Breakdown

I broke down in the car last night. Not in the sense of calling out the AA, more in the sense of starting to excitedly talk shite to my rather surprised passenger. Sorry! I think the sheer quantity of interesting moments that occurred to me in the last week became like a massive stomach full of excitement that I needed to spew forth.

What I really needed was some rest and relaxation, a bit of me time, a chance to get used to the speed of every day life. The month of October appears to have lasted forever, since I've packed so much into it. I couldn't work out how, since I was spending so much time away from home, I didn't have a massive pile of washing to do. I realise now that I was only actually away from the home for about 2 days at a time and I was rushing washing through on my return. I think that I had perhaps gained the time perception qualities of a fly.

Recovery

The answer comes down to one thing for me. Cooking. What I needed to do was get myself to Asda to buy some ingredients. I then needed to get home, and prepare me a fine meal. This I did. Chicken Tikka Masala, with my special extra ingredient - eight quarters of vine-ripened tomato. Okay, that's two full ones cut up, but the point is that they must be in quarters, added to the mix just before it's time to simmer it. The simmering slowly cooks the tomatoes and they keep some of their body. Lovely.

Here is last night's achievements at Ashley Towers:

• Made my curry
• Fixed the porch light, which has been off for weeks - I even washed its dome
• Restrung my guitar, ready for future gigs
• Ran a couple of loads of washing through
• Did the ironing
• Watched the movie of the musical version of Little Shop Of Horrors
• Played on the piano for a bit
• Did some reading
• Had an early night

A lot of that doesn't seem possible for a period of time that started after I arrived home at around 7.30pm. Perhaps I exaggerated the early night thing. I was tucked up in bed before 1am, which seems like an early night for me. It seems that having the temporal perception of a fly is useful in terms of getting things done.

Horrors?

The Little Shop Of Horrors is a wonderful movie. While I found one or two scenes lacked a little something, in general it was terribly impressive and quite moving when it needed to be. The direction was clearly effective (thanks to Frank Oz), the writing is fantastic, both libretto and music, but then I knew that. LSOH is one of my favourite musicals. It was interesting to see why they'd removed certain songs from the stage show for the movie and quite sensible of them to rework the story to fit the screen - it worked as a film as well as a musical.

The cast was just amazing. You had all the Saturday Night Live types, like Bill Murray, John Candy, Steve Martin and James Belushi (I'm not sure how many of them were in SNL, but they're clearly the mid-eighties comedy rat pack) and then there were wee performances from certain well known British actors (it was filmed at Pinewood). Danny John Jules (Cat from Red Dwarf) was in there somewhere, as was Ronnie Le Drew (George and Zippy from Rainbow). Miriam Margolys was more evident as the big boned nurse to Steve Martin's dentist.

I really enjoyed the movie and I'm glad I took the time to watch it. Highly recommended.