I trust you are well. It pains me that I have not seen you since the summer before my unfortunate incarceration. I understand you might be shocked (you would not be the only one, and I include myself in this camp), but I have only now recovered sufficiently to send you this letter. It is all ill-fitting account, but this time has been like a dream – and I think perhaps that thus it began, through a hazy drowse one afternoon. Who knows how and where the veil might be pierced and what might be learned or uncovered. Alas, I must related to that it is the latter – an uncovering of terror. That is what our studies have led me to. I apologise for leaping ahead without you, but I hope my haste can serve as your warning.
You know that there are worlds beyond our own, all laying one atop and beside each other in countless sur-real strata. The portals between them are guarded in myth and darkness, jealous secrets and on the borders of madness. I will not tell you of the precise steps and formulas that were required to bring me and my sentience to that sur-reality we posited. Do not go further. It is not what you hope.
Well, I must begin here:
I stood on the deck of an immense stone ship, mineral from its hull to the apex of its grey and flexing sails. My journey to this implausible vessel had been long and filled with wonders. I’ll not tease you and lure you with their details, but let me assure you they pale in delight, are cast into deepest shade by the being I discovered upon the Creythenslc Ptyaq.
Named for the lost queen of Leanu-Abt, the lands-now-dust, this ship once culled the shores of Hallse, before drawing into harbour off the coast of Sperce. These were the names we had found – ah, you know all this; I’ll not tarry further, though I think you’ll see why I might wish to.
So yes. The sparkling light of Sperce had somehow concealed aspects of the stone ship until we were corkscrewing along between the seas of above and below. Then its hidden nature came clear. This being, this captain of the Creythenslc Ptya emerged as if from behind a coal-dark waterfall… It was a grim thing, of nails and scales; bulky and massive, oddly shapeless, like a rhinoceros squeezed into a huge, wet bony frame – made dire, like one of those prehistoric forebears of life on Earth. Whatever passed for its skin was in constant flow, reflecting bolts of white light and half-rainbows stripped of their colour, across the wizened faces of the crew. They stood rigid, lashed in place like hated marionette, enthralled. At their center the captain crooned to the sea that hung in the sky above the great stone ship, its sails angry, sharp tatters rising like pennants.
Aghast, I was compelled beyond my reason. Drawn on like a moth to the monochrome flickering lantern of this beast, this ancient sur-real being. I realised that I was seeing beyond the skin of our world. As I peered into the captain’s depths, I caught sight of something else glimpsing in turn from the other side. All I saw was its tiniest aspect – an eye perhaps – with each blink tearing open the thin fog that hides the sur-reality from our soggy mortal senses. Ensorcelled by a shape that I perceived but could never etch in the dimensions we have access to, I stumbled past the crew, falling, prey to a gale that tore my thoughts from my grasp.
I slipped, took one of those mummified puppets by the shoulder to arrest my descent, and awkwardly twisted till my face and his were but inches apart. Comical. Other than the raisin-aged skin, lips stitched shut with what I knew would be his hair, and the low drone now issuing from that gnarled leather.
I recoiled as it began to speak. Its eyes had been closed, but now their lids pulled open like the lips of a lover to reveal four rows of shining teeth. In the strobing luminance of that gash in the world, I saw a black tongue a-coil in each orbit-mouth, forming gasping nonsense sounds which grew clearer into choked words.
“Eat,” it grated out.
And then they all joined in – all the eye-mouths of the crew – an awful chorus of grinding susurration, “Eat yourself…”
In a lull of their horrid speech all I could hear was the clatter of their eye-teeth chattering, laughing at a joke I did not – could not – comprehend. I felt their words digging into my mind, claws through memories and meat and all that’s me, finding purchase. With distant fascination, I saw my right hand tugging free each finger from the leather glove on my left.
The shed mitten fell to the rocky deck. The growl of those horrid mouths brushed against my mind. I thrust my hand into my mouth and bit down hard and savage. The sur-creature flexed or writhed or did something that bent it out of our world for stuttered moments, and while I gnawed my fingers off their bone, it pulsed white – a sensation not a colour – which rinsed each cell of my being in a wash of acid.
Impossible to bear, I was obliterated. My last memory is of ripping the meat of my forearm with my teeth. Tasting my blood and being glad of it, sickly beaming with satisfaction.
I awoke screaming, soaked as if I’d swum across the pond. By the dim lamp light I glimpsed again the frozen sailors with their cruel mouths, whispering from soft red and long-lashed lips. A pulse, and it was fine again – the hangover of a nightmare.
Odd, I thought, my glove’s on the carpet.
My waking screams were as nothing compared to the sounds I made when I forced myself to confront the dream and regard my left arm – the shattered ruin of my wrist and dangling thumb. I’m told that when they broke down the door to my apartment and found me in my study, it took four men to restrain me from forcing the wreckage of my left arm into my mouth.
My apologies for saying this so plainly, but Teresa my dear, I implore you to understand that the books we spoke of those long summer months, they are not for us. There is something above us, always watching, always waiting. Waiting for people like us, those too curious and too arrogant, and they see us and take us. But if I can save you from this, if you are not in too deep (do you have the dreams?) and if you are not too fixated on the nature of the sur-reality (how does it feel in your lungs?), you must abandon this course. Please, let me be your object lesson.
Please commend me to your father and brother – they have always been most kind and I have treasured them as dear friends. I consider you all to be my family. I regret that we shall likely not see each other again.
I will go now to post this warning and entreaty to you. I wish you well, and in one last remonstrance to your intentions, I must tell you that I fear my eyesight is failing. It feels as if no matter how much I blink there is some hardening shape in there which I cannot dislodge.
Leicester Comedy Festival has arrived, crashing into 2024 will all the force of a rhino clutching a calendar shouting the time has come! It’s all cool stuff:
Unspeakable Acts
Wednesday 14 February, 7.30pm @ East Street Lanes
This is such a lot of fun to be in – we take a page from a screenplay and then with no further context, invent the story that must surely follow it. Very often half the cast has never seen the film, so there’s little risk of coming remotely close to retelling it accurately.
A cinematic folly! A real movie script reinvented as an absurd, unfaithful comedy spectacle. The improv show that starts with a real Hollywood screenplay before diverging wildly into a whole new story. The audience selects the film you most want to see mutilated and abandoned, and the team – who may never have even heard of it – will spin the tale. Absurd, unfaithful, funny and endlessly inventive, these are the stories we’ll never see on screen.
Book your tickets here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/missimp/t-dvxvmoa
This is what one of our shows has been like before… it’s Fight Club!
It’s A Trap! The Improvised Star Wars Show
Friday 16 February, 7.30pm @ Sue Townsend Theatre
It’s hard to figure out which of the shows I’m involved in is my favourite, and I suppose like children they’re all my favourite… But creating a new Star Wars story is pretty high up there. Quite silly, but very good fun.
Book now: https://comedy-festival.co.uk/events/its-a-trap-the-improvised-star-wars-show/
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
It’s A Trap! tells untold tales from the Star Wars universe, packed with Jedi, jokes and Jawas. A handful of audience suggestions creates a unique episode before your eyes – complementing and breaking the canon in unexpected and ingenious ways! Truly geeky, hilarious entertainment – this IS the show you’re looking for.
Nominated for Best Improv Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2022
This show is improvised and we do not know what content will be created, we aim for the show to be 12A but we cannot guarantee that, sometimes the force works in mysterious (and rude) ways.
This one was chaos, with a small team and a (friendly) twat in the audience:
Mockbusters & Play It Again Double-Bill
Wednesday 21 February, 6.00pm at East Street Lanes
I’ve always loved short-form improv – the fun and silly games as seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and a million shows. We’re doing them as if it were a gameshow – scoring, winners, losers, and all of that good stuff. We’re followed by the exquisite improvised lounge singing duo Play It Again (you may recognise both of them from It’s A Trap!), and the show is followed by another fun double-bill, Enter Player 2 & Date Night at 7.30pm, finishing off with the excellent The Vox Pops at 9pm.
You can see all three shows for the price of two! https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/missimp/lcf-3-for-2-show-offer-21st-feb/e-zmdlar
Or just the Mockbusters & Play It Again if you’re kinda busy: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/missimp/t-dvxvmoa
Play It Again are immortal lounge performers, cursed to provide light entertainment forever! Give them your sultry suggestions, they’ll give you beautiful ballads and mesmerising musical pieces. Laugh and sing along as these eternal entertainers play it again, and again, and again…
Mockbusters are here to entertain you with a fun, fast paced improv gameshow. Come along and gift them with your presence, suggestions and help with scoring. Prepare to be both entertained by their enthusiasm and frustrated by their lack of knowledge.
This one’s just me! This is my first full-length solo storytelling show, and I’d love it if you came to watch me spin a story out of nothing but the air and a handful of words provided by the audience. For an hour!
Get your ticket here: https://comedy-festival.co.uk/events/ersatz-natterjack-spontaneous-storytelling-man-machine/
High-energy wordsmithing, spinning one-off stories inspired by the audience
One man and two books create an impossible story. With the support of the audience’s randomly selected words and phrases, enjoy a brand-new storytelling adventure inspired by the audience’s chosen genre. High energy vocabulary spinning like a human AI ingesting words and spitting out something never heard before.
One of the nicest things that happened at the end of last year was being invited to run a LEGO talk and workshop at the wonderful Museum of Making in Derby. The aim was to accompany the LEGO Lakes exhibit and just do a bunch of nice brick-related things. Additionally, I’d have the chance to display my LEGO in a real art gallery too! My dad helped me take the stack of Really Useful Boxes over, and I popped back a week later to install the pieces properly. All we were waiting for was the gallery opening… and then came Storm Babet… washing out not just Derby but also significantly flooding the museum, which is literally by the river’s edge. Doom! But we’re back and now my LEGO is on show next to the massive scale model of part of the Lake District. Just awaiting a rescheduled workshop date, which is likely to be Friday 5 April. I hope so, because I’ve bought a lot of LEGO for folks to build with and take away with them. The more that goes, the less I have to sort…
Jon Tordoff has done a lovely piece of work with ordnance survey maps and the precise dimensions of a 1 x 1 LEGO plate to reconstruct the contour lanes of the valleys and lakes. It’s great to see in person, and I’ve enjoyed talking about LEGO with him too. My approach, and the builds I have on show are perhaps the direct opposite of his work – his is vast and to scale, mine are compact and heavily textured. I also play with a lot of gold, which is less common in the Lake District landscape. Anyway, the exhibits pair up really nicely, and it was a lot of fun to attend the museum’s reopening ceremony and have people say lovely things to me about my builds. Which, I suppose, are now art…? Hurray, I am a brick artist now and LEGO told me so on Instagram, which was very validating too. I’ve also been able to show my nieces around the museum, further validating the activities of mad uncle Nick.
It’s an amazing museum, chock-full of inspiration from Derby’s industrial heritage, including a huge amount of railway ephemera, a huge model trainset (which my dad used to go and see when he was a lad, decades ago), just tonnes of stuff which is fascinating to poke around at and learn about. Highly recommended.
Also they have LEGO. My LEGO… I have missed them, and their empty cabinets have become dangerously refilled. The LEGO Lakes exhibition runs until 21 April, and then I can have my babies back…
Temples of Worship for Alien Gods
Drowned Shrine of the Piranha Gods
Me and my LEGO
Temple of the Beasts
The Ebony & Ivory Towers
Chapel of Silence
Temple of Quiet Contemplation
Abyssal Gold Temple
I’ve written up some fancy descriptive text for the builds which gives a little context and insight (especially for those looking for more LEGO inspiration):
These pieces are explorations of colour, symmetry and texture, usually inspired by a handful of elements or striking colours. There is never a plan, the bricks lead the way until the structures are completed.
Ivory & Ebony Towers
Both of these began by playing with new gold LEGO elements – the twirly plant pieces – inspired by the ancient, undying alien gods of the Lovecraft Mythos. There was a real joy in finding unlikely connections between the gold elements available. Once they existed with their non-Euclidean geometry, they naturally needed to be housed and worshipped. I rarely use black or white LEGO, so it was a fun exercise to see what symmetrical shapes could be built, taking pleasure in using unusual pieces such as the LEGO Sports “Subbuteo-style” pieces in the midsections, the creepily fleshy Bionicle plant shapes, and weaving branches together into spindly, unlikely towers buttressed with spine shapes.
Drowned Shrine of the Piranha Gods
When LEGO released their Dots range they introduced quarter tiles in gorgeous coral pink, a colour I adored in LEGO Friends. This grew from a flat mosaic into shadowy construction to support the curves and whorls in coral pink and teal. The colours on black just pop beautifully, despite the structure being rather fragile. If you look closely you can find various coral pink sea creatures and even an upside-down rubber ring. The outer foliage all in rich yellow is made up of leaves, stars, minifigure heads and hairbrushes…
Chapel of Silence
I’ve accidentally destroyed this one more times than I can count – it began as two separate structures which now form the front and back of the chapel. Unfortunately, they’re different widths and that really inspired everything that followed to accommodate the shapes. I like making LEGO foliage look less stiff and started using minifgure rifles to create more natural branch angles.
Abyssal Gold Temple
New shapes and colours are always exciting, and I ended up with a lot of gold LEGO (again) – this started with the central mandala and attempting to make a circle. The gold coils always feel as if they’re moving slowly, ever creeping out of sight. Apart from the mandala, this is a fairly straightforward construction, expanding outwards with complementary colours and shapes. until I reached the pink-flowered trees of course… The new five-pointed grass stems suggested a dandelion clock structure, and perhaps that idea gave direction to the whole temple.
Temple of Quiet Contemplation
This was the first temple I made in this series. Of all LEGO’s colours, I love sand green almost as much as gold. For a while it was a very scarce colour and I used as much of it as I could. This one started with the gates – a tangled close-knit mass of gold shapes and bars. The rest of the structure is in a shape LEGO doesn’t quite want to be – the angles of the hexagon are too sharp and the bricks are under a lot of stress. This was my first opportunity to use all kinds of shapes such as saxophones, swords from Lord of the Rings and even the plastic stubs that join Ninjago weapons together.
Temple of the Beasts
Availability of parts is often the driving force and the most significant constraint for what I can build. The LEGO Monkie Kid range introduced bananas in gold as well as the pentagon shield shapes. I picked up quite a lot of them… Again, the gateway was the first section to be built, and the walls echo the curves and gaps between the bananas. The dark red wolf heads came out with the LEGO Vikings in 2005 and had sat in a box for fifteen years, sadly unused. They contrast so well with the gold that they defined the rest of the colour scheme. There’s something in the richness and strength of the tones which resonates for me.
Loads to do there, and the LEGO Lakes is on until 21 April. I’m very grateful to the Derby Museums’ Event Programmer, Dan Webber, for the wonderful opportunity to feel great about my daft hobby.
