Dog Bites Back

Peaceful

2012-02-05T18:59:00.001Z

Clonie

2012-02-05T11:01:00.000Z

I am afraid.

This thing I'm writing, this story, is going well. If I must use a Nintendo analogy (and clearly I must), I would say that I am like Mario in his Kart, once limping along with green shells but suddenly bashing my head against a floating glowing box to become possessed by a star that makes me lightning-quick and invincible.

Which is a wonder, considering the sheer volume of red shells aimed at my vehicle (OK, I'll stop now). Whether it's paranoia or genuine, David Icke levels of conspiracy, it seems with every new book I read that my ideas have been covered better already.

Alexander Maksik's You Deserve Nothing (2011) shows young people, inspired by a male teacher, re-evaluating their belief systems better than I ever could, while demonstrating its theme of the power of literature by wearing its Camus and Hamlet influences on its sleeve. What a feat! John Lanchester's staggering achievement, Capital (2012), picks apart London life in the economic crisis with humour and panache in ways I couldn't even attempt (so why am I?). The Bellwether Revivals (2012) by Benjamin Wood also raises issues of God and the Soul vs neurological responses – and its protagonist is called Oscar, same as mine!

How could I carry on writing something so similar to everything else on the market? I don't want to see any more shirtless vampires. Even if they do sparkle.

I always tell people how the ancient Greeks said everything that needed to be said about the human condition (whatever that is) 3,000 years ago, and I'm personally about as original as medical check-ups in porn, but there's a layer of arrogance and self-aggrandisement in all creative people that leads them to believe their work is valuable enough to reach a wide audience. Even the term "creative" is more likely to inspire sneers and eye-rolling than respect or worship. (But I do still hope to have groupies.)

In times like these, we must think: What Would Madonna Do? But then we'd see her latest video, which Avril Lavigne claims ripped off her own cheerleader aesthetic for Girlfriend, inspired by Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl, a reproduction of Toni Basil's Hey Mickey in the '80s, and we might look for other role models.

Then again, my ancient faves like Euripides and Aeschylus all reworked the same old stories, lifted from older, more Middle-Eastern stories, but thought to make incest a dramatic irony. Their stories may not have been original, but the execution was sublime. Maybe that's all we can aim for.

Add shirtless vampires to the crisis-of-faith-in-London-economic-crisis-2010-foster-mother-boyfriend-sadness mix? Perhaps.

I am hopeful.*

* Opening and closing lines shamelessly lifted from Robert C. O Brien's Z for Zachariah.

Style

2012-01-10T20:33:00.000Z

Can something drown in style? I'm pretty sure that's how Jackie* would like to go; succumbing to a whirlpool of Tilda Swinton's Like This, as filmed by Sofia Coppola.

That last sentence, for instance: does it answer my initial question? As I near the completion of Novel #Whatever, I find myself haunted by an innocuous statement made by a colleague. "I think I'd find it hard," he said, "to sustain a style for the length of a whole book." And, I now realise, it was this dormant fear that kept me from finishing this goddamn masterpiece a year-and-a-half ago.

This was meant to be a freewheeling, fuck-you, who-cares, Beatnik-cum-Herzog, Tracy-Emin-stuffing-money-into-her-vadge story that I turned out to be far too anal to allow. Why do I have this constant need for self-imposed rules? Numbers must be digits in Character A's dialogue, but spelled out in Character B's; Character C must end all sentences with prepositions, while Character Y must have no less than 2 flashbacks involving Christian missionaries in Burma. To what purpose? Is there such a thing as past lives, and was I a truck-driver carrying nitroglycerin across South America?

I guess all the great stories I've read, all the brilliant films I've seen and the songs I've loved, have been layered. Even though the expression goes "style over substance," I'm of the opinion that substance is in the style. For example, a slim book speaks volumes to me; it means Concise, Economical, Waffle-free. Whereas a fat book says, Overbaked, Tiresome, Waffle-stacked-like-an-American-breakfast. (It's sentences like this that give me the cold sweats about my writing.)

Furthermore, so much detail can be garnered in the style of a piece. If a story is written in sparse prose, chances are it'll come across more fable-like, end up more haunting. A tale of a long, arduous journey might benefit from long, arduous sentences. Style has an effect on the reader's / viewer's / listener's perception of the essence of the piece.

If a girl in Shoreditch goes to great lengths to dress kooky, drowning herself in style with bangles and hoops and leggings and Scandinavian sweaters, it tells us something: she's desperate and trying to be edgy. The detail's in the style; the character assassination, the ammo, the truth.

And the fact that I'd write this long-ass blog entry about it only tells you what you probably knew: that I'm a big douche.

* Friend, sister, daughter, sister, daughter, sister, daughter, artist.

Picks

2011-12-30T23:20:00.002Z

Even before I started working in a bookstore, I believed myself to be an authority on great reads to pimp.

So here's my summary of 2011; some old, some new, some yet to come...*

___________________________

LOVED & PIMPED

State of Wonder (Ann Patchett, 2011) – an unusual plot, elegantly written, made this a compelling read. An utter joy from start to finish.

UPDATE Pure (Andrew Miller, 2011) – this year's Costa winner was a rare treat; intelligent, absorbing, darkly funny, whose plot (about the creation of the Parisian catacombs) definitely stood out amongst the crowd.

A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) / The Keep (2006) (both by Jennifer Egan) – the former is a dazzling, funny and profound reworking of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, while the latter is an inventive take on the Gothic tale. Both stayed with me long after I finished them.

The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes, 2011) – a writer's wet dream, every page of this poetic, funny and slightly dirty novel is a technical wonder. Its brevity made it all the more readable.

Childish Loves (Benjamin Markovits, 2011) – Markovits' third book about Byron is a startlingly clever Fabergé egg of a novel. By including Markovits himself, as well as a book within a book, it asks the question: how much do we actually know of an author solely through his work?

The Convent (Panos Karnezis, 2010) – a brilliant, taut little story about the ways in which faith dictates a person's choices and, subsequently, their effect on others' lives.

The Sisters Brothers (Patrick deWitt, 2011) – a western that's by turns hilarious, poetic, violent and moving. An astonishing achievement by one of literature's most exciting new voices.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zuet (David Mitchell, 2010) – an exotic, literary thriller, masterfully executed.

Seven Houses in France (Bernando Atxaga, 2011) – a bitterly funny book about Europeans in the Congo. Like Conrad via Marquez and Greene.

Nightmare Alley (William Lindsay Gresham, 1946) – as tough and cynical as an old-school carnie, it's a shame this dark little gem has been so ignored. As fresh today as it was on its release.

Mysterious Skin (Scott Heim, 1996) – highly disturbing but beautiful.

English Passengers (Matthew Kneale, 2000) – a dark, brutal and utterly compelling satire about the English in Oceania. Unforgettable.

Headlong (Michael Frayn, 1999) – you read this with a mounting sense of doom yet enjoy every page. Fantastic fun!

Was (Geoff Ryman, 1993) – a dark take on the Oz story, this is a haunting love letter to lost childhood and a bygone America.

Mark Twain: The Autobiography (101 years ago) – still working my way through it, but I thank Franzen and Aubergine** forever.

SHOUL'DVE READ

Smut (Alan Bennett, 2011) – couldn't prioritise

Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts, 2003) – couldn't be arsed
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen, 2010) – still damaged by The Corrections

House of the Hanged (Mark Mills, 2011) – still weary of Crime lit
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Tom Franklin, 2010) – see above

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? (Jeanette Winterson, 2011) – couldn't get around to it
The Cat's Table (Michael Ondaatje, 2011) – too many distractions

Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro, 2010) – there's really no excuse now

NEXT UP

In the Orchard, the Swallows (Peter Hobbs, 2012) – I loved The Short Day Dying, and this latest novel is possessed of the same fable-like, haunting atmosphere. Beautiful.

The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey, 2012) – the Alaskan take on the classic Russian fairytale is as tough and pretty as the titular character.

The Lifeboat (Charlotte Rogan, 2012) – I'm only a couple of chapters in, but this seems like a cool little psychological drama.

The Light between Oceans (M. L. Stedman, 2012) – the unusual setting and moral greys of the plot made this hard to put down. An easy and enjoyable read, could be big.

Home (Toni Morrison, 2012) – CAN. NOT. WAIT.

The Comedians (Graham Greene, 1966) – Graham Greene wrote a book about Haiti and Papa Doc, and I only realised this 2 weeks ago? FML.

UPDATE A Perfectly Good Man (Patrick Gale, 2012) – a new book by a wonderful writer? Hell yes!

UPDATE The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach, 2012) – strong early buzz.

* I didn't mean to be so gimmicky and do this on New Year's Eve, it's just that I have nowhere to go and the idea struck me on the tube while a guy who looked about 12 was going on about his experimental drug use.
** Tasmanian double-act, specialising in avant-garde post-modernism by way of post-retro-futurism.

Christmas

2011-12-25T18:15:00.003Z

I don't think this story's going anywhere, so here, Merry Christmas.*

____________________________________

The Virgin Mother

The sun was like a peach in herwindow on the morning her mother had roused her from sleep, whispering, “Mary…Mary…” until her eyelids opened to the warmth. “Mary, you’re betrothed.” It wasa muted joy that glowed in the woman’s eyes – the happiness of a match for herdaughter eroded by the passing stages of her child’s life. They had arrangedfor the girl to marry a man she’d known only in passing. An acquaintance of herfather’s, a good-hearted carpenter.

As she brushed invisible cobwebsfrom her cheeks, a thought alighted on the girl, one that was neithercomforting nor chilling but sitting somewhere in-between: that there was alwayssomething around the corner in your life, that there were days marked alongyour personal path. The day you are born; the day you speak your first words;the day your grandmother dies; the day you fall from the roof of the stablesand twist your ankle, so that the pain haunts your foot for the rest of yourlife; the day you marry…

It was not something she couldput into words, but she could feel it in her marrow. This impending union was laden with importance. It made her veins run cold. Something was on itsway. Slowly, the girl dragged her body up, and went to the cistern for ahandful of water.

Mary wished to see the man towhom she was promised. She took her father’s donkey with her to the market, andkept her hand on its neck as they tramped side-by-side. When the carpenter’sworkshop approached – the sound of sawing and the dust it released filling herbody – she slowed her steps until the beast’s head was shielding hers. Thecarpenter, Joseph, was older than she. He had a beard of short chestnut curls,and a sharp straight nose. But the heavy lids of his eyes softened him, as didthe crow’s feet at their sides, and his overall effect was more fatherly thanfearful. Amongst a pile of wooden planks, which together formed two benches, hecrafted his trade. His long, harmless fingers shooed the dust from the wood.They slid along the thing he was making, and tenderly rubbed, and moulded,until chunks of tree began to take the shape of furniture. Passing men greetedhim and he smiled back, squinting in the sunlight. His workshop was open to thestreet, as though to welcome friends and neighbours’ chatter rather thancustom.

Then, in a flicker of Mary’seyelashes, the scent of basil and sawdust gave way to the tang of leather. Sheheard their sandals on the stones before she saw them: the Romans.

The girl thought it best to move,not to appear a target for the soldiers’ wandering eyes. As she passed the twomen, wishing the donkey were blocking them rather than Joseph, one of thesoldiers met her glance. She started, and he turned promptly to his comrade.She had noticed that soldier on previous occasions. His upright stance marked him out, proud as he was of the uniform that should have worn him down. All faces became familiarin this town, this bowl out of which few ever thought to climb. Some who had triedhad only slid back down into it. This soldier, with his upturned chin, beheldthe Nazarenes as though he knew what their fates were. In a way, Mary supposed,perhaps he did.

Maybe she would leave. MaybeJoseph would take her out of Nazareth. Her parents had betrothed her to a manwho would treat her kindly. She was sure of it. It was but one step in the pathof life written for her to follow. But although his glance was brief, andunthreatening, Mary knew in the instant their eyes met that the Roman wouldprove the biggest turn in her life.

That night she imagined him asshe tried to sleep. She turned her head to the window, where his hand grippedthe stone. One by one, his limbs took shape in the ether. His arm, pulling uphis head, and his shoulders, then his chest, and his waist… The soldier who hadbeen trained to tear men apart, strip them into nothing more than meat. Hisarms could break Joseph’s in half. His legs could shatter Joseph’s skull. Thecarpenter’s heavy-lidded eyes, obliterated.

Those eyes had looked at her onlyonce that evening. Her parents had invited their future son-in-law to dinner.They were eating the bread Mary had made, and he congratulated her on herblessed fingers, which only brought thoughts of his own to her silent tongue,before he turned away again and spoke with her father about the livestock andthe harvest.

Joseph would make a peacefulhusband. He would glance at her once, once in a while, and though his eyes wereof a grey as shocking as a thunderclap, his temperament was mellow as a stream.

The hazy soldier had made it overher windowsill, and was advancing to her bed. Mary felt the moisture drain fromher mouth, the droplets of sweat gather at her hairline, her temples, and rolldown to the sheets where her legs shivered but her hands were numb. She inhaledthe invisible leather, the night, the starlight. Her body turned to gold.

“Go and fetch some water,” hermother demanded one morning, “we’ll be needing it soon.” She could see thelight changing, she said; a sandstorm was on its way. Mary would have spoken,but her mother had been proved right on several past occasions. The woman,though godless, had formed a system of belief based on the notion that if shefelt something, it was sure to be. So Mary trudged to the well with herfather’s donkey, swaddled in thoughts of Joseph and his piety. She wondered ifthe sight of a sandstorm would instil in him the fear of G-d; if it was, to thehumble carpenter, to her future husband, the equivalent of a flood or a swarmof locusts.

But her thoughts were shot witharrows for there, at the well, was the Roman soldier. He drank water from hispalm. Mary thought how much sweeter it tasted, water drunk from your own skinas opposed to a cup.

A heartbeat later he saw her, andstraightened his back. It was a response that amused her, given that he tendedto carry himself taller than his height. There was a defiance in his chin andpuffed-out chest that only highlighted his stature; here was a grown man whocould not disguise the fact that he was barely taller than a young maiden.

Mary was aware of his lingeringgaze while she filled her jug with water. Flies swarmed around them, and she couldhear their buzzing, and the donkey shaking his head to rid himself of them, butshe could see nothing. Without her knowing it, the stones of the well had beendyed a single shade of orange. The scent of the olive trees evanesced.Sand-filled air had poured into the bowl of Nazareth to bury the creaturesgreat and small within it. The mountains around them had struggled to keep itat bay.

A sandal on stone. The soldier’seyes were green.

The sky behind him had turned toturmeric, and the mountains had eroded to dust. His lips had found their waythrough the sand to her neck. His hands fought their way through her robe,until both their dying skins pressed together in a shock of warmth. He pinnedher to the well, and all she could hear was his short breath, the slap of hisleather tassels, her gasp as he grabbed her feeble ankle, her sinful selfbeneath this gauze of dirt, through which it seemed even G-d’s eyes could nottravel.

Mary went home with no water anda broken jug. “I shouldn’t have sent you!” her mother cried. “Anything couldhave happened.”

The next morning, panic sweptthrough the town like a surge of blood. A woman was being stoned. She hadmanaged to drag herself to the well, screaming for mercy to a deaf L-rd,beneath a shower of cries – “Whore! Whore!” – with stones thumping against herback and shoulders, and finally, against her head. Her fingers twitched as theNazarenes continued to dole out their punishment. It wasn’t enough that thesinner die. She had to be ground to ashes.

Twelve days had passed beforeMary understood what was happening to her. There was no sign of her monthlybleeding, and when she confided in her mother, drenched in the fear of troubleto come, a flicker in the woman’s eyes confirmed it. “You’re with child, my child.”Her mother said this as plainly as she might have said the sun was hot, and shesmiled that smile of hers – the one that hinted at further wickedness yet toarise in the girl, whether Mary was aware of it or not.

Mary’s father, a descendant ofKing David, was flushed with shame upon hearing of his daughter’s own. But hewas a soft-hearted man, and it only took a quiver in Mary’s voice to provokehis tears. He embraced the girl, then suggested she be sent to her cousinElizabeth in Jerusalem, so that her time away might inspire in them anexplanation for Joseph. “What explanation? She was attacked!” her motherinsisted, and Mary listened. The story mushroomed in the air around her head,glimmering, a memory of a story of a thing that had happened to a differentgirl named Mary.

So clouded by her thoughts wasshe that even Jerusalem, a place ten times the town Nazareth was, in thecompany of her beloved relatives, was an event she only half-lived. For threemonths, Mary swept, gathered olives and made bread. She obeyed Elizabeth’sgentle instructions and greeted Zechariah in the same way every evening when hereturned from temple. Elizabeth was lit from within, and was beautiful despiteher age and crooked teeth. Zechariah moved as though his head were weightedwith coins, and although she wasn’t sure what she believed, Mary found hiswords of G-d and angels comforting, if only because it was his raspy sweetvoice that spoke them. When she looked in her relatives’ eyes, however, shefound them to be mirrors; they cast back her abominable sin. But Elizabeth saidnothing. She patted her own growing belly, and spoke of the unborn childrenthat would grow up to be as close cousins as Mary and she.

On arriving back in Nazareth,with no explanation for Joseph other than the truth – that she had lost hersenses in the sandstorm and the Roman had taken advantage of a weak youngvirgin – Mary felt a sense of loss. A piece was missing, a piece of herselfthat she could never recover. She tried not to look in the direction of thewell, and focussed instead on the activity of the market. Traders from othertowns and lands vied for attention. Their voices, their pottery, theirpomegranates, their bulgur, their sandalwood, their frankincense, theirblankets, all intermingled with the earthy odour of donkeys, and of camel hairand dung.

She found Joseph in his workshop,piecing together a table. She willed herself invisible for a while and simplywatched him, he oblivious and totally absorbed in his cause: the fitting togetherof separate parts, cut from the same tree, reshaped to form a whole new entity.

“Joseph,” she croaked. And thegrey shock of his eyes was upon her.

With a hand on her stomach she confessed. The more of thestory she told, the more distant and unreal it felt. The soldier became less ahuman being than a shadow. Although they whispered, shielded from view by thestack of furniture Joseph had built for a wealthy client, Mary couldn’t helpflicking glances at the street. His attention, however, remained fixed on her.He had never looked at her so much and, she knew, never would again.

When Mary finished her story,Joseph leant against the damp wall, his hand resting on a table. “So in sixmonths,” he calculated.

“Yes.” It wasn’t a word but abreath.

