Archives: Friends

The day doesn’t start quite as early as I’d hoped to get up, but the alarm wakes me at 9am and I clamber out of bed and zombie my way to the kettle to brew myself a coffee in my swanky new cafetierre and drum up a cup of tea to rouse K with.

Once we’ve fallen out of bed and into some cleaning clobber we set about the flat. Seeing as we’ve only been in the flat for the odd evening and hardly any other time for the last week or more, things have been piling up, dropped off or unceremoniously dumped in the lounge, hallway, study and even the bathroom for want of a place to put bags down when we’ve come through the door and hit the sofa in “veg” mode. There is a lot to do.

We start by emptying all the Chrimbo packages and bags with gifts and attempting to find homes for everything, playing the DVD commentary on Pick of Destiny while we work. Halfway through the lounge, K reminds me that she wants to cook for the party tonight and requests I make a start on the kitchen so she can set-to on the cooking once she’s cleaned the bathroom.

I knuckle down the the washing up, re-organising and general scrubbing of the kitchen until it’s at least in a fit and clear enough state for K to rustle up her famous sausage rolls and more. Once I’m done I change out of my homewear into something a little more presentable and venture out into the big wide world to grab some last-minute things.

I start over at Mum and Dad’s, picking up a ‘script Dad had collected from teh chemist up the road from them for me. I stop and grab a bite of lunch (I’d forgotten to eat at home), then get way-layed by the sprawling mass of old photographs strewn across the dining room table. The ‘rents are getting their loft insulated (or at least inspected for insulation) and so have had to clear everything out of it.

Aside from the 15 boxes of stuff my bro’s squirreled away (ironically enough) up there, plus 2 or three boxes of my stuff and the same of their keepsakes, they’ve found a veritable treasure-trove of ancient photographs that show, among other things, that I was honestly and truly very cute once-upon-a-time. Knowing they don’t read this, I feel it safe to say I also found a pic of my Aunt’s wedding in which her husband actually had hair. Even Mum didn’t remember him having that much on top when they got married. Mind you, it was only 24 hours after my Nana’s funeral, so I don’t suppose Mum was paying a great deal of attention – it’s amazing the little tid-bits of info you find out going through old stuff.

Tearing myself away from Pa and his table of goodies, I left home with a hammer and some dishes to put dips in (we’re a touch lacking on the catering-supply front) and a bottle of wine for the festivities and made my way back towards home, aiming to stop at a local shop to pick up the bis and pieces.

The spanner is thrown by a text from K saying she needs all sorts of other things she hadn’t thought of when we went shopping twice in the last two days, namely the ingredients for Nigella’s Girdlebuster Pie – a desert so rich in sugary goodness that it’s sure to evaporate from any freezer in the country within minutes of the “ding” of completion on the kitchen timing clock. That said, it’s too cold for my overly-sensitive teeth to bear, so I have no idea if it’s actually tastes nice.

Once I’d collected the bits and pieces from the scrum that was Asda on New Year’s Eve as everyone tried to cram their last minute bits and bobs through the aisles, I headed back home.

Dazz had dropped in to say hey before heading back up North again for his New Year’s party up there and, bless him, ended up right in the middle of a veritable cleaning frenzy as we cleared, cleaned and moved things all over the flat to make it hospitable for the half-dozen or so guests we were expecting.

Once Dazz had gone and K had managed to calm herself down a bit in the bath (cooking brings on the fretful side of K, much like in her mother), I shot out to Maccy D’s for a nutritious evening meal to keep us going – with all the cleaning and cooking and cleaning we’d done, I wasn’t about to start cooking and messing it up even more.

Once we’d scarfed our hard-fought for junk food, K then turned my “no more cleaning” plan on it’s head by pouring half a jug of warm toffee over the pie and, in turn, the chopping board underneath it, then the kitchen surface, then the blender, then down the draws and finally onto the floor. It was a work of comic genius that seemed….well… somewhat less comic at the time.

Once the toffee was cleared and I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to chop up the veg stuff for the dips, I hurriedly set to it as our first guests arrived and the Wii was set up with extra controllers. Mid-way through our first game on Mariokart we were joined by the rest of the party and it all went swimmingly from there.

Most of the night was spent challenging each other and subsequently either screaming with frustration or laughter at Sonic and Mario at the Olympics, an insanely tiring game that essentially involves almost as much physical activity as competing in the Games themselves.

