claytoncast

The strange thing is that this blog is about what happens in my life, and yet the minute something happens in my life, I don't have time to blog. I'm cramming this in while on my daily journey over to West London for "Green Forms" rehearsals. It's not the most pleasant of slogs either way so how better to use this one than to get my blog up to date. Yes- after so many months of planning we are now halfway through rehearsals for our play and we open next week. Last week was very exciting as we watched tickets sales climb and climb, helped no end by some fab adverts placed by the aka team in The Telegraoh and The Times, and also a slow awakening on the part of friends and colleagues that it is actually on and that  they needed to book. I'm the same. A show can be on for months before I decide that I have to see it, and then I can be at least another two months before we have a discussion about when to book for. It's not a dilemma we face often as Rich h...

I am writing this weeks blog on my new I pad. It was a surprise Christmas present from Richard and I love it. It is a gadget that changes your life Rich has had one for a year now and is attached to it by an invisible umbilical cord. I feel now that with this I have grown another set of arms and eyes and ears. It really does change your life. I have just taken it with me on a business trip to Holland. It played a movie to me on the plane. It gave me my book to read at bedtime. It played me music. It allowed me to film the students I was working with and play back the results to them for analysis and feedback. It allowed me to book airfares for a future job. And of course it allows me to keep in touch - face time phone calls to Rich, Skype phone calls to Mum as well as dealing with all my emails. Hard to find something it doesn't do and of course it now means we are both sat on the sofa of an evening, ipads to hand ready to look something up, or tweet our thoughts abo...

So this is my first blog of 2012.  Last night we spent a quiet new year at home. Nice wine, nice food and our own company. For the last two years we've been away. In 2009 we were in New York, and last year we spent the new year in Swanage in a friends cottage.  This year I've been rather busy over the Christmas week driving over 1100 miles to bring mum down from Yorkshire, take us all down to Devon, take mum back to Yorkshire, and then having come back to London, a trip out to see our friend Andy in panto in Cambridge on Fridaywas the last stage of the Christmas marathon. Christmas was quiet too but none the worse for it. We spent it with Richard's parents and grandmother in Devon and I had my mother with me to so it was in every way a family Christmas. Despite the slightly antiquated tradition of family Howle not opening their presents until after lunch, which in this case meant nearly 4:35 PM in the afternoon, all was well and everyone seemed happy with what Santa...

At the moment I'm in Yorkshire. I've driven up here to collect Mum to bring her back down to london so that she can spend Christmas with Rich and myself. This was not our original plan. She had tickets for the train tomorrow, but since her recent illness she has lost the confidence necessary to make the journey, so my Christmas has turned into a bit of a driving marathon. Having driven up here today, tomorrow I'll drive her back to London. If we can get her up. Depression has set in again over the last week and in the mornings all she wants to do is stay in bed. Once she's up she is absolutely fine and enjoys her day but then the next morning we're back to square one. Thanks to her wonderful carers who are my Christmas angels and her friend Pat, she has got up each day by lunchtime but it's proving harder and it raises all sorts of questions for her future care next year - questions I can't and indeed don't really want to answer at the moment. Suffi...

I suppose at this time of year we all do more than our fair share of shopping. Having finished work on December 2 I've had quite a bit of time to get my plans in order to shop for Richards family and relatives and our friends. It's time of year when you see the best and worst of customer service. Regular readers of my blog will know it is something that I can all too easily clamber onto my soapbox to rant about. So let me highlight a couple of this year's winners and losers. Marks & Spencer seem to be well up there with trying to make it easier for the customer. They've got a new online delivery system whereby you can order the items online and if you don't want to wait in for delivery, or indeed pay for a delivery charge, you can have them delivered to a branch that you designate at the time of ordering and pick them up from there. I did that with a couple of items and there they were waiting for me in the Croydon Marks & Spencer yeste...

So it's the party season and that time of year when everyone is looking forward to the days when they don't have to go into the office and the holidays are looming. Except of course if you're a freelancer. As a freelancer holidays can sometimes be forced upon us. I did what looks like my last piece of work until next year on Friday. A days filming down in Brighton. Uneventful enough within itself, and yet it was filled with an impending sense of doom that it will be over three weeks before I do any paid work again. It's early this year. Normally my last day at work before Christmas is sometimes in the week leading up to the 22nd or so, but this year my work schedule has brought an early bath and now the days are stretching out in front of me with the prospect of nothing much to do except Christmas shopping, house work, and planning for our production of "Green Forms" in January. I can hear some of you sighing and saying what a delicious prosp...

So we finally made it. Mum's 90th birthday. I've been planning a surprise party for about the last five or six months. It's taken quite a bit of cunning and skill to get all the people I needed to be in one room on one night in November……….. in Rotherham! And yet we managed it. I drove up on Friday to check into the hotel, Rotherham's finest, and find out what our suite was like. Of course when I say Rotherham's finest, as Rich pointed out on Twitter last week, that's a little like saying the best table at a Harvester. It's all comparative. The room turned out to be a nice two room suite on the top floor, and mercifully Rotherham is so backward in the hospitality stakes that it was a smoking suite which meant that I was able to sit in the living room watching the television on Friday evening and indulge in a cigarette. Downstairs all hell broke loose as Friday night was the first night of the Rotherham Christmas party season, and the Carlton Park ...