Drip, drip, drip...

Sitting at the helm of a group of people, trying to project an air of authority, is problematic when your nose is dripping like a tap. But you can't leave them to it because, well, they're reading their work out to you and expect you to be attentive. So it was last night, when I was sitting at the helm of a group of people with my nose dripping like a tap. As they read and I listened, I adopted numerous strategies to stem the flow, all of which failed. Once the reading was out of the way an exercise was set that enabled me to leave the room to address my little, damp problem. Temporarily, the rivers of running cold were halted. However, the minute I was re-seated at the helm of the group, off it went again. A tough night, to say the least. They don't tell you things like this will happen at Sitting at the Front Looking Like a Twat school.

In pencil on a yellow pad...

"I'm sure that if he were writing today he would love computers and word processors. He would learn to use them too. Then he would sit down and write his books in pencil on a yellow pad.

"I have heard some writers say they can write anywhere. It doesn't matter where. It did matter to my writer: the work-room was the most important room in the house.

"I could always tell when he was about to write a book. There would be lapses in his conversation; he would stare off into space, be inattentive. Then there might be a time of good humour: he had decided what he was going to write and how to go about it. Then would come the final stage when we all knew that not one word we were saying was getting through to him."

Elaine Steinbeck on John Steinbeck, 1995

Tobacco road...

A rather overweight, shoddily dressed and obviously drunk young woman wobbles down the pavement in my general direction.

Sometimes, I think, you really do take your life into your hands when you walk from the city centre down any of Hull's main arterial roads during the hours of darkness.

"Have you gorra cig you?" she shouts "I need a f*cking cig."

I apologise for not smoking and my inability to provide her with the necessary goods.

"Burr I needed a f*cking cig. Gerrrout me way."

She wobbles past me, I laugh, then she adds.

"Yorra f*cking English bastard you. A f*cking English bastard."

Funny, I was thinking the same thing of her.

This tale is available, free of charge, to Hull's destination management organisation Visit Hull & East Yorkshire.

Start making dynamite...

"Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death ... Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits."

From Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010)

Holy Humber Lifeboats...

Spent yesterday afternoon in Holy Trinity Church, having been invited by my friends at the RNLI to attend the Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication to mark the 200th anniversary of lifeboats at Spurn Point. Caught up, very briefly, with Dave Steenvoorden, the current Superintendent Coxswain of the Humber Lifeboat who was so helpful during the writing of On A Shout (including taking us for couple of spins in the name of research aboard the mighty Pride of the Humber). Was going to have a quick pre-service pint in the nearby William Wilberforce pub but when I walked in it was absolutely brimming with lifeboat crew members leaving little hope of getting served quickly. So I nipped over the road to King's Ale House where, in the toilets, just before setting off for the church, I met a nautical looking fella who couldn't turn the taps on at the sink. He asked me to oblige, having pointed out that he came from Scunthorpe. "What, don't you have taps in Scunthorpe?" I quipped, to which he bafflingly replied "no"! He felt it very appropriate to strike up a full conversation with me, asking me what I thought of the pub, its food, its ale, and where I was going next. "A service? I've been to one over there already today." Five minutes after I took my place in a pew he wandered in, obviously ready for another service and demanding a service sheet from anyone that passed him, despite them clearly being handed out at the door on entry. I sat with quite a few members of HM Coastguard, who failed to impress me with their singing (and slight smell of seaweed) although I suppose if you do a job of such import belting out a hymn will not be at the top of your list of priorities. As someone that somehow manages to scratch a living by tapping on a keyboard I felt like a really insignificant wuss surrounded by lots of people that save lives. Hats off to them all and here's to the next 200 years of lifeboats at Spurn, wherever its shifting sands may be located.

Eyesore, eyesore, eyesore...

21st century politics are so, I dunno, vulgar, don't you think? Look at this Lib-Dem monstrosity:

Game of tag...

How annoyingly ignorant is this anti-graffiti poster? 'Graffiti is a crime'? Tut tut, Hull City Council, you reactionary, misinformed loons.

Catching up...

With the redraft redrafted I've been catching up on the dreaded paperwork. It's inevitable, in the heady freelance world, that the attention does need to be occasionaly turned to some admin. But knowing that doesn't make it any easier, nor ease the feeling that time might be better spent staring into space dreaming up some other insignificant cock and bull story that I could waste my time on. When Richard Eyre took over at the National Theatre - nicely documented in his diaries National Service - the cartoonist Raymond Briggs issued a warning, via letter, against taking up the post. The warning included the following:

You are a creative artiste and
must not become a boring civil servant.
All artistes who get anywhere are
in danger of getting SUCKED OFF
into Administration.
IT IS DEATH.