Once we’d all entirely exhausted ourselves, we settled on a more sedate game of Articulate, one of our Christmas presents and spent a good deal of time laughing our socks off at our ineptitude.

Without realising it, Midnight crept up on us and we flicked over to the last 15 minutes of pre-midnight musical fun with all the famous faces and those people you recognise and know you should know but just can’t place their names.

Midnight (and our leap-second for the year) came and went amid much hugs, smiles, good-wishes and clinking of glasses and the guests slowly ebbed away until K and I were left with the last vestiges of the clearing up before calling it a night just before 2am. We’re clearly not as hard-core as we used to be, but I’ll tell you something, I couldn’t have gone on any longer.

I blame the Wii. And Sonic.

Although we sleep in this morning, it’s still a wake-up dictated my alarm-clock, which is getting slightly tiresome for a supposed holiday period.

The alarm gets us (well, me) up at 10am and I make K a cup of tea and take my Fosemax tabs – horrible things I may have written about before, which are supposed to deliver calcium-enriching…things… to the body to help prevent loss of bone density and Osteoperosis (and I’ll thank the medics reading not to point out that they’re essentially the same thing) but that require the tablets to be take on an empty stomach with a full glass of water and not to be followed by any other food or drink bar water for the next hour or more. They’re pretty nasty things and my stomach isn’t a huge fan of having a load of water dumped in it unaccompanied first thing in the morning, so I always end up feeling a little squiffy until I can eat something. Mind you, it’s better than not being able to run or do fun stuff for fear of snapping bones all over the shop.

We’re up and out of the house just after 11 to get to my appointment in Newport for 11.20, where I have a hasty blood test to keep an eye on my CMV levels to prevent any recurrance, then we head off into town to hit the sales.

I hate sales shopping with a passion. When I shop I like to look around, take my time and not feel rushed, not to grab whatever I can as I’m bustled passed the racks of goods by the ebbing tide of the sales-masses. Still, K wants to hit them up to spend our Christmas vouchers, so I tag along.

We start by finding parking, which is a mini-epic of it’s own, but eventually end up getting somewhere near M&S, a minor miracle. We decide to start at the furthest place and work back towards the car, so we hit the O2 store to return my busted Blackberry, but it’s rammed and quite clear that customer service is going to be a while, so I give up on it straight away – I’ve been using my old phone for over a month now, so a couple more weeks to fix the new/old one isn’t a big headache.

We make our way round to the Apple store, my mini-Mecca, but without time or the cash to stop and fully appreciate their wares (re: to buy their wares), we hit them up for an iTunes voucher, which they don’t sell in the range we want.

0 for 0 from 2 shops, we hit the soon-to-be-defunct Zavvi to see if we can gather ourselves some bargains in the closing-down sales. It’s like a zoo where they’ve let the monkeys feed the elephants in there and we fight our way around the DVD racks hunting out interesting pieces and debating how much we can afford to splurge.

We come away with a stack of DVDs and a couple of CDs and break out of the madness before it consumes us. I shoot across the Place to Waterstones to see if they’ve got a book I’m after which they do, and reduced by half as well, but when I get to the counter, they tell me it’s not reduced at all so, with the flashing totaliser of the Zavvi spend in my brain and the knowledge of an impending Borders trip, I pass it up and move on.

As K heads for M&S for underwear shopping and voucher-spending, I make a dash to the bank to pay in a cheque, then catch up with her in the Minotaur’s maze that is the Lingerie section of the ‘Sparks. Slightly bored/self-conscious of being surround by women sizing up and purchasing their unmentionables, I opt to head to homewares to see what we can pick up with our Christmas vouchers.

By the time K’s finished up I’ve noted a few options and we settle on a 3-tiered hob-steamer and a blender. Once we’ve paid and got out to the car, it strikes us how upsettingly grown-up we are buying things that are actualy useful with gift vouchers and being genuinely happy and excited about what we’ve got. We resolve to correct it by buying something frivolous at Borders.

We hit up the Big B and grab some cards for impending birthdays and babies, then K hits the sales racks while I go off hunting for the book I missed out on in Waterstones. I come up with nothing, but very nearly bag a whole load more DVDs before thinking better of it and heading back up to the till where I find K with an epic bag full of stuff she’s just grabbed, so I jump in the queue to get my solitary DVD, impressed at my restraint, and manage to pick up the right-sized iTunes voucher at the till point as well.

