Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

The Delia Derbyshire of the Electronic Stomach

 

 

 Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:

 

 And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow: 

 

 I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...

 

 To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:

 

 I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:

 

Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.

 

  Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can. 

 What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back. 

 Here's more research:

 

 

* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.

The Village

 "I say people will insist on things being different."

 After Sunday's post, I can't stop thinking about Thatcher, so here's some Socialism. My parents recommended "They Came To A City" to me, or at least told me they'd enjoyed it – it's an unapologetically utopian thought experiment from pipe-smoker J. B. Priestley, just before Orwell put him on a list, and according to my parents, a lot of it has come true. There's another slice of the film on youtube, but these are all I could find. What my algorithms throw up next is not a third clip, but perhaps the most concentrated dose of Seventies British Programming I've encountered outside of pastiche...

 It's called "No Two The Same". I don't know why. It's from 1970, and features a nervous writer called Ian Nairn, saying nice things about a couple of housing estates in Pimlico. Here's Ian with his back to us, interviewing a doctor:

  Initially I wasn't sure why they were both leaning on a car, but then I noticed Ian having a bit of a sit for pieces to camera other presenters might have remained standing for. There didn't need to be a chair nearby. A wall or a bollard would do.

 I looked Nairn up. He died thirteen years after this was shot. I realise that's morbid, but it's a hard question to ignore while you watch him in action. He's really not comfortable standing.

 But he's talking about hope. Not towering hope like Priestley's, just something on the "oh that'll be nice" scale, and it's a tone I'm unfamiliar with. It's not an unemotional watch. Here's more. 

 Here are lives having attention paid to them, not just by Ian and his film crew, but by the makers of the places they inhabit. 

 It's common to dismiss architects like Le Corbusier for asserting "a house is a machine for living in", but I'd rather that than the uninhabited gated off from the uninhabitable.

Ian talks of it as a village, but also seems to enjoy the anonymity these new places afford. It's odd to think hope also looked like this.

 "Nice day for it," he says as he's greeted at the door. I think it's the first time I've heard this said for real, outside of a sketch.

 But all this is real.

  Which isn't to say it's not funny.

  But it's not just funny.

 Here's the full piece:

  P.S. Bonus notice: It opens EXACTLY like an old episode of Dangermouse, to the point where I wonder if it was an influence.

Frankenstein Placeholder

Apologies for the delay to today's hotly anticipated "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" post, but apparently today marks the 42nd anniversary of the first ever broadcast of "The Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy" so I'm off out to the pub to attemptedly down four pints with Geoff "Ford Prefect" McGivern. Trust me though, tomorrow's Frankenpost'll be a doozy (check spelling), with possible traces of actual scholarship - I honestly think I might have found something new to say about Lugosi's Monster that could validate this whole endeavour! (Feel free to post your guesses below.)

This Week's Drinks

 It's tax day today, and it's Brexit day, so Joel Morris and I met this evening for what turned out to be a responsible three and a half pints each. I brought Joel up to date with other drinks I'd had this week, and we both took notes. Joel noted, for example, that there should be a Liff word for the person in a group elected to explain the rules of a boardgame, an observation borne from me recalling how last Sunday I'd tried to explain the plot of the film "Cats" to John Finnemore. (I'd forgotten how easy it can be to make John weep with laughter.) Joel also noted how often he was hearing Tom Petty in pubs these days, and how effectively the pitch of his voice cut through the murmur of a crowd, like the tambourine in a Motown track that makes those songs so ideal for a jukebox. I passed on a Fun Fact I'd learnt in a bar from Mark Steel the night before, attending a recording of David Reed's outstanding podcast "Inside The Comedian", a fact for which I can find no evidence online... Actually before I tell you, think of the thinnest celebrity you can imagine. Okay. Now think of the widest. Okay, now here's the fact: John Cooper Clarke's school bully was Giant Haystacks.

Something else the "Cats" film reminded me of.
 

 What else? We talked about the background noise of vanishing coin, something I'd felt suddenly absent from the second series of "Fleabag" for example, and of the work of freelancers who constantly live with that background noise, and of the creative, commissioning and critical decisions of those who don't, and how so much British Cinema in our lifetimes seemed to be the work of the latter, telling stories that either ignore money completely or contrastingly find poverty fascinating, and I thought that might explain why so many British films are either Boring or Horrible. I was probably on my third pint by then. Cracking chat.