Although this is largely about going up to the Fringe this year, there’s a typically self-indulgent splooge of mithering first which you may wish to skip straight to the weekend or indeed just to the shows😊… though the rest of it is also quite long since I have awful autobiographical memory and simply won’t remember this in a month’s time. Also, I’m dreadful at remembering to take photos, so what you see is what you get…
What the Fuck Are Feelings Anyway
I have been neglecting my self-reflection type diary entries for a while now. It’s a side effect of feeling basically fine – why bother reflecting on being OK?! It is entirely backwards, yet that’s kind of the way our minds work, or at least mine does. This August I hit 45, which is in no way a milestone but feels like a BIG number, especially when combined with a genuinely significant 25 years spent with my other half (better, more respected half etc). Not that they add up meaningfully to 70, but a quarter century spent with someone else without killing them, and in fact being rather fond of them is something of an achievement; certainly my parents have yet to manage such a dramatic volume of days in relationships, and they are of course the providers of my primary datasets for such comparisons, however relatively meaningless.
It’s been a very busy couple of months – returning to sleeping tablets, increasing volumes of work, lots of improv shows (hurray for It’s A Trap! The Improvised Star Wars Show on mini tour this year: Leicester, Brighton, Bath, Nottingham Playhouse – the last a particular delight, for I am rarely given the role of Darth Sindy and asked to invade Barbie World [along with my Sith pal Darth Sylvanian Families we had a fine old time]!) and a little birthday party. I am very bad at looking forwards to things. I just… don’t. There are events and stuff which I know I will enjoy at the time, but I don’t get a thrill of anticipation other than in seeing people I love. They can be hard afterwards, especially after the buzz of being on stage as all that excitement dissipates into fading memories and the relentless drive on time dragging me forward to whatever the next thing is.
However, I committed a little while ago to visiting the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year with Matt McGuinness from our We Are What We Overcome podcast, and the proposed dates lined up with a couple of other significant things like my 45th birthday, our 25th anniversary two days before (which was also the first time I went to the Fringe, with our Nottingham University New Theatre show The Robin Hood Revue). So – worthwhile, and all good things to remember and celebrate, yet still so fucking hard to look forward to. I was doing OK, with a short week of work to cram in a bunch of stuff, and it all fell sideways quite abruptly. On the last day of each month, my work team assemble to play board and card games for a few hours. We all work at home, I have never once missed being in an office, and this is a fun way for us to reconnect, socialise and remember that we actually do like other people and find each other amusing. It was good! And yet afterwards, or by the next day at least I could feel myself falling sideways into the kind of grim despairing hollowness that I’ve been blissfully free of for months. It’s hard to characterise, but it’s a total emptiness where emotions aren’t even relevant and all I want is to cease to exist. Ideally, to never have existed, to just blink out and leave no trace behind. It’s not pleasant, and in those moments – if I can bring myself to act at all – I just want to feel something: laughter, warmth, pain – they’re all equally suitable. It’s a high risk time for self-harm, because pushing a needle all the way through my hand will feel just as intense and awakening as being happy, and is waaaay easier to achieve. I mean, I have needles, but happiness is caused by other things and people, and somehow they are just too far away. Having both a significant amount of work to get through and desiring to not be utterly miserable and hateful during a few days away over significant anniversaries I just couldn’t afford to be so wrecked, disinterested and empty. I chose the somewhat unorthodox option of a psilocybin microdose. As ever, it’s virtually impossible to separate out the factors that influence my mental health, but since I rarely experience a crash that lasts only a single day, I think it did pull me back up the slope and I could say goodbye to Shadow Me for a little while.
I feel as I have two proper states: engaged, focused and interested in whatever I’m doing (whether it’s work, talking, improv, reading, watching a film, just being) and the hollow absence of all of those things. I remain unconvinced that I experience proper emotions of happiness, sadness and the rest – they feel as if they’re just aspects of engagement, the appropriate hormonal and chemical responses to whatever it is that I’m engaged in. Their absence is just a side effect of disengagement and disinterest in everything. That’s the time for what I think of as Shadow Me, which is me without love and interest and attention to the world. I’m rarely bored, and Shadow Me is not a state of boredom or proper disinterest. It’s not like I’m suddenly bored by being alive, but it no longer matters and has no value – worse, my sheer existence only devalues everyone else’s and it’s like I’m both near and am a black hole, sucking the life out of everything and collapsing in on myself, my material self is lost.
But, after a fucking grim day and a half, Shadow Me was banished and I was sort of ready to at last give a fragment of thought to a fairly expensive holiday weekend – we should probably do something in it…
Edinburgh Fringe 2023
Last year I went up for podcast purposes, but I was on my own and as it turned out not really ready to do things on my own; the crowds filled me with alienation and rage and I although I got some good things done really I should not have gone. This year Marilyn and I went up together. Ostensibly this was to do a bunch of mental health events with We Are What We Overcome (WAWWO), notably joining the Blue Balls group for a swim in the sea. But it was a good opportunity for a little holiday since twenty-five years ago M and I became inseparable while rehearsing for a show at the Fringe, directed, co-written and performed by us and a host of brilliant people. I met a girl and then immediately moved in with her… For some, that might not have gone well.
Friday 4 August
I’m pretty sure the train journey is getting shorter – a mere four and a half hours from Beeston to Edinburgh and forty-five minutes of that is a change between the two Newark train stations. Smooth, easy and full of reading. Finished Bullet Train, which is fun, but slightly less fun than the film version and continued grinding through The Rise and Reign of the Mammals which continues to be excellent, but still slow-going.
This time our digs were out in Holyrood (a million miles closer than last year’s trudge) in student flats. Nice enough being on Abbeyhill, but the flat was absolutely roasting. Sure, you can open a window but then the traffic and railway are deafening. We nicked a big air con unit from a corridor, but that was as loud as the traffic… Comfortable enough for a couple of days but it made me think of both the Bibby Stockholm prison barge and how awful and oppressive it would be to live there for a whole year. Oh, and no kettle in the communal kitchen: what the actual fuck? Who wants to superheat a mug in a microwave to get a cup of tea? Truly baffling.
We ditched our bags and quick-timed it up through a series of residential estates to see the utterly sublime Shamilton by Baby Wants Candy in Studio One @ Assembly George Square Studios. Thank goodness no Fringe show (other than Ben’s) ever starts on time. We adore Baby Wants Candy – we shared a venue with them waaaay back in 1998 when they came to the Fringe for the first time while we were doing The Robin Hood Revue and we saw their show many times. As such, they hold a very special place in our hearts. This is an utterly new cast, doing their fun second show, a parody of the hiphop musical Hamilton. I have not seen Hamilton, but I’m at least aware of most of the songs and the story. The team wanted a historical character and they received “Mickey Mouse”. It was typically brilliant and hilarious, filled with outrageous musical numbers and meticulously organised improvised chaos. I really admire the amount of fun they evidently have on stage and I died with laughter throughout. Afterwards we had a brief chat with Chris Grace (who we’ve been enjoying in Superstore and most recently Stumptown), just to say how much we loved the show and to mention we’d shared a venue with BwC years ago. All very nice, what a lovely and hilarious man.
After that we met up with Matt and Neil (of WAWWO) and the poet and improviser Ben Macpherson (hi, Ben) at Bar Fifty which was handy for discovering that it was the same venue that our mates Stags and Josie were using for Spontadeity, and bumped into Benny Shakes and Mark Nicholas, both funny and splendid people. This provided both mostly-OK food, a nice break and good nonsense before heading off to catch Showstopper! The Improvised Musical at the Pleasance Grand. They’ve been around for years and I’ve never gotten around to seeing their show, even though I know a couple of folks in the cast. It’s an impressive and slickly created musical featuring fantastic singers, but for me it’s perhaps too slick and shiny and somehow lacks a component of joy and surprise that I deeply relish in improvised performances. A rightfully lauded and award-winning show for sure, but it’s not for me.
Them
Us
Thence to further drinks with Benny & co in the Pleasance Courtyard where we struggled to locate straws and I remembered how shit drinks out of plastic glasses are. Whiskey loses a lot. But that was all rather wonderful and fun. We left, promising to catch Benny’s show at ten thirty the next morning, and thus to meet up with the WAWWO boys for breakfast and figuring out how to record a podcast while swimming the next day.
Saturday 5 August
Saturday was my birthday, and I’d brought up a heap of birthday cards to open (which I did when we returned from the middle of town) and feel like it was my birthday, along with a couple of tiny boxes from Marilyn – I suspected necklaces and I was not wrong! I’m rarely away on my birthday since I like not having to do anything (and with an August birthday I never had school and have pointedly refused to ever work on 5 August), so the whole thing was a little discombobulating. I am a creature of routine to a great extent and am easily thrown off.
So – nine-fifteen to meet up and inhale coffee and bacon at Black Medicine Coffee Co, chatter and make some plans. Marilyn sensibly remained a-bed. I was delighted to discover that Benny had given us the wrong time and was actually a full hour later. I could have enjoyed one more hour of sauna sleep on my birthday… It did allow us time to bumble around a few vintage junk shops and more importantly get to Armchair Books where I was thrilled to find a copy of Karel Čapek’s War With The Newts.
After that, I was glad we made it to Benny’s show because Blue Badge Bunch: ReRamped is a wonderful show, putting people and kids in particular in the shoes of different disabilities through a series of daft-seeming challenges like drawing with your feet and buttering bread while being jabbed with big foam fingers. Benny Shakes is upfront about the challenges of cerebral palsy and his guests span disabilities from neurodivergence to profound physical impairment. It’s delightful, silly, funny and is a joyous fountain of empathy. The kids in the audience loved it even more than their parents.
Hustle hustle from there to meet up with Marilyn at McEwan Hall for Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel. I really never have gained any sense of where anything is in Edinburgh – I’m always going from one place to another for a specific reason, at speed, navigating the ghastly thronging crowds and it makes no coherent picture in my head. That can be quite stressful. Still. This was a show I’ve been meaning to see for ages, not least because one of its stars is Charlotte Gittins who we were at Uni of Nottingham New Theatre with, approximately a million years ago. The excellent title of Elizabeth Benn(d)et Like Beckham led to an amazing show about football and freedom and ridiculousness. I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to catch the show because it’s ace. It’s exactly the kind of improv I enjoy which doesn’t take itself too seriously (though never at the expense of breaking the show) in which the performers are confident in messing about with each other and all plainly having the very best fun (and Charlotte was great!). They also had pin badges on the merch table, so we were both thrilled.
Thence to proper birthday activities: the LEGO Store. An immensely happy hour of selecting bricks and minifigures and looking at gorgeous LEGO sets. The most super-adult thing I do. I took two reusable (and thus discounted) pick-a-brick pots up with me and filled em both with lovely gold and useful things while Marilyn assembled a bevy of terrifying horse-headed minifigures.
Alex Leam had been kind enough to add Matt and I to the first in the run of Awkward Question Time. Alas I am no comedian and severely lack a functioning autobiographical memory, so my tales of mere arson and criminality couldn’t compete with terrible dates and kidnapping cats while on acid. Fun to be there and play, especially to a full house! I was also unable to escape Matt encouraging the room to sing me a happy birthday at the end. Bastard/thank you.
I’d been hoping to gather a few friends for a birthday meal but I’d been equivocating about it – where to go, who might be free, but when, and why when they’re all so busy! – which are all symptoms of the malaise I’d been feeling at the beginning of the week. However, with a little gentle coercion I gathered a sampling of friends for a pint at The Mitre on the Royal Mile followed by a burger at Byron Burger on the corner. It was really nice and exactly what I wanted and needed. Alas, I did realise afterwards that I’d missed a bunch of people out! Never mind, I’m most grateful for having a proper mini-celebration of my 45th birthday. That followed by a quick Glenturret at The Waverley (around yet another corner).
And yet the evening was somehow still not over because we needed to catch our friend James’ show Shakespeare Up Late: A Right Royal Visit. I saw James in their other show Shakespeare for Breakfast last year which netted them a deserved award, and was entirely prepared for the ensuing chaos. They shredded Macbeth nicely, making it a contemporary satire with much swearing, joking and silliness. It’s really good fun, and feels like what Shakespeare plays might have felt like originally, before we became obsessed with elevating the wordplay. Loved it. We then drank and chatted for hours in the bar downstairs, which felt like the perfect end to a birthday.
Sunday 6 August
Staying up late on your birthday is great until you have to sleep in a room that slowly steams you and then rise at eight. In theory, this was to be the primary reason for our visit: recording an episode of the podcast while joining in with Edinburgh Blue Balls’ Sunday Service Porty Dip (if you really wanna know I’m fifth from the right, on the front row below). It’s a swim in the sea at Portobello organised as part of the Joshua Nolan Foundation which is a mental health charity in Edinburgh. The weekly dips in the sea are just one of their regular events, this one being for men specifically. Portobello is fucking miles away and we got there far too early through the magic of taxis. I’d been telling Matt he was going to die from the cold for a while now, and had created quite a monster in my own mind too, so was a little trepidatious. Matt, Neil and I assembled on the beach and waited… well, I wandered off to poke through the general sandy beach detritus (shells, seaweed and weird isopods, oh my!) and fawn over the many delightful dogs enjoying the morning. Folks began to arrive and I shook myself out of my natural aversion to chatting with strangers and got on with it. The whole thing is rather lovely – an assemblage of men of all shapes, ages and backgrounds (I reckon I was about in the middle of the age range). There were around forty of us, and you just get changed right there on the beach, pose for a picture (if you want) and then go into the sea together! It was great, and the water was so much warmer than I’d anticipated, so I felt right at home within minutes and happily swam about, though not wanting to put my face in the water – infamously the water around the UK is rather fucked, due to our government of utter wankers and dissolute water services. Swimming about, chatting to strange near-naked men about things and stuff for around twenty minutes was just lovely. The water was a thousand times colder (relatively, adjust for hyperbole) when I was swimming at Scarborough in late October), so the warm up and shivering phase was violent but not too badly extended. I stayed pretty chilly for a few hours and was grateful that I’d packed an extra long-sleeve thermal t-shirt and hoodie instead of my usual shorts and light shirt. They serve excellent coffee and sausage rolls at the Little Green Van just a few feet down the beach, which revives the whole group every week. We finished off our podcast and hurried into a taxi, as I was about to be late for the next show…
…and so very nearly was. This was Marilyn’s high-priority pick: Mog the Forgetful Cat. I’m aware of the children’s books by Judith Kerr, but I don’t recall them featuring heavily when I was little. This is superlative theatre for children: immaculate choreography, lovely songs, sincere, funny and engaging performances throughout, with a very clever and pleasing set. All the audience interaction is done brilliantly and just looking around and seeing even the children who began the show a little frightened become utterly enthralled within minutes was extraordinary. The show takes us through four seasons in the misadventures of Mog and her human family, with lots of emotional moments for the small cast who play multiple roles, and very fun costume and staging. I don’t even know Mog, and am a childless adult, but this is one of the best things I’ve seen this year. It’s not a show that would have leapt out at me, other than from their ubiquitous advertising (but then I believe we have a moral duty to ignore marketing if we can, and I didn’t even open the Fringe guide…) but I’m very glad Marilyn chose it. She has good taste in these things.