“That’s too little time to…”

He did not finish. The memory ofthe woman at the well, with stones crushing her body, possessed Mary’s headlike a demon. It had ensnared Joseph as well, for he breathed deeply and spoke:

“The governor has requested Iregister in Bethlehem. Tax collectors…”

But a man did not discusseconomics with his betrothed, so his words faded. Mary remained silent, knowingthis, and looked nowhere but at his sandal. One of his toenails was broken,like the cracked surface of parched ground.

“We will go together,” Josephcontinued, “soon, and return after the baby is born. It’s the only solution.”

She wanted to thank him. Shewanted to spill the tears of her brimming heart at his feet, but she didn’tdare.

“You have been blessed, Mary.”That calm storm of his eyes. “G-d has smiled upon you.”

And, because it seemed the rightthing to say, she responded: “Glory be to G-d.”

On their way out of Nazareth,Mary’s husband greeted every Roman soldier with narrowed eyes. The girl felt atwinge of love at his protectiveness. But when Joseph absentmindedly placed hishand on the donkey’s neck, unknowing that Mary’s hand was also there, andflinched at the touch of her skin, the girl understood that only a miraclecould unite them as a family. Perhaps it would be different when the baby wasborn. She prayed it would be a son; that she might in some way compensateJoseph for the sacrifice he had made in marrying this virgin mother. And thatin time, her one moment’s mistake would be diminished.

She tried not to think about thestoning, or the sinner’s family burying the pummelled and pulpy body. Itstirred the queasiness that grew beneath her robes. Yet she could almost hearthose mournful sobs, mingling with the whispers and the myrrh. She saw the backof her husband’s head, his thin neck, and the space between his ribs and hisarm where she wished she could belong.

By nightfall, both Joseph and thedonkey struggled to walk. Nazareth was far behind them. Its surroundingmountains had been cleared as though in a dream, several years in the distanceof the past. All she recalled of the solider now was the colour of his eyes.Nothing more.

Her baby would be born inBethlehem. How could she have foreseen it? But there it was, written before shehad ever existed.

All around them now was desert,and the multitude of stars in the sky. Mary looked for the brightest amongthem, and prayed to it as though it were G-d Himself. May He know her sins andforgive them. May He, in His infinite grace, turn a wayward girl into an honest,compassionate woman. May all ages call her blessed. When they reach Bethlehem,and the baby is born, may she cease to be Mary of Nazareth, and simply be thisgood man’s wife, and this baby’s mother.

*But in case it does, © Polis Loizou, 2011

Past

2011-12-24T23:25:00.004Z

Since the summer, my family and I have been hooked on a Cypriot TV series.

No, I'm not stoned. For the first and only time in our shared history, we've actually enjoyed a programme from our Motherland. That programme is Αίγια Fuxia, which translates to "Fuchsia Goat" (no, it's not a common expression); a comedy with a healthy dose of typically Greek tragedies that takes place in about 1910-11, while Cyprus was still a British colony and a single village hooker could monopolise the menfolk.

Picture it: a mountain village haunted by a mystery, that of 15 people – 10 years prior – who inexplicably dropped dead. An evil, money-grabbing mukhtar. The sister he turned into an outcast, whose life he ruined and whose mind he broke. Squares named after modern-day footballers. References to Lady Gaga Street, Angelina of Jolis, and the economic crisis. Song lyrics as dialogue. English, Italian, Turkish and Arabic words thrown into otherwise Cypriot sentences (for example, villagers use "Insha'Allah," or complain of crazies ruining the local "image"). Provincial dialect celebrated, turned into comedy gold. Improv poetry. Criticism of the Church. There had been nothing like this show in Cyprus.

This evening we watched the last episode. All the strands were neatly tied, the genuinely nasty explanation of the central mystery dealt with. But then the creators go and do something as manipulative as the ending of One Day, and leave the viewer with a bitter pill. The show ends with familiar locations of the village, as they are at about 1911 before fading into the empty spaces they are destined to become in a hundred years' time.

As of about 20 minutes ago, I get all sentimental around Christmas. So I understandably won't stand for this sort of buggery. I realised tonight how this show became a link to my own past; here I am in England, watching a comedy series not only about my home country but my home country before I was even born. There's a scene at a wedding, in which the characters partake in the local tradition of improv singing – this happens in my lifetime, but generally only between folks of a certain age. Once they go, my generation will probably be too busy updating Facebook statuses to bother with bawdy improv.

While watching this incredibly frustrating but enjoyable show, it dawned on me that at heart, though I can think and speak in English, I will always be Cypriot. The show garners laughs from Cypriotness itself, and 2,000 miles away we shared in that vernacular. It's been a sort of wake-up call. Like ET, only with more syrup.

This time last year, I spent a lovely Christmas with my perfectly acceptable acquaintance Franzen. It had been snowing enough for even London to be coated in white, my friends Bob and Loaf were still in England (they're now in Tokyo), I was working in Chiswick and I spent many a happy evening on a boat on the Thames. This year, London is almost warm, I spend my days in Putney with a different bunch of colleagues, I've decorated the first house we've ever owned in the UK and I've just finished watching a Cypriot fucking TV series. In the words of Nietzsche, "Hew knew?"

I have no point to make. Things change all the time and yet they also change slowly. All I know is, this is great material for me.*

* And I just wrote 500+ words for a dumb blog instead of putting those fingers to good use on a novel or something.

Ins

2011-12-03T23:36:00.001Z

It was during our usual Saturday brunch today when Ian McEwan asked me, "So how do you motivate yourself, how do you get writing?"

I took a sip of my elderflower tea and, in a show of pensiveness, munched on a brioche. (I couldn't very well answer straight away, and thus diminish the man for whom the answer to this question remains evasive.) "Well, Ian," I deliberated, "for me I suppose the key is in the key. The 'in', if you will; the portal through which I travel into the universe I am creating."

Not having met Mr McEwan, however, and therefore never having scoffed any sort of French pastry in his presence, this was a question and answer that I put to myself only 10 minutes ago as I was making a cup of tea. For insane and superstitious reasons, whenever I decide I'm finally going to sit down and get writing, I have to have tea from a literary mug. "What's one of those?" asks Alice Munro, and I explain to her: "See, I have a Shakespeare-themed mug for when I mean business, and a Shining-themed mug emblazoned with the drawing of a typewriter and the sentence, 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' repeated on the paper, for when I'm in a more playful mood."

Alice Munro never asked me anything, but the mug thing is true. When I was writing Book 1, I had to drink a cool glass of rose cordial first, to get me in the mood. For Nottingham-set Book 2, I had to stroll along the embankment of the River Trent, treading on the crisp autumn foliage. (I lived in Nottingham at the time, by the way; I wasn't bat-shit-crazy enough to get a train from London every time I fancied a typing session.)

The new play I wrote for The Off-Off-Off-Broadway Company (first script read-through next week!) is a chiller set in a sprawling mansion, and features elements of Haitian vodou. I knew that the only way to get into that world would be to rent a Haitian, drug him, bury him, and "resurrect" him two days later at a midnight ceremony as he woke from his slumber. Having been denied access to all Haitians, I satisfied my urges with simply turning off the lights. At 2am, in the dark, after a day at work spent looking up the autobiographies of dim-witted soap stars, an iMac can easily resemble a typewriter from 1911.

Why do this? Why embarrass myself looking for "ins" to my own work? I know, after all, that the only catalyst for a night of writing is writing itself. And possibly some Haitian vodou.

Gifts

2011-11-30T23:47:00.001Z

I must admit, I grew to resent my second job. It seemed like a good idea at the time, what with my need for extra duckets to spend on low-riders and gold chains, not to mention that having two jobs all of a sudden was a vast improvement on my previous stint as an unemployed graduate. [For more information, see all my posts from 2008 to 2010.] The reality, however, was that for two months I was left with no days off and payment in arrears (I said "arrears") – this, over a job that bored me to tears? Why? How masochistic do I need to be?

Today, however, the second job brought an unexpected gift. On my way to Holborn, I had a thrilling experience on the tube. No, it didn't have anything to do with rubbing against strangers on the Central line, but rather today's protests over Tory public-sector cuts. Let's just say it involved escalators and chanting, and needless to say it was an inspirational scene.

And I mean that quite literally. It not only breathed life into my body as I fought my way up to the surface, throwing Cityboys left and right, but gave me a whole new lease on a project I'm currently working on. Here was a whole scene, handed to me with John the Baptist's head, simply because back in September I lost my mind and decided that what I needed to do with my free time was Fill It With Another Job.

This! This gift! So soon after my previous gift, and I'll tell you about that one now: a couple of nights ago, I was inhaling a pack of Bourbon biscuits and typing up a new short story (which itself was inspired by a recent trip back to the Motherland and two events that knocked me dead). Having forgotten the English name for the buffer zone that divides the North and South of Cyprus, I turned to the Internets for help, and they smiled upon me most kindly. Not only did I get the alternate name that had evaded me, but I also received some bonus trivia I never knew I never knew! Trivia that added so many more layers to my story; layers that now my story couldn't do without.

I guess my Full House moral here, stated over the melancholy strum of an acoustic guitar, is this: creative people need to live life and draw breath from the experience. Also, checking in with Wikipedia now and again can't hurt.

Tech

2011-09-30T20:40:00.000+01:00

I am writing this entry from my iPhone. Not because I wish to show you that I'm a stylish citydweller in the 21st century, but because I'm better than you. It still surprises and upsets me sometimes when old people know what blogging is. Fuck, this is slow. It took me ages just to get to this part, what with Blogger's new interface and all. The reason I'm even bothering is because my fans are angry, angry lesbians. And nobody wants to get his wig ganked on AfterEllen. The other reason is that I've just moved house, and Sky forgot to mention that in order for my broadband and cable installation to coincide with my moving date, I must first resurrect Mother Teresa. Oh well, at least the house is pretty and there are woods I can stroll in nearby. And my index finger's never looked more toned.On Tuesday I start my second job, as an "audio-visual technician" at a university where sunglasses must be large enough to double as dinnerware. I am frightfully aware of my talents, and 100% sure I'll knock them dead with my vegetarian shoes and one-finger typing.Isn't it funny how people with iPhones always refer to their device as "my iPhone"? It's never just "my phone". How amusing. Or desperate.

Edinburgh

2011-09-15T16:41:00.001+01:00

A month after the event, I figured I'd write about my experience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Why has The Independent not asked me to join its team already?)

So picture it: me and Lars* singing along to No Doubt's Don't Speak while driving over the rolling hills of Derbyshire towards Jaquée's house. A night of "What the fuck are we doing?" later, and in the morning – or afternoon, depending on your choice of lifestyle – we start the long trip to our big adventure: our one-act play The Sexes does Edinburgh.

With my trusted Sat-Nav guide Jane doing the thinkin' and the calculatin', it's a whole 6 hours before we hit the town, exhausted, and desperate for our hostel beds. Well, actually, we were all a little wary of the hostel, imagining roommates with knives under the pillows and a propensity for sleep-wanking. It turns out the German and two Italians we were to bunk with were so pleasant we're now Facebook buddies. Who knew? We did, however, despise every second of taking a shower in that place – and I did see unexpectedly more of a Latin backpacker than was necessary.

In the evening we decided to hunt down the pub where our flyers were supposed to have been delivered. I say "supposed" because they hadn't been. It was three days before Andi McCann of Cann Print** fulfilled his duty and provided the flyers we paid for. This meant we watched a whole weekend race by along the Royal Mile, thousands of potential audience members glaring from the corners of their eyes at our custom T-shirts.

In the words of Spartacus, shit had got real.

So off we went to Poundland, where we bought packs of wedding-favour boxes and stationery with which to create makeshift promo for our show. We handed these from a bucket with "The Sexes" stuck to it, and Lars and Jaquée in costume, at the receiving end of finger-pointing and more glaring, with mascara running down their faces. We even wrote out wedding invitations with quotes from the play on the envelopes ("Get on your hands and knees," "I thought we didn't speak to him anymore," etc.), which we silently handed to individuals in the crowds.

We also had a radio interview! At The Pleasance; the glorious venue we had to turn down due to lack of sugardaddy and/or inheritance. This was a bittersweet experience, to sit in The Venue That Could Have Been, scoffing hotdogs and requesting Elvis Costello. But it was magical. We even mentioned Jane in our interview; how confused she was in Scotland, turning me down one-way streets, asking me to perform illegal right turns and, one terrifying night, asking me to drive into the river.

Since we were now part of the PBH Free Fringe, our venue was a disused shop in Princes Mall. This meant people coming up to ask me where the Whiskey shop was, and Italian tourists wondering if there was anything else to watch for free. It also meant buckets of Fried Chicken, but the less said about that the better. The venue may have been unglamorous, but the key word here was FREE, so we were happy with the space we got.

Our most eventful performance, however, entailed a Scottish lady who screeched like a child at every swear-word, spoke loudly to me about her poor view while the actors were performing, and burped during an intense silent moment. "Oh, pardon me!" she said, which set a boy off in the third row. He tried not to laugh, which only made it worse, while Jaquée and everyone else who hadn't heard Burping Lady were left mystified as to this boy's curious spasms.

When we finally had flyers, we made ourselves as loud and noticeable on the streets as we could manage, desperation forcing all the stops out. This worked, however, and we ended up with a full house for the last show. So full, in fact, that people were turned away at the door.

Whether or not anybody liked it, we couldn't tell. The donations dropped into our bucket managed to cover the extortionate parking fees, and also treated us to a beautiful breakfast in one of the city's hidden gems: The Canny Man's in Morningside. An inn like a Victorian TGI Friday's, with children's blazers hooked on door-frames, glass cases with stuffed roosters on the walls and dolls hanging from the ceiling.

The highlight, however, had to be our cosy existence in the flat we rented after moving out of the hostel. In the heart of the Meadows, it was a top-floor haven with a constantly running tap, broken doors and heating issues. But it was also a time of me, Jaquée and Lars eating together at the table, listening to music and creating those makeshift flyers while we waited for the real ones to turn up.

We went there broke and came back broke, but Edinburgh is a city that captivates you. It's massive and intimate at the same time, cultured, frenzied, peaceful, with Arthur's Seat on one side and the sea on the other. We love it. And even if it kills us, we're going back next summer. With a better piece in a better venue and, indubitably, a better printer.

Love from Edinburgh

* Names changed for training purposes.
** Name not changed for revenge purposes.

10

2011-07-28T00:42:00.002+01:00

Ten years ago today, I moved to England.

I remember the day we got the plane tickets, and I found my mum in her bedroom that afternoon, staring at the tickets in joyous disbelief. She'd been waiting for over twenty years for that moment.

I spent the first 16 years of my life in Limassol, Cyprus. The night of the 27th when I slept in my empty bedroom, knowing that my next sleep would be in a different country, is one that remains as clear to me as if it happened last night. (Clearer, in fact, since I'll soon be joining that fast Ginkgo Biloba crowd.)

Within England, I've had several lives. I left as a teenager and now I'm in my late twenties. I've lived in five different towns, had seven different bedrooms and, what with school, university, three paid jobs, many unpaid jobs and two ~~slave~~ internships, I must've met and parted ways with hundreds of people. My career took an unexpected foray from film into theatre.

England is the country in which I had my first girlfriend, my first kiss, went to my first gig, met my first celebrity, got my first job, attended my first festival and award ceremony, made my first film, premiered my first play... Of course, there were other firsts. Like the time Jenny Eclair outed me to the senior population of Derby, or the time I almost decked a chav.

I come from a country where everybody travelled by car because you never saw a bus without "LOUIS TOURS" emblazoned on it. Here, I learned to use the tube, as well as the correct pressure points to elbow in order to guarantee myself a seat.

I saw this country go from left-wing to right-wing. I felt my first signs of crotchetiness at Royal Mail's switch from twice-a-day-plus-Sundays-and-Bank-Holidays post to once-a-day-to-the-right-address-if-you're-lucky. I witnessed the introduction of Boris Bikes, was in the same country as The Royal Wedding.

Why say all this? Why think about it? I'm not somebody who believes in Fate or God, yet I'm so frustratingly human that I wish to find patterns and clues and answers in everything. Yes, it while I was at school here that I first heard Amy Winehouse, and after work long after I graduated when I heard of her demise. A morbid but coincidental marker of my time here, but nothing more.

I suppose I don't really want to make sense of anything. It's enough to throw out random facts and memories, simply to stare at them all in disbelief and think, "This all happened. This was my life in ten years."

And then I think, "Shit."

Almost

2011-06-05T21:21:00.003+01:00

Picture it:

On Friday, I travel to Lancashire for the premiere of Hyde. The sun's hotter than a pay-per-view college party and I end up watching my writing while grimacing through waves of nausea and a reddening forehead.

On Saturday, I travel back to Lunduntown, reading about horses that run into twisters. I attend a birthday party in Chiswick full of people from The Motherland. Today's word is "surreal." (It's many a day's word, to be fair.)

Today, I hang out in Hampstead with yet another friend who's fleeing the country, before attending an art exhibit in Waterloo, still lugging around my Lancashire luggage. (Try saying that five times fast.) Just to set the mood, bear in mind that all I've eaten so far is pain au chocolat, apple tart and a praline macaroon. I return to the safe bosom of my bedroom and am about to collapse on the bed like the star of a 1950s melodrama when I spot an envelope on my chair. It bears my name and address in my own writing. Aw, hail naw.

I tear the envelope open, coax my returned short story from it, and set to groaning at the standard typed rejection note that's attached. "We regret to inform you," blah, blah, blah...

Except this time, there's a handwritten message at the bottom!

We thought this was excellent, but not quite there for _____.

I stop reading. What I feel is not bile, not bitterness, not self-aggrandising fury... but gratitude. I want to marry the person who told me I was good but not good enough! We could be the Woolfs. I could be their Richmond. I know a lot of these poor lit-mags and film festivals are lacking in time and funds, but a personal message goes a long way. It says, "You are worthwhile. We like you. This note is a hug from afar."

Of course, the feeling doesn't last long. I re-read the word "excellent" until it starts to look Latin, and then the bitch-slap dawns. "Not quite there." Close but no cigar. It seems no matter what I try, I simply cannot get beyond Almost.

The festival feedback for my latest short flick was the same; "wonderful, excellent, we thought it was great, we blogged about it, we told our mothers, they told their cousins, get on Twitter so we'll follow you, here's Kate Winslet's phone number, but ultimately... no. Better luck next time."

Novel #1, same.* "Beautiful, glorious, a work of genius the likes of which only Dave Eggers has known... but no. Something about you is just off. Like a hipster without boat shoes. Goodbye."

