Uncle Alec

 Dad asked Susy and me to go through the big box of photographs under the spare bed I'm sleeping in. Here's our first Christmas on the Isle of Wight.

 

 That's my other sister, Alice, on the right. I think for some reason there were Tarot cards in that box on top of the telly. To the left of Alice, in the yellow, is "Uncle" Alec. Not an actual blood relative, he was Dad's first agent in the sixties, but by the time this was taken I think he'd given that up, and was a chef somewhere on the island. "Cor-dong bloody blur, darling." Alec came every Christmas.

 

 He'd come over in the morning for the unwrapping of the presents and help Mum with the vegetables, long after we'd left the Isle of Wight. As his obituary in the Telegraph from 2001 put it "he never married." He was the only one allowed to smoke in the house. I don't think even Dad's real dad was allowed, but Grandad hardly ever came down. Alec Grahame is why Christmas always smelt of cigarettes.

 

 We still have that tree. Also from the Telegraph obituary: "in the 1970s show business became a much more serious industry. Much to Grahame's dismay, the liquid lunch was replaced by the working lunch and first night parties always seemed to end much too soon."

 

 Alec was gorgeous. Here's what must be his last Christmas with us. My hair was now black to audition for The Pianist.

 

 

 

 It's only researching him today I found out that Uncle Alec's original name had been James Alexander Patchett, that he'd been a lyricist in the early fifties, had turned an art gallery into a venue for evening cabarets called "Intimacy at 8" ten years before the satire boom, and had taken the first ever late night revue up to the Edinburgh Fringe, After the Show, arguably inventing the Comedy Festival.

 "Aww," Susy noted yesterday, "the tree's nearly stopped smelling of fags." 

 (But Susy still has Covid. I'll have a sniff.)

Flooding The Internet With Richard Williamson (Technical Director)

 Back in the Spring of this year, as all the theatres were closing, there was an awkward campaign to flood twitter with images of theatrical professionals at work, awkward because it's only the stuff already receiving attention that normally gets recorded, the stuff on stage, not backstage. I wish I'd posted this:

 Until I went looking for online evidence of Hamlet In Kuwait to accompany yesterday's post, I'd completely forgotten about our technical director Richard Williamson's vimeo channel. It hosts footage from April 2001 taken by a documentary crew hired by the show's creator Sulayman Al-Bassam, and gives just a taste of the extraordinary challenges Richard had to face, none of which I think either he or Sulayman were expecting (the first being the destruction of a giant tree representing Kuwait that the previous show left standing in the middle of the stage). We also see what looks very much like Kuwait Today's first ever phone-in quiz, or at least if it isn't, I'm at a loss to work out how they normally went...

Richard comes to Kuwait from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Napping 4D

It's big, the Eiffel Tower. Terribly big. It's easy to forget but it's an honest-to-goodness skyscraper, like nothing that had come before. And at its apex there's a genteely furnished living room diagonally bisected by a gigantic girder where two wax likenesses of Eiffel and Edison sip tea and listen to cylinders: time captured and the sky scraped, both for the very first time, they must have felt like gods. And I thought when are we going to see anything that exciting again? We'll have to wait until Time Travel.

And then about a month ago it hit me that would never happen. Time Travel. I was watching old videos of life in the year 2000 and there we were in our twenties pissing around in the garden that's now next door and it was suddenly clear to me that the past was just gone. It's there in our heads, and in what we own, but there's no reaching it. And I know we talk about four dimensions but this is a dimension we can only move forward in and it takes no energy to do so and it requires no force, so it's really not the same. Which is fine. Everything's closed and cosy in this finite Universe, fine. Except... well I had been planning to get back into harness on the Doctor Whoey vehicle I used to go on about before the fire and now I suddenly find I don't believe in the central concept. It's only pretend I know, but there's nothing to explore in an idea I've dismissed unless, UNLESS I could somehow work out a practicable method for our hero to travel anywhere in time without cheating. So that was sort of it. 

Right, 80's break.

Brilliant! The only thing they got right was the hand dryer.

And on Sunday evening after the Dungeons, Transboundy Gal (hmm... maybe another name) and I went to the pictures at West India Quays, a location that has totally kept faith with what a place should look like in 2010. We watched A Single Man, and THERE was the past... I mean they must have gone to 1962 to film it, it was extraordinary and all the sadder for it. Outside and the water was still, a thousand lights were on and nobody home, and I realised coming here on a school night was more exciting than the Tate, so much more exciting, we risked a cigarette and I once more pondered: future, future, but how do you get back?

