Last night I finished a notebook I've
kept since 29 December 2011 (when I was in Egypt). I've kept
notebooks since I was in my teens, and find them very useful to refer
back to – pinching ideas from my past to pitch anew to unsuspecting bosses. It's not a diary, but
flicking through this latest volume reminds me what I was working on
and having ideas about, and what preoccupied the insides of my head.
There are the day-to-day notes as I
wrote one novel, 10 plays and three short films, marking down new
clever wheezes or things I'd need to go back and fix. There are
pitches for yet more plays, films and comics, notes on what I was
reading or watching (much of it later blogged here), fragments of
conversation – real and imagined – and turns of phrase or
interesting words or ideas.
As an insight into the terrible mess of
my brain, here is a selection:
21/1/12
Lord Wallace of Tankerness is asked if
he knows of a case of suicide in a young offenders' institution and
responds, “I associate myself with expressions of regret” -
[House of Lords, 24/1/12; col. 987.]
12/5
Page
21 of A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) refers to “con. men” -
NB the full stop.
Undated
Do we know what we vote for? Have we
read the manifestos, interrogated the data and understood the
arguments? Generally, no; we are lazy. We buy newspapers and follow
Twitter accounts that confirm our opinions. We avoid complex or
counterintuitive issues and the testament of evidence in favour of
the glib and easy. We elect a smile, a soundbite, a cipher, not a
problematic and uncertain truth. Rule so we don't have to think about
it – that is your mandate, nothing more.
10/6
Doctor Who - The City in the
Clouds ([Rough idea for a
Companion Chronicle set in Season 1, but beaten to it by clever Jonny
and his Voyage to Venus)
In space, maybe on zeppelins linked
together to create a city in the temperate zone on Venus – a city
in the clouds.
All a bit Dan Dare
(which Ian has read, confiscated from his pupils), and they realise
that this futuristic world is in the early 17th Century, the same
time as Galileo is on Earth recording the phases of Venus for the
first time.
Barbara falls in
love and Ian has to take her back to the TARDIS (he uses her mum Joan
to convince her to leave). Her lover will think she died.
They have to get
down to the planet's surface – the hottest place in the Solar
System – to recover the TARDIS. Need local people's help. They
don't use money there, it's all about reputation and respect – like
crowdsourcing, or your number of followers on Twitter. So the Doctor
and Susan etc. have to be storytellers, scientists, busking their way
in the society, getting themselves known – and only for the right
reasons. Loss of face can ruin everything. That's where we meet them
at the start of part one, the Doctor as a Punch and Judy man.
[Before I knew about Jonny's story, I
realised that was too much like Patrick Troughton's role in The
Box of Delights before I knew
Matt Smith would do some Punch and Judy business in The
Snowmen.]
21/8
Video going round of a guy mocking
iPhone users for taking photos of their food. We're often fooled into
thinking we're part of something because we consume it. There are all
the tweets and fan activity involved in watching a TV show (a passive
experience), or the adverts that sell the idea that by eating a
burger or drinking a fizzy drink we're part of the Olympics.
21/10
After the accident, people would say to
him, 'Do you dream you'll walk again?'
And he would consider – as if it were
the first time he'd been asked – then say, 'No, only of being able
to fly.'
14/11
We used to tease her
That in the freezer
Below the croquettes and fish fingers
and peas
She kept the bodies of one or two
geezers
Who thought they'd got lucky
When she invited them home.
But we were very wrong -
It wasn't one or two.
Something inside her
Moved like a spider
Spinning them in and dispatching them
Then cooking them up for her guests
Despite her reservations that these men
Could be counted as fair trade.
She liked the big-boned ones
Who made lewd remarks
And promised not to treat her
respectably.
Their steaks were good for marbleising
And she saw putting them on the menu
As a service to women her age.
27/12
Rewatching The Snowmen.
Why does Madame Vastra look a bit different from how she did
in A Good Man Goes To War?
She's a lizard and sheds her skin, so looks a little different after
each shedding. (Also, it's considered rude to point that out.)
4/1/13
Billy Connolly, interviewed by Mark
Lawson, describes “middle class” as “the kind of people who had
dressing gowns as children”.
7/1
Michael Rosen on Radio 4's Word ofMouth investigating stenography and Hansard (in the Commons). Stenography machines are phonetic and you press keys
simultaneously. Need 200+ words a minute to be accurate and keep up
with speech. Some stenographers are certified to 250 words. The
quality is “down to a price, not up to a standard”.
