There’s a lot of things that get left unsaid. If there was a script of our lives, if every word got transcribed and we could re read as though it was a play, would we want to? Would we want to remember all the things we said or had said to us? The pointless, the hurtful, the words chosen badly, as well as those that filled us like happy petrol? 

Sometimes as a writer things come out and you don’t realise until much later. I’ve been rehearsing my play Fran & Leni ahead of its London run next week. We haven’t performed it for a few weeks so we have to make sure the words are still up there, in our heads in the right order. Luckily they are. Saying the words again has made me realise how many little tendrils from my own life have found their way onto the page, into the mouths of people who don’t exist. They say you must write what you know if you want it to be authentic, so it’s a little weird when you think you have written something you thought was fictional but which you realise is actually a melting pot of a hundred true things you didn’t even know you were thinking about when you were typing.

 

Perhaps writing plays gives us the courage to say what we don’t say in real life.

 

The goodbyes. The I love yous. The hellos we’d like to say if only we got the time again. The anger. Our lives are full of things that almost happened or were never likely to happen. The things that could have been stick with us as closely as the things that have been, like ghosts. The old lovers, the near misses. The people we leave behind. The people we were too scared to love. The family who disappoint us, the family who inspire us and fix us and make everything brighter. The unkind people that we don’t admonish. The friends who by a few turns in the infrastructure of circumstance grow more distant until they are so far removed they only exist in memory. The people who will always be as part of your life as you yourself are. All the other beautiful fragile humans we have brief moments with, being real, our vulnerabilities temporarily grafted at the open points, sealing up our skins.

 

We seek to build a whole with other people’s incompleteness. Sometimes it works. We stick together. And sometimes the stitching comes apart and we drift. Sometimes we know to say goodbye. Sometimes we let it happen without words. Because for all our human ability to recognise that Love is the biggest thing to find, to let bloom, to conquer, to swirl around in like a magnificent skirt the size of the sky, sometimes we are just silly cowards.

 

Sometimes we get to go back and say the things we did not say at the time. Sometimes it is a kindness to yourself to say these things. Sometimes it is a kindness to them to let them say the things they’ve been storing up like acorns of regret.

 

Should we take the time to go back, or do we keep moving forward? What brings peace, and what stirs up questions and heartache? Does examining old pain smooth it over? Is it like returning to a messy bed, making it up, unfolding the creases, feeling the old fabric between your fingers, allowing the remembrance of that tactility to course through you again. The past can be returned to. We are all time travellers and every day triggers different temporal journeys through our imaginations. Smells, songs, a particular kind of light, a voice, a word. Words.

 

Sometimes writing a play is like waking up in an old messy bed and realising people have hopped in with you and are waiting for a story.

“What’s your address? I want to send you something.”

Instant intrigue. When an old school friend asks you this question part of you is immediately hauled back a couple of decades to the time when you were most together. Your sprawling hectic languid teens, writing long stream of consciousness twaddle to each other about boys you double-fancy and what a total cowbag Amelia Fairweather is. I’ve got a bureau drawer stuffed full of old letters and notes and cards; biro squiggly throwbacks to a life before email. I like knowing they’re there, these old voices, parts of people preserved, time paused between the pages.

“It’s a letter.” 

Such an ordinary thing, and yet it isn’t. Not anymore. And when your friend doesn’t give you a hint of what the letter is about, your brain emits little spurts of permutations of possibility until the imagination gets out of puff and settles in for the two day wait for the postman. Old-school waiting.

When the letter arrived, I plucked it up from the mat and instantly sat down on the stairs to look at the envelope, to honour the loveburst of recognition I felt seeing my friend’s handwriting again. Handwriting has always been powerful, and never more so than when you haven’t seen it for years but know it as surely as you did back when you saw it every day. It is a tiny loop-the-loop version of ourselves, and is evocative and characterful as our faces hands or clothes.

I read the letter and cried. A three page splurge of a lot of things, memories and musings, about the girls we were, about the women we’ve become, about writing and theatre and old friends and struggles and love and our heads and the harm we can do to ourselves as women and the changes we hope to make in the world. I could hear her voice so clearly it was like the paper didn’t exist but that she was next to me on the stairs, getting things off her chest, her letter acting as tendrils of her visceral thought, audio turned ink.

