We got the news on Wednesday afternoon. Yes, we could still use the university’s auditorium for our show, but the price had quadrupled. This, for us, amounted to the venue being launched into outer space. It has taken us a year to raise enough money to meet the original price. Quadrupled? As well suggest we hire La Scala. The project…

Today the future of our pantomime hangs in the balance and with it more than a year of hard work. With only three weeks to go to Curtain Up a bureaucrat at Ca Foscari University, from whom we rent the auditorium, has decided that our application failed to comply with the regulations. No matter that this would be our…

I just spent the morning in Paradise. With less than a month to go till curtain up on Cinderella it was time to get our Lord Chamberlain kitted out in something suitably grandiose so off we trolled to a local costumier who has very generously helped us with previous productions. Atelier Pietro Longhi, http://www.pietrolonghi.com is my idea of…

I just worked out that this will be my thirty sixth Christmas as a proper grownup with my own kitchen and my own peccadilloes but only the second time someone else has cooked dinner. Two dinners, actually, because on December 20th my youngest daughter is heroically gathering together and feeding all those who will be scattered on…

And so she emerges, blinking, into the daylight. Is it a coalface worker? Is it a nocturnal woodland animal? No, it’s Laurie Graham, newly-delivered novelist! She shuffles across to her desk. She peers into her Outbox. Nope, nothing there. It’s gone, despatched, flushed down the great Internet U-bend. Furthermore, it has reached its various destinations. At this point…