 And here's a neat place for plugs. Joel and Jason Hazeley's "Rule Of Three" podcast serves as lasting proof of just how good at talking they are, and is hearable here. David's podcast "Inside the Comedian", in which guests are not allowed to tell the truth, can be heard here, also if you can get over to one of the live recording at Kings Place I'd really recommend that too. David and I are of course both in Joel And Jason's scandi-nougat "Angstrom" which is apparently available on BBC Sounds forever here. Oh also, David has a scifi comedy pilot out next week here, "Napoleon Moon", which should be excellent. John meanwhile, though not credited as one of the writers of Armando Iannucci's "David Copperfield", is from what I've seen of the trailers absolutely all over it, so we should redouble our efforts to see that too. It looks neither Boring nor Horrible. The photo of Soho is from my Instagram. The image of the 50p coin celebrating the UK's joining the EEC in 1973 and depicting a Ring of Hands is from this video. And finally, not really a plug, but l wrote this post the day before the decision to leave the EU was taken three and a half years ago. I still think it's a dumb decision, and Europe, I love you, and we will be back. Bissous.

The Choosatron

Very quickly - Last night I was in the Hen and Chickens in Islingtonto see "Pekka and Strangebone's Comedy Showpiece" for a third time (it's excellent by the way, if you're doing nothing tonight get yourself along) and I ran into some friends from the Wireless Theatre Company all huddled round a guy from Minnesota called Jerry. In his hands was this:

What looked like a receipt printer was in fact printing the text of a choose-your-own adventure, and the thing that looked like a calculator was actually the number pad into which you key your choices. Written in marker on the lid after the fashion of Calvin and Hobbes was the name "The Choosatron". It was Jerry's own invention and you can out more about it here. He was not short of drinks that night.

"You Are A Shark"...?!

Show 317 (... Always Be Closing, cont.)

So hey! As you may have seen, we finally finished making that Money trailer. And into our fourth run the houses are full once again. COINCIDENCE?!?!?!?!? We're well past the three-hundredth show, and it's still fun to perform, more fun than when we started in fact, because all the niggling ideas of the other shows this might have been have long since faded now, and we can just get on with it. BUT... now, yes... the bad news is – here we go – Shunt's newly desperate straights have forced them to serve us two and half weeks' notice on the show! I KNOW! So, ignore the trailer. Stupid old trailer. We're running until August 7th now, NOT the end of September. ALLEZ therefore! VITE already!

There is a slim chance, after the 7th, that we'll be running the show part-time, rather than killing the old girl off entirely. but you know, who knows? I hope she lives, of course, because this job has been a life-saver: it was there to take care of me from the moment I came out of hospital to a life of homelessness and burnt goods back in March 2009, and it paid for that flat-share with Mossad, and the pool and sauna that helped me catch my breath while I fell in love.

And it's been my creative focus for over a year now, something I've been able to work upon, and within, alongside people whose company over a complimentary bottle of whatever's-nearest, in a car park full of chairs come dusk, cannot be matched. And it's offered us complete artistic freedom (and no artistic control, but that's the deal in any system, isn't it, freedom or control... but, now I think of it, that's probably why I made this trailer, to snatch a little measure of control). But most importantly, it is quite simply a very exciting show, and not enough people have seen it. No, I'll be gutted if she gets killed off. Chugging away there... Well I sent an invitation to Terry Gilliam yesterday, anyway. Priorities, exactly.

ReTweet @antimega "It's the London Dungeon for cultured adults. That's not a bad thing." I liked that.

Always Be Closing

 There is a cabaret tonight at Shunt, starting at 6. You are all invited. Only, Shunt is now at Bermondsey Street. All of it. So, if you're lucky, you might even be able to pick up a cheap chair. They're good, I've bought two, carried them off like a bailiff following the father's downfall in a Perrault. In other fairy-tale news: that small door on Joiner Street leads nowhere now, because of course the Lounge beneath London Bridge has – as I may have hinted at – after months of happy and open communication between all parties keen to prove the viable compatibility of artistic and commercial concerns, been suddenly thrown out on its arse by a shower of useless pricks.

