balance, I'm now tipping Sweden to win, with top five places for Serbia, Iceland, Italy and the UK. I'm told Russia will do well despite it's ludicrous old ladies, and Azerbaijan, as last year's winners, ought to poll quite strongly. The boys from Jedward have had Eurovision tattoos, which won't do them any harm, and I have an awful feeling that Cyprus, with words written on the back of the cereal packet, will also do very well. "I'm reaching so high, to the sky, oh my, I might cry..." (paraphrasing...)

It was a busy day for Pepys, who went to the theatre 350 years ago to see The Mayde in the Mill, a “pretty good play.” Mid way through, Lady Paulina, the 13-year old daughter of Lord Sandwich, was suddenly taken very ill. Pepys accompanied her out of the theatre and deposited her at a nearby house where she obviously had some kind of bowl explosion, which did the trick, for they instantly returned to the theatre to see the rest of the play.

When the play was over, Pepys took the assembled mass by coach to the village of Islington where they visited the Great Cheesecake House, better known these days as the King’s Head Theatre!

Lap of wine

I'm at a quiz in the village of Thaxted. It seems to be going on forever. We've stuffed our faces with table snacks - hundreds of bowls of crisps - and just as we all thought we were about to be sick, we were informed that round three was a crisp-tasting round! Just hideous. One of my team mates then dropped a glass of wine in my lap.

They're currently drawing the raffle, and one of the prizes is actually a sack of potatoes! At the last quiz they gave out a brace of pheasants. Country folk! 

We have done incredibly badly in the quiz... We were coming 7th at the half way point. No one cares who's won. We just want to go home and force ourselves to vomit with a toothbrush! 

I'm going to post this blog now, because I'm convinced I'm going to win the potatoes! Or vomit.

350 years ago, Pepys went to see The Little Thief by John Fletcher which had been revised by James Shirley. It was, we're told, a pretty play. 

Being a freelancer

Being a freelancer is not always a barrel of laughs. We’re often expected to negotiate the fragile egg shells which have been scattered liberally by large corporations riddled with codes of conducts, and ways of doing things, which we'll never begin to understand. The weight of a well-ordered chain of command will often drop rather squarely onto the head of the freelancer (or scapegoat) when he is perceived to have stepped out of line. He gets wrapped across the knuckles often before anyone thinks to listen to his or her side of the story. It’s only natural. He’s the outsider. But who listens to the freelancer when he wants to complain about the way he’s been treated? Who does he turn to? Who's meant to explain the rules? Freelancers need to be better protected by the people they work for.

Clashes of personality are funny things, aren’t they? The tiniest little quirk can make you decide you don’t like someone; the way they speak, the way they walk, the way they dress. Maybe they sound too southern. Maybe they’re too flamboyant. Maybe they're just from another world. Perhaps they made you feel undervalued in some way. Sometimes a clash of personalities is something that you just need to move on from. People should acknowledge that two people have simply wound each other up the wrong way, so the best option is for a go-between to step in and take control of the situation, thus allowing the two parties to continue to do the work they’re good at, and continue to be the people they are. Sometimes a little apology helps. Sometimes it adds fire to the flames. Sometimes it can be seen as an acknowledgement of guilt.

So the freelancer continues to swim against the tide, hoping the quality of his work earns him the right to talk with passion when he feels passionate and to hear someone saying “thank you” from time to time. Sometimes I get a very horrible taste in my mouth and it makes me feel sad and a little undervalued.

For Pepys’ Diary – see yesterday’s blog... I wrote after midnight, so skipped a rather boring entry!