A few days later I received something else in the post, this time from a friend I haven’t known for long but to whom I feel very close. The handwriting was new to me, we live in a world of typing now, homogenised neat and fonted text, but it still came with that delightful shock of familiarity, the person somehow perfectly represented by their long-baked scrawl, the writing style they chose as children, crafted and mangled by time and design and the mysterious language of our hands and subconscious and different pens and how much of a hurry we’re in.

My friend had offered to be a reader of my book, a thing I have been prodding at for a long time which I am bashing in its final edit before I force myself stop tinkering with it. It’s driven me nuts, many times. Books are ruddy hard. He had printed it out, kept it in a filing box, and had devotedly written notes on the pages, a heart-warming mix of short and long thoughts and hand-scrawled emojis. Then he sent it back. Here was my book, decorated in the handwriting of a friend I love and trust, who had been kind and helpful. Plus a typed letter of notes. Plus a photo diary written from the perspective of the book itself whose pages had been on adventures on trains and in cars and was finished sat on the Turbine Hall floor of the Tate Modern. It made me laugh and cry and snot a bit. It was just what I needed, right at the right time, to help me get the buggering stupid head-fucking book about my dead dad finished. Finally.

We can’t all be together all the time. Our lives move on, we live in different spaces, we rarely come together as often as we’d like to. We are not those teens clasped together in a small world made up of nearby streets, nascent freedom, and scant obligation. We are grown up. And the way we choose to stay and be in each others’ lives is important. And sometimes it is in that slow stretched out hand of ink that enters your heart quicker and speaks louder and closer and arrests your ear more than any email in any inbox.

“I thought you were just going to lob that.” I turned with my bag of poo. “What? Why?” The bag of poo swung louchely from my fingers as if to say “Lob me. I want it. Make me the shotput of the poo world, you filthy slut.” I resisted telling it to behave itself because the day you start talking to poo in a bag is the day people start officially worrying. And not in a polite “have this fisherman’s friend and a little sit down” way but in an “I wonder what go-getting goodwill services might be called to best deal with this” sort of a way. I imagine it’s got its own NHS extension number: “Press one for wilful nudity in the conservation area, two for talking to faeces, three for ballroom dancing with an Aldi trolley named Helga.” I say imagine; the NHS isn’t what it was.

I should point out before things get really dark that it was the freshly plopped poo of my hound and not my own out on a jaunty daytrip. I am no outdoorsy coprophiliac with bags to spare. I had just picked it steaming from the cold pavement and the person I was with thought I might be the kind of person who, once they’ve gone to the effort of ridding the walkways of canine turds, might then fling the encased excrement into a tree. “What would you have done if I had lobbed it?” I asked. “Laughed”, they said. And I laughed too, even though my left eye twitched a bit.

Inside was that dual feeling of “What kind of heathen do you think I am?” and “Huh. You think I’m a bit of a renegade.” And even if it’s just related to hot poo in a thin bag, it’s always nice to know someone thinks you’re a bit dangerous. It’s this quiet sense of power that accompanies me on all my kills.

Not really. For the limp truth is I’ve always struggled with ‘being bad’. I was too much of a pleaser as a kid to want to be naughty. And the instances of being bad have almost all been accidental, acts carried out without thinking that were mostly followed up with neck-freezing panic or guilt. I once spent a day circa 1993 in tearful self-flagellation because I had doodled a (mostly) anatomically correct diagram on my desk (the retro lid-up kind that now commands upwards of £100 from people in deliberate cravats) of a couple having ‘fruitful relations’ (fucking unprotected and getting up the duff; nice one). There on my desk sprawled an uncomfortable but determined penis curving itself up into a very serious looking vagina, with a cross-section of the egg being resplendently fertilised by a jolly little tadpole with a face. The couple weren’t even looking at each other; I don’t even think I gave them hands. It was a very British fertilisation. “Come on Brenda, less of the kissing, let’s get this done before Top Gear.” On a scale of nil to erotic it was Kama Sutra for Kids and a quarter. And I made myself sick over it. I thought my life was over; half an hour of science-based recklessness would lead to expulsion, infamy, and a life of sucking cock on the means streets for bread & the occasional orange. I didn’t realise then in my darkest hour that my form teacher and stern headmistress were probably laughing at my psychedelic Fallopian tubes and everything would blow over by Double French.

I find it hard to throw this otherwise well-behaved child into the cellar of oblivion to liberate myself for moments of tomfoolery and mischief. My bad girl moments are appended by an awareness of how bad I’m being, which I’m sure mostly negates it. I mean just minor acts of harmless rebellion that remind you you are not owned by the system, not kicking kids in the face to get them off the swings or robbing Poppy Appeal tins. Cool bad, not bad bad. That’s bad. 

