I blogged last month about how anxiety has been driving me to
stay in rather than go out when
I'm not at work. This week I'm on holiday, and aside from nipping to
the Post Office at the weekend, I haven't left the house. This hasn't
just been driven by anxieties, though; today the weather's miserable
enough that it's triggered a weather warning for rain, so I feel quite
justified in staying indoors. At some point today I'm expecting at
least one more book I recently ordered to be delivered, so I need to
be around for that, too.

Staying indoors and vegging out will do me good, I think. The amount
of driving I do each week has taken its toll, and I feel like I just
need to unwind, kick back a bit, and recharge my batteries. It would
appear that I've still got a way to go with catching up on sleep, too.
The alarm clock usually wakes me up at half past five in the morning,
but this week I've been making the most of things and having a lie-in,
waking up when my body feels like it. My body seems to be rather keen
on staying asleep; since Friday, my sleep tracker has recorded a
couple of nights where I slept for 11 hours straight. As a result
it's been awarding me sleep scores in the 80s and 90s rather than the
40s and 50s I was getting at the beginning of the month.

In the finest introvert fashion I will therefore be spending the rest
of the day listening to music and catching up on my reading. On wet,
grey and gloomy days like this I don't feel the slightest pang of guilt
when I sit in an armchair with a book for an hour or two. I have a
lot of books to choose from these days. Some people
might suggest I have rather too many books to choose from; one
of my colleagues recently discovered the Japanese word
Tsundoku
and the fact that he immediately shared his discovery with me should
tell you all you need to know about my book-buying habit. I need to
work through the piles—and yes, there are piles—of books
that I already have which have accumulated here in the living room
(and there are several equally large stacks in my bedroom, too) rather
than making any more purchases, but my philosphy remains simple: you
can never have too many books...

WHOSE REALITY IS IT ANYWAY?

I also blogged last month about the
curious tale of Jered Eames, a.k.a. Threatin, the wannabe rock star who
faked a following online and then expected his non-existent fanbase to
show up and see him when he organised a European tour. This week the BBC
News website ran a detailed
follow up story
on him. So did the
Rolling Stone,
and their article runs along almost identical lines. Little Jered has
clearly been out and about selling his carefully prepared version of
events to anyone he could get to listen, and what a revealing narrative
it turns out to be.

The overall impression I get of the man is that he's only tangentially
connected to reality. I may not be a psychologist but I've read about
the "dark triad" traits enough to recognise both narcissism and
machiavellianism when I see them. The BBC and Rolling Stone reporters
were both given the same treatment, designed to manipulate them (and,
by extension, the reader) into accepting Jered's version of events
as truth. The principal thing this reveals is how constructed that
version is. It becomes blindingly obvious when the reports start to
introduce perspectives from some of the other people involved, most
notably from Jered's brother Scott, who told the BBC how they'd
fallen out when Jered started using Facebook to claim credit for
Scott's guitar work when they were in a band together. The brothers
haven't spoken to each other in six years, despite (or, perhaps,
because of) the fact that they were "like Moberly’s version of Oasis,"
gushes the Rolling Stone. In the BBC's report, Scott is the voice of
reason, warning the reporter not to trust Jered. For the Rolling Stone,
Scott is cast (by Jered) in the role of the abandoned brother who now
recognises his sibling's greatness, hoping for a reconciliation. I
suspect the differing portrayals reflect the differing amounts of
willingness to accept Mr Eames's narrative in each case. I find it
particularly odd that the BBC makes no mention of the purportedly
life-threatening illness that is, Jered claims in the Rolling Stone
interview, the thing that drives him to seek greatness.

Even though his tour imploded in chaos, it hasn't done anything to
shake Threatin's belief in himself. Indeed, the complete failure of
reality to live up to the man's expectations has all become part of
a purported long-term master plan for global domination. In typical
narcissist fashion, he's now claiming that his catastrophic tour
happened exactly as he intended it to. A moment's
examination is all that's needed to realise that such a claim
is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

