Thursday 8th November

Birmingham was my destination this grey and murky morning, as I got in the car at 6am and heaved her onto the M40 - a road I'm quickly becoming intimately familiar with. Three shows a week is somehow much, much heavier going than two shows a week, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that in the old days we used to do two shows a day, five days a week, usually with a drive in the middle of the day. I wonder whether I'd still be able to do that now? And what I would look like by the end of the week if I tried?

The school I arrived at was one of those forbidding Victorian constructions whose main hall nestles right in the centre of the building at the furthest point from any given entrance, and which involve a more than usually strenuous get-in. And it was in Birmingham, which we know from experience can add a whole new kind of forbidding to any working day. But on the positive side we were doing Children of Iron, the Victorian play, which suits this kind of big, forbidding old hall, and whose workshop I enjoy the most since everyone gets plenty to do even with a cast of thirty. They were hard work, though far from the worst we've had (who were also in Birmingham), and against all our expectations they really pulled it together in the afternoon and put on a pretty good show. But it was still a hard enough day for me to need a trip to the pub once I got home.