So, with that in mind, I'll crack on with the paperwork.

Writer talks #GE10 nonsense...

"The country is in such a mess and there is such a gulf between the haves and the have nots that, if I was elected as the next Prime Minister, I fear I would have to be extremely radical as I dragged this nation and its people back towards the left of centre.

"As a matter of urgency, all of our troops fighting the so-called war on terrorism would also be brought home."

Sodding hell, I said that. And they've gone and printed it in the Hull Daily Mail.

Flattered to be called one of East Yorkshire's 'movers and shakers' and 'well-known faces', mind. The important people must have been stuck in airports waiting on that European airspace to re-open for business.

Read what the others had to say in part of the HDM's 'top notch' General Election coverage here.

Prime sinister...

Currently a slave to the laptop. Redrafting like a loon. Which would be fun if there was a room in this house with adequate lighting. As it is, I'd be better off working down a mine shaft. If Maggie hadn't filled them all with concrete back at the height of her dictatorship, that is. I do have an office that I share across town and would be tempted to go there if it were not for the fact that I know that I wouldn't get anything done and would, instead, eat buns all day and stare out of the window.

I fear that, today, lurking in the Hull Daily Mail, will be a quote from me suggesting what I would do if I was elected the next Prime Minister of the U of K. Luckily, there's no chance of me being elected as that Clegg fella seems to have the thing sorted. Will keep my eye out to see how much - if anything - of my left-leaning, anti-war gibberish made the cut.

In other news, can someone send me a Canon EOS 5D MK II to review please?

Plater: a proper writer...

"It's about listening. And writing it down. If you stop listening and you lose that curiosity about the way people speak and the way people behave, then you stop being a proper writer. I am constantly coming across little tales in the paper or in life. You put them away in the bank for later. Eventually they will turn up, by which time you forgot where you found them to begin with."

Alan Plater

Full interview at WGGB

Other things...

With every best intention I do sit down to write huge volumes of material, only thwarted by the simple fact that it's not as easy as all that. I am not a factory operative and there are days when writing words is as pleasurable as banging your head against steel reinforced concrete. I am especially distracted by the sun outside and suggested we go for a walk, meet eldest son, buy some lunch then walk back and sit in the sun eating our lunch. All the while, the laptop is there, teasing me, suggesting that I sit at it for a short time and write two, three, maybe even four lines of dialogue. Then the rugby league appears and, having eaten lunch and talked to son and given up on the sun because it was accompanied by a bit of a chill, I feel the need to ensure that Hull Kingston Rovers are humiliated live on television in the same way that Hull FC had been the previous day. With all of Hull's interest in the Challenge Cup over for another year, you'd think I'd be able to knuckle down. And I did. I did write quite a lot. But it was a battle with Mini Cheddars, NHL and Finn's white chocolate bar all vying for my attention. I did write an exceptional speech for a character called, in homage to M's sister, Holly. But I lost that dramatic gold in a technical hiccup as I switched from a netbook to a laptop while watching the dreadfully drawn out end to A Passionate Woman out of the corner of my eye.

Post Loot...

Went to see a preview of Loot at Hull Truck Theatre - which was excellent so by the first night audiences will be in for a real treat - and, afterwards, having grabbed a quick chat with Truscott of the Yard (Chris Connel, outstanding as one of the Water Board's finest officers), we headed over to The Old English Gentleman. We forgot that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is also in the city (at the New Theatre) and, almost as soon as we sat down with beer in hand, were entertained by an endless procession of outrageously dressed (and outrageously drunk) guys and gals that streamed by. In our Orton frame of mind this freaks' roll call seemed a rather fitting end to the night.

A distraction from distraction...

