And breathe...

And relax…

Aaaand - you're back.

Good lord. Has it really been a month? I think the time lag between entries gives you an insight into my working methods. Chaotic, haphazard, and pressured.

It's been a busy time. Mainly house stuff, a lot of which involved an apparently infinite number of boxes, and more of which meant spattering paint over most of my clothes, but I’m largely over that now because it’s BIGGER than our pokey flat, and we have a GARDEN. With decking and a shed, so slippers, golf buggies, and an abiding interest in laburnums clearly lie in wait.

I also moved my office into a room at the back of the house, which I naively thought would take 2 days, and has so far taken two weeks. However, I do now have a view of a holly tree and lots of space (once I’ve ploughed through some of the infinite boxes), and I’m sure that once I’ve actually done some work in it I’ll be very pleased.

Lots of other work stuff going on too. Afterlife 3 isn’t going to happen, which is a shame but no big surprise. Partly screwed by the schedulers I feel, something that I think was confirmed when the final episode of series 2 was sandwiched between The X Factor and Parkinson. Not exactly a seamless segue for your average Saturday ITV viewer, I’d have thought…

My swanky storylining session on the swanky new series at the swanky hotel was great fun and yes, the hotel pushed all the swanky buttons, including multiple shades of taupe*, and handsome staff dressed in metrosexual black.

2 execs, 3 writers and a development exec, with a basic idea, but basically starting from scratch. Brilliant! The two other writers are co-producing and intimidatingly full of good ideas, but fortunately they’re also generous, funny, and very good company. This team have worked a lot together so I was very much the new boy at school, but no-one pulled my chair away, and my satchel was still on the same peg at the end of the day. We all left excited, and me at least badly hungover, always the sign of a productive work session. Unless you’re English Dave, in which case it’s a sign of a valiant attempt at career suicide.

We’ve had another day since then, throwing out most of what we’d got excited about at the first session, but hey – that was a good thing. A couple more days to come, where we can throw out the remainder of what we’ve done so far, then to drafting in January.

I’ve also done a lot of meetings with other companies, which has been good fun. I don’t usually do that many, mainly because I’ve been lucky enough to be going from gig to gig without much time to spare, but the excellent decision to drop the last project has given me the time to see what else is out there. And to find out what just what it is that my agent does. Get meetings, it turns out.

Now the haunting smell of bacon calls, along with a shrieking toddler. Home office joys. More soon.

* or are we calling it magnolia, these post-ironic days?)