Last week I did my play Fran & Leni at the Railway Hotel, a perfect setting for a play about 1976 girl punks. My character Leni is a little tyke, no stranger to the mischief of the streets, she swears and spits and urinates standing up. Playing her feels…naughty. I enjoyed the night’s liberation, but I felt more myself when I went back the next day and cleaned up. I picked up some gum I’d spat out – even in all my punking I’d memorised with Rain Woman radar where it had fallen – and for a brief moment I allowed my inner schoolgirl to see me as I am now; the 36 year old writer, spitting out her gum, still testing herself and figuring out who she is. And I suppose that’s not a bad way of combining the good and the bad. Have a bit of fun, feel the flexing of freedom, be a bit punk, but clean up your own bloody mess, whether it be poo in a bag, gum, or a doodle of depraved fornication in an educational establishment. You can always use pencil, kids.

  

There was a little kerfuffle in the high street this week. Well not in it but about it. Some artists were commissioned to create artwork on the boards covering the BHS windows. They worked their butts off in some grotty weather to get it all done in time for the Christmas Lights Switch-on.

Four window boards now bear the following: “Some things are a dream.”, “Dream wonderful things.”, “People can be wonderful”, and “Be wonderful and dream.” The words were taken from the poetry of one of the artist’s late father, an artist himself.

The response I saw was almost all positive, but there were a few voices of dissent too.

Some people think it an affront to the people who harrowingly lost their jobs and pensions at BHS. Some people think the space is still ripe for political comment rather than a chipper encouragement to move on. Some people thought the sentiment was trite and offensive to people who perhaps weren’t feeling very happy and didn’t need to be told to effectively look on the bright side. Some people queried who got the job, how, and why. And of course all these opinions and the freedom and platforms to express them is what keeps things interesting. We are not all sheep baaing to the same flat note.

But. If we judged every high street billboard or window display or piece of publicly commissioned art against our own lives, we’d all be wailing and roaring. A jaunt down the gamut of the high street’s offerings could conjure a thousand insecurities or sadnesses or discontents with how things are. Are we pretty enough, slim enough, creative enough, popular enough, go-getting enough, clever enough, happy enough. Vegans don’t want to see posters of tender strips of chicken being ripped open to reveal moist flesh, but they’re there. People who’ve just lost a baby don’t want to walk past the Early Learning Centre and see A B C scrawled on a mini chalkboard; the letters their child will never be able to write, but they’re there. Homeless people slump outside as window-dressers plump up beds with stiff clean cotton that will never get slept on; a searing affront to the basic comfort they seldom get to experience. Lonely people pass posters of sequin-wearing bronzed pals quaffing festive prosecco, throwing their heads back and laughing with perfect pearly-whites. The windows are festooned with picture-perfect lives to taunt us.  Everything we see in them can hurt us somehow. There are times when all the life around us seems intent on jabbing us deep, right in the bits that already hurt. Windows are more about the things we do not have than the things we do have. And retailers capitalise on our deepest desires. That is how the big man maketh the money.

We are not all the same. If those four boards outside a now sad and empty BHS – the place I went for my school dresses and cardigans and socks, the place I trawled round on its sad last day before its doors closed and it just all felt horribly wrong – had been given to us all to spruce up, no two of us would have stumbled on the same design. And that’s kind of the beauty of art, isn’t it? Even if we’d willed it to happen by somehow communing our thoughts together, we would never have all come up with the same idea. Words, shapes, colours, style, message. All would have been different. Some may have fallen on the side of cheering passers-by with a sort of obligation to retail Blitz spirit; keep calm, keep on, love, laugh, live, etc. Some may have fallen on the uproar of the times, the ire of the year. Some may have gone abstract, some may have used words, some may have splashed paint, some may have painstakingly painted impeccable detail.  Within the designs would have been hidden thematic layers of love, loss, ambition, desire, fear, and rage. Within the designs would have been whatever spirit makes that artist an individual. If I was an artist and had been approached to cover the boards, what would I have opted for? Given my current mood at the tail end of this shitty year I think it might have been a big wash of black. Or a complete fucking mess of bottle-tops stuck on with blu-tack or something like some sort of Generation Prozac meets Blue Peter.  Thank god I know I am not an artist.

