A day for poets

Today's been rather productive. I've done a solid eight hours' work and finished another orchestration; a five-minute epic scene and song called "Letters" where every cast member has an individual line and every melody from the show is reprised in some form. I suppose in it's simplest form, it's a little like One Day More from Les Miserables, except a little more up-tempo with even more countermelodies floating about. I played the whole thing through just before leaving the cafe in Tufnell Park, a heavy book propped up against my headphones cable, which is the only way I can get the thing to play in stereo!

I'm pleased with what I've written, although I shall need another pass in a few week's time to thin the orchestrations out. I think a healthy-looking score is one filled with empty bars. Nothing should be wasted, although that's a more challenging concept than you might think.

I walked home again, up Dartmouth Park Hill and through Waterlow Park, which looked a picture in the early evening sunshine. The birds were going crazy, there was a ripe scent of May blossom in the air and midges danced like specks of silver in the hazy shafts of light between trees.

There are a lot of homeless people in Waterlow Park, which I find hopelessly sad. The same trio sit in the same little shelter every day; an elderly lady with a boxer dog and two young men. It might be my romantic sensitivities but I always feel like she's somehow looking after them. Whenever I pass, she's holding court. Today she was telling the lads about childhood trips to Trafalgar Square, and I wondered what sort of upbringing she had, and at what point, and indeed why she ended up living in a park.

There could not be a bigger contrast between this trio and the wealthy folk of Highgate, who walk their dogs, lounge about and play tennis in the park, taking loudly about the things that seem to fascinate the wealthy.

The walk from Tufnell Park becomes easier the more often I do it, and, one assumes, the more weight I lose.

Highgate Village was a similarly glorious sight, bathed in sunshine. There was an antiques fair being held in the Highgate Society building. A young lad was sitting outside, strumming a guitar. The pace up here is always slower than in the rest of London. People mill. No one rushes. Particularly on a day like this. The sort of day that poets write about.

Water wall

We've been having terrible trouble with the wall behind our house. Our neighbours, whom I recently discovered are the type who have strange Eastern European women permanently cleaning their flats, continue to use some kind of irrigation system to water their garden. The water, therefore, continues to flow through the wall, the stench of rancidity is becoming intense and there are now massive mosquitoes flying around the puddles forming underneath. Haringey council have been informed but they continue to drag their feet. Apparently, when dealing with them, you have to be deeply unpleasant, sarcastic and somewhat threatening. The softly, softly, terribly nice approach only ends up with them saying "sorry, this is out of our jurisdiction." I discovered this to my cost some weeks ago. In the meantime, the wall is starting to look really quite perilous. I keep emailing the council to let them know that if the wall collapses, I consider them to be responsible, and at some point, someone will be forced to take notice...

I went to see a theatrical agent this morning. I'm beginning to think the time might have arrived to go down that particular route, if not just to have an intermediary figure who supports me, and is able to be a bastard on my behalf when the shit hits the fan. I would far rather someone thought of me as a lovely person with a nasty agent, rather than as a bloke who occasionally loses his cool and sends out shirty emails in the middle of the night. With an agent, I can put much more effort into dealing with turds at Haringey council!

I worked in Soho for a few hours after my meeting, went to the gym and then continued working in my favourite cafe in Tufnell Park before opting to walk home - up the astonishingly steep and unrelenting hill to Highgate, where I worked some more.

I am writing this blog entry whilst half-heartedly watching Hillary Clinton in an interview with Jeremy Paxman. She is coming across as an intelligent, shrewd, candid and hugely impressive person. I seriously hope she stands for the presidency, and further more that she becomes the first female president of the US. The world might have a future if this happens!

Too many G and Ts

I returned from Sheffield today feeling absolutely lousy on account of the the gin and tonics I polished off the night before. To make matters worse, I hadn't slept particularly well. For some reason, despite having gone to bed at 3am, I woke up with the dawn at 4.30 and witnessed the most remarkable sunrise, which made my heart leap with such joy that sleep, until it had cleared, was not a possibility. The sun rose as a rather astonishing shade of peach, which turned the white walls of my hotel room into a light box. I lay in bed for several minutes making silhouettes of animals before drifting off to sleep again.

The train journey home was pleasant enough. Archie phoned to say that Jon Snow, in his talk to 800 festival delegates, had talked about the wedding and how proud he'd been to sing in it. Many people are still saying It's the best piece of telly they've seen this year.

London was an instant nightmare. St Pancras station was filled with braying tourists. One woman in particular was seeing how loud she could shout at the person standing right next to her. They seemed to be having a perfectly ordinary conversation, just one which was astonishingly shouty. It was like watching an RSC production!

I worry that I'm turning into one of those little old ladies who is simultaneously deaf yet says that everything (music etc) is too loud. What's that all about?

I learned on Spring Watch today that the English grass snake lays eggs whereas the adder actually gives birth. This is why adders can live much further North because they don't need to atmosphere to be so warm in order to procreate. I was surprised there could be that much variation within one species. It just goes to show that even at the age of 97, you can still learn something new every day.

