Tuesday, March 7th

Yes, I’m back. Took Sunday off as my day of rest, spending the morning in bed with the paper. Lovely. I did go on my site later in the day, trying to figure out how to password protect posts. What I wanted was to password protect the whole Black Dog Diary, but it turns out you cannot do this with a category. Figures. But I did an experiment to see how this worked on individual posts and, having seen this, trashed the post. Apparently in the two seconds it was live, some keeners were alerted and sent me comments on this no longer existing post. Sorry about that.

After weighing the pros and cons in my journal yesterday morning, I’ve decided, for the time being at least, to keep what I write public. I’m hoping, after reading my rant on Saturday, that anyone who has spoken to me directly about anything I’ve written here will have received the message: This is like a play as far as I am concerned. There is a fourth wall. Please stay off the stage. If you have anything to say, leave a comment. Thank you.

Speaking of plays… Oh, my god. Only the tech and dress rehearsals left and then it’s time for the world premiere of An Unhelpful Complication. Holy shit. I think we’ll be fine and by “we” I mean me. At the joint rehearsal at the venue on Sunday afternoon, I had to call for a line again. A line I’ve never once before missed, a line that follows on perfectly from the previous line. I just froze. I don’t know if Charlie did something slightly different that threw me or if my brain just seized up, but after that I couldn’t get my mojo back for the first third of the play.

Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, trying to rehearse under the full fluorescent lights is distracting. We’ll have the stage lights tonight, so fingers crossed.

And now the bad news. After writing Saturday’s rant I went to the gym. When I got home from the gym I started playing stupid fucking spider solitaire. No slow build from Facebook scrabble via Guardian crossword puzzles. Just straight to it. For about three hours. Sigh.

Came back from flubbing my line at Sunday’s rehearsal and did it again. Came back from the gym yesterday and did it again. Sigh.

For what seems like at least a month I didn’t give the bloody game a thought. Zero temptation. All it took was a couple of annoying encounters and a flubbed line (and absolutely no excuse yesterday) and I was back at it. Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers. I am not going down that rabbit hole again.

That’s it for today. I really do have things to do.

Oh, and in a complete non sequitur: John Oliver had a fabulous interview with the Dalai Lama on Sunday night, reminding me how much the man loves to laugh. If you didn’t see it and can find it online anywhere (tricky as it’s an HBO show and they really don’t mess around with their copyright) do watch it.