Mankind

Suddenly writing when you haven’t done it for a while is an odd experience. I’ll know by the end of this whether writing about random words is like the proverbial riding a bike, or whether it’s like riding an elephant: you remember the fundamentals but when it comes to trying to actually do it suddenly its prohibitively terrifying. I’ve been away a long time. When I say that, clearly I mean in the figurative sense, because like everyone else I’ve been absolutely nowhere this year. But in my head I’ve been everywhere, including a lot of bad places – but before you start to fear for the levity of this piece, nowhere I couldn’t get back from. Except I’m locked out of one room. It’s marked “Concentration.” It doesn’t matter how hard I try to get in, the door won’t budge. I don’t know if it’s locked, or if the frame has swollen up in the unseasonably warm weather, or if there are dextrous antelope on the other side hitting nails into the door to keep it shut, but the result is the same: I can’t access Concentration. But I will admit, I’ve only tried the door I can get to via Work. It’s the most obvious one, has the shiniest handle and the clearest signage, but I need to try a different way in. Now, someone once told me that there’s a crawl space under Work called Silliness. Most people go there and just twit around, but if you stick with it you can eventually get to a trapdoor under Concentration and work your way up from there. And once you’re in Concentration, you’re in, and it doesn’t matter how you got there. So while the world burns and mankind throws itself into the flames of chaos, here I am writing a silly thing in the hope that I can concentrate long enough to achieve something, anything, no matter how utterly worthless, as long as it lets me use my random word and possibly mention “squirrel sex”, because I just wanted to. So there we are. And here I am. It worked. I’m 350 words in and I haven’t checked my phone or looked out of the window or wondered what I’m having for dinner (though I am a little peckish, hmmm). The quality – which, let’s be honest, has seldom been the purpose of this endeavour – might not stand the test of time, but the test of mind has been stood upon, and it didn’t squish. Hurrah. Now, what’s for dinner?

Impossible

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett wrote that:

"It's OK! I'll keep it clean!"

"The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them..."

What Sir Terry didn't then expand on was that, to steal another (unrelated) Sir TP quote: "the process is called living."

Life is impossible at times. If you tried to look at it as a whole it would swiftly overwhelm you. And fortunately, the human brain knows this and does it's best to help you. When you get to the point in life when - terrifyingly - you could just about work out how the rest of it will pan out, you'll have forgotten so much of what you previously knew that you're still only getting the Executive Summary*.

That was a slightly morbid opening to a random word that could have had me talking about breakdancing unicorns and talking soap. And I would much rather be in the mood to discuss pirouetting elderberry fish, even if it meant looking up how to spell 'pirouetting.' But it's been a tough few weeks and I'm feeling like it would be impossible to be entirely lighthearted. 

But if the soap could talk, perhaps it would offer some wisdom. And if one breaks life into a series of horribly hard tasks, and then into tricky jobs, and then into merely tough moments, and then finally into grains of time, it's entirely possible that some of those grains will be happy, and dust your life with enough joy to make the big picture worthwhile. 

Because while it's sometimes tempting to conclude that it's all not worth the effort, it's impossible to know. 
* I forgot the name of someone I've known for more than 8 years today. I had to look them up on a website to put the name back in my brain. It was fairly humiliating, but - based on this evidence - I'll have forgotten about it by Tuesday. 

Role Play - My 5 Favourite Parts

This is a self-indulgent series, briefly taking over "Tramplings" in the absence of a better place for it. But most blogs are fairly self-indulgent, so now that this disclaimer is duly deposited I shall move on without further apology.

 I'm in the post-show glow/blues (take your pick) of a successful run as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. Frankly, it was a blast, every bit as much fun as I thought it would be when I signed on. It was, I reflected, likely to be in my top five parts - if only I could agree on the other four and which order they would be in.

So I had a trawl back through my theatrical history and worked out what they would be. The unlucky sixth was poor Captain Stanhope, but rather than ignore him I thought I'd give him some time in this intro; although I now seem to thrive playing oddballs, misfits, eccentrics and - in one case at least - a psychopath, it was the psychologically damaged but otherwise pretty-damned-straight Captain that set me on the path to the roles I treasure.