What is it I'm doing wrong? Do I lapse into Babylonian poetry too much? Not enough? Do I unconsciously mention my inability to pronounce "brethren"? I look back at all my submissions, disliking everything about them, and can't see from whence the necessary bonus points might have sprung. How do I get from B+ to A?

When I was 17, I asked my art teacher that very question. He spent approximately half an hour not telling me. He kept drawing a flight of stairs, and marking me as a blotch somewhere over halfway up. "You could be here," he said, indicating the top, "but you're not."

"Then how do I get there?" I twitched.

But he only repeated, "You're still here," pointing at the blotch.

In Lancashire, my head in my hands and my nausea in my head, I watched audience member after audience member take a seat in the theatre. I caught the techies fetching more seats. I saw people standing against the walls. In short, we had sold out like hell. And then I beheld this thing I wrote as it unfolded in front of me, a child I had given away in infancy and come to applaud at his graduation. People laughed at the jokes, hissed at the villain, winced at the fight scenes, cried at the end and cheered during the curtain call. The premiere of Hyde was an indubitable success.

Where it'll lead, I have no idea. What it'll do for me, who knows? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing. It is —all together now— Almost.

* Novels #2 and #3 were sent nowhere.

Kid

2011-06-03T14:19:00.003+01:00

I've been 50 since I was born. A glum infant, a crotchety teen and a comatose 20-something. When I was 16, I bought Tesco booze for friends who stood a chance of being IDed. Having said that, I was recently purchasing "The Social Network" from a clothes shop (!) when the salestwink asked if I was over 18 (!!). His jegginged colleague was all, "Uh, it's only rated 12. And besides, this guy must be 80."
It was this moment of falling in love that got my brainwheels turning. (Actually, it was my reading the first book of the "Skulduggery Pleasant" series that did it.) Couldn't I be a decent kids' author?
"You make wonderful omelettes," my other brain cautioned, "like the surface of the sun."
And I said, "Thank you."
"But do you really think you're cut out for a life of Michael Morpurgo?"
Yes, actually, I don't think it's that unreasonable. Inside this OAP's body is a child barely contained - one that spent about 11 minutes laughing at Paperchase wrapping paper covered in foods with faces. The pizza slice with the pert smile reduced me to the happiest of tears.
Besides, kids like me. They wave at me on trains, and I wave back, then they wave again... Two hours of greeting each other later, they get bored and turn back to their iPhones to book trains to Legoland.
So, I'm going to write kids' fiction. Funny how little my already existing stories would need to be tweaked for the tween crowds, by the way. I figure I should change my child-terrifying name, though. Here are the alter-ego options so far:

Porky Lorenzo
Pumpkin Log
Pop Lock
Parker Lowenstein
Punky Loose
Polo Logo
Pollo Loco
Preston Loaf
Pizza Locks
Proust Lollobrigida

Of course, I'm not naive. I know there's my image makeover to consider, too.

Microcosm

2011-05-22T19:25:00.003+01:00

When I was 8 years old, my sister, godbrother and I liked to roam the fields of Panthea in Limassol, before the place got packed with blocks of flats. One day, we discovered a makeshift church inside a cave, the remnants of candles and sculptures of disembodied limbs sitting beneath the modest icons. It impressed us, and we understood the importance of our discovery, but we kept it to ourselves. Years later, the church was someone else's news story.

I went from being a kid with a BMX bike to a teenager who watched at least two movies a day and could speak French. Now I'm a twenty-something who tries to cram reading-time on the commute to and from work, and writing-time somewhere between dinner and the bath before bed. As Peggy Lee might've said, Is that all there is?

Thankfully, no.

Today I went to the Isle of Dogs, a district in East London that was once a notorious dockland before turning into Stockbroker Central. That might seem like the last place a broke bookseller should be, seeing as I hardly ever think in percentages and almost never appease my stockholders. No, I was there for a different reason: some friends (and former inmates on The Boat) had suggested we take the DLR to Crossharbour to visit Mudchute Park & Farm.

Yes, that word was "farm". Babe's country. Knee-high boots. Orwell. Not-Stalinist-Russia.

Picture it, if you will: a leafy tunnel that leads off a bland avenue to a landscape of vast, green hills. The sky bigger than it's ever looked, with clouds as formed as plaster. A flock of sheep eating together. Woolly little ones with dark faces, picking at grass. In the distance behind them, the O2 arena.

We walked amongst the animals, watched the fat adult sheep negotiate passing through a wooden fence. As we followed the path towards the other creatures, we contemplated how similar the apocalypse feels to life pre-Judgement Day. That's when we saw Napoleon and Snowball. But they apparently have 44 sharp teeth, so you must "not put your hands into the pigs." The expected farm menagerie followed, with chickens and turkeys, goats, horses, donkeys and... llamas.

Photograph by $ara

After a healthy ciabatta, a brief and sudden rain-shower and a visit to the obligatory farm shop (full of such farm-paraphernalia as bouncy rubber eggs and plastic brontosauruses), I bought myself an ice-cream and we continued our journey through the park.

Not only was I enjoying the bliss of an unhealthy snack again, recalling my days of obesity with rose-tinted glasses, but minutes after leaving the farm I found myself smiling at the sight of people sailing on the Thames. Those imposing office blocks behind them – mere toys.

On my art foundation course, a man with an unfortunate alpaca sweater came in once a week to impart his artistic wisdom. One afternoon, he made the mistake of saying that nature was far more beautiful than anything created by man. That's when one of my classmates, a boy in a tracksuit and perma-shiny trainers with a Mockney accent, decided enough was enough. "You can't say that," he argued, and the debate lasted the rest of the day, the teacher dismissing his student as clueless. But I agreed with my classmate.

Sometime in the past ten years, I became somebody who forgot what relaxation was, always rushing around and keeping my eye on the clock. Being on the farm today felt like getting into a hot bath instead of a quick shower; a time to breathe rather than a job to get done. But I know that it wasn't natural beauty that filled my heart with joy – it's the fact that it was in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world.

Machine

2011-05-17T23:57:00.002+01:00

Some people have God. In times of crisis, I turn to Fiona Apple.

No-one else can express, in 10 words or less, everything I'm feeling, have felt, have made others feel, hope to make others feel, or have suspected others of feeling regardless of what they're actually feeling. Bitch gets it SO RIGHT. I only wish she'd stop cleaning out barns and hurry back to the recording studio.

Upon hearing that my friend Franzen*'s short story was accepted for publication, I was hit by two things: 1.) elation, and 2.) the realisation that my own submission to the same magazine was shot down like Nancy Sinatra. I have already illustrated in my previous post how well my novel is progressing (hint: the clue is in the pun title. To give you a further hint, I just corrected to "progressing" where I'd originally written "prog-rock"). You can therefore imagine the effect of this news on my progress.

Or maybe not. You see, Rejection and I have been like an old sitcom couple – I can't stand her being around, but ultimately we need each other. Who knows why: the immediate sugar intake she drives me to? The drinking? The refusal to go down with my ship? It's self-doubt that fuels me. The nearest I can describe the effect is this: I'm on fire, so I jump into the Thames. May as well try to extinguish the flames and lessen the burns, even if it means ending up in Slough.

What I'm saying is, sometime in the past 10 years or so I've become a machine. As I sat down to work on my novel, the single thought buzzing around my head was, "Why?" I couldn't answer that, so I didn't. "Why carry on?" I don't know. But suddenly my story has to be better, phrasing has to be unique without being overwritten (ignore this blog), and the novel needs more focus now than I ever gave it before. Even if I hate everything that comes out of my digital mouth.

To quote Ms Apple, I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine.

* names changed for uninvited ego-massage

Notvel

2011-05-09T17:55:00.002+01:00

OK, so the title of this entry sounds like the name of a Jewish uncle, but in a way that's quite apt.

What a time I've had recently – if it hasn't been junkie-cousin drama, it's been chav fights and job offers, friends leaving and first cars being purchased. I like to view my life as though it's one of those overviews of the 20th century you sometimes see on TV.

...Which seamlessly brings me to the Holocaust. (It does, really, just hang in there.) While I await the premiere of my stage adaptation of Jekyll & Hyde* in June, I have been approached by another member of Thunder Road to write a script about WWII. In particular, a female three-hander about the 'Escape From Hell' mission at the Treblinka concentration camp.

At first, the thought of tackling anything WWII-related filled me with dread; how could I avoid clichés, how could I bring something new to the table, how could I presume to write about the experiences of persecuted people who lived 40 years before I was born, etc, etc...? It was, I must admit, the female angle that hooked me. Before I knew it, my initial reluctance gave way to scribbling like crazy.

I also scribbled like crazy while standing for 2 hours on the train from London to Stockport last Thursday. It's not easy trying to write a play about disillusioned youths whilst attempting to dissuade the advances of a drunk rent-boy who tells you to relax while trying to fondle your buttocks. It also doesn't help when the person who's gently molesting you looks more and more like a possible chapter of that novel you keep meaning to work on.

...Which seamlessly brings me to my point (and title). The novel. The thing I was meant to finish last year, to send to the publisher who'd shown an interest. The thing that was going to make me BFF with Mariella Frostrup.

It should go without saying that the novel is not done. Every time I think about opening up Word and turning my notes into fiction gold, the pressure gets too great and those good intentions collapse. I do other things, like sing '90s dance-pop with a German accent, or stare dreamily into the pages of National Geographic's Machu Picchu feature, only to wake up two hours later with a Canon 5D ad stuck to my face.

If that drunk rent-boy taught me anything (and it sure wasn't UK geography), it's that I should suck it up and get on with things. Disable my Wi-Fi, forget German accents, put aside other people's books and get on with writing this thing that was meant to happen a year ago. Maybe now. Maybe later. Maybe after a nice cup of tea.

Would they have liked PG Tips in Machu Picchu?

* title shortened for reasons of laziness and assumed reader intelligence

Terror

2011-05-03T23:33:00.002+01:00

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Or the same info, by way of The Sun: "BIN BAGGED."

To many people around the world, these words meant "break out the party hats, there's life in our Royal Wedding tablecloths yet." To me, however, the words were code for: "Revenge is on the way. Stay away from the District line and discount DVD spindles at Lidl."

Though quite why Bin Laden's sons would want to bomb me personally is anyone's guess. Is it because I laughed at a couple of jokes against their pops in 2003? Or because I persistently call one of my Muslim friends Towelhead? Today, I believe I finally got my answer.

Having ordered Kirsty Gunn's novella Rain through eBay, I looked forward to receiving my parcel in safe Croydon [/irony]. Tonight I returned from a night out with colleagues (Kenneth's Branagh's Thor, if you want the truth as well as an example of anything being possible), and tore into the awaiting package. The first thing I saw through the bubble envelope were the words, "PROPERTY OF THE US ARMY." Fuck. My. Life.

As gingerly as a I imagine a bomb-disposal expert to be, I coaxed out the plastic-covered novel and realised I'd just spent £3.99 on a former military-library book, loaned out 4 times between 1995 and 2001. Not only will the Taliban think me a US ally, but now I've also got the US Army hunting me down for its stolen library goods.

What if I promised to stop calling my friend Towelhead?

Me hiding from the Bin Ladens

B.A.D.

2011-04-11T22:58:00.001+01:00

Burlesque

2011-04-09T00:37:00.004+01:00

It was Moulin Rouge and Toulouse-Lautrec. Then it was Bettie Page and Dita Von Teese. It was also Cher and Christina Aguilera, but that's better left unspoken.

Last weekend, however, it was me racing to the affluent suburbs of West London right after work, to the Kew of Kew Gardens fame, to a burlesque show at St Luke's church. While the shrubs outside the hallowed stone walls were covered like brides, the girls inside were preparing for the wedding night. Amateurs, all of them, students of the art of the tease, putting on their first proper show. And I was there to film it.

No, not as the requisite Perv of Suburbia*. As the official unspecified one-man film-related creative that I've become over the past few years.

I first met Miranda Llewellyn, the brains behind the Burlesque Academy of Dance (BAD, wink-wink), through my dearest friend and actress, Laurange**. We met at Carluccio's in Richmond, just before Jaquée and I went scouting for girls called Virginia Woolf. Miranda bought me lattes and spoke of her old dancing injuries (the Can-Can is a bitch on the ol' gams). But best of all, Miranda made me an offer. A job offer. She was to be putting together a charity event in April, a night of burlesque featuring her students, and wanted someone to film it.

Now, I don't know what it is, but the world of cabaret keeps sucking me in. Somehow, it follows me through happenstance and friend-of-friend encounters. At university I filmed a showreel for burlesque artist Leila Domini. In September I fell into a cabaret workshop in which my group put together a song-and-dance routine about "bus stop crazies." The night before New Year's Eve, I stumbled off the streets of London into a cabaret revue inside an abandoned church. It was run by a Bohemian group of squatters known as The Oubliette Arthouse, and it enchanted me with comedy songs and ukulele, Judi Garland and conjoined twins. The candlelit romance was just what I needed. I decided this was a world I felt an affinity for – underground, decadent, anarchic, with a sense of humour to boot.

Of course I accepted Miranda's offer. She was doing me a favour. And those girls – women – exposing themselves as they did in front of friends and family, they were humbling and thrilling to behold. All I could do was shuffle around the church hall attempting to capture the pizzaz of their movements while trying not to get whacked in the face by a flying stiletto.

Burlesque, you want my love – take it all.

* Disney's other flop Gyllenhaal movie.
** Nickname born of mash-ups and history.

Hedgehogs

2011-03-17T00:07:00.001Z

My new video for Kinzli & the kiloWatts (made with Kinzli over 2 days of giggling like cheerleaders):

Owned

2011-03-08T14:23:00.004Z

Part of my job as a bookseller – apart from shining cityboys' shoes and contemplating Brancusi in corners – is, perhaps unsurprisingly, to sell books. While it gives me great pleasure to force Jean Rhys on unsuspecting Dutch tourists, one of my duties is to pimp the merchandise sitting by the till. Sometimes this means Marian Keyes. But other times, to my absolute joy, it means Ian McEwan.

I have no qualms whatsoever about pushing Solar into the terrified face of a stockbroker buying The Art of War. I have, however, found myself pushing it with such statements as, "It's so Ian McEwan." Whatever that means. Cynicism, dry wit, ambivalence, slick yet spare style? Then I find myself reading lines from Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal:

Sheba insists that [Steven Connolly] has superb skin and it is true, I suppose, that he has been spared the sort of suppurating carbuncles to which boys of his age are prone. But what she refers to as his "olive complexion" has always struck me as rather dingy. I can never lay eyes on the boy without wanting to give his face a good going-over with a hot flannel.

And this is so Zoë Heller. Fuck off; how would I know? The tart bitchiness, the humour built by snobbery – is that really Ms Heller? Or is it simply the narrator for whom she's invented a past, a body, a mind and a voice? Why do we – or at least, I – want so much to believe that the work is a reflection of its author? Hitchcock's blondes have to be the embodiment of his personal issues with women, and Tarantino's shots of feet, a glimpse into his fetishes. My beloved Jean Rhys was a drunk ex-model who got trampled by every man in her life, and wrote about a drunk ex-model who gets trampled by men.

Surely there must be a line between fact and fiction. Otherwise, Zoë Heller was an aging, bitter, obsessive – and possibly lesbian – History teacher when she wrote that infamous 2003 novel. I suppose the truth can't help but sneak in every now and then; that a work, being the creation of an individual with an individual history, experience, belief system and cultivated taste, must to a certain extent be an insight into its creator. Well, I know this to be true from my own work.

My characters tend to be lonely, misanthropic, paranoid, cynical, jaded, snobbish, or relentlessly wanting, and sometimes all these things at once. But they're also usually self-deluded or lacking in self-control – two things I sometimes wish I was but never am. Some of them appall me, and I mock them, while others invite my sympathy and love. But I am not them and they are not me, even if I know that they've seen things through my eyes; they've watched the same surf roll back and forth, experienced the same sleepless nights.

A customer recently told me she never reads fiction because she'd rather read something true, "something that matters." I wanted to say, "Right, because newspapers are always right and there were never Psychology books that claimed single-parent children would suffer from dwarfism." But I let it pass. I know that in the best fiction, there's always an element of truth that reaches out to touch its reader / viewer / onlooker, and that the experience is ultimately richer for its combination of grounding and escape. It can be the portion of somebody else you identify as your own. That matters.

Aphrodite

2011-03-03T19:18:00.004Z

A bit of a thing...

* * * * *

Aphrodite took a bottle of Paracetamol into her studio. On her journey along the parquet length of the house, she recalled the first week she moved to Omodos; the openness of the villagers in contrast to the Gucci sunglasses of the city-folk. They told her, having eyed her up and down for traces of designer jewellery or irony, that the place was haunted. The ghost of a girl, they whispered, who had humiliated her father by falling pregnant with the candle-maker’s son, who was slaughtered in a fit of despair, who screamed out to the mountains on the day of her death, and whose footsteps could be heard crossing the ceiling for forty days after that.

Aphrodite did not believe in ghosts, but she believed in the beauty of folklore and her eyes widened in earnest as she was being fed the story. Satisfied by the reaction, Calypso, the storyteller, raised her already high eyebrow as both a sign of acceptance to the newcomer and a signal to the rest of the village to treat her likewise. The old woman wiped her hands on her daisy apron, leaving the bowl of green beans to fend for itself in her shifting lap.

‘What do you do?’ she inquired of the younger woman.

‘I’m an artist,’ Aphrodite replied.

‘All the artists live in Lania,’ said Calypso.

‘I know. That’s why I came to Omodos.’

Every day since, Aphrodite would pass the old woman – usually sitting in the shade of her entrance and cutting a vegetable of some kind in that cream plastic bowl – and Calypso would ask, ‘Have you seen her yet?’ to which Aphrodite would always respond, ‘I’m still waiting.’ And it was true. She found herself waiting every day for those footsteps in the ceiling. She would sink in the bathtub, her eyes on the mountain range framed by the window, and long for the echo of that scream. It never came. And as she sat in her studio, chasing pill after pill down her throat with the water from her paint-can, she still couldn’t hear a thing.

It was Calypso who realised that Aphrodite was dead. When she checked her watch –a pretty leather-strapped one her son had sent from America – and realised that it was past eleven o’clock and the artist still hadn’t come out for her morning walk, she set the cream plastic bowl of potatoes down on her doorstep and lifted her well-nourished backside off its canvas seat.

She knew before she even got to the window. There always hovered an air of disquiet about the old Giannakou house, but this was different. There was the unmistakable lack of something behind the stone walls. There was no trace of that sense – whatever it was – that the pine doors and window shutters might open at any second. The air was not fresh here. The artist was dead. And, on peeking through the open shutters of the living room window, Calypso saw the evidence with her own eyes. In the distance, silhouetted against the glassy panorama of those pungent fir trees, slumped in a chair by a painting in her studio, was Aphrodite.