From there to the LEGO Store – no, I was not yet finished with bricks! Moar bricks and figs acquired. That was basically on the way back to the flat so I could wash the scum of our beleaguered and polluted seas off my skin and put some proper (fewer) clothes on. It’s a nice walk back past the US Consulate and we had a lovely view over the city and the graveyards as we headed towards Arthur’s Seat. Not too close, but I forgot to mention that the one really good thing about the flat was it’s view of Arthur’s Seat. Splendid. It was wonderful to scrape the filth off and cast a fine layer of sand over every surface before returning to shows. Marilyn at this point presented me with possibly my best birthday cake yet (excepting of course the brutally violent Jaws cake that I apparently wanted when I was eight or nine – I don’t know…), a Tunnock’s Tea Cake impaled by a candle. Precisely the required picker-upper!
The view from our flat
We found this.
Why, it’s Edinburgh…
LEGO!
Then Marilyn and I headed off for different things, she to TheRailway Children, and me to The Full Irish. A bunch of great things about this show: this instance was at 16:10, not 11:00, I was down to perform, and it’s an all-Irish performers show and I am not Irish (I mean, arguably a bit from great-grandparents on both sides being Irish, probably), oh – and it was at Bannerman’s Bar on Cowgate. We spent a fair amount of time in there back in 1998, just drinking and hanging out after our show. Nice to be back! I’m sure I’m misremembering, but I don’t recall it being a rock venue, just a cool pub set in cool caverns. The gig itself was in one of the curious bunkers behind the bar (presumably a railway bridge remnant or something), with the affable Chris O Neill hosting and wrangling the very non-Irish bill. I think only he and one other act were actually from Ireland at all. I freaked em out early on with Captain Pigheart’s Mermaid Adventure which may not have been what anyone was expecting from a stand-up comedy show. It went down pretty well though, and everyone loves shouting “gaargh” regularly. Matt delivered the portion of his live show We Are What We Overcome that deals directly with preparing to kill yourself (cheery!) and it went down very well. It was a fun little gig and nice to get a bunch of laughs in a good but traditional stand-up comedy line-up.
Somehow there was yet more day to come though. I strolled lazily to the Pleasance Courtyard in lots of time but became suddenly confused by the whole courtyard with multiple venues within and around basically called the same thing. It didn’t matter that I’d already been to the actual Venue 33, or next door twice already, there’s just something about how the addresses get listed that made me feel utterly lost for a moment. Like a madman I asked for assistance and plainly seemed like a lunatic, unable to grasp the idea of names. Le sigh. Anyway, found it and Marilyn just barely in time for NewsRevue. I hadn’t really heard of it, but then the live comedy realm doesn’t register much as it perhaps should. I didn’t enjoy it much, though at least some of the audience seemed to be very into it. It’s a satirical current affairs sketch show, or it usually is. Apparently at the Fringe they pretty much do the best bits of the last year, so about half of it felt weirdly irrelevant and the rest wasn’t very good. The performers were certainly digging in, with a couple of good singers, and some nicely choreographed dance numbers. But it felt much more like how you’d portray a mid-1990s university topical sketch show in a mid-1990s university topical sketch show. I found it predictable and kinda hackneyed, some of it just mean-spirited rather than funny, with absolute death silence from the audience for too much of it, especially the radio-style announcement gags. Apparently they’re a big deal and it’s a very well-known show, but I was dozing off, possibly from the early swim. Oh, and when the clumsy horse-human creature from the row in front made a bruisingly dumb effort to climb out of her seat and onto our row.
Oh my god, this was already more than just one day of stuff, especially after a really late night that I woke from often and early, so naturally we headed back off around the corner to join the cast of Spontadeity: Whomst Let the Gods Out?! I get a bit jittery at the prospect of guesting in other people’s stuff – I don’t seek it out but I think about it sometimes – it feels different to doing a pirate story in the middle of a poetry or stand-up thing, makes me anxious and I have not really explored why… maybe I just don’t wanna fuck someone’s show up. But I do like playing with people who I know well, and it was really nice to be asked, so Marilyn and I both performed with our good pals Josie and Stags, who not only run the lovely Chewy Improv in Derby but are also part of the MissImp exec team. I can’t offer any form of useful review, but we had an absolute blast doing vaguely Grecian mythology scenes. I was forced to hold many marshmallows in my gob for making the audience laugh and Marilyn did an absolutely killer scene in the agora explaining who her granddaughter’s real parents were. It’s a fun and audience-engaging shortform improv show on the theme of gods and mythology – let’s make some more! So yeah, that was great and one of my most fun things of the Fringe.
In recognition that it was not just my birthday but also our anniversary we revisited a spot that still felt resonant for us. Twenty-five years of not murdering each other (so many wasted opportunities)! We never really dated, just going from nothing to something while sharing the same room from day four (or something close to that), but while at the Fringe in 1998 we did have a sort-of date meal out at Ciao Roma, an Italian restaurant just around the corner from the venue we shared with them Baby Wants Candy folks – what is now Greenside on Infirmary Street. In the 45 minute window between shows we visited them both, one for a photo and the other for perfect pizza and a photo. I don’t remember the restaurant itself from 1998 but I do remember how I felt, and how it felt to be there, and it felt that way again. A swift pizza was had, and the nice waiter entreated to take a photo despite their incredible busyness.
The venue from 1998
Us back at Ciao Roma
Thence to Bubble Show for Adults Only 2. I blame Laurie. Gotta see some random stuff right? Well, this was ours. I like bubbles and blowing bubbles, but not as much as these two. Not entirely easy to characterise… this begins as a series of pretty snappy scifi pastiches with wide grins, with rather fit looking young folks (insanely toned good-looking humans) blowing inventive bubbles from a range of objects to them stripped down to very skimpy underwear exhorting a glowing young guy from the front row to snort a line vape-filled bubbles from the very inner reaches of her thigh. All set to a banging 90s techno soundtrack with excellent sampling. They had a bit of a rough time getting some of the bubble tricks to work, but they can both vamp the fuck out of burlesque and it didn’t seem to get them down. There is much grinding, albeit while soaked in washing up liquid, costume changes, impressive contortion, dancing and an excellent and clever shadow puppet segment. Wild, and so very much not for everyone – avoid the front row if you don’t want a possibly dangerous woman to pounce on you with almost zero notice. Some remarkable burlesque clowning in such a chaotic and nuts show. This is absolutely not for everyone, but I was delighted by their utterly unapologetic glee in performing. We who saw it were very divided, but everyone loves bubbles, right? After that grabbed a couple of drinks at Underbelly with noted poet, Ben Macpherson.
Monday 7 August
Some sleep, check out of the tropical hotel. The two kilos of LEGO in my rucksack was worth lugging through town. We knew we’d only have time for one show before hopping on a one o’clock train – neither of us had any desire to fight across town before sitting down for four hours – only one choice: Serious Nonsense (for Terribly Grown-Up People). Before that we sought out some fudge for our excellent neighbours who will have been utterly unrewarded with good cat encounters while caring for our beasts (as it turns out they didn’t see Geiger at all, and Pixie just hissed at them from the top of the stairs), so they more than earned the incredibly weighty box of fudge from Fudge Kitchen. Then we had a quick amble around the Museum of Childhood on the Royal Mile which is a memory journey for jaded adults and fans of terrifying dolls. I was especially pleased to see a BBC Micro Computer and a random scattering of things that we all had as kids, though devastated (strongly put) that we couldn’t get to the Dolls and Action Figures gallery, but then we might never have left.
Then to our final show with Ben. It’s an hour of smart and funny, cleverly-rhymed and vocabulary-busting poetry aimed at children but entirely ready for adults. Good book too, you should buy one, I’ve bought at least two so far: Kofi. It’s a lovely show and we were pleased to see a good turnout of kids and adults. From there we finally bumped into more people we knew and immediately departed. We had just enough time to buy some important tat like a three-legged haggis metal pun badge, and acquire coffee at the Edinburgh Press Club (exquisite espresso cortado with much entertainment for an unfortunate soul having their first day of work) before fleeing the city.
In Conclusion
What a nice long weekend away! The relative importance of revisiting the Fringe in alignment with our 25th anniversary took on greater and greater significance in my head, and while that all feels like a terribly long time ago, I guess it also is not. Memories lie in places as much as people, so this was a good idea. Birthday fun was fun, but I definitely prefer a super-lazy birthday at home. It would have been less good without such lovely people. I’m very grateful to Matt and Marilyn for booking almost all these events in, plainly I was in too great a shamble state to properly conceive of these few days before we actually got to them – beyond the basics of booking accommodation and travel, at least. I do fear over-commitment because I know it really messes me up, but the alternative of under-arranging things isn’t great either. In the end this was probably the perfect mix of shows to see without too much running between them, and plenty of time chatting with friends. It was fun to be able to perform at the Fringe without putting any hard work in too, so thanks all!
A brilliantly witty and wild improvised musical parody of Hamilton, incredibly funny and essential viewing.
Baby Wants Candy’s hip-hop Hamilton homage returns! Following sold-out runs in Chicago, NYC and LA. We improvise an epic musical based on historical figures/celebrities you choose (Genghis Khan, Paul Hollywood, Kim Kardashian… anyone!). Just like Hamilton but (ahem) better! Expect the same level of hip-hop, storytelling, stunning choreography and powerhouse singing… except made up on the spot. ‘An absolute extravaganza, absolute pinnacle of improv. They freestyle lyrics that rival Lin-Manuel himself. Tremendously impressive, side-splittingly funny to the point oxygen becomes a luxury. Shamilton astounded me’ *****(Entertainment-Now.com). It’s the show Lin-Manuel calls, ‘Cease and Desist!’
The Olivier Award-winning West End hit is back! Every night is opening night for the hottest new musical in town! There’s just one problem, the writer hasn’t penned a note and needs your help! A hilarious musical comedy made up on the spot using audience suggestions, this multi award-winning must see show is back at Edinburgh Festival for a 14th year. A Fringe favourite, your Edinburgh experience is incomplete without it! ‘The funniest improv on the Fringe’ *****(BroadwayBaby.com). ‘Achingly funny…worth seeing again and again’ *****(Time Out). ‘Had me weeping with laughter’ *****(Mail On Sunday).
Disability, empathy and fun wrapped in a wonderful gameshow for children.
The disability Taskmaster! A hilarious, interactive game show where each game represents a different disability, giving kids and grown-ups the chance to learn about autism and cerebral palsy among others. With host Benny Shakes and a panel of comedians, battling it out to come up trumps in a show where disadvantage is an advantage! Shortlisted for the Neurodiverse Representation Award 2022. ‘Cleverly thought out and engagingly interactive’ **** (ThreeWeeks). ‘Lots of fun’ ***** (MixUpTheatre.com). ‘Extremely inclusive’ ***** (AYoungishPerspective.co.uk).
Loved this longform improv show of manners and madness, everyone is having a fantastic time on stage.
The smash-hit West End comedy, as heard on BBC Radio 4, celebrates its 10th glorious year at the Fringe! The all-star cast (featuring Rachel Parris, Graham Dickson, Cariad Lloyd and more) improvise a hilarious new Jane Austen novel every show, inspired entirely by a title from the audience. Performed in period costume with live musical accompaniment – it’s a riotous, razor-sharp show where swooning is guaranteed. ‘Hilariously bold, wickedly funny’ ***** (Times). ‘One of the most enjoyable 60 minutes on the Fringe’ **** (Guardian).
Awkward Question Time
Venue 605, PBH’s Free Fringe @ Burrito ‘n’ Shake, 18:15, August 8-13, 15-20, 22-27
The intimate inner lives of comedians grilled for your amusement!
The hit streaming show and podcast are live for the first time in Edinburgh. Alex Leam takes a panel of comedians and performers from across the Fringe and asks them an hour of awkward and stupid questions. What could possibly go wrong? (The live shows will never be broadcast, what happens live stays live!)
Shakespearean chaos and satire as the bard would have wanted it.
All-new Shakespearian shenanigans from the company behind Fringe favourite Shakespeare for Breakfast. In this topical tragi-comedy Macbeth meets Ubu, as Mrs Macbeth, already first minister of Scotland, sets her sights on a newly crowned royal visitor. Will fair be foul or foul fair? Politics and parody meet puns and pandemonium in this satirical and sweary re-telling. A raucous comedy for everyone from Shakespearian novices to seasoned thespians. ‘Wonderfully chaotic’ (FringeReview.co.uk).
Mog the Forgetful Cat
Venue 302 Underbelly, Bristow Square McEwan Hall, 11:30, till 27 August
The most perfect children’s theatrical experience. Lovely, touching and beautifully performed.
Judith Kerr’s Mog the Forgetful Cat, adapted for the stage by The Wardrobe Ensemble. A Wardrobe Ensemble, Old Vic, and Royal & Derngate Northampton co-production. Mog is a very forgetful cat. She forgets that she has a cat flap, she forgets that she’s already eaten her supper, and she forgets that cats don’t have eggs for breakfast every day. Bother that cat! But Mog’s forgetfulness can come in handy… ‘A miaow-vellous musical treat’ **** (Guardian).
The Full Irish
Venue 158, PBH’s Free Fringe @ Whistlebinkies (main room), 11:00, till August 27
Random stand-up action with whoever Chris has found to fill the bill!
The Full Irish will be served for the 10th year with lots of laughter from Irish acts from around the world. Chris O Neill curates the funny at an absurdly early hour for comedians. Come along for the perfect start to you day. A different show every day. People come back.
NewsRevue
Venue 33 Pleasance Courtyard – The Grand, 17:30, till August 27
Meh, any sketch show will do.
We dedicate this year’s show to the late, great, founder of NewsRevue, Professor Michael Hodd, who launched this multi award-winning, Guinness World Record-breaking institution 43 years ago. Emma Taylor, its producer since 2001, says ‘it is fitting that Mike’s enduring legacy will make its debut in the iconic Pleasance Grand.’ Expect 100% brand-new material, much of it written by the preposterously talented cast and creative team. From King Charles to Keir Starmer, Prince Harry to Putin, Sunak to Strikes and Sleaze, no stone will be left unturned. NewsRevue provides ‘license to dissent en masse’ ***** (BroadwayBaby.com).
A super-fun shortform improv show, perfect for newcomers who may not yet believe improv is unscripted.
