For some reason – perhaps because I've written about it so much elsewhere – I've failed to note here previously that I had a novel on the verge of publication. Well, anyway, it happened: in January of this year, Hobart Books published Architecture For Beginners, a novel I started in 2006 and which I thought I'd long since finished, until I found myself, towards the end of last year, frantically re-writing the ending as well as negotiating with my editor over various smaller bits of the thing. I think I may have driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown (and possibly over it), but I'm convinced the process resulted in a much better book than if they'd just put it out exactly as it was when they first read it. So I'm grateful for their exacting attitude, even if they might have regrets about meeting their perfectionistic match. Copies are available here. Now to start a new one – which, if published according to the same timescale as the last, should come onto the market some time in 2040.

What a difference 10 months can make. When I did my last post, I little thought we’d end the year having clocked up a new monarch and TWO new prime ministers. Even back in the summer it was looking like quite a year to bottle and keep: Fibber Johnson clinging on to power as if it were his birthright, finally being dethroned by a mass exit of almost everyone else in his government; then the interminable Tory leadership contest, in which Liz Truss promised tax cuts at any cost and the grassroots members voted exactly as everyone expected them to do; then finally (we thought), the remarkable, and, as far as I know, unprecedented prospect of a new PM and a new monarch coming to power in the same week. But there was stranger to come, for Truss proved such a disaster that history will be kind indeed if she's simply remembered as that woman who read the lesson so turgidly at The Queen's funeral. She did serve one useful purpose, though: by taking over Johnson's job just a couple of days before the death of Her Maj, she robbed him for ever of a major bit of Churchillian glory-basking. But for Truss, Johnson could for ever more have bored people with the fact that Winston Churchill was QE2's first PM, and he, Johnson, was her last. Bad luck, Boris: there's just not the same ring to "penultimate". Anyway, it's 3rd Jan and, last time I looked, Rishi Sunak was still PM.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing Santa at Leeds Castle – in Kent, not Yorkshire, though still the subject of a daily three-hour round-trip commute. Notwithstanding, it's been a joy, greeting the kids and their parents as they come to the end of the sumptuous illuminated walkway in the grounds of the castle, and in the process enjoying the kind of Christmas spirit that two months (at least) of rapaciously cynical TV ads can do so much to destroy. That's me in the picture on the evening of Mrs Claus's visit. Happy new year, readers!!!

I’m not good at blogging, let’s face it. How long’s it been since my last confession? Christ on a bike! Getting on for two years, that’s how long.
To be fair, I did get a couple of draft posts in the bag, but I fret so long about style and structure that things move on. One draft was about anti-covid masks and HMG having needlessly abandoned the requirement to wear them when that, surely, was the least onerous of precautions. But when did that happen? Last July. And before I could finish the post, they’d reintroduced mask-wearing in the pre-Christmas Omicron panic. Mind, the rules were scarcely being enforced, anyway, at least from what I could see on trains and in supermarkets – but by the time I’d waded into a new post on that topic, the agenda moved on yet further as it became apparent that Boris Johnson and his staff, as far back as the first Big Lockdown (when, be it remembered, vaccinations were still but a pipedream) were cheerfully disregarding their own Covid rules and throwing a whole string of office parties at Number 10.
Well, I didn’t even start a draft about that. I mean, there was certainly time, cos yer man made time, seemingly happy to drag the thing out till Doomsday, just as long as he could carry on calling himself Prime Minister. First he said there'd be no comment till we’d had Sue Gray’s report (cos he needs an independent civil servant to tell him whether he broke the rules he made himself), and then no comment till the Met have done their report (they having only lately started investigating, despite having officers constantly on duty outside No.10 during the Party Season). And then, of course, Russia started building up troops on the border with Ukraine, and the PM was jetting off everywhere to try and save the world; consequently, it looks, at the time of writing, as if he’s gonna get away with it.
​And d’you know what? I’m not now sure if that’s a good or a bad thing if he keeps his job. On the one hand he’s totally unprincipled and unfit to be Prime Minister. On the other hand, he’s totally unprincipled and therefore just possibly better to have as Prime Minister than some doctrinaire Tory who’d want to enact more Thatcherite "small-state" policies. On the third hand, being someone with no principles, he’s just as likely as not to wake up one morning with a wizard whim to enact those very small-state Thatcherite policies he spurned when he was on the other side of the sixpence. 