 

 No news is good news, and that's the news. I'm not really sure even now, some three or four weeks after its last night, how much I'm allowed to say, or what the plan is, which is a bit why this blog – in which the Lounge featured so centrally – has been so quiet recently... that, and just the abominable anger and sadness of how's it all transpired. Anyway, here belatedly are some stills from that last night, the 26th of June:

 

 Of course, we'd already had a last night back in November, with the place stripped, and old changing-rooms re-revealed, and the recognition that this wasn't just the Lounge we were saying goodbye to but the spaces of "Tropicana" and "Amalto Saltone", and that was a nice night, with seeing old friends and looking ahead and we knew where we stood. This night was different, of course.

 

(I don't know what's going on here, 

but four hours later there was an egg and spoon race.) 

 

 And naturally the Shard asked Shunt to "leave the place as they found it", but while we're not short of volunteers, none were found willing to rip out the toilets and the plumbing and the electricity, replant the sawn-off steel, or smear shit back onto the walls, so sorry about that.

 

 Two nights ago someone called Hilary came to see "Money". She had programmed what turned out to be the Lounge's penultimate week, and had hung from piercings in her shoulder while singing Verdi, something she can only do once a month, but that's not the point, the point is on Friday she lit up as she told me something I had found for myself whenever I came to put on work at the Lounge, but have probably never acknowledged here: that there was nowhere as helpful, as generous, as responsible, as unquestioningly encouraging, or as just plain big and playable-in as those vaults, let alone for free.

 

 Hillary told me she had made exactly what she wanted to make there, and everyone had come, and nobody known what to expect. (And then I walked home with a chair on my head.) So all I'm saying is, when I would describe the Lounge in terms of a mini-Edinburgh-Fringe reprogrammed weekly, impressive as that sounds, I actually did it an enormous disservice: it was far easier than that. Art got made there, even by accident. Not good art necessarily, of course not, but how are you going to know until you put it in front of strangers? 

 

 

 And there was no flyering, no feedback forms, no mentoring schemes, nothing except anything you wanted. Half a panzer coming through a wall? George would build it. A live, seven-foot wide video link to New York above the bar, or the running of a fake lift for your own promenade? Andrea would rig it up and get two volunteers to stand either side with a cue sheet and pneumatic forklift. And on and on. That was the Lounge. Something like one hundred people on that payroll, three of them paid for by the Arts Council. No really, just three. And now what? The Foundry gone this past month too. And East 10. But it's the Eighties Revival, non? "Always be closing." 

 

  

 "Oh well, it keeps you honest!" said an old acquaintance. God I hate poets. Okay then, back to the ghetto. And while fifty per cent of the world's cranes stand idle in Dubai, the Great Work of transforming London from a temperamental network of human-scale cultures into a collection of incredibly large, fucking stupid objects best viewed from twenty storeys high proudly changes up a gear.

 

 

 P.S. With not quite the numb pang that accompanies the deleting of a dead friend's number from your phone, I have removed the Lounge's video from my myspace homepage and placed it below. It's more of an advert than a tribute I know, but what are you going to do? Oh yeah, you're going to come to the cabaret! Tonight, quick! Here.

 

 

The Shunt Lounge

from Susanne Dietz on Vimeo.

This Handsome Chair

The other night my baby and I met up after the show and went to the Shunt Lounge to get smashed before walking home which has become a happy weekly thing. She asked me to tell her a story that night, and weak on cross-eyed Joyce's plum gin I made up this, which I thought i might as well put down here, without the ums:

'Once upon a time there was a handsome chair.

And all the bums in all the land wanted to sit on this chair. And they did.

But the chair did not like bums and longed one day to be sat on by a face instead. And all the other chairs said to each other "Who does this chair think it is, for whom bums aren't good enough?!"

But then one day a pervert turned up. And the pervert placed his face on the handsome chair and sniffed the seat.

And so the handsome chair learned that some faces are every bit as bad as some bums.

And the handsome chair decided to set out and find for itself where true beauty really lay. But being a chair it could get no further than falling on its side.

So there the handsome chair lay, on its side, and the police saw it and said "Was this the site of an incident?" And all the other chairs said "Yes! Yes, this was the site of a terrible incident!" And so the police taped off the handsome chair with incident tape and nobody was allowed to touch it and all the bums now sat on all the other chairs for ever and ever until the nuclear apocalypse.

And then all the people died and all the seats of all the chairs gathered radioactive dust.