An improvised comedy extravaganza of tales of gods and monsters, heroines and heroes, mundane and mythological beings all made up on the spot each day from audience suggestions. Ever wondered what Zeus liked to eat for breakfast or how peanut butter was born?! You just might find out the answers to these mythological questions as well as unfold some rip-roaring epic tales with the help of Stägs Woodward, Josie Ettrick-Hogg and their fabulous guest improvisers. Come witness the birth of legends!
Filth! But clean because bubbles! Funny, often clever with impressive bubble powers and powerful unapologetic performers.
New Show! Weekly Award Best Circus 2023 Fringe World, As seen in La Soiree, Australia’s Got Talent and iUmor. Continuing the phenomenal bubble artistry that audiences have come to expect, this brand-new show takes the beauty of body bubbling to another level. See beautiful bubbles, naughty bubbles, very phallic bubbles, bubbles as pasties, smoke bubbles, swirling torrents of bubbles that do things that you never dreamed of. A sequel to the Fringe cult hit that has sold out across the globe for eight years. If you haven’t adult bubbled, you have not Fringed.
Superlative verse for children and adults, filled with silliness, laughter and child-friendly horror.
Funny, horrible and a little bit naughty, this poetry show is perfect for children no matter how old. Meet the chaotic kids, gruesome grown-ups and bizarre beasts that fill the imagination of Ben Macpherson (BBC Radio 4 Extra) and his debut poetry collection. Expect energetic rhymes, masterful storytelling and laugh-out-loud moments from this verbal tour de force. If you like Roald Dahl, David Walliams or Spike Milligan you are going to love this whirlwind of words. ‘Fantastic’ (Michael Rosen). Part of the PBH’s Free Fringe.
So, a full week back on the old sleeping tablets and frankly, it’s great. I’ve had a couple of nights where I haven’t fallen asleep immediately (or at least within my half hour ideal), but that’s mostly been a result of the aggravation of Britain’s brief heat wave. I have dug out my enormous-dog-sized cooling mat which I leave in the fridge all day then lay it on the bed and pillow for ten minutes before I subject myself to the bodily shock of lying on top of the icy layer. I reckon that cold shock itself does something good for dozing off. I am slowly getting used to the weird amitriptyline hangover – that peculiar lethargy and fuzziness first thing in the morning which makes it oh so easy to fall back to sleep. Easy enough that I’ve had to set a second alarm forty-five minutes later to catch me. That’s as disruptive as not sleeping for getting up and getting along with stuff first thing in the morning, but I believe I’m getting there. I did manage to scribble a short story on Monday morning, but I haven’t felt any need to maintain this mental health track. Dude, I’m sleeping again and that feels very good indeed. And with sleep restored that’s reduced any other mental quibblings to ignorable background noise (absolutely the recommended approach for internal feelings…)
Despite my absolute loathing of being too warm, I’ve been enjoying this week’s sunshine. I mean, I’ve had the window open all day for weeks anyway, but now I definitely need to apply sunblock just to sit at my desk. I’m rather looking forward to being in the coldest room of an old Victorian house this weekend for my dad’s 70th. Even though my old bedroom has been redecorated multiple times and lost all the trappings of myself at least a decade ago (alright, so the last hundred or so books only came out earlier this year!), it has continued to feel like a peaceful haven. It is of course the old servant quarters, and is alarmingly and unexpectedly two steps down from the rest of the first floor. It’s only one of the odd things I’ve always liked about it. When I was much younger there was a fire escape immediately outside the window, which led to what was once the separate flat on the second floor. With a big sash window it was the easiest thing in the world to hop out of it in the early hours of the morning. That’s how I spent many of my teenage insomniac nights, just going out for a smoke and wandering the streets at three in the morning. The fire escape was ironically an utter death trap, but I rather miss it. That, and the endless (sometimes poorly) fitted cupboards, wardrobe and sink. Love a bedroom with a sink in it. My bedroom felt like a self-contained unit, having its own exit and source of water, filled with hidey-holes and eventually an awesome amount of junk – much of it on the walls. For a few happy years I even had a beautiful little cat who lived in there with me, lovely Holly. The fire escape was good for her too, with a cat flap cut into the glass so she could hop in and out. I have so few continuous memories from those years, but I still miss her terribly.
I remember a lot of essay writing, lounging on a big Garfield cushion (possibly acquired from Castle Donington car boot sale), painting miniatures (badly) and reading. Lots of reading. It’s not a space that really has other people in it, not in my memories at least. Strange that. Well, some more from sixth form I guess, but it feels patchy before that. Peaceful loneliness for a big chunk of my teenage years, perhaps. Though now that I’m paying attention and focusing on it, I reckon I can detect or recreate sleepovers with a knackered fold-up bed. Dammit – yeah. Trying to go to sleep after watching An American Werewolf in London, terrified that my sleeping over mate would turn into a werewolf as I slept. Such a good transformation sequence! We definitely watched that one too young, but if I recall correctly the VHS tape came along with a bunch of Michael Moorcock books from a mail-order service. Even younger, I remember curling up with my brother and sister in a tight little nest as we tried to process what our parents getting divorced meant for us. And my brother hiding in the airing cupboard one Christmas Eve so he could catch Santa/dad in the act of filling a stocking. He fell asleep; I totally forgot he was there, and it took a panicky hour or so to find him on Christmas Day.
I have clearer memories of Blu-tacking various posters, scraps from newspapers, postcards and photographs to the walls; the excised pages from Dr Faustus after we gutted the play to perform at sixth form – actually we performed it at The Brewhouse, a proper theatre and everything. It all feels very jumbled. I wonder what else will pop back into mind later. OH YEAH – and the room had a goddamned attic too. Perfection.
So I guess this is where I am today, bumbling around in my half-forgotten past.
I can almost feel them watching me as I glide past. Almost. If I didn’t know that was impossible. I mean, literally impossible. They have no eyes, no senses, no way of seeing. Technically, they don’t even not see. Meanwhile, as they’re busy not seeing or feeling or thinking, the rest of us who can see and feel and think bustle about them. I’ve tended to the soul bank for as long as I can remember, while we drift along through the galaxy. It isn’t a hard job; others do the proper work of maintaining our vessel, determining the curving course we’ll take between stars and the gaping voids between them. It can be beautiful, to gaze out through the windows at the endless blackness out there, punctuated by dusty swirls of colour. None of them are for us though – we have a higher mission. To safeguard these ancient souls to the core. That a number of us are regrettably instantiated in bodies is a necessary sacrifice to guide our fellows home.
Every day, when not peering at the velvet expanse outside, I lay my attention on the soul bank itself. It filles the length of a corridor which winds all the way around the starship. Souls are by their nature non-material, an energy pattern, often to be found sparkling across the brain-analogues of physical creatures. Separated from that crude matter they dissipate or with luck find themselves twitched and drawn into another being. The souls here have been captured before they can dance off into nothingness, spreading their cognitive nets ever wider in hopes of snagging on some substance. Here they’re held in magnetic containment, bound within glass shapes. If I didn’t know what I was looking at I’d see nothing at all, but knowing that they’re in here changes what I see. I see them in the odd reflections and shadows around the edges of their prismatic confines; in my mind they’re glowing and sparking clouds not unlike the majestic constellations I watch us approach in space.
My role is to ensure those containers hold, that each soul is held in perfect balance, compressed, contained, quiescent. Without physical form to dwell in they are just patterns, merely potential. Cleaved from meat, they have no sensation, and thus no thought. When in a body it’s their presence combined with the physical structure they occupy that gives rise to consciousness, awareness, taste, hopes and dreams. Here they are just half of nothing; silent, not-dead, not-alive. I envy them their purity. Not all the crew feel as I do, most are content in their tasks, trusting that when our mission is at an end, they too will be able to return to that state of utter peace. I have my doubts. I long to be free of this flesh, even though that which longs is of course a combination of this body’s self and its animating soul. Is it even me that desires the freedom? I should know better: the two are fused as one for as long as the body lives – there is no distinction between me and the soul that infests this skin. It feels old and tired, too many decades of space wasting away my bone and muscle. The souls I tend behind their glossy walls seem to have it so much better. No pain, no boredom, no waiting interminably. In the beginning I saw them as being imprisoned, denied their flourishing in co-existence with a physical being, but somewhere in the last hundreds of years of travel that has reversed in my mind. I can’t help but feel as if it’s my soul itself that longs to be free of me.
Time passes, light-years of distance guide us further and further into the stellar web we’ve been aiming for all this time. The souls in their bottles persist and my reflection in their glass is ever more worn and weary. As is our starship. Built in haste, with the technology and materials available to us, it is proving insufficient to the task at hand. Battered by radiation, the endless grazing and pummelling of fragments of cosmic dust, we have a very real fear that we might not be able to complete our mission. In contemplation of this I gaze at the hoard of souls and wonder what would happen if they were loosed here. If their containment fails they’ll begin to expand, casting their nets ever further in hopes of tangling in some matter complex enough to support them. It isn’t known how far they can stretch before losing their integrity. How much space could I encompass if I too were cast out into the void.
Matters come to a head. The outer fabric of our starship has ablated to a lethal degree. Within days, the interior will be daily bathed in cosmic radiation. Those of us in bodies are estimated to perish perhaps four or five days later, as our flesh perishes under that withering burn. Without the shielding, the starship itself will crumple and die only weeks later, and the soul bank will be lost as the power dies. I propose a desperate plan: we will use all our resources to send a message ahead, then launch every soul in the soul bank into the core. It is not a good plan; it presumes that those in the core are instantiated in bodies to receive both the message and the souls in their bottles, fired at superluminal speeds as if they were spiritual torpedoes. Alas, no one has a better plan.
We count down as the bottles are flung out ahead of us, each in its fragile glass cell, accelerated by our own astonishing speed and all the force of the remaining railgun. The last of us – souls unharvested, our bodies breaking down, in agony and disarray – await the ultimate dispersal of our starship, our home for so many years. This is the freedom from my body that I have yearned for, and now that it is upon us, even though my flesh fragments and rots under the assailing rays of space, I would have a little longer in a body. I would have a mind for more time. And then it’s gone, I feel my body give up in a little cough of liquidised cells and for a moment I’m half of me, racing through the patterns of a dying brain, finding exits from the maze and untangling from this physical prison. As I come unstuck and the very idea of though slips away, something vast says, “welcome”.
I woke up feeling great. I took my regular dose of amitriptyline last night, went to bed slightly later than planned and went straight to sleep. I might have woken up once, but I ponked myself in the forehead (it’s where the play button on my headphones is) and went back to sleep. It was hard to get out of bed – took me a full ninety minutes to convince myself that I was staying awake and wanted to climb out of the nest with a cuddly Geiger in it. But I did, and felt immensely refreshed. I haven’t slept like that for around a month. It was pretty great. So right now I’m feeling very little in the way of regret for ending the experiment, and the sheer relief at catching a good number of Zs has rather overwhelmed any of my other doubts or concerns for now. In time, who knows? I felt an immediate sense of re-engagement with stuff and interest in the world. If anything, I feel foolish for even trying to do without this kind of sleep.
As ever, this is only a day one and I shouldn’t be leaping to conclusions or anything like that, but it’s been a good day one and I’m really happy about it. I am slowly winding down now, with an “Impossibrew Enhanced Non-Alc Red Ale” which is performing some relaxing function or other. I’ve also been to see the lady I do creative mentoring with once a month, which is always a curious highlight of the week. It’s good to bring some additional light into the lives of others (I guess…) and as ever I found it made me think about stories and creativity in a positive way. My main goal now is to drag myself out of bed at the right time and catch back up with, and maintain, my daily routines of exercise and writing. Oh, and work too. It all feels a lot more plausible and appealing today than it did yesterday.
Another day, another… what? Not dollars. Obviously. More time introspecting and obsessing about sleep? Yes, probably. There are advantages to having my morning routines spannered by not sleeping. One is that I’m now awake as I write this, if rather dopey and worn, rather than first thing in the morning fuzzy and sleepy. I often, if not usually, feel fine first thing in the morning. Overnight, whether by sleeping or dwelling in that peculiar twilight between sleep and dozing, I’m kinda reset. Whatever I was worrying about the night before has slid away and I’m vaguely prepared to handle a new day. That’s possibly overstating the readiness part, but in most of these entries I’m OK, even if I haven’t slept and feel rather frazzled or wired. By the end of the day I’ve been through that and beyond it, but when I go to sleep again I tend to forget what that’s been like. Ideally I should capture the beginning and end of my day and how I feel, but that’s just too much effort and I’d never get around to it.
So what have my days actually been like? Well, they do start off fine, but I’m quickly falling into a weird yo-yo oscillation between blandly OK and hugely disconnected. The disengagement from, well, everything has been on the rise over the last couple of weeks. I think it’s partly from my ongoing disappointment in myself – a bunch of reasons, but high up the list is realising that perhaps I cannot do without these sleeping tablets. What I’ve fallen back into the oscillation of mood I used to experience, albeit without going quite as hyper as I once would have. Instead I’m switching throughout the day between these states of feeling dandy to utterly hopeless and disinterested in my life, and back again. So by the time the day comes to a close I’ve probably bounced back up to OK once more – ready to reset again. It’s tiring. And it’s frightening. I really enjoy my work, and feeling myself pull away from both my team and being engaged in the work itself is alarming and makes me sad. I even go in with good intentions and just feel it all drawn away. Yesterday had a lot of moments when I recognised that was happening, even if I couldn’t do anything about it. I recognise that same behaviour from how I was mentally checking out of being in Birmingham and Bath last week, even when I was trying to re-engage. It’s very frustrating. A wise friend reminded me that this is various neurotransmitters being out of sync and all fucked up. That’s important, because my brain state is not precisely the same thing as me, even if we do share a house. Back before I took these things, I was out of whack, and now that I’m not taking them I’m similarly out of whack. Solution: take the fucking pills.
And I think that is the fix. I’ve tried this, and it hasn’t worked. It could have gone much worse, but it hasn’t gone well. Apart from a few nights where I’ve just slept and it’s been fine, I’ve been running myself down for several weeks now and it’s impacting all the things I want to do and the people I want to be with. I can’t place myself in a situation where I’m diving into “maybe I should just quit” and “what would it be like to put a whole bunch of holes in this part of my leg – would that feel like something?” – certainly not when I can mostly avoid it. I’ve been erratically taking the sleeping tablets in hopes of scraping together enough sleep over the last weekend or so and it hasn’t really worked, probably because I’m not doing it systematically and as part of a routine. I should know better than to get up at 1am and take a bunch of sleeping tablets. The hangover and lag are much the same as necking a few bourbon doubles, and not particularly good for having a decent night’s sleep. I feel like I’ve learned or reminded myself of some very obvious things that I should have known, like remembering why I’m taking the drugs in the first place and that they do mostly work. My frustration at them not always working may be related to a lack of discipline in how or when I took them, but also not fully appreciating how much they might smooth me out. One of the things I wanted to know is whether I’m different when I’m not taking sleeping tablets. Easy answer: yes, I’m not sleeping. Harder answer: it’s the lack of sleep that fucks me up, reduces my emotional availability, reduces my capacity to be creative, and makes it harder to feel good. Even if that is different, those are worthwhile differences to acquire. Or at least they are for now, anyway.