So, and I imagine you'll be pleased to hear it, I've finally parted company with Simon Gray, the author of The Smoking Diaries and countless other memoirs; of many plays, including Cell Mates (the one S Fry scarpered from) and Butley and lots of other writings. I read Coda slowly because I didn't really want the man to go off and breath his last. But he did. Back in 2008. I know that I've read quite a few of Gray's plays - I gobbled up hundreds of playtexts from 1995-1998 and he was certainly amongst them, because I recall thinking about his Christian name and how it led to some assumptions on my part about his social status (Simon being a bit of a poncey moniker on these tough streets and I rightly assumed he was of the Cambridge cloth). Yet I can't remember a single detail about any of them. I was going to take out Otherwise Engaged and The Common Pursuit from the library the other week to trigger some memories until I remembered that I had a £12 fine hanging over me and only a tenner in my pocket. When I raise the funds I'll be on it. Michael Billington, in his 2008 obit of Gray, says of the man "What he did, at his best, was carve out his own special territory: the arrested adolescence of the educated Englishmen." Meanwhile, Richard Eyre is in no doubt about Gray's body of work: "He's one of the most important British dramatists of the last 50 years - no question. He used a classical structure and wrote within tightly prescribed limits about people whose emotions were very messy, so there was this engaging tension between the classical form and the chaotic vortex of emotions." So, there you have it. I'll no doubt read all of these memoirs again - probably when I'm in my 70s and dying. Until then, well, I'm tempted to flash up a cigarette.

Hotel bar...

So, I had this idea for a caper set in a hotel bar. A short play. And I was in Leeds, with two hours to spare. So I went to Eddie Waring's old haunt, The Queens, and wrote it there. I wasn't looking my best - a sort of Larry David number; trainers, jeans, New York Rangers t-shirt topped off with a 'sports jacket' - because this was M's day, and today she was the smartly dressed one. I strode confidently up the red carpet The Queens insists on securing to the steps in front of its main entrance, nodded at the concierge, and found myself stood in the lobby. There were no clues to the whereabouts of the bar so I decided to ask for them. "Where's the bar?" I mumbled to a woman putting together a promotional display about the hotel's beds - a display that included a hotel bed. She suggested, having looked at me and my Larry David get-up, that there wasn't a public bar available to the likes of me. "There's a pub in the station," she said, ushering me along. I know there's a pub in the station. It's a Wetherspoons. Good prices and good company if you like old gents with bulbous red noses but not a place to write a caper set in a hotel bar. Then she spotted the NY Rangers t-shirt, which proved to be my passport to the high life waiting just around the corner. "My husband is a big New York Rangers fan," she said, rather too proudly given their recent and last day, end of season defeat that kept them out of the Stanley Cup play-offs, with no suggestion that she wanted to get me into the promotional bed that was located in full view of anyone that ventured into the lobby. "It's a nice t-shirt, where did you get it?" The Rangers chat went on for some brief minutes with obvious nonsense about online stores and a lack of forechecking until whatever test I was being asked to pass, I eventually passed. "I was just looking for somewhere to do some work for a couple of hours," I said, thinking of alternative bars I could go to, not realising what was within very easy reach and was now mine. "Well, why not go through those doors, order a drink and take a seat?" And, lo and behold, I had entered the bar that was not available to the public, although very obviously was, because while I was sat there all shapes, sizes and sorts of public wandered through, some of them just sitting down and not even ordering a f*cking thing. Mainly, these were rude business types of the kind that believe they can commandeer tables to enable them to unfurl printouts of their Excel spreadsheets before talking very loudly about stakeholder engagement, regeneration and other such contemporary babble. But occasionally there was the odd writer sort looking for a place to hide, watch, drink and work.

Where do they go?..

My daughter, so she tells me, spends much of her time in this rusty Jenga-meets-obelisk of a building, which houses lots of Leeds Met and its design-orientated students. I have just discovered that this Cor-Ten steel-clad construction cost £45m. I quite like it. Apparently the rust, contrary to my expectations and shoddy understanding of corrosion and oxidisation, makes the steel more durable because it provides a naturally built-up protective layer. I have no idea, really, what Danielle does in here, although a lot of it involves designing staircases. She does try and tell me. But I'd rather there be some level of vagueness on my part because I'd hate to know more than my next generation, who will, I believe, save the planet and mankind from destroying itself. With, in Danielle's case, the deft use of staircases. For me, it's impossible to equate the Danielle who makes regular appearances within this rusty structure with the little girl that used to sit on my shoulders, although the two of them still look very similar. This makes me feel both proud and, ridiculously, a little bit sad for myself, because I realise that, like the Cor-Ten steel, I've started to look very weathered on the outside and, unlike the Cor-Ten, on the inside too. I'm afraid my protective layer has failed rather dramatically.

Laird on writers' block...

Nick Laird wrote about 'the fitful nature of inspiration' in The Guardian's Review yesterday.

