Have managed to do a bit of writing today that didn't involve actual writing. Now, that sounds like the sort of half-assed excuses that people who don't want to go through the actual tedium of third, fourth, and twelfty drafts come up with (and, indeed, it is a little bit), but I had two sudden solutions to plot problems (or more specifically, dialogue problems) on my way to work. In fact, while I was cycling to work. In the rain. It's true that I very often come up with writing ideas while in the shower, but I guess not so often when getting caught in a shower of a more natural type. 

Not only was I on my bike (not exactly a pen and paper to hand), but I was on my way to work, where I knew that I wouldn't be able to write any of this up for eight or so hours. And I know what I'm like - what loads of writers are like - it doesn't take too much for those really good ideas to go fluttering away on the wind. The good side of that is that you can kid yourself that the novel / short story / sketch you've finally hacked out would've been so much better if only you hadn't gotten distracted at just the critical moment. The bad side, of course, is the rather disquieting assumption that you will now forever labour under, that whatever it is you've finished, could have been so much better in some alternate, never to be realised, reality. There is a third possibility, of course. Equally as likely. But since that mainly involves managing to rescue your initial ideas and discovering that they - and so, you - weren't that good in the first place - it's probably not a thread that we want to pick at for too long. 

So, I found a post-it note (other informational reminder slips of paper with a mildly sticky strip on the back are available), and scrawled a couple of words on it, so that I would remember what the hell had occurred to me w hen I got back to the writing proper. They were 'FRIEND' and 'POWER', which, out of context, don't seem like particularly original words - and, indeed, they're not. It's just the clever-clever scenes that I've got bubbling under that make them relevant. (Of course the scenes are clever-clever: I haven't actually written them yet. Once I've got to work with my writers pen with all the elegance and subtlety of a caffeine-addicted spider monkey armed with a claw hammer, I'm sure I can reduce my works of potential genius to works of actual mediocrity. Oh, you don't believe me? Ye of little faith).

But I've been burnt by this method before, and not just by single words on Post-Its. On more occasions that I care to admit, I've scribbled eight pages on the way home, my fevered and over-excited mind working far faster than my penmanship can keep up with, only knowing that the words burning onto the bits of A4 have genuine wit, clarity and emotion. Only to get home and discover that the scribblings are literally scribblings, and I can't decipher what most of the words say.  

Apart from 'TURNIP' and 'MUSEUM'. 

I mean, what the hell? Perhaps it wasn't such a good idea after all. 

Tuesday 29th April 2014

Hurtling towards production week. At the moment, it feels like running down a very steep hill, so fast that my feet can't quite keep up with themselves. It's going to be a somewhat busy few weeks, the longest performance run I've yet been involved with, and - it's just occurred to me - the largest part I've played in a fair while. The plan is to keep myself sustained with fresh fruit and gallons of ginger tea with honey. Knowing my organisational skills, however, it's much more likely that my diet for the next month will consist mainly of lucozade and pot noodles. 

Because my bloodline is apparently under sufferance to an ancient curse which means I can't keep a bike for longer than two months without it either being stolen or falling apart, it comes as very little surprise that I have a flat tyre. This, traditionally, adds about a hour and a half to my commute per day, as I'm having to walk to and from train stations. On the walk to work this morning, I lost my cap, which I'd been meaning to use at tonight's rehearsal, as part of the costume. I'm guessing that it will be no great hardship if I can't find one that's both reasonably nice looking and big enough for my freakishly large head, but I can have some sympthay with actors who attach undue importance to an item of clothing that they've been using to inform their character. It's oddly unsettling; you almost feel that, robbed of the chance to rely on props and the like, that your acting will be exposed as the charlatans dance it really is. And even if you're not quite that self deprecating (who, me, self deprecating? No, there must be some mistake), there will always be a part of you that feels bad that the audience will never get to see the 'good', the 'original' version. 

Yes, I'm fully aware it's just a cap. 

Tonight is our first rehearsal in the space itself, which I'm fully expecting will throw us all a curve ball: we haven't ever really been able to be in an environment that in any way truly replicates the space we will actually be performing in. I'm expecting lots of wide eyes, cold sweat, and incoherent gibbering. 

I imagine that everyone else will be fine, though. 

