House mouse count: 0
Current skin colour (1-quite pastey, 10-thoroughly ethnic): 7 but fading

Just got back from Palm Springs in sunny California, up in the mountains outside LA. What a lovely little holiday, I'm brown as a button and I got six new songs sketched, sat by the pool. There's one huge benefit being married to cabin crew: you get global, upper class travel for free. Fun as this is, I treat it as work time for some very good reasons. As a composer, you either do your writing around everything else in your life, or that is your life and everything (and everyone) else fits around the writing. Either way, you're constantly battling against all sorts of interruptions, noise or time constraints. The most annoying thing is when you're busy getting something down that's in your head, you're interrupted by something, which in hindsight is thoroughly unimportant, then you look back at your page or the screen and it's just not in your head anymore. It's gone, lost forever in the creative ether.

However, sitting in an enclosed seat pod on an 11 hour flight to LA, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic, surrounded by nothing but your whim's desire, and most importantly white noise, allows you a glorious freedom from the world that you can't find anywhere else. It's a totally artificial environment, it's comfortable, it's completely removed from your everyday, you can't go anywhere, you can't distract yourself, and it's perfect for writing. The only interruption you'll ever get is a smiling face presenting beautiful things to eat and drink. What further bliss could a composer with a robust appetite ask for?

Coming to think of it, I've written the majority of my music onboard concession flights, although I should point out that trying to write anything when sat in Economy is totally impossible and utterly inconcievable. The moment somebody sees music dots or scribblings of a strange nature, they can't help but stare, which is very off-putting, especially as they're practically sat on your lap back there. And worse still, you get stupid casual comments like, "oh, so you're writing the next big hit are ya?" or "I play a bit of guitar, used to be in a band years ago." Would you go up to a person reading a newspaper and say, "oh, so you're catching up with the latest headlines, are ya?" No you wouldn't. It's rude. They'd give you an odd stare and hope you'll go away, and quite rightly so. Rant over.

My joy was also doubled by the fact that on this trip I was working on a musical revue show about flying and being cabin crew. What better place to write it? I'll keep you up to date with that as the demos start to take shape, but there’s one attached to this blog, so turn your speakers up and have a gander of the ear. It’s a song for a girl (so ignore my voice) called Back To Back. Our heroine's standing there exhausted on the second of her two back-to-back flights, with her trolley in the middle of the aisle, struggling to do a meal service on her own and realises her life back on the ground is falling apart.

If you like the song, please feel free to share the link to this page on your profile on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, what-have-you. And if you know a good girl singer who'd like to record a demo of it, drop me a line (contact)

Meanwhile, a first draft of The Puppy That Ate Christmas is complete at last. Next, it'll go into workshop this year and then go through the usual edits and rewrites to keep everybody happy. The publishing end of things needs sorting out too, but our agent is handling that admirably, and hopefully it'll go into production for Christmas 2009. I can't wait to actually sit in front of it and actually watch it, like an actual audience member. That's going to be a proper thrill (unless my songs turn out to be terrible, in which case I'll leave before the houselights come up).

In other news, not much. I had a cull of Facebook "friends". It was brutal. I looked at the list and I thought, come on Jamsheed, you couldn't even name these 329 people, let alone call them all friends. So I got delete-happy. It was quite cathartic really, deleting people with a stroke of my index finger, like some power-crazed mafia king. At this point, I'd normally keep typing, but given you won't know if I culled you off my list (mwahaha), the subject is at best only mildly interesting to me. Therefore I shall sign off.

Goodnight, and don’t forget to have a listen to the song!

x

Being humane requires more effort than I thought. Every time you catch a mouse in a trap, the trap’s useless until it’s empty again. So you have to take it for a walk far away from the house and let it out, bring the trap home, wash it out, stick some more peanut butter in it and set it again. Given there’s a foot of snow outside and there may be an untold number of mice in the house, this could go on forever. So I called the council and today the rat catcher paid me a visit.

He was not unlike the child catcher from Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and of course knew all about mice and rats and other pests, but was resolute in telling me all I could want to know about them too. I suppose, if that’s your vocation. He seemed friendly enough, but as he laid the little cardboard traps in all the likely places, I could swear a glint of world-domination malevolence crossed his withered face. Anyway, him and his halitosis will be back in three weeks to examine the results. I just hope I don’t start finding dead mice everywhere, I’ve grown quite attached to the little things.

Anyway, back in music world, I did a piano gig at a hotel in London last week, where usually I’m playing to a small bar full of American tourists or bored looking business folk on some boring conference jolly. But this gig was different: the entire staff of Delfont-Mackintosh were having their late New Year party around my piano, all 130 of them. Now if, like me, you’re a musical theatre boy/girl you’ll understand my excitement. If you don’t know who Sir Cameron Mackintosh is, then look away now and close this browser tab immediately.

The company owns, amongst other things, seven West End theatres and their current slew includes shows like Billy Elliot, The Sound Of Music, Oliver!, Phantom, all the biggies. At the time of evening I was playing, the party consisted of all front of house, directors, producers, box office, accounts, management folk. All the cast members and backstage people from the shows hadn’t finished work yet. As their entertainment for this part of the evening, I was suddenly faced with something of a musical dilemma: What do I play? Should I play it cool and stick to jazz, swing and pop songs, blatantly avoiding the musicals altogether? Would they notice that? Would they appreciate it? Would they understand I’m trying not to stereotype them and I’m not trying to get into their hearts using the music of their trade? Would they get that I was just playing it cool?

Or should I just abandon all decorum and self-consciousness and roll out the Barbra-Streisand-sings-songs-from-the-shows routine, with bonus chorus number medleys of everything Cameron Mackintosh has ever produced? Well, put a few theatricals in a bar with free drink and you can imagine what inevitably happens. By the end of my gig, I had the front of house staff from the Prince Of Wales and the producer of the Chinese run of Mama Mia belting out everything from Abba to The Little Mermaid around the piano. It was great fun! To be honest, I’ve never been that loud-voiced, piano-man, all-round entertainer type, but once you’re rolling along, you just have to go with the crowd. I find it a bit destroying, but it does make me wonder how I’d feel if I ever saw people gathered around a piano belting their way through songs that I had written. Would I be proud? Would I be appalled? I’m hoping I get to find out one day.