Also, quite importantly, I’m utterly fucking sick of myself and thinking about whether I’m sleeping or not. I am thoroughly bored by myself. Possibly this is linked to the fluctuating levels of interest in myself and everything I do, but this has become the only thing I’m thinking about and it’s getting right on my tits. I’m pleased with how much we’ve managed to do despite this – having things booked into my diary means I usually do them even if without that prompt I wouldn’t do anything at all.
Last night was my dear friend Ben’s book launch for his wonderful book of comic poetry for kids (well, like all good poetry for children it’s also excellent for adults), Serious Nonsense for Terribly Grown Up People. You should buy a copy, you will like it. A lovely full room of funny interesting people saying and doing funny and interesting things. I even took part in the open mic at the end and read Captain Pigheart’s Mermaid Adventure to a very heartening crowd of chuckles and giggles. A nice feeling, and even lovelier to share the evening with so many people I know and am most fond of. Hurray for other people’s successes.
It’s been a good few weeks for BIG movies at the flicks. There are many huge explosions, stunts, fights and action galore. Occasionally there are characters too.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most utterly lush and gorgeous thing I’ve seen at the cinema since, oh – probably the first one. It is astonishing that a film can have such texture, both in the mashup of animation styles but also in the richness of its storytelling and character development. It’s a powerful statement of what superhero films can be. While I imagine having a decent knowledge of the many different Spider-Men (Spider-Mans…?) would be beneficial, it’s not a huge leap to grasp that they’re often quite different in their own dimensions, and they are delightful, wacky (cowboy and his steed, also wearing a Spider-Man mask), sometimes scary and all feel unique. This time we’re introduced to the world by Spider-Gwen, which is a lovely change of direction. We later revert to the equally brilliant Miles Morales as he encounters his next villain of the week, Spot. That’s also (possibly) the very best and most imaginative fight sequence from any film ever – he’s covered in spots which are little portals so if you punch him, you may punch yourself, but it goes waaay beyond that. Such cleverness simply never ends as we enter the very best version of the multiverse so far seen on-screen (yes, even more so than Everything Everywhere All at Once), so much more so than the MCU’s version which saddens me further every time it comes up. In the Spider-Verse, what happens in the other universes actually does matter, and the introduction of “canon” – core events which make Spider-Persons who they’re supposed to be become hugely important, driving the plot and the whole of the next film forward.
I can’t think of many films which are so welcoming and directly invite you into their story, using all the best of comic structures to label characters, offer backstories and directly talk to the viewer/reader. This is undoubtedly the best film I’ve seen this year. If you don’t already know – this is the first half of a two-part film (Beyond the Spider-Verse is out next year), and if you’re the sort of person who is driven to fury and sulking by a film ending halfway through, be prepared. The teenagers behind us were not ready for this and were hilariously outraged by paying to see half a film. Honestly, their absurd reaction was almost as good as the film. I’m kinda with them though, I felt the same at the end of Infinity War. Genuinely unmissable, but rewatch Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse first.
Sisu
This is the perfect WWII spaghetti western set in Finland. Honestly, it’s brilliant. One old man, sick of war, goes off to mine gold high up in Lapland. He’s successful, but on his way back to civilisation to cash in his nuggets he’s fucked over by a bunch of Nazis who are busy razing Finland to the ground. They steal his gold, kill his horse, and he goes wild. This is a pure action movie, following the utterly relentless ex-soldier (who turns out to be a legend, having already massacred the Soviets, to the extent that Nazi command advise their officer to leave him the hell alone and count themselves lucky), who is drowned, blown up, hanged and more but just will not die until he’s reacquired his gold and taken his vengeance. He barely says a word, but Jorma Tommila’s face shows you every shade of pain and suffering. It’s extraordinary and highly cathartic to watch. There is not a lot of story to talk about since it’s just one man against the enemy, grinding them down even harder than they grind him. We’re given great action scenes, mixing horrific violence with comedy and great timing and it’s all just so damn good. The whole film is immensely satisfying, and if you don’t want to watch it immediately after seeing the trailer then I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Fast X
Ten times faster and ten times furiouser than The Fast and the Furious, the seemingly endless and pointlessly growing faaaaamily saga is slowly drawing to a close in yet more bloated and oddly boring action movies. We keep going to see these for a couple of reasons. The first film was fun, a snappy Point Break-ish cop going undercover in a street car racing gang to nab some muscle-vest wearing idiots who nick DVD players from moving trucks. Fun, fast, cool. Nine films later, Vin Diesel’s family of former enemies have lovely meals in his back garden while they’re resting from their missions for the super-clandestine Agency (the laziest and dumbest carbon copy of SHIELD I’ve seen onscreen for a while). That’s right, the car-racers are now secret agents. Also, they’re absolute morons – without exception. Is there a story here? Yes, but the film’s universe has been so poorly explored despite running to dozens of hours that they’ve had to retcon the events of a movie halfway through the franchise to create Dom’s ultimate nemesis: Aquaman. Well, not Aquaman proper, this is heavily queer-coded Jason Momoa, who is plainly having a lot of fun. To get a proper villain who could never simply be adopted into Dom’s family they’ve had to make the baddie as camp and murderous as possible. No way could he be one of his friends! Nope, Dom’ll take CIA, assassins, cops with a grudge, hackers, morons, other people who try to kill him, but not this guy. Anyway, Aquaman’s gonna destroy Dom’s perfect life because they retconned him into the film where his dad (who didn’t used to be his dad, because there wasn’t a son in it) died, and five films later he’s back (for the first time).
Like the last few films and the Michael Bay The Transformers movies, it’s impossible to figure out what’s happening or why because it’s all shot exactly the same way: super intense, super-exciting. No idea what matters, and the film ending came as a slight surprise because there had been no sense that it was wrapping up or building to anything. So what’s good about it? There are some fun car chases, albeit half-CGI and those bits look kinda ropy. Not enough of the moron characters (all of Dom’s faaaaamily) get punched in the face, though some do slap each other in a shitty London internet café. Lettie (Michelle Rodriguez) gets a good fight, earned solely through her own stupidity: told by Charlize Theron’s character (why are these people in this?) that they’ve got three minutes to escape, Lettie instead has a huge fight with her, tries to escape, fails and returns to the waiting Charlize and they escape together. One of the best things is Momoa (even if he does exactly the same thing in every scene), who people say is channelling Heath Ledger’s Joker but that’s way over-stating things. He’s mincing a bit, biting his lip and doing horrible things to people, for example the pair of Agency Agent corpses he’s putting nail varnish on. This is always true – the best characters in this franchise are the new ones, because they haven’t yet been brainwashed into the family and turned into morons. Also, John Cena – who I totally forgot was supposed to be Dom’s brother – who is not in any way playing his character and is just having a lovely silly time looking after Dom’s kid (oh yeah, that’s in the plot too). Shame he dies pointlessly. Sorry – spoiler. Oh, and the massive man playing Reacher on Amazon Prime shows up with a shit haircut, and he’s quite fun. I honestly never thought I’d miss Paul Walker so much – he was not a good actor, but he seemed like a really nice guy and he was the only character in the series that Dom’s character had any real fraternal chemistry with. Maybe the whole show has been Dom searching for a new and better brother but finding only absolute cretins and men who are twice his size.
There’s at least one more of these fucking things, and I desperately hope they all die in a fireball during it.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3
This is a found family which I love returning to. In contrast to Fast X they’re all supposed to be morons, and they are, except they’re all super-competent in different ways and idiots about how they relate to each other. Here we finally resolve an awful lot of the relationships, hopes and dreams of these characters. They’ve been through a lot, both in the first two volumes of their trilogy, Infinity War / Endgame and odd, sort of pointless Christmas Special. I say pointless, but as it turns out, spending an additional forty minutes with some of these guys, Drax and Mantis in particular has genuinely fleshed out their characters further. At last the story turns to Rocket, injured by Adam Warlock (splendid force-grown golden dude with the brain of a child) and we finally get his much-hinted at backstory. He is indeed a raccoon. In a lot of ways this is a big ad for PETA, because animal vivisection does not come off well here – for parts of it I’d rather watch Watership Down again. The High Evolutionary’s attempts to develop intelligence and accelerate evolution is horrifying, and the story around his fellow animals, Lyla the otter, Teefs the walrus and the rabbit Floor, is absolutely devastating. Most of the film is the rest of the Guardians doing typical Guardian shtick while chasing down the MacGuffin which will let them fix Rocket. Along the way they really do become the heroes they’ve sought to be, despite their Ravager tendencies, rescuing all the High Evolutionary’s test subjects. The film is packed with gorgeous space environments, exciting action scenes, cool new Groot, and more, yet all I truly remember are the perfect character notes and conclusions for each of them. The thing I was most pleased and impressed by was their treatment of Gamora – Quill’s former love interest who died in Endgame, replaced by an earlier version of herself who never met or fell in love with Quill. It’s a wild concept anyway, and you can see why Quill struggles to handle being around someone he loved but has no interest whatsoever in him. And they don’t make her fall in love with him again. That alone is a goddamn victory for Marvel, whose habits in killing off female characters (including Gamora) and not acknowledging their deaths while having a full-cast funeral for Tony Stark has been atrocious. This is a wonderful finale for these characters and I can hardly wait to watch it again.
Slept OK. After much havering and hawing I took one tablet last night. As ever, it’s virtually impossible to know what effect such a low dose has, but whatever combination of things, I did sleep alright. Woke up a couple of times, apparently confused about how long or if I’d been asleep and tapped my white noise back on and fell into slumber once more. I feel less hungover than I did yesterday, possibly because I’m further away from the vague psychic and physical effects of being in a car all day, so that’s all good. The weights felt a bit lighter today too, so I’ll be adding that to the balance of wakefulness. It did take a while to crawl out of bed, mind. The allure of just falling back to sleep was very strong, but eventually I overcame it with my will to get the hell on with the day.
This week we’re back to more or less normal – no weird unexpected bank holidays, no conventions to set up and hotels to try and sleep in, no road trips or shows in distant lands. I am out every night except Tuesday though, and that’s going to have to be an admin heavy evening. FUN. Tonight: Ben’s book launch, Wednesday: teaching, Thursday: improv, Friday: Shakespeare at Nottingham Playhouse. We can do this team! Shadow Me has been happily in abeyance this last few weeks, though I’ve felt his ghost chuntering away late at night – not so close as to be fully audible, just gnawing away at the background fabric of my reality; ignorable right now.
Yep, that’s it from me this morning. Things to do.
Sunday, at last! The much desired lie-in has been lain in and reluctantly emerged from. Despite getting a number of hours’ sleep on Friday night, I remained pretty fuzzy and mind-fucked for most of the day. I did manage to doze in the car for a few hours on the way down to Bath which felt fairly special. It all helped, but it’s the now weeks-long sleep deficit and brain fog I’m fighting through. I did eventually wake up and become something more like human functional by the time we were able to get into the theatre (the excellent and wonderful Roper Theatre), though then lying on the stage floor in the dark while being bathed in Star Wars music might have been my favourite part. I could definitely have fallen back to sleep in the deafening bass.
That late afternoon / early evening revival is familiar, as if I’m trapped in the slow treacle crawl of the daytime and then freed by the dark. I’ve also been using amitriptyline in various quantities for the last three nights in hopes of being remotely functional for the various things we’ve had to do. It hasn’t been particularly successful except for the important business of actually going to and staying asleep (mostly, though I’m counting being in a hotel room on Thursday as an aggravating factor anyway). I took just one last night with the aim of spinning down into oblivion not long after we returned home just before 1am. If being in a car for most of the day is exhausting I can only imagine how much worse it is to have been the driver (Ben and Phil, I salute you!) I certainly wiped out pretty fast once I was in bed, and promptly slept for the best part of eight or nine hours. It doesn’t really feel like that though.
That said, I have no way of discerning between “tired and still weary from catching up” and “not tired but suffering from an amitriptyline hangover”. They’re very similar. I don’t know what I’m doing now – am I giving the sleeping tablets another go, or trying to stick it out and reserving them for occasional nights where they’ll semi-guarantee sleep but leave me hungover in the morning? I mean, which is worse: exhausted from no sleep or drug-hungover? Coffee will help kick both states into the long grass for a little while, but that feels like I’m just getting jacked up at either end of the day and you’d think I could just do neither… But it doesn’t appear to work like that. Ugh. I’m not sure I’m any better off than I was a month ago when I started this nonsense.
But, beyond all that, how do I actually feel? I enjoyed yesterday; I like hanging out with my friends, even it was a little purposeless spending the afternoon bumbling around Bath. I enjoyed doing the show, despite a disappointingly small audience – but hey, Bath is at the other end of the country and the theatre, although lovely, is more separate and disconnected from the Fringe scene down there than we thought. Gotta try these things, right? I feel quite positive, despite the vague sinking sensation behind my eyes. Also, the burn on my wrist is healing a bit and looks less like a suicide attempt than it did all bandaged up yesterday, which somehow feels better. So – things are good, and this week offers many diversions and things to do, alas with only Tuesday night at home with the fur beasts. Sad face, yet happy face at the things to be done.
Up early on a Saturday? Ghastly. It is for a fine cause though: that of the Rebel Alliance. Today we’re driving down to Bath for the Bath Fringe, where we shall once more don the apparel of improvised Star Warses. It’s going to be very fun, even if it does involve quite a bit of time in a car.
I am somewhat knackered. The sleeping poorly thing has sucked this week – I am just not getting tired enough to sleep until the early hours of the morning and that’s not enough snoozing time. I need my beauty sleep (it’s for everyone else’s benefit of course). I missed yesterday’s scribblings because we were at UK Games Expo, which necessitated trying (and failing) to be at the Aconyte Books stand comfortably before 9am when the public were unleashed on the halls. There’s a chain of dependencies running backwards from there including important things like sleeping well and not cruising through an alarm, or the three that I set. In theory this should all have been fine – we finished set up in good time on Thursday, chilled out for a bit in my hotel room. I needed to sleep so badly by this point that I’d already given myself a severe burn on my wrist off the steam from the kettle in my hotel room. It took me a few seconds to realise why my wrist hurt, which is not a great indicator of wakefulness. I fled the room, bumbled around some shops to stay awake for a little longer, had some nice food and was back in my room by eight for winding down. I was so desperate to get a decent night’s sleep I even took my last couple of amitriptylines. I’d picked up a bath bomb, face and foot masks so I could laze in the bath. Dozed off a few times in there, read a few chapters of my book, dozed a bit more and yet did not properly get to sleep till after midnight and then woke up at five, having hallucinated my alarm. And then further half crash out, half semi-awake brain murmuring. Obviously that left me running late and hastily showering, acquiring breakfast and having a bag full of books explode on me. Not the best preparation for selling books and chatting with random folks for the whole day. It was good though, and we sold a heap of books to interested and nice people. I did a lot less wandering around the convention than usual, but I did score a few games in the bring and buy sale.