For a while there, things in Covidland weren’t so very different from real life. As an artist all too often "resting" from his acting work, I spend a lot of time in my flat writing plays etc. etc. – and, for about the first half of the lockdown, which started on the evening of 23rd March, things went on pretty much as normal. True, I was separated from Jenny – we having failed, in five years of marriage, to get round to finding a place to live under one roof – but, that sadness aside, it was largely business as usual – in fact, with the absence of any paying jobs to take me away from home, I increased my efficiency; updated my showreel, got to third-draft stage with my play Little Things That Keep Us Together, and even got to cutting together some vox pops I did in Barnstaple at the time of 2015’s Something Rotten premiere. 

But a fiver to get in, as I recall, and reasonably-priced snackology, as well. We sat on big comfy sofas at the back. The film itself was better than the previous one, less good than the one before that, with, as usual, the best stuff being the interplay between Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver. Anyway, that being done, we went back to Tiptree and saw in the new year with Chinese food. Who, I wonder, could ask for anything more?

Shortly after getting back from New Year, Jenny and I were off again, on holiday – well, a sort of working holiday, a writers’ retreat in a cottage in Ansty. We were there for a week, and both of us, I think, got a fair bit done (I was working mainly on Little Things That Keep Us Together and on ideas for a Harvey Matusow podcast series), but we also did a load of touristy stuff, visiting the Tutankhamun exhibition in Dorchester, and Bovington Tank Museum and Monkey World, as well as seeing the brilliant JoJo Rabbit at the Plaza Cinema.
I’ve felt compelled to catch up on all that stuff, because of course that was when life was still normal for the world. In fact, as it was all going on, things were kicking off, over in China, with bat-virus Covid-19...

On 5th December I’ll be opening in LanternLight’s adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I auditioned to play Scrooge, but my friend Seth also auditioned, and he always gets the parts I want - at any rate, he did once, when we were both up for Prospero, and he did it again this time.
Never mind; I’m looking forward to playing Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley (who’s dead), and a couple of other roles into the bargain. 
Tomorrow we start rehearsals, so I should by now have been some way into learning my lines. Trouble is, I’ve been busy trying to finish the second draft of Little Things That Keep Us Together; I know I won’t be able to devote any time at all to writing once I’m into rehearsal, so it was important to get that done. Now it is, though, so that’s grinworthy.

Apparently it’s 18 months since my last confession. No-one’s noticed, though – no-one’s begging me to get my blog up to date. So why’m I here? Vanity, I suppose, which (let’s face it) lies at the heart of so much I do. 
Anyway, what’ve I done, over these past 18 months?
Well, let’s see: I’ve been in a production of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (and what a load of old rope it is - though artfully edited into a dynamic one-acter for the Brighton Fringe by The Rialto’s Roger Kay); I’ve played Egeon in The Comedy of Errors at the Petersfield Shakespeare Festival (that’s me in the tricorn hat, looking surprisingly untroubled by the thought of having to kick off the play with one of Shakespeare’s longest monologues); I’ve responded to the alarming rise in popular Hebrewphobia by writing and performing a one-man show called Dog’s Chosen, all about my life as an Anglo-Welsh Jewish atheist; and, in my occasional spare moments, I’ve continued to toil over two long-term writing projects – Say What You See, a musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, and Little Things That Keep Us Together, a play inspired by my old prep school art teacher.
All of that, though, pales into insignificance alongside the big news of the last year: I’ve become an orphan. My mum, Meryl Cohen (née Williams) died back in 2010, and I think it’s fair to say that my pa, Peter, devoted the last eight and a half years of his own life to the monumental task of getting used to her absence. He had the support of his three sons - especially my brother Kerry, who continued to live with him at the house in Eastbourne - but, though there were many happy times over the remaining years, and though he never lost his unapologetically unique sense of humour, the sadness was rarely very far from the surface. His late-blossoming interest in gardening was partly in tribute to Mum (every year there were new plantings to mark her birthday and her day of departure), partly just to occupy himself so his mind didn't focus too long on his loss.
Cheerful this, yeah? 
Well, it gets better, cos late last year, not long before Christmas, Pop was diagnosed with myeloma, aka cancer of the bone marrow.
​Better? How’s that better?
​Well, distressing as it was for the rest of us, I think that for Pop it came as something of a delivery, a welcome way out of the melancholy condition that had become his lot in life. Explaining to me his refusal to have any treatment (aside from pain relief), he said, "I get up every morning and I have nothing to look forward to". He’d’ve liked it if the NHS could offer him a simple pill to see him off in one go, but, as yet, our nation withholds from human beings the mercy routinely shown to animals.