We shoot over to Deanshanger to collect the couple of bits we left there last week, including K’s complete Calvin and Hobbes set Santa brought her, and Mama D, like the classic Ma that she is, provides us with nourishment in the form of bacon sarnies after which, like the ungrateful offspring we are, we jump straight back in the car and head off again (we did say thank you, though).

We make K’s day by stopping in at TK Max on the way home and she picks me up a cafetierre – a present she had intended to get me for Christmas but then a case of crossed-wires with other family members meant I ended up not getting one. We also grab b’day presents for friends and then head to Tesco over the road to stock up on all the New Year’s Eve party stuff we’ll need for our Wii Party – crisps, dips and softies for those who aren’t bringing a bottle.

We head home, unpack all the bags, then hurriedly change into our going-out gear and head down the road to a friend’s 30th. Being pregnant and newly-installed in their freshly extended house, it’s an open-house affair and we arrive in time to see her family off from their day in the den, but have enough time to catch up with them first, which is cool.

We can’t stay long as we’re then off to a big Chrimbo meal with our friends organised, bizarrely, by the only one of us who no longer lives in MK. It’s great to see the whole gang again though, minus the odd couple of peeps, and we have a good giggle over some tasty Mexican food, even if they don’t know how to make a Caesar salad.

Our friend plus baby is there and K goes into broody mode, taking the baby away so that Mummy can eat her dinner, but loving every minute of it. As everyone is taking the mick and pulling my leg about the impedning pressure for sproglets, I’m forced to admit that I’m actually on the same page as K right now and am loving the number of baby cuddles we’re getting.

I take my turn and we head off to investigate the flashing lights on the Christmas tree (we don’t like standing still), then find an interesting plant that has leaves that are rough and not like normal flower or plant leaves at all, which keeps us interested for a good few minutes while Daddy finishes up his dinner and gets the car seat ready.

With baby out of the picture, we’re forced to interact with our peers once more and continue to have a good giggle. The meal done, almost everyone else is headed across the way to the pub for a drink, but with the knowledge of an early start tomorrow and a long day’s driving, we call it a night and head home.

We get back in and empty out some more of the bags while we grab a cuppa and watch a bit of telly before quitting for the night and hitting the hay, where I desperately try to get into my slow-starting book which I’m praying will improve. After a couple of chapters with no joy, I call it quits for the night and put my head down.

I wake up later than I have for a while at around 10am and realise I need to take my tac, so head downstairs, where I grab a bite and my tabs before running a cup of tea up to the still-snoozing K.

I shower and dress and start packing up as K comes to life, then we head down and wave off Mum and Dad who are heading off as fast as they can, since they’re back to a party this evening.

Before we head off, I slip my friend’s soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated short film, Gone Fishing into the family Blu-Ray player and head upstairs to watch it projected on the big screen in the cinema room. Although I got a real kick out of it on the small screen the 3 other times I’ve seen it, watching the 35mm print-made DVD with full digital sound ramps it up to another level.

I’ve honestly never seen a short film so accomplished in its technical efficiency, story-telling or sheer emotional impact. If you’re at all interested in film, I urge you to go here and pick yourself up a copy. You’ll probably know how much an Oscar campaign can cost to run, even for a short, and every penny made from these DVD sales goes towards the Oscar run which concludes in February at the ceremony itself. Please, please support this amazing, home-grown filmmaker with a true passion, talent and cutting edge in his field. He’s been a great support to me over the last 18 months and I’d love to repay him by giving him a bigger and better war-chest for the final push of his campaign.

The trailer, if you want to know a bit more about the flick, is here, for those of you who are interested. And for those of you who don’t understand a trailer for a short film, let me assure you this is nothing like the whole story – you really have to see the whole thing.

Once we’ve peeped Fishing out, we grab our bags, load the car and head off, making a quick detour through Ipswich to visit my Nana’s grave. I barely knew my Nana, my Mum’s mum, as she died when I was 3, but from the stories I’ve heard tell she was a remarkable woman. In fact, when I was a baby and in obvious (but then-inexplicable) pain, she was the only person who could quieten me down. I like to think that had she stayed around she’d have been proud of me and what I’ve done – and started to do – with my life and I hope that she smiles down on me from her lofty perch.

Once we’d say a hello and Happy Christmas to Nana, we jump back in the car and head back to MK and home to see it in daylight for the first time in nearly a week.