A lift home spared me from the horror of the Megabus (thank fuck) and it was lovely to be home at a sane hour, ready to wind down again. I caved once more and took some more amitriptyline, which appears to have knocked me out pretty well. Not for quite long enough because we’re being collected at 9.30 for the drive down. I’m feeling that familiar bodily lag from taking the sleeping tablets, but I appear to have a vocabulary and don’t feel too wretched. I’m not sure where I go from here with sleep habits and pills. I’m very conscious that the notion of failing to give up sleeping tablets is entirely a construct of my own, even if that doesn’t diminish its force. Requires more thought. But for now, I need to get in a car with some mates and drive to the Empire.
Ugh. Morning? What’s that for? Feels vindictive. This morning I have mostly grumbling to do. This has been a crappy week for sleep (my sole focus!), and I haven’t managed to fall asleep before 3am yet. It’s very annoying. I have proceeded further with my book however, which I totally could not have done at any other more useful and more awake time. I only have a couple of chapters left, which puts me in the intolerably mild predicament of deciding whether or not to pack an actual paperback book for being away from home tonight, rather than just my Kindle. The very idea that I might be stuck with only one book while having just a sliver of free reading time tonight. Of course, that’s me still assuming (bless) that I’ll be able to fall asleep at the time I want and not spend my early hours in the Hilton Metropole reading instead… I almost admire myself for that sort of mindless optimism. Maybe it’s a personality trait; I don’t think I’d know any more.
I did also dip into The Transformers Vault which is a lovely history and treasury of Transformers toys and ephemera. Despite loving a whole assortment of things and franchises from my childhood, I’m not sure that it’s usually nostalgia that I’m wallowing in. I’ve enjoyed most of the Star Wars films (we’ll not discuss the prequels, ruined my childhood etc) and now that it’s all current again it doesn’t feel like I’m longing for the old stuff any more. Similarly, despite the fuckawful Bayverse of Transformers films, the comics – which have always felt like the core of my Transformers experience, not films or cartoons, or even really toys – have been incredible this side of the millennium. That said, spotting the exact pair of Ultra Magnus slippers I had as a kid in this book was extraordinary. I have not thought of those for I don’t know how many years, but I can feel their mass-produced toy tie-in foamy softness around my toes right now.
I do find that I am dwelling on the past and on the litany of mistakes that make up a human life, in this case mine, more than I feel like I usually do. Partly that is because I’m scoring an extra four to six hours a day to fret about such things. Hurray… Or maybe it’s the other way around. Since the middle of last week I’ve been feeling that familiar tug of anxiety at bedtime. I wonder if other people feel it the same way. To me it’s as if there’s a little hook inside me, about two inches above my belly button, and it’s being gently tugged inwards. The physical manifestation of such sensations is so strange. But it is definitely a feeling that I associate with free-floating anxiety – I’m not thinking about anything in particular when I climb into bed, but that hook is there just waiting to latch on to anything, doubts, fears, full-blown existential dread; whatever. And since I’m not someone who just conks out, there’s space for that hook to drift about lazily, making its presence felt without necessarily having caught anything. I suppose that is what the amitriptyline did well. In addition to making me extra sleepy if I had a couple of drinks to wash it down, it either skipped me fast through that falling asleep phase, or pushed that hook back down inside where it could do no harm. Anxiety these days is almost only a thing that comes upon me at night time, when I’m quiet and vulnerable. The rest of the day I’m able to exercise my powers of being more rational and finding other stuff to do, ideally things I can practically fret about.
All of this is to say that I continue to have doubts about the direction I’m travelling in. What I am comparing my sleeping states to is my experience on amitriptyline, which puts me to sleep (and keeps me asleep) three or four nights out of five, and even if it fails me, I’m almost never kept awake all night. Being off amitriptyline is not currently measuring up well against that. So this is a threat, body and mind: get it together, or we’re going back on the drugs. I’m concerned about this enough that I’ve even ordered a repeat prescription (my doctor wisely left it available in case all went tits up) because I don’t have a back up supply if I really, really need to get a full night’s sleep. Last night would have been ideal really, since I’ll be spending the day with colleagues doing work. While I can grind through an unslept day on my own, others require time and attention. But I’m also noticing that I’m becoming detached, partly from simply not being fully awake and conscious, but also perhaps from this current degree of self-focus. I’m distracting myself from myself? Yeah, possibly. Ridiculous puff-paste worm meat creatures that we are. Reminds me of one of my favourite bleak quotes from a favourite bleak as fuck play, The Duchess of Malfi:
“What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk
Fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those
Paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible,
Since our is to preserve earth-worms.”
Ah, Mr Webster. Perhaps my love of the grim and dark comes from you.
It feels like it’s been sunny for weeks and this morning’s break into chilly rain feels like a shock to the system. Being back on a half night’s sleep doesn’t help either. It’s just a bad start to the day, you know. Dragged unwillingly from sleep by an alarm, dragged unwillingly through a round of exercise which felt like wading in that old treacle river again. I do not need to struggle getting to sleep on weeknights. It’s very unhelpful, and feels like a proper kick in the teeth in a way that still surprises me. The hauling myself out of bed and doing a thing when I can’t sleep is at least giving me more reading time. I speculated that reading non-fiction doesn’t do the right thing to my brain in terms of relaxation. I think it’s something to do with being caught up in an alternative narrative – we feel the flow of story as it hooks us, pulling along to some inevitable but unseen conclusion. I wonder if that’s why it works (sometimes!) for falling asleep – instead of being distracted and trapped by the minutiae and late-night worries of real life which are all aspects of our tedious existences and the story of ourselves, all those concerns and anxieties can be transferred to fictional characters and settings, and while I might worry for them, they’re ultimately fictional and don’t matter. Neat trick! Non-fiction is as bad as real life from this point of view. Mammals gonna rise, etc in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. There will be many surprises, and even though it’s told narratively, I reckon it’s going to end with humans (spoiler). Instead I plucked David Benioff’s City of Thieves randomly from a shelf in the near-dark. I’m now halfway through it, so that’s something.
I’m thinking a lot about how to evaluate my progress in ditching sleeping tablets. I’m obviously very keen to declare success and pretend I now sleep normally. Of course! Anything else feels like a failure. But I am sleeping some nights and not others, some days I wake up refreshed, other days we’re back in the treacle mines. Is it worth it? I don’t know. I like the feeling of being able to do this trivial normal human thing (like it’s an achievement), when it happens. I don’t think I feel any more clear and unfuzzy, for lack of a better term, than I did while taking amitriptyline. It’s possible that the amitriptyline mostly did just get me to sleep – variously amplified by drinking and not having the best evening routine (actually, cutting my drinking in half has been quite good too) – and the things I’ve been fearing from it like lack of emotional range, libido and being able to enjoy later parts of the evening… maybe they haven’t been a consequence of the drugs, and this is just me (older and *cough* wiser etc than when I started on ’em over a decade ago). What seems likely is that they helped stabilise me at a time when I was spinning fully out of control. Stability’s OK, right? After all, this isn’t something I have to do. I’m voluntarily not taking these drugs to see if it makes a difference. While I’m not anxious in the way I used to be, there are more things in my head by bedtime, which isn’t particularly helpful. I doubt that I’ve ever solved a problem while lying in bed, instead of simply wasting a night’s sleep fretting about things that seemed trivial in the morning. That feels like the most noticeable thing so far. I suspect I’ll need others to tell me if I’m otherwise changed. Despite keeping track daily, what I’m feeling is the natural continuity of self. I probably should have been keeping stats records, but since I haven’t it seems reasonable to apply a range of subjective judgments to the experiment instead! Research next.
The birds came back this week. After a long, dark and cold winter. I’d been looking out for them, waiting for the flash of black in the sky. They’re like the first sight of the snow beginning to melt, dark patches of grass beneath hoping for a fresh glimpse at the sky. It’s been a cruel winter since Shadow Joe was hanged. Snowmen were built but remained unjudged and stood like sentinels in the village, watching us. It felt they drew closer to our houses each day, despite every fresh dawn of ice freezing them more firmly to the ground. There was a strange, creeping sense of dread unlike any winter I remembered. Ma Tulip says the dark woods have nestled up more tightly around the village. I don’t know if that’s true since trees don’t grow much in the cold months, and you can’t exactly watch them growing. Not if you want to stay busy. Dad says no one should listen too closely to Ma Tulip, that she’s exactly the sort who spends too much time on nonsense like watching trees. But standing outside, looking at the woods that encircle the village, they do feel closer, taller. Like there’s less of the village or just more of them I can’t say. Either way, it seems like we’re smaller, tighter, more squeezed than we were before the ice came. The stumps of the snowmen are out here still. It takes a long time for all that lovingly compacted snow to fade away. One night someone went out and smashed them all. Maybe it was the sight of them glowing in the moonlight, round faces turned to the sky or into your soul depending on how you saw them. For all the effort they took to roll up, our delight in them had soured fast. I don’t think we’ll make them again. It’s been a long winter. The Sallis family took ill after the third ice storm battered our homes. No one could get to them for a week, not with the snow and freezing splinters whipped through the village. When they did, when dad and the woodsmen hacked their way through snow drifts the height of our doorway, they found the family frozen to their beds, all the windows opened to the storm. No one said much about it. They left the bodies there to be removed and cremated once the thaw sets in – no use cutting someone off a bed just to burn them, dad says. So we spent half the winter with the dead family cold and waiting for a funeral. That’s tomorrow, the day after the birds have returned. It doesn’t seem like the brightest welcome home for them, but then the village does feel different. Whether Ma Tulip’s right about the dark woods or not I don’t know, but something has happened. The winter has sharpened things. We were tighter on supplies than we’ve been before, despite the hunters spending every day in the woods right up till the first ice storm, bringing back less and less. I feel like I’m more than just one winter older too. Shadow Joe’s hanging stuck with me long through the darkness, even though I know that his thefts were one of the reasons folks were so worried about the coming winter. Maybe I’ve just outgrown snowmen, and the world looks different now that people I know have died. People live and die in the village, obviously, but I liked Shadow Joe and I liked his children. It never seemed fair that children should pay their parents’ price, but the village was stretched too thin. Standing out here, watching the birds coming in over the crest of the forest, they’re like a vast wave of leaves lifted out of the trees themselves, a whirling darkness descending on the village. I wonder where they go. It must be a long way, to escape the ice and cold. Their cawing as they wheel into the village is a reminder of last year, and instead of bringing in fresh tales of their adventures elsewhere, they’re bringing back the past instead. I long for their stories of sun-filled meadows, the dusty heat of desert, lakes and rivers thriving loud and vibrant. For the first time in my life, I wonder if they’ll stay. They always have before – my whole life has been watching the birds come and go over the seasons. This is their home, or one of them at least. But if it seems different to me, colder, more closed and meaner than it did half a year ago, perhaps it feels that way to them too. They don’t settle on the hanging tree, picking other ice-battered hosts instead. The bier for the Sallises disturbs them; they travel to avoid the grim winter but they’ve returned to find it’s still here. I catch a glimpse of Ma Tulip also standing on her doorstep, watching the birds. She shakes her head at me, too far away to read her expression but in her shape I read sadness, resignation. Then she goes inside. Some of the birds have settled on her roof, but they all seem restless, unsure of themselves. Not their usual cocky and swaggering selves. I think Ma’s right. The trees are closer, denser, like the space between them narrowed over winter. Do trees draw near each other for warmth, or to stop the brutal icy wind from pushing them apart? I think it’s going to be harder for the hunters this year to make their way to the hidden glades where their prey might be. Imagine if those glades have closed up, pushing all the living things out. The village is just a big glade, really. A hole in the forest where people live. I watch the birds flutter a bit longer. I don’t want to go inside in case they all fly away as soon as my back is turned. But there’s work to be done, so I give them a wave and hope they’ll stay for the summer.
Bit wonky getting to sleep, but semi-resolved with a gentle touch of self-medication… It’s not a good habit, but worth giving a shot occasionally. Two things for me to note relating to that. One, finishing a book and starting a new one in bed is not helpful. Generally, one of my go to methods for phasing myself into sleep is by placing myself in the environment of the story I’m reading, but that only works if I’m still in it – a finished book doesn’t work, for y’know, brain reasons. I did very much enjoy Max Gladstone’s epic-feeling Last Exit, even if the ending leaves me with many questions. I don’t mind ambiguous endings, but there’s a whole wealth of possibility there I’d just like to know a teeny bit more. However, I also know I shouldn’t try to sleep without a book on the go. Knowing that I’ll be away from home for a night later in the week I cannot be arsed to lug actual bulky paper about so I just started the more-or-less next book on the Kindle. That’s a very rare non-fiction book for me – I read The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte a couple of years ago and found it ace and very engaging. It seems dinosaurs are one of the few real things I can stand to read about! The follow up is The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, which is just as involving and interesting. Alas, starting it before bedtime meant I had to read the prologue and introduction before even getting into the meat of the diapsids and synapsids (hello ultimate grandad). That delay and fucking about with books kept me up just that little bit too long. Slightly – but not devastatingly – vexed I sought a classic quick fix to relaxing and dozing off. And that brings me to the second point: it didn’t work. Helped me to lie down and chill out a bit, but didn’t knock me out or draw on sleep noticeably quicker, though the mug of chai that went with it was nice. So the late-night, last minute self-medication route that is ever a temptation just doesn’t work – worth remembering and believing.
Anyhoo, I’m up and about at the proper time, doing exercise and scribbled. I feel reasonably positive about getting on with stuff. I’ve taken tentative steps towards making some plans in the summer, which feels good as well, though they are very much preliminary. I am a little sad that the sunny weather of Saturday seems to be vanished, but I’m glad we had the unusual fortune to spend most of it outside. Thankfully I spent most of the rest of the weekend inside; god forbid I’d develop a shade beyond my crypt pallor.
