Wednesday 23 May 2012

It’s been great having Suzie visit town on the final leg of her world tour: yesterday included a bike ride along the river, and a lot of sitting around in the garden in the sunshine. Here she is hard at work in my outdoor office.

The late George Wyllie, like his art, was unpretentious and prone to simple moments of genius. I was delighted to work with him on a childrens’ theatre production of Peter Pan about 20 years ago, for which he built an enormous mechanical crocodile and wrote (and performed) a song or two. One of them had a terrific couplet which he sang to me and then promptly cut from the show because the concept of Bum Steers was borrowed from another production of his, but the lines have always stuck in my mind, and they were … ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of beer / The Old School Tie is a Great Bum Steer’.