From The Pen of Pooky

This is Pooky's latest song - I do wonder what they've been telling him in assembly.......

I love you little honey pie,
You won't cry,
You will just tell someone like me.
And if you fall into the water,
I will just pick you back onto my back
And then we will just be alive.
And if we don't be died any more
We will live in a new home.

To All The Bikes I've Loved Before

Pooky's bike's getting a bit worn looking. I expect next year he'll get a new one as he'll have grown another metre taller. This, for some reason makes me go all sentimental and reflective, and I'm the kind of mother who chucked her kids' first shoes in the charity sack as opposed to having them covered in plutonium and preserved for posterity. It led me to musing idly upon all the bikes I have owned in my life.

Bike #1: Tiny red one with stabilisers
Bike #2: Cool Raleigh Denim
Bike #3: Dorky white folding bike with blue saddlebag full of sketchbooks
Bike #4: Donated brown bike sadly nicked by Brummie fuckwits
Bike #5: Purple Raleigh Vixen with babyseat, granny basket and sometimes trailer.

No reason at all for this post, just felt like sharing/inflicting it.

Things are going too well. I expect my house will fall down next week. But then it's insured, so that's probably a blessing.

Last night I went to see a play and IT WAS GOOD. Yes, I know this rarely happens to me. I'm shocked too. The last time I saw something halfway decent, I'd written it. And even that was marred somewhat by one of the lead characters fluffing his lines in the opening speech.
The play in question was Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads by Roy Williams. The set was stunning. They had actually built a pub on stage! The windows had rain falling behind them, the gents was a slide-out set within a set, and the CCTV behind the bar showed characters in the street before they entered. In order to defeat the Theatre Royal's sloped stage, the pool table had been built up on stilts of varying levels and at one point, a brick flew through the 'glass' of the window. Impressive.
The dialogue was raw, snappy and fast-paced. Most of the characters were so well drawn that you didn't know who to trust or how they would react. SO much was left unsaid. Many sharp intakes of breath were heard amongst the audience.
The plot was outwardly simple: over the course of an evening, a pub footie team and their various hangers on gathered to watch some cup final against Germany. The one black member of the team, Barry, was trying way too hard to fit in, with his bulldog tattoo, St George flags on his cheeks and desperate cries of 'Stand up, if you won the war' whenever the conversation strayed into uncomfortable areas. Which it frequently did. There was a character, Lawrie, who was your archetypal football hooligan, goosestepping, violent racist, but much more sinister was the 'Don't read The Sun, read BOOKS' BNP type, Alan. He wound the other characters up and made them say what he wanted them to say. He just wanted to HELP black people, because they'd be much happier elsewhere...............
Then there was the landlady's white son Glen, who desperately wanted to hang out with the cool black kids, but had the piss ripped out of him (and his stuff nicked) continually. All the while, Barry's brother Mark smouldered away in the background, attempting to get Barry to realise what a tit he was being. Throughout, the white characters referred to Barry and Mark as 'son' or 'boy' and let them buy round after round at the bar without reciprocating.
It was clear that with such a mix of characters in such an enclosed space, there would be a confrontation at some point, but where it originated was a genuine surprise. And I'm not going to spoil it. The play ended abruptly, boldly, without the satisfaction of a neat resolution which could never have rung true.
Fantastic acting, directing, writing and set. WHY were there only 110 in the audience? The auditorium was almost empty. Does the answer lie in the fact that I asked for the cheapest ticket and yet paid £14? Under 25s get in for £4, which is cheaper than the pictures, but the message obviously isn't getting through. This play needs to be seen! PLUS you get a complete copy of the new, rewritten script in the programme. If you can get to see this production, do so - This will stay with me for a long time.

I don't wanna go to Guantanamo

Tony, could I please emphasise if you're reading this that I said in my previous post I'd bought a BATH bomb making kit on the internet. Bath bombs are fairly innocuous creations made from bicarb of soda, essential oils and food colouring. Sometimes they contain glitter or rose petals. They make your skin all nice and soft. AND THEY ARE NOT WMDs.
Thank you. As you were.

Hold the Front Page!

I'm having a good day.

And I thought, given the tone of my recent posts, that I should blog about it before it all went wrong. Last night I painted a very large picture of a dandelion and ordered a bath bomb making kit from t'internet. The night before that I sewed Pooky a new bag. Today I have made a gallon of wine out of tinned fruit cocktail, then, on a roll, went out to Clifton Backies to forage for berries with Puggle. Ok, so the buggy broke and is now completely, as oppposed to partially, shagged - but Puggle managed to walk all the way home, so my back remains happy. And we did get enough blackberries for two crumbles.

