Staggering Coincidences

It was dark and cold and windy. Heavy rain soaked me to the bones.  The full moon was swallowed by Wagnerian storm clouds as I hurried through the night, wishing I had taken the bus, or that I had the foresight to wear an overcoat, or that I lived with a harem of the world's most beautiful and brilliant women in a chateau near a sun-kissed beach in the south of France, and that my aimable fiancée was perfectly happy with such an arrangement.  There is a hole in the bottom of my shoe, and my back hurts.



The staff at the Llandoger Trow have been playing Fleetwood Mac's Rumours on repeat, followed, as the pub empties around ten at night, leaving nobody to compain, by terrible and incomprehensible nordic thrash metal.  Tonight, to my surprise and delight, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was blaring out as I stepped inside.  I smiled at the young barman.  He smiled back.  I nodded.  He nodded.  We listened to Dave Gilmour's massive guitar solo from Time.  We shared a moment.  Then I asked him why he was still stood there staring at me when he should be doing his damn job of serving me the pot of tea I ordered five bloody minutes ago.  Jesus.  You can't get the staff these days.

This album helped fund Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I always wanted to hear a version with vocals by the Knights who say Ni.

Tonight we started the third act of our play, which required much discussion about characters and plotting, and not much writing.  We always seem to start slow and pick up speed, like a skier with an anxiety disorder being pushed off the crest of a snowy mountain.  Creating characters to populate a story is always an exciting process, and it's one of Naomi's (seemingly endless) strengths.  Previous to meeting this evening we had shared ideas in short text messages and longer emails, and via carrier pidgeon (a bad idea, that), so we had a few stakes in the ground on which we wanted to build our house, to torture a simile.  Sometimes characters are created to serve a situation (we might need a taxi driver, for instance, especially on a night as foul as this), though often the characters are the story.  We worked out what we want to do in terms of building the story around the characters, and thought about how different we wanted this part of the play to be from the others, both stylistically and narratively.  We also discussed creating characters that were specifically non-white, and how that would need to be handled sensitively, and whether or not a director should have any say in such a thing (no).

We talked about the difficulties in naming babies, forgetfulness, how many pizzas you'd need to feed 100 people at a wedding, frustratingly vague medical advice from GPs, and the laws on scooping up your pet dog's poo.  We also talked about luck.  Plot-wise, one of the things we're doing in this part of the play involves incredible good fortune and almost supernatural coincidence - we have to set the tone for this right from the start so that the audience buys into it.  We discussed "coolers" - people who exude bad luck, and who are employed by casinos to sit near a gambler on a hot streak who is winning big.  And we talked about very strange coincidences, just as, by a staggering coincidence, the barman finally brought me my cup of tea.

It had stopped raining on the way home (apart from when I was a few streets away, when it pelted down again, giving me my second soaking of the night), and the moon still cowered behind angry clouds.  I have Only Connect on series record on BBC iPlayer.  As I settled down to watch it with a chicken salad sandwich, a mince pie and a cup of hot hibiscus tea, I was astonished to find that by a staggering coincidence the first round involved a question about Dark Side of the Moon.