It’s hard to know whether the world most needs our love or our anger. I think it needs both, the love keeps us sane while the anger drives us forwards, but it’s hard to know how to fuse the two together like some sort of swirly light sabre. The onus is on us to contribute to making things better, but how the fuck do we do we do it? If world leaders are getting so much of the big stuff wrong, how do we ordinary folks stand a chance?

Maybe we just start small. We start at the very centre of things and work our way outwards. We start inside ourselves, we get to know what drives our guts and we propel some of it out into the world. We think and we learn and we contribute. We are a part of it all, and that’s important.  I personally found it hard to listen to some people’s opinions about the art that went up on the BHS boards. Because vitriol makes my eyes water and I felt protective of the artists who had made choices and worked hard to bring them to life, with good intent in their hearts, and I think sometimes the better things to judge is the intention that goes into something, not the thing itself. That’s more interesting; that’s the person, that’s the fire inside. Street Art is an invaluable part of our visual world, and it’s an important counter culture to the images the high street in its role as a long shifting gallery curated by rich cunts offers us, that by its very corporate nature just plays on our weaknesses not our strengths; our lack not our haves; our emptiness not our fire.

We’re all carrying an arson of things at all times. Some keep it all inside never to be expressed like a guilty mute secret, often to their own detriment. Some fling it out without thought and damage things rather than add something good, some choose their battles and their words and their counter-attacks carefully, to great effect. As I consider what the right balance of peace and fire is, I think I generally fall somewhere on this: instead of hurling bricks at people, we should build something with them. I think that’s how better things get created, and the world builds itself back up from the rubble.

Well. It’s been quite the week. I don’t know where to start, such is the utter daze that has wound its way around everything since the election results rang across the world like a bell intent on breaking your ears off the side of your face. It seems too big to tackle with my own words. Like figuring out how to scrub a whale with a tooth-brush. I am badly-tooled for the job.

 

Perhaps that means I’m in the wrong bloody job. Lots of other people have put aside their blue daze to form words about all this, about how we came to be here, about what might happen next, about what must be done to make changes from the inside. Those with political savvy who can take a clear line on it all having assimilated the stats and facts but I just feel a bit lost and like I have reached the outer limits of my noise. Like the year has extracted everything from me and I am empty, and might only automatically refill at the strike of midnight of 2017’s first day. It’s been a year. New home, new job, new writing, touring, new friends, a lot of work work work, change, unrest, exhaustion, a million questions about love and life, Brexit, Trump, this, whatever this is. Deeply deeply unsettled, the world a turbo carousel that I might get flung from. I know a lot of people feel the same. “My god, what an absolute bastard of a year.” I think I’ve just reached a sort of muteness. Like I can make hand gestures but can’t talk. But of course you’re not really permitted that when you write. You have to find some words.

 

And then Leonard Cohen died. And it was impossible not to see it as a sane man checking out of Earth before he could watch any more ugliness. It was hard not to think that if a poet who hardly shies from the dark matter of life feels like even he can’t bear any more, then we really are in trouble. That is over-dramatizing it I know. He was old and ill, dying wasn’t a choice, and if he’d had a choice I’m sure it would have been anything but leaving. He was a very much alive and still fruitful man. But the timing of it seemed so exquisitely pertinent. It could only have been a greater slight to the world if Cohen had actually been the American that people keep mistaking him for. Shunning your country by dying might have been a real statement, but the Canadians don’t really need a totemic gesture in the form of a dead legend to further express their separateness from the States. Cohen’s dying was just a chance of timing, one extraordinary man’s ordinary body reaching its inevitable end during a seismic world shift, nothing more, nothing less, but it socked itself further into the firescorch of our winded guts.

 

Leonard Cohen is one of the men who keeps my Dad alive for me. I’ve stowed bundled bits of my Dad into many things, though he did most of that himself just by living in the word and leaving traces. Most of the men who keep my dad alive are men of music. Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Cat Stevens, more. And Leonard Cohen.

 

He started as a thing of inherited dread for me. Mum can’t bear Cohen. “Whenever I hear bloody Leonard Cohen my blood runs cold.” For he was the music of choice when my Dad took to bed for days with a savagely demonstrated depression. He’d play it on loop , the low gravel grumbling around the house like a minor earthquake, the cracks from his bed splitting out to my helpless mother trying to reach a man who could not be reached. My little sister & I would’ve been there too, toddling about with our hands in jam & Cohen in our blithe unthinking ears. Cohen was the chosen voice of Dad’s darkness. The lyrics were a friend; the darkness didn’t judge him. I grew up thinking listening to Leonard Cohen was tantamount to climbing into a pond of voodoo treacle; like palapable actual visceral bad things could happen if you listened. But like all dark things he intrigued me. I somehow knew he was brilliant. I was drawn to him; he was marked by me as a young girl as a thing for ‘later’.

