Author: James Lark

…I dreamt that I was put on trial for tax fraud and video piracy.

I don’t remember anything about the trial, but I recall that the urinals were carpeted.

George W Bush was careful to point out the “Saddam Hussein will continue to receive the due process and legal rights that he denied to the Iraqi people”.

That’ll be jolly useful to him if he wants to negotiate exactly how much he’s going to be executed.

I may have mentioned before that one of the most delightful things about my friend Jason Fout is that his often serious and challenging obsession with matters theological is tempered by a similar obsession with matters culinary. As such, Jason stands as a living example of the importance of sensual experience in spiritual understanding, every bit as much as the cinematic joy that is Babette’s Feast.

Jason was our very own Babette a couple of weeks ago at St Mark’s, when he prepared a selection of pizzas along these lines:

And the pizza in question did indeed live up to the look on his daughter Alex’s face.

On Sunday I invited Jason and family back to Victoria Street after he preached at St Mark’s (a sermon in which he disappointingly ignored my suggestion to preach on Guy Fawkes) and became increasingly nervous that, even with Alastair’s capable assistance, we would end up serving something which to an expert like Revd Fout would seem the equivalent of beans on toast. Actually, I even considered cutting my losses and making him beans on toast.

But Alastair and myself discovered something wonderful; cooking is not about following instructions, or trying to recreate something you’ve seen your Mum do. In fact, you can make it up!

We even cooked something with a name that we thought had been made up too – a poussin. (Well, four of them actually – poussi?) Though later we were informed that a poussin is a teenage chicken, and I suddenly felt quite bad about eating them. I mean, they were probably quite unhappy in a sulky, listless way, but they still had their whole adult lives ahead of them.

The joy of cooking the poussi was not in the simplicity of the process (you put them in the oven) so much as the little artistic details we achieved. Alastair bought some fresh basil and liberally shredded it over the teenage birds, whilst I slapped on olive oil and herbs. Then I sliced up some apple and stuffed it into the teenage birds’ orifices. And finally (possibly getting a bit carried away) we sprinkled them with mulled wine mix.

An example poussin follows.

The look on Jason’s face says the following:

1. That joy at freshly cooked food runs in his family.
2. That the poussin was a success.
3. That Jason was actually quite jealous of our achievements with the poussin.

The reason I bring all this up, apart from the need to brag, is that if we were in a television programme called Can’t Cook, Can Cook (I admit it’s not conceptually as brilliant as the original), in this instance the Can’t Cookers put up a pretty good fight.

I’m quite keen to know how the audience would have voted. So if you feel you can judge our efforts on the above photos, please do let me know.*

If you prefer simpler pleasures, maybe you’d like to draw me a picture of what you think a poussin looks like when it’s still running around?

*Keen judges may wish to take into account the fact that I was aided in the Can’t Cook kitchen by Alastair, who can cook, whereas Jason made several pizzas alone. In this case, I feel for the sake of fairness I should point out that Jason managed to lose the middle of one of his pizzas in the oven, along with half a jar full of anchovies – which was of course a huge tragedy.

Okay, I confess I’ve been catching up on Neighbours since I got back from Australia. Not obsessively – just to see the bits I learned I’d missed on the Ramsey Street tour, like Connor being horribly murdered and Sky getting pregnant by three different people.

The following line from an episode at the end of August leapt out at me. Paul and his children are having a jokey chat about home videos and Robert (who is, incidentally, pretending to be Cameron in this particular scene) makes a comment about Paul’s 80s mullet. Paul responds:

“I did not have an 80s mullet! Excuse me, it was your Uncle Scotty who was the king of the mullet. That was until nature took revenge and his hairline started receding…”

In case you forget who played “Uncle Scotty”, I would point out that this is a brazen jibe about none other than Jason Donovan and his current follically-challenged state.

It’s just one step away from joking about Aunty Charlene and her breast cancer…

Jimmy Carr has co-written a book called The Naked Jape in which he explains how to tell jokes.

Not only is this like Hitler writing a book on international diplomacy, it is clear from the extracts in The Sunday Telegraph that he has nothing interesting to say on the subject. Aside from recapping some classic one-liners that don’t work on paper, it’s full of well-worn observations about the power of shock, the importance of timing, and the fact that ‘k’ and ‘oo’ sounds are inherently funny.

There are, however, hints at why Jimmy Carr himself fails to be funny so regularly (however many ‘k’ and ‘oo’ sounds he uses). He advises, for example, that comedians should “project a demeanour of relaxed confidence”; so that’s what he’s trying to do! I’m sorry to break it to you Jimmy, it’s coming across as a demeanour of being an unpleasant, arrogant dickhead.

