5609/18629
I am under a fair degree of stress as there’s some rapidly approaching deadlines coming and it’s been difficult to find the time to sit down and write properly and I’ve lost days to illness. But today, I had a pretty much unbroken run at writing Relativity series 2, episode 1 and was hopeful I might even have a skellington script by the end of the day. And the morning went quite well and I got into the groove a little bit, feeling out the characters again and coming up with some nice, weird chat about what Jordan’s coffin might be like.
Annoyingly I had a radio interview in the middle of the day with a local radio station. I had questioned if this was going to be a big enough deal to justify me giving up writing time. After all I’ve already done one of my Dublin gigs and the second was just six hours away. Was the hour out of my day and the disruption it would cause and the25 euros in taxi fares likely to be offset with significant ticket sales? I was assured it was worth doing. And I still felt I could be back at work by 2.30 and get another four hours of writing in.
I was in high spirits as the writing was gone well and I had a fun chat with my first ever uber driver (though I was disappointed when he turned up in a taxi) and a jolly newspaper interview by phone with a laughing young man (who laughed at stuff that wasn’t even jokes - he might have been nervous). Anyway, I arrived at the radio station which was a bit in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the river. The man at reception clearly wasn’t expecting men and all I could find in my emails was the name of the station, not the show I was meant to be on. He took me up to the studios. People asked me who I was and who I thought I was going to be talking to. I was embarrassed not to be able to tell them and couldn’t get through to anyone back in London who knew. But I assumed it would sort itself out.
But it didn’t. Embarrassingly they had no idea who I was, why I was there and the interview that I thought I was doing had never been confirmed. They thought they might be able to make it work anyway, but I was sceptical that they could do an interview with someone with no research and in the end they agreed that they didn’t have the time to fit me into the show for today. I may be being judgemental, but even if I had been on their list, I wasn’t convinced this particular radio station was going to be listened to by that many people who knew who I was and who’d be willing to rush out and by a ticket.
It was not only a bit humiliating to turn up somewhere where you weren’t expected in this way, but also it was utterly infuriating that I had wasted my time coming out here. What made it worse was when I tried to get an uber back to the hotel there were none in this desolate area. I was fuming now and so decided to just walk it. Even though I knew that would waste another hour. I hoped I could walk off my anger. But I just got more annoyed. And by the time I was back by my computer I was too pissed off with it all to do any effective work.
I am not someone who usually loses my shit over stuff like this, but I did today. I hope I am not turning into a prick. But I don’t think I am. But then I guess no prick does.
Work (or lack of it) is stressful and it’s hard being away from my family and alone in a foreign country, where everything is upside down. The post boxes are green here for godsakes! How I am meant to cope with that? I saw all my family on FaceTime, but as much as I feel superior to all those generations of parents who never got called “Poo poo daddy” when they were away from home and as much as it lifted my heart to see everyone, it’s also heartbreaking not to be out there having fun with them. They went to see Peter Rabbit at the cinema today and Phoebe found bits of it scary. What a Morris Mitchener.
But even though the script ground to a halt, the show must go on and
the room was a lot closer to being full tonight. The man who I’d been
stuck outside the apartment with didn’t make it though either. In fact
he happened to come out of his room just as I dashed off to the venue.
We said hello, but we must both have been aware that the special moments
we had shared last night and the promises that we’d made to each other
were meaningless.
Anyway,
as always the magic of theatre pushed the blues away. A great crowd and
a much more assured performance. I had lots of fun. And I got into the
apartment without seeing my friend. I missed him.