"The dream is to be overtaken by an automatic fluency, and then fix the thing up perfectly in a few crisp drafts where each decision seems ordained. It doesn't work like that, of course. When inspiration wants to hide it simply vanishes ... And those hours and hours of tinkering don't quite contain the proper thrill and calm of an absolute immersion. So you write nothing, and that's the one thing harder than writing."

Read the full article

On shirts and shit...

Day started nicely. Lots of sunshine. Enough to cause me a Formula1 pit lane-style conundrum over how many layers to wear to the football. There was a moment, as I sat in the garden supping coffee and listening to some pre-match build-up and getting a little bit excited, when I considered a short-sleeved shirt with a t-shirt beneath. But that arrangement went out the window as soon as it dawned on me that I would be unable to sit down in the shirt in question without all of the buttons bursting open. I may be deluding myself but I am almost certain that the shirt must have shrunk in the wash. As it was, I donned a jacket over a long-sleeved shirt. If I hadn't been sitting on the prawn sandwich side of the KC Stadium the dress code would have been a little shabbier. Hull City's performance against fellow cellar-dwellers Burnley was abysmal. The majority of players lacked the necessary passion required to fight for the three points. And so it was that they ended up losing 1-4. And, more disastrously and highly likely, look to have ensured that the Tigers' Premier League dream will end after two seasons. In our posh and poncy seats, we were separated by the Burnley board of directors by a piece of rope. I do hope it was put out of sight quickly at the conclusion of the game because a lot of Hull City fans, sick to see their team self-defeated by unmotivated, mercenary, money-grabbing twats with no skill, would no doubt have been keen to have fashioned it into a noose.

Beautifully written...

"Of all the compliments I've come to fear, 'beautifully written' is the one I've come to fear most. A play shouldn't be beautifully written unless, for dramatic purposes, there is a character in it who speaks beautiful writing, so to speak. If it's to be any good a play can only be truthfully written, which means the characters speak as the characters would have spoken in this or that situation - from time to time they may find the resources within themselves that enable them to speak as if from beyond themselves (the prerogative of fiction) and therefore beautifully, but the resources must be recognisably, even if astonishingly, the characters', not the writer's. With luck and at his best the writer will pass unrecognised through a play, only identifiable at the end in the effect of a whole experience - if he's lucky, and been at his best."

Simon Gray

Kick-Ass cinema trip...

Kick-Ass last night. Lived up to its title. Beautifully choreographed, baletic Woo-style violence and action, funny and very tightly knitted screenplay and solid performances from a quality Anglo-American ensemble. This film looks superb throughout and the story is just crazy. Chloë Moretz's Hit-Girl is the finest, handiest, weapon-savvy child since Natalie Portman's Mathilda in Leon. Loved every one of its 117 minutes. Apart from, well, the set up for the sequel at the end, which, as welcome as it will be, and as much of a nod it was to all those Super Hero films that have preceded Kick Ass, came across as just a little bit smug (yes, yes, that was the point). But the best thing I've seen in a long, long while.

I expected the cinema to be busy. Up until a minute before the main feature, there were four of us in front of the screen. Sod's law dictated that, as the feature was about to start, a group of noisy young folk would plonk themselves and fill the row in front of us - and take 15 minutes of the film to calm down and shut up. And just in the nick of time, as I was about to get nasty. Quite why that row and not one of the 15 others is beyond me. As Hit Girl would have it, they were c*nts.

Avoiding the underclass...

I learned, last night, with thanks to some participants in a writing workshop working under pressure, against the clock and in a room lit with flourescent tubes, the difference between the working class and those that feel they're above it. It is their consumption of meat. Frozen, pre-packaged meat is the preserve of the former, the freshly hacked and often rare-cooked parts of animals - including their innards - belong to the latter. So that's that sorted. All very tidy. Compartmentalised. The have fresh meat and the have-nots. It'll do for me. They didn't mention tinned meat. The Campbell's Meatballs et al. I don't want to use the word underclass. Does this meat - if that stuff contained within actually contains any - of the canned variety belong to the great ignored?

My working class credentials. I was born in a council house. Next door but one to a public baths. Dad was a signwriter, mum worked in a variety of shops and rose to the dizzy ranks of off-licence management, where she ensured that folk with a drink habit got their regular fix. There was always a tin of corned beef in the house. When I became a discerning young chap I would often request a can of Heinz beans & sausages to be placed on the weekly shopping list. I started going to rugby league. I once had a shell suit. I worked in the building trade. Then I became a ponce. Went back into education. Until I devoured them two nights ago we had a can of hot dogs in the cupboard. I once ate steak in The Goring. I'm a mess.