Monday was a write-off of course. In a good way. Mondays are normally a write-off these days. But, but, but... hanging out the washing I had a moment that merited if not the full "Eureka" then at least a little "Eurekeeny", when it suddenly occurred to me how you might be able to visit the past without having to travel backwards through time after all. All it would require is infinite patience, for time to be cyclical, and a big-bounce-proof container. But that's MY idea, Science, you're not allowed to nick it. Still, great! Right time to get out of bed... although meh*, anything I miss I know now I'll be able to catch next time around. Ah yes, legs this has.

* And it's surely a sign of this country's increasing civility that we finally have our an English word for "bof".

(originally posted on myspace here)

Hello, Goodbyes (status update)

(originally posted on myspace here)

love is all i can bring and ting

Oops, wrong paste. That's something I pasted into Google trying to find out the name of that song (turns out it's "Uptown Top Ranking" by Althea and Donna). Hang on, this is what I meant to paste:

It hangs in Uncle David's House, or did a year ago.

But I can't pretend to any continuity with my last post really. It's been almost a month. Of course this always happens when I end a previous post on a cliffhanger - Jonah, Contains Violence, Hamlet, the funeral... Every time I go "So this important thing is happening next and I'll tell you about that - " like I'm writing some book or, worse, like I'm living some bloody book... Well of course I had no idea what to write about Uncle David's funeral: the Garden of Remembrance was nice, rose bushes and wind chimes and little terra cotta figures and space for many more bushes and chimes, I don't know, David's life was extraordinary, well no it wasn't, just exquisitely-lived, he lived through the Blitz as a child but so did everyone, do I rattle on about church some more, or numbers, or the eclipse of '9(9?) that he'd waited to see ever since he was seven - No I had no idea what to write about, or at least what to write about HERE. Sorry... here. Anyway there's the dear man, standing on the right.

And since, Geoffrey Perkins has died, and I'll never get to work with him, and Ken Cambpell has died, and I'll never get to work with him (and feel a little like the world's been expelled). Since, the switch has been flicked on the Hadron Collider at CERN (or the voice-command given or the knob turned or the button pushed and held down for two seconds or whatever it was. "THAT was a nice day!" to quote Bill Murray). Since, I've seen every episode of "Arrested Development". And "Xanadu". Since, I've visited my parents again in Languedoc (it was through Ken Campbell's stuff in fact that I first learnt of the existence of either CERN or Languedoc - SEE "Reality on the Rocks"! READ "Violin Time"! - you see, that would have been a good post - most of the more interesting ideas posited on this blog I'm pretty sure are trains of thought set into motion by that man). Since, Zoe's visited from LA where she writes movie scripts now for Stan Lee (it's fine that I felt so little at Uncle David's funeral, that doesn't make me a sociopath, she said, maybe just a narcissist, and suggested I look it up, which I did, and I am, look it up). Since, the Republicans have wisely plumped for a Despair ticket yet again (the WHOLE POINT being to find a candidate who stands for everything worst in America to terrify the Democrats into another coma). Since, I've learnt that the Mitchell and Webbs will be filming a whopping four sketches of mine for the new series (three of which I have written about here, which is pleasing to me). Since, I've played a magic baker on Southwark Bridge.

What else, since, in the public domain? I've given up smoking for a month. And I've given up drinking until I finish a screenplay (I wanted to write something about Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" I said to Zoe. Oh, she said, Warners want to make a film of that. Write it.) And also, as of tonight, I've given up

facebook

No more "friend requests", "relationship status", cryptic misreadable messages snuck into "status updates", not for the time being. This isn't the fucking sci-fi channel. Actually it's me that's the problem, not it. I am a newly self-diagnosed narcissist and the last thing I need is another empty inbox. If I feel like issuing a status update I'll just have to post it here now, which is as it should be. Status update: Simon Kane has a new phone fit only for happy-slapping. That kind of thing. Let's see if my next post is any more pleasant. I found this great A Team colouring book today for 5p on a stall at the Thames Festival so maybe I'll just put up some NO! NO CLIFFHANGERS!!!

Hh. Still, hello. Oh it's just not been the same since they got rid of the Scrabble. Night.

 

SETTLEMENTS (time excellently spent)

To my right (your left) is Ms Meikle. We met arbitrarily (pictured) at a Superthriller gig, when I was in the mood to be met. That was last year. Her veterinary training has come on quite a bit since then, and now they let her inside cows.