Calypso searched for the nearest man, spotted Takis the builder about to set off in his double cabin Mitsubishi, and called on him to break down the door of that cursed house.

Aphrodite was dead. Frosso couldn’t even say the words. She lumbered by the photo of her late husband, unable to speak them to him. She sat in rigid comfort of her darkened living room, unable to organise them in her head. She picked up the phone to dial her sister, and sat in the intermittent breeze of a standing fan as she finally shook them out of her mouth. ‘My baby is dead.’She had spent all morning making spinach pie, caressing the filo pastry as she prepared it and inhaling the sharp sudden scent of it as she opened the oven door. Now it sat in its Pyrex tray on the kitchen table, perfectly layered, entirely too much and totally unwanted.

Frosso drove through Saitas, wondering which of the schools it was that had reportedly acquired that empty patch of land with plans to build anew. It was all empty here – big, white, dry undulations specked with grass that had no hope of growing beyond an inch. Behind her, there lay a wide expanse of sea, glittering blue beneath the sun, and she tried to catch as many glimpses of it in her rear view mirror as she could. She longed to be facing it, and driving towards it, instead of the mountains where her daughter’s things existed without her.

She passed the Hani, that old, traditional inn run by that lovely man who always wore a waistcoat. She felt the sudden urge to go back there sometime, to sit beneath its high arches and feast on mezze and wine. The way they used to as a family. But she had to remind herself that Aphrodite was dead, and lay the image of a little girl poking the octopus around her dish, with a grimace at its vinegary odour, to rest.

As the roads wound narrower, Frosso struggled to keep her eyes on the road. The higher you ascended the Troodos mountains, the more perilous the journey. Steep cliffs on either side, with nothing but a flimsy metal bar between a Fiat and its demise. Signs along the way, pointing out the angles and gradients of every patch of road, depicting boulders tumbling towards the tarmac, proclaiming, ‘Sharp bend’ and, ‘Slow.’ But the rows and rows of fir trees, staggered like a choir in an English church, were restful to behold. The light was cooler here. And that scent of pine, followed by the images of acorns it invoked, was comforting. Until, that is, she passed the burnt patch. Her eyes wiped the scene left to right, left to right, like that lazy printer Kostakis’ brother had brought and set up for her, translating and committing the image to her brain. There they stood, bent and charred, an army of wooden soldiers. The forest fires had terrified her. It was something that happened every year in Greece, but that was Greece. She didn’t know anyone there. Here, it was personal. It could have been her daughter, the crazy artist who decided out of thin air to go and live in Omodos, where she might have been killed by forest fires. ‘I’m fine,’ Aphrodite had whined and laughed at the same time on the phone, when a panicked Frosso had called to check. The woman remembered thinking, ‘That’s right – it’s Aphrodite. She’d not only be unharmed by the fires, she’d probably go out and take pictures.’

She would have stared at these broken black trees and thought them beautiful. She would have reproduced them in charcoal back home in her sketchbook. Frosso wondered if Aphrodite had even got to see the trees before she killed herself. And what did it matter if the girl had died in the fires a month ago? Better that than die by her own hand, with vulgar medication, in middle-of-nowhere Omodos.

Thanatos

2011-02-27T11:21:00.004Z

It is our only certainty. More likely than a bestselling Scandinavian crime series, surer than another #1 hit single for JLS. And yet society at large — mine, at any rate — has such a problem talking about death.

I can't throw out a simple phrase like, "If I live long enough," without my mother crying, "Oh! My darling boy, touch wood!" The fact that I know I might be hit by a bus tomorrow (increasingly likely, the way my attention and peripheral vision have been conspiring with each other against me nowadays) simply makes me a realist; it doesn't make me a be-fringed zombie who listens to My Chemical Romance while carving poetry into his arms.

And yet I realise I have a slight death obsession. My stories wouldn't be complete without someone being impaled by a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and it's been that way since those sun-kissed, knee-high schooldays. As an impressionable teenager* I read a lot of Patricia Highsmith — a woman whose knack of creating microcosms of increasingly sinister claustrophobia thrilled me to the core. In particular I was haunted (and continue to be) by Jenny Thierolf, the catalyst of 1962's The Cry of the Owl. Obviously disturbed by the demise of her young brother, Jenny has grown into a beautiful suburban woman whose frank discussion of death unnerves even the stalker she invites into her house. Things do not go smoothly for her (though, this being Highsmith, not in the way you might expect) yet she remains an attractive figure to me. I want to know her, if only for this trait that separates her from her suburban counterparts.

Last night I saw an advert on the tube that simultaneously shocked me, tickled me and made me grateful to be alive in a world where such things exist. It was for something called The Clear Pill; a thing you take to expand your mind and help you achieve Self Actualisation. The disclaimer, however, was where the wackness really kicked off, stating that the side effects of this miracle pill will include paralysis, brain damage, blackouts, suicidal feelings, homicidal feelings, extreme paranoia, rapid aging, and sudden death**. While I would never seriously consider such a pill, part of me longed to try it.

Isn't there something liberating in the idea that one's body is no more than that? An extraordinary machine that seeks to sustain itself with not only food, but also thoughts, beliefs and longing? One day it shuts down, and that is all. There's no ego-trip, not usually, consisting of Hollywood Rare Diseases and Deathbed Wisdom. People still live, still procreate, still dream, still write life-changing literature, and nobody's death is big enough to change all that.

*I was never impressionable.
**Limitless (2011).

Toys

2011-02-19T00:34:00.001Z

"I wanna pack cute little lunches for my Brady Bunches, then read Danielle Steele."

That's a lyric from I Wanna Get Married, Nellie McKay's sublime 4 minutes of sarcasm. What sweetens it for me is that Nerina Pallot played it at her wedding, smirking to herself as she walked up to the altar.

I love rebels. But I'm talking about the people who snicker in churches rather than those who start Facebook groups called "Time to put Lady CaCa back in her egg!!" People with a sense of irony, a funny bone, a lack of arsiness. There's only so much navel-gazing about the wonders of feet and paper boats I can take before a flick loses its appeal. Sometimes, you simply want to watch a bunch of militant Jews burn a cinema and shoot Hitler several times in the face.*

Kinzli, lovely Kinzli**, is one of the shiniest examples of human being I have ever been fortunate enough to meet. Picture the two of us in her Putney living room, me hyperventilating on a sofa while she performed a track she'd only finished half an hour before I got there. Sad and beautiful though the new song is, Kinzli insists that the production and accompanying video should be amusing. She can't stand the thought of 100% moroseness.

The rest of the afternoon was spent filming a video for I Read Your Letter, a track from her second album, Down Up Down. While almost operatically offbeat, it is also a serious song that deals with medication and heartache – which, in Kinzliworld, translates to improvising a video cast entirely with toys. See, I've somehow ended up with a vast supply of cuddly animals (and, most creatively, a cuddly Mount Fuji with arms as well as a face) from all my friends who've travelled abroad. Kinzli has amassed her own supply because she is their queen. Meanwhile her kitchen provided us with miniature bottles of booze and Beatles album-cover fridge magnets that handily double as tiny LP sleeves.

In a matter of hours, having giggled at harmonica-playing collies and busted our own seams at slo-mo hedgehogs, we'd wrapped filming on Video #4 (Video #3 is also currently in the works). As I encode the footage, I'm aware of this cloud hanging over us: is this video going to be seen as "quirky"? Am I going to be regarded as the sort of Family Guy-obsessive hipster I normally run away from in Shoreditch?

I hope not. Our reasons for using toys for the video are really quite straightforward:

We have no money.
But we both have toys.

We were also both loners at school.

* Reference to Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, not snapshot of London life.

** Insanely talented singer-songwriter; www.kinzli.com.

Love

2011-02-14T10:42:00.000Z

"In my glass coffin, I am waiting...

In my glass coffin, I am waiting..."

~ PJ Harvey, Hardly Wait

"(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
~ Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

"She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them."
~ Othello

"No, no 'baby' anymore –
And if I need you, I'll just use your simple name

Only kisses on the cheek from now on,

And in a little while, we'll only have to wave"

~ Fiona Apple, Love Ridden

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

~ E.M. Forster, Howards End

"Oh, I ran, I ran so easily
Casting no shadow in my wake
In chase so manly that I soon get bored
And honey, I'm such a flake"
~ Nerina Pallot, It Was Me

"Stand there like that
Keep your eyes on me
For one more minute
Let our habit be
It's so automatic
The avalanche
Of knowing I loved you
And you just can't back"

~ Charlotte Martin, Habit

"Shut the windows so the neighbours won't see
Bolt the door and snuff the candle
My arms are hot as wax and melting,
In expectation of our embrace"
~ Napoleon Lapathiotis, Shut The Windows

"That voice you're so afraid of,
It's not me, it's not me
I'm quiet, listen, I'm quiet
I don't expect responsibility of you
That's someone else yelling,
Someone else interrogating you
Someone else keeping score
I swear to you, it's not me"
~ Kostas Hatzis, It's Not Me

Glod

2011-02-07T13:06:00.002Z

The other night, I thought I'd be magnanimous and give Glee another try. (For those of you who have just been released from prison, I'm referring to the TV show that consistently fails to live up to its promising set-up of a PE teacher trying to stamp out a bunch of singing high-school kids.) I'm always amused by Jane Lynch, so I figured some mindless midnight entertainment over a pot of apricot yoghurt would go down a treat.

Grilled Cheesus

Unbeknownst* to me, I had sat down to the Twitter-legendary Grilled Cheesus episode. Basic synopsis: Chris-Klein-a-like jock Flynn sees the face of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich, believes he is blessed, and starts to pray for all the boob-related things a teenager would pray for. At the same time, LGBT-Agenda Kurt (the lovely Chris Colfer) fears he is about to lose his dad to a heart attack. While the rest of the singing high-school kids want to sing spiritual songs to support the ailing man, atheist Kurt takes offence and sides with misanthropic PE teacher Sue Sylvester (Lynch, firing on all cylinders) to retain a separation of Church and State.

It's an ingenious idea; one that in the hands of Tom Perrotta and Alexander Payne would have made a worthy rival for 1999's riotous Election.

Unfortunately, that yoghurt pot done nearly melted in my fist at the shocking events that unfurled on my TV screen. Whereas Grilled Cheesus seemed like an inoffensive bit of self-conscious quirkiness designed to appeal to Facebook statuses, the conceit quickly gave way to horrific televangelism the likes of which Jim and Tammy Faye would applaud.

What is it that American TV execs don't understand about atheism? Why is a disbelief in God constantly regarded and represented as a lack; an error; a deficiency; the result of some loss? Kurt doesn't believe in God because he's gay and people mock him. Sue doesn't believe in God because she has a disabled sister whom people also mocked. The sister character herself is yet another appalling attempt on the writers' behalf to add depth to Sue's character. Why humanise a monster? Why "add depth" in order to remove bite and flavour? Why can't characters refuse to believe in God, not because their deaf-dumb grandmother was run over by a snow plow, but simply because they've weighed up all the options and arrived at the conclusion that they don't need The Bible in order to live as worthwhile human beings?

Your attitudes are not only patronising, Glee writers, they're also downright scary. Kurt would never have relented and gone to church with Mercedes, just as all real-life atheists would refuse to be coerced into beliefs they simply don't swallow. No matter how disabled their sisters might be.

*I bet that word was previously unbeknownst to you.

Tragedy

2011-01-26T23:33:00.004Z

The above image is taken from the ancient Greek version of Home Alone ('Apomonosis'), starring Makolos Calkion. It was a long-standing tradition of Athenian theatre to make full use of an amphitheatre's acoustics, so scenes made up entirely of protracted screams were not only fashionable but they also guaranteed success.

At a night of Greek-Cypriot theatre in Croydon, I was so inspired by the feeling of togetherness amongst my London-based compatriots that I decided, 10 months later, to offer my assistance to Camden's Greek-flavoured Theatro Technis. Run by director George Eugeniou, the sort of man with whom one could discuss the psychological complexities of Sophocles and Euripides within 5 minutes of meeting, the theatre is dedicated to showcasing contemporary works of socio-political importance as well as keeping the ancient tragedies – which, let's face it, never lose their relevance – alive.

That's how I ended up observing rehearsals for Oedipus the King tonight, whose curtain rises in under three weeks. Having arrived to find a fine actress on the floor, I immediately assumed that the patricide and incest elements of the plot had been uncovered by the titular monarch, the male lead had turned method and killed his co-stars, and that I was also somehow responsible. Turned out they were in the middle of a scene, so I stopped dilly-dallying by the door and rushed to sit my arse down*.

As George rallied his chorus to improvise a temple prayer, I found my brain-screen flooded with images of my one day at drama school. I was 6 years old, and possibly wore a beret as I announced to my mother that I was going to be an actor. This would have come as no surprise to her, considering I had "fallen" out of every tree in Cyprus in the hope that I would end up in an electric wheelchair.

So the poor woman obliged and enrolled me in the finest acting school that ever took place inside a 40-year-old woman's living room. While I've repressed memories of most of the exercises that afternoon (and failed to repress the ones about pretending to be a flower), one activity alone has reigned supreme in my mind, and is guaranteed to provoke headaches every time somebody says the word "improv".

Gather 'round, children, the brief is simple: it is 1974, you are a Greek-Cypriot, and we are at war with the Turks. Go!

You can only imagine the horror. 8-year-old boys, 5-year-old girls, tossing themselves around an unlit living room across the road from a bakery. I didn't know where to look besides everywhere. One girl crawled around an armchair, crying out to God for taking her son, while an older boy re-enacted the son's moment of death on the battlefield. I found it far less painful to be one of the corpses, so I died immediately by the coffee-table and tried not to breathe until the activity was over. Tonight, Theatro Technis may have been a far cry from that woman's living room, but it certainly helped open the floodgates.

If I had a conclusion, I would use it here. As it stands, I don't. But I do know that every time someone mentions improvisation or tragedy, I get as far away as I can, sweat buckets at the fear of being found out, and try my best not to laugh and cry at the same time.

* "set ma a$$ downE" if you're street

Successless

2011-01-24T21:19:00.003Z

Mariella Frostrup: So where does a famous writer such as yourself manage to go for a little privacy?

Me: Well, Mariella, it's funny you should say that. When I am not in the safe confines of a Malmaison hotel, I find myself horse-riding through the Cotswolds.

There are moments when I hear myself talk and think, "Christ – I sound as though things are going well." While it's the very definition of my fellow Cypriots to hit an interlocutor with a list of one's own talents and accomplishments, I happened to be born with that old English gene of self-effacement and the indubitable knowledge that everyone else has it better.

I was out with some friends the other night, people I hadn't seen in a while. We went wild with hot chocolate and fruit scones, shared stories and updated each other on our general statuses. It's times like these you wish the world was Facebook. Instead of describing what it is you do at work, you can simply write, "Moved a box of Jamies 30-Min Meals and dislocated my pancreas." If you've broken up with your significant other, FB can communicate this on your behalf with the blunt image of a broken heart. Magic!

But what can any app do when you ask a friend what he's been up to since you last saw him, and he mumbles, "My life isn't as exciting as yours," thinking you didn't hear him? Pretend you didn't hear him? That's what I did.

In the past year, I've realised more and more that people around me seem to think I get commissions from Cameron Mackintosh, or that Ian McEwan wants to go on a book tour with me. It's flattering, but do they know how angsty I get on this blog? Probably not. They probably have no idea how much I envy them, admire them for being so successful too.

Hmm. That feels like the beginnings of a new play brewing in my head. One that Cameron Mackintosh will never see.

Novel 2

2011-01-08T20:56:00.000Z

Actually, this would be Novel #3. But because I wrote about the second one back in 2008, and never wrote about the first one, Novel #3 gets this confusing blog entry title. (The actual title of the book is, as they say on the street, killah.)

This is a story that has been with me for years; one that has devolved every season into something a little less grown-up, a little less meaningful. I've decided at 25 that I hate meaning. Fuck meaning. During a glorious phone conversation last night, Jackie and I reminisced about our uni days when every project had to be a statement – a veiled one, at that. Since uni, I've come to the conclusion that I don't need to understand a piece of text, or an image, or a song, to love it. There's something much more sweetly, deeply potent about the thing that affects you despite logic and 'meaning.'

That's what Novel #3 is about, if I must encapsulate it in brief (which, clearly, I must). The protagonist, Oscar, is a lost young soul who in fact partly enjoys the feeling of being lost; of not knowing where he's headed in life; of finding himself in a dark, faceless street in the middle of the night; of seeing a girl with her head in her hands and a pair of boots strapped to her rucksack, and being deeply moved by the sight.

Oscar also spends the novel searching for love (though I'm trying to avoid the word in a bid to rival Toni Morrison for Oprah Book Club Choice 2012). Eager to portray his emotions as realistically as possible, I have attempted to fall in love for the past few weeks. It isn't going very well so far, but at least the effort and intention are there.

As for the writing process itself, 'messy' could describe both Oscar's head and my approach. After being coerced by some attractively plain journals at Paperchase, I've committed myself to scrawling instead of typing. Not in sequential chapters, of course, but in phrases and lines, moments and passages. On one page it's Christmas Eve services, on the other it's sex on a plastic sofa.

That's all Oscar's world needs to be. Fuck meaning.*

* But ask me 2 months from now how much fun I'm having putting all this random gibberish into some kind of novel-resembling order.

2011

2011-01-07T21:14:00.001Z

I never liked the look of 2011. It was too visually unappealing, too upright and evil for me to invest any hopes in it. (Ever since that Sandra Bullock movie The Net, I've distrusted any figure that closely resembles binary.)

Not that 2010 was as wholesome and dependable as it appeared. I lost my dog, went from one job rejection to another, came to a premature halt in my Spanish lessons, shovelled mud during what was meant to be a theatre production internship, felt the crushing disappointment of apathy towards my own theatrical project...

But then there was that job offer, out of the blue. A bookshop at last! Colourful colleagues, boat parties, haiku texts and Canadian writers. The Sexes received positive feedback from those interested enough to see it. I got a commission off the back of it. There came the bittersweet promise of a publisher's interest in my writing – bittersweet because I've been down this road before. I also made my first narrative short film in years.

On my first day of work in 2011, I found out that I'm now so part-time at the bookshop I may as well not show up. There go my dreams of a better contract, a decent wage and my own flat in the city. My latest film missed out on a festival because my application had wrongly been redirected to the organiser's spam box. I recently discovered I might have feelings.

