Thankfully the TV didn't come on at 5.30 this morning. I began to wonder if I had somehow left the TV on the night before and had merely been woken by programmes starting on CBeebies. But that seemed unlikely, even if CBeebies shared its channel with something that I might have been conceivably watching. But this put enough doubt in my mind not to make an official complaint to the hotel.
I met Collings for breakfast and thankfully he had come down a little from his performance high of last night and no longer had arrogant madness behind his eyes. We have become like a predictable married couple and spend our hotel breakfasts having the same conversation, where Collings mocks me for thinking that counting calories is the way you lose weight (even though I am not doing that at the moment) and I tell him that he is mental for believing that butter is healthy and so it doesn't matter how much of it you eat (he eats loads of it - in handfuls). Neither of us is going to change our mind (well I will id science proves me wrong) and yet still we go through it. We should probably do a podcast at breakfast in a hotel sometime. Although our real life relationship isn't as abusive and unpleasant as our podcast one, there is a blurring of the lines somewhere. But I guess that's why the partnership works. We're in many ways similar, but have differences that I don't think you would consider manufacturing. He still has the ability to surprise and flabberghast me. Which keeps our strange blend of fact and fiction interesting. And like in all proper double acts I may spend my whole time taking the piss out of him, but if anyone else does it then I will defend the bean-faced idiot to the death. I loved the episode of Morecambe and Wise where (if I remember it correctly) someone was offering to buy Ernie's plays in order to mock them or parody them and Eric stepped in and told them to sling their hook.
And Collings' solo writing is very like Ernie Wise's plays.
And so it continues.
He's a good lad really.
I am making very slow progress on the first (and shorter) Rasputin book. God knows how much of it is sticking in my head, but I think I will have to aim for middling score respectability. I watched the 1996 movie "Rasputin" tonight, which starred Alan Rickman. Most Rasputin films are wildly historically inaccurate and my memory of this one was that it was closer to the truth, but it was little use as a study aid (Stolypin was assassinated, it seemed, the day after Franz Ferdinand, rather than as was the case, three years earlier). So there's still a long way to go, though at least I don't have any other work deadlines, so can spend most of the weekend trying to cram and speed read. Or I could just hope that all the questions will come from book 1, about stuff that happened before 1915.