My list will also be unkind to the King of the Faeries himself. I've played Oberon twice and adore doing it, but if I'm honest the productions - a surprisingly cool VI Form effort when I was 17 and a far less cool foresty frolic in 2009 where I was forced to dress as a genie - don't really merit that much reminiscing. My list has forcibly ignored external pleasures and pains - I don't want to talk about fellow cast mates and the influence they had offstage, although inevitably that's always part of the fun (or otherwise), as I'd inevitably forget someone important and - despite the likelihood that no-one will read this - they'd get marginally miffed.

So, Stanhope. Until Journey's End, I'd mostly been cast as hilarious wacky buffoons, such as Dr Pinch in Comedy of Errors, or soppy idiots, like Cléante in The Miser. This was largely my own fault, since I had a long history of wanting to be funny. I was always on the look-out for any onstage silliness that I could get involved in, and for all that they say comedy is harder to get right than drama, it's also comforting and reassuring, because you can tell if you were doing it right.

Then a slightly histrionic turn* as Edmund the Bastard in King Lear, agreed to as a rare concession to being in a theatre group rather than an itinerant thesp (they needed men, I was one) got me an at least theoretical Shakespeare role, but most importantly drew me to the attention of Andy, who would eventually direct Journey's End. He contacted me months before he got anywhere near it, getting his (masculine) ducks in a row to make sure he could actually deliver on his promises to the group of putting on a play that needed several men, and good men at that. For some reason he'd decided (in the absence of any evidence that I was aware of) that I would be a good fit for Denis Stanhope, a broken 23 year old (I was 36) army captain in the front lines of the Great War, who was just about functioning in the face of constant death and violence.

Within the space of weeks I had to unlearn all my bad habits - silly voices, even sillier faces - and try to understand what would engage an audience without my usual box of schticks. I'm looking back 11 years, so forgive me if I'm foggy on the details, but I recall trying to use my style in reverse: pick a voice, stick to it, pick a face, keep it as a mask that only cracks when things are bad. I remember nicking Nickolas Grace's posh, drawn out accent as a basis, largely because no-one (including me) can ever work out where it comes from and because it works quite well for patronising people (it came in useful again for Don Juan) and bossing them around. Keeping my face still had added benefits - I was 36 playing 23, and nothing gives away the wrinkles (and flakes the stage make-up) like a good old facial expression. Presumably I delved a little deeper than that into this shell-shocked character, able to live with what he’d become until confronted by an unspoilt vision of his old self, but I’d be retro-engineering the part if I tried to explain anything here. I was a bit lost without laughs, hoping that whatever I was doing would turn out to be sufficient to match the skills of the other actors and – a stand out star here – the magnificent set that Incognito Theatre’s John Savage had created, with its tons of gravel and cleverly self-collapsing structure for the devastating final scene.

There are funny characters in Journey's End (2nd Lieutenant Trotter, for example, and Private Mason, the blueprint for the version of Baldrick seen in Blackadder Goes Forth), but - although he was once played by Noel Coward - Stanhope is not amongst them, especially once he finally loses his self-control in the face of innocent young school friend Raleigh who arrives having asked to be assigned to Stanhope. Stanhope's disintegration, made worse when he is effectively forced to sacrifice his men in a hopeless cause, was short on hilarity and therefore on the instant gratification of the audience reaction (apart from the few audience members who couldn't cope with the constant fog of senior service cigarettes that we were somehow allowed to puff away at for the whole two hours, and who reacted with impressively persistent hacking coughs).

Despite this, despite the fact that when required to break down in tears at the death of my right-hand man and best pal "Uncle" I had to turn my back on the audience so they couldn't see my resolutely unmoist visage, and despite having to drink so much fake whisky (peach ice tea) that I was in danger of bursting, I realised that laughs weren't everything.

* although I did enjoy the round of applause I got one night (I suspect I woke up the audience after King Lear’s lengthy opening scene) my Director proudly told me it attracted one comment from acting stalwart: “I thought Stephen overdid it a bit”. She was delighted to tell me this, because “I told him I asked you to play it that way.” I think she thought I’d be happy about this story.

