Sunday 4 February 2018

Being social

Blimey, it’s turned cold! I have just walked from my house down to the tube. The air feels like little daggers. Surely snow is forecast?

It’s been a weekend of work for me. Bank holidays, evenings and weekends cease to have any form of meaning for a freelancer. We can try to force ourselves into 9 to 5 regimes, but at the end of the day, we tend to work when everyone else is at play! (Often because we’re generating the play for others.)

On Saturday, I spent the morning singing in shul. It was a last-minute booking: sadly one of the other basses has a dad who is ill. It was rather good practice for me because it meant I couldn’t obsess about the material and had to rely a little more on my sight-singing skills, which I guess I’ve never really trusted before. I genuinely recommend regular singing for everyone. It’s such a joyous experience to sing in harmony, really one of life’s great pleasures. It all went very smoothly and I think the quartet blended particularly well and made a very nice sound. 

Saturday evening found me quiz mastering at a very charming tennis club in Holland Park. I deduced from the clientele that it must be a fairly exclusive club, and I was really thrilled that its members were so cosmopolitan. I doubt there were more than a handful of native Brits in the room. Fortunately, I’d been given this information before setting the quiz, so I was able to choose questions with an international flavour. Scores were very high, and very close. There was just one point between the winners and the two teams who came joint second. Everyone seemed to have a very jolly time. 

I had a meeting at lunchtime today with a charming chap from Leeds. I love chatting to creative Yorkshire folk. They never seem to have the jadedness of arts professionals in London. There’s always a can-do attitude and a sense of wanting to get in there to get their hands dirty.

This evening is about watching crappy telly at Julie’s house which I’m very much looking forward to. I’m not having a great time of it at the moment. I feel I just don’t understand the world any more. Every time I switch on the news these days it feels like someone’s being morally outraged on behalf of someone who we’re repeatedly told it’s really awful to be at the moment. The problem I have is that it doesn’t really feel very nice to be ME right now. I’m beginning to feel invisible, like I’m being sent to the back of every sodding queue I arrive at. I used to feel that way when I went to the shops as a child. I’d often be made to wait until there were no more adults left in the building before being served even if people came in after me! Sometimes this makes me want to hide. Sometimes it’s nice to be forced to be a bit social.

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