Standing room only...

Auditions were fun. As for the train journey, well, we'd had a heads up at 7am and throughout the day from various other people via the miracle of text that there'd be some hiccups coming back to Hull but it wasn't that bad. Standing room only on a GNER so we decided to stand, or rather lean, in the bar carriage and drink several cans of beer from plastic glasses. We got on rather well with bar manager Darius, who humoured our feeble efforts to create the kind of atmosphere you might find, say, in a public house in South Cave. In Grantham we hopped back on a Hull Trains train and did some work on the script. Made a change from sitting at the dining table clattering on the laptop on my own.

Tags: London, On A Shout, public transport

No bags under my eyes...

I lost a bag the other week. It was my own fault. Well, the demon drink's. I managed to get off a train but didn't pick my bag up. Who knows where it is now? Certainly not First, who operate the station the train terminated at, or Northern, who operated the train. And certainly not me. Which is a shame. The bag contained a script, covered in notes, a contact book ten years in the making and two Moleskine's, one containing some memories of trips abroad, lots of doodles and mad thoughts and ideas that never went anywhere but round and round inside the Moleskine, the other, well, not much aside from some recent notes made at an On A Shout-related meeting and a reward notice promising the finder a daft amount of money. Irreplacable items worth nowt, really, and probably now languishing in a skip, somewhere. It mattered, for a couple of days, and I felt I'd lost something really important. But the redraft was still done without the notes, the ideas would probably never have gone anywhere, and the memories still remain intact, without the need for those written reminders.

Tags: lost property, public transport

Snaps...

The keeper of this hand encroached on my space on the train last night. Look at it - do I pay £16.90 for this? Anyway, the keeper of this hand did redeem himself by making me laugh. We were just coming up to Selby when he caught the attention of a very elderly man sat across the aisle from him by repeatedly saying the word "Snaps!" "Snaps! Snaps! Snaps!" it went. The elderly man understandably looked puzzled and feared for his life. Then came an attempt at clarification: "Take the snaps!" It eventualy transpired that the keeper of the hand wanted his photograph taken with a high falutin' and very fancy mobile telephone but had, unfortunately, selected a man for the job who had not crossed paths with technology since the introduction of cylindrical music boxes. "This is the snaps button, you press it, it takes a snaps. Take a snaps of me!" The elderly chap complied with the demand and, after a lot of fumbling about, showed the keeper of the hand his photographic effort. "No good! This snaps is no good! You have taken too much snaps of the table. Do it again! Another snaps!" Thankfully, the subsequent snaps ("Another snaps! Another!) finally did the job. Phew. I thought at one point it would all end in tears. If you believe in karma then this thrilling entertainment was possibly all due to the elderly man snatching a Manchester Evening News that I had my eye on when I boarded the train but, rather than reading it, tucking it into his bag, which he then clutched tightly to his chest until the snaps incident.