I found Jered's story particularly interesting, because the one thing
that doesn't get mentioned in the press coverage is his music. If
your master plan revolves around getting your tracks in front of a
wider audience, surely you'd want to focus attention on what you're
playing? After all, surely the whole point of going on tour is to
get people to listen to your music, isn't it? Dig up one or two of
his tracks on YouTube, though, and you begin to realise exactly why
nobody wants to mention the music. Firstly, Eames doesn't want to
push his music because he wants to be famous for being Threatin, not
for his musicianship—that was clear right from the outset. But
secondly, nobody else is talking about the music because it's just
not very good. The Rolling Stone is either
regurgitating a press release or just plain tone deaf when they use
the word "anthemic" to describe one track, because the word they should
be using is "derivative". Threatin's music is weak, insipid stuff. It
sounds like something Bon Jovi would have discarded thirty years ago.
Focus on the music, and the whole media circus that was the European
tour loses any point whatsoever. Listen to the music, and the hype is
killed off immediately. Because—to put it as simply as I can:
his music just isn't worth your attention.

I almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost. But then I remembered that
there are thousands and thousands of musicians out there who are far
more talented than Mr Eames. Talented musicians who regularly play
gigs to real audiences, talented musicians who have never had their
moment in the limelight. They've never been interviewed by the BBC
or Rolling Stone. There are insanely talented musicians
out there who have to finance their creative endeavours by taking
day jobs, and they are often struggling to make ends meet. They're
the ones we should be paying attention to. And they're the ones who
deserve our support. Which is why my coverage of the Threatin scam
stops here.

It's Arthur C Clarke's birthday today; he would have been 101. I've
been revisiting his work a fair bit this year, spurred by the release
of a new print of 2001: A Space Odyssey that commemorates its fiftieth
anniversary. The new, "unrestored" print is truly beautiful, and I keep
going back to the 4K Blu-Ray
release to marvel at a film that remains one of cinema's crowning
achievements. I recently reread Clarke's novelization and after reading
Michael Benson's excellent new book on how the film (and the book)
came
into being, I gained a whole new perspective on things, namely
that Stanley could be an absolute nightmare to work with, but everyone
wanted to work with him because he was also a genius. It was Stanley
who delayed publication of the novel; in doing so, it would appear
that he cost Arthur a significant sum of money.

As is pointed out in this
retrospective,
written for the Guardian on the occasion of Clarke's centenary by Adam
Roberts, Sir Arthur wasn't perfect either. His writing could be stultifying
and wooden; in his later years he fell into the Hollywood trap of
following up his best work with a deluge of sequels that were seldom of
the same quality as the hits that spawned them. For sure, 2010:
Odyssey Two took the findings of NASA's Voyager probes and some
ideas about stellar evolution and worked them into an enjoyable if
rather hand-wavy plot about the monolith turning Jupiter into the Solar
System's second sun, but it's no 2001. Having said that, I enjoyed
the resulting
film
by Peter Hyams a lot, thanks primarily to Keir Dullea's eerie return
as the astronaut-superman David Bowman. When he delivers his "Something
is going to happen. Something wonderful" speech, I still get goosebumps.
The film wasn't as popular with the critics, although comparing it
with 2001 is never going to be anything except extremely unfair. 2010
was marketed at the time as being "easier to follow" than 2001, but
because it's nowhere near as obtuse or mystical as its predecessor,
it can't bear the level of meticulous examination that 2001 withstood,
nor does it have the same appeal that drove people to watch 2001 over
and over again. It couldn't hold a candle to Kubrick's technical
achievements, either. Hyams couldn't afford the teams of painters
that Kubrick used to blank out any offending stars or scaffolding
from his spaceship shots, and fortunately for his crew, Hyams
also lacked Kubrick's obsession with achieving the impossible. The
special effects, made with physical models in a time before CGI,
are sometimes decidedly wonky, revealing the velvet-draped mounts
that support the spaceships and the outlines of the mattes that
were used to drop them into the background starfields. There were
also differences in scale; Kubrick's model of the spaceship Discovery
was fifty-six feet long—Hyams had to make do
with one that was
less than half the size.
By showing the gas giant's atmosphere in motion, the FX crew got the
scale of Jupiter's atmosphere totally wrong; I remember snorting in
derision at that point when I saw the film in the cinema.

2010 was the last of Clarke's novels to reach the silver screen,
although a very good adaptation of
Childhood's End
aired on the SyFy television channel in 2015 and is now available on
Blu-Ray. Morgan Freeman has been trying to get a film of Rendezvous
with Rama made for decades, now. As far as I'm aware, films of
2001's last two sequels (which are set in 2061 and 3001) haven't
even made it to the development stage. The less said about
2061: Odyssey Three the better; it's really not very
good. I'll get to 3001 in a moment.

