The Lamb Ad

Matthew Melhuish, chief of BMF Advertising, the Sydney agency that made the ad, said: "Lamb has permission to do this. There's a lot of affection out there for lamb..."

I agree with The Bravery. All I want is everything.

Tom says he identified the content of this blog before I'd written it. Apparently I'm predictable.

Anyway Robert Forster says that at one point in his career he realised that being a rock star is a 24 hour job. He realised it when seeing Marc Hunter walk down the street, thinking like a rock star, acting like a rock star. Even for those of us who aren't rock stars it is a full time job: thinking like a rock star, acting like a rock star.

The first song I recognise I think is a cover, because I recognise it. It's about what people in surfing magazines do. I think that Forster looks like an older version of Jarvis Cocker. What Jarvis Cocker will look like when he retires to a sheep farm near Wagga in about 15 years time. Hopefully by that time I won't actually have to write the blog. People will just know what I would have written.

I wanted Forster to talk more in that funny, droll way about things that happened in the 80s. When he did speak, to me, he became a character in Monkey Grip, or at least that version of the 80s in Australian cities.

Mrs Cress

As soon as the ceremony is over the bride holds her arms above her head in mock triumph and we laugh. She's sweet and funny and herself all evening. She wears a knee-length dress, red, red lipstick and on her head is a large jumbled nest of cream tulle which seems to be home to various other bits and bobs. It's high and striking and perfect. There should be more brides like that.

There's a bedouin tent on the side of a mountain, and a bar in the studio where we can all paint on a canvas while waiting for a drink. By the end of the night most people have paint on their faces. There are people from London and Melbourne and Grenfell and Sydney and they're on the dance floor, all of them. There's no room for big moves, certainly not enough for the Madonna squat from the Hung Up clip, but we try it anyway. I start dancing with an older woman and after a while she begs off saying:....I'm, I'm...just going to find...my husband.

At the end of each set waiters bring around trays of cock-sucking cowboys and the mother of the bride laughs. "It's our favourite family drink," she says as she grabs a few and hands them round to her friends.

Later I'm standing behind a man at the buffet queue and without looking he thrusts a plate back at me and says: hold this. He starts furiously carving ham, automatically I move the plate closer and he piles it on. When he stops I push the plate towards him, he looks at me and says: oh, I thought you were my wife.

I'm wearing flat shoes and at the end of the night my friend makes me swap into her heels because her feet are sore from dancing and we have to walk back down the dark path to get the bus home. She falls into a ditch in my flats and sprains her ankle. I tell her to get up and keep walking.

Russian one night, nonsensical the next

In the foyer there's a sign that says: The Department is performed in a nonsensical language. And it is. Like spending 70 minutes with the Swedish chef. Except that they're Norwegian, and darker than the muppets - yes, it's true. At one point they find new shirts in a cavity below the floor, put them on excitedly and with pride, marvelling at the identical little holes in the left breast pocket of each one and sticking their fingers through in comical wormy ways. It all comes to an abrupt end when they discover matching exit blasts in the back of each one.

The wall of pigeon holes to one side of the stage is bursting with screwed up pieces of paper and seems an entirely appropriate full stop to a first day back at work largely spent filing emails in a labyrinthine system of creatively named virtual folders. One burgeoning folder I already feel quietly chiding me. It's labelled "for follow up".

In a 24 hours hard to imagine under circumstances other than an arts Festival, I've also sat among a mix of smiling, passionate Russians and the self righteous Sydney arts core. The Russians in the first row of the circle were drawn forward and closer to their countrymen on stage at the expense of people in the rows behind, left only with surtitles and glimpses of upstage action. What ensued was a display of personal assertiveness at the same time politically correct and viciously snide on the part of the arts core and knowingly yet smilingly ignorant from the Ruskies. Stalemate. The core were thwarted in much the same way as the advances of ardent Orsino on stage. In moments when my eye and my mind wavered between the surtitles and the golden comings and goings of the second act I thought these things: what fun it would be to run into the Russian company at the Festival bar one night; who designed this theatre anyway; will I be able to sleep after consuming two bottles of Solo in quick succession; why can't everyone just see that there are two of them? and now I remember what I find so frustrating about Shakespeare.