On the flip side, I was motivated enough by the recurring nightmare of joblessness to apply for other jobs – even to enter writing competitions, sending me on a one-night-4000-words deluge. There's my Jekyll & Hyde adaptation around the corner, and it'll be stopping all over Britain to either make my name as a playwright or destroy it. (I have a list of alternate names for myself should the latter occur.) I'm making good progress on the novel I intend to send to that interested publisher. The theatre company I established with my friends is turning down an exciting new avenue.

Dead birds are dropping out of the sky. A new PJ Harvey album is on its way. More elections. More protests. More episodes of Boston Legal to cackle through over dinner.

Year in, year out, it's always the same. Doesn't matter how ugly the digits are.

Disclaimer: this blog entry may have been inspired by an infinitely more profound one.

Kitsch

2010-12-21T23:48:00.009Z

I decided that I would celebrate Christmas by writing a new short story. You're welcome.

* * * * *

Kitsch

Simon enters the wood-panelled auditorium with seconds to spare. The scent of children stains the walls, from the crude drawings of saints and halos in oil pastels to the wet-dog emanations of the hanging winter blazers.

Among the rows of seated parents, resentful siblings and mildly nervous teachers he spots Marbella’s waving hand. Those Disney eyes. That tantalising pink sweater. He takes his seat next to the au pair just as the lights dim, and a grimly thin figure appears on the stage. Miss Whittall, the director. Toby’s mentioned her. The other night he clanked his fork by the remnants of his fish fingers to perform an impression of his teacher. “Wise men didn’t have PSPs in Bethlehem!” Delivered with the right dosage of sneer and worry. The boy even threw in a Cocodemol reference for good measure, and for a moment Simon thought his son a precocious talent. Marbella, on the other hand, told him off for being cruel and Simon wondered if his motherless child was growing up too fast and cynical for his own good.

Simon did search for a replacement mother. He even attempted smooth movements towards Marbella’s sweater last Christmas, but the girl’s staunch Catholicism put a mince pie in his hand and a damper on his groin. Now she sits close by, breathing audibly. He’s undone the top two buttons of his Jaeger shirt for her benefit, but she seems distracted. Her big dark brows push down on those eyes, willing the fragile director’s speech to be over so that her trek in the snow might be justified.

Simon doesn’t mind kitschy things like school nativities. He basks in the hilarity of other people’s triteness. The kids’ drawings of camels make him smirk, as do the stars of David adorning the red curtains. One particular child must be handicapped, he thinks, as he laughs inwardly at a Boeing that’s trying to look like a dove.

“Thank God,” Marbella whispers, charmingly reinterpreting the vowels, as Miss Whittall leaves the stage.

The crowd settles. The room gets slightly dimmer. A dad next to Simon takes an attractive Canon 5D out of its case and clicks his iPhone to silent mode.

The curtains part to reveal an unimaginative set and a bus queue of wide-eyed child actors. A round of applause spreads its encouragement from the back rows, and a woman with spectacles begins her jaunty tune on the mahogany Bell piano.

Simon can feel the other parents’ sweat. They’re terrified their kid will be the retard who fucks up. Mary’s mum must be praying that the Baby Doll Jesus doesn’t get dropped on his holy head. It comforts Simon that his son will steal the show. He can’t count the number of times a parent has thanked him for the free entertainment at their child’s birthday party. Or the number of times he’s stood in a semi-circle of dads, watching the kids play “Need For Speed” while Toby motormouthed a commentary from the sofa that managed to make both participants sound like losers.

He’d been called in to the school several times on account of the boy’s behaviour. Most recently, it was because Toby explained to the other children why the Virgin Mary was so called. Simon fought the urge to laugh as the headmaster stressed a need for “boundaries” and “structure.” Marbella kissed her cross in shame.

Toby’s probably gay, too. His hair is coiffed and his smile is a little too eerily borrowed from his deceased mother. He has a habit of laying out three possible ensembles on his bed for the next day, and walks up and down the carpet with one hand on his hip and the other tapping his chin as he makes his decision. Not to mention the time he pushed a girl off the see-saw in the playground to get a closer look at the new boy from Lebanon.

Now he’s dressed as a wise man, stage right, enjoying every swish of his robe.

“I have brought you frankincense,” the boy next to him states, flatly but with great volume. Not skipping a beat, Toby gives the audience a knowing look, before feigning discomfort at having to stand so close to his wooden co-star. There’s the rising buzz of chuckles, which Simon breathes in. A couple of dads pick him out in the crowd, smiling their congrats. But Marbella’s eyes are hard and black.

Toby is the last wise man to present his gift to the Baby Doll Jesus. The pianist watches for her cue as Toby moves towards the stash of hay, and her hands billow towards the keys for the final number.

In the flash of the cameras, a loud voice rings out through the hall. “Oh-oh-oh-ooooooooh oh-oh-oh-oh-oh…” It sweeps the ceiling and the seats. Simon freezes. It’s Toby.

The laughter slowly builds as Toby lifts Baby Doll Jesus into the air to the tune of Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance”. It compounds with the pianist’s shocked silence and the gasps of the more pious among them. Miss Whittall must be downing her entire Cocodemol supply. Simon leans back in his chair and lets his laughter shake through his torso. He’s overcome with pride.

“I don’t wanna be friends,” Toby sings earnestly into Jesus’ face.

“Boy’s got pipes!” chirps an American nearby.

“I don’t wanna be friends!”

Just as the crowd is getting into the new development, the cheers fade to boos and hisses. A figure, obviously bigger than the rest, has climbed onto the stage. Some killjoy adult. Simon’s laughter stops when he realises it’s Marbella.

She grabs Toby by the arm and pulls him out of the scene. The whispers lick around the pair as they walk up the aisle, away from the stage and towards Simon. Toby has taken off his turban and holds it in front of his face. The cameras go off anyway.

Marbella fixes Simon with a glare as if to say, “Why are you still sitting?” He leaps to his feet, his jacket already on, and follows her outside the auditorium.

In the empty whiteness of the hallway, her slap echoes. It fades along the length of the corridors but it doesn’t disappear completely. The three of them stand in silence for a while, as Miss Whittall’s embarrassed apologies to the remaining audience drift through the crack in the door. “Children are so easily influenced…”

Simon knows he’s been a bad parent. He’s let Toby get away with too much, and it’s lucky he has Marbella by his side now to keep the boy from making even more of a spectacle of himself.

Yet there’s something in the boy’s thinned mouth, and the upward tilt of his head as he adjusts the angle of his turban upon it, that gives Simon chills. Toby leading the way, they walk out of the school and into the snowy night.

Birthday Boy

2010-12-19T23:07:00.000Z

When snowflakes flutter towards the ground they spell DOOM. Trains stop, people fall over, pandemonium erupts and suddenly everybody remembers to buy Christmas presents.

One night, as I realised with growing terror that my journey home from work was to be plagued by beautiful sprinkles of weather, I felt the familiar self loathing at not having my camera on me. Icy rivers. Frozen branches. Moron.

Phone photos are no comfort.

As soon as I got back home, I slammed a cup of tea down my throat and before the steam had time to settle, I was back outside with my trusty Canon. This is the result:

http://www.shootingpeople.org/watch/film.php?film_id=93897 (Please vote, lol *hugz*)

I was interested in exploring the notion of dreams as abstracted memories, the idea that seemingly random imagery can be construed as a sort of meaningful narrative. Whether or not Birthday Boy achieves this is up to you. I just hope you find it beautiful.

Roxanne

2010-12-17T11:04:00.001Z

When they tell you to wish upon a star, they don't tell you it could take 20 years for your wish to come true. And, after spending most of my childhood begging my mum to have another child (I was an individualist), at the age of 25 I received news of the birth of my half-sister. I am finally The Middle Child.

Roxanne was born in Cyprus on 3rd December to my father and his new Russian bride. (No Nicole Kidman references, please.)

"Roxani was the wife of Alexander the Great," my father proclaimed over Skype.

"I think it means, like, dawn in Persian," I replied.

"D'you mean Roxanne like the prozzie in that Police song?" asked everybody else.

Thrilled by contemplations of my little Roxie Hart's burgeoning personality, I turned to astrology. While I roll my eyes at comments such as, "You are such a Pisces!" or, "What do you expect? He's a Leo," I can't help reading the predictions of every atrocious horoscope or numerology pedlar I see in front of me. I revelled in the fun of imagining who this new being is going to be, even though I might be dead before she develops her character. [/age_jokes]

So I dusted off my sister's olde Book of Birthdays and looked up the third day of December to read about how my new sister will apparently turn out. It seems her key words are "dramatic, fiery and strong."

Well, what do you expect of somebody called Roxanne?

Vince

2010-11-15T21:18:00.006Z

I am 12 years old. The nights are balmy, so we spend all of them outside on the veranda, eating watermelon and halloumi. Our new neighbour is a young London Cypriot woman with two kids, a husband who was once Mr Cyprus and a penchant for Barbra Streisand. She has a beautiful collie called Honey.

12th July, 1997. Honey's had her first litter of puppies. I've begged my mum for a dog to add to our 17 cats, and made verbal contracts about feeding and walking him.

The night is black. I'm at the neighbours', on the little tiled porch outside their kitchen. In the yellow light, six fuzzy pups are scrambling towards me, playing with my feet and jumping up to lick my hands. But I see a seventh. He's small and curled up on his own, watching the commotion as though too scared to join in. I am fat, virtually friendless, and feel an instant connection. I choose him. His name is Tiny.

I carry him to my house in the crook of my arm. He's all snout and floppy ears. His little brown tail wags like a finger. I smell his fluffy head, and catch the scent of puppy food on his breath. He'll need a new name.

My sister and I are in the car while Mum's putting in petrol. "How about Titan?" we say, "Or Indy, or Chase?" We settle on Vincent, remembering the beast in the early '90s TV series of Beauty and the Beast starring Linda Hamilton.

The cats gang up on Vinny and chase him into a corner. I step over the crowd, throwing furballs left and right.

Vinny sleeps under the bookcase, assuming it's safe there. We grab him and squeeze him into our hugs. He groans back, and continues to grunt as he walks off to get some sleep.

We leave Vinny alone for the first time when we go back to school. He whines as the car pulls away.

Vince likes to play tug-of-war with old rags. His teeth are growing. Despite this, we come home from school to find him lying on the veranda with a litter of kittens on his back.

We walk Vince through the parched fields by our house. The neighbourhood kids scream and run away. Cypriots have a hard time with animals. One day, I decide it would be a terrific idea to take Vince on a 2-hour tour of my past around Limassol. We have bonded.

We have to leave Vince with an army sergeant / dog trainer in a bungalow off a dirt track. Quarantine laws until we can take him and two of our cats over to England with us. After an agonising few months in Cambridgeshire, we finally ship the pets over. They come out of the van, dopey from the sedatives. Vince stumbles around but his tail wags slowly when he realises who we are.

Huntingdon, 2002. I have my first girlfriend, I'm vegetarian, and Vince experiences running around in the snow for the first time. He combines it with biting a squeaky toy.

2003. We take Vince in the Fiat to our new house in Peterborough. In our ever-diminishing space, he learns the skill of walking backwards.

The move to Croydon is further. For 3 hours in the Kia, Vince pants happily while our one remaining cat, Dinky, wets herself with fear.

University. I have to separate myself from Vince for the first time in years. Up in Derby, I feel his absence at my feet. I take up baking.

I'm home from uni and take Vince for hour-long walks in the park. People stop to admire him, and their little mutts try to attack him. His philosophy is: never step in puddles and never bite back.

Vince gets jealous when we're opening Christmas presents and barks excitedly. We've learned to wrap up chewy toys and present them to him on Christmas morning. He jumps up and down and tries to bite them open.

Vince is 11, and has started coughing strangely. We think he might have swallowed something he shouldn't have. It's not kennel cough, and the vets can see nothing wrong with him. This lasts another two years. Vince goes from coughing to bringing up his food.

Finally, a vet tells us he thinks there's fluid in Vincent's lungs. He gives him medication to make him cough up any phlegm, but one of these pills is too strong. Vince has a hard time keeping down his food.

Cyprus, August, 2010. I can't stand another minute separated from Vince. I want to get back to England, terrified that he's dying all alone in a kennel while we're thousands of miles away. The day we get him back, he lumbers around in a daze. For the first time, he doesn't wag his tail when he sees me and I can feel his bones when I stroke him. I hug him on the kitchen floor with tears streaming down my face. I know he's dying.

November, 2010. Vince keeps throwing up and walks around the house confused. He tries to climb up the stairs but he slips.

15th November, 2010. I wake up and Vince isn't in the house. Mum has sent me a text – Vince fell and couldn't get up, they're at the vet's and it doesn't look good. On the phone she tells me we have to "make a decision." She comes to pick me up, and we go to the vet's to say goodbye to Vince for the last time.

The door opens on a sterile white room. He's on the floor, on a blanket on a blue stretcher. He lifts himself up when he sees me. I get on my knees and he puts his head in the crook of my arm. His tail is wagging but he doesn't stand for long. Mum and I sit on the floor as the vet sedates him. Vince rests his head on my leg and grunts when I kiss his fluffy head. He falls asleep. I remove my glasses.

Outside, I hold my mum in the street and tremble as we walk to the car. Back home, we wait for my sister to come home from work. She opens the door and we all well up. We can't answer the phone. Our Vince is dead.

RIP Vince ~ 1997-2010

Poppy

2010-11-14T17:31:00.002Z

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

– Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum est, 1918

In Wilfred Owen's day, young men were either forced to go to war, or they went willingly under the false belief that they were dying for good reason. His words still have the power to chill, and while I first read them at the age of 14, they float around inside me to this day.

War is not glamorous, and it is rarely for "good" cause. The poppy we wear, soberly once a November, is both an acknowledgement of the men who gave their lives on the battlefields for what they believed to be the greater good, and a reminder that we must never allow a World War III to take place.

It is sad, then, to see the symbol of the poppy become such a controversy this year. I was shocked to hear of several teenagers misinterpreting it as the symbol of war, and choosing to wear a white poppy instead, as though that is somehow a statement of peace. We wear a red poppy because red poppies grew in the aftermath of the battlefields; spilt blood became a flourishing hope. Those poppy burners should think about what they're doing and be ashamed.

So why did I refuse to wear a poppy this year? I respect the veterans (my own grandfather fought in WWII and my father fought in the Cyprus war of 1974); I have trouble passing a charity box without throwing in some coins; I'm an advocate of peace. So why not wear the symbol of all that?

One morning, as I was on my way to work, I noticed a poster at the tube station. It was of a soldier in 2010 putting on an artificial leg, with the words, "It only takes a second to put on a poppy" emblazoned on the sad image. As it gradually dawned on me that the poppy donations were going to soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was furious.

Why should I give money to people in the 21st century who learned nothing from the past; who willingly fought a groundless war against innocent (and already trampled) nations; a war which drained Britain of money for its own people; a war which made London the focus for terrorist attacks in July 2007? There is no conscription any more. These soldiers chose to go to war, to shoot whoever became trouble, even to torture their captives. If one of them gets shot, am I meant to cry for them? They knew what they were in for. It's their poor families I feel for – the people who probably tried to get them to stay at home.

If it makes me cold, so be it. I don't see these men as heroes worth celebrating. In fact, I'd go as far as to say they sully the names of all their forbears who died against their will. It's no wonder those teenagers see the poppy as a symbol of war.

threewheelers

2010-10-22T19:23:00.002+01:00

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

That was a drum roll. No, it wasn't a helicopter. Please don't look at me like that.

So, today I went and launched another blog. Something not about me, for a change. A blog dedicated to the luminous individualists who not only refuse to follow the pack, but also spit at the pack from a great distance. Be they movies, singer-songwriters, producers, stuffed doctors or brands of chocolate, I pledge to pay tribute to...

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr... [now you know what it is]

^ Cliquez ici ^

Cheating on Blogspot with Wordpress, I know. What can I say? I'm a tramp. Like Rihana's Rated R, I try to straddle all markets.

LFF1

2010-10-22T00:01:00.003+01:00

And so the city of London was hit by a blast o' cinema. Just in time for the annual London Film Festival, too. I kicked myself last year for having missed out on a number of notable flicks, and vowed to make sure I didn't repeat that pattern in 2010.

Sadly, I have. 'Black Swan' was sold out in seconds, so you'll find me begging for admission outside every performance (probably insinuating to ticket-holders that I only have three weeks to live). There's also the usual story of Too Little Money And Not Enough Days Off.

Without further ado, here are a couple of reviews of what I've caught so far...

NEVER LET ME GO
If you loved Kazuo Ishiguro's novel but felt the absence of Keira Knightley's lips, Mark Romanek's gorgeously lensed adaptation is the film for you. While a little too music-heavy for my liking, this is an absorbing, unusual and almost unbearably moving drama about the ethical ramifications of cloning, with a terrific central performance from the fearsomely talented Carey Mulligan. ****

WOMB
The sort of film that mistakes 15-second pauses between lines of dialogue for sophistication, Womb is so far up itself it could make itself pregnant. Or something. While the Director of Photography ought to be given some kind of medal, turning the landscape into a haunting and mesmerising character, writer-director Benedek Fliegauf ought to be sued for physical exhaustion due to eye-rolling. Characters say things such as, 'Hi Mum, look at the little rabbit' without a trace of irony or Beatrix Potter. The effect is less fairytale than bloody irritating, and the aforementioned pauses more barren than pregnant.
Eva Green, however, is a goddess. Having nailed female characters of icy brittleness with a vaguely sinister air before, she lifts the film no end and almost manages to erase the thought that this brilliant idea wasn't a wasted opportunity. Almost. **

Apathy

2010-10-21T00:16:00.002+01:00

Two fringe festivals. Two invitations to perform Oop Nohth*. Three different flyer designs. Three different printers. Painful train journeys. Hundreds of pounds' expenditure. An internship that involved shovelling mud. A trip to Cyprus that hampered promo. Nights spent tramping the streets of Camden and Soho to hand out flyers.

One week, six performances, and The Sexes is over.

For this year, anyway – we've just been given an extra Buxton date for May 2011!

As we breathe in and out towards the Holy Grail of Edinburgh Fringe next summer, I wonder if all that hassle will prove to be worth it. I'm proud of what we've achieved with the show; feedback has been positive and I'm in no hurry to bury it.

However, our London experience was far from glowing. We already know from past experience not to rely on Facebook 'attendings', but even cynical Me was surprised by the general lack of interest in The Sexes. While some friends redefined friendship by catching the earliest Eurostar out of Paris to see the Sunday matinee, others appeared to view our blood, sweat and tears as some kind of juvenile amusement we'd soon grow out of, and subsequently had no qualms with pushing it off their to-do list.