Vote Pedro...

Not sure what time it was but I got the news about Brown calling a general election at some point in the early hours of the morning via Radio 4. I have convinced myself I cannot sleep unless I am listening to some kind of talk radio and, while I prefer Up All Night on 5Live, that usually means starting with R4, and I have become quite a regular listener to the shipping forecast, awaiting news of Cromarty and Dogger and the winds veering their way like some folk used to anticipate the footie results coming through on a teleprinter. Therein lies (lay?) madness. Although I use it as an aid to sleep, all that listening to people talking on the radio does, really, is constantly wake me up. So, between going to bed and rising this morning, I had heard about Brown calling a general election on what seemed like 30 occasions and, on around five of these occasions, I had been dreaming and the news was coming at me via the multi-limbed, two-headed weirdos populating my dreams. It came as no surprise, then, to hear later that Brown had been to Buck Palace and got the necessary permissions from Da Queen to dissolve Parliament. Two things - wouldn't it be great if Parliament did, literally, dissolve? And, well, I'd have quite enjoyed it if, when Gord turned up at Queenie's palatial abode, she'd just nipped out to Budgens for a few cans of Woodpecker and some Doritos and wouldn't be back 'til May 7th. I am already bored of the general election. Hopefully I will, come the time, be able to muster up the necessary enthusiasm required to vote for someone.

The old yin...

Stayed up and watched Billy Connolly on The South Bank Show Revisited. What a strange, cigarette-infused husky voice from another planet he had in those early clips. Today, he's looking like an old yin. Which he should be; he was born in 1942. Good show - he's spent the last two decades getting increasingly annoying with his ventures into film, those irritating travelogues on a trike and wittering on about the abuse he suffered to Pamela, who didn't have the decency to just listen and offer advice but got it all published. Bragg took him back to basics last night, although over-intellectualising comedy always makes those doing it look pretentious and unfunny. There was a strange moment in time, when British comedy was in its post-Python, where's Not The Nine O'clock News, hurry up and write Hitchhikers please Douglas Adams doldrums, that I listened to a lot of Connolly. And, oh this is rather embarrassing, Jasper Carrot, Mike Harding and, deary me please forgive me then kill me, Max Boyce. I also had a cheap Connolly book - published by some outfit called Arrow I think - that basically contained transcribed bits of his stand-up. One bit explained the leap of faith he had to take in order to escape the world of work to try and make a go of it. This was inspired, somewhat, by an old welder he worked with in the Glasgow shipyards. On a day when it was pissing with rain, the old guy, looking worn out and close to tears, turned to Connolly and told him to just do it. "Son. You don't want to be the one working, when you're 60, with the rain pissing off your back wishing you'd done the things you always talked about." So off he went. Although there will be some, those who remember his bothersome take on the Village People's In The Navy, the reworked In The Brownies, say, or those still offended by the jokes about a hostage that was soon to be beheaded, who'll wish he hadn't bothered. But the old guy's advice remains sound and should be followed.

What a Gray day...

Closed the cover on Gray's The Last Cigarette for the last time. Well, unless I re-read it at some point, of course, or dib in and out of it, or just open and close the cover for the sheer hell of it. Discovery of a tumour on his lungs was thrown in at the end, little more than an aside, although we knew it was coming. And he knew it was coming. Very moving bit towards the end, too, titled No More Heydays. Will have to put off reading Coda for a while I think - mainly because I want Mr G to live on for a while. Might dib into Enter A Fox tonight but there's a lot of writing to do over the next ten days so anything weightier than 122 pages might get in the way and I don't need any more distractions on top of the many that I already - quite foolishly - surround myself with. Writing of which, just discovered that Simon Gray's Diary is on twitter.

Death by buttocks...

"I've often, when trapped in the mire of writing a play, with drafts on drafts half done or phonily completed and totally hopeless therefore, longed to murder myself, and violently, but I don't see how one could do it with an axe, how to get the leverage and balance required to swing the heavy blade in on oneself - except for the crotch, that would be the only easy target area - no, I've just tried it, stood with my legs apart and head down like a golfer, then swung a phantom axe upwards, and it turns out that the easiest slice would be right between the buttocks, and how would one guarantee that it would be fatal, and how attempt to explain it if one survived it?"

Simon Gray - The Last Cigarette