Before that, I'm going to return to that point about mysticism, as
it's an important one. Clarke's scientific and technical grounding was
something he was very keen to point out (although, as Adam Roberts says
in his Guardian article that I linked to above, Clarke's claim to be
"the father of the modern geostationary communications satellite" was
nowhere near as strong as he'd like you to believe), but his stories
often have a streak of the supernatural a mile wide. His interest in
the metaphysical can be traced to the influence of Olaf Stapledon, a
writer whose novels Last and First Men and Star Maker
Clarke frequently acknowledged in interviews. I've already mentioned
Childhood's End, a novel about the transfiguration of the human
race that is facilitated by a race of beings who look exactly like
devils. It's a perfect example of Clarke blending the metaphysical
seamlessly with hard science. Characters with psychic powers crop up
in his work more than once—apart from David Bowman in 2001 or the
children in Childhood's End, they're central to the plot in
Against The Fall Of Night.

Clarke was always able to come up with some startlingly high concepts
for his stories and two that really stand out in this regard were
The Star and The Nine Billion Names of God. Either one
of those tales would be enough to ensure his legacy as one of SF's
legendary storytellers. Tellingly, they're both short stories. For me,
Clarke excelled himself in this form. It was Clarke's 1951 short story
The Sentinel that formed the kernel of 2001: A Space Odyssey,
don't forget. Clarke was a far better writer when he had to make every
word count. His frequent failure to portray characters that are
believable is forgivable when he only had a few thousand words to work
with; it's less forgivable when he had the length of an entire novel
to fill out. My all-time favourite tale of Clarke's is another of his
short stories. It's A Meeting With Medusa, which won a Nebula
award in 1971. The nature of the central character also makes Clarke's
limited ability (or reticence) to develop character work for him, rather
than against him. It's the gripping story of a cyborg who descends into
the upper levels of Jupiter's atmosphere and encounters something
wonderfully strange. The Medusa Chronicles, an "official"
sequel from Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter, was published in
2016 and it's an enjoyable read. It captures Clarke's mystical side
well and, like Clarke, Al and Stephen base the plot on hard science
concepts as much as they can.

Clarke's focus switched from short stories to novels from the 1970s
onwards, and in my opinion, that was a mistake. Few of them live up to
the spirit of gleeful invention that Clarke showed so clearly in the 50s
and 60s. And yet, of all Clarke's work after Rendezvous With Rama
(which was published in 1973), I'm surprised to say that it's 3001:
The Final Odyssey that has stayed with me. Published when Clarke was
80, it's perhaps not a surprise that its central themes are mortality
and turning back the clock—after all, the central character is
the astronaut Frank Poole, who was murdered by HAL in 2001. Clarke's
plots often involved events in the distant past (such as Time's
Arrow, written in 1950 and Encounter in the Dawn, written
in 1953) but as he got older, the theme of turning back the clock was
gradually displaced by musings on how to achieve resurrection. This is
addressed most overtly in
The
Light of Other Days, which he wrote with Stephen Baxter and which
was published in 2000. Arthur clearly had hopes that technology will
one day become advanced enough to bring him back from the dead. Clarke's
third law
states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic, after all. If that ever happens, I wonder what sort of
world will await him?

We're not far from the winter solstice, and here in the UK we're already
getting less than eight hours of daylight each day. However, the length
of each day doesn't change by equal increments at dawn and dusk until
the solstice happens, nor does this immediately go into reverse the
next day. It's much more complicated than that. The Sun currently sets
at four in the afternoon, which is the earliest that this happens during
the year. But sunrise this morning happened at 08:04, and it'll continue
to happen later and later until the first week of January. This is
because the Earth's orbit around the Sun speeds up or slows down during
the year (because its orbit isn't circular, but an ellipse) and because
the Earth's axis isn't perpendicular to its orbit, but tilted. You can
calculate the effect of these two things with the
equation of time,
something that I've mentionedbefore on these pages. This also
throws off the time at which the Sun is highest in the sky; it's not
always at midday. Today the Sun will reach its highest point at 12:02,
and two minutes out is pretty good; the time can sometimes be out by as
much as thirty minutes—the equation of time was originally used to
correct the time on people's sundials! At midday the Sun will be only
fifteen degrees above the horizon. Right now it's shining down the
entire length of the living room, and it was noticing this that
prompted me to write about it today.