I have granted myself a small lie-in this morning and feel pleasantly relaxed as a result. Also, I failed to note that it was a bank holiday and my weekday alarm woke me at seven, along with Geiger demanding to go outside. Back to bed was essential of course. Going to sleep feels OK, like it’s a thing that’s within my compass, which is a really lovely and novel feeling. I’ve little to report today, other than I’m looking out on a busy week which includes only one and a half proper days of work, plus boardgaming, doing our Aconyte Books stuff at UK Games Expo in Birmingham, followed by the Improvised Star Wars Show at Bath Fringe. All those things and the bank holiday do rather knacker my nice cycling and swimming routines, but as long as I get my swim in tomorrow, everything will be fine. Getting back from Birmingham in the middle of a train strike may offer some challenges however…
But apart from the prospect of another bus journey these are all things to look forward to. I’m especially looking forward to the rare treat of seeing my colleagues in person, playing some games and hanging out for a bit. I adore working from home, and being free of the purposeless distraction of being in an office is brilliant, but I do very much like these people. I’ve realised I’m a small team person, and every time I’ve been in an environment where the concept of “team” expands to be fifteen, twenty, hundreds of people I just don’t enjoy it. It’s just too big and it doesn’t feel like anything to do with me. This only confirms for me that I’m a detail, do stuff guy, not the big vision strategic stuff which involves lots of meetings and remembering dozens of peoples’ names. I’m quite content to be a cog in a machine, as long as I don’t have to look at the whole machine. I mean, it can be interesting, but none of it is the stuff I need to get done. I suspect that’s where a lot of the stress back working in Probation came from – the consolidation of small teams into a larger, noisier one, followed by the catastrophic restructuring at national, regional and local levels (for sure, a massively stressful, badly managed and fucking stupid process) continually changed what the team was and what we did, never mind who was in it. Horrible, horrible stuff. It’s a bit like being in an improv team I suppose: you want just enough people to introduce chaos and fill in the gaps, but not so many people that no one gets enough stage time or space to explore their own ideas in the show, or that the sheer number of characters and detail becomes overwhelming. More than two, less than ten works for me, and ideally an odd number.
No idea where all that came from, but that’s sort of the pleasure of giving myself this time to muse and introspect without any particular purpose other than figuring out how I feel on any given day. I do feel more present, and I wonder how much maintaining this mental health track has been responsible for generally being up and in a good place. I have to think about it, at least for a bit, every day. Having the record and knowing that I felt just dandy two days ago was very helpful in digging myself back out the week before last, so even though this feels very self-indulgent some days, I suspect it’s proving its worth.
I feel bright and clear today, despite a night of weird dreams about people I haven’t seen for years. That feels more common at present. Presumably it’s a combination of recognising that time has passed (something I’m not great at, which allows the months and years to slip by without ever noticing that it isn’t still yesterday) and that consequently much may have changed for those people, and maybe even for me. I recall talk of a school reunion when we were all approaching thirty, but that sounded like a nightmare hell I couldn’t even contemplate, and I backed well away from anyone who was trying to sort that out. Fifteen years later and it doesn’t seem so horrific a concept. It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of such events is. My main references are Grosse Pointe Blank and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, both of which are I guess fairly positive about the whole affair. I was not well in my late twenties, I did not feel like any kind of success or that I had anything worth sharing or even showing off about. Racked with anxiety and depression, re-meeting the people I’d no choice but to know and deal with at school wasn’t at all appealing. I suppose the people I never wanted to see again loomed large in those thinkings, while totally ignoring all the people I actually liked and whom I hope have thrived. I guess I want to see a very select subset and know that everyone else is basically OK or in prison or something.
The concept of the reunion seems obvious and natural (I blame the above films and many others), but really what even is it? School is notorious for being the time when we had zero choice about who we spent every day with, is rife with bullying and being bullied, utterly miserable times punctuated with moments of happiness. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong. Do people have reunions with those they were banged up in prison with? I can’t even tell if being at secondary school was a happy time. I made a lot of bad decisions about who to be friends with, largely I think through sheer desperation to not be alone. Almost all of them are relationships I came to regret, and I can see such clearer paths to happiness and being interested in things than I managed; ain’t retrospect great. Sixth form was a little different: smaller group, fewer of the absolute twats who made education so grim. Still, some did manage to persist… Yeah, I think most of sixth form made me happy, and probably a chunk of GCSEs, the whole thing ever-improving as the year group got winnowed down. While I was good at schoolwork, honestly it was mostly easy – nice structured learning suited me well, whereas the freer do you own research and find things interesting really fucked me at university, or rather I fucked that up too.
Perhaps seeing some old friends recently has whetted my appetite for revisiting some of the memories of school and those seven or so years we spent together. Some of them I think about a lot, some even get dreams (not always good ones), so they’re clearly important to me, yet I’ve been terrible about reaching to out to anyone I’ve ever known. I regret that, but I still feel a resistance to making contact. I’m afraid of rejection for sure. But the prospect of having to deal with having let them slip away in the first place is distressing too. Perhaps if it had been intentional I’d feel better about it, but no – I’m lazy and forgetful, easily distracted by just being here, and I’ve neglected many people I care about as a result. Perhaps one horror of no longer blunting my brain at bedtime is that the past is rolling out its carpet again, filling up that nice empty space by the door. Thanks, brain.
What is it that I want from this? I’m sure there’s a bit of being seen which is both good and bad. Other than family, I’m not in regular contact with anyone who knew me before I was eighteen, and they’re countable on less than a single hand. I suppose I want to know if I’ve changed, or if there’s some essential property that’s remained the same – am I recognisably still me? Am I better or worse (whatever possible measures could be applied there…). Are the bridges I’ve burned re-buildable, or were they never really torched at all – maybe I just lost the map? Are the people I remember the same as well? I want to know if they’re happy. I think I thought a reunion would be horrible and competitive, but there’s nothing to have won at, just people doing different things. That feels as if it speaks to some inner self-confidence and esteem repaired over time. Other people will have done astonishing things, and maybe some of the stuff I’ve done is cool too, but living a relatively small life with a wonderful partner and cats is the thing I’m most happy about.
Well, I guess we’ll see if I manage to drag myself out of my torpor and fear and manage to say “hi” to some old friends.
It’s very different writing these entries at the end of the day rather than the morning. I imagine there’s value in both, in seeing either the hope/anticipation/dread of the day to come versus its actual success. I definitely can’t be arsed to do both. This morning was a busy whirl of having a managed lie-in so I don’t just annihilate all hopes of wearing myself out naturally with time, sped up when I realised we were supposed to be recording a podcast today instead of tomorrow. That turned out to be a massive confusion for all of us, since there is no Sunday 27 May. So we were all wrong! It continued to become wronger as my laptop, or rather the goddamn antivirus designated a really useful program as a virus and then crashed the laptop. Super helpful, thanks. It saved some of the podcast but means we’re recording properly on Monday (not even one of the possible days!). That leaves tomorrow entirely free which is kinda cool.
It has been a little while since Matt, Wez and I have managed to catch up for podcasting. Busy lives and all that. I keep forgetting how enormously relaxing I find their company and that we’ve created a space specifically to talk about how we feel. Even if, as noted previously, I’m better at articulating this stuff on the page than, um, in the air, I guess… Much like other reserved spaces, with the expectations already set out it’s possible to embrace them and feel more free. Sometimes rules and boundaries are good things!
It’s been a very nice day actually. We enjoyed watching our neighbours “gardening” with machetes, which is always a delight. We lent them a rake just so they had at least one actual tool and looked less like murderers. Then we hopped, skipped and jumped a whole two roads away to rehearse Star Warsing in a very sunny garden. That was both hilarious and exhausting. Maybe it’s just being out in the sun talking nonsense, or standing up for a few hours, but I came home very sleepy indeed. It’s a nice sleepy, one not born of exhaustion or stressing about sleep though. Is all very pleasant.
I remain undecided about where I am with these sleeping tablets. I feel (again) like it’s balancing out OK and I’m in a decent place. Obviously I felt like this right until I had a crap night’s sleep and then became quickly untethered. I do now have the experience of bouncing back from that though, and gathering up this little portfolio of experience is part of the exercise. My dataset on I feel expands daily. If I had maintained my love of spreadsheets I could definitely be charting this. That had occurred to me actually, as I kinda liked the scoring systems I used when I first started cognitive behavioural therapy. I don’t remember them specifically, but they’re bound to be in a notebook somewhere. Then I could chart various 0-10s of feeling groovy or suicidal. I’m not sure I’d have much use for it, but it might be reassuring to see all those highs and lows evening out to the mean. That’s the best reflection I’ve got on this so far: in general I’m turning out to be pretty OK, mostly upbeat on most days (even those where I’ve had horrific sleep), albeit with a lot of conscious choosing to be as alright with it as I can muster.
I thought amitriptyline stayed in the system for ages, but apparently it’s more like two to six days, so I’m actually more than a week totally “clean” now (although it’ll be in my hair for maybe three months!) Skipping any consideration of what general ebb and flow I might experience emotionally over weeks and months, I have not fallen off a cliff with stopping taking these things. There’s certainly going to be some inconvenience when I can’t sleep and I’ll be immediately blaming myself since I have the pills to undo that, but I like the idea that this is more under my control. I undoubtedly have better habits and structure than I could ever manage when I was younger. Post-counselling and the years in between I’ve also grown more confident, calm and my life has become more stable and predictable. That latter is in good ways, even if it sounds very dull indeed. I like to plan surprises… That’s not true, but I like consistency. Uncertainty becomes doubt which swiftly melts into anxiety.
I’ve certainly learned a lot from the last few weeks, and I’m (right now) quite positive about moving forward. Let’s see if I can manage to not break me.
After dutifully delivering my cautionary tale to the crop of new students at the Thaumatorium, I and my two right arms were guided back to the vault. The Thaumatorium takes deviation – greater deviation than intended – fairly seriously, so incarceration in the vault was inevitable.
The process of teaching kids how to make intuitive leaps, skipping around through reason and determinism to find another answer to the questions of how, why and where the universe works and what we can do with it, is a treacherous road. You can’t tell while you’re walking it that on one side is a ten thousand foot drop into a tentacled hell, or that the other is clustered with nightmare beasts watching for any step of the path you’re blindly ambling along. The risk that we’ll blunder into something so far out of our conception of reality that it can follow us back while dragging its own weird physics and ideas with it is so much greater than most people imagine. When big science builds bombs with a small chance of erasing life on Earth or a vast clyclotron that could generate a black hole in the heart of the world, people get a bit twitchy. Doesn’t stop them doing their thing, but it certainly freaks people out afterwards when you tell them the odds. That’s partly because we’re so very, very bad at grasping what a one percent chance looks like – we’re only really geared up for what actually happens, not the infinite vane of possibility that sprays outwards from every decision.
So the Thaumatorium keeps a close eye on its students and their projects. That’s all fine until a student – no one you’d know – gets too into their discovery and starts hiding their research. Yes, alright, that was me. Infusing my living DNA with the genomic fruits of my immortal axolotl work was perhaps not my finest hour. I was so convinced it had worked that I cut off my left arm to test it out. Not some rusty kitchen knife in a cellar affair, I was in a proper lab and everything was neatly cauterised and done with proper anaesthetic. I’m not a mad lunatic grave robber or anything. When the new arm sprouted on the other side I was surprised, but pleased by how neatly it also grew up the muscle groups and nerves I’d need to manipulate two right arms. I feel a bit off balance some days but in general it’s worked out pretty well.
I don’t really feel it was a sufficient error to be condemned to the vault, and I was rather bitter about the whole process, at least until I reached the end of the disciplinary process and discovered where I was truly headed. “Vault” is rather pejorative, and does give the impression that we’re all kept in boxes or locked drawers or similar. Certainly, there are locks aplenty, but in many ways the vault is the second city underneath the already vast Thaumatorium. The leaps of logic and revelations that my fellow inmates made while traversing those half-imagined roads of learning and intuition are too valuable for thaumaturgeons to simply discard. The work has been done, and in order to exploit or explore it, all that a thaumaturgeon needs is to apprehend the discovery and then it can be used or developed further. Depending on the digression from the path, that might be perfectly safe. My immortality research for example isn’t taunting the beasts that live in the hollows between worlds, so it continues, albeit with less enthusiasm for self-testing.
Others’ work however, promises nothing but disaster if continued. Though, even containment requires study. There’s a thaumaturgeon four levels down who learned how to pull time out of a neighbouring universe like a ribbon. When they found her, she’d pulled aeons through a tiny gap, sapping that other universe of a billion years of its future. But in our universe time doesn’t work that way, so she was surrounded by hoops and loops of actual time locked in a physical shape. If that comes undone it’ll add that billion years to our own universe, but where in time they go no one has any idea. It might be added on at the beginning or end, or between this word and the next. Wild stuff. She doesn’t get to explore much any more, as you can imagine.
And then there are the monsters. Not all of them are real. Some are just shadows – literal shadows – that have replaced the thaumaturgeon’s own shadow. Imagine having a shadow that doesn’t match you, and which waxes and wanes to a different light source. It’s… unsettling being in the same room as someone whose shadow vanishes and flickers across the ceiling while your own rests peacefully on the floor like everything else in the room. Better than others though. There’s the guy who drifted off the path, trying to perceive the connection between the concept of nostalgia and the table of elements. There’s things out there between feelings, between ideas that are tied inextricably to emotional states. When his attention wavered, they pounced. Unable to exist in the real world, they’ve infested his flesh. No one knows what they’re living on, but they’re definitely living inside him, ghost lights you can see when he opens his mouth or strobing under the skin of his arms. Then there are the big things, the ones which are more than real, massing greater than they should under our laws of physics because where they came from everything works differently. A bit like the notorious blobfish, which looks very strange at the surface but perfectly sensible at its proper depth and pressure. Most of these things can’t be caged, not using anything on this side of reality anyway. Research into the conceptual paths that led to them has revealed new ways to twist both reality and imaginary matter into new frames and machines that can subdue them, or in rarer cases translate them into something more suitable, like making a suit for a dream.
It’s not the worst place to be, it’s really another huge research installation that isn’t supposed to exist, counter to all the promises and treaties that founded the Thaumatorium. And I get it, there’s so much potential, so much that could be discovered that they don’t want to throw all of this possibility and raw material away. Plus there’s a lot of stuff from between the worlds that no one can destroy even if they wanted to. It’s got to go somewhere. The trouble is, everything in here is smart, and not all of it is content to stay in the vault. Some of us want to go home.
This morning I feel pleasantly tired – not an “I haven’t slept, burn the world” tired, just not quite enough of the fairly normal sleep I feel like I had. That’s a nice feeling, one that coffee will supplement very nicely and I imagine bring me to a standard awake and functioning baseline. It has been hard to maintain any kind of perspective over the last week or so. That one night (Monday…?) really did a number on me, but that’s just one night out of the last eight to have been unsuccessful. That is quite good, I think. Without wanting to leap back into premature hootings of success, this is definitely better than I either imagined that I’d enjoyed in the last week or really expected to. Yesterday and today I’m up at a proper seven o’clock again, and even though my body plainly wants to rise at around nine or ten, that’s just not compatible with doing any of the things I want to. One of those things is more writing, or a return to writing. As a result I feel dopily upbeat, and I’m content to gaze out of the window at the cats delving into bushes and enraging magpies. Oh! I saw two foxes on the way home from improv last night, both within minutes of home. One, a beautiful slender beastie and the other with a big fat brush tail. It’s been years – maybe lockdown – since I last saw foxes near home and I am quite delighted. I still remember being properly spooked by turning around in our garden one night many years ago and finding a big fox standing about six feet behind me, just looking at me. All very good.
