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We finally got our puppy today. Because our life wasn’t complex enough. I had met Wolfie (Professor Wolfenstein) before, when she was only days old and really tiny, but due to not having a home and being at the Fringe we haven’t been able to take her until now and she’s huge.
Her brother Huxley has been taken in by my in-laws and is slightly crazy and unruly and very difficult to train, so I was expecting Wolfie to be hard work. But she seems to have a lovely temperament, with soft and sad brown eyes and none of the high-jinks.
Having left it so late though, Wolfie has got an emotional attachment with the family that were looking after her and her mother and the siblings who remain in that home. So the sadness in her eyes was in large part down to this cruel separation. And she wasn’t the only one who was upset. The man who owns her mother was very emotional at the handover. We felt cruel on all kinds of levels. But hopefully the adjustment will be swift.
We went for a walk together and then Wolfie came back and once off the leash did two big, soft shits in our garden. It fell to me to get my hand in a plastic bag and pick them up. I gave it a good go, but the soft ice cream like texture and the long grass meant I had to have a couple of goes at it and I ended up with dog shit on my hands. It was incredible how quickly I accepted this as my new normality. This is my life now. Clearly up another creature’s faeces. And not feeling too squeamish about having dog shit on my hands. I was squeamish enough to wash it off though.
My in-laws came round and were a bit envious of the temperament of our dog. We felt like we’d lucked out. Though things were to take a bit of a turn, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s blog to find out about that.
My radio 4 sitcom Relativity was on Radio 4 today. I hadn’t listened to it before, allowing the producer Polly Thomas to take the responsibility partly because she’s ace, partly because I have been so busy this year and partly because I find it difficult to listen back to myself. I was intending not to listen to it today, for fear of mortification, but as I drove to the supermarket I dared move the dial to Radio 4, just to see how it sounded and ended up listening to the rest of the episode. I was very pleased. It held together well and I couldn’t even really tell which scene had had to be added in (and written) at the last minute because the recording had come up short (in the end I worked it out because it had an in joke about tennis elbow - Fenella Woolgar who played my character’s sister had been complaining of the same condition that week). It felt Radio 4 enough (though to be fair, I’d more or less written the show that I wanted, with a bit less swearing in it - I don’t think I’d even appreciated that it would be going out at 11.30am), but with a bit of weirdness and edge to it in places. And I wanted a first episode that eased people in a little bit, so we can surprise them later. It was such fun to record and such a great cast and it had me laughing because I’d forgotten loads of it (especially the stuff written overnight).
You can listen to it here. If you saw “You Can Choose Your Friends” (I mean, did anyone?) then some of it might be familiar, but this is the series that that show might have become (and episode 4 is heavily based on the non-filmed pilot episode I wrote after the 90 minute film). It’s the first scripted thing since YCCYF that has been produced (aside from “I Killed Rasputin” and 10 minutes of “Everything Happens (For No Reason)”), so that feels like a triumph in itself.
And if you haven’t got enough Herring-based stuff to keep you going, RHLSTP with Katy Brand went up today.
We got our 1000th backer tonight, but need about 200 or 300 more to join us to get to the target. Any excess money will be used to increase the crews’ wages and to go into the tank for the 2018 series of the show.
