Professor Higgins opens the My Fair Lady Song, “I’ve Thrown A Custard in her Face” with a long string of Damns, which I am in a mood to repeat. I have a ten-ton deadline hanging over me suspended by a single human hair. If I don’t stay and stare at my screen all day every day until I have bled out a screenplay I will have my nipples torn from me like medals from the tunic of a disgraced officer and Shame will know me for her own.
Douglas Adams liked deadlines: “I love the loud whooshing noise they make as they go past,” he said. My deadline has whooshed past four times and this is now IT. I deliver or ELSE.
I remember putting the final full stop to the last essay of my final exam at university and thinking to myself, “There! That’s that. I shall never have that awful exam feeling ever again.”
Ha!
How was I to know that not only would I have it always but that it would seem to get progressively worse? I’m not complaining, I just … oh wait, it seems I am complaining. Well, I don’t mean to. I mean merely to observe. Most of us in the world of work have these horrors looming over us. Reports to be written. Shelves to be stacked. Orders to be completed. Calls to be made. Duties to be done. Many of us wake in the mornings with a deep terrible feeling of foreboding inside us: hot lead seems to leak into our stomachs as we contemplate the day. When I’m in acting or presenter or comic prancer mode it isn’t so bad – but writing. Writing is bloody.
So you must expect a few days of radio silence from me on Twitter and here on my site as I descend into my particular hell.
See you the other side. I hope. Enjoy your bank holiday weekends and try not to think about work if you can help it.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.