We head to Tesco to pick up a few essentials, then hit the flat and unload the car. We were planning on heading out to catch Australia tonight, but based on the fact that we’re both shattered and the film runs close to 3 hours, we change our call and opt for a night in instead. We throw on Jersey Girl and kick back on the sofa. As soon as the flick’s done, we’re straight off to bed and we both pass out pretty quickly.

We’re up unconscionably early for the morning after the night before at around 9am to grab a bacon sarnie and hot cup of much needed caffeine-delivery before jumping into the cars for a 3-hour trip into London to Twickenham, where my Godfather has a box.

Once there, we are treated to more wine (from a regular bottle, this time – if a 2001 can be called “regular”) and another fine meal before adding as many layers as we were able to carry with us to perch outside in the stadium for Harlequins vs Leicester. As a Northampton Saints fan, I’m duty-bound not to support the Tigers, but since Quins were sporting an old school friend wearing their captains armband, it stopped me having any kind of conflicted of – dare I say it – neutral feelings about the game.

Entertainingly, for a game without huge excitement, my old school buddy gets himself sin-binned 10 minutes from half-time, during which time he sees his side ship 13 points to the visitors. The second half isn’t a whole lot more entertaining, until the last 10 minutes when Quins come back from 26-16 down to draw the game with a last minute try and conversion which is all but the last kick of the game. Stunning come back that had me properly out of my seat.

After a warming glass of brandy and some good steak pies, we all pile back into the cars and head back. Wtih my eyes arguing with my brain about staying awake, I’m glad I opted to stop the extra night in Ipswich so I don’t have to do any driving this evening. As soon as we’re out of London, my body sides with my eyes and sends me to sleep before waking just short of the Dartford crossing, from where I stay awake-but-monosyllabic for the rest of the ride back.

We get back and all grab a thirst-quencher (mostly non-alcoholic) and chill in the living room, introducing my ‘rents to the glory of Outnumbered, after which K hits the hay early and I challenge Dad to a game of his newly-acquired Really Nasty Golf, a board game that’s far more interesting and entertaining that it sounds, I promise, even if you don’t like golf. Mum excuses herself to bed as we play and slowly the house quietens as people head off for kip, before we head up to follow them at the end of the game, around 11pm.

Boxing Day starts slowly with an 8.30 alarm call upon which I find K still sound asleep despite claiming to be getting up at 8am to shower and wash her hair. I nudge her awake and we realise her alarm failed to go off, largely due to a failure of being set.

Devoid of any major urgency for the day, she ambles out of bed and into the shower while I sit in bed and read awhile until she’s done, when I get myself up, washed and dressed and we head down stairs. I grab coffee, K tea, and Mama D cooks us up some French toast and bacon for breakfast to sustain us on the drive to Ipswich to catch up with my folks.

We load the car up with bags of gifts from yesterday and head off, stopping in at the flat on the way past to drop some bits off and pick up the various bits we forgot, like my swimmers, and some extras we need having arranged to stay another night after tonight, rather than shoot back tomorrow night.

We eventually leave MK around 11.30 and arrive in Ipswich after an amazingly quick and unproblematic run between 12.30 and 1. Once there, I unload the car and say my hellos to the fam and to my Godfather and his fam, plus the other guests at the Boxing Day lunch, a work colleague of G and his family. I’m slightly embarrassed by the familiar way his daughters greet me as I have no recollection of meeting them before, but they seem to know me instantly. I’m sure they noticed, but we still ended up all getting on really well.

After a chill and a chat, we hit the dinner table for a cold-meat and salad lunch which we crack through. The wine on the table in five separate decanters is from a single, epically-sized 5-litre bottle of red on the side. I forget to look at what it is, but hate to think where it came from and what it cost.

After lunch we head up to the cinema room to play with the newly-installed Wii Fit on the giant screen – it’s an amazing experience which could only be bettered were I to have any kind of balance whatsoever.

A little later in the afternoon, once the dark has drawn in, we all change into our swimmers and hit the pool. The outdoor pool. Swimming outside in England is strange enough at the best of times, but on Boxing Day in the middle of winter it’s straight-up surreal.

We mess around and throw balls to-and-fro across the pool into the inky, steamy blackness where we hope to find a person to collect and return the ball and then start playing “toss the ball at the girls in the jacuzzi” which is fun for a while until I managed to nearly knock Mum out with a badly-aimed and over-powerful throw. The games cease.

