Despite having lived in the Leeds area for over a decade and being a Theatre Technical obsessive, I haven’t been behind the scenes at the remarkable Leeds Grand, discounting a visit to the understage rehearsal room a couple of years ago to see the recording of an interview with Warren Smith, the larger than life General Manager.

Of course, I’ve seen dozens of shows there, good and bad. However, when I heard that the ABTT had organised a visit, that provided me with the impetus to rejoin and get along to the event.

The event turned out to be very popular so that the party was split in two in order to visit the various spaces without (too much) overcrowding.

Crossing the stage on the way to the new rehearsal workshops, we paused to admire the house. The view from upstage on a big stage is rather odd without an audience, namely a very large wall with hole in, beyond which is another room full of empty seats. I’d particularly felt this once at the Sheffield Lyceum working there for a few days whilst the building was “dark” (i.e. no show in) and the stage stripped of all masking in order to clean the dust out of the grid area above. This view reminded me a little of that experience…

After seeing the new spaces, we were then treated to a ride on their massive lorry lift, which raises 40 Tonne wagons from street to stage, nearly 6m above street level.

This must be an absolute boon for the crew, although it is really just making the best of an awkward job as a modern theatre such as the Lowry will be able to cater for several trucks at once with them simply backing up the way they can at Tescos round the back. The Grand used to have to haul everything up and down with a winch & presumably a block & tackle in the earlier days when the scenery & cloths used to arrive from the train station on a hand cart. Now scenery and props can be stored on the connecting bridge seen in the photo, as well as the comparatively spacious original backstage areas. It is still necessary to brave the weather somewhat, as can be seen by the raised hoods amongst the riders.

A new flying system replaces the old, driven from a computerised panel on the fly floor. The system has a precision of a couple of milimetres so that once a position has been plotted it will reliably return to that setting night after night. As moving heavy scenery above actors can be a dangerous business, the system includes various safety features to detect anything unexpected. A dead man’s handle approach on the control panels ensures the brakes will be immediately applied if the operator lets go or the panel is disturbed. It is also designed with performance in mind so that up to four combinations of complex movements can be individually controlled and the speed adjusted to suit slight variation sin performance. (The Grand is the home to Opera North so music sets the pace for most shows).

Up on the grid 70′ above the stage, 64 sets of hoists (32 each side) do the actual lifting work. Each assembly has a long drum upon which five sets of steel wire ropes wind and unwind in their allotted grooves. This photo shows the mesh floor and the stage way down below.

We were also given a chance to see Leeds’ forgotten theatre, the Assembly Room. There is hope to re-open that as a performance space in phase two, but in the meantime it is used as a rehearsal space, asbestos removal permitting…

I’ve been fighting off a cold since the weekend I’ve been off work these last two days. “Aww Diddums!” I hear you say…

It is hardly a life threatening illness, but coughing fits that make you dizzy, sizzlingly painful ears that feel like they are going to implode and prickly eyeballs that feel as though they have been peeled are not pleasant. I know I’m not well when I can’t even be bothered to surf.

Anyway, I’m Lemsipped up and feel ready to take on the cut & thrust of IT Networks again, although I’ll probably be wrecked by teatime.

I’ve mentioned coffee stains before, where an otherwise immaculate presentation is marred by lack of attention to detail, e.g. the Coffee Pot ring on the pristine table setting.

Yesterday, the three of us went to a surprise party for an Eighteen Plus old friend down in Leicester. It was being held in an out of town hotel and the afternoon’s procedings would include a buffet and a Kaleigh Band. People were attending from North and South as well as from the Midlands. We even had the Lord Mayor of Lichfield join us, in civvies of course…

It was a great do and marred by only one Coffee stain, or more accurately a Chocolate Chip Cookie stain. I had stuck a couple of biscuits in my top pocket for the journey to share with David but forgot about them until late in the journey. At this point they had melted somewhat and my shirt pocket looked as though my Pooper-Pen had leaked. (What do you mean, you don’t have a crap Biro? I have loads of them, generally made by Bic…)

Fortunately, I am too thick skinned to worry overly much about what others think and didn’t feel it was necessary to scoot along to a retail park to buy an emergency shirt. (this is the Yorkshire influence:- depp pockets, short arms!)Instead, one of the girls tastefully arranged a napkin as a flamboyant Pocket Cravat.