And when the aliens finally landed they saw all the chairs covered in dust and said "Let's not sit there."

And then they saw the handsome chair, on its side, whose seat had gathered no dust, and they righted it, and took their turns to sit on it. And they all had faces in their bums.

And so the handsome chair and the aliens with faces in their bums lived happily ever after. The end." 

 

 Phew, good thing I got that down!

 In other news, "Six Impossible Things", the radio play I was in that got pulled from iplayer can now be downloaded here. I say something with my mouth full towards the end. It's "Sad times." The rest is pretty audible.

Random Acts of C***ness

(originally posted on myspace here)

The scene of the crime

BLOOD AND GUTS UPDATE: Well Hywel's go on the laurels was pretty short lived because Friday night (Banker night) saw ME become the hero when - you remember! - your boyfriend Belmondo'd me in the face halfway through a show (Cliveowened me, Danielcraiged me, Neesoned, Mitchumed, "nutted" - what you will,) then ran off and abandoned you while the show went on, as it must, with blue roll up its nose. Good thing there was a doctor in the house, our own esteemed Dr. David Rosenberg who having been denied entry to South Africa because there was literally not enough room in his passport for another stamp (true true!) found himself freed up now to give Hywel the crash-course on Thursday, and on Friday witness your boyfriend hit and run mid-show leaving behind only you, mumbling and panicked, and of course all his booking details at the box office.

Nice men. Do not hurt them.

Crikey you were drunk, weren't you, whoever you were, and terribly annoying. You must have known that. And I guess I sort of know where your boyfriend was coming from because even I felt a bit bad about singling you out when you were so clearly barely able to even stand. Then again though, it could be argued you actually singled yourself out by wibbling on about carbon in the corner of the auditorium, I don't know... but I mean why didn't your boyfriend make any attempt to try and keep you quiet, that's what I don't get, or to even acknowledge your presence until you wanted to be escorted out of the show? Why did he try and take it out on that volunteer in the riot gear? Did your boyfriend not get that it was pretend? Did your boyfriend just have a bad day? Was your boyfriend actually, secretly mad at you? Well this is all academic I guess... Man I just can't believe your boyfriend ran out and left you like that, that's all. 

And poor old Hywel! A second baptism of fire for day two. (Oh yeah, fire. Did I mention the pyrotechnics? Yeah he's great, Hywel.) And Nigel's had his appendectomy now I hear. They eschewed keyhole surgery in favour of the full Jack the Ripper, that's all I know. Dr. David only works on electro-shock therapy cases these days, says he misses the smell of an operating theatre, the smell of cauterised meat. And me? Well I almost look TOO gorgeous but on the down side every face pressed towards mine on the tube now makes me just that bit more bristly. Like I said, I don't know. Things fall apart, mistakes are made, the Machine begins to warp and split but the run continues, and Friday Night will always be Banker Night. Applying Goode's Pertinent Binary (see Feb 18) we deal with it... Honestly though, your boyfriend! It almost makes me wish now that I'd listened to your Dad! 

(Thank you videogum.)

The devastating effects of a Belmondoing 

ILL AND DEAD

Ahhhhh, "Credit Squeeze" says the radio and, as a "sup-prime", I skirt blithely like a coyote in a batsuit around my overdraft limit of whatever it is, and look around me to see what I might sign up to next. Inspired, perhaps, by the jumper my parents have bought me for Christmas, I investigate the Campaign for Real Ale, and a copy of the "London Drinker" I picked up in a pub in High Barnet. I don't really know anything about CAMRA to be honest, but I know any organization so clearly estranged from the insidious influence of marketing and homogenised thought as to produce an advert as impenetrable as this...

... is clearly onto something. Or rather not. Which is the point. Surely, these cosy, beardy, sedentary men who drink "Santa's Wobble" are more like the kind of guys I should be hanging out with than the shiny-eyed zeitgeist pilots I find myself drinking with at Shunt.

But then I come across the obituaries. 