Because the plots of each effect (orbital eccentricity and axial tilt)
have different wavelengths, the results aren't the same from year to
year. Gravitational forces exerted by our Moon and the other planets
also have an influence on the Earth's orbit each year. At present, the
Earth's orbital eccentricity is gradually getting smaller, and so is
our axial tilt. These
secular effects
are currently flattening out the curves of the equation.

It's no wonder people don't rely on sundials any more, really.

REST YE MERRY

I went to a party on Friday night, and I consumed more alcohol there
than I normally do in a month. Since I've got my fitness tracker
I've seen very clearly how badly I sleep when I've had a drink or
two, and the terrible night's sleep I got on Friday night confirmed
this. I think I've reached the point where I prefer sleeping through
the night and waking up in the morning feeling rested over booze
of any description.

I still feel like I'm catching up on sleep from last month's hectic
whirl of gigs and social events. This week will be much quieter,
and it's my last week at work before the Christmas break. This
year I'm planning on staying at home and, weather permitting,
getting a decent amount of exercise by going on some long walks.
I live in one of the most beautiful parts of the UK. I should
really get out there and enjoy it.

I had a busy day yesterday helping to run through and analyse an event
at work that we'll be running for a client next February. It was a
full-on day with no downtime and lots of creative thinking required.
It was great fun, but on the way home I could really feel the past
week beginning to catch up with me. It was a slog driving back, too.
The weather was horrible, there was lots of traffic, and the M4 had
snarled up around the Bath junction thanks to a couple of accidents,
so I came off at Junction 17 and drove home through the tiny hamlet
of Tiddleywink, whose name always makes me smile. I arrived home much
later than I normally do and by eight o'clock I was falling asleep.
So I went to bed early and slept for ten hours, which is most
unusual for me on a work night. I feel much better today. These days
I'm feeling better than I have for a couple of years.

My run of regular blog updates took a back seat over the past week as I
had one of the most hectic and enjoyable few days I've had for months,
if not years. It's been huge fun. Last
month I wrote about how changing my diet is beginning to have some
positive effects, including an elevation of my mood and a reduction in
the anxiety that normally kicks off when I think about going out and
enjoying myself. In the past week I've really pushed myself to get out
of my comfort zone and go out, and it has turned out to be an
overwhelmingly positive experience.

To start with, on Tuesday night I found myself at St. George's in
Bristol where I saw Beverly Craven, Julia Fordham and Judie Tzuke
on their
Woman To Woman tour. It
was an absolute delight; I've been going to Jude's shows since I was
in my early twenties and I love her work but I'd never seen Beverley
or Julia in concert before. It turned out I knew a lot
of their songs, though! All three women shared the stage, performing
backing vocals for each other's songs—after Jude sang one of her
songs (I think it was "For you") Julia said she'd learnt every
single vocal part of the song in her room when she was a teenager.
"Never thought that it'd come in as useful as this," she told us...
All three women are incredible artists and gifted songwriters; I
got misty-eyed on more than one occasion. Hearing "Stay with me 'til
dawn" always reminds me of a dear friend who is no longer with us,
and from the stories Jude told it was clear that other people had
fond memories associated with that song, too...

I was back in Bristol the following night to catch up with my friends
from France, those masters of prog rock
Lazuli. It was really
good to see them all again. After one or two niggles with some dodgy
cables during the first couple of numbers, they were off and running
and despite being crammed onto a stage that was much too small to let
them be the energetic performers that they usually are, they romped
through a two-hours-plus set that featured some of my favourite tracks
and showcased plenty of stuff from the new album including j'attends
un printemps and Les 4 mortes saisons. And as you can
see, they were enjoying themselves as much as the audience were.

The band always do Bristol proud on their tours and Wednesday night
was no exception. Dom was as apologetic as ever about his English;
"I was too busy dreaming music at school," he told us. When he said
that his dearest wish was that there would never be a breakfast,
keyboard player and French Horn maestro Romain started laughing.
"Brexit! You mean no Brexit!" The Exchange's proprietor clearly
loves the band too, and the crowd made it clear that they'd like
him to bring them back for another gig next year. I got to say hello
and chat briefly with most of the guys before and after the show, and
the more I get to know them all, the more I realise what lovely people
they are. You should definitely check them out; their new album
is superb.

