Welcome to my blog which I suppose is already half-way through its preordained life. My reader is supposed to be having a weekly grandstand view of my increasing success through which s/he can become impressed and inspired. The hitch to the plan so far has been the ‘reality’ element of the enterprise for in that reality I don’t appear to have made any progress whatsoever and my income from this 40 week exercise has been exactly nil. Only the fact that I always give up is stopping from giving up.
Talking of follies…My visitors over the last fortnight have all commented on my front door which until recently was a badly painted council installed piece of hardboard that has somehow survived thirty years of being slammed by teenagers. Thinking it was letting in phenomenal draughts, I enquired about the price of fixing it and was given a quote of £1100 for two doors and a set of windows in the kitchen. Of course I had no intention to pay out that sort of money, especially as once I’d seen that what you got was one of those white PVC doors which seem so characterless. I was telling a friend about this quote and he said, I thought, ‘oh, I could get you a really nice oak door for £170’. Quite how that turned into £545, I don’t know but it seemed churlish to say anything after he did such a good job.
“It’ll take a lot to bash that door through,” said Roger proudly. Which is true. The person most likely to try and kick the door open is me. Last time I locked myself out, I immediately became frantic and furious rather than calm and rational, not least because my calm and rational props (tea and tobacco) were in the house which is the middle one of three terraced boxes. After I moaned at my kids for slamming the door at night, they took to accessing the house by climbing onto the porch balcony and pushing open the front bedroom window. This I could never do, so on being locked out of the front my only alternative is to hope I’ve left a door or window open at the back. I can only get to the back by either going through my neighbour’s front-door or going around the side of her house to the back garden. When the houses were built, there was only a token gate between the two houses at the back but recently I had that replaced by an implacable wall so when I went around to my neighbour’s garden, I could only get over to mine by pole-vaulting over the fence that divides the two gardens. A branch of rotting buddleia made for a poor pole and the brambles on the pawlonia stump did little to soften the landing. Luckily I’d left the kitchen window so with the destruction of only one teapot I was able to climb back into my sanctuary. It occurred to me then that next time I would just break down the door. Now I won’t.
Another folly will probably turn out to be the Day of the Dead that I’ve stumbled into thinking I’m going to organize. Beware of ideas, really. They have lives of their own, selves of their own, their own consciousness and desires; they are the succubae that take over your soul, they are the demons to be exorcised. Arguable our memetic inheritance is even more mutated than our genetic one.
Certainly its chances of being a financial folly are clearly adumbrated in the opening moves which have seen me spend over £500 already on a notion, on a half-baked creation. It began in September when I was writing this and wondering how to place articles about death in magazines. Then I drifted off and came back with this big idea which actually is a total diversion from what I was planning. Now it frightens me. I am not a doer, not that sort of doer. I like to write about Kashmir Shaivism and make-up funny stories. I have no passion for this Day of the Dead, it is just an idea that is using me. I could stop it now, should stop it, haven’t stopped it. This week I’ve had business cards printed and a few letter-headed papers; in a while I’ll pick up 800 fliers designed by the world’s worst artist, me, for an event which doesn’t really exist. I should hand these out in Glastonbury on Saturday and in London on Sunday. All too too much. I must escape into empty space, Archarya Peter Wilberg and the Cosmic Vibrators from Kashmir.
But no. No space for the engaged. Amazingly the printer changed my artwork to produce something reasonable, so thus armed I decided I best strike while the iron was hot and took myself off to visit the Southbank Death Festival in the hope that I might, despite my nature and all past experience, somehow ‘connect’ with something or someone. To make life easier, I thought, I would get the cheapest train, £30 return from Yeovil Junction to Waterloo, leaving 7.20am returning 21.20. Yeovil is 45 minutes’ drive from here. I allowed an extra 15 to park the car and collect the ticket from the station. What I hadn’t allowed for was the presence of two stations in Yeovil, or in fact, out of Yeovil, neither of which is consistently signposted. As a result the train was in when I arrived at the right station. Then the coins wouldn’t go in the parking meter so I had to take a piece of paper and phone somewhere while on the train – which didn’t work because I can’t hear anything on my phone and it was an automated response system that kept responding extraneous noises. I hadn’t time to collect my ticket from the machine so I jumped on the train only to be deposited off again six minutes later at the next station when the ticket inspector noticed I’d actually booked a ticket for the 7.50 train.
I did get there in the end and although in two days I only rid myself of three leaflets and one business card, the actual festival was mostly pretty good and quite inspiring. On the Friday night I went to see the Kulunka Teatro put on a performance of mime, called Andre and Dorine, in the Purcell Room. It was amazing, absolutely wonderful. There were moments of silence in which you could hear 400 people holding their breath and trying not to cry noisily. Moving, funny, unbearably painful, just fantastic.
Which is a positive place to finish.
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