I'd gone to London last night to see A Little Night Music. It's by Stephen Sondheim and I'm keen to see as much of his stuff as possible. It always gets so well-reviewed, but although the Americans quite rightly treat him as theatrical royalty his stuff doesn't get done here very often. So although I like the think I see a lot of theatre it's only the third of his musicals I've ever seen.

He can be tricky though. It's very wordy and clever, and although the music is beautiful it's not the kind of thing you'll whistle on the bus on the way home. It takes a bit of work, but I'm up for the challenge - and last night it paid off!

The production I went to see had been really well reviewed and was a bit of a must see, but the tickets were expensive - £60 for a decent seat. But when the man from Brighton visited we talked about theatre and he was telling me that a friend of his went and discovered they're finding it really hard to sell tickets for it. Next stop lastminute.com, where I got a ticket for £27.50 - in the second row!

The reviews were right - it's stunning!

There's an older man who has married an 18 year old girl, who remains a virgin despite being married for 11 months. His son from his first marriage is training to be a priest but is in love with his stepmother. The maid loves the son. The older man meets an actress who he had an affair with many years previously. She's having an affair with a soldier. The soldier's wife is a friend of the 18 year old. The actress has a daughter who lives with her grandmother, who despite 'liaisons' with Dukes and Kings, finds her daughter's life 'untidy'. So far so complicated. In the second half they all meet for a country house weekend, where things unravel and happy endings take place.

The music is beautiful, the songs are great, the plot is light and joyous, but also sad and wistful. It's a proper grown-up musical about love. The cast are magnificent! The only person who I'd heard of was Maureen Lipman, who played the grandmother, and who spent the whole time in a wheelchair being bitchy. She's fantastic! But even better was the actor playing the older man - he was so handsome! At the period costume required thin legged trousers that did something wonderful to his thighs. At one point he's striding the stage in a nightshirt and I had to make sure my tongue wasn't hanging out! I wasn't expecting that.

The best known song from the show is Send in the Clowns. I knew it because it's something of a standard now, but it's even more heartbreaking when you see it where it belongs in the show. The woman besides me sobbed all the way through it. Here's Frank Sinatra doing it - you might need a tissue.

My first stop in London was the National Portrait Gallery to see an exhibition of paintings by Gerhard Richter. I'd never heard of him until he turned up the lyrics of the last Pet Shop Boys' single. Turns out he's been painting for 60 years, so I'm a bit of a late-comer!

The paintings are gorgeous! They're all portraits, mostly painted from photographs. But they're slightly blurred - it looks like he paints them then runs a brush across the canvas so all the brush strokes go the same way, and so the edges blur, like an out of focus photograph. Apart from a couple of family pictures that are left unblurred, but they still seem to have no brushmarks. They're beautiful and glamorous, and some of them are just in black and white, which makes a nice change for a painting. It's a pity it's only a small exhibition.

Then I stumbled on a fantastic room full of identical paintings. They're all of the same woman, a saint, and have been painted by loads of different people and collected by a painter. Assembled together in the same room they're just stunning. You just can't help laughing and grinning at them, they're utterly fabulous!

After that I needed food. I really fancied Mexican, and there's a lovely Mexican restaurant just round the corner from Trafalgar Square. But when I got there I couldn't go in. I don't know what's happened to me - I seem to have lost my confidence. Hard to imagine I once went to New York on my own, and now I won't even eat in a restaurant alone! So instead I got a sandwich and had a picnic in front of the National Gallery.



And then there was just time to buy some Bruce Springsteen CDs before the theatre.

I'm sitting on Downham Market station, far too early for my train, reading the paper, when someone shouts my name.

No one ever shouts my name, I'm not the kind of person who meets people wherever they go, I don't even bump into people in Tesco and I seem to spend half my life in there.

I look up - it's Sarah's Mum! Sarah's Mum is fabulous in a way that other people's mothers often are but you never think your own is.

She's going to London too, so we sit next to each other gossiping all the way. And at one point she does something with her face that is so reminiscent of Sarah it makes my head spin.

It was gorgeous to see her!

I had an appointment to see the pension man today, which must surely be the low point of an already quite dull week.

I didn't even mind that it is worth less now than last year - only an idiot who never reads the news would have expected anything else! What bothers me are two things: the fact that all the figures assume I will leave a pension for my partner when I die, or the fact that they assume my partner is a woman. For additional annoyance they've even assumed she's three years older than me!

To be fair the pension company have swapped the word 'wife' for 'partner', but the pension man hasn't. Shouldn't he have been on a course about this kind of thing?! Okay, he's from the Fens so possibly hasn't been exposed to much gaiety but for goodness sake! It's not even that it's homophobic, because that is deliberate, it's just ignorance, and there's nothing more depressing than ignorance!

I also hate the fact that they don't have enough imagination to think you might actually want be single! "Well they have to assume something!" the pension man said, but why do they have to assume I will be partnered?!