I was out again on Thursday night, but this time I only had to walk down
the road to the pub and catch up with my buddy Paul. We haven't had much
chance to chew the fat in recent months, so much news was swapped. There
was enthusiastic talk of guitars, and bands, and life in general. Now
that the Tavern has changed hands, it seems to be returning to its
position at the centre of social life in the village, which is just
where it should be. They had Charles Wells's Bombardier on draught, so
Paul and I conducted extensive quality checks during the course of the
night and I'm happy to report the beer passed with flying colours,
although we had another pint or three just to make sure.

NOT ENOUGH SLEEP UNTIL HAMMERSMITH

As a result of all this gadding about I averaged less than four hours'
sleep on each work night last week. By Friday evening I was definitely
feeling it, too. According to my sleep tracker I managed to catch up
with a few extra hours on Friday night, but I was back in the car on
Saturday afternoon, heading off to London and the Hammmersmith Odeon.
(Yes, I know it's currently known as the Eventim Apollo. Don't care.
It was The Hammersmith Odeon when I started going to gigs there in the
70s; it was The Hammersmith Odeon when I used to hang out backstage
with Motörhead there in the 80s; so shall it ever be.)

If you're one of my regular readers you may remember that what seems
a lifetime ago but was only back in
June, I made myself extremely ill mixing antihistamines and
antidepressants. I was bordering on suicidal when I should have
been out and about attending one of Robin Ince's Space
Shambles events at the Royal Albert Hall. We've been friends
for a few years now, so Robin knew about what had happened to me, and
he'd offered me a free ticket on any show on his next tour to make up
for missing out. Robin is a lovely—and extremely generous—person.
Me being me, I didn't like to bother him; instead, I just bought a
ticket for the Bristol show as I normally do. When I caught up with
him last month at the Tobacco Factory, the first thing he did when
he saw me was to ask how I was feeling. Have I mentioned what a lovely
bloke Robin is before? Well, he is. He then asked me if I'd got a
ticket for this year's Christmas Compendium show (which has been
the absolute high point of my calendar for the
lastthreeyears running) and I told him sadly
that I hadn't. At which point he immediately offered to arrange a ticket
for me. He was as good as his word, too. He really is a lovely chap.

Things on Saturday didn't get off to the best start; at Reading I got
caught in a huge traffic jam on the M4, which had been reduced to a
single lane after a pile-up. That delayed me by over an hour, so by
the time I arrived at Hammersmith with a couple of bags of food for the
Trussell Trust's
collection van, it had left and the show was already under way. For a
moment I thought I was going to be making my way to my seat with a
couple of carrier bags but fortunately the Trust's people were still
around, so I was still able to hand them over. After giving my name
at the front desk, I was handed my ticket together with a blue
wristband. I didn't remember ever needing one of these before at
Hammersmith, even during my Motörhead days, so I asked what
it was for. "Oh, that's for the afterparty," I was told.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Did I mention what a nice
person Robin is? He's touring to
promote his
new book
at the moment, by the way. You should totally go and see him and buy the
book, too. It's great; I bought a physical copy and I've got it on my
Kindle as well.

