Seal with a Kiss

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 1
Watching: Match of the Day
Hair day: windswept, in the walker’s style

Man, what a term. Three educational projects over, a hilarious audition for Shlomo at the South Bank (where I aced the vocal side but possibly came a leetle unstuck in the high intensity street-dance-off, ha ha ha!), and a curation of Gobsmack at the Forge in Camden (sadly skeletal in audience size but rich and nourishing in its line-up of Ben Crawley, Woodpecker Wooliams and Kay Grant). I also had my official EP launch at my nearest and dearest artcafe, The Gallery, lent out to me for an evening of You Are Wolfishness and CD-selling, which was super-lovely. This fortnight I have to cram in a recording with Metamorphic, my birthday, a gig in Leeds, a week in Sweden on the PRSF music exchange course, teaching at Aldeburgh, and this week attempting to finish a commissioned magnificant, currently called my magnifiCAN’T…

Yorkshire Tripper
A swift Easter trip to Yorkshire aimed to flush out London’s toxins. We went to Spurn Point to walk its flaccidly remote length; one wind-emaciated side was scattered with erroneous flotsam such as blue rubber gloves, a freezer, and old war defences tumbling in great blocks off the dunes. The south side, marshy, wide and calm, had a rock that looked like a bloated, beached seal. We thought we’d investigate; Andy, kneeling over it, shouted to us that it was a dead seal; said corpse promptly rolled over, opened it eyes and gave us the fright of our lives. We stood over it for a while, wondering whether it was in trouble, whilst it huffed and snorted at us in an uncanny impression of my dad. As we turned to leave, it belly-flopped over the beach, in the wrong direction from the sea, but I’m sure he knew what he was doing. Here is a picture of Simon.

Flamborough Head dished up sheer limestone cliff-faces choked with pretty kittiwakes - whiny baby monitors on wings - and hundreds of guillemots, plump sheeny monochrome types, lined up on vertigo-inducing ledges, beaks to the cliff and shuffling into each other, bored stiff of the sea-view.

A wayward countryside walk from the pub at Wetwang (which means, in too-good-to-be-true style, ‘a slap in the face with a wet fish’. In Norse.) took in yellowhammers, three hares, one of which came, well, haring down the track and stopping dead 10 metres away when it spotted me, before doing its ‘Bewitched’ thang, transporting itself in seconds far, far away over the horizon. We also caught sight of a buzzard skating the air, a pair of aloof sparrowhawks, a large tawny something-or-other on hedgerow and a keen-eyed kestrel. We managed to skirt the rainclouds all day as they gently pulled their jellyfish trails of rain, or sneezed themselves like charcoal powder across the sharp-focus view.