 

There are two, and while they're both written with obvious affection for their subjects, they also contain substantial cause for qualm. I'm reprinting here only those details that led me to reconsider, which is of course grossly unfair to the dead men in question, but... sorry:

Andrew Cifton, I never knew you. It says here that you were found dead in your home "aged just 56 years and 5 months". It says you "had a heart of gold and will be sadly missed." It says you were "the bane of present and past CAMRA national chairmen, given to heckling at meetings whenever a perceived injustice frustrated him, often culminating in a theatrical storming-out, with a tirade of invective, and occasionally having to return to collect a jacket (or cuddly toy) that he had left behind!" It says "Unwelcome questions that he didn't wish to answer were often fielded with a shrug of the shoulders, while if he was unhappy about something, he would mutter away about it under his breath."

And "'Arry" Hart... It says here that many stories were shared about you in the Sultan in Tooting after your funeral on 22 October. It says many precious memories were shared by "Sue". It says you were "a very private person whom few would have known closely, except when riled, as he could be." It says "When things were promised and those promises broken, he would become quite vocal after a few beers. The spelling lesson in Dudley when he was refused orders after 2am will live in everyone's memory. I remember Sue had to take him back to the room quickly. On another occasion he flew into a righteous lather on the Isle of Wight when told he could not redeem tokens he'd been promised were redeemable."

A deep, dark mirror...

So now I'm thinking of joining these guys instead:

 

33rd

 An excellent party and I didn't even have to throw it.

 

Ruffians, toffs and catty slags hanging by the gibbet at the Prospect of Whitby, watching the fireworks going off in Blackheath, sporting sparklers and gins, cakes and tails, stage blood and corsets. And Ms. Meikle makes it over with a big bag of watercolours, colouring sheets, pudding mix and "FOUR INTERNATIONAL GAMES" taped to a board for 99p. All for me! And let me here record that she whppped my ass at Chinese Checkers, and immortalize the butterflies coloured in by the stragglers at 4am washing their brushes in pink champagne, irrespective of insignia.

 

This is what we do. Part 1

 

"This is what we do."

Those words spiral in white from a gobo across the floor of the new cafe in Broadcasting House. Free-standing plastic pillars are covered in catch-phrases. It's like the Millennium Dome, except it's a corridor. It employs whatever the opposite of Feng Shui is, a bit like that triangular cell I hypothesized about a month back, and is an even worse place to stay behind and have a drink in than the Drill Hall, which may be the point. Oh you BBC!... whose buildings have inspired literary and filmic dystopiae for nearly a century now. Always at the forefront of baffling and inhuman architecture. "This is what we do." Isn't that what they hung around Morgan Freeman's neck in "Unforgiven"?

What I was there to see was excellent however, and not the work of idiots, so I'll stop being mean: Two recordings of "Safety Catch", a new sitcom about a hapless arms dealer by Laurence Howarth (an alchemist of comic assonance - eg. "infertile wind-surfer") and an excellent idea all round as it gives him the opportunity to a) write a treatise on the nature of evil without anyone minding, and b) have carte blanche to a motherlode of new and amusing-sounding words like "Uzi", "Howitzer", the "Gambia", and "Chad".

These two nights of recording ran either side of Chris Goode's last London preview of "Hippo World Guestbook", which was also an excellent idea perfectly executed (and an uncharacteristically simple idea for Chris): the reading aloud of a selection of six years' worth of comments from a hippo fan site guestbook... first about how much they like hippos, and then about how much hippos suck, and then about how much people who think hippos suck suck, and then how about much they like to fuck hippos if anyone is interested in visiting their site to watch, and then just endless adverts for internet gambling and viagra, and then nothing... in short, a neat portrait of the death of, well, hope Hahahaha. In the bar afterwards ("Bar"? Pub. Downstairs) Chris said something about being "surprised by the people coming out of my mouth" and I thought to myself: "He's talking about acting. *Gasp*. Not theatre-making, not even "performance" - which he's said is like Texas and I can't work out why - but Acting. Capital A. Pretending to be someone else. Awwwww, he's got it!" Which was pretty petty of me actually. It's on in Edinburgh. It's very good.

When Chris originally told me about it I was immediately reminded of my own first glimpse into the dark heart of an internet community, when I finally got broadband and discovered youtube and found a lovely little film someone had posted spoofing someone else's lovely little film, and then read the comments beneath... There were over a thousand. Some people loved it. Some people didn't "get it" and made the usual complaints about "twenty-five seconds of my life I'll never get back". Some people retaliated with the usual "you wasted even more time writing in to complain" which in turn inspired charges of retardation and general volleys of hatred increasingly based on what country a post had come from leading in turn to heated debates about the state of Israel and the existence of God, the War, and on and on and on and it went EVERYWHERe, and it was all AnGRY and in a way... actually... that was the one thing I missed from Chris' show: None of the dissenting "Kill All Hippos" posts that he read out had to be taken that seriously. They were evidence of vandalism, nothing more. Sad, but not scary. Not as scary, anyway, as an open forum's flip into the dark side can be.
Nor as scary as, say, my own flip...