Clubbing

I took the train to the documentary festival in Sheffield today, where I talked on a fascinating panel about musical documentaries. It was a great event; lots of interesting opinions floating around and a good selection of musical documentary practitioners including the Daddy of the movement, Brian Hill, who made the iconic Feltham Sings.

We went for dinner afterwards and then out to a club. Imagine me going to a club and actually dancing?!

You might rather expect a documentary festival to be filled with people who'd seen our wedding on telly but I'm not sure I was quite prepared for the sheer number of people who came up to me in the club to offer their heart-felt congratulations. The funniest was a little Japanese girl whom I could barely understand. She kept saying "you? Composer? Wedding?" And then something I couldn't fathom which I subsequently realised was her asking where Nathan was. More than one person came up to me and said the wedding had made them feel proud to be British. What an astonishing, astonishing compliment. It's almost worth the tinnitus-like ringing in my ears that the loud club music has left me with!!

I read in the paper on the way up that Ronan Keating is making his acting debut in the musical Once.  How lucky is the West End to have a man of his calibre gracing its boards? I'm sure he'll prove to be a subtle actor with endless depth and maturity.

Ronan has said on record that he never saw himself starring in musicals but "now I see it as a play with music that sits better with me." One word. Tosser. I hope he gets nodules!

I'm eternally amused by how little pieces of one's life can often be knitted together in a single journey, in today's case, a walk from the train station in Sheffield to the hotel I'm staying in tonight. On the journey I passed locations from A Symphony for Yorkshire and a little film I made almost ten years ago about the floods in Sheffield.

More surprisingly, when I arrived at the hotel I realised I'd stayed here just after it opened in 1998, when I was working as the Resident Director of a tour of Madam Butterfly.

It was the first leg of the tour and I couldn't believe how fancy the hotel was. We all had double beds and the rooms had amazing city views. It was so fancy that I immediately called my partner at the time, Stephen, and said he had to come up to the next leg of the tour in Manchester so he could see how well treated we were all being. I told our bitch of a company manager that he was coming up, so imagine my horror, when we reached Manchester, to find I'd been placed in a single room which smelt of smoke and had no window!

I was so upset. At the time I was very conscious of being poor, and the fact that Stephen always ended up paying for everything. I'd really wanted to show him how well I was doing! And there we were, sharing a single bed!

The land of opera was such a back-stabbing, horrifying world, which thrived on cattiness and cruelty, and the most intolerable treatment of those who weren't the divas. Some of the most miserable times of my life were spent being bullied by a stage manager called Annie, whose nose I managed to put out of joint at one stage. She used to have me monitored in the Albert Hall to make sure I was doing my job properly. The moment I left the building she'd call me and ask me what I was doing. A lot is written about the aggressive behaviour of men towards women in the work place, but that cow made my life a living nightmare!

Still, the hotel in Sheffield was, and remains a rather lovely place, and I'm as happy to be here today as I was almost 20 years ago. Back then, I remember having to take a really early train back to London without the rest of the company. It was probably another little punishment from the tour manager. Whatever the reason, I was up pre-dawn and remember walking to the train station in a thick mist, over the strange tram bridges, the sound of factory sirens going off around the city; a call to work, one assumes, for steel workers.  It felt so other worldly.

The smell of rain

We're currently listening to the Shipping Forecast in the car returning from Huntingdonshire where we've been visiting Lisa, Mark, Poppy and the Slow Loris. It's been thundering and lightning all night and there are now little wisps of mist rising from the ground which we keep catching in our head lights.

There was a rather exciting little storm going on whilst we sat chatting in the conservatory. At one stage the air was thick with static, and every time there was a flash of lightning we could feel a soft buzzing around our ears.

I was reminded of a trip to the South of France (just before I met Nathan, in fact) when the house we were staying in ended up in the middle of the mother-of-all electric storms. Lightning actually struck that night and destroyed a garden wall no more than four metres away from where I was standing. I can still remember the smell of electricity as the lightning struck, and the hairs on my arms rising up as though I had my hand on a Van de Graaf generator.

The sound of rain on the conservatory roof tonight was wonderfully soothing. I'd cheerfully sleep in a conservatory during a rain storm. The constant drumming would soon send me off to sleep. I did it once with two friends during my sixth form. It was around Hallowe'en, I seem to remember, and my parents had gone away for the night. We carved pumpkins and then went to sleep in the conservatory with the pumpkins flickering in time with the rain.

As we arrived at Lisa and Mark's house we were instantly greeted by the glorious, rich and somewhat dark smell of rain in the countryside - a smell I love and realise I've missed since moving London.

It's felt rather like a Sunday all day today. That's what happens when your husband's day off is a Monday and you're lucky enough to be able to shape your own schedule. I genuinely don't know how some relationships last when one half works in the theatre and the other half has a regular day job. The actor wakes up after their partner has gone to work, and leaves for work just before the partner returns, who goes to bed before the actor gets home. It's disastrous really. Oddly, I'm told it can work quite well for child rearing!

