The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Meeting Your Heroes

The way to the bottom of my heart might be windy... prononunced wine-dy (I wish there were a way to disambiguate that as I've mentioned before)... but it's down there somewhere, and from that bottom I heartily recommend making one's friends one's heroes. 

 Look how many turned up to the show on Saturday night (Tickets here!) Some I hadn't seen offline since before the pandemic. Some I'd seen out Ripper Walking in the Summer. Two are getting married. One's just been confirmed as the new voice of Wallace. One's working on the fourth and final series of The Monster Hunters. One's going to be working at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve as a mime. One really liked Del Toro's "Pinocchio", and thought I would too – Sorry, Kevin. So I haven't witten more about that copy of the Daily Mail from 1946, Sorry. But of course you don't just stave off the darkness of this season by putting lights up, you also get busy reuniting.

 (I will let you read that story a little closer though, in case yesterday's image was too small. It's stunning to see how little time following the end of the actual Second World War it took some papers to see things from the fascists' point of view again... Also, an odd choice of defense of tactic from Goring on the right there...)

Unposted Photographs of October 2022 in Chronological Order

 On the first, I left Trafalgar Sqaure in bloom, happy with the city I lived in, and crossed the river to get a better view of it:

 

 In the basement of the Royal Festival Hall, three dancers had found a space outside the toilets:

 

 I've lived in Notting Hill a year now. I finally found the quickest route to the park, but it still feels like I'm finding routes, rather than walks:

 

 Trellick Tower, its green heart still commemorating Grenfell. It always appears in view suddenly, and to the right of where I expect:

 This was the first time I'd revisited the Victoria and Albert Museum since moving up the road:

 

 I suddenly remembered seeing Jennifer Tilly here, and hearing her, and tried to recall the plot of Slipstream:

 Neil and I went to see Big Ben break his News Revue cherry. Their six week run outlasted two Prime Minsters, and Fred Strangebone in a blonde wig turned out to be a very serviceable Keir Starmer. He was the only one to do a silly bio:

 In Tate Britain, I stayed in the box with the racist language for the whole video (I can't find who's this was or what. It was wonderful. Does anyone know?) Others entered the box, and left very possibly because I was in there, but I don't know how better to screen it:

 

 Over the escalators in the tube, adverts are now screened an angle, tampering with my balance over the duration:

 Here, outside the vault of the Ned, it occured to me that on Saturday we should all wear robes:

 

 Then we moved on to Greenwich peninsula, to rehearse the counting of rice:

 Our rice in situ:

 Suddenly, October was beginning to end. I mean, to finish. I caught Ilona's exhibition just as it was being taken down:

 This Flying Tiger model could have got more into the spirit of the season, I felt. I bought nothing:

 On this stage, I saw David dance and speak lines from King Lear. A good block:

 Outside on Regents Street, they were beginning to put up angels:

By this point, my phone had crashed. Everything was harder to record on Badphone, particularly Maxfield Parrish light. Why was it still Summer?

 On this stage, I saw Natasha dance and speak lines from King Lear. I was not expecting that in a production of Henry the Eighth:

 My balance tampered with, I was still happy to have to caught the last matinee, and celebrated with a walk on the beach:

 

 On this stage, I saw my former rice wife Julia cast her own legs as her parents, and her hand as her dog. I'd missed her rumbling, threatening giggle. It got messy:

 

 Rehearsals started for the Love Goddess in Marylebone. Working in daylight suddenly:

 Opposite Alfies Antiques. Everything a walk away:

 And last Saturday, like the first, saw Trafalgar Square in bloom again.

A Couple Of Things I Learnt From Ghosts

 One thing I learnt filming Ghosts back in January was how to tie a double-half-hitch, which is why there was that rope hanging from the ceiling of my trailer in case anyone peered in and was wondering. I was prepared for the double-half-hitch therefore, but less prepared for what I had to do just before: nothing but my hand would come into shot initially to grab the collapsing festoon, and then the rest of me would swing into shot revealing the identity of this hero. Not a detail in the script, just some proper film-making from director Tom Kingsley, which was a lesson in itself. And I sort of managed it, but the line "I got it" was actually recorded a few months later on a phone under a duvet in my flat, possibly to cover the faff of me not managing it more smoothly. It still really works though, doesn't it, don't get me wrong. Also, this is very much what I normally look like at weddings by the time the dancing's started. The costume department gave me lots of stuff to bulk out my pockets because I thought Keith's decision to turn up might have been a bit last minute, and he couldn't find a big coat.

 The other thing I learnt from Ghosts, just off the top of my head, was how to act in front of a camera. This I learnt very quickly from Tom Kingsley after two takes of the scene at the stump. It had been one of the scenes at the audition, an uplifting ten minutes in a room with Tom, Jim Howick, Ben Willbond and the producer Matt Mulot sharing stories of Ripper Walks - which it turns out Jim also did - and of course also being invited to act. So I'd definitely done okay, but performing the scene again a month later in front of a green screen outside West Horsely Place (oh! I didn't know until I got out of the car that the show was filmed in a real mansion - that was exciting!) I could tell the knockee wasn't really leaving the park. So: "Okay," said Tom after the second take. "This time, just try saying the lines to yourself."

