Time flies!

We are almost a week into September, and it’ll soon be Christmas!

This coming weekend is the read through for panto (oh, yes it is!). I am hoping for a good turn out; it’s a great script, we’ve picked some cracking music and the annual pantomime is for me the highlight of the theatre’s calendar. It will be colourful, noisy and hectic, and gone in a flash (literally, as far as the Genies are concerned!).

It’s unbelievable that we have got to the panto season already, though. It seems not long ago that I was away at Easter and not even considering the niceties of rehearsal schedules, community songs and the appropriate dimensions of a dancer’s bra top.

Someone once told me that the older you get the quicker the time passes and that certainly seems to be true. Each year it seems to go quicker and quicker, and events creep up on us and pass more swiftly than the year before. Of course that can’t be the case, after all 24 hours is always going to be the same 24 hours lengthwise or worldwide chaos would ensue, but it does seem like it and I don’t know what to do to slow it down. At this rate, in another few years things will have finished before they have begun!

Mentally, I don’t feel any older than I did in my late twenties. I think I make better, more considered and less judgemental decisions now and my experience in dealing with other people and situations means I do things differently, but in my mind I am still slightly alternative and non conformist. In reality, I am probably a typical middle England Tory living in an increasingly unrealistic fantasy world. But the real difference is in my physical capacity, which is definitely reduced.

I went to bed at 8.30pm the other night. The combination of dieting (which saps your energy anyway), extra walking with the dog (actually all walking with the dog is extra because I didn’t do any walking at all before) and just the pace of life are getting the better of me. I am looking decidedly haggard, or at least I think I am. The Hubby, bless him, always tells me I look beautiful but he’s a consummate liar about that sort of thing and will say anything to make me feel better (ie stop me whinging) so I have to take it with a pinch of salt (either that or he really thinks so, in which case he’s deluded and should be committed).

Does everyone feel like this? Or have I been unlucky and allowed myself to get into an unfit, overweight and isolated state and my chickens are coming home to roost?

If other people feel like it they don’t let on, so perhaps I just don’t have any backbone and ought to pull my socks up and have a stiff upper lip (a few slightly confused metaphors there, but you get the drift). I’ve always been a cope-er, but at the moment I feel like I’m sinking. Or maybe this is the state that everyone goes through when they try and do something about their health and get fitter, because doing exercise knackers you and then you don’t have any energy for anything else until you are fit enough not to need to do the exercise in the first place? It’s always been one of life’s paradoxes that the more you exercise, eventually the more energy you have.

I’ve obviously got some way to go! And lets hope that I don’t arrive before I’ve set off.

Where does the time go?

I can't believe it's a week since I last blogged. Of course, I have been busy terrorising children for the last week. Not, I might add, by lurking down an alleyway with a bag of sweeties and a pad of chloroform going "Come here, little girl", but by poncing around on stage dressed in a big black frock and scary black wig and occasionally shouting "Oh, no I didn't". Much to my gratification, in every performance but one there were at least two small children that had to be evacuated to the bar and were too afraid to come back in! For the baddie, that's a result!

The older I get, the more I don't know where the time goes. Perhaps it is an indication of age that time passes more quickly the less you have of it left, although I am very hopeful that I have several more decades still to go. I can well believe it when oldies say that they have never been so busy since they retired; I have just had five days off and I can't think how I have passed the time (except for the evenings, when obviously I do know where I was - see above).

It is scary to think that panto is over for another year and I now have to start thinking about what I want to direct next year. I am being nagged by the Player's committee for my choice, and I haven't had five minutes - or so it seems - to even think about it. I am going to have to force myself to work on it in the evenings and if I want to finish writing something, I am going to have to work on the train. I did do something this evening but all I have done is decide what I had already written is not good enough and started again virtually.

There seems to be so much to do, quite honestly I don't have time to go to work. I could quite happily spend all day doing Operatic Society work, learning lines for 'Midsummer Night's Dream', working round the house, writing rubbish like this and painting what I optimistically call ' abstract art'. I firmly believe I have at least one novel in me, probably a bodice ripper, and I have several more panto scripts to write.

What I really need is a moderate lottery win, enough to pay off the bills and to stop work and allow me to do all of this at leisure. I'm sure I could make some pin money out of it and get a lot more satisfaction than doing what I do now. If you write for a living, you can do it from anywhere there is an internet connection so perhaps I could get broadband put in by OTE in Crete and work from our apartment there. I wonder whether all that Cretan sunshine would affect my mood? Of course I'd miss The Hubby, but I could pop back and see him from time to time when I had to come back to London to see my publisher. My publisher - doesn't that sound grand!

For the moment, it's all a pipe dream. Too many mortgages, too many children and too many responsibilities. But in time, it's an achieveable dream and I too, intend to be busier as I get older doing more of the things I want to do. And I'll keep writing - I like it!