Protruded

I'm in the middle of a health crisis.

Of course, for me, a health crisis is me thinking that I should have signed up to a local doctor. Every time this happens, the possibility gets seriously considered and then not acted upon, until the next time I have some unspecified malfunction and realise I still don't have a local GP.

On this occasion, a mole on my neck is suddenly very hard and sore, and probably not the sort of thing I should be ignoring. In all likelihood I caught it on something and its just damaged, but I've been repeatedly warned that there's the outside possibility of melanoma when things go wrong with moles, and now this one has protruded a little further than comfortable I should get it seen.

This will involve me phoning by old GP and desperately trying to remember my old postcode from 5 years ago when asked for my address. I just hope they don't have a ruthlessly efficient admin system that long ago clocked the "not known as this address" returns to sender and deleted me from the database.

The mole is on the back of my neck, so I've been reduced to taking pictures of it. It looks angry and sore, like a mole that's just lost at Monopoly using real money and been informed that the guy being the Banker was cheating and has run off with its life savings. However, it being on the back of my neck, I haven't looked at it very often, so for all I know it always looks pissed off. It can't be much fun being stuck on my neck. Even a bent game of Monopoly would be a happy diversion.

UPDATE

It all ended up making a weird kind of sense. I never made it to the GPs, handily, but the mole saga didn't just go away. Well, actually that's exactly what happened.

It turns out (I was going to write "transpires," but then I remembered this is supposed to be a fun blog, not a policy paper) that the reason the mole was so upset was that I'd slathered freeze gel on it in an attempt to soothe a stiff neck. The mole, clearly preferring tropical climates, had gone into a massive sulk and started playing up. Eventually I got fed up of its angry surface rubbing against my t-shirt and stuck a plaster over it. And that, dear reader, is the last I ever saw of Maurice the Mole.

By the time I removed the plaster a couple of days later that what had previously protruded was now nothing more than a brown circle on my skin, like one of the squashed dogs in A Fish Call Wanda. A few days beyond that, he'd gone, with only the slightest speck of brown to show he had ever existed. Admittedly I was in Geneva at the time, so I can't really blame him for running off.

Now, I have no idea of the science behind a disappearing mole. I'd been told - many years ago by my Mum, I think - that moles could be "frozen off," but had no idea of what that actually entailed. I always imagined something being ladled out of a pot that smoked like dry ice before being carefully applied. However, I can now state - anecdotally - that smearing a blue gel that smells of eucalyptus will have the same effect.

I'm not recommending it though. There's something so disconcerting about a part of your body squishing flat and disappearing, even if it's a mole. I shall be careful with my remaining subterranean mammals, just in case one day I need them to dig me out of prison. Or Geneva.





 

Article

I thought I’d revisit my old random word generator to see what it offered me: I got ‘article’, which doesn’t sound like the spark of life for a surreal rampage through my memories, but does seem fairy appropriate for a return to regular blogging.

I say regular – if this remains the most up-to-date post come July 3^rd feel free to slap me.

Even ‘article’ was a bit of a cheat; the first word offered was “brightness” which for all its light and fluffy connotations seemed even more vague and unhelpful, so I skipped over it, thereby trashing all the rules that I originally set up for Trampling (but since I broke them fairly solidly by not writing every day I probably shouldn’t worry too much).

Of course when I started The Trampling of Small Pigs there wasn’t much opportunity for writing in my life. The most exciting things I got to write were updates to government departments on how their money had been spent, which afforded fewer opportunities for yellow hippos and talking oysters than I would like. Now I get to write articles about human rights abuse in central America – strangely I’m still short on the talking oysters, but nevertheless it’s a marked improvement. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been back for a while?

But as with everything, as soon as you start doing it for work it becomes hard work. If I was paid to drink Irn Bru I’d resent it by day three and start dreaming of Tizer. Frankly I’m perplexed by the right-wing tabloids: if thousands of “loafers” are indeed being paid by the state to not work, there ought to be an epidemic of volunteering as not working starts to feel like far too much hard work for all these apparently work-shy people.

But that might just be me.