Wednesday 8 May 2013

I'm no good with bikes. I'm so no good with them that I buy a couple a year. Repairs are beyond my skill, energy, and usually time, so I generally just buy a cheap old bike (£30 or thereabouts) ride it til it falls apart - which happens in an absolutely literal sense more often than you might think - and buy the next cheap one. You might think it ends up being false economy, but generally I'm in the plus column, although it does seem that the next bike always falls to bits at a point when I really don't have the time to start walking to work again. Not including the train part of my journey, the walking bit of each day is nearly two hours. It can be a massive exhaustion throughout the course of a week, not really leaving any time for things like food, and sometimes sleep.

Anyway, last month, I paid slightly more for a bike. It was still second hand, but I was certainly shelling out a bit more than usual. Generally speaking, it was worth it: it was clearly a bit of an expensive bike in its previous life, and much, much lighter than any of my previous bikes. Much lighter than all of my previous bikes, all together, in fact. That being the case, it's a much smoother ride, and much more pleasant to use. Well, it was. I had to get it repaired last week because of brake problems, etc. It wasn't a particularly expensive repair, but still one that I could ill afford. And this week: the pedals have started dropping off. The problem is that the nut of each pedal has become completely smooth on the inside, meaning that the threads have entirely gone. There's no purchase, no grip. So I ended up walking home (well, to rehearsal) tonight. It's very annoying, particularly as I don;'t see it getting repaired until next month. That's next month, for crying out loud. 

I think what annoys me most about the pedals is that it's a simple thing, designed to do only one thing, incapable of doing that one thing. A single function item that fails at that function. How disappointed its parents must be. I get annoyed by this sort of low achiever quite often. I have to wear cuff links each week for the Ghost Walk, and I find them annoying out of all proportion. But at least with cuff links, they are clearly quite awkward items in the first place, as the job of putting them on would be made much easier if you just had an extra hand. It's the other things that exist in spite of their obvious design faults that really annoy the hell out of me. Chief amongst them is the tray on the back of seats in Southern Railway trains. Who the hell decided that they had to have that awful, squealing metal against metal shriek when you pull them down? Or indeed, up? Because these things are designed. They go on drawing boards and the like. There's very likely some kind of prototype mocked up, so that the client can see what their money is being spent on. At no point, did nobody raise a hand, no matter how shyly, and suggest that perhaps passengers didn't actually want the sound of hell accompanying their journey home? The trays on the trains wouldn't have survived one week of The Apprentice. 

Which suggests only one, somewhat sinister option. That it's all deliberate. That these things really are sent to try us. That everything is designed with the specific intention of keeping us in a constant state of annoyance and tension. This would explain a great deal. Like the Daily Mail, for instance, and Jeremy Kyle.

Your Number's Up

They've changed the lock on the bike shed at work. Well, I say bike shed. In reality, it serves all manner of purposes, including housing the snow plough that they finally invested in a couple of years ago to ensure the place never again had to be shut down because of a particularly heavy snow fall. And, of  course, it's worked like a charm: the place has indeed not had to be shut down because of heavy snowfall. But that's mainly because we haven't had any. 

They've changed the padlock, but not the code. This should be a good thing - the padlock will no longer get rusty in rain, or do whatever it did in very cold weather which meant that it just gave up and refused to move like a sulky teenager who's locked themselves in the bedroom with a bag of Doritos and a box set of Girls. Now that the padlock has been changed, everything should be shiny, new and effortless, and the whole putting my bike away thing at the start of the day, and the retrieving my bike at the end of the day thing (both very similar things) should be events that are so mundane that they don't really deserve to be called events. 

If I'm honest, they still are mundane that they don't need to be called events, and certainly not of enough interest to be written about on any public forum (such as this blog, for instance), but at the start and end of each day, I find myself getting needled, rattled and frustrated. These are three feelings you really don't want to be having at either end of the day. You kind of expect them during the day, that's part of the deal, that's why you have endless cups of tea and migraines as coping mechanisms, but the simple act of getting or leaving your bike shouldn't be a source of frustration. 

It's particularly annoying at the end of the day. I have exactly nine minutes to get out of work and catch the train. If I miss that train, it's nearly always impossible to get the following train, because that one is stacked with excitable college kids and gently glowering building site workers. There's not even enough space to claim 'standing room only', and even when there is, most of the kids elect to do this curious thing where they're going to stand in the doorways of the train for the entire journey, even if they're on the train for fifteen stops and forty minutes. Even if, after a while, entire carriages have eventually become empty. It becomes difficult to get on such a train if the doors are blocked in such a fashion, and downright impossible if you've got a bike in tow. People who are needlessly blocking train doors get curiously uptight about letting you on with a bike. 

