Warming Up

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I am 57 and two thirds today and I have to accept that I am almost halfway through my life now and I need to work out what I want to do with the remaining 62 and a third years that have been allotted to me (if I live beyond 120 I am going to retire, so we're down to the last 6300 RHLSTPs whatever happens - including Book Clubs).

I am trying to decide if I am going to get back into writing again.

I know I am writing right now, but I mean writing books or films or sitcoms or plays.

I've had some modest success in this discipline, but also some frustrating disappointments (check out my ever expanding portfolio of unproduced scripts on Substack) and a few disasters and I've found it difficult to pick myself up and put myself through that emotional wringer again.

I've been fortunate to have some work made and some books published, but one of the regrets of my career is that I didn't get more stuff actually made and never got to the point where people were beating down my door for more. I have given up trying to work out if this is my fault or whether it's everyone else who is wrong.

Every now and again something comes along that gives me hope that something might be about to happen and today was one of those days. It could be a hugely significant day in my professional life or another of those days that led to nothing, but I had an enjoyable meeting with a man who clearly liked what he'd seen of mine and who was in a position to possibly give me a commission. It was a low key first meeting, where he told me what he was looking for and even though I had a couple of ideas ready to discuss, we didn't get round to doing that. But maybe this might lead somewhere.

He did tell me a very funny story about living in Hertfordshire, which as it isn't my own story I am not going to put out for general consumption, but I will add it to the end of the substack entry for paid subs, which I very much see as Warming Up - After Dark. Not that it's a sexy story. Quite the opposite.

I left the meeting buzzing with possibilities and walked to Victoria station. I needed some lunch and a wee and ended up in Victoria coach station, a place that was once familiar, but which I haven't stepped inside since the 1980s. Not sure they're cleaned the loos since then either.

It brought back vague memories of bus journeys to and from Bristol and Oxford. In 1986, on returning from Camp America, I had basically run out of money and didn't have enough for a single to Bristol. The lady coach driver (or maybe the woman at the ticket office, but I feel almost certain it was on the bus) took pity on me and let me buy a half, even though I had the beard of a 19 year old man.

But most of the memories were just of the general boredom and fear of waiting here, when London felt like the most dangerous place on earth. Now at 57 it feels like that again to be honest. Those taking the bus are less of an underclass today, as you basically need to earn 100K a year if you want to get anywhere by train, but it was (and I presume still is) a tortuous and painful way to travel. You need some time on your hand. And the resilence to avoid the kind of people who hang around in bus stations.

It was an adventure though and part of me pined for it today, though a bigger part of me just felt frightened and didn't like the smell of the dirty toilets.  The bus station may have been modernised (though I can't be sure) but the atmosphere was the same. Though the sandwiches were better and I am not sure how I'd have felt about paying £7 for a baguette and £4 for a coffee in 1986. I couldn't afford whatever the sliced white bread and instant coffee would have cost even then.

I then walked through the train station to the tube and was taken back to the 1990s when I lived in South London and used this station all the time. The bus station seemed distant past and the train station felt like I'd last been there last week, though there's only a decade between them in reality. I thought about the time that the IRA bombed the station and a man died and I thought, "it could have been me". So I think that dates the glory days. When we only had to worry about the IRA.



That was 1991.

Being 19 and being 24 feel like epochs apart. Whilst being 57 and being 24 seem adjacent. Even though I have easily lived that lifetime again.

Nice to be taken back to the past, and to have hope for the future. I wonder how I'll feel looking back at all this in another 57 and two thirds years.

RHLSTP with Poppy Hilstead, a perfect guest for this show, is now up here.

We are very bad for each other. I love her. Listen to me on her podcast.