(I understand the concerns, of course – you don’t want people bumped off for their money, but there’s a balance to be struck between caution and common sense.)
Pop was lucky, in a way, to get cancer; it got him into the hospice, where, though still denied the one simple pill he desired, he received world-class treatment from a bunch of people peerless in their kindness and devotion. Not to say that everything was right all the time, but shortcomings were never, it seemed to me, the result of people not trying. Everybody cared. Anyway, the folks at St Wilfrids were, in one key area above all, highly efficient: in managing his pain all the way to the end, which came just over a month after his diagnosis. For all that he’d’ve liked it to happen quicker – Pop always valued speed over any other consideration - it was all pretty efficient. 
That picture up there; that’s Pop in his room at the hospice. ​It’s the last one I (or indeed anyone) took of him, and it’s one of my happiest artistic achievements. I’d just arrived, and was sat beside the bed, enjoying a glass of booze (the Quavers were mine, be it noted, but whisky and Coke were definitely among his favourite things, and thus most aptly foregrounded); meanwhile, my big brother Andy was standing behind me, telling some or other anecdote – I don’t recall the specific nature thereof, but I noticed that Pop was smiling, and, with his attention diverted, I wondered if it’d be appropriate to grab a snap -  it’d be nice, I thought, to capture such a moment. Appropriate or not, I did it. Now, had I a better camera on me, I’d’ve maybe got him in sharper focus; but then, had I a better camera and the means to focus more effectively, chances are I’d’ve missed the moment altogether. 
When Mum died, back in 2010, the funeral was about as minimalistic as such an event could get: a husband, three sons and three grandchildren. The over-riding task was to get Pop through it, and that meant a minimum of people in attendance. It was the right thing to do in the moment, but even so, it was nice, at Pop’s send-off – which took place on an unusually sunny 14th February this year – to redress the balance a bit; thus, my contribution, in addition to Andy’s reading-out of tributes from friends and family, and a hair-raisingly brilliant rendering by Kerry of Dylan Thomas’s And Death Shall Have No Dominion, was an appreciation of "Peter and Meryl”, ie both our parents – and, indeed, that picture there, of the two of them together in happier times, was the one we displayed "downstage" in the chapel. Good, that.

Nothing much to report, except that I recently ran a workshop, in the Hove Grown festival, about the creation of solo stage shows. Having last year done all three of my one-man shows under the umbrella title Men Without Friends, it seemed the only way to follow up was to show how it's done - or at least give some clues.
So, on Easter Sunday, at the Rialto Theatre (Hove? No, Brighton, actually), I ran Holding Your Own, a two-hour workshop in which I encouraged participants to come up with a structure and a plan to write a one-person show all their own. ​It was, I'm pleased to report, packed out, and most of them even stayed till the end! In fact, most stayed past the end, as we ran over somewhat. As my wife Jenny remarked afterwards (she having been among the attending), I'd tried to cram a day's workshop into two hours. Still, it was the first time I'd ever done such a thing, so it was difficult until the day to know whether I'd too little or too much material to get through. Anyway, I'll make the next one longer. 
Meanwhile, on to the next two acting projects, both in the Brighton Festival: Rope at the aforementioned Rialto, and Magnus Volk's Electric Train of Thought, a 20-minute monologue by Liz Tait Readman, which will receive 40 performances over the course of the closing week of the festival. I'm not doing all 40, though; I'm sharing the role with another actor, Julian McDowell. 

