No, I've not been sent to prison. Not yet. Not that kind of "inside". Nevertheless, it does occur to me, as the weather turns prematurely autumnal, that I've spent rather too much of the summer admiring the sunshine from indoors. But then, I do that most summers, because I'm a writer. I went once to a student press event in London - David Puttnam was launching his Cambodian film epic The Killing Fields - and I remember Bruce Robinson (who'd written the script) saying that the life of a writer is a very lonely one. He was right about that, but he might've mentioned too that it's also one spent largely in shadow. Well, mine is, at least. Whenever I've got a project at a stage where I can scribble all over a print-out, I like to take it outside and work on it - usually on a bench outside the church opposite my flat, or, if I'm at my pop's place in Eastbourne, then I'll work on it in the garden there (only problem being the ease of distraction - "Ooh, I'll just do a bit of weeding..."). More often than not, though, a project will require me to be indoors and chained to the computer. This summer, of course, the thing keeping me indoors has been Fashion!, my working-titled musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. It's robbed me of the summer, but at least now, having just completed the second draft and done a print-out, I might yet get to soak up a few rays as I slash and burn what's on the 100 or so pages before me. P.S. I'm humbly aware (and doubtless Bruce Robinson is too) that the minor travails of the middle-class English writer are nothing compared to the problem of having your country bombed to shit by the Americans, then taken over by a bunch of sociopathic communists so far to the left that they end up round the other side of the circle and exterminate somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million people. Still, it's all relative.
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AuthorRobert Cohen – a man in showbiz so stepp’d in that, should he wade no more, to go back were as tedious as go o’er. These are among his musings. Archives
September 2023
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