All of this becomes of paramount importance when I'm trying to get my bike out of the shed. If I can make the nine minute journey to get the earlier train, I manage to get the connection that's pretty much empty. It feels like I'm getting a train in the middle of the afternoon, only used by mothers on their way back from toddler group, and youngsters on their way to sign on to the dole. It's a different world. It still depresses me that it took me the best part of five years to discover that it was possible for me to make this connection. But in order to get to this train on time, I need to simply - get - my bike. No fussing, no messing about. Certainly no enraged tumbling around of the numbers for the twentieth time as I attempt to unlock the padlock from the bike shed door. 

Because the problem with the new padlock is that it doesn't quite work. I should be clear here. If we judge a lock purely and solely in its effectiveness as just that - a lock - then it's a fine lock. A dandy, there are very few locks that are more secure than this lock. The cast of Ocean's Eleven would be befuddled, confused, and finally exasperated by this lock. It wouldn't be as great a film, but it might certainly be on par with Twelve and Thirteen. The aspect in which the lock fundamentally fails is the whole un-locking part. It just doesn't. It refuses. It doesn't refuse entirely, of course, but confusingly, you have to wriggle the numbers around slightly so they don't quite match up in the correct order. Once you've managed to guide all the numbers in exactly the correct position (by which I mean the slightly wrong one), the lock will effortlessly and easily slide open. Like it was meant to in the first place. I don't have time for this sort of thing. Literally, I don't have time. I have a thirteen minute journey to cycle in nine minutes. The amount of time I've got for screwing around with this padlock is one minute, tops. 

But here's the thing. The really frustrating thing. Because, being me, the frustrating thing can't just be the frustrating thing - there has to be another frustrating thing on top of the original frustrating thing, just to put a highlighter pen to the whole, general frustration of the thing. Because, despite the fact that the new padlock is stupid, ridiculous, and unhelpful, despite the fact that it only works if you nuance the tumblers in some secret way that is only clear after doing ten years of mystical chanting and Zen like meditation - despite all that: I'm the only one who has a problem with it. Everyone else who uses the bike shed on a regular basis - and there's at least six of us - have no problem with the padlock whatsoever. 'You just have to wraggle it about a bit,' they declare, cheerfully. WRAGGLE IT ABOUT A BIT?!? I rage, in my head. This is supposed to be a security measure, this is supposed to be the thing we rely on to ensure our bikes don't get nicked. Surely it can't all depend on things being wraggled about a bit? 

I don't have time to say any of this, of course. I have a train to catch. In less than seven minutes.

The Whole Lanyards

This week seems to have been one for breaking things. There was the back door to my bedroom, which leads onto a balcony, on which the lock has suddenly snapped (indirectly a result of the four or five days of almost relentless rain we had earlier), and then my phone froze, with no hope of a way out. It seems the smarter a 'smart' phone is, the more likely that it's actually quite stupid; when I was young (alright, two years ago), 99% of problems with your phone could be fixed eventually by simply taking the battery out and putting it in again. But now, since the battery is often irremovable from the casing of the phone, you're kinda screwed. The third thing that might have got broken this week is possibly my ribs. Hm, seems that I should really have put that one in at the top of the list.

It wasn't exactly an event that I could fill into a form that started with the question 'have you had an accident that wasn't your fault', but then it wasn't something that I really saw coming. I'm always losing my keys, so I have them attached to a lanyard. I didn't know that the big strappy things that ID cards and the like were called lanyards, but I suppose they had to have a more elegant name than 'big strappy things'. I've managed to build up a reasonable collection of them, since I get one attached to a press pass every time I'm reviewing up in Edinburgh for the fringe festival. It's the closest I feel to importance all year.

It was this lanyard that was dangling out of my pocket as I was cycling home on Wednesday. You might be able to see what's coming next, even if I didn't, or, indeed, the cars that were directly following me. The big strappy thing dropped, hung, and then wrapped itself against my front wheel. It was like a particularly cheaply made instalment in a Final Destination movie. The bike very suddenly stopped. I suffered no such impediment until roughly three seconds later, when I smashed into the road. The car behind me, luckily a sensible driver, was able to stop in time (quite remarkable when you think about it, since the cyclist in front of him didn't even do anything like braking, they simply .. stopped. It must have been like watching someone slam into an invisible wall). The driver got out, and helped me retrieve all my stuff, and get it off the road. He also asked me if I was ok, sounding just about as shocked as I felt. I didn't sound shocked at all, but this was largely due to all speech having been winded out of me.