 

It all changed when we were introduced to an album of Cohen’s songs sung by Jennifer Warnes. Famous Blue Raincoat. I must have been about 14. And something in the new treatment of the songs, songs she’d heard before in the bad old times; the melody, the newness of fresh harmonies, the feminization of a deeply male voice, made my mother listen. And listen and listen again. It became one of our albums; a soundtrack to those years of our life together; a 3 girl choir singing at the tops of our voices while polishing the house on a Saturday morning. Maybe Mum washed herself clean in the singing. It is still one of my most exultant joyful albums. But I listen to Cohen too; I listen to the real stuff. I like the darkness, I am lured by the words. And he’s damn sexy. I’m not sure there’s many octagenarians who can make a shiver travel from your neck down down down to be lost in warmer parts with his voice; his last album You Want It Darker has a deeply erotic charge to it that transcends the finality; the work of a man who knows he’s not got long to say the rest of everything left in his expansive wonderful heart.

 

I suppose what I’m saying, though I’m not much good with the words or the clarity right now, is that times and songs of darkness can be filled with light and colour. We just need time and the determination to sing even when we are scared.

 

 

 

A pub table is a dangerous place to plan adventures. The devil’s in the glass, the mischief’s in the music, and the old chairs creak meddlesome suggestions to you like the bows of pirate ships or the hammocks of forest hideaways. There is a reveller’s riot spirit lurking there under the table like discarded gum, ready to stick itself to you with the leftover minxy scent of Juicy Fruit. Plus you’re drunk. That almost never helps. 

We were sat down at such a table the Sunday just gone – me, Paige, Dean, Liam, Matt and Michelle. A colourful gang with Sunday fun on their mind. Paige and Dean had just moved into their new flat so we were clinking to them and their new walls so they could blithely ignore the fact they now had a heckload of unpacking to do. To distract them we were attending to all the important stuff of life, like how long can you hold your eyes wide open without it really hurting? Can you put your arm around and up your back and touch your head? Can you do that really quick finger-clicking thing that makes a cool snapping sound? The big stuff. Like if Mensa did Twister.

 

Now. I think there is something intrinsically dangerous about sitting opposite people. Hear me out. When you are physically able to see each other, something happens. You incite mischief together. Something alchemical happens as your eyes spark off each other. Trouble ignites itself. You egg each other on. You get the giggles. You indulge in a precarious “what if”. Less stuff happens when you are all facing the same way. When was the last time you formed a human pyramid just to see if you could, at, say, the cinema, or queuing up in Primark to pay for a 50 pack of socks? No. That is because you were all facing the same way. Most of life’s big moments can all be tracked back to the moment when eyes locked together. Human eyes are the start of most of the trouble. Especially when they’re drunk. That almost never helps.

 

Then, around our table of weekend champions, as can happen, talk turned to the local airport. Not to bemoaning the noise or the flight paths, but to adventurous plottings. To that possibility of adventure residing in our very own town in the form of a magical portal to Other Places.

 

“Let’s all go to Another Place, just because we can.” said someone. “Alright”, said everyone else, not entirely in unison, but we can work on that for next time. We talked about Barcelona, Prague, Lanzarote, Reykjavik, we got so fired up at one point someone even mentioned Jersey. I made that person calm down. The central tenet of our adventure logistics was that when we went, and go we would, we would hike to the airport by foot, eschewing the use of cabs, because we could. Because it’s there. Because the airport is so flipping local you could almost wake up in the morning and clonk your head on the 07:23 Easyjet to Glasgow.

 

The trouble with carousing with your mates around a table in the pub, planning pan-global recreation eyeball to eyeball is that your phone’s sat there in front of you. There you are, all together, all excited, existing in the modern world, with real-life phones sat there right in front of you. Drunk.

 

And I can only presume that is the reason I woke up the next morning and saw in my inbox, to my surprise, a confirmation email telling me “Dear Sadie, Congratulations! You’re on your way to see Ludovico Einaudi at Waldbühne Berlin!”

 

I wonder whose eyes are to blame. Whose mischievous brain. Whose adventurer’s calling. Someone is at fault. And they were almost certainly drunk and that almost never helps.