claytoncast

So it's Sunday, it's very cold and I'm waiting for the shuttle bus in the car park at Gatwick North. I'm heading over to Amsterdam to work as speaker coach on a conference for two days. It shouldn't be too arduous. It's reasonably well paid and Amsterdam is a great city..... And yet I seem to have gone into that winter hibernation mode this week where all I want to do is be curled up in the flat with the heating on and watching tv. The best reason I had for braving the cold this week was to venture up to Yorkshire to surprise my mum on her 89th birthday. Having already bought her a new chair( see previous entry) and arranged for a card with flowers to be delivered she wasn't expecting a visit. So a call to her at 2 pm to ask her to check the doorstep for a parcel worked a treat. No matter what I had bought her it wouldn't have received quite the same reaction as the sight of me standing on the garden path did. She was overjoyed. That and the combination ...

We're both very big Harry Potter fans in our house. My lovely friend Jane Millman introduced me to the books around 2000 and I quickly devoured them. They took me back to books I used to read in my childhood. The boarding school adventures of Jennings and Derbyshire, the Five Finder - outers etc. The first three books came out without much of a furore, and it was the fourth book “Harry Potter and the goblet of Fire" which really seem to catch people's attention. This was when Rich started reading the books. While I lay in bed at night trying to make my way through the 500 or so pages of the latest Harry Potter, Rich was beside me making his way through the first three books which were of course much slimmer volumes at the same time. This meant that by the time volume 5 “Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix" came out our household had to order two copies. There was no debate as to who was going to read it first. So we have two copies of the last three books. As ...

Like banks, accountants are difficult to change. I've been with my bank now nearly 20 years. First Direct. The appeal when I first went to it was of course that it's a faceless bank. All business is conducted over the telephone or now on the Internet. Which is great in that you don't have to deal with people when you don't feel like it. Of course the downside is that when you'd like to actually talk to somebody with whom you have a relationship, it's potluck on who answers the phone. Whenever I've found them obstructive in any way I have thought about changing, and then 10 seconds later when I think of all the hassle of changing direct debits, bank details on invoices, and thinking of all the various things that could go wrong, I take a deep breath and carry on with them. I suppose it's what banks rely on. We all stay where we are because it's too much hassle to change. It's the same with my accountant. I'm sure he's not the cheapest, an...

Well it’s been one of those weeks. Monday morning I went into town to meet the director of the BBC 4 project that I had been asked to audition for. A woman who quite clearly should have stood closer to her razor! I thought I read reasonably well, but as I said in last week’s blog I find it difficult to judge. They liked me a great deal I was told, so as you can guess, I didn’t get the job. The trip up to Yorkshire this week took me and Mum out to purchase a new fireside chair for her. Some of the things in mum’s house have been around longer than some people I know have been on this earth. The Parker Knoll chair that she sits in on a daily basis by the fire moved house with her in 1984 and had already been in situ at the old house behind the shop for four years at that time. It’s given good service, but as now she spends a large part of the day sitting in it, I was intent on getting her one that was orthopaedically correct, didn’t have a sagging bottom (the chair, not my mother!),...

One of the illicit guilty pleasures of early winter night television is the glut of reality shows that seem to fill our screens. I know it is not everybody's cup of tea but I'm afraid that Rich and I do set the recorder for“Strictly come dancing" and “ X factor". There is a real pleasure when one of the contestants and their celebrity dancing partner, or budding recording artist, actually does well. What does annoy me greatly is that when they don't do so well, and people refuse to tell them. There were quite a few performances on last night's edition of the X factor that needed firm criticism. Quite simply the singers failed to deliver, and they needed to be told so. So they can start to deal with what will be a recurring feeling in their career, no matter how successful they become. Failure is one of the most important and yet difficult things to deal with as a performer.Believe me it never gets any easier. No matter what you've done before, you...

I think I have mentioned before in these pages how I love autumn as a season. As the air gets colder the days get shorter and the leaves turn to gold I start to feel cosy and warm. I think it might be part of the process of getting older, but as one does so I feel that one wants what is familiar around one. I spent Monday of this week up at my Mother’s. She is much better now and has regained much of her bloom and wit. Her house is now virtually a nest. Chairs filled with familiar objects, old pieces of paper that “she might need’ and a resistance to change that is almost palpable. It would be so much easier for her to have a microwave for her meal preparation, but this is something she has stoutly resisted for over twenty years, and now at the ripe old age of nearly 89 I stand very little chance of persuading her to have one. Anything new has to be introduced with the greatest of care. I managed to get her to use a new and more secure walking stick while she was ill, but I t...

There are some place names that when you hear them don't come up a vision of quiet idyllic hideaways. Marbella has always been one of these for me. For the last four years I've had the pleasure of directing the McDonald's UK AGM each October. It's taken me to Warsaw, Prague, and last year to Malta–a delightful burst of late autumn sunshine. Even though the work is hard and the crew and I spent long hours locked up in dark conference halls, it's always nice to come outside into a beautiful environment under a sunny sky. It started raining in Marbella within 10 min of me leaving the airport. Driving out of Malaga along the motorway that connects that part of coastal Spain, the rain lashed down. Through the running streams of water on the window screen, or was it the tears in my eyes, I saw a road lined with supermarkets, hypermarkets, all types of bloody markets. I started to know then what I know now–Marbella is not for me. The conference was being held in a large l...