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Well, I'm an up-to-the-minute typeofagal, hanging out in the East End on a Saturday afternoon.
Weeks of sulking because Rough Trade appeared to have abolished me by no longer having Suburban Pastoral on their website were nipped in the bud by a simple phone call.
'We haven't got any left', they said.
So I put on my best 1940s dress and slinked down to the tube station, entering a commuter's reverie as soon as I sat down.
'The next station is Ramshackle', announced the smooth-toned tubelady.
'Boneless Banquet For One', announced a KFC poster. What a brilliant insult! I thought of at least five people I could use that one on.
All too soon, we arrived at Aldgate East and I crumbled on the cobbles as I walked down Brick Lane, unused to high heels. After successfully delivering ten CDs to the beardy chap at the counter, I resisted the urge to rummage to see what was there, and fell into a vintage clothing shop instead. It was buzzing with people but had masses and masses of not very nice clothes- or so I thought until I stumbled on a pair of perfect men's boots, size six, a size too big but to nice to let anybody else have. I tried them on and looked like Olive Oyl, but there are worse people to look like and I resolved to put all the boots I have that are a size to small on Ebay as soon as the winter sets in (that's quite a few boots).
Perfect logic! So you will hear me clumping and thumping around as my feet echo in the void where my toes should be, and I will probably trip up as much in my big boots as I did in my tottery heels.
I had a moments' nostalgia seeing the signs pointing to the Toynbee Hall. That's where I had one of the best experiences of my life, working on a childrens' musical called Identikit with Lester Square. The director was a brilliant guy called Kevin Dowsett, and he was generous enough to share his raw script with us and let us help to cook it. It was about schoolkids- in a nutshell, the prissy boy became a teenage tearaway and the naughty girlfriend became a policewoman. It was a blast writing the songs for it- we divided them between us and became mildly competitive but I think we both wrote some great things as a result. Kevin insisted on one song, a punk one, having a Fisher-Price Activity Set solo, and that one fell to me to do. Lester Square's finale had them all sailing off on a ship of fools, and I had the idea of the young guy's graffiti-d name, Nigel, being flipped upside down and looking like a ship, the other way up. It actually worked. And we got to sit in the orchestra pit with 2 girls from the ILEA Youth Orchestra on Bassoon and French Horn, Nick Smith (love him, wish he was still with us) on keyboards, Simon Smith on sax, Tony Hepworth on trumpet (LOUD), Lester Square on guitar and me on bass. It was such fun, believe me, looking up at everyone's chins and getting the giggles for no reason a all just because we weren't supposed to.
There were at least 20 young people in the cast and they grabbed their songs and ran with them like a pack of terriers and a set of ham bones. The shyest boy, Damien, got cast as the sex bomb and I wrote him a fake Elvis song full of innuendo and a fake Tom Jones song called (ha ha) It's Unusual.. He suddenly turned into a total extrovert and boomed his songs out like a pro, picking up a clutch of admiring girlies in the process.
I think we only performed it on two nights, but the rehearsals were fascinating: watching a good director get the best out of his cast was a real education. I missed it when we stopped and started looking for a job as a musical director, but actually it was the writing of the songs and fitting them like a fashion designer to the people who were going to wear them that was the best fun.