She's been staying in a caravan in Dorset, training on a farm, birthing calves, visiting the abattoirs, waiting for the cows to die, inspecting meat, considering the waste of such finely evolved teeth in the head of an animal that once bled to death has only about a fifty per cent chance of ever being eaten, going for runs and getting shat on a lot. And as mentioned in the previous post I invited myself over. We're both mumblers, but she seemed fine with it over the phone I checked.

My God I learnt so much. The amount of roadkill on the 12 mile stretch from Salisbury to Sixpenny Handley alone was an education. She looked like a millionaire when she picked me up from the station in her bauble-coloured Clio, and it was a red sky at night. And the caravan was family-sized and quiet and stuttered with valances but with everything, like Japan, in its right place. And she'd never heard Miles Davis so I flipped open my powerbook and I put that right and then, as requested (since she'd played me Hot Chip) cradling Bulgarian red and amaretto and orange we moved onto Arvo Part, King Oliver and O Superman. "You have a lot of stuff that's good for... if you don't want to think about anything, but you don't want to think about nothing either," I made out, and nodded. And she told me about the local walks and the abattoir and the time it takes to die from a bullet wound and the great times she had at Matt and Fred's in Manchester just sitting by the music and smoking roll-ups - Ah! - Laurie Anderson pronounced "Smoking? Or Non Smoking" and neither of us are "smokers", but it hits home. And tipsy enough not to mumble, we basked. Like Michael Caine and Clive Owen in the film "Children Of Men" if you've seen that. Exactly like that.

And so it went on for two days: dropped off by Salisbury Cathedral while Ms Meikle went to work... Magna Carter, Second Hand Books, checking out Scope for board games and finding a bag of South American Lying Dice, free tea in the town hall while I sat at a bank of laptops being market-researched... yes, a dip had been reached, I wasn't feeling very much like Ferris Bueller. But: Then: a call from Mia Sara Meikle to say she'd been given the afternoon off. So: Back into the Clio and off to the settlements. Stone Henge, wangling free entrance by impersonating Egon Ronay (both of us! in a big coat! No! Fences are fine. Neither of us have an issue with fences), and then the Roman Villa, four-hundred years in the making, sixteen-hundred years hiding in a hill, mosaics, pins, bones, sun and unburied treasure. And time.

And another day. And a big walk. And an idea for something fomenting. Farms and flies around a horse's eyes, which is normal apparently, and a light drizzle so I don't get burnt. And pizza and packing and a lift to the station. And forty-eight hours in which I haven't been rotten to anyone. I am a passenger. I naturally passenge. Thankyou for that, Ms Meikle.

No, I didn't want to come back. Every single paper on the midnight train to Waterloo (I know it's not called that) carried as their main story an event gleaned from a television trailer for a show about the Queen which was unresearched, unimportant and, unlike the weather or the Magna Carter, never even happened in the first place. Where's the facts? Where's the stuff? What did I learn in London today? What corner in what track did I turn to be delighted?

Actually, when I left work at six today, I found, lying in the middle of Joiner Street, pretty dusty and passed on either side by the six o'clock rush, a bra.

I just haven't found a name for it yet.

Happiness: An Apology

It turns out that contrary to my twitchy, unproofed posting last night there may indeed be such a thing as tender sadness... So behold (and in memoriam) the "Smokers' Corridor" at 6:00pm, June 30th, 2006:

 

Now this passage through which I pass into work each morning must be known simply as "the Corridor". And that's that. The end.

At work today they put me in the "Bubble."
It is a closet-like, triangular room with a two-way mirror that enables you - by the depression of a foot-pedal accompanied by shrill, pre-recorded screaming - to superimpose your own face onto the reflected faces of punters lost in the Mirror Maze adjacent. Scarily. Like a film by David Lynch in fact, if you found the right face. The Bubble's a little claustrophobic though, I think because of the shape more than the size. Rooms shouldn't be triangular.

If prison cells were triangular... spacious but still triangular, still a shape that no room in which you are to spend a great deal of time normally comes in... would it be more difficult to become institutionalized? - I just thought: You can't smoke in prison anymore. Or was that the case anyway?

And so much for the Smoking Ban deadline I had set myself. I was meant to have finished my radio play about Frida Kahlo. I haven't even started it. Nobody knows who she is.

And so much for setting fire to myself in Parliament Square in protest... I could probably have managed the dousing, but would never have struck the match. Imagine standing there, defeated and stinking of fuel. And imagine the journey home, desperately trying to remember the least flammable route.

Here's that picture closer up: