Fyse’s Floating Face

Fyse July 22nd, 2005

I actually finished the new Harry Potter on Monday night, but that still put me behind several of the rest of the cast. Needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was kept guessing until the very end, but I’d better not say anymore than that for fear of spoiling it for any of you. A friend of mine has an interesting theory worth mentioning, but I’d better give time enough to be sure you’ve all caught up.

Rehearsals are progressing, if not as smoothly as we’d all like. The main problem is the rate at which we’re losing cast members. A couple of days before rehearsals began we lost the lead bass, and now one of the sopranos had to go home for personal reasons. There’s been frantic shuffling of cast to try and get a workable solution, but if I say that the original cast size was only eleven then you’ll understand the problems this poses. The production team are trying to put a determined, optimistic face on things, but they’re obviously having to change things drastically, and most disappointing is that the show will never be as good as it could have been. The chance of getting anyone else at this stage is tiny, but I think they’re trying nonetheless. I guess we’ll have to get by the best we can…

Tonight I’m off to a friends 21st birthday party, and hopefully the trains will be running well enough to get into central London (can’t quite believe the news recently). I’ll have to remain reasonably sober however, due to a rehearsal again first thing tomorrow. Kate, the director, is very keen on starting the day with strenuous exercise of various types, including vicious stretching and running round fields. I guess better physical fitness can only be a good thing with a four week run ahead of us, but it is a somewhat rude awakening.

It’s terribly frustrating trying to type posts on my phone, and I do worry the quality of my writing is suffering as a result. Obviously my lucid prose fairly shimmers normally (that goes without saying) and I do apologise if my usual high standards are not maintained over the next few weeks. This is obviously technology’s fault, not mine.

• from the field
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Fyse July 17th, 2005

My summer of furious thespian activity has now officially begun, and I am back in Cambridge ready to start rehearsals tomorrow morning. This evening was spent making vague acquaintance with the other members of the cast, aided of course by alcohol and pizza. The weeks ahead consist of a fortnights rehearsal before a long train journey north for the four week run in Edinburgh. I’m not quite sure what to expect from the show, a new piece of writing premiered earlier this year, but I understand my character is ‘evil and scheming’. I’ve never played a villain before, so that ought to be fun.

The show is an operetta written in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, meaning it is cheesy and corny in the extreme, with a pun rate far in excess of safe levels. I heard mixed reports of it’s first run, and didn’t see it myself, but it ought to be entertaining if not taken too seriously. Time will tell how it is received at the festival, but they’ve got an excellent production team who have been working hard on the script, so fingers crossed for critical acclaim. Maybe. It’ll be fun to perform, anyway!

This is my first post from my phone where I can’t check it gets through ok, so I’d appreciate a comment to reassure me everything’s gone smoothly. All comments get emailed straight to my phone, so feel free to tell me how much you’re enjoying my pearls of wisdom throughout the summer (though I unfortunately can’t reply). Right now I must go to bed, since rehearsals start bright and early tomorrow. Oh, and one last thing. For some annoying reason the posts via email all claim to have been sent an hour before they in fact were, so it is actually later than it seems. Midnight still isn’t particularly late, but it’s been a long, hard day. I just can’t keep up the frenetic pace of my youth…

• from the field
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Fyse July 16th, 2005

I’m actually a few days late on this, since my first post was on July 13th 2004, but at least I didn’t miss it entirely. I remembered on the day itself, but haven’t till now had the time to craft a retrospective worthy of such a momentous occasion.

Yes, it really is true. A whole year has passed since I began this humble enterprise, since I found a new and exciting outlet for my inexplicable, uncontrollable urge to fritter hours into the ether. Sitting idle last Summer, I determined to hone my HTML skills by constructing a personal homepage, to which the blog was added as something of an afterthought. Recently it has become a diary of my activities and day-to-day life, but at first it was far more bizarre and random, with posts coverings such diverse topics as a sensational new sport and a German marksman. Fortunately I seem to have found some semblance of sanity since those early, hedonistic days.