I made my way to my seat as unobtrusively as I could. I'd missed Brian's
D-Ream reunion,
a talk on parasites by Steve Backshall, and Professor Sophie Scott
recreating the part of her Royal Institution Christmas Lectures from
last year where she rendered Robin incapable of speech using
transcranial magnetic stimulation (can't find a video online,
but you can
read this transcript
of the RI lecture). I made my way to my seat in the stalls as Robin
introduced Nish Kumar, who talked about Jesus, embarrassing relatives,
and Brexit. He was followed by Mark Miodownik, who gave a talk about
the relative sizes of organisms that was illustrated by a video of a
cat scampering away after a ten-storey fall from a balcony on a block
of flats. It was so unexpected and graphic that there was a loud
collective gasp from the audience and a woman a few seats along in
my row expressed her surprise with considerably more vehemence.
After the remains of Mark's experimental balloon subjects had been
cleared from the stage, Grace Petrie came on to perform her anthemic
song Black Tie, the sixth track on her excellent
new album (which I am listening
to right now as I type this, as it happens). Grace was accompanied by
Steve Pretty and the band (who all spent the entire evening
sitting at stage right while things went splat, bang or WHOOOMPH
just a few feet away, which impressed me greatly). Professor Brian Cox
then gave a talk about a video clip of a computer rendering of a black
hole that was produced by the same team who did the special effects for
Christoper Nolan's film
Interstellar. Black holes are deeply
weird things and their gravity bends light in unexpected ways that
mean you can see things that are directly behind it. Starlight gets
bent into circles. It looked lovely, but it made your eyes go funny.
Brian then introduced the gang from the
Festival of the Spoken Nerd,
a.k.a Matt Parker, Steve Mould, and Helen Arney who
sang about the
Banana Equivalent Dose as a measure of radiation exposure.
I had no idea that a week in Cornwall gave you as much of a dose
as it does! Matt and Steve donned impressive banana costumes for the
finale of the song and judging by Helen's reaction they hadn't told her
that they were going to do so! I was hugely entertained by the song
and have already added the B.E.D to the
Standard Routemaster Units system of
measurements that I have developed over the last decade and a bit...
The curtain came down and Samuel West kept us entertained
while gear was shifted and plugged in. "Sam's parents make the
best
canal journeys show EVER," Robin told us, and he's not wrong. The curtain
rose to reveal one of my favourite improvising musicians, Beardyman,
who got Brian to say "Universe" and then made a complete EDM track out of
it with every other component of the music beatboxed on the spot. He
really is jaw-droppingly good and I would love to be talked
through how on Earth he put it all together. He made it look effortless.
He was improvising loops while he edited Brian's voice!

After the interval the second half started with science demonstrator
Greg Foot attempting to do twelve demonstrations in twelve
minutes. He brought the Spoken Nerd gang back on to help, and Robin
and Brian were conscripted too. Robin helpfully pointed out at one
stage that the flashing light at stage front meant that things were
running over, but given that things were glowing in the dark, gently
fluorescing, fizzing energetically, squirting foam all over the place
or just loudly going bang, nobody seemed to mind that much.
Steve Pretty and the band then attempted to explain the entire history
of music accompanied by a robot drummer, and they made a good job of
doing so. Robin then introduced Compendium favourite Andrea Sella
with the immortal words, "He's a proper chemist—which
means he's usually missing one or both eyebrows." The good Doctor did
not disappoint, either. Large balloons burst into flames with a
selection of interesting colours. He was followed by Kevin Fong,
who told the story of Apollo 8 and what happens to Lunar conspiracy
theorists when they challenge Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to
swear on the bible that he really did go to the Moon...
The awesome Rachel Parris came on to tell a very funny story
about writing a song for X Factor, was entertainingly rude about
Simon Cowell (and why not) and then performed said song, which
contained absolutely every cliché that Mr Cowell has forced
his roster of artists to perpetrate over the last decade or two. I
was in fits of giggles. The curtain comes down again so the crew can
set up for this year's mystery band, and Robin and Brian are joined
on stage by Sean Keaveny from BBC 6music, special effects
wizard Andrew Whitehurst, and Professor Fay Dowker
who talk about the computer graphics clip we saw earlier. Andrew
explained that they used general relativity to generate the imagery
and what they initially thought were glitches in the rendering turned
out to be a representation of gravitational lensing not previously
known; the team ended up co-authoring a
scientific paper
with Kip Thorne about the results! Producer Trent came on
stage to give Robin the thumbs up and the curtains rose to reveal...

Orbital!

I just sat there grinning madly while they played a quick set of hits
that included Halcyon On and On and finished off
with—of course—their version of the Doctor Who
theme tune. They sounded amazing and the light show was spectacular.

And then I found myself in the upstairs bar having a pint in the company
of some very nice people and it turns out that they all think Robin is
lovely too. I would have quite happily stayed until the early hours
but the Hammersmith staff had to get home, so we were all politely asked
to call it a night; I thanked Robin as profusely as I could (and shook
hands with anyone who didn't get out of the way fast enough including
producer Trent Burton, Steve Pretty and Professor Brian Cox, who are
all lovely too) and headed off to the tube station. I left Osterley
at 1:30 am and got home at 4, but it was six in the morning before I
got any sleep. I was buzzing; always the sign of a
good night. Sunday was, quite understandably, a bit of a write-off.
I'm still catching up on sleep, and it'll be Wednesday in a few hours.

But it was worth it.

It was so worth it. What an amazing evening. I'm going to
remember that one for years.