There was the carrot of extravagant praise, and then the stick of “Please try not to treat those people whom you think are idiots as if you think they are idiots”. I sort of nodded along with it, but as I was listening, I was plotting my extravagant revenge (the only person who could have done my internal monologue justice at the time was John Webster, if that helps you imagine the scale of the thing).

One of the things that I have to do is visit the people in the rest of the world with whom I work, so now (once the Summer holiday dates are finalised) I shall be planning a global road trip (as long as they’re places to which I’d like to go) with Old Friend at Work, who’s also been given the green light for a world tour at the company’s expense, taking in Istanbul, Singapore, Moscow and Buenos Aires. Could be worse, eh?

Now: I don’t WANT to have my review on Friday – and the reason for this is simple. I see-saw violently between craven, chuckling, moist-eyed delight at any and all praise; and a rich spectrum of emotion at anything even wearing the small pocket-handkerchief of criticism. These emotions are:-

1. “Fine. I’ll leave then. I’ll just fucking GO!”
2. Something akin to that teen romance classic “Well you can’t break up with me, because I’m breaking up with you” when I get MY objections to all and sundry in first, in order to render their disapproval meaningless.
3. A Raffles air of “My dear chap, I couldn’t give the slightest testicle hair of a shit about the opinion of these intellectual midgets.” (to be twinned with a supercilious smirk that would make Maria von Trapp punch a baby.
4. Hot-headed, red-faced, prickling rage of “No but that’s SOOOOOO unfair, right. That is just SOOOOOOOO not true and it is just rubbish, yeah? And, oh GOD! That is SO out-of-order, because do you know what, yeah? I WROTE THAT PRESENTATION BACK IN MAY!” that would shame an eleven year-old girl.
5. Cold, shark-eyed vengeance on those who have criticised the way that I roll my eyes in front of junior clients.

Of course, in my mind, I have decided that when I enter The Room for the review, I shall be wordlessly nodded over to the guillotine, hastily erected in the corner for one day only (Fearless Leader sitting at its foot, knitting and cackling toothlessly), and will shuffle my head into place, not with any noble thoughts or words akin to “It is a far, far better thing…” so much as “But I DID feed back on the creative recommendation for Russia before the deadline. This is SO unfair…”

If I am still employed/here on Friday, I will, of course, present the unlovely truth for your enlightenment and disdain.

In readiness for this, we went off to Argos and chose him the football of his dreams (bright orange, covered in Nike swooshes and Premiership endorsements), which came what I can only describe as “flat-packed” – or, I suppose, a better descriptor would be “uninflated”. It was the work of but forty minutes to get in the car, drive to Richmond (where my parents live), borrow their pump, get back in the car, and get back to Chiswick – so that was GREAT. By the time we had a workable (playable?) football with us, there was only going to be an hour and a half for the football itself, it seemed.

Never mind: he’s only seven and even he’s not up for a full ninety minutes.

Daughter put the brakes on: “What am I going to do?”

“What would you like to do, darling? You’re very welcome to play football too.”

“I don’t like football.”

“Well… what would you LIKE to do?”

(The likelihood of her saying “Play on my DSi” had already been addressed through a previously negotiated, adhered to and mandated “Electronics Embargo” for Sunday – so that wasn’t going to be a problem.)

“Can I bring Baby in her Push-A-Chair?” (This is Daughter’s phrase for her doll’s pushchair, which, it has been decreed, will go EVERYWHERE that we do).

“Of course you can, Darling – but we need to go now.”

With this, Daughter responded with a look of horrified urgency (as though she’d just been informed that the house was on fire and we needed to get DOWN these four flight, through that locked door, and out into the streets, carrying only what we most valued) and bolted up to her bedroom. She came bumping back down, with Baby, Push A Chair, Umbrella, Changing Bag, Changing Mat and Travel blanket. Baby had enough kit to see her through a month on a cruise liner, rather than an hour in the park. However: we were ready, and so we left the house, with Youngest Son jumping along like Zebedee with his new ball.

Daughter was not ready for the trip to go slowly. In fact, it soon became clear, that Daughter had envisioned this trip as the sort of excursion that would make Shackleton blench and think twice.

“STOP!”

(The men all wait)

“Her blanket has come loose. She’ll get a cold.”

We pause and look on as she re-arranges the covers with a fair bit of clucking and tutting – ensuring that Baby is toasty warm and safe. Eventually, the caravan moves off again.

“WAIT!”

Another break: I turn around to see her, feigning anxiety and resignation.

“The sun is in her eyes.”