I continued down to the train station (just before I got there, I heard some kid from the school where I work shouting abuse at me, presumably unaware that I'd just escaped death. I like to think that he would have stuck to his morals, and still continued to throw names in the direction of my bloodied, twitching corpse), and eventually got home. After a bit of a sleepless night, I struggled (literally, the pain was getting quite bad) into work, but by the time I arrived, I'd realised that work was going to be very difficult, so after a convoluted series of conversations, I was able to get myself to Accident & Emergency.

Where ... they were able to do almost nothing. That's the thing with ribs, it seems. They don't even x-ray anymore, because it won't actually change what they do afterwards, which, essentially, is not a very great deal. So, there's every chance that I could currently be walking around with a cracked rib, which certainly is something to follow the fake dislocated shoulder I had last month. In all reality, it's reasonably likely that the ribs are simply very bruised, (it doesn't seem that they are actually broken, since they're not, you know, letting air out of my lungs or anything like that), but the pain is still quite often terrific. But only when I move. Apart from that, it's fine.

Odd was the inescapable guilt I still had about having to take time off from work. I wonder what I would consider an appropriate reason to take some time off work. Decapitation, perhaps, or maybe just the loss of a lesser limb. The staff at the hospital were all fantastic, and another reason why I'm always so pro-NHS. We hear a lot of negative stuff about our health service (thank you, Mr Lansley), but at the very least, when I go to them in pain to hear that there's not actually anything they can do, it's a relief that I'm not having to spend two hundred quid for the privilege.

The Long Walk

I was late for work today. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me tetchy and nervous. That's the thing when you rock up late to your job, you imagine (at least, I do) that everybody else is sitting in judgement, darkly commenting on your inability to do basic things like know the time. No matter that when it happens to someone else, you really couldn't care less. But it makes no difference: I still assume that my work colleagues have less than flattering things to say about me when I'm late. Actually, I assume that they have plenty of stuff like that to say even when I'm early, which probably points at some underlying paranoia stemming from the fact that my parents didn't buy me a BMX bike when I was a kid, and is probably more a complicated series of neuroses than we really have space to get into here.

Actually, talking about bikes, it was a puncture that caused my lateness this morning. I cycle to Hove station, and then cycle from West Worthing station in, well, Worthing, to work. Both cycling bits of the journey take just under ten minutes each. However, if I find myself without a bike, and have to walk, both take about half a hour each. That's a hour added to my morning journey, which isn't the best way to start your working day.

The closer I got to work this morning, the more frustrating this became - to be so close to my destination, a route that usually takes only about eight minutes, but to know that it was now going to take the length of an episode of The Big Bang Theory to get there, was pretty annoying. I began to wish that I could be taller, so that I could take longer strides, and have at least an outside chance of arriving on time. This would have advantages and disadvantages. True, I would get to more places more quickly, but once I'd arrived, there would be more people asking me what the weather was like up there.

A few years ago, I knew an extraordinarily good looking woman who happened to be reasonably tall - around six feet. The combination of these two factors meant that men who were attempting to hit on her in night clubs were fairly unoriginal in their approach. 'You're really tall!' they'd declare happily as their opening gambit, presumably under the impression that she hadn't spotted this physical anomaly for herself. After a while, her reply ended up being equally unoriginal: 'I know!', she'd answer, in the tone of voice one normally reserves for conversations with toddlers and victims of recent head trauma. She's married now, and I'd be willing to bet that the man who won her fair heart did so by the simple expedient of managing to find something else to discuss when they first met other than her height.

If we're honest, however, a hour at both ends isn't the worst hardship that can be added to my working day. I'm pretty sure both my parents had to walk even longer to get to school each day. Of course, this was rural Ireland in the 1950s, and they didn't get to catch a train for the middle portion. While we're at it, the train can be a bit of a strain, too, when you're carrying a bike. Even when you restrict yourself to those sections of the train that are specifically designed to carry bikes. People seem to delight in standing directly in the doorways, thereby getting in the way of everyone else trying to get on or off the train. This is even more exasperating when you've got a bike in hand, since many people seem to think that, as a cyclist, you absolutely shouldn't be allowed on board.

But, anyway. I shouldn't moan. I need to save my energy: it's nearly home time, and I've got a long walk back.