The Good Companions

I have been waking up well before dawn a lot recently and worrying a great deal about my future, which I cannot seem to focus upon, as if it lay the other side of a great bank of fog. You never quite get up to it. By nature it is always out of reach - always drifting away from you.

I wish I could say that it is a consolation to me to remind myself that I am not the only one around here feeling this way, and I may be considered as fortunate by comparison, but it is not. Sorry.

To drive the negative thoughts out of my head, I tune in to radio with headphones. This morning it was to the first, one-hour episode of a J. B. Priestley play starring Tom Baker as a Music Hall villain/magician. Much of it was recorded on location at a theatre in Oldham, with live orchestra and audience.

I really love J. B. Priestley. He is just the sort of good-natured English escapism I need right now, and the historical settings are just far enough away to be not quite remembered - first hand - by anyone except veteran ex-child actors who cut their teeth in Music Hall, and there aren't many of them left.

Most of Priestley's stuff rides along on small circles of companionship, making it the ideal antidote to modern divisiveness. Also, much of it is set in theatres - escapism within escapism.

I wonder if those days really existed. I see no reason why not, and he doesn't shy away from all the usual nastiness that goes on when more than three people get together, or the trials and tribulations that affect everyone in life.

I studied 'The Good Companions' at school. I think it should go back on the curriculum, but I bet it won't. They probably want something more forward-looking. Something more modern. Something more nasty.