I am so far beyond excited by all of this that were it not for the fact that geographically we’re as far apart as we are Kathe, you’d be having to peer out from behind your blinds to check that I wasn’t camped out in my car on your street, watching through binoculars for any signs of UtP comings and goings! Be very glad that I live in Wales! I want to see that cover, hear that music, play with that puppet and sift through those costume drawings. Not fair, not fair, not fair!!!!

It sounds exciting beyond words. And of course at this stage all things are possible. Soon decisions will have to be made and ideas refined and locked down, so that they become component parts in the realisation of this dream. That too will be exciting, though occasionally challenging, infuriating and even heartbreaking.

But THIS stage is the true marvel, when your created universe is still amorphous and capable of change, gathering itself from thoughts and thin air out of sight behind a curtain, just waiting for the moment of coalescence into something corporeal as the music softly begins, the audience becomes hushed, the footlights glimmer and the velvet parts!

I’m swooning here. Can you tell?

I’ve been meaning to ask for ages, have you read ‘Hiding the Elephant’? It’s an account of the development throughout the nineteenth century of the great stage illusions and the extraordinary stories of their inventors. A handful of magicians/illusionists were the creative minds behind the ideas that even today form the basis of all practical stage illusion. You should get a copy. (Just a thought!)

I better had be Ms Koja, or there will be trouble! Moreover I shall expect my invitation inscribed onto vellum in copperplate written with myrrh-perfumed ink, folded into an envelope sealed with purple ribbons and red wax, and delivered by a pair of handsome but dissolute flunkies with half un-buttoned breeches and come-to-bed eyes. I shall arrive in a black-lacquered carriage with four matching bays sporting curled ostrich plumes on their heads and their hooves leafed in silver, flanked by torch-bearing pages and a pack of baying elkhounds. Of course I shall be late enough to cause just a little bit of a stir. I shall eat little but take a glass or two of absinthe. Be ready!!!