It becomes clear, relatively quickly, that Daughter does not have a plan on this one. It’s simply a statement of fact and one that she is looking to her father to solve for her.

“Could she close her eyes until she gets to the end of this road? Then the sun won’t be in them.”

“She’s not tired.” (This is said with all the dreadful finality of a hanging judge passing sentence.)

“Why don’t you turn the chair around and walk backwards until we get to the end of the road?”

She’s dubious: she has to confess that this MIGHT work, but I don’t think that she was necessarily really looking for a solution. She gives it a go.

Our progress is now slowed to the rate where we would have packed a light meal “for the journey”, had we only had the fore-warning and Youngest Son’s Zebedee bounces are getting more like Eeyore’s; but with the critical end of the road in sight, we are ready to re-manoeuvre Baby around until she’s facing the front and Daughter is pushing her once again. We’re almost at the park now.

“STOP!”

There’s no disguising the boys’ frustration now. Indeed, Eldest Son (who likes to paint things in as emotive a way as possible) does all but fall to his knees, crying out “WHY??????????????????” at this next interruption.

I do my best to keep my voice concerned and level.

“What is it now, Darling?”

“She’s cold.”

“But her blanket’s wrapped around her.”

“This is her Summer blanket. I need her Winter blanket. Can we go back?”

We don’t go back, of course. Instead, I persuade Daughter of the health risks of Baby over-heating, and we plough on to our final destination.

The football was great, by the way. Friends of Eldest Son were all in the park and we rotated who went in goal and every single person scored (yes: including me – I’m pretty nifty when pitted against players with an average age of eight and a half) – so that was great.

And yes: Baby made it back alive.

The children have already seen it and given it their unconditional approval, which is heartening, as I chose it largely with them in mind – as you would, of course. When I saw it, I wasn’t completely convinced – in fact, I was quite anti: but the endorsements of Sister, Parents, Old Friend at Work and Best Friend all brought me round and now I am enamoured with it. This is probably due, in no small part, to the fact that it no longer has mahogany floorboards, a black quartz kitchen floor and blue and white tiles in the bathrooms (one of the reasons I have spent so long not living in a house that I have owned for six months is that I decided to bite the bullet, do ALL the work – and spend ALL the money, rather than do it in drips and drabs, which would be disruptive – and I think everyone’s had enough disruption to be getting on with…), and is now exactly as I would want it.

It’s also the first time that I’ve lived in a house of this style: very modern and open-plan, rather than old and self-contained rooms. Again, I am now delighted with this way of living, and it’s also quite therapeutic to be living a new life in a new kind of space, rather than in a version of the houses that I shared with Ex Wife.

So: good times ahead. The children are excited, and I’m excited. If I can put up with the navy blue front door until the Spring, when I shall re-paint it (and there’s more than enough woodwork to be painting in the meantime), then all shall be rosy in the garden. Assuming some cunt hasn’t planted bamboo in there…

Well, I think I do – and as such, I have, of late, been devoting my energies to creating exactly that kind of environment in which great things can happen. This has meant a focus on the basics, the foundations, on which the palace of creativity can rest certain and sure, reaching to the skies. My focus has been on project naming.

One of my clients is pleased to call the projects in their marketing plan by code names that correspond to contemporary pop musicians. Thus we have bent our collective minds around Project Lennox, Project Shania and Project Velvet, to name but a few – and it was with an eye on the next one, a series of launches, that I had decided to concentrate most of/all of my working day. I had decided, dear reader, that I should know no happiness unless the next global marketing project was named after that Titan of the modern music scene, Justin Bieber. I wanted to see “Project Bieber” all over spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, presented with a straight face by an assortment of earnest marketers. To me, “How is Bieber looking for LatAm?” and “Are we going to have funds for Bieber in India in Q3?” was more important a thing to make happen than almost anything else I could imagine, and so I set about (with the happy, bright-eyed collaboration of the entire agency team) of making a damn good case as to why the future was bright, the future was Bieber. “Most Googled individual”, “Responsible for waves of hyper-enthusiastic response among a young demographic” (that’s right – I refer to “Bieber Fever”) and many other soundbites were submitted in defence of why we should all be talking Bieber in 2012.

And what happened?

Project Adele it is. I see no reason to continue: where is the humour in that? I am (we all are) gutted.

And yet, and yet…

Until I move into Future Home, I am still living with my saintly and fantastic parents, and part of my residence has been my insistence that I buy the food and wine. This has meant my going to the local Waitrose (can you imagine the combination of Richmond and Waitrose, it’s like an upper middle-class apocalypse) every Saturday morning at 8am, before the local retired majors and actors turn up.

