Talk To Rex

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??!!

I don’t really have anything to add to what James has written. Catherine was always friendly, keen and a pleasure to work with and be around. She will be much missed.

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.

So. Did I really have a conversation with someone about how annoying Dan Mazer is, or did I dream it?

So…I’ve had something of an altercation with one of my churchwardens over some equipment that was “safely” left in the vestry and which was then sold, in the way that you don’t with somebody else’s stuff. The details are not important. Naturally, the altercation has been expressed entirely through polite, friendly, simmering unspoken resentment, because we’re Anglicans.

But I was discussing with Alastair a polite, simmering note I received yesterday from said churchwarden, and he told me the whole thing was outrageous and that if he was me he would “dip his pen in poison” and retaliate through the powerful medium of words.

I just smiled and shook my head, enjoying my aura of quiet grace.

This morning I went for a swim and with every length found my strokes becoming more aggressive and Alastair’s poison pen running paragraphs past my slightly sleep-deprived mind. When I got home I put them all into a letter, which turns the heat under “simmering” up to “boiling slightly” and does away with the friendly bit. I then angrily sent six or seven emails to various unrelated people in much the same vein.

So…er…basically, if you’ve received an unaccountably rude email from me this morning…well, sorry.

And if you read about any great rifts in the Anglican communion this week – that’s my fault.

If my current housing situation has ever been summed up in a single photo, it is here:

Knowing that we were moving to a house just down the road from a swimming pool, Alastair and myself decided when we were still touring Australia that it would be a fantastic idea if we started a fitness regime of regular visits to the pool, in order to make us healthier, fitter, better-looking people. Nobody believed we’d ever really do it of course – but then, nobody thought we’d really have a projector and watch films on the big screen in our living room, and we’ve proved them wrong on that count as well.

So yes, I’ve been swimming a lot. In fact, since starting I’ve maintained a very healthy five visits a week. When I first went I was appalled to discover how unfit I was, with a couple of lengths finding me grasping for the side of the pool and spluttering for breath, fighting the growing nausea and pain shooting through all of my muscles.

I’ve kind of got over that phase. On Thursday I felt a particular breakthrough when I realised that I was still ready for another twenty lengths after my usual routine. (Alastair’s routine, incidentally, seems to have settled into a routine of drinking until two in the morning, getting up four hours later to prepare for supervisions and possibly fitting in a quick guilt-inspired trip to the swimming pool and observing that he’s not enjoying it any more.)

I put my progress down partly to the yellow T-shirted attendants who stand around the pool watching the activity with a sardonic air, and who I can feel staring at me every time I stop for a breather, as if they’re thinking “why’ve you stopped? Is it to perve at all the glistening naked bodies?” They are not aware that my eyesight makes it impossible to perve at anyone, so I have to maintain continuous swimming to persuade them that I’m just a decent member of society trying to get fit.

Today saw another exciting development. Because, being a saturday, the flumes were open. I haven’t been on a flume for over ten years and I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to have a go today, awkward though it felt when everybody else taking advantage of the flume fun was half my age or younger. Still, I ascended the stairs (under the scornful gaze of every serious swimmer in the pool, plus the disapproving looks of the yellow T-shirts), feeling a growing goose-pimply excitement – though that might have been partly to do with being wet and cold.

At the top I was politely told that I needed “an inflatable” to use the flume, which would be found back at the bottom. So I had to go through the embarrassing descent (under the same disapproving inspection, real or imagined) and nearly gave up on the idea altogether. But I found myself a doughnut-shaped inflatable blue thing and ascended again (presumably by now the serious swimmers were having a good laugh at my expense and the yellow T-shirts were on the phone to the police).

All the safety notices explicitly said I had to go down feet first, so that is how I finally set off on my blue doughnut. My journey at first was rather pedestrian – but then remembered how it works and started using the corners to accelerate, swinging my blue doughnut up them like a bobsleigh.

Unfortunately, I had failed to anticipate the affect this would have on a doughnut-shaped inflatable, and as I rounded the second corner with increasing speed I spun round and found that I was hurtling down the flume backwards, just like it said not to in the safety notices. I tried correcting my position with my feet but I was going too fast by that stage and with every corner I spun further out of control. This, by the way, is why bobsleighs are not circular.

I finally corrected my position on the final bend, thus avoiding possible death and a certain telling off from one of the yellow T-shirts.

I went back to swimming lengths.

By the way, the answer to the question which is no doubt on the lips of the ladies (and some of the men) reading this is: yes, I now have a swimmer’s physique, with muscles rippling through my taut, firm body. Thank you for taking an interest.

This is quite clever – spam that says “hi, you’ve got some new content on MySpace”. What a neat way of tricking vulnerable idiots (ie: children) into click-click-clicking on random links, and down-down-downloading random viruses.

Except that anyone under sixteen thinks email sucks and wouldn’t read it in the first place. So maybe not that clever.