Small flood, #BBCphop, Sitcom Trials, eBay, the year begins

2016 has begun for lots of the country with devastating floods. Touchwood, that wasn't us. We had some water leak in from Ian's flat upstairs when his builders drilled through a pipe. We're getting a new printer, it's not the end of the world.

The BBC People's History of Pop is something for which I did a radio interview at the BBC in Bristol this week, and for which I should be doing a TV interview next week. They've picked up on My Childhood Diaries (which have their own blog), in particular my Records For The Day. So I've been talking about the music I liked as a kid, if indeed I ever shut up about that.

The Sitcom Trials 2016 is starting to take shape. I've spoken to Karen about having the final at the Gilded Balloon in August, and I've got a thumbs up from the teams in Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham and Glasgow, with a hopeful new showrunner for London and even talk of a show in Dublin. So there's that to look forward to.

And the Socks Do Shakespeare will be the Edinburgh show, which is starting to take shape but slowly. I have started artworking the promo logo, which will be going into the listings for Bath Comedy Festival and Brighton, and so far it's taken me two days to get anywhere with it because, no sooner had I started doodling it, the water came through the ceiling, which kind of wiped out a day, and had a knock on effect. That would be why my scripts and art for Bible Society, which were the way I was going to actually earn money this week, are also behind schedule. Oh and this didn't help...

At the same time as the water came through the ceiling, Hev was taking down the Christmas tree, and I was taking a moment to look through stuff in my office and see if I could make more room. And you know how sometimes you get into this stuff and do more than you planned? Well, three visits to the tip and umpteen trips to the charity shops later, we've made quite a bit of space in the cupboard above the bathroom, largely through getting rid of old Christmas cards we'd been hoarding for decades, and material and curtains we were never going to need again; and my office has a tiny bit more space in it, thanks to me getting rid of a few years worth of Private Eyes (I realised they're just newspapers, and I'm not the only person who has them). I also put some stuff on eBay - four Doctor Who box sets and some Scorcher & Score comics. The Scorchers were going to go on as a job lot, until I saw someone was getting £3 a pop for copies identical to mine. So either that box contains £300 worth of Scorchers, which would be worth eBay-time, or it's lucky old charity shop again.

So, there's not a lot to show creatively for the first week of the year, but I have been working solidly doing something. Honest.