I dunno, look at the time!
The time of year, I mean. Seems I last posted here in November. Now we're half-way through March 2018.
What's been happening? Well, I'm still working on the musical (now going under the title Say What You See), though I got rather distracted by having to write a play every day during February, as part of the 28 Plays Later challenge. They didn't have to be full-length plays, but even a 10-minuter, done properly, takes a lot of work, and some were quite a bit longer than 10 minutes. Still, it was worth the experience and the discipline, not least because it left me with a good handful of short plays I can use in the future, as well as a couple of longer projects I mean to develop. I've also got the seeds of a new one-man show, provisionally titled, How I Won the War in Vietnam, Just as well nobody wanted to distract me with any paid work at any point of the month.
That's changed just lately, and right now I'm working with some students from Sussex University, playing a grieving farmer in their graduation film Crimson Sky. It's a fabulous script, and if we can get through the next couple of days - somehow reconciling the footage shot over several unseasonally sunny days with what may come under the tyranny of another projected snow extravaganza - then I think we'll end up with a magnificent film. Aside from the talent and professionalism of the production team, things to celebrate include having almost no lines (it's all face and body) and the presence on the farm of a top dog called Honey.

Been doing a lot more writing than acting this year. Apart from two outings for the Men Without Friends triptych at Hove Grown and more recently Stroud (that's Matusow in the pic, at the British School on 1st Oct) , I've been somewhat short of offers to perform in other people's shows.

Annoying, undeniably, and yet a blessing simultaneously, it having left me free to proceed with projects that might otherwise have been disrupted by line-learning regimes. Topmost among these projects has been my musical based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes.

As you'll guess from the history of its working titles (first Fashion!, more recently Alchemy!), it's a fairly free adaptation. There again, Andersen doesn't give you all that much to work with. Some of his stories are immensely lengthy, while others, such as Clothes, are surprisingly slight. I'm not complaining, mind; on the contrary, I feel it gives me quite a lot of licence. 

I've never written a musical before. I did write the book for a show called Miss Givings, weaving a story around a selection of great American songs sung by soprano Debbie Bridge; however, though I've written a few songs of my own, I've never performed any of them in public, nor have I ever before been compelled to create so many songs in such a short space of time. Not, of course, that I have to do anything; any deadline I have is entirely self-imposed. Nevertheless, I gave myself the length of this year to do the thing, and if it's not complete in about eight weeks (Jesus - where does the time go?!!?!!?!"?!!!?), I'll be very disappointed in myself.

Anyway, I've been seeking help and inspiration from various sources, including an excellent Musical Theatre Singing Course at the Academy of Creative Training, under the tutelage of Lesley McClymont. Of course, that's really about my professional development as an actor, but I can already feel my confidence as a songwriter grow with my confidence as a singer. More specifically I've been seeking to learn from the greats, hoovering up any and all musicals on CD and DVD, as well as reading useful literature by those who know. Right now I'm a little way into Tunesmith, an extremely well-constructed, user-friendly guide to the craft by the legendary Jimmy Webb, author of such greats as Wichita Lineman, Galveston, Up Up and Away and Macarthur Park - and yes, I'm aware that there are many who pour scorn on the last of those titles, but I think it the most magnificent of songs. Indeed, in my home town of Brighton I've been privileged to hear it performed live by two of my idols, Mr Andy Williams and Mr Jimmy 'that's right, the man himself' Webb. I even got to hear them do it for free, in return for writing 'em up for the local 'paper. Both of those reviews are reproduced on this very website here. 

In closing, here's an interesting point that Mr Webb makes in passing. Songs, he observes, for the most part are made up of lines that rhyme, However, it's not always so. For instance, he notes, Paul Simon's America doesn't rhyme at all. "What?!???!?" I said. "America? Doesn't rhyme?"

​Y'know what's funny, though? He's right. It doesn't. Not once. Check it out and see. ​​