I can see that by the time I reach a Certain Age, if I'm lucky enough to reach a Certain Age, any theatrical leanings will be more than amply satisfied by attending a play reading group.

We have certain members of our sea-faring theatre group who only attend readings for fun. For the interest and the love of it. I could never understand this. Why attend if not out of duty / you want to be cast?

But tonight, we read an exceedingly fine script called Agnes of God. DG's festival baby, quite literally.

By a happy quirk of fate (i.e. loads of people piled out the door just before we began), I got to be God's Agnes. And what a rollicking old part that is. Quite amazing.

And then we put down the scripts, took a breath of air and I stepped away home.

As I'm currently neck-deep in rehearsals for my six lines, trying to be a baby Obama in my paying employment and panicking about when I'm going to squish in a rewrite for my Vanity Venture alongside a pressing requirement to tend to the FOH rota for Jerusalem and a tangled nest of a rehearsal schedule for the VV, I feel a surge of love for the read-through strategy.

Mind, this does rather presume that my reading voice gets 'cast'.