It's all going suspiciously well............

but then Friday is the day the Jehovah's witnesses call. HELP.

Reminiscence Writing.

Here's a reminiscence.
Tonight, I walked into The Royal Oak, to conduct the playwriting workshop I've run for more than a year now. I peered into the room we use. OOH, I thought, lots of new people with files. They're keen.

Then they slammed the door in my face.
I asked the barmaid what was going on. She didn't know. But she could provide me with a lovely, if chillingly expensive, pint of Deuchars. Emboldened by this relative good fortune, I walked into the room.

"Are you here for Page to Stage?" I enquired, nicely.

"We're a WRITING group," one of the scary people said, "A reminiscence writing group."

I was so confused that I was nice. I am often confused. And often nice. This is the great tragedy of my life. By this time Edd and Jane had arrived for the workshop, so we went upstairs to investigate the alternative room.
SHIT! It made my house look clean. Full sentences fail me, so I shall merely say:

carrot peelings
pants
ironing board
overflowing fagtray
family photos
Danielle Steele novels
ouija board
human sacrifices hanging by one foot
John Smith's Smooth

Actually the last three were made up. The old gits writing shit about their childhoods to foist upon their teenage descendants who will merely use it to light their crack pipes - did I type that out loud? I mean reminiscence writers - wouldn't budge and I am too wet to tell them to fuck off , so we had to have our workshop in the bar.
So now I am covered in fagsmoke and very, very grumpy.
And I will phone the landpeople tomorrow to ask what the sodding hell happened. Or more probably I will tell them it's no problem, not their fault and we can put up with it. And I never really liked my lungs anyway.

Has anyone got a second hand assertiveness book I can have?
Please?
Only if it's no trouble.............

Bring Me The Publicist of Ay Carmela!

JAYSUS SUFFERING FRIG!

I have just spent the most wasted evening of my life since watching the talentless young things of Cheltenham Ladies College murder some Indian Folk Tale or other at the Edinburgh Fringe. And would I meant wasted as in inebriated off my tits. No, insobriety would have been a mercy.

Ay Carmela! Ay indeed. This show, at York Theatre Royal's Studio, was billed as some kind of musical comedy satire on the Spanish Civil War. Which sounded really rather good. Instead I have just sat through what felt like three and a half hours of an elderly woman in a black dress and a white bra singing badly and 'going mad' in a very cliched manner, while her wizened, mumbling co-star does the incredibly amusing and never before seen on stage trick of pretending to piss in a bucket and it goes on for ages and it's oh-so-F*****G-FUNNY. I waited for the first scene to be over. I thought, generously, that I've written a deliberately dull first scene in the past so as to heighten the impact of the brilliant second scene whch blasts away the audience's preconceptions.
I left the theatre three quarters of an hour ago. I don't think that first scene has ended yet.

Half the audience left in the interval. I wish to Minerva I had.

Want a taster of the show? There is a programme on CBeebies (the allegedly educational channel for under 5s and specifically my son Pooky) called Something Special. It is aimed at children with special needs, and is partly delivered in Makaton. A freakish clown called Mr Tumble teaches his bafflingly adoring audience new words in the following fashion:

"This is my FACE. What MR Tumble? Is that your FACE? YES, this is my FACE."

similarly, Ay Carmela:

"See those prisoners up there? PRISONERS? YES, PRISONERS. What prisoners? LOOK, PRISONERS!!"

Thank Odin we didn't waste a babysitter on this sh*t, that's all I can say. Incredibly and pathetically, we couldn't find anyone willing to sit on our sofa, eat our food and ignore our sleeping sprogs, so we had to go on alternate nights. And I went first. This means that my lovely spouse gets to skip out, as frankly, the £7.33 I wasted on his ticket due to a 'special' offer ("SPECIAL? YES MR TUMBLE! SPECIAL IN A BAD WAY!!!") would be better spent reclaiming the two and a half hours of his life that he would have expended yawning and cursing the day he ever met the woman who would ultimately buy him a ticket for this torture.

The only thing I liked about this production was the fact that halfway through the first half, I was so bored that I went into a trance and thought of a really really good idea for a teenage novel.

And whoever publicised this pile of w*nk, I'd love to know, because they make Alastair Campbell look like an amateur and quite honestly, I'd like to hire you for my next play. I think you could probably get me the Nobel prize.

p.s. When I'm cross, I type like an amputee, so now I'm going to go back and correct all my spelling.

Then I need a beer.

Thank you.