I should have posted by now. This is getting ridiculous.

The last week has, to be honest, been rather fraught. I ended up with a gigantic log-jam of reviews to clear before today (as I begin five days of Christmas Issue-related subbing at What’s On TV), added to which I had the fun of struggling with my MiniMac to get it to do things which were very easy before I installed Leopard (OS updates are truly the work of the devil), and the beginning of the Olympian effort of sorting Christmas out. I’m hoping to get a teeny-tiny laptop soon, which will free up time on the train for potential blogging and writing, and there’s a whole host of TV-related stuff (thoughts on Heroes, thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor, and various other thoughts about the season now winding to a shut-down via the strike) that I should have written, but I’ve also got a review of the year to do for Vector, so I’m trying to save most of my thoughts for that (at least initially).

As a result, posting is something that gets put off- and yet I enjoy doing it, and the social side of interacting on Livejournal is actually pretty good for me, considering that massive proportions of my life are now spent on my own, and I have the habit of spending certain social outings blinking wildly and feeling like I’ve recently arrived from a different (and incompatible) plane of existance.

I’m also waiting on feedback on the book- from an actual editor. Gulp.

Basically, this is just to say that I’m still here, still battling through, and hoping to actually play a slightly more major role in this long-form improvisational drama called “Life”- (and not the one starring Damian Lewis as the ex-cop Policeman).

Now, to dash dramatically into the distance while accompanied by a dramatic (if annoyingly repetitive) theme tune.

(Cue the credits…)

You can always tell when you’re having a good day- annoying or ridiculous things happen, and they still don’t manage to derail you. Yesterday was my third wedding anniversary- and despite the fact that we are somewhat strapped for cash at the moment, I was able to utilise some very creative accounting and make sure that George and I had a day to remember. One of the most important things I did was not tell George any of this was happening- she got a few inklings from her Mum (thanks to me not outlining what the plan for Tuesday was), but most of it ran smoothly and she didn’t have a real idea of what we were doing until we reached our destination.

Essentially, I picked her up from work, whisked her to Alton and onto a train, where we travelled to London and made our way to the Criterion Theatre for the matinee performance of the stage version of The 39 Steps – a show that essentially takes the Hitchcock film adaptation and produces a gloriously lunatic version of it with only four cast members. While there’s a certain amount of humour milked from the arch 1930s dialogue and some of the physical slapstick is a little overdone in a few moments, the majority of the show sticks amazingly closely to the original film, and gets most of its gags from the wonderfully bizarre methods used to do this kind of ‘running man’ thriller on the stage. We get cast members posing as bits of the landscape, a dizzying train sequence where two actors are playing six seperate roles depending on which hat they’re wearing at the time, and some gloriously loopy bits of shadowplay, including a North by North-West parodying sequence that comes complete with bi-plane crash! It’s the kind of theatre that I love- using very simple devices and props to create a world (particularly in the chase sequences, which are made up of clouds of smoke and characters running around waving torches) and the whole thing is tremendously inventive, while always poking fun at the sheer ridiculousness of trying to produce a film like this with four people. Tremendous fun, and leaves the admittedly entertaining but downright bloated Spamalot in the shade. If films are going to be adapted for the stage, this is the way people should be doing them…

Underground delays meant we arrived in the auditorium with only seconds to spare, but we both had a fantastic time, and our journey home seemed to be going smoothly- until we got to Waterloo, and found that a ‘suspect package’ meant the entire mainline terminal had been shut down. When you’re trying to get back to darkest Hampshire, that’s not the kind of problem that’s easy to think around. It was 5.30pm, and rush hour was starting to descend, and I will admit that I flaked out a little- but thankfully George was a lot more sensible, and got us onto a bus to Clapham Junction, which was an odd experience as I haven’t been there for almost eight years since I lived in Battersea. There, we were able to leap on a train to Woking, and were soon on our way home- where I was hoping to find my mobile phone, as I’d found it missing on the train into London, and was hoping I’d left it in my office. It wasn’t in my office, however. It wasn’t anywhere in the house. The damn thing was gone, and I didn’t know what to do. So, I called the phone, in the hope of hearing a distant ‘brrr brr’ that I could track- but instead, someone answered. After a couple of confused attempts, it turns out that it was my neighbours two doors down- it had fallen out of my pocket somewhere in the drive, and they’d found it. Thanks to the weather, it had gotten seriously rained on, but- in a wonderfully bizarre twist- we actually have a spare phone that was exactly the same model, so all I had to do was swap the Sim Cards and all was well. Breathing a sigh of relief, we collapsed onto the sofa for a Chinese meal, and four episodes of the early eighties TV adaptation of Jane Eyre (starring Timothy Dalton in full gothich brooding mode as Rochester), and spent most of the time goggling at the jaw-dropping number of bonnets on display, or making pithy comments when the moment was right.

