I have been acting very hard indeed this evening.  Agamemnon has angst.  He has to kill his own daughter!  And he doesn’t want to!  But he has to pretend that he does!  And drive his wife insane!  Because if he doesn’t, his army will kill everybody!  Because they can’t have their war unless he kills his daughter!  That is <strong>Intense</strong>!

It is very hard to get all this across without feeling like you’re overdoing it a bit.

I’ve been crying today.

I was born during the last months of the Nixon administration, so for all my lifetime I’ve known the United States as a nation in decline, long past its best days, and mired in massive corruption and endemic racism. It wasn’t the United States of Lincoln, or Wilson, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a nation led at best by merely adequate managers such as Clinton, and all too often by corrupt and threatening incompetents like Reagan or George W. Bush. I’ve known nothing else.

Today, everything has changed. A United States I’ve never seen, but only read about in history books, has raised its head again. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a US citizen tonight. Whatever happens from here on in, I’ll know that the United States of America has a future as well as a past.

It’s good to be in Wellington with no work to do for a change. I am making good use of my time by talking about politics in restaurants.

I’m not sure I have the abs to play Agamemnon, even in a read-through.

Rose certainly is a jumpy child. She has a special jumping machine, and she practices all the time.

A lot of the quality of one’s life can be measured in trays.

I could save a lot of time if people would read my emails before they reply to them.

To be fair, I have learnt a lot about clay target shooting that I didn’t know before breakfast.

Brekfast is not for meetings. It is a sacred private time between a man and his cats.