Danceworks is up near Bond Street. I didn’t have to be there until half one, so I drove Bergie up to the edge of my borough near Hyde Park, and struck on foot into the park.
Colder than it looks out there, isn’t it? Didn’t stop half of London coming out to the park for Easter. It was crowded around Rotten Row. Skateboards and rollers and families and strollers. I was on a mission.
Back in the eighties my grandma wrote a short poem for a competition in The Daily Express. It won. The poem had to be about Rotten Row and the prize was the author’s name on a bollard on Rotten Row.
Peggy died in the early nineties. Mum and I used to go there to her bollard on her birthday (28th September) and pop a cork, pour a small libation, neck the rest. I haven’t been in years, maybe just once since mum died. It’s Easter. Family time. We do what we can.
Took me a while to find it. Many of the bollards have been stripped of names now. They were all added with a strip of metal around the top, and perhaps they were something of an afterthought as they haven’t weathered well. Many have lost their name entirely. I was ready not to find it, but I remembered vaguely where it was.
Sadly her surname has gone now. But I’ve made myself a video to help me find it. I’ll check back occasionally and perhaps one day I’ll measure it up and bang out a new one for her in a workshop and attach it as fearsomely as I understand how to. They won’t be replacing the bollards for a few hundred years yet, and her spirit would be glad to know she’s still got that tiny bit of London. I’ve made a video that ensures I can find the bollard even if the rest of the attribution goes as well, and it might. Scrap metal weight has tanked so I doubt it’ll get chipped off any further on purpose, but weather happens every day. There are plenty that have been ripped off entirely by bored people, people wanting material for things, students, whatever. London, innit.
Happy to have found it, I forged through the bluebells and up to Oxford Street and to Danceworks. A negotiation with a nasty little dancer who wanted to give me a fifteen minute monologue about how he wanted to use the room we had booked for fifteen minutes. I just kept saying “Stop talking and get on with it then, I won’t need to ask you to leave until ten minutes before I start.” I ended up walking away from him mid sentence after feeling too harangued and going down all the stairs and asking the receptionist to chuck him out. I just got tired of his tone and his constant domineering attitude. He got less time than he would have as he didn’t know how to shut up, but really I think he just wanted to dominate me for whatever tiny tiny little … reason he had.
Glad we flushed him though as my Americans came earlier than expected. San Diego today, about twenty of them with a wide age range, and they got a cracking two hour workshop. I’ve got the format down now so this is gonna stop being anything other than joyful for me. Yay a new dayjob, now bring on more acting. Meeting people, being enthusiastic, sharing passion, connecting, geeking out, doing fun things, telling stories, last minute work… Lots of things I like. I’ll take this one over science in schools every day of the week and twice on Easter Sunday.
A bit of Shakespeare and the chance to commune with the spirit of my grandmother. Max knows the whole poem that won the bollard. I don’t. It was about Rotten Row though, a place where Earls would go… I just remember the last couplet: “Only problem is, of course, / I can’t afford a bloody horse.” She knew what she was doing. “It was a newspaper competition, it had to be relatable.” God rest her soul. She had another one published about Churchill’s death. She had the creative stuff in spades – even got accepted to a London drama school (RADA in those days perhaps?) but her sisters opened the letter and her mother burnt it. She only learnt it decades and decades later. Fire. I’m sure I’m partly her fault, but mostly I did this to myself.
AlBarclay 