Artistic endeavour

It was a full week. The Chadwicks, the office rock band, met for a rehearsal on Monday night. After a couple of glasses of Dutch courage, we gathered in a local rehearsal studio – a damp cave, redolent of rock n roll, under some railway arches. The studio is called Alaska. Trains thunder periodically overhead. A sign on the door says “This is not a massage parlour”. That gives you a flavour of the place. It is wonderful. Humming amps, battered speakers, the thump of a bass guitar, the muffled sound of a band rehearsing the primeval rhythm of a rock song. Sniff and breath in the sweat and damp, plug in your guitar and away you go. There are many ghosts in this place. The five singers sang. We played our rock songs and drank beer and wine and had a grand time. Only Jon and me were left at the end. I was a bit shell-shocked.

Tuesday night was a rehearsal for my Edwardian melodrama, The Friends of the Dragon. Five people sitting around a kitchen table, neat, freshly printed-off scripts, red wine. The idea was for me to explain the message and themes of the play and for us to talk about the characters and their motivations, before doing a read-through of a couple of acts. We never got round to the read-through. Four hours of animated conversation ensued, table thumping, gesticulating, everybody talking at once. At one point, there was a fully-fledged and passionate argument on a racial theme. It was initiated by my use of a word – a quite innocuous one – which was current at the time of the play, but is no longer considered acceptable. By the end of the session, the scripts were tattered and covered with wine stains. I remember us all linked with our arms around each other's shoulders singing Major Tom (the Bowie song) at the tops of our voices. It was a bit too much. The play is emerging rather slowly from these encounters with our psyches. Too slowly. I wish that we could rehearse without getting hammered.

Meanwhile, at home, my horned man mask is slowly emerging from papier mache and chicken wire. We have selected the music. Night on a bare mountain, some Django Rheinhardt jazz and the sound of a spooky ambient choir. The play is in four acts. Watching a recent production at the Brockley Jack theatre, which did not have a discernible story really and a vague sense of place, has helped our little troupe. We plan to put on the play in the living room/dining room of my friends' large Victorian house. The first time I saw the space, I said to myself ... it's a theatre.

PS My most recent editorial is linked to below. I took me about two years to be disillusioned with Tony Blair, but only two weeks to be hugely disappointed by Gordon Brown and to realise that he represented and, in fact had been a well-spring, of what we call “New Labour”, just as much as the smiling Blair.

Out on the street, the public's contact with local institutions, constantly denuded of power by unelected surrogates, has become frighteningly remote, society has become more unequal and divided than ever and the UK's democratic deficit has grown larger.

Words from bright new ministers ring more and more hollow, legislation looks increasingly desperate and disconnected. There is a sense that time is almost up and that the political well has run dry.

Lies, damn lies and local government – click on this