An Overdue Update

Look: I’m not going to start making rash claims about regular updates. I may, or may not, start doing this again “properly”: but what I CAN commit to is a swift and utterly non-comprehensive update on some of the things that have happened in my life since my last post, which was a LONG time ago.

1. All my children continue to be superb. I shall say nothing more about them: they are the centre of my world, but that does not make for diverting updates.
2. My workplace has moved from the wildly convenient Chelsea to the hideously inconvenient Shoreditch. I am the only person in the world unconvinced by East London: but there it is.
3. I have been considered for redundancy twice in the last six months. On neither occasion did the redundancy transpire, but it is an utter hurricane of piss when it’s going on.
4. Old Friend at Work DID get made redundant. This has affected my enjoyment of being at work negatively by approximately 86%. She is far happier and strolled into another job almost the second that she left here:s o there is that – were I less self-involved I would see this as an unqualified good news story.
5. I have gone out with: two actresses (one famous – so famous that I had to sign a form saying that I wouldn’t post about her on social media, which was weird – and one not famous, but absolutely stone cold mad); a journalist (who decided she wanted a baby – and as I have done all the baby-making I want to do, we parted ways very amicably); a teacher and a fellow advertising professional.
6. I have bought a new rug, largely on the basis of Old Friend at Work’s frank assessment of the decision, which was: “If you don’t buy it, you’re a cunt”.
7. Seen a lot of excellent theatre, much of it with the children. I took Eldest Son to see the almost-impossible-to-get-a-ticket to Benedict Cumberbatch “Hamlet”; and (whilst he professed to find it excellent, and I think really did enjoy seeing it); when I suggested, earlier this year – that all four of us might go to see fellow “Sherlock” alumnus Andrew Scott in “Hamlet”, I got the earnest reply “I think I’m probably OK for “Hamlet” for about twenty years or so.”. We’re all going in July. I’ve already seen it once, and it was phenomenal – better than Cumberbatch, in my opinion (but I think a lot of that was down to the director, Robert Icke, whose work I admire very much).
8. Had a number of people I work with leave and be replaced. This has not been painless, as those that I lost (not that they died, it just felt like that) were quite a bit jauntier than their successors. The current batch seem not to have the same quality of being a bit odd – which I think is a pre-requisite for being a good Planner. One of them has a first name that I find so objectionable that I have had to give him a new one, which he has accepted without a murmur of complaint.
9. Various bits of fuckery from the Ex-Wife, which have served – as ever – to remind how very fortunate I am not to be married to the adulterous old witch any longer.
10. Been introduced to – and liked – the following:-
    1. Fever Tree Angostura Bitters Tonic Water.
    2. Beetroot stems used as a salad “leaf”.
    3. Pistachios in previously unimagined quantity and manifestations.
    4. Freeze-dried raspberries.
    5. Sanetra Sourdough from Gail’s.
    6. Baguette from Le Pain Quotidien.
    7. Sartorial aftershave from Penhaligon’s
    8. A Karcher pressure washer, which I ache to use, but have now run out of appropriate surfaces.
    9. The novels of Elizabeth Strout.
    10. Veep
11. Had a sabbatical, during which I went on a watercolour painting course and wrote six episodes of a TV sitcom, which is brilliant in parts and turgid beyond belief in others.
12. Ten things about which I have become certain:-
    1. Sean Penn is an actor who absolutely deserves to be talked of alongside DeNiro and Brando (and some way ahead of Pacino).
    2. Flawed as he undoubtedly was and is (and aren’t we all?) Tony Blair is the only politician whom I can imagine marshaling a course out of this mess: everyone else reminds me of a sixth form debating society, or a university first year meeting of the Socialist Workers’ Party.
    3. I can’t be fucked with WhatsApp.
    4. Office politics are a waste of time, and people who indulge in them are – without exception – wankers.
    5. Funny people are nearly always clever.
    6. Cooking from scratch relaxes me and tastes immeasurably better than anything I can buy – apart from bread, at which I have no talent.
    7. Olivia Colman.
    8. People are nicer in the North of England, but London is too brilliant to leave.
    9. No man who cycles to work needs to wear Lycra to do it. Ever.
    10. Brexit is a catastrophic decision.
13. Ten things about which I remain unconvinced:-
    1. Cross-gender casting. I’ve seen it work (Fiona Shaw as Richard II, Glenda Jackson as King Lear, Tamsin Greig as Malvolia) and I’ve see it fail (Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero, Kathryn Hunter as King Lear, Harriet Walter in the last two years’ worth of experiments) – but this assumption that it makes no difference just isn’t true: there needs to be a justification that makes sense.
    2. Quinoa.
    3. A Gin and Tonic that costs £18.
    4. Jeremy Corbyn as the saviour of the Left.
    5. Cold-press coffee.
    6. The slew of TV programmes where “a cohesive plot” is seen as a bourgeois, reactionary indulgence: I don’t mean that everything should be linear and require no investment in terms of time or interpretation, but there have been a few things on TV recently (“Marcella”, “Missing”) where the contortions of the plot appear to have left the programme makers themselves absolutely lost.
    7. The following descriptors in restaurants: “foraged”, “heritage”, “spume”.
    8. Millennials.
    9. iCloud security.
    10. Wales.

I’m sure you will agree with me when I write: “That’s quite enough of that”.

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