What's happening at YTYT

Here comes one of the most vacuous blogs of my career…(incidentally the blog has now been going for 16 months and I write one a week so that’s a lot of blogs to compare it to…) Are you ready for it? Well here goes…I liked the round of applause at the end of the Hepworth performance on Thursday…that’s it…see I told you it was vacuous… I liked it because it was warm and heartfelt…I liked it because it told me that the audience got what the piece was about, that they understood the writing, that they appreciated the performance and that they’d enjoyed the cumulative effects of all of those things combined. I liked it because it was from lots of pairs of hands. It was also enhanced by the acoustics we’d battled to manage vocally in the rehearsals and the performance…I liked it because it was from a mixture of staunch fans and people entirely unfamiliar with our work and I liked it because it was backed up with so many positive words from so many people. I put writing this off a day as I...

It’s been a snow week made up of many snow days and the effect of this on people has been fascinating…some have railed against it…but most have delighted in it…at least at first…and some have used it as an excuse to unhook from their ordinary lives. I’ve been amused at how quickly the novelty and delight wore off for some people…what was magical on Tuesday became the worst thing in the world by Thursday but I’ve been greatly intrigued by how quickly people assumed they had an absolute right to this time “unhooked” from their real lives. There is something about human nature that when something is offered, something nobody saw coming, all too soon it seen as something they are entitled to. Having Tuesday off was a complete bonus and then for most people Wednesday was thrown in as well…what good luck…who would have foreseen the reaction of anguish and indignation that ensued when people had to go back to school/college/work – whatever represented real life for them on Thursday or Frida...