It is nice to mmet up with old friends, especially when it feels just right to drop into the groove again. It is a shame we don’t all live in the same place and there is the dawning realisation that as we move from the natural progression of marriages, 40ths, re-marriages and 50ths, sooner or later we will be attending funerals as well. In the meantime, aging Eighteen Plussers are determined to grow older disgracefully…

I ordered some replacement water cartridges the other day, Sodastream Filterstreams which look like the blue thing on the left here

(Find out what a Filterstream is here) It is the grown-up version of the Brita water jug filter, where you have a plumbed-in tap for about six months worth of filtered water for drinking & cooking.

Anyway, the filters duly arrived, but they were the wrong ones. Instead of push fit connectors they had a threaded shaft at one end and a plastic mesh at the other.

My first reaction was that I had cocked up- maybe I had clicked on the wrong one. Checking back with the website, the items were the correct code, although the line description matched something else in the catalogue with a different number but correctly described what I had received. I rang up their customer care line and after explaining the situation, Susan$ was tremendously helpful. They would send me a postage paid label with the replacement shipment. A very satisfactory result…

However, they rang back later in the day. Was I confused about it being unbranded and not saying Sodastream, asked Susan? No I said, that didn’t bother me, my concern was that it didn’t have the right connectors. Hold on, she said, let me transfer you to Vaughan$. Vaughan tried very hard to persuade me that I had the right ones, but eventually had to agree that he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about and that I would have to talk to Ken who understood the product. Ken was out that day but would be back the next day.

The following day, I talked to Ken who assured me he packed the order himself and that they should be correct. Had I looked at both of the cartridges? All four of them were the same I replied. That stumped him as he hadn’t sent an order for four Sodastreams and he eventually acceded that I did have the wrong ones & someone else must have prepared mine. He didn’t feel that that the coincedence of the incorrect description matching my shipped goods were related however, as they all knew the product lines…

This morning, the right onses showed up, with a Freepost shipping label. A satisfactory outcome, despite three phone calls and a lot of explaining. In the world of technical support, this is known as a “Shit sandwich“, where the miffle bit is crap.

($ Footnote:-Not their actual names, which were actually Lesley, Dave and Lee)

I use Vaseline nearly every day and it involves a liberal amount of smearing and then insertion.

Now, if you are of a similar age to me, you might well be sniggering, because Vaseline used to be synonymous with rude goings on in the bedroom, or possibly (and somewhat more sordidly) in a Cottage.

I can recall a bit of a shaggy dog story that Billy Connolly used to tell, revolving around a Vaseline Survey in the centre of Glasgow. The punchline twist was that the parent of the large family used it for sexual purpose: they smeared it on the bedroom door knob so that the Kids couldn’t get in…

Now it turns out that vaseline is actually a somewhat third rate sexual lubricant, as being oil based, it dries out mucous membranes and dissolves latex. Water based solutions like KY jelly are the right thing to use on occasions that demand it.

In case you are wondering, I use it every day to block my grommetised ear with a cotton wool ball, in order to keep out soapy water which could apparently have unpleasant consequences.

So, I asked myself, what is petrolium jelly? Ingredients: Petrolatum. You can find out far more than you wanted to know about it on Wikipedia here, including who eats it for breakfast.

Seeing that it is a distillation by-product, I recalled a schoolboy visit to a Rohm & Haas chemical works, where we discovered this very large lump of brown, squidgy plastic on the access platforms of their fractional distillation tower. When asked what it was, we were told it was an unintended by-product, which they referred to as the “embarrassing polymer”.

Wow, no hits at all for that in Google, yet…