All in all, a fine way of spending our third anniversary. And now, for the day after… I’m back doing sub-editing.

Hey ho…

Four hours of sleep followed by six hours solid driving isn’t the best way of going about things. LadyGeorge, as she is sometimes known, is now off having fun in Sweeden for the next few days, after which she’ll be off to Finland. Her flight was 7AM from Stansted Airport, which involved traversing the London Orbital Motorway known as the M25 at about 4 in the morning. This in itself wasn’t too bad. What turned out to be a problem was getting back– from mistakenly not refilling the petrol when I could have done, to the service station that let people queue up for petrol pumps and only told anyone that they were only taking cash via a handwritten sign of the pumps, to the point where my car’s engine decided to start impersonating one of the finer examples of the Great Western Railway steam age, it was somewhat of a saga. At one point, I found myself driving somewhere near Slough, desperate for a petrol station, and praying to any deity who might be listening- not a good place to be dealing with sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, I got through it all, collapsed in a heap at home, and then had to go and carry out all kinds of missions in Alton. I’ve got four days of subbing from tomorrow– I’ll be up at 6.30 am, so I need to be in bed soon. I’d like a chance to catch my breath, but I’m not sure I’m going to get one. Hey ho…

Still awake, at the end of a very good day. We’ve had great food, good films (the rather eccentric double bill of Casino Royale and Pan’s Labyrinth), a chance to admire the work of one of my favourite comic artists via the book ‘The Art of Brian Bolland’, and more birthday wishes via Facebook than I could ever have expected. I even got work done, and am marching closer to the end of the book. Pretty soon, I’m really going to have to work out what I’m doing next, but for the moment, things are fine, and I’m very happy.

Hope you are, too.

Work on the middle of the book began today. It’s starting to come together– slowly, but surely. There are certain other ideas that I’m having– but I’m resisting the temptation to get too complicated. I want it to be good, but I also want to finish, which won’t happen if I keep going “But, if I only changed this…“.

I also managed to get one of the reviews mostly out of the way, and watched a weird, oddly compelling (if bafflingly poetic) Korean movie called The Bow. More progress tomorrow, plus maybe a spot of floor cleaning…

It’s funny how much just writing down a problem as a blog entry can help. This morning life felt difficult. Now… nothing’s changed, but things feel a little easier. I’m also hammering on with the current rewrite on the book, pushing one of the latter chapters into shape.

Maybe, just maybe, we can get through.

Radio silence on the blog sometimes means that there’s not-tremendously-positive stuff happening and I really don’t want to depress people. Money is a little tight at the moment, plus there’s been a few other problems which have given life a certain negative twist for the past week (the very least of which was our Washing Machine starting to seriously malfunction). Therefore, the very last thing we needed was for Waterstones to write to George and say that, despite having declined to give her a final paycheque, that they’ve actually overpaid her by £610 and they want her to return the money. (This is apparently following on from an initial letter in February which never arrived).

I’m trying to tell myself that things are going to bounce back, but it’s rather difficult at the moment.

Two weeks offline. Oddly enough, the only pangs I felt for those fourteen days were thanks to having sent an absurd amount of work the night before leaving (Well- about four hours before leaving, if you want to be accurate) and not being able to check that it had arrived safely. Thankfully, it all seems to have worked out fine, and the holiday turned out to be very good fun. Yes, being enclosed with members of your family (and particularly when young children are involved) can sometimes make the experience rather an up and down one, but on the whole it was very good fun, an excellent break, and a chance to collect some happy memories of Brittany to wipe away the slightly horrible ones accumulated on a school camp in 1986. We were right in the centre of Brittany, in a tiny hamlet called Lustryn and near to a small town called Rostren, and much entertainment was had. We went go-karting, visited an aquarium, went on plenty of walks and spent vast amounts of time lying around doing nothing, watching movies or playing computer games (I managed to complete the official tie-in game from Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and got re-addicted to Wipeout Fusion). About the only downside was the epic journey- fourteen hours, most of which was spent in the back of a car, and which left me somewhat frazzled and unable to think once I got in last night.

So, in the words of Sam Gamgee, I’m back. More importantly, I feel like the two weeks away have given me a little perspective, as well as giving me the chance to work properly on the book. All I need now is some time, and I think I know how to get the damn thing finished. At the moment, my main priorities are getting unpacked, doing the washing, tidying things up, and working my way through the gargantuan amounts of e-mail I’ve ended up with.

Plenty to do…