A little known fact is that I actually began my first blog in February ‘03, but it was very short lived and is now lost to the world (or rather wisely deleted). I’ve discovered that the key to a rewarding blogging experience is to read the blogs of other people, which I never did first time round, and hope that they then come and visit yours. I guess the egotist in me (who enjoys writing tales of my life for the world to peruse) doesn’t quite see the point if nobody takes the appropriate amount of notice. I had a few abortive attempts at keeping a daily diary as a child, but soon got bored with the whole idea. I never trusted the privacy of it enough to write anything even vaguely personal, and it became a perilously prosaic account of how “I did this, and then did that. After tea I did that again, before doing something else.”

Here certain of my college friends would no doubt say I haven’t broken from this pattern, but I hope that wouldn’t be true. At the very least, a newly increased tendency toward exaggeration has tempered the comatose inducing anecdotes of my youth, and there are a select handful of heroic people returning to read these pages regularly. I may not have a large readership, but I’d like to think it is of high quality. Who needs a million nutcases when I’ve got you guys?

With a little organisation I could have rigged things so that this was also my 100th post, but instead it is only number 97. (Irritatingly my blogging software is miles out of sync, giving this a post ID of 199, but that’s because of the countless test posts I’ve done at different times. Actually, not countless. Rather easy to calculate. But I digress…) In my previous 96 posts, I have written 32,246 words, whilst you lovely people have left 7,706 words in 201 comments. (Actually of course around half those comments were me, but I do like to be polite and reply. It’s not just me trying to boost my comment count to appear more popular. Really, it’s not.)

A brief word about the name, since it is rather bizarre. It came from the original design of my website, which featured my disembodied head in the top corner, grinning and staring somewhat disconcertingly (a precursor to my current incarnation as a cross between the sun from the Teletubbies and an Oompa-Loompa deity). My unholy visage obviously had a profound effect on one early reader, who shunned the original title ‘Blog-based Procrastination’ and linked to my site with the wonderfully enigmatic and alliterative ‘Fyse’s Floating Face’. Kudos to Dan (aka Mr Moxie), on whom I bestow the title ‘blogfather’, whether he likes it or not.

Now I have purchased the floatingface.com domain my blog has a permanent home, hopefully for years to come. I read some bloggers who have been posting for as many as six years, and I wonder whether I will still be hear, tapping away on my keyboard so far into the future. The great thing about this blogging lark is the reciprocated reading and the online communities it creates, and I expect I’ll continue to update this site as long as there are people reading it. So, in true over-emotional Oscar-speech style, I’d like to thank most of all you, the public. Or rather, that small subset with sufficient masochistic tendencies to keep revisiting this godforsaken backwater of the world wide web…

• blogging
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Fyse July 13th, 2005

I’m still working on getting posting via email working properly, and it’s proving bloody tricky. This time I’m experimenting with posting multiple photos in a single post, and I figure I might just leave this one up, rather than delete it straight away like the others. I thought I’d send a couple of the half-way decent photos I’ve taken on my camera phone, both of which are on my TextAmerica blog somewhere as well.

Taken on the river in Darmouth, Devon.

Dark clouds gathering above my street.

• from the field
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Fyse July 10th, 2005

There’s not a whole lot I can say about the events of Thursday, and certainly nothing of value to add to the millions of words already written. I’m sure you’ve all read more than you can stomach, but Ian McEwan writing in the Guardian on Friday morning is worth reading, as is London blogger Diamond Geezer, who recalled his post in the aftermath of the Madrid bombs last year.

As for my own experience, I first heard of events at about 11 o’clock, and then spent the next seven or eight hours in front of the TV. I fielded a couple of calls from concerned relatives, checking that my Dad wasn’t in London (he often commutes through King’s Cross), but fortunately he was working from home on Thursday. At around 16.30 my brother rang from Greece, on holiday with friends, having come back from a boat trip to hear news of the attacks. He was fortunate in getting straight through, but a couple of his companions waited several hours before receiving reassurance. St Albans is only 20 minutes train ride north of King’s Cross and consequently has a huge number of commuters, including the parents of several of my brother’s friends.

