Okay...
Friday, July 3, 2009, 02:00 AM
Well, that was weird. Call me when you get back.


Thoughts of the Month
Monday, June 29, 2009, 08:44 PM
So, before I went on family holiday (translation: down-grading to full-time unpaid slavery for a mere £2,000 in the discomforts of someone foreign's home) I managed to kind of finish the kind of first draft to the kind of theatre component of LondonTales.

I've ben part of this great programme called PowerLab, mentored by Marc Boothe from B3 Media. B3 are informal partners with the Young Vic Theatre so I was riding the bus from Brixton down to the Cut to write in their super-friendly Pod space every day.

The journey in never failed to make me light. One day I saw this:



LondonTales is (spoiler alert) about London(!)

My first writing day, I was sitting out the front of the Young Vic and these very drunk guys at one of the tables started sniggering and pointing at my shoes which, to be fair, were made of red glitter.

"There's no place like home!"

said the one drinking Diamond White from a 2 litre plastic bottle. I ignored him for about 30 seconds before I realised that he was 22 and possibly a friend of Dorothy's and that to his apple-soused mind, I looked like two of those kindly badly-dressed teachers from Hogwarts played by Dame Maggie Smith.

So we struck up a conversation - he asked me what I was doing and I told him I was writing a play about London. He said he'd just come out of prison and was due to go into a rehab programme the next day. He was staying in a hostel round the corner. He was a plasterer and a chef by trades but wouldn't get a job -as soon as he did, they'd charge him rent for his room at the hostel and then he wouldn't be able to afford to live there. He'd been offered his own council place in Bexley but he loved London.

'Nothing like it under the sun. Always something to see, someone to talk to, any time of the day or night. Makes me feel alive, makes me feel free.'

He showed me pictures on his cheap mobile phone - blurry shots of him and his mate with naked torsos and arms out-stretched, on Waterloo Bridge with the city behind them.

'I love the bridges best' he said. 'That was a good day, eh, Pete?'

I finished my cigarette and said I had to get back to work.

'Write about me', he said. 'Write my story'.

Well, I didn't write about Dave, I wrote about my characters, who I fell in love with, Milton, Jack, Jem and Chan. Except since I've been back, they flee from me that sometimes did me seek.

Maybe I should get back on the bus to the Young Vic. I was meant to start a residency at another theatre down the road on the 22nd June but didn't feel able to sign the contract and since then I've felt like hiding till everything's out of me and formed and nothing that happens to me can change it's nature.

It's quite political, I've found, writing, once you get out of the tiny happy cashless bubble that is performance poetry. I think maybe I should put put on my red glitter shoes and click my heels one, two, three.



Two Grains Of Sand
Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 01:18 AM
We went out together a while ago, when he was a painter and I was a mess. It lasted a few years. I remember the first time I saw him - it was in some bar and I had been about to leave when this angel walked in. At the least, I'd never seen anything more worthy of a belief in God. He paused under a spotlight, or at least it seemed so and I went up and told him my name as if he'd been waiting to hear it.

It was the best and then the worst of times. Replayable Lo-light: Curling up to sleep in a fire.

He was someone it was worth being a real person for - problematically, this wasn't in my remit, so I did some d.i.y

The dust-fall was so messy it took me a good nine months to realise he'd gone, but by then, I was a charred nerveless freak, so it was for the best.

Every night, for nine months, I'd lie, whiskey-soused, on the communal lawn of an old people's sheltered apartment in Salisbury mumbling at the semi-precious stars. It was there that I started writing poetry.

I remember thinking that maybe one day he'd have a child and I'd have a child and one day they'd meet and feel an irresistible connection to each other and fall in love and make it work.

At some point, later, we started a band together. Music is a healing thing, though our alt-pop/folk-hop music really really pissed some people off. Anyway, it requited all that love without wrecking anything important.

Music has always had my vote as the most blessed artform.





He's married now, to a beautiful woman, inside and out. They have two sons. I'm with someone who possibly deserves me and is no better than he ought to be. We have two daughters.

His sons are already quite cultured and play musical instruments, even the baby, while my girls are into Batman and even the baby can name-check all the Ninja Turtles. So if they do get together, it'll be carnage.


A Storm Is Going To Come



Open-source project
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 03:53 PM
Hey there, I'm working on a new project, LONDONTALES and I'm hoping to have some kind of open-source component on it.

If you have 2 minutes, please visit

http://londontales.livejournal.com/

as I'm posting work in progress related to LondonTales and I'd love your feed-back.

Thanks, hope to speak soon!
Speak Not Easy But Then Yes
Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 11:22 PM


Been having a weird week. I'm writing a new show, which at last has got under my skin except that now I'm mooning around like a 17 yr old, obsessed and aroused by impossibly cool characters who don't know I exist. And then, in the evenings, training it round Eastern England, doing Poetry Link gigs. In order to combat the spacey, twitchy state I'm in whenever I have to talk to actual real people, I've developed a spacey twitchy persona and my poems are suddenly quite intense.

Anyway, Speakeasy at the Glass Onion in Peterborough is probably the coolest gig I've ever been to, I sat there with my mouth hanging open - until, you know, it was my go and then I did my Anthony Perkins impression.




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