And on that subject, I read that David Blunkett’s book has only sold 768 copies in its first week of publication.

That isn’t very many.

While I am enjoying my continued feeling of glorious triumph over Blunkett (if you recall, my blog brought about his downfall), I would say that if you’re torn between buying his book and Carr’s, please buy the Blunkett – if he doesn’t shift a few more books he may redirect his poisonous personality (which in the world of literature just mingles nicely) back towards political ambitions (which, I believe his book makes clear, are to eventually run the world).

The writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 4: “Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?”

Well – actually there are quite a few ways of keeping warm alone. And whilst I applaud the suggestion of keeping warm by lying down with somebody – for it is certainly a good method and arguably the most fun – I offer the following alternative methods of keeping warm for those who are not in such a relationship during the winter months:

A radiator
An immersion heater
A blanket
A hairdryer
A wooly jumper
A dog or a cat
Or a hamster if you can’t afford the above (a big one)
A warm bath (more of a short-term solution)
Jumping up and down lots
Hugging your pillow and pretending it’s someone you like
Whisky

I’m sure there are others, but those are the main ones.

I’d like to congratulate Cambridge City Council – and presumably somewhere along the line Gordon Brown – for their most Machiavellian of brainteasers, the form you have to fill in to claim council tax benefit – a form which all but the most dedicated must surely toss aside, weeping “I’ll just pay the bloody money…”

Why is it, I wonder, that it is nowadays so easy to fill in a tax return, the form that enables you to pay tax (online forms, easy-to-follow instructions talking you through the different amounts you have to enter, an instant result telling you exactly how much you owe) when the form you fill in to claim back tax seems designed to trick you and befuddle you at every corner (demands for information about people you barely know, demands for documents you have long since lost or thrown away, approximately four hundred pages to fill in, each filled in with warnings that failure to do exactly as they want will result in a delay in the payment of your benefits and possible loss of British status)?

As an Oxbridge educated 27-year-old I just about made it through the taxing (ha ha) process of filling in the form, though I still have to get vital information from my long since missing Uncle in Australia and somehow fake bank statements that I got rid of at the turn of the century. And it took me two and a half hours to get this far, not including the bit where I hurled things at the wall and shaved off my eyebrows in frustration.

I’m thinking what a useful diversion these forms must be for pensioners, though. It’s not like they have anything to fill their hours, after all. And I understand the pension form itself is rated “IMPOSSIBLE!!!” on the sudoku scale.

Apparently over a third of all pensioners never claim it at all. I mean – how stupid can you get??!!

Two weeks ago Peter Jackson announced “I’m getting a little bored with films”.

This should at least enable him to empathise with the people who are unwillingly forced to sit through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

On Friday afternoon I heard that Catherine Stevenson – or Cathy Steve, to use the name she was fondly given by the Uncertainty Division – committed suicide last week.

Her long-term boyfriend Michael Nabarro has written about her here.

Catherine was the technical director for our 2003 Edinburgh show, Out of Your Mind – since then she often willingly stepped in to do the lighting for shows I was doing, including the first trial run of The Rise and Fall of Deon Vonniget and most recently the London dates of Impromime. I was always immensely grateful for her quiet efficiency and for her ability to work wonders with tiny resources within very tight time limits.

She tended to keep herself to herself – which, especially in the frantic world of theatre, was one of the reasons why she was such good company. To walk into a venue and see her calmly putting gels in lights, or to get in from a day’s awful flyering and sit down on the sofa with her, never failed to have a soothing effect.

I had no idea that she was suffering from depression – as Michael says, she kept it very well hidden.

I know that I’m one of many people for whom the world feels a slightly colder, darker place without her.

Everything seemed so simple on Wednesday. Even quite good.

Somewhere along the line since then things have got terribly complicated, via miserable.

Coincidentally, on Wednesday we finally got a piano. Almost instinctively, I went into my student-learned habit of playing a Bach prelude and fugue before breakfast every day – starting, for simplicity’s sake, at the beginning of book one.

I say coincidentally, because on Wednesday (when things were simple) I was playing the C major prelude and fugue; yesterday’s miserable mood coincided with the slightly gloomy C minor, though I didn’t make the connection at the time. But this morning, as I struggled into the twentieth minute of playing the C sharp major fugue, where even simple chords like C major are relabelled B sharp major and F double sharp gets way too much attention, I thought to myself “what does this remind me of?” and then I thought, “oh yes – my life”.

If this trend continues, I’m in for a rather gloomy, old-fashioned time tomorrow, but things ought to be quite manageable on Sunday.