In the absence of proper motivation I’m going to follow my friend David’s suggestion and go back through the fifty short stories I wrote earlier this year and write the second part of each – assuming I didn’t kill all the characters and raze their world to ash. That began yesterday with A Village to Kill, Part Two, the first part of which I wrote a million years ago on 5th January this year. The fun thing about returning to these tales is that I mostly don’t remember them since they were almost all written first thing in the morning, and with zero preparation or planning (my absolute favourite way to do everything). Since at least half the challenge I find in writing is finding a story that incites me to explore it, with all of these I’ll have established something to pick up and carry on, be it character, story or at least voice.
What an incredibly long half-year, no doubt stretched out a bit by messing with my sleep habits. But as I run up towards my forty-fifth birthday in a couple of months, I feel as if I’ve finally put the work into establishing a decent framework for wellbeing and the potential for creative work. I’m certainly fitter than I have been for a good while, even if my cursed asthmatic lungs aren’t really pulling their weight. Not a lot I can do about that, alas, but they do appear to still convey at least most of the oxygen I need to my brain so I guess they’ll have to do. I am profoundly disappointed by the lack of cool bionic devices that allow us to be plug and play cyborgs.
Sometimes I feel as if I’ve spent an awful lot of this war lying in rusty, blood-tainted water. Maybe that’s just what all wars are: a whole lot of terrified running around, falling over and praying for it all to be over. Sure meshes with my experience. The hunt for octals never seemed to end. We’d spend a day wiping out another village and receive orders to move on to the next. It’s one of the benefits of rank, I guess, to be filled in on a bit more of the plan than us at the bottom. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. Watching the lieutenant receiving the next update in our mission plans makes me suspect it’s just another burden. All I want to be able to believe is that someone else is planning this war, because from my eye line all we’re doing is eradicating the countryside and everything in it.
We are somewhat depleted as a force. It’s unavoidable but we also haven’t been reinforced since that little shitshow a month ago where our own damn arobot took out a quarter of the squad. Friendly fire. These arobots are great to have in a firefight, as long as they’re on your side. As we trudge cross-country to our next mission I’ve settled into a long stride that never quite puts me in front of our remaining arobot. We had five to begin with, now we’re down to the one that didn’t go mad, kill its teammates or get ground under the teeth of an octal tank. Out here you bond in confusingly deep and intimate ways with your fellow soldiers, but with enough space that when they die you don’t go immediately to pieces – all that pain and grief can be stored up for when we finally get out of here. It’s not that you don’t bond with arobots – of course you do: slap a smiley face on a toaster and you’ll greet it good morning and thank it for burning your bread – it’s that they don’t seem to bond back. I know they aren’t people, but neither are cats or cars and I like both of mine well enough. Trust them… Well, I’m walking behind it aren’t I? I’d been calling this one “Clock” for a while. It needs a name, otherwise it’s just “that arobot over there” which is fuck all use in a fight. Anyway, “Clock”, from how it looks around, just stops and then its head clicks round in a full circuit with – I swear – twelve stops in all. Drove me crazy until I actually counted because the pattern was familiar yet seemed out of place on the neck of a humanoid robot. The other arobots didn’t do that, or at least not the same way. They might come out of a factory somewhere back home, but mould isn’t the same.
Following Clock turned out to be a good call on my part. Great thing about the arobots is that they don’t get tired, their attention doesn’t fade after six hours clumping across broken fields and over fucked up hedges. They’re just on all the time. So even though I didn’t spot the octals lurking in the copse ahead, I sure noticed the arobot react. I hit the ground with a yell, at approximately the same time one of the octal velocity weapons turned the top of the lieutenant into a bloody rainbow arching backwards for a hundred metres before fading into nothing. I like to think it was my strangled scream that saved most of our lives. We were in a bad place, caught while crossing the most open part of the field. Not that we’d had much of a choice since artillery had torn up every scrap of cover for the last half mile, covering the whole area with hedgerow turned into sharp chaff. Those same thorns and spikes of wood now stabbed me in every part of my body as I lay as flat as possible.
All the while, Clock, our last remaining arobot was moving. It’s genuinely difficult to grasp how their mission priorities work. They have the barest trace of interest in preserving human life, the mission is the thing. Although the lives of their squadmates are quite high up on the list, given that we’re often useful in accomplishing the mission. They also develop preferences and “habits”, yet more terminology that makes you feel like they’re people. Machines have protocols and logic gates, people have favourite colours and hobbies. Clock likes things to happen in a certain order, and it takes badly to other factors messing up that order. Much like its baffling choice of wearing a tartan shawl around it’s shoulders underneath the pack and armour, that preference is something the rest of the squad had wisely not fucked about with. There were plenty of stories about arobots going wild when command started restricting their habits and preferences. They both follow orders perfectly and are simply too lethal to impose whimsical orders on about what colours are acceptable in the field.
That shawl of Clock’s whirled and whipped about as the arobot charged the octals. Not a suicidal cavalry charge, it was a lot more acrobatic than that. I guess Clock had already figured out all the firing trajectories that the octals had from the little cluster of trees and was just moving between them, but from the ground it looked like dancing. We figured out what it was up to and started laying down some cover, pumping incineration fire into the copse ahead. That stopped when Clock – midway through something between a pirouette and flinging a spear – very precisely turned its head back to us at a weird sardonic angle, like “really?”, as if we were screwing up its plan. We made awkward eye contact with each other. It’s hard to shrug when you’re pressed into mud and brambles. So we just watched Clock do whatever it had decided to do. Oh, and checked all the other directions we could have been vulnerable from – we’re not bad soldiers, but arobots do have a weird effect on a squad, making you feel both indestructible and very, very fragile at the same time.
Clock reached the copse, despite the remaining octals focusing all their attention on him. Velocity spray arced around him, evaporating the ground it struck into columns of fading light. It had killed at least half a dozen just on the way across the field between us with unerring aim even as Clock tumbled and twisted. The octals obviously knew it would be all over once the arobot got its hands on them. I was relieved to see it didn’t individually decapitate them. I wasn’t ready for another fight with an arobot and I doubted there were enough left of us to survive that, especially after seeing Clock go into action. It had never done anything like that before, that combination of graceful balletic movement. The longer they survived, the weirder they got. But Clock just shot them all, left them smoking in the woods, then gestured impatiently for us to catch up.
Just behind the copse (or what was left of it) was a pristine octal half-track. Basically a jeep with caterpillar tracks. I mean, they’d have been tracks if it weren’t octal. The slippery, rubbery loop that wound around the wheels wasn’t what we’d have built but it did the same thing. Clock was already in the driving seat, one fist plunged into the weird biological interface the octals had instead of a wheel. We all piled in, grateful for the opportunity to pluck thorns from our clothing and skin. With a ticking scan around us, Clock drove us out of there. A somewhat worrying thought arose: with the lieutenant now dead, had the arobot decided it was our commanding officer? And was that an arobot preference I even remotely wanted to challenge?
Wow, it’s powerfully bright outside. Or eyes have grown mole-like and crave only the darkness of sleep. A bit of both I think. Well, I feel a lot better than yesterday which is a good start on the day. That’s at least partly because I managed to express a whole range of things last night which I’ve been struggling to articulate while bring knotted up inside my head. As ever, simply talking is useful and does a lot for making me feel better. By talking I obviously mean writing. This journal entry is often the end of feeling however I do, not the beginning or the middle; it’s a record of how I’ve been, not always how I am.
It’s main benefit is in making me feel thoroughly sick of myself and perversely intent on doing something better. So I was finally awake at seven again this morning, despite hearing the alarm and thinking… “I could just fuck that off.” And I could have done, even though I’ve set the volume to continuously ramp up until it sounds like I’m in the middle of a thunderstorm under my eye mask. So yeah, I’m up and exercised and writing this and it’s barely eight o’clock (a very slow wander towards exercise this morning). I don’t know what I do with my legs while I’m asleep but the goblet squats were an absolute bastard.
Fundamentally, things feel lighter and brighter today. I’m not psyched about being on an emotional see-saw; I don’t like real see-saws, they make my teeth hurt (same is true with swings, I don’t know what that’s about, but it really makes them feel nauseatingly loose when I swing back and forth or up and down; pretty sure they’re OK the rest of the time). It’s a wearing thing, in its semi-unpredictability and its effect on all forms of progress. It is important to me that I can get my work done, that I can do the fun things I want to and enjoy them. I have always had a strong work ethic (I’m not counting uni, I had no work ethic of any kind there), and I feel proper responsibility to undertake my commitments and do them well. It pains me when that quite low bar feels out of reach. I have various other commitments and when they all feel too hard I feel like I’m falling behind in a race I never consented to join.
Gotta get shit done, even if the stuff that needs to get done is just sitting around and reading. I also think I’ve been reading my current book for too long. Even though it’s very good and I’m enjoying it, it seems like weeks have passed watching the percentage bar on my Kindle approach seventy. Soon. I made myself build a pretty little LEGO model last night so I could feel like I’d done something yesterday, and it helped. Creating something – anything – every day is good.
I’ve been avoiding doing this all day. It doesn’t help that I’m not getting to sleep on time and then not waking up when my alarm goes off, thus neatly knackering my nice little morning routine and meaning I’ve had fewer hours awake when bedtime looms once more. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle and it’s already getting me down. It’s not the only thing getting me down.
I knew, when I started keeping this little mental health track journal, that while it might be quite tedious to recount feeling basically fine, it’s both much more interesting and much harder to write at all when things are not so good. Writing is my version of talking. Despite being one of the co-hosts of a podcast called We Are What We Overcome which is explicitly about encouraging people to talk about their feelings, I am not very good about it. I can feel it like sealant filling me up from the base of my stomach, expanding and clamping shut every part of me, cutting me off from my words. So I write instead – it’s the same essential self-expression, even if it feels like cheating. It also benefits from having no pauses, no awkward ums and ahs (which I just cannot bear in my own speech), none of the emotional agony of transmitting words through resisting flesh into the air. No interruptions, no feedback good or bad, no need to check in with who I’m busy burdening and ensure they’re neither overreacting (perhaps to an offhand comment about just ending it all). In text I can clarify as I wish, qualify without distraction.
It’s a very selfish method of communication, and wildly self-indulgent, but is one of the only forms I’ve ever truly been comfortable with. It’s not like I lack the vocabulary, emotional or literary but there really is something that wires my jaw shut. Maybe I don’t trust myself to be honest when I speak, or complete – having someone responding breaks the flow. Perhaps. When I was going through counselling, in contrast to CBT, my counsellor’s main aim was to give me space to talk, not to sympathise, not to interrupt or clarify unless it seemed important. I didn’t like that much, but I guess it came close to my ideal situation which is essentially a police interrogation suite, with a nice metal table in chair where I can chat to myself and the two-way mirror, pretending there’s no one on the other side of it. And who knows, maybe there isn’t.
When I was a teenager I discovered that no one will notice if you’re suffering (that sounds overly harsh and is not intended to be so brutal a criticism of my family and friends at the time – I mask and pretend very well), and no matter how you scream internally, bleed invisibly under your clothes and want to be dead forever, no one will see it unless you let them. That hasn’t stopped being true. Even living hand in pocket with someone I love for a quarter of a century hasn’t broken through those verbal dams constructed inside me during my teenage years. And if I don’t splash a little water over the top (this is a terrible metaphor but I’m enjoying it; the water is this journal, in case it’s not as transparent an analogy as one might wish for) then I remain walled away. And drowning, presumably, in the reservoir above (maybe not such a bad metaphor after all…) It takes a vast effort, and being challenged and breaking to break my way out of the concrete that encases me (I guess I got tossed in the reservoir or something), but even then I’m not as free as I am here.
That is also what this journal is for. It can, if I wish, be a way of beginning a conversation with myself or someone else about subjects I cannot bring up through my body into voice. It’s not necessarily an invitation though. It’s public because otherwise I won’t do it; open because otherwise I won’t acknowledge it; available because otherwise I am not. All this of course is merely me dancing around how I feel today, burying feelings in performance, battering the present back with words.
Yesterday was not great, today is the same or worse. Hard to measure isn’t it? I’m stopping, just freezing as I try to proceed with the day. If it’s routine and autonomic I’m probably doing OK, but if it requires thought and consideration I appear to be fucked. That’s desperately inconvenient this week. There’s only so much staring ahead while I fall backwards out of my body into a darker realm, leaving the puppet flesh fingers hanging over the keyboard. It’s that reservoir I’m sinking back into, though I doubt that metaphor’s going to broach any further deep understanding. Depression’s no particular stranger, and I have to be honest with myself that I experience this even when I’m on my minimal sleeping dose of amitriptyline, that the really bad patch which led to me beginning this mental health track was while I was doing everything, taking everything I have done for years. I always figured that they stopped me from being worse, but it’s possible they did nothing at all bar helping me sleep most of the time. Is this sudden decline even related to my ongoing experiment in stopping the drugs? I have no control; I lack data; the plural of anecdote is not data, etc.
Let’s characterise that falling away from the world: it’s deadness. I don’t feel sad; occasionally frustrated and disappointed; but it’s not a feeling of sadness. It’s a retreat from everything – you’re all about half a mile away, too far off to care about, too distant to engage with, just out of reach. And in that place of deadness is a lack of feeling, a lack that can all too easily be filled with getting absolutely wasted, because that at least involves being present even if it’s in an altered state. And all consciousness is a flux of states, everything we do flips a bunch of chemical switches. It’s why going for a walk, meditation, reading and punching the wall until your heart hammers all take us to the same place of calm and quiet. The drugs do it too, so does booze, just busy rotating the self so a different window into the soul is visible through your eyes, and so we can look out from a different room. Somehow this is like the magical Faraway tree, except it’s the self that emerges from those terrifying realms sliding around at the top of the forest. And in this place of absence, everything is impossible. It would be so much easier to never have been.
Yet I persist. All this will pass, miserable though it might be in the meantime, harrowing and tedious in equal measure for my loved ones. For me, I can’t separate how I feel – or rather unfeel – from the challenges of sleep and the breaking routine that I thought would protect me. It feels like failure, but I remember that it did not feel this way two days ago, and may not in two days’ time.
Fuck, that’s a lot of words to say virtually nothing. Right now I don’t want to sleep because I don’t want to wake up.
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