The Giant Olive Theatre Company, whom we paid for the venue, insisted that our marketing materials credit them – regardless of the fact that not a single member of their team even saw the show, let alone participated in its development. (A far cry, by the way, from the superb treatment we received from The Continental in Preston.)

Could Edinburgh – the very hub of theatrical creativity, Dogfight Central – possibly be better? How could we refuse to take that risk? It's like our pay-off is constantly around the corner, and I just want to keep turning 'til we get there.

If people won't take our flyers, I'll simply have to ram some in their pockets.

* Vaguely prejudiced Northern pronunciation of 'Up North'.

CY2010

2010-10-06T13:26:00.002+01:00

Beloved syrupy dough balls, much missed by me in the UK

Seventeen years after the event, I feel I can finally write about my holiday in Cyprus. The Motherland, The Motherload, the Mothman Prophecies.

When not embarrassing myself with white skin and three-quarter-length shorts in front of my Armani-clad compatriots, I spent my time taking 943 photos of everything I took for granted throughout my childhood. I ate 'til I added a full milimetre to my wrist circumference.

The Evil Eye

This year introduced my Summer of Meeting Cousins for the First Time™. These ranged from a Brighton biker to a Greek Lit teacher / scathing political journalist and her half-French, jazz-playing sons (!) - how retrospectively deprived this made me feel. And you should know by now that I hate that feeling even more than pseudo-spiritual emancipation. Or something.

The Curium

Since returning from the Island of Aphrodite, my time has been swallowed up by the regular-paying job, some non-paying jobs, partly-paying jobs and the entirely unfunded tour of The Sexes, which was invited up to Preston, Derby and is currently dwelling at The Lion & Unicorn in Kentish Town, London (review on SoSoGay).

Also, the excitement has been building on another project, which my pessimistic self has been hesitant to discuss until now... [drumroll that sounds more like a helicopter than drums] ...my stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde! I am, as the kids say, psyched. Maybe they only said that in the '90s. Ah, what the hell.

More to come soon, including an Exciting New Blog™ about something other than me...

Rulebook

2010-08-11T23:43:00.000+01:00

'I like to read' does not mean 'I am smart.'
Especially if what you read is Sophie Kinsella.
Seriously, you're 45.
The picture-book section is to your left.
Why are you visibly twitching at the word 'literary'?
Are you epileptic?
No, fiction is not better than anything else.
It just tends to be more beautiful.
Your children have sticky hands.
They are touching Ayn Rand.
No, your 10-year-old is not intellectually mature enough for '1984'.
Liking 'Transformers' does not equal appreciating '1984'.
No, that is not snobbery.
It is fact.
Justin Bieber's autobiography comes out in October.
Katie Price has never written a book.
She has published 34.

Kinzli & the kiloWatts – SAFE PLACE FOR US

2010-08-09T19:08:00.004+01:00

At long last, here is my video for Kinzli & the kiloWatts' second single, Safe Place For Us (click on picture):

I'm so proud of Kinzli. Her album Down Up Down has not only received universal critical praise, but also stands as a personal triumph; a confirmation of her scary talent as a songwriter and composer.

Mostly, however, I'm thrilled to have somehow met her (what a turn of events that was) and formed this unique friendship / creative partnership that will bear many more videos yet.

Please support her. We don't need any more Jason Derulos in the charts.

Brim

2010-08-04T11:17:00.005+01:00

I decided to register my blog for traffic reports, if only to verify those rumours of fans in Uzbekistan. The e-mails so far, however, have been disheartening. Apparently nobody visits this site. Not even accidentally via BoysWithEngorgedNipples.com.

Thankfully, I'm far too busy to pay much mind to the weekly e-mail reports (Bill Gates ain't never seen that many zeros). Yes, reader [/irony], I finally have a job! It took 18 months of unemployment, desperate lunges at opportunity, filling in countless application forms a week, modifying about 800 versions of my CV and briefly contemplating becoming a Mason, but I am now a part-time employee of Waterstone's. This means I can now almost afford to buy all the books I buy. And answer the phone to Colin Firth.

Besides that, I've been fulfilling my duties as a production intern at The Old Vic Tunnels. This has involved rigging lights, shovelling mud and sand, developing and overcoming vertigo during the course of a day, delivering vegetarian sandwiches to a stoned Alan ('Watchmen') Moore, moving Kevin Spacey's sofa and being renamed Wallace by said sofa-lender's assistant.

Thankfully, a small window has opened up. Inside this window lies a haven of making amendments to Kinzli's new video, and working on an exciting new project, which I will hint at for about a week before I cave and spill copious amounts of unnecessary info.

For now, suffice it to say that, having dazzled approximately 3 people at Buxton Fringe, The Sexes has landed me not only some new friends and supporters but also a mouth-watering opportunity as a script-writer.

Watch this space (if you're actually here)...

Whirl

2010-07-10T19:44:00.000+01:00

It's a good thing I'm unemployed. While the uncertainty of the Freelance Creative's* lifestyle may be a little too Bohemian for my level head, I relish the several open doors it provides.

To simplify, if I were Dolly Partoning in a 9-5 job, I wouldn't be able to:

travel up and down between the Peak District and The Big Smoke to partake in a fringe theatre festival
work with the fabulous Kinzli
do a theatre production internship at The Old Vic Tunnels, a.k.a. Kevin Spacey and Waterloo Station's underground lovechild
paint props for a Martin Scorcese flick (!) and get paid for it (!!)

It does, however, mean that I'm constantly running around in a panic, losing yet more hair and melting brain cells in the process. With this in mind, you can imagine how much fun it was to sit in a little cubby-hole with my laptop burning holes in my thighs, making sure I brought up the right lights and sounds for The Sexes.

Yes, it was our first performance at Buxton Fringe on Thursday, and it went... OK. Not the level the show has previously reached, but we'll be better next time. Unfortunately, the review is now a done deal, and it doesn't exactly fill one with enthusiasm to rush out and see the show. While I'm annoyed that a complete fabrication – that Jaquée and Lars called each other by their real names on stage – has now been plastered all over Underground Venues, I'm somewhat more bothered by the insinuation that I've been leaving the actors to their own devices for the past few months and it might be time for me to 'step in' as a director. First-night nerves + very late start due to previous shows' overrunning = possible contributors to lacklustre performance?

Ah well, no time to think about that now. Those animals won't paint themselves.

* That's what I've decided to call myself to the taxman.

Trailer

2010-06-30T00:03:00.001+01:00

Boys and girls (and boy-girls, girl-boys), the deed is done.

In the dark space of The Pauper's Pit, the theatre space beneath Buxton's historic Old Hall Hotel*, we filmed THE SEXES as a movie. A theatre movie, a film play, whatever – it involved cameras.

Our wonderful friend and fellow film-maker Jim 'Spekti' McSpektron** supplied not only his camera but also his camera-operating hands and eyes. We were grateful for all of them.

Sadly, I was a big old mess and – for possibly the first time ever in anything – was totally unprepared. I had ideas about shots but time constraints + wordy play script + brain malfunction = director needing to lie down with a sandwich.

The film edit is some way off. For now, however, we have the handy, pre-festival promotional tool of a TRAILER:

* Where Mary Queen of Scots was kept under house arrest, innit.

** Name enhanced to sound bionic.

Kinzli

2010-06-25T23:23:00.001+01:00

As you may or may not know, I've formed the sort of working relationship with Kinzli that most creatives dream of; one that blends monkey sanctuaries with falafel sandwiches.

So, having done a music video, the artwork and started work on a second music video for this fabulous woman's sophomore record, today we sat down for an interview/press-release-scribbling-session. This was the result (celebrated with Magnum ice-cream):

DOWN UP DOWN

As an eight-year-old girl, Kinzli used to climb onto a haystack 'castle' and sing to the Rocky Mountains - that is, she claims, 'when my TB wasn't acting up.'

Following 2007's critically acclaimed Going Just To Be Going, Kinzli returns with Down Up Down (under Kinzli & The kiloWatts) - an album the singer-songwriter herself believes to be a musical progression. 'It's more thought-out,' she explains. 'It came from my being more settled and not worrying about survival; reflecting on what's important instead of trying to get away from things.'

Recording predominantly in her living room, Kinzli self-funded the project while still teaching Maths and Physics full-time. Drawing on her classical influences, she recruited pianist Vince Webb and violinist Barbara Bartz to help realise her vision. The album eventually became a huge collaborative process, with musicians and synths alike forming the unexpectedly cohesive mix. 'I arranged the album in my head, and would try to convey the separate instrumental parts to the musicians by singing or thumping. I got a lot of strange looks.' The lo-fi record was then passed on to Gigi Piscitelli's safe hands, where it was cleaned of street noises and shouting neighbours.

As its title suggests, Down Up Down is a record about struggle, whether personal or political, and addresses Kinzli's background more directly than the debut. Having spent her early childhood in a South Korean orphanage, plagued by TB, she passed through several foster homes before being adopted by an American family from Colorado and ending up in London, where she intends to remain. This has resulted in a more mature, genre-blending and experimental album that explores themes of peace, independence, safety and child welfare.

Album opener Don't Shoot is a haunting ballad inspired by gang violence on Kinzli's doorstep. The Land Of Il (3 Part Dance) is an attack on Kim Jung Il's 'mass games', in which crowds of brainwashed citizens perform for their leader. The album is not all dark, however, choosing to lift its head towards hope; We Walk For Peace encourages the people of Burma to get behind their spiritual leaders and march for independence, while moving album closer Safe Place For Us blends its sadness with the comforting promise of security.

Kinzli has been accused of 'genre-whoring', an achievement she embraces wholeheartedly. 'If you thought the debut was a genre-whore, I'll give you genre-whore,' she kids - except she's not really kidding. Mixing folk with gypsy rhythms, jazz, operatic vocals, synth drums and ukelele dance breaks (sometimes all within one track), the ten songs can stand individually but fit perfectly together - rather like people in Kinzli's dream world.

For Kinzli, song-writing and recording are very visual experiences; every song is a movie, and every instrument is a character. Her increasing involvement with video is, therefore, unsurprising. Having filmed a music video for Don't Shoot for £23, she has been inspired to work further with its director, Polis Loizou, with the goal of creating a companion video for each track on the album, and eventually bringing both visual and musical elements together for a live show.

No matter what musical direction Kinzli decides to follow next, she will always have firm roots in her past while looking to the future. The Rockies may be far behind her now, but they still feature on the album cover.

* The album is available as a digital download from iTunes and Amazon, and as a physical CD from www.kinzli.com.

Quiche

2010-06-11T18:24:00.003+01:00

******************

ADVERTISEMENT
No, I am not watching the fucking World Cup.
ADVERTISEMENT

*****************

My friend Summer* has informed me that she's now following this blog, which means I have to up the entertainment quotient big-time. So, let's see... What's a funny word...?

QUICHE. (Always makes me giggle.)

FOIBLES. (Anything with an 'oy' sound works, e.g. 'Oy, Poodle.')

OK, I'm dry.

* Name changed for the purpose of stereotyping Americans.

Nice

2010-06-10T18:50:00.007+01:00

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows!

Along with yesterday's emo downpour (I blame the weather and its cousin Pathetic Fallacy for everything), I found myself riddled with sun bullets. Not only did my good friend Bling* give my short story Devil In Me the sort of feedback a writer yearns for – i.e. penetrative and complimentary – but also my last short flick (The Pink Ladder) got a special kind mention on the Kino London website!

For those out of the know, Kino is a monthly open-mic film night. May's event took place at Brick Lane's architecturally dazzling Truman Brewery, and I registered my film to screen. Then I had to get up in front of people and talk about it like it mattered. So I made sure my belt was tight and got up to waffle for 20 minutes about candles and bitches. Or something, I don't remember.

As if that wasn't enough human kindness to make a PJ Harvey character take a walk that doesn't end in the river, Kinzli has asked me to animate a video for her next single, Safe Place For Us. We're going to make it so lovely and Disney that Lesley Gore will want to run back to the recording studio.

Isn't that nice?

* Names changed for capricious reasons.

Werq

2010-06-09T14:30:00.001+01:00

This is no fun anymore. Not that unemployment was ever fun, but I needed a punchy opening.

I just got rejected for a bookseller position at Waterstone's, a job I desperately wanted. The interview was on the same day as my driving test and, having passed that, I took to believing in omens and other such fables. I was also flat-out rejected (sans even the chance of an interview!) by The Gate theatre in Notting Hill, for a job whose duties I've been consistently fulfilling since university. I applied for a traineeship at Film 4, for which I was also never interviewed. Now I look back at their 'equal opportunities' form, and see that I would've been guaranteed an interview had I been disabled. (!) How ironic that if I were dyslexic, I'd have a higher chance of working in a predominantly administrative role. Remind me next time I apply for an intense career to break all my limbs first.

Yes, frankly, I'm getting increasingly pissed off by all the rejection this past year-and-a-half. I want to work, I'd like to have money in my account for a change, and I don't see how much better all the other applicants could have been. I've had such varied experience and put so much effort into everything I've ever undertaken – even jobs I hated, under managers I hated. Would I really not be able to serve your meal or sell you a book? Hell, I'd do it with a smile on my face even as you're battering me with Katie Price's autobiography.

I'm tired of begging. I will not beg for the pleasure of working my fingers numb for you. It's time to be French circa 1933 and conduct ménages à trois in grimy loft apartments overlooking the flattened hopes of my peers.

Bionic

2010-06-07T23:43:00.003+01:00

BIONIC - DELUXE (Explicit)

Few women in pop have been as universally criticised as Christina Aguilera. A precocious vocal talent, knee-high Aggie could blow the roof off your suburban home through the TV speakers, boil your Cornflakes and blind your children with her rendition of Etta James' Sunday Kind Of Love. A few years down the line, who could have guessed she'd constantly be compared to Britney Spears – a singer who could barely cobble an octave together? Despite forays into '70s soul, gospel-tinged jazz, psychedelic pop and even, in one song, drum-and-bass-and-flutes, Aguilera has spent her decade-long career being compared unfavourably to people with far less talent and ambition. This is a woman who made Patti Smith leap to her feet with adoration at a live cover of James Brown's 'It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World' – what could it possibly take to make the rest of the world acknowledge her ability?

As Aggie returns with Bionic, an album she has been working on since long before anybody Ga-Ga-oh-la-la-la-ed, she finds herself once again impaled on the Vertigo stick. Countless reviews have drawn comparisons to GaGa (ironic, since the video for Just Dance was initially blasted for 'copying' Aguilera's Dirrty) and, annoyingly but predictably, these comparisons are utterly baseless.

From the opening title track, Bionic exemplifies what separates Xtina from the other girls: her interest in music itself. Whether multiplying herself to swoon over a Betty Harris sample (Understand) or soaring like an imam over a frenzied organ (Make Over), Aguilera has consistently displayed an ear for textures and a genuine love of sound over the years, and her latest album is no exception. In fact, it is the best example of her vocal and musical experimentation to date.

Between the cool monotony of Bionic, MIA-featuring highlight Elastic Love and the smoky angst of You Lost Me, Aguilera manages to sound like a dozen different people while remaining very much herself. Desnudate brings horns, Spanish guitars and Aggie's orgasmic sighs together in an enticingly rhythmic orgy while Le Tigre seem to channel The Ting Tings and the slinky bassline of PJ Harvey's Down By The Water on My Girls, a strutting highlight featuring everybody's favourite unnerving rap-slag, Peaches.

Bionic is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, Aguilera's most fun record. 'If you see me as nothing but a horny prima donna,' she seems to be saying, 'then that's who I'm presenting.' And so Bitchtina Slaguilera is unleashed. Vanity slams every conceivable tongue into every available cheek as Aggie contemplates how extremely fucking hot she is, closing an album full of vadge tracks with a reminder that she does have a sense of humour. When the magical Sia Trio™ hits, therefore, we realise that herein lies the Christina to the rest's Xtina; the human parts to the machinery.

All I Need is a tribute to her baby son that sidesteps sentimentality, while the aforementioned You Lost Me is as hurt and vulnerable as a broken lover. The genre-defying I Am, however, is the arguable album standout; an impossibly pretty ballad that throws punches such as, 'I am timid and / I am over-sensitive / I am a lioness / I am tired and defensive.'

Unfortunately, clumping the five slower songs together makes for issues in pacing and cohesiveness – particularly when the chain is broken by the absolutely retarded I Hate Boys. This highlights Aguilera's major flaw as an artist: in trying to straddle both the mainstream teen crowds and the savvier music afficionados, Xtina's legs spread far too wide to be comfortable. How can you convince indie bloggers you're a worthwhile artist when you push the majestic Ladytron cut Birds of Prey and sing-along Santigold collaboration Monday Morning over to the bonus disc in favour of disposable pop with lyrics such as 'I'm normally in the corner just standing'? Why sing about how much boys suck when you can sing about vile bodies not having to worry about going to work after a long night's partying? Why do Rihanna and Miley Cyrus when you're capable of Manchester circa 1983?

Oh, well. I suppose that's what makes Christina Aguilera who she is: fascinating and frustrating, person and persona, a dozen different people all at once. There's no point in comparisons, 'cause there ain't no other diva like her.

Pass

2010-06-05T09:50:00.002+01:00

I finally broke my fail cycle the other day by... passing my driving test! I have decided to commemorate the occasion with a haiku:

The wheel scrapes the curb
Blood gushes through his body
'Congratulations.'

Scribe

2010-05-25T23:20:00.003+01:00

It's that time of the month again, Dinky*. TIME TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

Forgive me. I suffer from a traumatic childhood birthday party which has left me prone to Pinky and the Brain blackouts. I wonder if there was anybody at that birthday party besides me and the three cakes.

Having waxed theatrical about The Sexes, I figured it was time to stop contemplating how my sunburnt arms resemble lobster claws and get down to writing. Then, having been distracted and drained by my ongoing quest for paying work, I figured I could write about writing instead.

It's such a cliché to say it, and I almost hate myself despite my peppy charm for blogging it, but creativity is an entity you can't reckon with. If you're naturally somebody who loves to create, then you will keep creating. Like Catholics. And every so often I become pregnant with octuplets [/gender_headaches]. The ideas come smashing through my brain-window, some of them unfamiliar but most of them bricks I already threw out that beg to be reevaluated. I love this creative deluge, particularly when I think back to dryer spells, when it seemed like nothing besides The Golden Girls quotes** was ever going to come out of me again.