I swim properly for a little bit, but am not feeling my fittest, filled as I am with nearly a week’s worth of gourmet over-indulgence, so settle in for a quick jacuzzi before calling it a night and showering, dressing and grabbing a beer.

Post-swim we all sit around nattering, drinking a little more and enjoying the chlorinated glow of the night’s festivities. The others leave sometime after midnight and we all hastily call it a night to get some rest before tomorrow.

Who’d have thought that going to a theme park in the middle of winter could be fun? I suppose it helped that it wasn’t totally freezing, just a bit on the nippy side. I think the thing that really makes it, though, is the company you keep on days like today and I couldn’t have had better company for keeping the place cheery and fun than my Godson whose idea it was to go in the first place.

Gulliver’s Land in MK is the place I took him the very first time we went out together on our tod. He was probably not a lot older than 5 or 6 and Gulliver’s caters perfectly to that age, with a large selection of Alton Towers-lite rides that are fun and a little scary but largely all appropriate for the post-toddler age group.

Now pushing 11 and with me lolloping up through my 20s it occurred to me that it might not be as intensely amusing as the last time we went, but if anything we had more fun today than we had last time, despite the larger half of the park being closed off due either to the wintry weather conditions or the low levels of staffing.

We managed to amble around the park for a few hours of festive fun, queuing for almost nothing and having a whale of a time on just about everything (altough the Might Mouse roller coaster was neither mighty nor really a roller coaster so much as a large figure of 8 with a train on it). In fact, many of the rides were incredibly dull, but I haven’t laughed so much and so solidly for quite a while.

Dodgems with only two people is an interesting experience, as is riding the same mini-whirly-pirate ship four times in a row, although ride of the day has to go to the back-to-back teacup rides which left us both staggering around the park like Santa getting off his sleigh at the end of a globe-trotting 24 hours of non-stop sherry and pies. Mind you, if we’d had the pies they wouldn’t have been safe in our stomachs (images of the Red Dwarf “food escape!” slipping into my head…).

And, ironically for a theme park – which are, at the best of times, renowned for their escalated prices within the boundary walls – we actually found the city’s cheapest pick-n-mix, which delighted not only the two of us, but also K when we arrived to pick her up from work with her own little bag of goodies.

After a quick cuppa back home, we then assaulted the arcades in the snow dome and whittled away even more time and pocket-heavy change doing everything from shooting zombies to playing mock-basketball before running Li’l R home.

We made a quick dash to Tesco for a few last Chrimbo bits before heading across the road from ours to see a friend and her mum for a little festive cheer with mulled wine and assorted Christmas treats (pigs in blankets, anyone?) and to have cuddles with not-so-little Baby E.

Having wedged herself in for firsties on E this evening, I have taken the executive decision that K has forfeited her rights to first cuddles with Sebby G, my cousin’s newborn, when we see them tomorrow. Although I suspect I may end up in a fist-fight with my mum over him, I know that I have dibs on first cuddles between us to at least.

I can’t wait!

PS – today also saw the internet debut of Live Life Then Give Life’s latest video piece, which I directed, shot and edited to highlight the varying attitudes to Christmas from different transplant perspectives. You can check it out here.

It’s been a really strange day today, giving me a surreal, 3rd-person insight into how my life has changed in the last 13 months.

I was out for the day filming with Emily for the Live Life Then Give Life website – part of our new media project to add even more impact to our life stories by getting the people in question on film.

First port of call was our fabulous advocate (or Fabocate, if you will) Jess, who has been waiting nearly 3-and-a-half years for a double-lung transplant and is now way beyond the “worrying” stage of the wait and headed rapidly downhill. Sitting an interviewing her at her home in Kent, I remember how similar I was last year just weeks before my call – I couldn’t really move around, everything was a struggle and, mentally, I was right on the verge of giving it all up.

She also made me realise, however, just why people find people with CF so inspiring. As I sat and watched her making light of her situation while pausing for enormous, breath-stealing coughing fits, I saw in her something which I suppose many people once saw in me – a determination not to be beaten by something we’d battled for years. More than that, though, I sat there and wondered to myself how on earth I did it.

At the time, you don’t really have a choice, you just get on with it, but looking at it from the outside yesterday I could see just how much hard work it is to stay alive and keep fighting and I was blown away by Jess’s willpower. She’s a phenomenal girl and I hope and pray that she gets the call she so desperately needs now.

