These past few weeks I have been gorging on some fine writing. Three plays by Henrik Ibsen, for a start: two in vivid versions by Frank McGuiness (A Doll's House, The Lady From The Sea) and one very strong one by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (An Enemy Of The People). Then there was Fram of course, with Tony Harrison at his eccentric best, and round the corner, Simon Stephens's soulful Harper Regan. Martin Crimp's play The City had the quality of a nightmare and resembled, for me, the darker work of the great Paul Auster. At the Bush, I enjoyed Lucy Kirkwood's sweetly insane Tinderbox, and next evening over at Soho I loved Static, by Dan Rebellato. Today I saw the wonderful (and unexpectedly touching) big splash debut by Polly Stenham. I've already written about Jonah and Otto here. What I didn't tell you is that I attended a recent rehearsed reading of Robert Holman's Rafts And Dreams, that knocked me over. Then at last Sunday's Miniaturists there was fine work from Christina Balit, Rachel Barnett, Declan Feenan, Hilary Bell, and a debut from Paul Chadwick (our first professor). I make no apology for citing the writers alone here. Needless to say, great work was done on all the above by directors, actors, producers, designers, etc. But I'm wanting to big up the people who dreamed up and wrote down the words, the scenarios, the blueprints, the rubrics - hell why don't we call them the scripts and be done with it, for these life-enhancing, spellbinding entities and say, hey, thanks. And respect.

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What do Damien Hirst, legendary cricket umpire Dicky Bird, and poker superstar Dave "The Devilfish" Ulliott have in common?

Answer: they "love their snooker". During the final session of this year's World Championships, the camera picked out the above luminaries, and in those beyond-parody (though Mitchell and Webb have made a very good fist, witness the fact that a spectator was wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend 'Ooh and that's a bad miss') cliche-ridden hushed tones, the commentators informed us, proud as Punch, that the famous umpire/artist/poker player "loves his snooker". Moments later a streaker, er, streaked on to the stage, divesting himself of black tie and dinner dress before dancing around the table bollock naked; I can't begin to do justice to Dennis Taylor's panicked demeanour, resolving to stoicism, as the director cut to him in the commentary box to spare us the delicate pink in the middle.

I shall so miss the whole Crucible thing when the Championships decamp, as they surely will in time, to China. It'll be on the box still, obviously, but will it be so unselfconsciously, gloriously eccentric?

Today's the last day of my NT attachment. It's been a sincere sensation. There's that old quote, which for the present purpose I shall gender-transpose: "What my husband doesn't understand is, when I'm looking out of the window, I'm working." Eight weeks of looking out the window. Marvellous. There's a particular atmosphere here, very conducive, and that's down to the staff, artists and others, who are without exception as hospitable and supportive as an incomer could wish.

In memoriam, here are some notes I took, towards some scenes for something I'm not now going to write, having since taken rather a different tack (all that looking out the window you see). But I like the list as a thing in itself (and some of the ideas persist).


James Joyce introduces

Crusoe and Moll

A Garden in Newington

The Queen Goes To The Toilet And Washes Her Hands

The Pillory (Dead Kittens)

Anyone in from Colchester?

A Tempest Off Great Yarmouth

Mary Goes To Nottingham

JEHOVA PROVIDEBIT

Bricks and Fire

Sophia and the Lip Reader

The Invention of the Guillotine

Robinson and the Moor


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Also in memoriam, eighteen years ago today I took the bus up to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, to be told that the results of my scan were very encouraging and that by the end of my course of chemotherapy I should certainly expect to be free of the disease. Hodgkin's, that is. I remember the feeling very well, as I left the building and looked up at the blue spring sky.

Taking the link down, I thought I'd record it: I miss David E's "One Writer and His Dog", the passion and erudition, the cooking, the Rascal news and all the rest of it.

While rummaging for Tony Harrison's Oresteia I dusted down another (academic, annotated) translation of the middle play of the trilogy:



featuring Dame Diana in what I'm sure you'll agree is the mother of all Clytemnestra costumes. The photo isn't credited in the volume, for shame, but I asked Dr.Google about it and she directed me to this page, recording the existence of a Frederic Raphael/Ken MacLeish adaptation for the telly. She even made the cover of Radio Times, look.

It's Friday night, I've put the boys to bed, cooked and eaten my mushroom omelette and now I'm listening to Jessye Norman's voice, married to The Four Last Songs, Richard Strauss. I used to listen to a lot more classical music and opera and so on than I do these days. The Fall and Pink Floyd are the two names currently most heavily represented on my iTunes '25 most played'. Funny how things mutate.

It's been an interesting week workwise. I wrote virtually nothing but had one of those real lightbulb moments on Monday, which has illuminated the rest of the week's reading and thinking. In and around Daniel Defoe and his work, but you could have guessed that.

Also on Monday I saw Fram, Tony Harrison's new work for the National Theatre, directed by himself and its designer Bob Crowley. I found it enthralling, bewildering, beautiful, touching, funny, strange, baffling, frustrating, majestic, prolix, self-mocking, and quite unashamedly challenging in its piling up of a tottering tower of weighty themes. And there were fart jokes, and vomit. Video, dance and what at one stage I thought was a Mighty Boosh tribute sequence. Quite wonderful. Of course it goes without saying, the man's a legend in his own dinnertime. And yes I have seen him in the canteen. But no even if I had the courage, I wouldn't still. Never meet your heroes, don't they say (though I did hear he came to Northern Stage to see A Christmas Carol, and if I'd been there at the time, who knows..). As an actually not very spotty teenager in Liverpool, I watched the video of the NT's production of TH's Oresteia with the rest of the A Level Greek class, and was awestruck. No translation had ever before come close to generating the heat and power of classical Greek, but as soon as the watchman opened his mouth, we knew Aeschylus had finally found a mouthpiece for the age of English. Sorry, Gilbert Murray! At least you have lovely Jeff Rawle bringing you to life on stage.

(Half) A Night At The Opera

What with all the scribbling, childcaring, penury and other constraints too nebulous to mention, it's not easy for yours truly and his crew to be proper spontaneous, like this guy. Hell, I didn't even notice when the passport expired two years ago. Little things like last night help, though. Seated here at the desk in The Cut at 7.05pm, I decided to see something. But what... Bliss at the Royal Court? Sold Out. Ibsen at the Arcola? Yes, but not tonight... At 7.25 I was climbing the stairs at the Royal Opera House, to take my perch in the Lower Slips, misnomered for sure, as I had to fight creeping vertigo to concentrate on the half a stage I could actually see from my standing berth, priced at a reasonably reasonable £7. It was Eugene Onegin (in a production by the late Steven Pimlott), a work I only knew (past tense operative, as I couldn't remember anything about it) from reading the Pushkin, decades ago. But I warmed to the score, the performers were endearingly committed to the barmy enterprise of recreating romance among the pre-revolutionary Russian bourgeoisie, and there was even a comedy accident in a scene change that would have had the Whingers jumping for joy. The first act of three was enough, I'd had eighty minutes of lush orchestral loveliness poured into my ears, I'd assured myself this whole world of the operatic repertoire still existed, I'd witnessed the rich at their extraordinarily innocent play, and so ambled off into the Covent Garden night well satisfied with the improbability of it all.