Well then. The Pantechnicon opens tomorrow. Bring your name. If you are a supplicant, bring a laurel branch. If you’re afraid of snakes to the extent that you’ll fly off the handle, don’t be a supplicant. If you’re afraid of me so much that you’ll fly off the handle come anyway. I can handle it. First few days are just going to be scratching the material we’ve got and making sense of what flies and what doesn’t within the frame of what we are making.
Mel and I collaborate so well together despite the fact that we can fight like cats. It’s an odd pairing but it works. We both generate sheds worth of raw idea soup. But then we look at all the ideas we have and add more. Occasionally we pick one up and refine it but then as often as not we abandon it for a shiny new one and forget it ever existed. But today we have been forging order from chaos. Now we can bring paying people into the mix and notice how things work outside of our very different slightly bonkers minds. I suspect it’s going to be lovely.
I just picked up a robust and beautiful set of stairs up from New Cross, so now we have an entrance that the audience can use. I have to go home and write some material now, just to thicken the idea soup and make sure the flavours all blend together nicely. But right now I’m sitting in a pub with a Heineken 0, getting this blog down.
I have no house keys. I didn’t think this through. My friend Emma arrived today with her cat in a bag, five minutes after I was supposed to leave for work. Her house is being fumigated. She works at The Lister Hospital which is right round the corner. We locked her cat in my room and went to work. I gave her my keys. It’s now past ten in the evening and she’s walking here having only just finished.
I gave the other set of keys to my nephew Campbell. He’s brilliant. He’s partly responsible for a Shelley poem having made its way into the idea soup. He also is extremely good at switching all the lights off, which is a mixed blessing. I have no idea what I’m going to get home to. Two cats in a pitch black flat with nothing but a locked door between them…
We didn’t have time in the morning to introduce them and supervise it. If Pickle goes for boy, her claws are like razors right now. If Boy goes for Pickle, he is twice her size, although lacking in testicles. They might end up the best of friends… Or they might have been yowling through the door at each other all day and spraying on everything they could possibly spray on. They might have trashed the place running around in crazy circles in the dark.
But this sort of thing is just speculation. Likely everything will be fine. But it’s the nature of what we have had to do all day in the van. “What if an audience member is terrified of snakes and smashes everything trying to get away?”
I’ll let you know when I get home about the cats. I reckon everything will be fine. And if it is then maybe I can let myself off the hook worrying about the show, because it’s the same thought pattern.
Here I am in a fabric shop with snow outside. We got some shiny material, and some Chinese ink. But cripes it’s cold.
(The cats didn’t kill each other. Yet.)
LAST TWO YEARS
Day 1 and I am up before dawn. The Airbnb is lovely but full of sleeping strangers and considering I rolled in late last night and went straight to bed I’m aware they might be a little uncomfortable with me wandering around switching all the lights on. The patio is full of horny cats rolling around in the predawn, and as I close the door behind me and incompetently jiggle my keys in a terrible attempt to lock the door, the neighbours’ rooster wakes, guilty, and starts crowing. I stand to admire the palm trees and traces of red in the sky, and then open the big security gate that leads to the street. The cats make a break for it but I block them with my feet. I don’t know the rules here. As I close it behind me another man exits the house, precipitated by my incompetent attempts to lock his door. He introduces himself as Artur, and comes through the gate also blocking the cats. With all these cats it’s a miracle there’s a rooster. I tell Artur I don’t have a car but I’m going for a walk. He asks me if I’m mad. I tell him I hope not, and he offers me a lift. “Don’t walk around here.” He is going into work in his uber. He drives me to a starbucks on Jefferson and tells me it’s safer round here. He then gives me his number and insists that I call him if I am in danger. He repeatedly tells me to trust nobody. I trust him. It’s still dark, but Starbucks is open so I buy him a coffee and one for myself. I order myself a flat white as they have one on the menu, which is progress from the last time I was here. It’s a latte, but at least they’re trying. Artur makes sure I know that the emergency number is 911, and clarifies that he is best friends with all the local police because his family sorts out their life insurance. The last guy I met called Artur gave me a lift from France to London and left me standing by his van at Calais with a massive wrench in case “someone tries to sneak under the van”. Is there genuine danger, or are people called Artur lovely yet paranoid? Either way he leaves me on the street clutching a flat latte and feeling I might need to look over my shoulder. I shrug it off and go for a walk as the dawn cracks around me. Big shops, big stone churches, lots and lots and lots of cars, big trees, things built for show. I think I’m going to need to rent a car. Uber will break me and the buses are pretty bad here. I find a metro station. Artur has told me that nobody knows how to use the metro. An opportunity to be a pioneer? Sadly it doesn’t go in the direction I need to go, which is back to the cats, through this dangerzone of Artur’s. So I walk, following Google Maps, and there is nobody else walking. I walk through discarded clothes and ripped off bags, auto parts lying neglected on pavements, human turds, shopping trolleys. After an hour I come upon a small building with stained glass. Outside it sits a gigantic man with a gun. People are going in. On impulse, I go in too. To St. Matthew’s Evangelical Baptist Church. I stand at the back but it is obvious that I am new. I’m the only white face, and they worship together daily. I am gently asked to introduce myself. They make me feel welcome and the pastor preaches a gospel of hope and transformation. His context is that of children dead or in prison, and the shackles of deep poverty. I find the message very pertinent, full of hope, and a call to arms. “Too many of us mistake our stopping place for our staying place.” After the service, he runs to catch me in the street as I walk away. He thanks me, and warns me “This is a bad area. You should be careful here.” I walk back to the digs and open the fence. This time the cats don’t seem so keen to go out onto the street. Or is that my imagination?
AlBarclay 