Time Travel for Cats and Kittens

The world just keeps on doing what it’s doing, and there’s no rewind or pause or stop or fast-forward…at least until time-travellers get their act together, in which case this bit will already have been re-written without anybody knowing.  Perhaps it already has.  Perhaps time has been changed.  My cat Fergal is looking a bit different.  For one thing, I swear until a few moments ago I didn’t have a cat named Fergal.  Are cats time-travellers?  It could explain a lot of things.

I'd genuinely love one of these.

Since I last updated this blog, lots of things have happened.  Amongst other things, Naomi has played tennis with brusque Germans in Morocco, attended a course on writing children’s books, and been reprimanded by a stern mortician for not taking things seriously during an autopsy in a medical training centre somewhere near Birmingham. Naomi is like a Horrible Histories version of Dr Victor Frankenstein as played by a Children’s Poet Laureate. 

We have been re-writing our play.  In January, we held a fun read-through of the (little) epic first draft, which went down well.  But it was clear from feedback, and from our own instincts, that we needed to rethink some major structural elements, and that it would be quite an extensive process. We stared at each other.  I knocked back a glass of orange juice.  Naomi knocked back a lime and soda.  I matched her by downing a second OJ.  And then a third.  I stared at her.  She told me to take my medication and then she went home to think about things and have some dinner.  But I was the clear winner in that battle.

The first draft – without giving too much away because we really want you to come and see the play – the first draft was the story of a young man who arrives one stormy night at a big country manor house to paint the portrait of an eccentric old lady.  The new painting will hang in the family gallery, and we tell funny stories of some of the other family members as our artist sets to work with paint on canvas.  But he is not really an artist and he has a sinister agenda…  The idea was a portmanteau of stories all linked together, like in those wonderful Amicus horror films of the 70s like Dr Terror’s House of Horrors or The House that Dripped Blood or Tales that Witness Madness.  Only nothing like them because Naomi has never even heard of them, and we don’t write horror.  But there was a thunderstorm. The first draft had themes of art (and art criticism) and luck and destiny and a bit where a drunk old lady strips off and sings My Heart Will Go On from Titanic.  One of the story segments was a complex narrative set in a casino on New Year’s Eve, and dealt with cosmic forces and superstitions.  It took us absolutely ages to write, and nearly killed us.

The second draft has taken us many, many weeks, and we’re still a few weeks away from completion.  We stumbled around for quite a while, trying to lock down the story.  We had many ideas, chased up many a blind alley, scoffed many a thoughtful biscuit.  We met most Mondays (bar Naomi’s sojourn to Morocco, and my wedding and honeymoon in Europe, where in Berlin my wife and I accidentally stumbled into the European Union Birthday Celebrations Party at Brandenburg Gate, and I inadvertently insulted the earnest young man who sells tickets to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum), and we completely re-fashioned the main story.  Gone was the portrait artist.  Gone was the naked bit and My Heart Will Go On.  Gone too is the whole Casino segment, even though it nearly killed us to write. You have to be ruthless when you rewrite.  Kill your darlings, as the saying goes.  Well, not just kill them but dismember them and use their body parts to stitch together a better, stronger darling.  We were ruthlessly editing and cutting and writing new bits, but we were still, in truth, rather unsure of what we were doing.

It actually took someone else to make the key suggestion that unlocked the story for us.  Though Naomi had had many inspired suggestions (particularly the creation of a new, adorable character with whom I am a bit smitten), and in my own sexy, intelligent, modest way I came up with some utterly brilliant ideas, it took an outsider to get a bit drunk in a pub in Fishponds and come up with the perfect idea that made everything click together.  Naomi and I looked at each other.  I downed an OJ.  Naomi downed a lime and soda.  We briefly discussed whether we’d need to kill this other person just in case they decided to write their own better, funnier rival version of the play, but the sun was shining and the orange juice tasted good so we decided to be benevolent and let him live.  Besides, he was cooking Naomi’s dinner.

Rewriting is never an easy process.  But we’ve got through it so far with a zero body count (the stiff in the morgue had nothing to do with us), and minimal pub expenses.  In a few weeks, we’ll have a second draft ready for the second readthrough, and the time cats will inherit the Earth.  Things are back on track.  

Isn’t that right, Fergal?