Some sort of manifesto

As I sit here on the stairs thinking to write, forcing each quaver in to my mouth for the crisp to dissolve or crunch away, I am struck with a sense of foreboding determination. I came home and I was so hungry but lacking the willpower to cook anything I ate two bowls of cereal, using up that extra carton of soya milk I bought by accident. Kill two birds? Not the right idiom. Like when I cocked my eyebrow in that way no one else can do apart from on the silver screen, at my friend across the pub table and pronounced, ‘So he’s quite the dark stallion.’ Meaning horse. As I crumple the yellow packet between my twisting fingers, I am doing sums in my head. I have exactly 9 hours I spend at work, 1 hour for lunch, which I completely waste doing nothing, 30% of which is eating. I bore myself eating my lunch, eating the same thing I have cooked every day for the past month now, too afraid to try something different in case it comes out horrible like that baltic curry I tried to muster (and from a jar). Either way that’s 9 hours gone. That leaves me 15 hours in a day. Now if I try to scrape back the equal amount of time I am not at work for myself i.e. to do waking, living things, then that would leave me 6 hours to fall asleep in. And that’s if I really squeeze everything I want to do in to my 9 hours, which has to, by nature, include things I don’t care about doing like putting out the bins, tapping in through commuter barriers, buying soya milk, etc. That’s not even including all the miscellaneous things I sort of want to/have to do in my play time, like answering WhatsApp threads and watching YouTube videos. 

So I pace it up the stairs.

I leave the cereal bowl behind me on the table - I’ll clean it up later - I open this laptop and start padding for words to appear on this screen (a lot like the screen I have to stare at for 9 hours at work), but that’s my bread, you know how people used to say wholesome things like earning your bread and butter to mean doing an honest day’s work? Yeah, well I don’t remember, but I still get the gist. Everyone’s got to make a living and I spend all day looking at brands. We don’t eat as much bread any more but we sure consume a lot of brands and that gave me a job, in the end, I’m grateful for our gastronomic capitalist habits in providing me with a wage. I feel like I’m writing some sort of manifesto, just so that I can get my head stuck back down to the thing that I want my head to be stuck to. And that’s write.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Shove the bacon buttie in my face and absorb it instantly.

Things I will not miss about the Fringe are: the wet drips which fall from the grim underside of that bridge in Cowgate, the stairs (that are everywhere), and flyers.

Hungover days and the restless nights that come with drinking too much, and then the Scottish fried goods and the endless walking over from New to Old parts of town. It never stopped not even in the downpours or in the early morning, stuff just kept going on.

Lurching down steep steps, which I’d only just clambered up half an hour ago to collect some pants I’d left in the print storage room (spare pants - because I’m always prepared - or because I forgot that I’d left my pants in a back room of a venue and thought before catching the train “outta here” that I should probably collect them).

Sweating. Ski jacket. Prepared for all-weather but not for all this weather meaning the sunshine we’ve been getting. In Scotland? I know right.

But the upside of all this traipsing by a banister is, or, were the shows. I managed to see a heck of a lot of good shows. So here’s some I remember the most jotted down for you:

Le Gateau Chcocolat who is a big black beautiful opera singer told an achingly honest tale of a young man who grapples with depression, being gay and being black. The lighting design was the lighting design to beat all others. His voice is ridiculously amazing.

The show which dedicated it’s heart and soul to the artist and wife of Beatle, Yoko Ono, titled appropriately Oh No! by Jamie Wood was brimming with creative nurture. The most enticing bit was when Jamie curated some Bagism on stage and invited a member of the audience to get in a bag with him and get completely naked. The minutes of silence that ensued after this innocent plea was met with awkwardness until a fly lad of 23 got up, crossed the stage and entered the bag/blanket with him; they both followed to get completely butt-naked beneath the sheet and then continued to talk about whether said young lad had ever fallen in love before, and what it means to love a person. Performance art + comedy = happy fun.

LetLuce in Sea Men (A Naval Tale) was a hilarious and sometimes trippy ride in to the world of two clown-character comics who’s unfurling narrative about a fish who wants to go clubbing on River Island and a pirate captain who wants to drink the Potion of the Ocean (said in an elongated Brummie accent) was just the bomb. The nuts. Mighty Boosh would have taken their hats off to the pair.

The stand-up that I enjoyed the most was Liam Williams with his second stand-up hour: Bonfire Night. A pretty neat and of course, damnably clever hour to follow up his last show (Capitalism). Lots of self-hating and millennial naval-gazing, you just have to laugh or else you’d cry.


They’re my picks and in hindsight, I did have a good time and managed to tone my arse from all the stairs and got a surprising tan out of the outdoor flyering ordeal so, all’s well that ends well.