Of course, to go off piste for a moment, the government would then sanction them for volunteering because if you’re helping raise money to stop old people from being made into kites, or whatever, you’re clearly not looking for jobs that don’t exist, and where would we be then?

So here I am, blogging ‘for fun’ and hoping that it actually is.

This article is a gentle reintroduction for me. Hopefully the benefits will become plain if I keep up some sort of momentum (keeping the Jeremy Corbyn of my motivation in charge of the hapless political party of my creativity). I don’t imagine this post itself will attract rave reviews, but since I don’t have an audience, at least it can’t put anyone off. See you “all” soon.

Noisily

[Due to general incompetence, I'm publishing this two years late. That's right. Two years. Actually, two and bit. Sorry about that.]

The world does not fit nicely into our plans. Things that seem a good idea at the time are often revealed as wildly optimistic hopes. In hoping for a lie in on my holiday, I have been made to feel that I was counting on a golden swan to deliver my shopping or firmly believing that one of my legs is actually getting younger while the rest of me ages.

Though I'm pretty sure that one of my legs *is* ageing faster than the other one.

I'm in Edinburgh performing in a play called The War of the Waleses, in which I play Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair. It's enormous fun to act in (and hopefully to watch), but it does have the slight draw back of going up at 10:05pm every night. We finish at 11:30ish, and we're at least 30 mins walk from our digs in leafy surburbia, so the earliest I could get to bed would be midnight, and that's ignoring the residual adrenaline rush of performing in front of more than 6 people and the siren voices of whisky bars. In addition to that, go to bed at 12 and my body will assume that 10:50 is the top of the gentle slope to unconsciousness, just when I need to be bouncing on as Blair and dishing out the 1996 conference speech.

So, the simple solution is just to play fast and loose with the old body clock and shift everything onto my own personal time zone.   Jet laggedly zigzagging my hours into a new format should be simple - we all do it at least twice a year. I'll put my own clocks back a couple of hours. What could be more simple?

Me, it seems.  If it wasn't awkward enough sharing a double bed with Alistair Campbell, who seems to have shifted *his* personal time zone enough to have him hanging around in the Caribbean, the good burghers of Edin have decided that the paving slabs on our said leafy crescent need replacing. For some reason, paving slabs need urgent attention at about 8:30 each morning, though you have to be nice to those precious grey squares, and you mustn't tire them out by replacing them after 2pm in the afternoon.

So, thanks to my zone shift, I now have workman digging up the road outside my room from 6:30 till noon. And then they fuck off home.

The most delightful aspect of this is that according to one of my cast mates, at least half the workmen are actually performing community service.  Probably for anti-social behaviour.

Bastards.

Reason & Sanity

Cheating, me? It's just that my random word generator, Watch Out for Snakes, is back! And oddly, the last word before it died was Reason, and the first it's provided now it's back is Sanity. They seem all bedfellowy together, so I thought I'd do both.

I don't have very much reason to doubt my sanity. I might have a blog called The Trampling of Small Pigs, and my girlfriend would point out that I talk to our foster cat by mewing so much that I sometimes meow at other people by 'mistake', but other than that I'm boringly shorn of the signs of madness. Or even the CDs of Madness. Frankly I'm beginning to worry that middle age is making me sane. I haven't had the urge to write a novel about a giant, orange, shape-changing peanut that fights crime for years.

I realise that, rather facetiously, I'm confusing "reason & sanity" with "having an active imagination", though the link between the two has long been a source of conjecture. Or, y'know, something that people go on about. I think it's using phrases like "a source of conjecture" that is probably eating away at my playful imagination like acid. Or worms. Formal phraseology is like some like of parasite that takes over your brain and makes you spout more formal phraseology, like that fungus that rides ants to the top of grass stems and makes them explode all over their ant friends to spread its fungal evil. Just like that.

If I were to make that analogy in a meeting about learning materials or corporate social responsibility, perhaps I'd get that satisfying look of fear from some stiff looking individual with sad eyes and a bluetooth keyboard; instead I'd probably just mutter about 'developing appropriate linguistic cues to establish societal norms' and look stiff and sad-eyed while tapping at my wireless keyboard.

But it's lovely to have the snakes back. Maybe they can eat the worms.