The trouble is that I now have trouble prioritising. Which should go first? My first feature script? Which one? The anarchic comedy about a disgruntled graduate, or the Hitchcockian thriller? The romantic comedy about a school reunion, or the school-set TV satire? What about the suburban love triangle, or the suburban mystery? And will that Val-Lewton-inspired, 65-minute personality-disorder horror flick ever see the light of my memory stick?

On top of that pile are those three plays I want to write – longer than Clothes and The Sexes; the one about phantom pregnancy, and the black comedy about a séance, and a new one, a revenge thriller. I've even got a title for this latest addition: Wolves in This Country. Picture it: an English village, the 1950s. A professor's widow invites a young former student of her husband's over for dinner, gradually revealing to him (and the audience) the true purpose of his visit...

I suppose I should stop writing about writing and actually get writing. Oh, wait, what about that novel I was reworki––?

[Is dragged away by a mountain of cats.]

* Monstrous pet cat.
** 'I'm jumpier than a virgin at a prison rodeo.' - Blanche Devereaux

Brighton

2010-05-22T21:39:00.003+01:00

So, THE SEXES premiered in Brighton and we were so thoroughly worshipped I have now been commissioned to write the entire town's entertainment for the next 15 years. Or maybe not.

When such a large portion of your day-to-day life has been an ascent towards a major event, no words can really describe the comedown in its aftermath. All I'm left with is a hazy vision via crystal ball of the past few weeks: rehearsals with Lars and Jackie* in my living room until midnight; late-night chats about our futures; me waking up on the sofa with THE FEROCIOUS DINKY mauling my face; train journeys to Brighton; multiple technical problems relating to the venue's projector and the vicious battle between Macs and PCs; Lars and Jackie being distracted by shirtless Canadians; the upturned noses on almost everybody in Brighton as they may as well have spat on our flyers...

It was magical.

On one of the late-night train journeys back from a performance, the three of us eating the packed sandwiches I'd prepared earlier, it struck me how lucky I was that I devised this thing – this play, this being – and got it out of my head and onto a stage with two of my best friends from university; people I'd never known before university but to whom I'm deeply tied through this experience.

THE SEXES' seed was planted in Buxton, on the walk back to Jackie's place after the penultimate performance of our debut, Clothes To Fall Apart In. The premise came quickly: a married actor couple fights for the same, gender-unspecified role. Old wounds surface. Things get bitter, nasty even. I knew immediately that this was going to be a totally different piece to Clothes – tougher, uglier – and I knew that I wanted Jackie (who's actually a man) to play the wife and Lars (who's actually a woman) to play the husband.

While the gender-swapping conceit made issues of gender and sexuality unavoidable, I knew I wanted to avoid that as much as possible; 'Man plays woman, woman plays man,' get over it. This was more the story of a bitter marriage, of performance at every level. It had the potential, in its short running time, to be a loaded punch.

Stylistically, we thought BLACK, WHITE, RED. The line, 'Get on your hands and knees' grew in my head and pounded to be let out. I not only included it in the play, but also made it the tagline (which offended the supposedly liberal Brightonians). As I discussed the story over a coffee with Jackie and Lars, we deliberated over the use of video. Should it be there at all? At first we decided that no, it shouldn't. Then we changed our minds. Then we changed our minds again. Finally, we booked a space to film the damn things. We made them black-and-white. They look beautiful, and haunting against a black wall. Now we might need to take most of them out.

To our disappointment, it seems people just can't accept the combination of theatre and video. Our Clothes audiences predominantly assumed that the video segments (supposed to be the deceased character's proverbial two cents on her own life) were simply there to give Jackie time for a costume change. Granted, the videos needed to be longer for that reason, but it was frustrating to have the heart of the piece – the sympathetic character's voice – brushed aside as a cover-up or a thoughtless mistake.

THE SEXES begins with a video montage of Lars and Jackie's** careers. Nobody has a problem with this. It's a handy narrative tool. The next two videos, however, exist for more obscure reasons. When Lars puts on Jackie's wig and pretends to be her in an Oscar winning film, a video of Jackie in that very role plays behind him. When Jackie pretends to be Lars in an interview, the verbatim interview with Lars plays behind her. With the right timing, this becomes a sensory wonder to behold: husband and wife so intertwined that there's almost a tragedy in their mocking each other. They know each other so well, yet they don't stop short of hitting where it hurts.

As it stands, we gathered that this doesn't come across to the audience, and we can't be precious about elements of a piece that don't work. Instead, we have a new plan: while we're rehearsing in Buxton next month, weeks before our next fringe festival outing, we're going to film THE SEXES as a 'play movie'. It'll evolve into a different animal. This is where cinematic nuances such as camera composition can enhance the piece, bring it to life in a new way; where the video segments we excised from the stage might find a new home.

It's exciting to think what a whole new being this could be, where else it could go, both figuratively and physically. I don't know where, either. Definitely not the local cineplex, that's for sure.

In the meantime, I need to get rid of 'GET ON YOUR HANDS AND KNEES' as a tagline. We don't want to scare everybody in Buxton, too.

* Names of actors changed to names of characters in the play, which were themselves thinly-veiled references to the actors' actual names.

** The characters, not the actors whose real names were pillaged.

SEX

2010-05-03T21:26:00.000+01:00

I handed out flyers in Brighton this weekend.

Nobody seems to know that 'sexes' means 'genders'.

Affronted middle-aged woman: 'No I won't get on my hands and knees, thank you very much!'

ONE WEEK UNTIL:

10th–13th May, 7.30pm

The Marlborough

Brighton

Paris

2010-05-03T21:18:00.002+01:00

Let's face it, I'm never going to be a reporter. I'm not one of those hot young bloggers with his finger on the quickening pulse of everything ever. Ain't no political debates or stories about volcanoes here. Instead I offer photos of Gay Paree, 21 days after my return:

Most of my friends love this shot. Yeah, I know, I have friends. Please gather yourself, you rude person.

While tearooms tickle my snobbery bone, they do my wallet severe damage. How about we go for a coffee somewhere simple? What's that? NO? You mean, the famous French café culture is entirely disappointing? You mean to tell me the choices generally range from espresso to cappuccino to hot chocolate? And is a hot chocolate really worth £7? And why are cappuccinos always £5? What kind of trouble do the French have with a drink made up of 30% foam that they need to charge so much for it?

Lacking the £3,000 apparently necessary to enjoy a meal out in Paris, our breakfasts consisted of croissants from a bag and black coffee in plastic cups, while our dinners came courtesy of crisps, bread, butter and their amalgamation: CRISP SANDWICHES (that's 'chips' for you Yankees, and 'grits' for you Confederates).

But Paris made up for the food situation by offering double-decker tube trains with umbrella holders!

And its hauntingly beautiful catacombs.

It's so surreal to look back at these now, just 3 weeks since I was there, and feel so distanced from that wonderful place. This trip was a huge deal for me, being the first time in ages I'd done something purely for my own enjoyment. Something unconnected to work, or uni, or duty, or familial obligation, or a sense of guilt (I am leaving croissants out of this).

I'm going back.

[abandons all responsibility, runs to the airport where he persuades Security to let him through to kiss his one true love, and everyone cries and cheers with no concern for their own flights]

Prelude

2010-04-09T10:28:00.002+01:00

As in love, i have teased whilst planning furtive European death trips. Now I sit in the Heathrow Costa, waiting for a coffee and the gate number to a long-overdue Parisian holiday with my kinfolk.

I chose a hotel in the Montparnasse district, for easy access to Man Ray, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre's graves, as well as the skull-ridden catacombs of gay Paree.

It's not all gloom, though. I do aim to find the Moulin Rouge, too (the original dancers of which must surely be dead).

Photos and babbling to follow next week...

Poster

2010-04-04T22:42:00.002+01:00

Festen

2010-03-30T00:17:00.001+01:00

It figures that my waxing emo would come back to slap me in the face.

After whining about The Pink Ladder not getting a satisfactory response in my film-making circles (I make it sound like I attend parties with buffets or summingk!), I cranked open my inbox the other day to find two e-mails from the London Independent Film Festival. One said, 'The Pink Ladder is shit, get over it,' and the other said, 'We love that video wot you done for Kinzli, with the gun crime and the dancing? Come show it in April.'

Talk about your mixed emotions. Joy on the one hand for my dear collaboration proving successful, and disbelief again at The Pink Ladder's apparently repellent odor. Short-circuiting my keyboard with tears, I decided to call it quits. I'm obviously a mediocre film-maker. The narrative short that was meant to be my Sandra-Bullock-style renaissance has flunked like All About Steve. I ran to an Islington bakery with Kinzli, where we toasted the music video's success and discussed the next three we're going to make together.

So imagine the scene today, after a very pleasant interview with Cocknbullkid and meet-up with Bob and Loofah, when I gingerly coaxed my inbox open to find an e-mail from the Croydon Film Festival – the fest for which The Pink Ladder was made in the first place.

I'm pleased to tell you that your film has been shortlisted.

Thank you, Davina Christmas of the Croydon Film Festival! You sent me the words I've been waiting to see.

Now please rearrange the screening for when I'm not in Paris.

D'oh.

Guh?

2010-03-24T23:41:00.000Z

When I uploaded my film The Pink Ladder to the Shooting People website, I was hoping to get some valuable feedback from my film-making peers. As a creative, I'll always have to deal with criticism of my work, but that's understandable and acceptable; part of the job. I'd rather be bitchslapped than ignored. Nothing feels more like a personal attack than apathy.

Or at least, that's what I told myself. Coming 16th on Shooting People's leaderboard for Film of the Month, with an average rating of 2.77 out of 5, doesn't exactly assuage my fear of mediocrity.

There's the smart person in me who says, 'Well, it's not the end of the world. The movie's no masterpiece, so who says you deserve a better response?'

But the other mes are getting defensive. 'The film is not that bad, surely!' If I started out with an average rating of 4/5, that means a load of people gave me 1 or 2 to bring that average down. [/obsessiveparanoia] See? I even use 'me', when I should be saying 'the film' – I need an intervention.

Me, on finding out my Shooting People rating.

On the plus side, I got away from it all and stepped in front of the camera this past weekend. Running in a muddy field chased by my camera-holding friend Jim Moore, Producer & Keyboard Enthusiast, certainly added more hair to my chest. If you don't believe me, check out how manly we all look in Patrick T. King's short film, Plastic Vultures.

A bientôt, cheries!

Oh shit, I forgot to mention I'm going to France–– [commercial break]

Thingwright

2010-03-19T10:57:00.000Z

I write plays. Yes.
I am a playwright. No.

I write short stories. Yes.
I am a short story writer. No.

I've written two novels. Yes.
I am a novelist. No.

It's a curious block, but the words 'playwright' and 'author' and 'film-maker' just won't slide down my gullet. They are not descriptions of me; they're descriptions of other people who do the same things I do. I'd rather call myself a 'thingwright'. That's what I do – I write things. Who says I have to describe myself anyway?

So it was with understandable fear and trembling that I spent my past week frantically working towards the deadline for the National Youth Theatre's WordPlay competition via IdeasTap (links). The brief called for a play by a writer in his/her fumbling early days; preferably (if the playwright had the wherewithal to untangle his/her fingers) for a cast of 10.

I was like bitch no way! Ignoring the more political themes, I chose to focus on the Mental Health category and work a story out of that.

So I worked two: an ensemble drama based around the delicate issue of phantom pregnancy, and an ensemble comedy [cringe] about a fragile daughter who hires a medium to help settle the score between her already deceased father and her currently dying mother. Both were to be about how we label people 'insane' but offer no helping hand; perversely, we almost resent them for it. [By 'we', of course, I mean the other characters in the play. Please don't sue me for libel.]

That was when I re-read the WordPlay brief and spasmed at a line I'd overlooked: a subtle hint that the issues in the play might be better off reflecting similar issues these 16-25-year-olds might have faced. D'oh!

Deciding that phantom pregnancy and deathbed séances may not best reflect the UK's youth, I bit the inside of my face 'til 2am, a couple of days before the deadline, in search of a new story. Finally, I did what I often do – dug up an old idea and reworked it with Homosexual Tension™(one day, I hope to have an army of gays. Like Lady GaGa).

Still finishing off a sample scene half an hour before the deadline, and submitting my application with 10 minutes to spare, I ended up with the following:

Tired of living inside a mind and body he can’t control, a 17-year-old boy writes a rambling farewell letter to his boyfriend and commits suicide. Shocked and devastated, the already misanthropic boyfriend plunges into a rage against his peers. He hates them for their apathy, for their self-obsession, for their petty fights and misunderstandings, for their desperation to be seen as original while simultaneously labelling themselves in order to fit specific subcultures. However, the boy's suicide hasn't only affected his boyfriend; his action has struck a nerve with 8 other classmates, and his ‘madness’ forces them to confront their own ‘madnesses.’

Or something. I write things.

Wait

2010-03-12T22:16:00.000Z

Singing PJ Harvey's Hardly Wait in the shower is doing nothing for my general impatience.

A few days ago I went into Croydon by tram, because if you have trams in your vicinity it is considered impolite not to use them. There's even an old folktale about it; someone's put a bomb on a tram and it can't go below 10mph or it'll explode.

Anyway, what was my point? Croydon! I went in to buy myself some slick black jewel cases to send DVD copies of my film, The Pink Ladder [pleasevotethankyou], off to actresses and film festivals. 8 within England, 1 in India and 2 in the USA (technically 5, but that's a long story). First of all, that was a bitch of a decision in itself, because it was a case of not only which fests to choose, but which I could actually afford. Cannes ain't getting no £65 from me, thanks – not while I'm saving Pizza Hut boxes to lick for dinner.

So the total money drainage sent me scuttling to Gumtree, 'where I oft hop'd to catch a break as a chambermaid' (Alexander Pope) but alas! Nothing doing. Even Soho sandwich joints won't get back to me.

That was when, in Croydon, having travelled there by tram of course, I called a restaurant merely a tram's ride away from me. (Who knew trams would feature so prominently in this post? Not me, mate. Tram. Traaaaaam. Trammmmm.) The voice at the other end of the phone said, 'We have vacancies, come quickly!'

I ran.

Bursting onto the scene of family dinners, I slammed my CV into the fist of a very confused (possibly sexually) waiter, and what do you know? No waiting for me, no siree bob. It just so happened the general manager was at that branch that night, and he interviewed me there and then. We bonded over Australian Disney On Ice, and he said, 'Are you free on Sunday for a trial shift?'

'Golly, yes!' I enthused, my elbow patches unfurling. And with a shake of the hand, when I least expected it, I was offered a job. After 14 months of searching fruitlessly for employment, it fell into my lap. After I shook the tree with a hell-sent fury first, but whatever.

Now all I have to wait for is replies from film festivals.

I wonder if Christina Aguilera's Bionic will ever see the light of day?

The Pink Ladder

2010-03-01T10:55:00.007Z

So, OK. A week after we finished filming, here is my short flick about teenaged girls, faith, obsession, tension, and fits of frenzy. Click on the pic below...

Fakon

2010-02-22T01:40:00.005Z

Sigh, the fakery of filmage!

No, my friends, not the first line of a forgotten Dickens book about a comely actress — 'tis in fact my reflections on this strange, wonderful birthday I've had. For, having struck senility early enough to match my alopecia, I decided the best way to celebrate my Quarter-Century Milestone™ was to shoot a film. A short one. A little one, no bigger than your thumb. Please don't look at your thumb.

The fakering was omnipresent on today's The Pink Ladder shoot. We split a bothersome double bed in two; we used 150W film lights to give the impression of a dark room lit by candles; we cheated the distances between candles and actresses; we made said young actresses lean over open flames when they normally wouldn't; we shortened the amount of time needed to fiddle about with thread; we pretended there were screensavers of boys called Brandon on phones (or just one screensaver of one boy on one phone — will the lying never cease?). Best of all, we feigned random acts of violence. At least, I'm sure my actresses never meant for that candle to fly so close to my eye.

* * * * *

FILM-MAKER TIP: For a cheap alternative to blackout fabric, try taping kitchen foil to the offensive windows. It not only does the job, but it also acts as a fiery reflector of the million candles you have lit in your bedroom, thus creating both warmth in the room and cool condensation in your double glazing. It also makes a satisfying crackling noise when you tear it down.

* * * * *

Now I sit here after catching up on Gilmore Girls, drinking my own concoction of Strawberry Ribena and flat Sprite with ice. This marks the end of a day in which I spread tuna-sweetcorn sandwiches for the cast and crew, ate two pieces of quiche and three jam tarts, told the girls to say their lines a bit slower or a bit quicker, and accidentally spilled wax all over my hands, sheets and CD player.

The warped microcosm that is film, how I missed you!

Which

2010-02-15T16:44:00.002Z

I'm not a tough person. I have trouble saying 'No.' I can't even watch those YouTube videos of morons embarrassing themselves in front of the UK and Ireland at X Factor auditions.

So picture me loading frozen peas into a trolley at Sainsbury's, trying to decide which young girl's heart to break. No, not my annual Valentine's Day dilemma; I had just held auditions for my upcoming short, The Pink Ladder, and was all face-slapped by a whirlwind of performances to choose from.

Fully aware that actresses may be completely unbothered about being rejected for one of my masterpieces [/muchos irony], I couldn't help but feel the smarts of rejection on their behalf. I've been there, man. I know what it's like to get that e-mail saying, 'Unfortunately you have been unsuccessful.' That's too impersonal. Too many Us.

I've even helped out with more professional auditions and casting sessions, and seen talented young performers be dismissed as soon as the door shut behind them. I've seen sleazy directors long for a casting couch, and ugly bastards deciding over which teenage boy would be more likely to entice the 11-18 demographic.

How could I dismiss any one of these girls? I liked them all.

Sadly, the decision had to be made. It took a few hours of hair-pulling and out-of-window-staring (oh, OK, and biscuit-in-mouth-shovelling), but I finally have a cast. And a great DoP*. And a location and filming date of 21st February, a.k.a. My Birthday. I still don't have anybody to record sound on this thing, though, so there's still the possibility that this has all been a waste of everyone's time. YAY.

*For the uninitiated, no, this does not stand for Den of Pies. It is, in fact, a delicious acronym of Director of Photography.

Drama II

2010-02-05T21:27:00.005Z

On Wednesday 3rd February, I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at that entry form for the Croydon Film Festival. Lulling myself into the same complacency I detest in others, I scoffed at the deadline of 26th February. Until, that is, I read that at least half the cast & crew of films submitted needs to be based in Croydon. After slamming my eyes back in and rearranging all my insides, I paced my bedroom for an idea.

Films need to be about PASSION.

