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The railway companies like to cheer their customers up with funny excuses as to why their trains are late (real reason- because they don’t care). It’s nice that they do this as they spread laughter which is the second most valuable commodity on earth. After arriving somewhere on time.
This morning in Cheltenham the announcer apologised for the delay saying it was due to “slippery tracksâ€. Come on, that’s a good one. And it made everyone in the waiting room at least smile. And many of us laugh out loud. Some of it was the loud, hollow laughter of the aggrieved, but most of it was real. Surely no one believed that was a real excuse, but they enjoyed the attempt. If tracks were slippery the trains would be going faster surely and get here early. If someone had put talcum powder on the rails then that would slow the trains down.
Apparently there’s a good reason why slippery tracks halt trains and why UK railways are not geared up for the unlikely event of some October rain. But is there a reason why new trains have lavatories with two buttons, one to close the door and one to lock it, rather than a single button? No one can answer that one.
Got home mid-afternoon and made up for missing bath time and morning time by taking the kids up the rec. It was quite a trek for a tired and mildly hungover man and there was a steep bit where I thought pushing the pram up the hill might kill me. I wondered what my kids would do if I keeled over - we were on a little used path and no one was around. I decided not to die just in case they weren’t able to cope with the emergency,
It had seemed like a nice day when we set out, but although it was only a 15 minute walk, by the time we got there dark clouds had hidden the sun and there was a strong wind and after two minutes on the swing Phoebe said she wanted to come home.
So off we trudged.
After bath time I had to walk the dog in the dark. Stone clearing is very difficult in these circumstances, but I still got a few.
We watched Bridget Jones’ Baby on Netflix - it’s quite a poor film which underuses most of its amazing cast. I auditioned for a part in this movie. It was a small role of a man interviewing Bridget’s alternative love interest of a man who has set up a website that can find you your perfect partner (the film, which is weirdly reactionary in loads of ways, seems to think that “algorithms†are the most ridiculous thing ever and that love is more than matching people based on said “algorithms†- maybe one of the writers’ family was killed by an algorithm). I was surprised at the time how close to filming they had decided to cast the role. The filming dates were days away. I would have had to cancel a gig to do it. I wasn’t sure it was worth it, but tried my best to get the part.
But as usual my best wasn’t very good. I’d tried to learn the lines, but failed to remember them all. I’d come up with a character, but it didn’t really fly. I was being filmed in someone’s house, by a junior member of the team and their notes didn’t really help me.
So I was interested to see who’d got this part. But in the end it turned out that they’d dumped my character and decided to do the interview via the news channel that Bridget works for, with Sarah Solemani’s character doing most of the lines (that I could somehow remember now, even though I couldn’t during the audition). I don’t know if they filmed it one way and then decided to cover it in another way, or in the few days between audition and filming they just changed the script. Certainly some of the film does feel like it might have been made up as they went along.
So I lost out the part to no one. Or maybe someone got it, filmed it and then had the disappointment of finding themselves on the cutting room floor.
I’d have had Nick Mohammed’s character come to the restaurant myself. If you could ignore the mild racism of him having a funny foreign name, him getting caught up in the love triangle and thinking he was coming to the restaurant was the funniest bit of the film. And it would have been great to see him in the next scene too. You’d think if they were just making it up as they went along that that would have occurred to them.
Still, would loved to have been in the film. And if my character had survived and I’d got the part I would have had more lines than Julian Rhind-Tutt, Jessica Hynes, Beattie Edmondson, Tom Rosenthal (was he in it? I must have missed it), Dolly Wells, Ben Willibond, Joanna Scanlon and Darren Boyd put together…. Hope they all got paid well for essentially appearing in the background though. It’s only a great film that can squander talent like that.
I was able to do my gig in Shoreham-upon-Sea instead.