Now: if your heritage combines Scotland, Ireland and Italy, you’re going to get a group of people who like a drink. This means that on most weekends I am buying at least six bottles of wine for the forthcoming week – and this is where the problems begin. There is a woman (and there is no nice way to say this) who works on the checkout, and is the spitting image of the dwarf from “Don’t Look Now” in a tabard, and she combines this with an eternally downbeat manner – which is kind of understandable, and if she is ever on the tills when I am waiting to pay there is a ritual which she always goes through. She sees two bottles of wine hit the conveyor belt and enquires, “Oooh: are you having a party?’ (delivered in the exact tones of her asking “Are you chemotherapy?” and every time I see her, I have replied “Yes” – because it’s quicker.

But this morning, I got bored of the thought before I was even asked and started thinking of possible responses to “Oooh: are you having a party?’ and at the moment my top five intended are:-

1. “No. I’m an alcoholic.”
2. “Just drinking to forget. Drinking to forget.”
3. “THEY put them there. THEY MAKE ME BUY THEM.”
4. “It just makes Communion go with more of a bang if we use a bit of the… you know…”
5. “Yes – seven for seven-thirty. Bring a bag of crisps and a goat on a bit of string.”

How well I remember the feeling from the first house that we bought (sight unseen by me, as it happens, with Ex-Wife and my mother making the decision together – and doing a fine job of it), when the builders have started to knock the living shit out of the structure that you have just paid a fortune for, and you’re left with the sort of environment that one would more readily associate either with heavy shelling or installation art -  the former being only just marginally worse than the latter…

And so it proved again, when I went over to look at my new house on Sunday: much of it has gone (fortunately, the bits that the architect and I had decided SHOULD go) and there was rubble everywhere. The drawing room was home to four lavatories, the dining room was piled high with smashed tiles, and the kitchen appeared to be nothing but concrete slabs. Everywhere, windows had been leaned against walls, in readiness to be re-inserted into the new, extended structure (maybe it’s true what David Hare says in “The Breath of Life” that my generation’s legacy shall be “We came, we saw, we knocked through”…) and I was left with the panicky feeling of “This will never be done” – but then I get that feeling when painting a cupboard, so maybe I don’t need to worry too much.

In fact, if Gigantic Builder (seven feet tall, hands like coal shovels, tattoos on his arms that could contain the entire text of “King Lear”) is to be believed, it will all be done in mid November – which feels incredibly unlikely at the moment, but if they’re as quick as putting stuff in as they are at ripping shit out, then it’s probably feasible. It’s been like having two jobs, doing all this – and I have had a hell of a lot of help from a hell of a lot of people – and I can’t wait until my bit of it is done. The only thing I haven’t done is chosen tiles for the kitchen walls: this was always Ex-Wife’s area, and so I’m slightly nervous of bollocksing it up. UAG put in a bid for duck egg blue, but that’s so ridiculous, that she might get a punch in the tits. My sister has good ideas, but a VERY unrealistic idea of “budget”: so my conversations with her often involve the sourcing of high-end glass and marble compounds from individual suppliers, and then my concern over whether or not they could (instead) be found at Fired Earth.

Ah well, it is a “luxury problem” to have – and if I do fuck it up and end up with a wall full of turquoise tiles that I thought would be very pale grey, I suppose I can always rip them off and start again…

This is a bitter-sweet realisation for me: with the bitterness of a career path dashed, is the joy of the architect’s plans for my new house – which make it crystal clear that he is going to have me living in a semi-detached PALACE, rather than the house I (sort of) bought by accident. I have spent a number of meetings with him whereat what has come out of my mouth has been along the lines of “Of course… I see… Yes: quite right.” but what has been going through my head has been much more along the lines of “WHAT? WHAT? HOW? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? You can’t do THAT! That’s MAGIC! What do you MEAN: “Move a wall”? You can’t move a wall. WHO ARE YOU?” Fortunately, he then gives me plans to look at and (perhaps because of my time spent designing sets) I can translate those very easily into reality – even if I do always subconsciously wonder where the lighting rig is going to fit and how we’ll accommodate the army for Act IV in a downstairs loo.

I am now in a state of wonder and admiration for all architects and those who understand their ways. They are magicians of space and concrete – and that is a good and noble thing to be.

What neither of us had really factored into the plan was that the theatre was in Sheffield.