By way of total contrast, we left Jess in the mid-afternoon and traveled to Epsom in Surrey to talk to another one of our advocates, Lisa, who is celebrating, like Emily and I, her second Christmas post-transplant. In fact, Lisa, Emily and I were all transplanted in 2007, spreading ourselves through the year – Emily first, in January, Lisa later on and then I brought up the rear in November.

Talking to Lisa I was given chance to reflect on the changes that happen between the state we were all in pre-transplant and the freedom and joy we all feel now it’s behind us. We’re all incredibly lucky people, but it made me realised even more strongly than usual just why we all work so hard to raise the profile of organ donation – this life we’re living now is amazing, remarkable and truly miraculous, but we still lose over a 1000 people who need a transplant every year. That’s more than 10% of the people who are on the waiting list.

It doesn’t have to be like that – we can all help to change it by talking to our loved ones about our wishes and making them talk to their friends and their families and to let everyone know that giving someone the gift of life when you no longer have yours is the greatest thing anyone can do for another human being.

Sign up. And Talk.

I often laugh at the BBC local news when they run Transplant-related stories – they’re so hackneyed and cliché now that you can pretty much use the same voice-over and just change the pictures.

But I had to eat my words this evening when I got this link through to my friend Sally’s report that went out this lunchtime.  It’s hard to think that a little over a year ago I was in exactly the same position – here’s hoping that this time next year Sally’s in exactly my position.

Today was both an emminently enjoyable day and a massively frsutrating one.

A while back, as you’ll no doubt have noticed from the banner on the right of the page here (unless you’re reading this through in the archives in the middle of 2011), I signed myself up to take on this years doitforcharity.com Santa Run through Greenwich park.

At the time – about 7 weeks before the run – I thought that a small, fun 5k could be just the right way to ease myself into the physical challenges I’ve set myself for the next couple of years.  I’ve developed a bit of a master plan that I’m not going to la out on here because I’ll only fall foul of it at some point and feel lousy, but suffice to say that a 5k before Christmas seemed to be a good way of easing myself in.

Then came my port op at the end of last month and truly knocked me back.  Not physically – or at least not in my chest – but the pain in my shoulder and the general disablement it brought caused me to have to stop running.  I figured that even having missed a week’s training I’d still be good for the run, but it appears that my shoulder protests too much.

Any kind of movement of the shoulder, particularly harsh, juddering, running-style movement, has been really painful and – mindful of the fact that I’d have to operate a car all the way home after the event – I had to take the disappointing decision to “drop out” of the run.  I say drop out, but that’s really not true, I just ended up walking it instead of running it.

I was, frankly, really bummed about it the week leading up to it – the whole point of the exercise had been to give myself a physical challenge to round of what’s been an amazing twelve months – but as people kept pointing out to me, it’s a big step forward.  I just wasn’t so sure it was, after all, I’ve done a lot of walking since my op, not least back in October when I not only walked 5k, but did it with a video camera on my shoulder to shoot Nelly’s World’s Biggest Walk.

It was only once I was actually walking around the park, breathing in the freezing cold but deliciously crisp winter morning’s air that I realised what a difference the last year has made.  At this point 12 months ago, I was just learning to wobble around the ward on two very over-sized legs in between bouts of dialysis to keep everything under control and on course for a Christmas release, a date which seemed to be looming without signs of improvement.  To be wandering freely through the park today, holding conversations and pushing Nelly up a really steep hill (until her family came to a perfectly-timed rescue) is a miracle beyond words.

I feel like I spend every post on here at the moment in a moment of thanks to my donor and their family, but if it wasn’t for them I’d never have had the chance to do all of that.  And I’d never have seen my Great Cousin born last night, either – so thank you all, whoever you are.

For most people who know me and have ever had any kind of a discussion of musicals with me, you’ll be well aware, no doubt, of my “issues” with Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (which, apparently, is a registered trademark, according to the writing on the back wall of the set…).

I think the best description of my attitude towards Joseph is “jaded”.  Having worked at Milton Keynes Theatre – one of the country’s biggest receiving houses – for nearly seven years, on and off, I have seen Joseph pass through, in one incarnation or another, five or six times.  It’s a great, vibrant, fun show, but after the third or fourth year, having seen the comings and goings, the shabby sets and sometimes dodgy backing performers, you can get a little tired of it.

