Temperature in Kos: 24c Temperature in Hull: 17c. This is the first time I’ve checked out the weather to see what’s in store but, ooh, it’s lookin’ good and skimpy shorts will be de rigeur. Can’t wait to get there now but the caffeine-fuelled days here are getting longer ‘n’ longer and Saturday seems to be getting further away, not closer. Reading for the trip is Hunter Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear but might be having too much fun and be doing too much writing of The Worst Seat in the House for that. Have just realised that the title of the one man show could be read as a piece about an Spanish car being driven inside someone’s gaff. Maybe Seat will sue me? Maybe the Humber Mouth will want their money back if I don’t get round to writing it? Maybe I’ll stay in Kos until post-June 25?
Watched Neil Simon’s I Ought To Be In Pictures last night. A good play and not a sign of a Walter Matthau-a-like or Sgt Bilko-style gag anywhere. It was one of those plays that triggers off all kinds of memories and thoughts – which sounds like I was bored sitting amongst the blue rinsers but I wasn’t. Very interesting. On the drive back, feeling inspired, was running ideas past myself about my own work and jotted a (very) basic outline down for a new thing when I got in, in between eating toast smeared with Quorn pate, slurping down tea and racing through the final parts of Andrew Oldham’s 2Stoned before collapsing, exhausted, in a heap with thoughts of the 1960s merging with plays from the 1980s and me up on stage thanking three people for turning up to watch me on the same night that England played their Euro quarter final all swimming around my muddled head. Used the words ‘mental illness’ in a review yesterday and am still wondering if it’s unPC. No one else has brought it to my attention so I guess not.
Met a man from Yorkshire Coast Radio (or something like that) last night who told me that a penguin had been stolen from the Sea Life Centre in Scarborough yesterday and was found, dumped, dehydrated and hours later, in someone’s garden. It is now in intensive care. Its life partner, back at the Sea Life Centre, will die of a broken heart if its mate doesn’t make it. How sad. Poor penguins.