When I last visited Chris' blog I did a very bad thing, and I'm not sure I can go back. Why does this happen? I'd just come home from Dungeon team-building exercise. I had made someone cry without noticing. Go team. I was a bit rattled so I sat down to the powerbook and saw that Viv had just joined F*c*book and posted photos of Sofia, so I cheerily insulted her ("hunchback") and then her baby ("Dylan Moran") and then moved on to Chris' glowing review of my friend Mel's astonishing Edinburgh show "Simple Girl" and insulted that ("I..." actually what the hell am I doing quoting this stuff again) and then went Ahhhhhhnm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm-nm and got into bed and went to sleep.
And then woke up.
At seven.
Pale.
And waited until twelve.
And made some phonecalls.
And received some texts.

In our kitchen now are five large bin-liners full of uneaten cake from Morgan. And there's a sixth in the hall. And I'm off to Edinburgh today. I still don't feel that well. I'm just waiting for the water to stop dripping from the lightbulb above me and the ceiling to stop fizzing from where I let the bath overflow and my room to stop smelling of Copydex. I may be gone some time.

And I am so very sorry.

(To come in Part 2: Nice stuff about the BBC... and everyone... redemption... padlocks folded into swans.)

Dongly things and Dont's

I found the above panorama on my phone when I woke. I have no idea when I took it or why. I was in Ellis' guest nest surrounded by computers, box files and what Douglas Adams called "dongly things". I got to my feet (smelling, I have to say, great) and a small, dark cube on a shelf suddenly went click... and then hummed. My immediate reaction was to freeze, but I trust Ellis implicitly and realized that any cybernetic sequence I may have set off by standing must be there for my own welfare. So I pulled myself together and headed downstairs, to be treated to a plate of tabbouleh followed by a bacon roll.

When I first knew Ellis he wasn't in IT, he was a director from the much under-rated "Do that again, only less shit" school and he passed on two rules to me that I have never forgotten:

1. "Never put on a play you're in love with. Every play has bits that are pants."

2. "If anything in a production is shit and the director says it's not his fault, he's lying."

He is also the most fictionalized man I know. He's just appeared in a novel and back in 2000 there was this (for the broadbanders):

Which is also a pretty fair picture of how he approached theatre. Which I appreciated.

I decided to head home via Abbey Road, which I've never been down before and I'm glad I did. It turns out it's a very long road but also, architecturally, the maddest in London. Take Rowley Way for example: I came across it in a sudden downpour. It comes out of nowhere like a dystopian Hanging Gardens of Babylon (a good thing) offering neither shelter nor, once you're walking down it, any clue as to what might exist outside of Rowley Way. There's no horizon to Rowley Way, just this strangely maternal arrangement into sloping concrete rows and columns of potted palms and security cameras and chrysanthemums and tiny plastic garden features all apparently thriving on neglect. Those inhabitants of Rowley Way who are wearing anything at all wear the usual no-fit gangster fashions. They're supposed to look stupid though, aren't they? These clothes, they're meant to be annoying, yes? Regardless, when the weather cleared up I headed down Regent's Canal into Camden Market and that family-friendly rave emporium "Cyberdog".

I love Cyberdog. They have live dancing on the counter there now. It's better than Hamleys. I didn't go there to buy clothes - obviously... I don't buy clothes, anywhere - I just wanted to slip into that loud, daft, comfy nineties bubble again, with it's wide-of-the-mark utopian vision of twenty-first century living. Actually there was a t-shirt there I quite liked once as well. It had a little red computer display that counted down from 50 to 0 in the chest and I thought, if you're going to have a screen in your chest then that's the one to have. It would make you seem more dangerous... provide a useful air of suspense if you meet someone at a party. They would stick around talking to you at least until your t-shirt reached zero, I'm sure of it, just to see what would happen. But it wasn't in yesterday. Not that I asked. Not sure how I'd wash it anyway.