I guess with events such as these everyone has a story to tell, and can count themselves fortunate if it is only of friends stranded or near misses. The only member of my family in the vicinity was a cousin, above ground on a bus at the time, who safely found her way to her office soon afterwards. As for my friends, I have a few working in central London this summer, one of whom I was speaking to earlier this evening. His usual route to work takes him on the Edgware Road line, but by amazing luck he decided on Thursday to test an alternative route. By the time they shut down the trains entirely he was above ground again, but the timing of his journey would have probably taken him on the very train that was attacked. Stories of such narrow escapes are not uncommon and it is sobering to think of the flip-side; those who ran onto the trains as the doors were shutting, or just happened to have a meeting in London that day.

I left a host of unanswered questions in my last post, and I will be sure to address them next time. I’ve managed to find some work for these few weeks, yielding tales of fridge wrestling and fork-lift riding. On Monday I travel to the exotic climes of Swindon. These tales and more in the next exciting dispatch from the Floating Face…

• in the news
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Fyse July 2nd, 2005

There as been an appalling interregnum. I have no excuses, except perhaps congenital laziness, but there now seems a quite overwhelming amount to catch up on. I wont bother trying to fill you in on everything, but I’ll endeavour to cover the salient points.

Much fun was had in Cambridge post exam results. It was when recounting my last week or so in college to my sister that I realised quite how much I had done, and consequently spent. A black-tie ball, a champagne and jazz garden party, punting on the river watching fireworks, more garden parties, a space themed fancy dress party (I was a planet by virtue of green face-paint and a frisbee on my head) and a BBQ or two. I’m sure there was more, but my recollection is overlaid with the haze of an almost perpetual alcoholic stupor.

I have now accepted the role in the Edinburgh production, and it is in fact one of the lead tenor roles. I don’t know all that much about the show as yet, and am rather concerned at the lack of communication from the production team. I keep hoping to receive an email detailing plans for the rehearsal period, but reliable information has been hard to come by. I’m getting worried (probably entirely irrationally) that the whole thing has fallen through due to financial or casting issues. I’ll keep you posted on that.

As for the production in Cornwall in September, I am looking forward to it massively but think that perhaps I ought not to do it all. There is extremely lucrative employment available to me at the beginning of September, and should I not work properly at all this summer I would be left in dire financial straights for the whole of next year. I’m sure dropping out would be the most sensible decision (I’m one of six tenors in the chorus, so that wouldn’t be at all disastrous for them) but as my sister said this morning, I’m only young once. Again, I shall let you know the conclusion to my pondering.

Exciting other news is that I may be living out of college next year, sharing a house with friends. I’m not a big fan of living on corridors, and far preferred my second year living in a flat. My ideal would have been to live in one of the college owned houses with some post-grad friends, but since I am still an undergraduate I wasn’t eligible for that accommodation. It may or may not be wise to live out, but it’s hardly as if dormitory style accommodation has proved conducive to hard work in the past. Perhaps a change of scene will be beneficial to my work ethic? My prospective house-mates have already offered to bully me into greater effort, and one of them is about the most studious and hardworking person you could ever meet. Maybe she will prove to be a good influence. However, all these plans rely on finding a suitable four bedroom house. Once more, I shall have to let you know how that one pans out.

I’m now back in St Albans and looking for a job, but with only a couple of weeks before I (hopefully) head back to Cambridge for rehearsals, employment is proving hard to come by. I’m definitely gonna have to try and find work in Edinburgh, otherwise starvation will be my fate. That or getting stranded in Scotland, unable to afford a ticket anywhere. (Speaking of which, if I do both productions this summer I’m going to have to travel direct from Edinburgh to Cornwall. That’s a pretty long way, by British standards. Fortunately there are other people in both casts, so I wont be making the journey alone.)

I’ll leave you with the good news that I’ve set up posting via email, so thanks to my trusty mobile phone you wont miss a scrap of news this summer. Just think of the fascinating posts from Edinburgh, with pithy insights into the largest arts festival in the world. You’re salivating, aren’t you? I know I am…

• work (or lack of) , university life , thespian life
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