Monday 15th October

One of the things about The Autumn is that you can eat porridge. Theres nothing I suppose, to stop you eating porridge any time you like - it's great when you roll in from the pub, for example - but the warm, stodgy, comforting oatiness of it is really geared to the dark end of the year. When you crawl out of bed at half five, in the dark, before the heating has come on, and you have a long arduous day ahead of you, a big fat steaming bowl of porridge sets you up for the day like nothing else. And if you neglected to eat anything the night before but went to the pub instead and had several beer, porridge both packs out the growling gap that is your stomach and soaks up any remaining booze that might be swilling around in the pipes. There is the downside that porridge takes a good ten minutes to make, if you're doing it properly, which means having to get up that bit earlier still - you need to calculate your sleep to porridge need ratio quite carefully.

On reflection, going to the pub last night was a bad idea, but with the application of porridge, I was out of the door at 6.45 to pick up Sian at the Travelodge and head to Maidenhead. At a posh girls school today, to do Children Of Iron, the Victorian play in which we recreate a Victorian schoolroom where the childs get beaten with a cane before we send them to work down the mine, take a brief sojourn on the canals and finally experience a mining disaster where a number of the supporting cast die. Luckily we save most of them, so we can all have a jolly morris dance at the end. Being a posh girls school, our group of supporting actors were used to being in plays and produced an exceptional performance in which they remembered nearly everything (which doesn't happen often). When this happens it tends to catch us out a bit, because we suddenly realise how many of our own lines we don't know properly.

Once we'd got packed up, around five, we drove back up to Wenlock so we can have another day's rehearsal tomorrow. I managed to get some work done on my class logs in the evening, which surprised me.