I'd been spoiling for a fight earlier in the week, but by the time I was finished I just felt too exhausted to care!

This week hasn't been going well at work and coming home to do nothing but waste the evening on the internet hasn't been helping. I know I haven't got the willpower to be in the house and resist the internet so I went out.

I went to Norwich to see a play called Sign of the Times. When I first saw it advertised I wasn't that interested, but yesterday someone I work with went and really enjoyed it so I thought I'd go too. Apparently now I'm taking theatre tips from 25 year old straight cricketers! Well to be fair to him he was right - it was great and I really enjoyed it!

It only has two people in the cast, playing an older and a younger man. The first half finds them on the roof of a building putting up a sign. The older man has been doing that kind of thing for 25 years, whilst the younger one is on a scheme and is only there because he was too late to apply for a job on Emmerdale. At first they seem to have nothing in common with each other, but as they get to know each other it turns out they both have other things they'd love to be doing instead: the older man wants to right a novel, whilst the younger one wants to paint and sing.

The second half takes places five years later. The older man has been unemployed for some time and goes for a job only to find it's the younger man interviewing him. At first it seems like his life has been a success, but inevitably neither of them have been able to do what they really want. There's a happy ending of sorts, although it's more bittersweet than happy.

It's really funny but also sad and nostalgic. It's helped by the fact that it's set in Yorkshire, because there's something sad about a Yorkshire accent, or is that just Alan Bennett? It's all about work and how your life doesn't turn out quite the way you'd hoped it would so was perfect for my mood this week.

It's written by the man who write Calendar Girls, which I saw and loved recently, and the older man was played by Stephen Tompkinson whose done loads of telly and is great. There was hardly anyone there though, which is a complete scandal!

I'm glad I went, and must be spontaneous more often!

I'm an old misery today!

After two weeks of being sociable and lots of interesting going out this week was always going to be a bit tricky. My big mistake was hoping that other people would fill the void. I'm old enough to know better than that! As a result I feel irritated and disappointed, more with myself than anyone to be honest.

It sort of reminds me of a Madonna lyric - which is pathetically gay of me: "Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another." It's not how I feel at all, but it's similar if completely wrong. It's also a good excuse to watch Madonna running round in her underwear:



And she wonders why they don't want her to adopt. Go Madge!

It's not all bad though: the Morrissey gig that was cancelled last Monday has now been rescheduled, much to everyone's amazement! But not until October. I may go mad waiting that long!

Meanwhile back in the real world I'm eating lemon Swiss roll because I'm too lazy to make tea. But they don't call it Swiss roll in Tesco, they call it sponge roll. And yet the chocolate equivalent is called Swiss roll. Have the Swiss got something against lemons?

The car went for an MOT today, which meant I spent all day anxiously wondering whether it would pass or not. It passed, and thankfully they managed to make the fog light I didn't even know I had work.

It's been a bit of a car few days lately. Saturday afternoon I was expecting to have the windscreen replaced, because it had a chip/crack in it that was too big to repair. But when the repairman turned up he said it wasn't too big at all and fixed it. Which was great, apart from the fact that I'd already paid my excess for a new one! Thirty minutes on the phone trying to get it back came to nothing - apparently accounts people don't work Saturdays.

And in the middle of it all I've been trying to change insurance company, which means I've spent a lot of time on the phone listening to music whilst on hold. The AA have a preference for light classical that made my brain melt, whilst Adrian Flux had a 70s disco thing going on. No prizes for guessing which one I'm going with.

It's been a dull day!

Another night another Morrissey gig. Someone at work asked me if that wouldn't be a little repetitive. I said, "no" although the voices in my head were screaming, "no of course not, I could watch that man every night of my life and never get bored because I love him and he his God!" Some things are best kept to yourself.

And of course "no" really is the correct answer. As with any live show every night is different and it really does depend on the venue. Monday's cancelled Albert Hall gig would have been triumphant - an iconic venue, first London gig in two years; Great Yarmouth was always going to have novelty value; and last night in Cambridge was always going to be boisterous, because it's that kind of venue.

I got there just in time for the support band, and because the venue was filling up slowly I got quite close to the stage, maybe twenty feet away. But the second Morrissey came on stage half the audience went flying past like a runaway train and started jumping up and down, and kept doing it for the whole gig.

I love the jumping, I can never understand people who have no physical response to loud music! Although I don't get involved in it myself - it makes me scared, makes me feel like I'm drowning, so I stand on the fringes where I can jump a little and let the real jumpers bump into me. Perfect metaphor for my life! :-)

The set was essentially the same as the previous night, with three different songs. Morrissey was in great form - he sounded fantastic, he looked fantastic, he is God!

I can't believe that my Morrissey week is over so soon! I've been looking forward to it for months, so inevitably I feel a bit deflated today. Why didn't I just get tickets for the whole tour?! Let's cheer myself up with a little Morrissey nudity:



What a fine figure of a man! You're the Daddy!


HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRISH!!! XXX