To be fair to WWWISaG, she had rather more reason to be ignorant of the exact locale, what with her being American. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no excuse at to thinking that it was probably in Zone 6 of the London Underground, or (at most) a thirty minute train journey out of London. This, to be clear, is not the case. Sheffield is a long way away from London: it’s a two-hour train journey, and once you get there – and you might want to sit down if you’re not already doing so – people talk with a differently inflected accent. True.

Anyway: we worked out the facts, and we committed to it. It was going to be a laugh and a carry on anyway (she’s very funny, amongst her many other recommendations) and it was in the service of Shakespeare (for whom I have seen Hamlet in Bulgarian, a Kabuki King Lear and – worst of all – Gary Wilmot as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an open air theatre…) – so this seemed like a walk in the park, as it was to go and see Dominic West and Clarke Peters in “Othello”.

It was phenomenal. Dominic West is by far the best Iago I have ever seen: playing the part as a common sense talking, all-round good lad whose blunt logic takes him very credibly from “passed over” to “revenge by murder”. The best I have seen before were Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale – shrewd strategists and cold calculators both. West’s was the most credible soldier I have seen in the role. To be reductive (not for the first time), it seemed to me that this man was a soldier, a man of the army first and last. The army is about rules, rank and death – so if you break what are seen to be the rules of rank, then it’s only logical that the price will be death. The army also doesn’t welcome ”the feminine” – and so, without a hint of trendy sexual politics or an alien extra-textual gloss, we saw a man who had no time for women: from his own wife, to Othello’s to Bianca. They got in the way, and were best used as pawns in the real matter of men dealing with men, according to the rules that they had chosen to live and die by.  He avoided any hint of bathing in his own wit, smoothness of ability to control and played it straight down the line as good bloke to whom anyone would turn with a problem – and it was more unsettling as a result than any other painted, obvious villain.

He was equally matched by Alexandra Gilbreath as his wife, Desdemona’s confidante, Emilia. Sunny, smirking, taking nothing seriously: this characterisation served her brilliantly for the full guns blazing of the final act when she recognises her complicity in her mistress’s murder, at the hands of her own husband. She was railing at her own stupidity, horrified at how she could have been so naive, just as much as how her husband could have acted as he did.

Desdemona was great too: heart-stoppingly beautiful and credible in a real dog of a part (the only other comparably sized part that is as stinky is surely Miranda in The Tempest), she made goodness alluring, and handled the scenes with her father better than I have ever seen them done.

Clarke Peters didn’t quite do it for me, sad to say. His was the most “in love” Othello I can remember seeing (helped by the staggering beauty of his wife) and so the pathos of the finale really was enormous. But love seemed to be the only emotion that he did suffer an excess of: jealousy did not appear to be a problem for him – certainly not the sort of emotion that Iago needed to warn him of – and when he entered to commit the final terrible murder, he had the air of a man who was about to dial in for an irksome, overlong conference call, rather than one who has convinced himself that there can be no other course for him than to kill his once-loved wife. That said, he was an entirely credible commander of men, that Desdemona should defy her father for him seemed very possible and he seemed to be bowled over with love for her. He also managed the (almost impossible) “falling into a faint” sequence in a way that was neither embarrassing nor half-hearted – and that alone was a first for me, so he should be praised for much.

I can only say that I am very pleased to have discovered Sheffield – and with such an excellent companion – and that if the next show weren’t “Annie”, I would be up there again.

I have been advised (a number of times) that I have a set of “tells” which announce a set of different emotions on my behalf.

I have seen this in others, of course. In Best Friend, it is the planting of both feet at shoulder width to announce “You and I are going to fall out, sunshine.”

With Old Friend at Work it is the simple words “Are you joking?” to announce “The next fifteen minutes are going to be the worst of your life – and I shall fill each one of those with such invective as could take the paint off an ocean liner.”

With me, they are as follows:

• Emotion: “Disregard for your intellect/the content of what you’ve just said”
• Tell: “It’s like shutters coming down over your eyes” (to quote someone who’s seen it).
• Emotion: “Warm Anger”
• Tell: “Lion Hands” (fingers splayed, and bent back into “claws”)
• Emotion: “Cold Anger”
• Tell: “Shark Eyes” (to quote Old Friend at Work’s assessment, followed by the qualification – “I would rather be dead than have those shark eyes turned on me”).

In my line of work, of course, it’s the first that’s the most dangerous, as I have to spend a fair (or, as I would argue warmly, an unfair) amount of my time doing my “nodding and encouraging and “I’m sure there’s something in that” face – and yet it is that first tell that I have been advised/warned of most often and most consistently.

I wonder if I was born with it?