Frenzy

So a World Cup frenzy is hotting up, and everyone's hoping against hope that England will do well. I'm not altogether sure why anyone bothers. We'll scrape into the quarter finals and go out against Germany on penalty shoot-outs, the pain is written on the walls. I suppose, as a long-term supporter of Eurovision, I'm a fine one to talk, but at least with Eurovision, you can support another country who perform better! When it comes to the World Cup, we place our faith and hope in a group of over-paid bastards with silly hair-dos, who camply prance about like the world owes them a living, before being utterly smashed into the ground by Jonny Foreigner. Actually, that sounds almost identical to Eurovision, doesn't it? I've always thought of it as the gay man's World Cup!

I have been so profoundly traumatised by extraneous noise today. Sirens seem louder than normal and I have never heard such shrieking on the tube. I think it's the large crowds which are probably disturbing me most. I feel insanely agoraphobic when Nathan is away.

Still, I was very pleased to have overcome my ludicrous fear of weekend people to make my way down to the Southbank late this afternoon, where Ian was celebrating his birthday. He does the same thing each year; hires a table at Giraffe and tells all his friends he'll be there from 4 until late. These things are always fairly self-regulatory, people come, people go, and if you stay for a long stretch you'll meet all sorts of interesting people - and if you're lucky, you'll get to eat a Key Lime Pie!

Samantha Bond was there, but I didn't have the opportunity to tell her that we'd met, in 1996, I believe, at the stage door of the Adelphi theatre. It was the night of the Dunblaine massacre; that awful occasion where a gun man had gone into a primary school and shot loads of children. I can't remember whether she told me the news, or whether it was something which was filtering around, but I do remember feeling terribly shaken and explaining to her that there had been a shooting at my own school when I was a child, and that I hadn't, until that moment, realised quite how high the stakes had been. There but for the grace of God and all that...

I fancied an evening stroll on my way home, so walked up through Soho to Tottenham Court Road station, which was rammed to the rafters. Heaven knows where all those sweaty tourists were heading at 9.30pm, but at one stage the people standing both to my left and my right were snogging, which I consider to be unacceptable tube behaviour. No lust is so all-encompassing that it won't wait ten minutes to be continued behind closed doors. I stood in a corner of the carriage, desperately hoping they'd all get off ('scuse the pun) at Euston, which some did, although it wasn't until Kentish Town that I was able to sit down.

Nathan comes home tonight, which I'm thrilled about. I've missed him rather a lot this week.

Britain's Got Talent

The sound has stopped working on my computer. Hurrah. (I'm searching for the sarcasm emoticon...) Quite what I do to deserve such dreadful luck when it comes to all matters technological, I'm not sure. I guess the simple truth of the matter is that I'm glued to machines for many, many hours a day, which makes the likelihood of them wearing out, or breaking, or sulking quite high...

I punished myself by sitting down to watch The Towering Inferno which happened to be on telly. A disaster movie is always brilliant when you're in a bad mood. However bad your life is, at least you're not trapped in a burning skyscraper with Fred Astaire and O J Simpson... Although one can't help but wonder if the tits who masterminded 911 weren't somehow influenced by the film.

I went to the gym feeling a little sorry for myself, trying to work on the bus, with the sound from my computer continually cutting out in my ears. As I reached my stop, the guy next to me nudged me and blurted out, "did you get married on the telly recently?" Obviously I said yes. "It was beautiful," he said, and my day was instantly made. Believe it or not, he's the first stranger who's approached me in this manner and I felt proud as punch!

The gym was exhausting, but even more exhausting was trying to write a sequence of underscore in the cafe afterwards. The sun was glaring through the window and I was forced to hold my headphones in a special way to make the sound work properly, but really the exhaustion was Brass itself. I'm right at the end of my proverbial tether!

I worked late into the night and finally turned a corner on the song I'm currently working on, which means another one can get ticked off the list...

I stopped for a while to watch the final of Britain's Got Talent, which was a fairly high-quality affair by these shows' standards. Still, I worry that the result will mean a plethora of over-produced formulaic albums of musical theatre and semi-operatic covers hitting the charts in time for Christmas. Yet again, an absolute riot of cliches sprang from the glistening lips of all involved. The opera girl, with the semi-okay voice which would benefit from proper classical training, was told she was "pitch perfect." I get so profoundly irritated by people using this term to mean "you sing in tune." Perfect pitch is a very specific thing, which should never be muddled up with other terms. If I were a doctor, I wouldn't get away with telling someone they had cancer if they were having a heart attack, so why should an "expert" judge on a talent show get away with critiques which simply don't make sense?

I wrote down a list of all the cliches uttered (without any form of irony) by one or all the contestants. I think we had the full compliment...

"We're going to raise the bar"
"We're going to bring it"
"Blood sweat and tears have led up to this moment"
"This is going to be the performance of our lives" (x3)
"I want to make my dad/ family/ little boy/ dead husband proud"
"This is the biggest performance I've ever done"
"This is the hardest I have ever worked"
"This show has made me believe in myself"
"It's been such an amazing/incredible journey" (x2)
"This performance could change our lives"
"Everything rests on tonight's performance"

How's that?!

Tragic!