 Up until then I had been saying them to camera. 

 And the camera was, well, this far away.

 Whereas the microphone was directly underneath my tie. So that's what I learnt. You don't actually have to act for the camera. The camera will pick it all up anyway. So will the microphone. And I hope it's okay to say that I adore this scene, partly because I know I'm just doing what I'm told in it, (even if I didn't manage to make my forehead go all veiny like a sad Don Draper). If it's the only acting I get to do on terrestrial television, it will still have been something useful in something great, and a performance that could never be given on radio or on stage, because it needs green screens and framing and a soundtrack and a microphone under my tie. So I got to do some proper telly. I also got to do something brilliant, kind and loved, made by - as I hinted back in January - a brilliant, kind and loved team. You can watch it here.

 

 (The filming of this, sourced from Tom Kingsley's twitter) 

 

   And to continue the Hallowe'en Countdown of the old Universal Farnakensteins, here's what I wrote about 1942's Ghost of Frankenstein.

Fancy Party and 4 Oz. of Furlough

 Sorry this is only going up now, but I was catching up with my fellow Ripper Walkers last night, in the actual flesh in an actual pub, and it turned into a tiny, tiny stag do. Yes, we all got married! Not really. Neil noted it felt a bit like being in a pub on the telly; busy enough to fill the seats, but no busier, and we all looked like background artists.

 I remember most of what happened. I think of Ben - author of our Walks, and founder of the Ghost Bus Tours - very much as one of the keepers of London. He always knows what to point out on a ramble, like the Duke of Wellington's replica noses poking out of the concrete on Great Windmill Street. Oh god I've just remembered the toilets. They were magical, they lit up, where were they?

  Here's something else I remembered, and it contains spoilers: I've been using the last week to start reading again, watching less television as a result, binge-watching less, switching more between shows. I put on an episode of Parks and Recreation, series three, episode nine, this one:

 And here's the spoiler, it turns out that the party April and Andy are throwing is actually a surprise wedding, and they get married. I then put on an episode of Orange Is The New Black, series two, episode nine, it was this one, literally the very next thing I watched on television:

  In which Piper gets furlough from prison to attend her grandmother's funeral and, here's the spoiler, at the service her brother throws a surprise wedding, and he and his girlfriend get marrried. I have nothing to say about this coincidence, except that I wish I'd been able to share it. I don't mean share it on the blog, because as you can see I have nothing to say about it. It wasn't even interesting enough a coincidence to share with Neil and Ben. I just noticed it would have been nice to share the oddness as it happened.

Goodye, Diana Rigg. You kicked arse.

Arithmophobia Is All Around.

 I've just finished watching Don't F*** With Cats on Netflix. It wasn't what I expected, and I think I might have hated watching it. This is not a recommendation. But I wanted to see how it ended, and as someone who's worked with both Jack the Ripper and Shakespeare I felt maybe I should keep abreast of contemporary developments in self-mythologising monstrousness. One of the problems of course is that everyone always joins in with the mythologising, and this documentary confesses to being as guilty of that as the next ghoul, but in its adoption of horror tropes it brought to my attention one I'd never considered before, even though I as a writer have also used the trope (and I can't find it on tvtropes.org either), namely that of the Scary Number.

 A camera cranes in onto the "19" on the door of an apartment in Paris for example, or an internet café owner in Berlin will point to a stall and say "This is it. Number 25."  The cliché is that certain numbers have a power, but they all seem to, just the fact of them - the factiness even. 10 Rillington Place. Room 237. Inside Number 9. Arithmobia is a fear not of specific numbers, but of numbers in general. And that's what I can't work out - whether the Scary Number is simply a horror trope borne of True Crime, or whether it speaks to something more primal... The Matrix.... The Prisoner... Like shadows, snakes and skeletons, have we always just, secretly, found numbers inherently evil?
 Because if we have, I can see that becoming a problem.

A Pertinent Point About Behaving Suspiciously For Money

 My late night walks are getting later and later, so it's still Monday for me, but, before I go to bed, there's a bunch of half-thought-out drafts I keep in reserve, and the one accompanying this picture seems the most apt to post before #BlackOutTuesday. 

 The picture wasn't taken today. It's me heading into the City to do a Ripper Walk earlier in the year. I love the job. It's nice pay, and you're very exposed, but you get to be scary, and I love being scary – maybe because I'm not very active: There's no Point Break-type activity I practice to feel more alive, or in touch with the sea, or the air, or the earth or whatever, but being allowed to be scary is a proper taste of the bigger freedom. I turn up to these walks in "costume" – a long, black, cheap mac, black shirt, tie, trousers, and shoes, clutching a lumpy, clanking plastic bag that secretly holds my hurricane lamp, and here's the point: Every time I took to public transport in this clobber, or hovered round the railings of the Square Mile, waiting for my group to turn up and working on my skulk, dressed like a middle-aged high school shooter, I knew that I would never be stopped and asked what I was doing, or where I was going, or what I was carrying or why, no matter how egregious or inexplicable I looked. And I will pay myself the compliment of saying that I also knew this was what white privilege looked like, that these were the freedoms I enjoyed, freedoms everyone should be able to enjoy: the freedom to raise questions without being questioned, and the freedom to be scary, but still listened to.