mostly david ephgrave

The journey to the station this morning felt like 'Attack of the Secondary-schoolkid Zombie Apocalypse'. Everywhere I looked, teenage drones lurched toward the road; a sea of identically-uniformed nearly-adults with impractically over-lacquered hairstyles and a lack of spatial awareness. Thank God I was in a taxi. If I hadn’t been, they’d have swarmed and subsumed me as one of their own. I’d have come out the other side looking like one of the younger cast-members of The Inbetweeners. Imagine that. It made me wonder where they all came from (their parents’ house) and where they were going to (school). They were a frightening sight en masse. I’ve never seen so many moody-faced people dressed in blue. Who says it’s a neutral, calming colour? I was on my way into London for my first audition of the year. It was a reasonably good start. Nobody was harmed in the process. The only shock was discovering how much the train fare had gone up:...

I was very sad to hear of the death of Sue Townsend. I loved her books as a kid. For me, Adrian Mole was more fact than fiction. We had all the same neuroses – and while I never fell for an aspiring politician called Pandora, I definitely empathised with Adrian's bad luck with the opposite sex. (I didn't measure my extremities as often as he did though; I promise.) It’s amazing that a middle-aged woman could capture the voice of a teenage boy so perfectly. Perhaps she was some kind of witch. Whatever her secret, Townsend managed to make Adrian both likeable and irritating in equal measure; with a story that was as tragic as it was comic. I felt as if I'd grown up alongside him. He was the friend that I'd never met. Yet I somehow had unrestricted access to his diary; weird, that. It’s strange to think that the force behind such a big part of my childhood has gone. At least we still have her wonderful books. I hope it ...