Tuesday 6th of March, 2001
Every March my face seems to fill with poison. You don't really need to know this, but in the spirit of full disclosure and all that...
Anyway, I used to think it was lifestyle - too much liquor, the wrong food and too much of it, stress, you know - but I've given most of that up - liquor, meat excess and late nights. And I haven't been too stressed recenly. I have now come to the conclusion that it is just March. Why this should be, I don't know. Perhaps the same process that brings sap to the tree.
A nice little Scholastic job arrives in the post, which is a relief.
Another gym visit, try to work out some of the poisons. Spend most of the time, as usual, trying to deconstruct the logistics and economics of the music videos. Also try to work out whether a video is by S Club 7 or Steps, and fail. This means (a) the members of each group are so homogenised that it is difficult to tell them apart and so count them or (b) I can no longer count up to seven. A little of both, I imagine. Also see what I suspect is the single from the group from Popstars. I have managed to avoid this phenomenon so far (by the simple expedient of not turning on the television), and had hoped to miss out on their whole career, so seeing this video was a major stumbling block for that ambition. Only had a couple of weeks left to go, too.
(Ooh, bitchy.)
On leaving the gym, I see that my mobile phone has not been recharged for a few days, that I have had the ringer turned off since Friday night, and that there are a few messages. When I finally get to the message that immediately concerns me (the others having been dealt with or simply running out of time), the phone dies just as the caller is getting to the reason they were calling. I'll have to charge the phone up before I can find out what that was all about.
When I get home there are also messages waiting for me. Leaving the house is a really effective way of getting people to phone. One from Ben regarding corrections to a book I worked on just before Christmas, another from Laura asking if was thinking of getting tickets to see Tom Zé at the Barbican next month, with Tortoise as his backing group. I had forgotten all about this, and was glad to be reminded. I call the Barbican immediately and get three tickets, since Ben is a big Tortoise fan.
When I booked for the three of us to see King Crimson last year at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, I made the mistake of getting tickets for the stalls - consequently Ben & Laura couldn't see anything at all and I could only see if I stood on tiptoe. This time I think I've made the opposite mistake of getting tickets in the Balcony (when I went to see a Philip Glass/Robert Wilson piece at the Barbican a few years ago we were in the Balcony, which was a narrow strip of seats suspended hundreds of feet above the rest of the auditorium. Or that was my impression at least. And it might have been a different room. I'm pretty sure I wasn't dreaming it. It was the Glass/Wilson show that was in 3D - that is to say more deliberately in 3D than a normal dance/drama piece). I suppose we could always take binoculars or telescopes with us.
It turns out that the mobile message concerned another job and whether is should be sent to me at home. It now ought to arrive tomorrow morning.
Finish the fliers for the Kamel Klub in March and send an email to Katrina to warn her of the impending large e-mail attachment about to come crashing into her Inbox. Send e-mails to those artists I've booked who are on e-mail with details of the gigs (several of them reply with questions about the information they really want, such as how long they are supposed to do and whether they'll get paid). This includes a jolly colour logo that I did, ostensibly for a web page, but essentially because I wanted to; also a GIF of a map of the area that I have included as a JPEG attachment. The resulting e-mail isn't collossal, but is, I notice on sending it, a little bulky. I wonder whether this will mess up anybody's e-mail - I hope not.
Vast amounts of Quorn fake-chicken stew. It takes whatever little self-control I have not to just sit and eat the whole pot. Greed being like that.
I download a shareware program from the internet that works as a story outliner. A bit basic, but it works. I start writing a story with it. Not a very good story, I hasten to add. Not going to be aiming for the Booker at any point soon, but it's quite fun to do. I find that any task can be achieved as long as I have a piece of software to do it with. Even doing my accounts became possible when I got Excel and wrote spreadsheets to tabulate the information with, if only because learning the software was a distraction from the creeping horror that is One's Financial Affairs.
Oh bugger - April's coming up. The whole damn tax business again.
Bum.