My Leg's Gone Fizzy

Today was my birthday. Happy birthday me. I am now 48 and my handy inferiority-ometer informs me that by the time he was my age Mozart had now been dead for 13 years.

I need a new yardstick by which to measure my lack of achievement over the last near half a century.

Five minutes Google time later:

By typing "Didn't start writing until he was" into the search box, and reading through the first few hits, I discovered that Raymond Chandler didn't start writing until he was 45, and didn't publish his first big commercial sucess, The Big Sleep, until he was in his early 50s. He went on to win two Oscars.

That'll do me. My inferiority-ometer is now off the Mozart standard and is now measured in 'Chandlers'. Gives me at least another ten years before I have to start feeling guilty and dissatisfied that I have not produced some monumental world shatteringly famous opus. But by then who knows - in a decade's time I may well have done that thing (and stop laughing at the back there - it's my birthday. You're not allowed to laugh at people on their birthdays).

I spent most of the day locked in a room with Mike writing lewd jokes for the first half of the village panto and trying to work out what the hell we are going to do in act two. By the end of the day we had blocked out the whole thing. We now know roughly who does what to whom and where - we have no idea why any of this stuff happens apart from it getting us from where we are now, to where we want to be (ie gleefully typing the words 'THE END') with as many opportunities for silliness and childish lewdity as possible.
I just hope I can remember what all our hastily scribbled notes and 'joke ideas' were when I get to work on it again sometime tomorrow because our incredibly elastic deadline is, even by the local West Coast of Scotland, relaxed, "Ach fuck it, we'll get round to it soon enough", standards is getting a bit tight (basically we have started rehearsals and only have half a script).

I was tempted to throw a few of the choicer moments from what we did today up here but I know Ilona, our director, sometimes reads the blog, and I didn't want to get to the next rehearsal to find she had blue pencilled half the lines before I had a chance to see people go pink as they read them.

Lucy, our princess, went a lovely shade of pink the other day when she finally got the joke about a Mongolian Porn Star being called 'Attilla The Hung'. A moment I shall treasure for a while. I mean, getting sixteen year olds to blush these days is some fucking achievement let me tell you.