Tomorrow Is A Long Time. (12/3/14)

At what point do you give up and just write the whole day off?

You know those days when you can't get started? The days when you're desperately trying to come up with something creative, coherent, cohesive, constructive and any other words you can find beginning with the letter C in order to pad a piece out?

Yeah. One of them.

Started a rewrite of a short story that I first worked on ......oh, twenty six years ago. It's a story that I know I'll complete to my satisfaction and publish at some point soon (I've already completed it as a comic script and a short story on two separate occasions) but it's not going to be today. One paragraph of stumbling for words was enough to tell me that.

Tried to write a piece on Paul Weller for a website. None of it made any sense.

Revisited a character sheet for a half hour radio play that I'd been working on with the intention of turning it into a forty minute stage play. Just not quite there. Not at the moment.

Turned to music for comfort. Intended to write about The Bible's 'Eureka' album, the album that made me buy my first CD player and move away from vinyl because the extra tracks on CD were so good. It's an album that I've loved for quarter of a century and I meant to write a blog about both that and its predecessor 'Walking The Ghost Back Home' which contained the wonderful 'Graceland' and 'Mahalia'. I could talk about how we discovered the band on 'The Tube' one Friday night, how I only saw them live on the reformation tour years later (Duchess of York in Leeds, smart venue) but.

But.

I didn't enjoy the album. Probably due to the fact that my iPod was still on random after my Beatles filled four hours of driving on Monday. It just didn't hang together, I wasn't in love with it and didn't understand why. It was only once I'd reverted to the safety net of The Jam that I realised the mistake I'd made; the brilliant Going Underground was followed by the frankly woeful 'News Of The World' rather than the sublime 'Dreams Of Children'. I knew then, knew that I'd listened to Eureka in the wrong order. Didn't help.

Monday. I haven't told you about Monday yet have I?

At 10.30 I was sat at this table typing about what I was about to do (table and chair not ergonomically designed for writing, need to find a way to get comfortable). By 1.15 I was standing at the edge of Derwentwater in The Lake District, deep into Cumbria, so deep that I'd passed Tebay services which I always connect with being on the edge of Scotland (my Geography is appalling though so I may be hundreds of miles out on that)

At 2.30 I was sat in a theatre auditorium listening to Mark Lewisohn speak about the first volume of his proposed definitive Beatles biography.

'Tune In' is (as I know I've mentioned) 1,000 pages long and stops at the end of 1962. Once upon a time I'd have casually commented that this is before they became the actual BEATLES with all that entails, all the stardom and the genius, and the falling out, and the mania but the position that the book takes is that it will set out to prove that the four lads in the band didn't become special once they had their first number one or played the Royal Variety show or hit America. The argument is that all four were always, individually and collectively, special by their very nature. Everything that happened did so because of who they were.

I like to think that I'm fairly knowledgable about the Beatles (obsessive if we're being fair about this) but without even opening the book Mr Lewisohn's talk had presented information that I'd never come across, photos that I'd never seen (one wonderful colour picture from the madness of the Hamburg days and nights where the band are holding up tubes of Preludin (speed if we're honest) and Lennon is the single most wired man you've ever seen in your life.

The most notable moment though?

There's a very famous picture of John Lennon live on stage at the Woolton Village fete with his band the Quarrymen. He's sixteen, plating an acoustic guitar and in about ten minutes will meet Paul McCartney for the first time. What I had never realised but Mark Lewisohn's six years of research into this first volume had thrown up was that (by the account of the photographer himself), as the photograph was taken, Paul McCartney was standing next to him. In that photo we are seeing exactly what Macca saw on the day that the history of music changed forever.

And if you think that last sentence is an exaggeration of The Beatles' effect then you've not been paying attention.

I love details like that.

By 6pm I was back in the house, via an actual visit to Tebay this time. There's no Costa in Tebay (which is what I'd been looking for) but they do serve a nice selection of ales in the shop attached to the services and in that nice selection is a line of 'Ulverston' ales. Brewed in the birthplace of Stan Laurel they rejoice in names such as 'Laughing Gravy', 'Lonesome Pine' and 'Another Fine Mess'.

I wish I'd bought some.

For the moment though, you've now read the only productivity that I've managed all day. I'm going to read for a bit, watch some more Breaking Bad (season 4, Ep 8 in case you were wondering) and then think about doing something useful tomorrow instead, see if the muse is knocking round.