OK, to me that says night-time rape in a field, homosexual knife crime or an animal activist making pies out of fox-hunters and serving them to Tory ministers. Last one's too ambitious. Homosexual knife-crime it is, hooray!

Unfortunately, after reading a second line of the rules & regulations, it transpires these PASSIONate films have to be suitable for 12A audiences. F_CK.

This was when, as the clock struck midnight, I remembered an old idea about a bunch of teenage girls practising witchcraft. Easy indoor location, simple story, brilliant. Realising that I was running out of February, the only possible filming date would be 21st February: my birthday. What a gift to me!

The next day I posted bulletins on Talent Circle, Shooting People and why-not Gumtree. I even e-mailed the BRIT School, whose patron saint is Leona Lewis. I researched, wrote the script, called it The Pink Ladder after telling everybody else it was The Red Ladder, and have been furiously planning since.

This was today:

[E-mail to Croydon-based stage school]

ME: Hello, I have no money but I make flims. You got 15-year-old girls I can use?

[Driving in Beckenham, phone rings.]

M: Hello?

SCHOOL: Hello, we are The School you e-mailed an hour ago. We shall e-mail you a baker's dozen girls to choose from!

M: I'm not a pervert, by the way.

S: OK.

[Stanley Halls, theatre and function place: CLOSED. Please ring this number to hire the venue: ____________. Calls number, no answer. Leaves message. Goes to college / community centre across the road from house.]

M: Hello, I need a room to hold auditions in.

COMMUNITY: Lovely, we charge this much: £___.

M: Ah. I'll get back to you.

[Goes home. Phone rings.]

COUNCIL: You want to book Stanley Halls? That'll be £_________.

M: Bladdy 'ell!

C: OK, good luck.

[E-mails come in from 15-year-old girls and camera ops.]

M: A bounty! Is this really happening?

[Books trip to Paris. Goes back to college / community centre.]

C: We forgot to tell you, you need public liability for that room hire.

M: That's nice.

C: No, you need to get it.

M: No sweat, sugarplum. Gimme some. How much?

C: Don't know. Call an insurance company.

M: WTF? But I don't want to be liable. Especially not PUBLICALLY.

C: No liability, no hire.

[Phones 12+ insurance companies. Is passed around. Nobody can / wants to do it.]

MUM: By the way, here's a flyer some girl handed to me in Crystal Palace yesterday.

[FRONT OF FLYER: Free coffee if you bring this flyer in! BACK OF FLYER: Rooms for hire! Frantic call.]

M: Hello, I want a room for auditions YES?

WOMAN: You need to come see the place first.

M: Can't I just book it now?

W: No. We shut in 40 minutes.

[Runs over, sees room. Is perfect and less than half the price of the college / community centre. Is happy and without the need to be PUBLICALLY LIABLE.]

I can't believe this is happening again. It's been too long. To think I was about to throw in the proverbial, sweaty towel...

Drama I

2010-02-05T21:11:00.002Z

In the space of a week, I hopped the bus from May As Well Lobotomise to Somebody Give Me An AMEN! My ability to switch between flatly dejected and deliriously productive stands me in good stead to be prob— analysed by Stephen Fry someday.

Friday 29th January was set to be a momentous day; the photoshoot for my new theatre piece, The Sexes. This is how the 28th went:

[Phone rings.]
ME: Hello?
PHOTOGRAPHER: Hi, I'm calling to confirm tomorrow's photoshoot.
M: Yes, thank you.
P: How many people are coming?
M: Uh... Difference much? You'll be photographing 2 people.
P: TWO PEOPLE?! By Jupiter's beard...
M: Are you OK?
P: This changes everything. The price is doubled.
M: But... they're in the same photo.
P: No, I'm sorry.
M: You quoted me a price for the day.
P: Sorry. Double.
M: OMGgoodbye!
[Frantically rings ANY photographer.]
M: Hello?
SCOTTISH GUY: Hello?
M: Hello, Photography?
SG: Sure, I'll come to you. I don't have a studio.
M: F_CK.
SG: OK, good luck, bye.
[phone rings]
M: Hello?
SG: Hello, I've got somebody for you.
M: By the milk of human kindness!
[Phones other person.]
GOOD PEOPLE: Yes, come over tomorrow, we love you.
M: You are so nice.
[Photoshoot happens on 29th, goes beautifully, poor theatre hopefuls given faith in humanity, airbrush techniques and discounts on pictures. Poster and flyer coming soon... Soon.]

* * *

To Be Continued...

Bitch

2010-01-25T14:38:00.000Z

Don't believe in yourself

Don't deceive with belief

Knowledge comes with death's release...

iPod's shuffle feature can be a right Queen Bitch. Either mp3 players have developed a consciousness à la most technophobic thrillers of the '90s or I read too much into things. But there I am, picking apart my life on the 14.29 to London Bridge when David Bowie's Quicksand comes on to give me its 2 cents / 2x4 to the head.

A few days earlier, my Greek self was on the train with my Greek sister when a drunken man asked me how to get to Greenwich. 'It's spelled Green Witch but we pronounce it Grennitch,' he offered. That's when a pigeon flew through the open train doors and straight into my head. Except it wasn't a pigeon, it was a rolled-up Chinese newspaper.
'That happened to me once!' enthused the drunk. 'I was skiing in Austria when some guys came and punched me right in the face! My wife was with me, though, and she's Austrian, so she punched them back.' The touching story was followed by a 'Heil Hitler' salute.
At London Bridge, the drunk asked me what I did. It's the question I fear most. 'I'm a freelance creative,' I replied. He was inebriated enough not to alter his face for me: 'I fucking hate you people.' But he shook my hand anyway and wished me luck. 'You'll find your niche,' he softened. 'I found mine.' Then he staggered towards the Jubilee Line. The next day, I received another rejection e-mail.

It had to happen sometime, this quarter-life crisis. Through my days as a straggler in Nottingham, there remained the knowledge that this was a means to an end; of course I would be doing what I wanted one day. The climb was longer than I anticipated, but there's always a mountaintop. But now I've reached that inevitable point: the compass is broken, I have no idea where I'm going or what I'm doing up here. It's best to keep walking but I'm tired.

Maybe I'll just sit here with my iPod on shuffle and hope for an upbeat tune.

Flunk'd

2010-01-15T13:43:00.000Z

When I first started my driving lessons, I drew on all my Mario Kart experience. Blue shells, high-speed swerves, power-up mushrooms... More than one person expected me to be like Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky. Why my friends would think I'd drive my instructor mad by giggling incessantly and wearing high-heeled boots is anyone's guess, even if I always played as Princess Peach.

But today, I may as well have been Poppy.

From the moment my morbidly obese examiner stepped forth, I had concerns. When he got in the car and I had to rev like I was running from zombies just to move off, I had my doubts. When he said, "Turn left," and I realised we were heading for Upper Norwood, I HAD MY CERTAINTY.

Upper Norwood = hills.
Hills + obese passenger = fuck.
Hills + obese passenger + "reverse around this corner" = fuuuuuck.

What next? A coach blocking my path so that I have to keep the clutch at biting point for a full minute until cars from the opposite direction came through first? Why, yes. A six-wheel roadworks truck veering into me in a narrow street? Why not. Ambulances, schoolchildren, pedestrians running into the road, me going secondgear-thirdgear-secondgear-thirdgear-stop-first-second, all the while struggling to retain motor function of my face.

But all that was fine. I did it! I felt something like warmth inside my desolate being.

At a junction, however, halfway through this Rat Race obstacle course, I stopped to check for oncoming traffic but couldn't see past my passenger to my left side. I peeped-'n'-creeped – the most absurdly cute manoeuvre name – but by the time I pulled out, another car had approached from my right. So I stopped to let it pass. But because my car had already come out of the junction he had to move around me, which I knew meant Game Over.

At the end of the test the examiner turned to me and said, "I'm sorry but you haven't passed."

"It's OK, I thought I hadn't."

Bemused silence.

I'm annoyed at myself for that stupid mistake but also proud for having handled the bastard conditions thrown at me as well as I did. This is my new philosophy: don't beat yourself up for every failure, because there will be many. Just carry on to the next junction.

(I hope that doesn't make me sound like an Oprah guest. I keep checking my lips for signs of collagen and my hair for fixative.)

Drive

2010-01-15T00:05:00.002Z

Tomorrow I will put my clutch control to the test. This means mirror checks, indicators, roundabouts, lane discipline, and catching the biting point. I might be so far uphill the car would be vertical. I might stall the car, forget the handbrake and career down suburbia backwards.

The past few months have been gearing [pun very much intended] me for this. After October's brutal semi-final in central Croydon, in which the theory test tried to knock me out with mouse-clicking "hazard perception" lunacy in the second round, my all-important Practical Driving Test looms.

But now I'm thinking, "Meh." If I get my licence*¹, it means I finally get to bring the shopping home from Tesco. Or at the very least, embark on a road-trip around the UK that shall be documented in a vlog*² that takes a sudden turn into a tale of tragedy and survival. Picture me with a ragtag troupe of orphans crammed into a Ford Fiesta.

If I fail the test, I retake it. People are dying in Haiti.

Puts it in perspective, dunnit.

*¹Firefox corrects "licence" because it doesn't realise that, while the verb is spelled with an S, the noun is spelled with a C. More grammar lessons coming soon.

* ² Video blog, for those over the age of 19.

Fit

2010-01-13T16:24:00.002Z

There's snow over the gravestones as a sinner's laid to rest. It's easy to turn the frosty mood of my grandfather's funeral into a story. A man on a bus in Cambridgeshire, being accused of paedophilia – write that in. Me finding my way home one night when the snow has brought London's transport to a halt – work it. Money problems, relationships, fear of inadequacy, et al. – all perfect fiction fodder. Sometimes I even work from imagination. I say to myself, "Donatello"—that's sometimes what I call me—"Write a nasty tale about contemporary London in Victorian style." And I do.

But then what?

I'm left with tales about gay singer-songwriters, ritualistic children, broken parents, bad parents, gender-bending, and incubi that may or may not be the product of sexual repression. Where do I send them? Who am I writing them for? The only lovely people to accept my work have been Martin Reed and Pauline Mason at Decongested. But, to quote Erykah Badu, "Bitch gotta make money."

I leaf through lit-mags like Ambit and Granta and I think, "Yeah, I'm not that good." Should I try Women's Weekly? "Yeah, nobody can be that bland. I mean, they must have developped software to generate those stories." I can't send Nice Shoes, Anton to LGBT mag Chroma because I need to be L, G, B or T. Part of me says, "Fake it. Say you're bi, say you're post-op. Who's gonna know?" But the rest of me would be fraught with guilt. What if my story was accepted, pushing the next James Baldwin to the rejection pile? What if people wrote in, saying, "That story reeks of heterosexual beliefs about our community"? They'd run me out of town.

I need to wise up. Can't be naive and bring my Mid-Twenties Existential Crisis™ into every aspect of my life. What I should be doing is research; buying every £8 literary magazine to see what it is exactly they want, then somehow try to match that while remaining "original".

But I suspect there'll always be that part of me that thinks, "Why can't they just accept my stuff?"

Screwed

2010-01-02T00:54:00.006Z

The Turn of the Screw is either a ghost story or the depiction of a woman’s corruption of innocent children born of her own sexual repression. Written by Henry James in 1898, masterfully filmed by Jack Clayton as ‘The Innocents’ in 1961 (one of my favourite films ever), recently bastardised by the BBC.

This is the BBC version.

Originally broadcast: 30th December 2009

Forgotten: Hopefully, soon.

Director: Should be ashamed.

Writer: Should be ashamed.

Spoilers ahead. If you planned on watching this on iPlayer, don't.

"SCREWED"

INT. MENTAL ASYLUM

Miss Giddens is INSANE. She is locked in a room where she stares solemnly like a MANIAC. A young Doctor is living in the 1920s, instead of the Victorian period when any God vs Science debate should have been more relevant, and is assigned to getting the truth of a horrific event out of Miss Giddens.

EVERYBODY ELSE: She will not speak! She will never speak!
DOCTOR: I will make her!

He shows Miss Giddens a photograph.

MISS GIDDENS: Iwilltellyoueverything.

INT. A MAN’S OFFICE – MONTHS EARLIER

The room is full of hormones as the uncle of two orphaned children inappropriately touches Miss Giddens at every opportunity. He hires her to look after said orphans, Miles and Flora. Miss Giddens fantasises about the uncle doing her sexually.

INT. BLYE HOUSE

Miss Giddens enters the house – she is the new governess and so venturing upstairs is immediately beset by lots of frenzied GHOST whisperingS. There is a little girl but no Jennifer Love-Hewitt.

FLORA: My name is Flora.
MISS GIDDENS: Hello, Flora!

Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, enters.

MRS GROSE: Oh, miss, the children adore you!
FLORA: My brother Miles is coming.
MISS GIDDENS: Not until the end of term, I hope.

Flora’s eyes glint with EVIL. Miles returns home, having been expelled from school. Miss Giddens fantasises about the uncle DOING HER SEXUALLY.

LATER

MISS GIDDENS: What happened to the previous governess, Miss Jessel?
MISS GROSE: She died.
MISS GIDDENS: I see her everywhere! She is evil.

EXT. THE GARDEN

While watching Flora play and hearing lots of frenzied GHOST whisperingS, Miss Giddens sees a man on the tower.

MULTIPLE JUMP CUTS AND WHISPERINGS

INT. BLYE HOUSE

Miss Giddens talks to a maid who is Ruth from ‘Spooks’.

MISS GIDDENS: Tell me how Miss Jessel died!
MAID: She was abused by her lover, Peter Quint. He was violent with and raped every woman in this house.

CUT TO:
Peter Quint being violent with and raping every woman in the house.

MISS GIDDENS: What about Miss Jessel? Did she do nothing?
MAID: He was violent with and raped her, too. But she enjoyed it.

CUT TO:

Peter Quint being violent with and raping Miss Jessel. She ENJOYS it.

MISS GIDDENS: In front of the children?
MAID: Especially in front of the children.

CUT TO:
Peter Quint having NAKED SEX with Miss Jessel. She ENJOYS it. Miles also enjoys it, from a chair right next to the bed, smoking a phallic and masculine CIGAR.

MAID: This is a house full of women and you’d think we’d derive some sort of tension from that. Instead we keep mentioning how this is a house full of women.

INT. MENTAL ASYLUM – THE PRESENT

DOCTOR: Do you think that maybe you’re sexually repressed and therefore the lack of men has made you insane?
MISS GIDDENS: I am not a sexually frustrated female!

Miss Giddens fantasises about being gangbanged by ghosts and absent uncles.

INT. BLYE HOUSE

MRS GROSE: The children adore you!
MILES & FLORA: You bitch whore die you whore bitch
MISS GIDDENS: Mrs Grose, the children are possessed by the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, in a most unspeakably blunt MTV manner. After all, little Miles is currently doggying poor Flora as we speak.

The children look EVIL. Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are also there. Miss Giddens fantasises about Quint and Miss Jessel having NAKED SEX and also being done sexually herself by the children’s uncle.

INT. BLYE HOUSE
It is night time and Miss Giddens has heard LOTS OF FRENZIED WHISPERING. She goes to a window. Miles is outside in the garden.

MISS GIDDENS: Miles, you evil possessed child, come inside!

Miles stares, EVILLY. The maid who is Ruth from ‘Spooks’ SCREAMS AND FALLS TO HER DEATH from the TOWER. 

INT. BLYE HOUSE

MILES & FLORA: You bitch whore die you whore bitch
MISS GIDDENS: Leave me alone with Miles, Mrs Grose. Is it hot in here, or is Peter Quint naked?
MRS GROSE: Goodbye, Miss Giddens.

She takes Flora. Miss Giddens talks to Miles. Peter Quint COMES. Miles DIES. 

INT. MENTAL ASYLUM – THE PRESENT

DOCTOR: I see Quint everywhere too, even though I had no association whatsoever with that house or the events that unfurled within it, and besides, if Miss Giddens is seeing Quint out of her own sexual frustration, then my seeing him must be an indicator to myself that I am gay!

He goes outside, where Quint is A POLICEMAN FOR SOME REASON. Except he ISN'T REALLY.  Because that denotes ________________.

INT. BLYE – SOME TIME LATER
The new governess arrives. She is led upstairs, where there is constant whispering. She goes into a room, where Flora is playing the piano. Flora looks up.

FLORA: (POSSESSED - or maybe the new governess suffers from the exact same sexually-frustrated delusions as Miss Giddens) We've been expecting you...

Henry James would be rolling over in his grave.

2010

2010-01-01T23:33:00.001Z

2010

Christmassy

2009-12-22T17:38:00.001Z

Cut

2009-12-12T01:20:00.002Z

Well, Brighton flopped like the return of Blue. The Clothes To Fall Apart In mini-tour has seen 2 towns, 6 shows and so far no profit to speak of. But if I was in this for the money, I'd already have staged my musical adaptation of The Crucible starring Christine Baranski, wouldn't I?

On my constant search for poetry, today I figured I'd celebrate my Brighton failure by setting my head on fire. Having posted a Christmas present to my almost-wife in Jersey, I took me down to the barber for a quick chop.

'Just shave it off,' I say, to which he says, 'Let's make it art.' So he shaves and snips, and with the blade scraping my cheekbone he tells me he's from Turkey. 'I'm from Cyprus,' I say, expecting to be dead in seconds. But then we speak of open-mindedness, and people vs. governments, and he lights a taper to burn my ears off. 'Don't worry,' he chuckles, as he waves the fire in and out of my head space. Before I know it, it's over – the redness of my neck and earlobes the only sign that this actually happened.

'He is from the Middle East,' I think, 'and this is exotic. Burning your customers' heads is not unusual where he's from. I am a narrow-minded Westerner.' Then he sprays something on my face and rubs it down in a rigorous massage. His thumbs work my forehead. I hope he doesn't wipe all memories of the 1996 Oscars. It's just the two of us in here. Across the road is a Tesco Express. I think of the Polos I must buy.

He finishes the head massage. I'm sure that in a few seconds I'll feel totally free of negative energy and float around all one with the universe and think, 'They know things in Turkey. Wise things.' But all I'm aware of is the stench of ham coming from my reddened ears and the need to go home and bathe.

This time next week I'll be curled up in Bethnal Green, sobbing over the remnants of a pasty. We're listed in Time Out, which makes me throb, and there's an interview with me at OffWestEnd.com (I prattle endlessly about pretentiousness while carefully avoiding my inexplicable fascination with this year's X Factor). London, I really hope you come to our show.

But you know what? I had flames at my head and I'm still alive. So fuck you.