Which is why sitting in the audience of the Adelphi on the Strand last night I felt a tremor of fear rippling through me.  Lee Mead was a classmate of my cousin’s at a local drama school in Southend way back in the day, so they have been following his progress carefully since he first popped up on the BBC’s show about the show’s lead.  I have to say he was always a clear winner of that, so I figured that the show must be worth going to see to find out if I was right or not.

In addition (and probably more importantly), K is possibly the only person in the world who loves Joseph so much she not only knows it word for word, but when we was still single-figured in age she managed to wear out the tape of the original London cast recording with Jason Donovan, and yet has NEVER actually seen the show.  To say she was excited is like saying people think Michael Jackson is a little on the odd side.

The show itself was outstanding, I must admit.  It’s got an absolutely fantastic cast who are all consummate professionals to a man, woman and child.  The quality of the singing and dancing was fantastic.  Having read the notices when the show first opened, it appear to suggest that they had simply jazzed up the sets from the touring production, but this was like nothing I’ve seen on the tour – they’ve re-imagined it (to steal a pseudo intellectual arty-farty term from the movies) and come up with something very similar in concept by with many more modern flourishes.

I’m told that the whole production is based on the 90s Palladium version, starring first Jason Donovan and then the slightly left-field but equally acclaimed Philip Schofield. It certainly has a much bigger feel to it than the touring version and is a lot busier with set moves and scene changes.

The whole thing is technically remarkable, very much akin to the proverbial duck on the water – the staging is incredibly simplistic and the technical side appears incredibly simple.  But sitting and watching the vast variety of pieces coming to and fro around the two revolves centre-stage, it is easy to imagine the manically-paddling feet of the technicians backstage.

Talking to one of the cast after the show (which I’ll come to later), he was explaining how the technicians are almost as precisely choreographed as the performers on stage, such are the quick-change demands of the props and set dressings that are almost constantly on the move.

As is my wont at most theatre I go to now, with several friends working in the theatre and knowing some of their friends, I tend to scan the programme for names I may recognise in passing.  Imagine my surprise when, glancing down the cast list, I came across the name of a good friend of mine from my early days working the bars at MKT.  A friend who ran away from MK and his “cosy” box office job to enroll and subsequently take by storm the Guildford School of Acting.

Not having had his number for some years, I legged it around to stage door during the interval (not as simple in Town as it is in MK or Northampton, it must be said) and dropped him a note with my number on it to see if he wanted to catch up.  I was a mite nervous of meeting him as I was informed by K that she had been horrible to him when she knew him before.  That was before I realised she had meant when they were 8.  I figured he’d probably got over it by now.

So after the show we ambled round to stage door, dodging the throngs at the front of the theatre waiting for Mr Mead, and met up with JS and headed to a quiet little bar just around the corner for a drink and a catch up.

JS is one of my friends I’m most proud of – he’s gone out and done what he’s always wanted to do.  So many people who work front of house in theatres spend a lot of time talking about how they want to be on the stage singing, dancing, acting and everything else.  JS actually got off his arse and went and did it.

He auditioned like mad, got into a great drama school, did three years of hard graft and came out at the top of his class.  After jobbing for a year or so post-graduation, he joined the original cast of the new Joseph from the start and opened the show in the West End, where he’s now done a full 18 months and still has 6 months on his contract.  Not only that but, as a Swing, he has the hardest performing job in the West End.

Not many people know what a Swing is, other than it being a name at the end of the list of characters in most musical programmes.  A Swing is, in essence, a cover-player.  They are there to fill in the gaps when anyone is off sick or injured.  There are two types of swing – an on-stage swing or an off-stage swing.  An off-stage swing is essentially an understudy for a lot of roles, an on-stage swing is basically a performer in the show who plays whoever he’s needed to play.

In Joseph, for example, that means that JS has to know the part of every male character in the show, bar Joseph, Jacob and the Pharaoh – all three of which have their own understudies. That equates to 11 different roles that he has to know inside-out and be able to play at the drop of a hat.  And he rarely plays the same role more than a week at a time and often changes role every night.

Next time you’re in the Theatre and glancing down the first few names on the cast list, take a look down the bottom and spare a thought for the hardest working performers in the Theatre – eight shows a week of they-know-not-what, but rarely put a foot wrong.

All in all, it was an awesome night – a great show (albeit with a few slightly odd stylistic decisions – the less said about the random psychedelic 60s sequence the better) and a great time catching up with an old friend.  Who could ask for more.  I want to say a big thanks to my Ma and Pa for getting the tickets for us as a first 2nd birthday present – it couldn’t have been better.