RIP Splat the Cat

So goodbye then Splat, after all these years.

My relationship with you has always been ambivalent. On the one hand I shall miss you being there, but on the other hand, that's all you ever did. You were just there. Never, in your sixteen years, did you show me a moment's affection, or cat-like pretence of such, even when desperate for food. You'd cry and moan and look insistent, but never do feline wiles like rubbing up against a leg or purring. I'd have fallen for it - I'd have known it was cupboard love but that would have done me, even a simulation of empathy would have been fine, but no, you rejected all tender approaches from me since the day I bought you in a pet shop. You were the one bossing the other kittens and you were beautiful and I thought you showed character. Turned out you were either plain bonkers or seriously abused.

What did you think I was going to do to you when I picked you up for a cuddle? Eh? I know, once, when carrying a tray of glasses downstairs, I did kick you out of the way to stop myself from tripping and dying, and I did call you some names, but that was in 1998. Did you hold it against me ever since? Was it because I'm tall? A man? You weren't much better with Judy and the boys but at least they tell stories of purring and sitting in laps. Never. You never sat in my lap and purred. In sixteen years. That's rejection.

But there's a picture of you being held by Jasper when he was about eight, and you've been part of the boys growing up, and you were more than an aspidistra or a painting on the wall; for all your self-containment - you were alive and you were Splattycat, and now you are no more. And we'll miss you.

My one-man show

"Love Your Chocolates" reaches the end of its current tour this weekend in a series of three shows in village halls in Norfolk. Here's the schedule:

Tonight, Friday 21st September
Welborne Village Hall
Church Road
Welborne, Dereham
Norfolk NR20 3LH

Saturday 22nd
Magdalen Village Hall
Park Crescent
Magdalen
Norfolk PE34 3BU

Sunday 23rd
St. Botolph's Church
Gayton Road
Grimston, King's Lynn
Norfolk PE32 1BG

If you're up Norfolk way, it would be lovely to see you!

TV Commercials

I recently came across this commercial for Wall's Feast that I was in.
We filmed it in the Masai Mara in Kenya in 1987.

I never recorded it and haven't seen it for 25 years. The extraordinary thing about it was that it looks as though it was filmed in a studio, but everything you see is for real.
We flew from Nairobi in an old Dakota,

and set up an enormous camp in the middle of the Masai Mara.

The giraffes in the background were being herded by four landrovers.

The setting sun with the acacia tree for the end shot was timed to perfection so that we embraced at exactly the right moment. The shot of the girl (Emma Harbour) with the giraffes behind was us standing on top of a landrover with a camera assistant waving a small branch in the top left of shot, while the reverse on me was shot at a safari lodge.

An entire camera crew were housed in a tented encampment provided by Abercrombie and Kent, with an enormous support team of caterers, drivers and armed guards to defend us against elephants and lions at night. I had my own tent with verandah, personal valet and shower. It was just like the thirties.

My 'gun' was a lorry starting handle with a it of wood attached - 

The ice creams were kept in a cold box with dry ice so that some of the Feasts were rock solid, and some were half melted. When I bit into them I never knew which it was going to be, rock or bleucchhh.
We waited for four days for the skies to clear and for the incessant rain to stop so we could get the shots. Driving everywhere looking for giraffe and elephant, and getting badly stuck -

During this time we played liar dice, to a standard never since surpassed. I ended up as the champion and was rewarded by having iced water poured down my trousers.

Today it would be shot in a studio in a day. In the glory days of advertising, agencies would write copy that demanded we all go off to Africa for a fortnight and have a riot. I was also paid an absolute fortune, that only slightly compensated for the fact that my son Will, then aged 3, was in the Whittington Hospital in a totally frozen London with suspected Still's Disease (juvenile chronic arthritis). It turned out he didn't have it and was fine, but not before they'd pumped him full of steroids and seriously worried the pants off everybody, and it was not a time to go away.

I wrote a song and a radio play about it.

Mauvais quart d'heure

Bloody hell, that was scary. I just opened up Powerpoint on the Mac to go through my show for next Friday, and ALL the text was garbled. I mean nonsensical, complete gobbledigook. I opened up a previous version, same thing. WHAT???
This would mean no show. I was panicking. Then I looked at the text and realised it had done a Caesar shift one space to the right, so that 'Good Evening' became 'Hppe Fwfojoh'. Was it a virus? I opened up other files and exactly the same thing, so at least it wasn't just the version that I'd just done a week's editing on. The fact that the whole program was consistently weird was slightly heartening. So, like you do, I shut down Powerpoint and re-booted it. Massive and huge sigh of relief. All was well.
Well what on earth was all that about then?????
Relieved, Norfolk.

2012 Tour Dates

Here are the dates so far for my re-vamped show, "Love Your Chocolates" in 2012

Friday 3rd Feb The Exchange, Sturminster Newton, 7.30pm
Friday 10th Feb Haile Village Hall, Cumbria 7.30pm
Saturday 11th Feb Ireleth Temperance Hall, Cumbria 8.00pm
Sunday 12th Feb Lamplugh Village Hall, Cumbria 6.30pm
Saturday 24th March Sarah Thorne Theatre Club, Broadstairs Q&A 7.30pm
Monday 17th Sept Beccles Public Hall, Smallgate, Beccles 7.30pm

Happy New Year everyone - hope to see you there.

Ranting again

It's the little things.

In Outlook Express on Windows XP, I could press "Go to folder", press the initial letter of the folder I wanted, and get within one letter of where I wanted to go. In the early nineties, there was a lot of correspondence with System Operators, so I had a folder called Sysops. Then, as other S folders got added, the quicker way to get there was to give it a unique first letter, so the folder became Xsysops. So then for anything nerdy or receipts or computery things, I could go Go To Folder... X , Enter. Bosh.
So then I upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit, which comes with Windows Live Mail. I import my entire history of emails, going back to 1992. Wow, that's 20 years of email and I've still got it all!

So I start off, Go to Folder, hit X - and nothing! Ok SOME GUY has looked at this and made a conscious effort in the upgrade, to DISABLE this function. Why? Is it saving fucking band width, memory, disk space? No, it's a tiny little function that a child could program, and some dipshit MIT graduate has decided probably a billion people don't need that, it's redundant - they never used the program so they didn't see the need. This then got past a whole host of other MIT graduates, all earning huge amounts of money, in countless meetings, going over every line of code, and decided that it would be a positive, thought-out plan to TAKE AWAY SOMETHING THAT WAS USEFUL! Why would you do that?

I despair. 

Tasting the "Bentinck K50"

Still recovering from heavy sampling of the "Bentinck K50" at Brew Wharf, Vinopolis, to celebrate Kevin's birthday. An agricultural brew that reflects my Aussie birthplace. Very little subtlety and hits you like a rock. It's almost edible. I completely love it. Having some bottled especially, so pressies on their way for Christmas!