It's been quite a ride.
The play went well, picking up a handful of four and five star reviews and a booking to play in London, which we did last week. There's a rumour we might be doing it in Dublin next year, which would be exciting. I've never been to Ireland.
After it was all over I went with Ricky Demarco to hear John Calder's talk about Beckett at the Book Festival. John had been very kind to me when I started out as a baby writer - possibly taking me more seriously than I took myself at the time. The talk was brilliant - with the added bonus of readings by the multi-talented and lovely Derek Watson, with whom I'm always threatening to have coffee, and whose bookshop I have not so far kept my promise to visit. They are going to be doing a longer version of the presentation at the Edinburgh Arts Club sometime in October, and I really hope I'll be able to go.
Just for a few hours it felt like the old days - seeing my former Scotsman colleague Catherine Lockerbie, who now directs the Book Festival, looking so good, and a host of other faces from the past, with the familiar tall mackintoshed figure of Jim Haynes completing the retro trip. Jim didn't remember me, which was OK. It's been almost 20 years since we last saw each other and more than that since I stayed at his atelier in Paris and helped him put up some bookshelves. Once he stopped the traffic in Prince's Street in the rush hour and hauled me off a bus to have coffee and catch up on nothing in particular, and another time we sat in Pizza Hut on the corner of North Bridge and the Royal Mile talking till they threw us out. But before that were all the years of awkward moments when we would find each other at the same play or party and have nothing to say to each other because we didn't actually know each other any better than we do now.
"Did we....?" Jim asked me about the old days, mildly curious.
"We had fun," I said. And we did.
It was even longer since I'd seen John Calder and I was sure he wouldn't remember me. Martin Belk bet me that he would. He remembered my face but not my name until I reminded him. Sheila Colvin was there too - a gracious doyenne of the Festival Press Office back then, and she hasn't changed a bit. I always think of her as rather like the Queen but more intellectual and more unequivocally Edinburgh.
As we milled about in the book-signing tent discussing the talk, Ricky said that he thought the greatest writers wrote from the depths of their disappointment about religion. I thought that was profound, and have been thinking about it sporadically ever since. I guess that if formal religion isn't a major issue, the depths of disappointment about anything one had expected to believe in and now questions or rejects could apply just as well. I quite often write when I'm happy, so there's probably no danger of being considered a great writer - a weighty responsibility avoided.
Then Ricky and I went for a sunset stroll over the Dean Bridge as he had to go to a meeting and I had some time to kill. I once saw a film of him from around 1969, bounding around the same streets and enthusing about their history. It was slightly surreal and deeply satisfying to walk the same pavements and get a personal snatch of that Demarco passion for our city as he became a tour guide once again just for my benefit and just because that's the kind of person he is.
The first week of September is always weird. I regard it as a personal New Year time, with the final weekend of August as a sort of summer Christmas, followed a week later by the end of the official Festival time in Edinburgh. A kind of non-week that feels as though the story has finished but the dream is still happening. It ain't over till it's over. New Year itself I mark with the Festival Fireworks - a last burst of magic and then it really IS over. Resolutions made, regrets lumped, reality faced, it's time to sharpen pencils and prepare for the year ahead.
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And then it really was over.
Everybody was grumpy and grim-faced after the circus left town. Brown patches on the grass where tents had parked, gutters full of flyers torn down but not quite swept away. Driech weather reminding us that autumn is almost upon us. Even the children seemed miserable... I passed a couple of small boys arguing about skateboards on my way home from a horrible meeting."C'mon," one was nagging the other, to a stony response. Finally he gave up. "Ach, I've had it wi' you!" He stomped down the street with his skateboard under his arm. "Dunno why I f**in' bother," he was muttering to himself, sending waves of anger and frustration radiating into the gloom.
What a relief to get to London, where Real Life has survived August intact and the sun was shining hot enough to burn skin.
So many nice people, such a lot of lovely food and coffee and such a beautiful moon.
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The show went well too - some people filmed it so I hope I'll be able to get a copy sometime. Hooked up with my new American friend Laura, who was promoting a series of cabaret shows at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden featuring acts from this and that side of the Pond. Introduced her to Martin... put two arty New Yorkers together and watch the rabbit - the Duracell Bunny doesn't get a look-in. It was funny.
Laura came to our show and a couple of days later I went to hers, which that night was Rick Skye's excellent one man show "A Slice Of Minnelli". This is a tour-de-force that looks at the start like a regular drag tribute and delivers so very much more. Wicked, funny and oh-so-clever without ever dissing the diva - it's a fine line and he trod it well, even in 6-inch heels. The night before I'd also met the show's producer, Neil, who lives in what he calls Mill F**ing Hill and I call home. Real home, because I was born there and it really doesn't change that much beneath the surface.
Went there on Saturday with Xavior to do some serious charity shopping (a nice little haul) and touch base with my roots. I always find it grounds me to go back. Bought some pens from John Maxfield Junior, whose relocated shop just up the Broadway still has the same incredible smell and sense of calm that his Mum and Dad's shop under the railway bridge had when I was growing up. Tea at the Waldorf on Sunday was fun, with Lawrence, Hazel & Paul, Kitten & Adjorka and Xavior. The talk was of new pop sensations Paul St Paul & The Apostles, of Club Bohemia's forthcoming Night of the Thousand Ziggys, at which I'll be performing next week, and also of Charles II, as Xavior is putting together a night of Restoration fun in which I shall be playing Nell Gwynn, from whom I believe I am descended, in as roundabout a way as anyone can ever be descended from an ancestor. Later on Laura and I had dinner in Covent Garden with Dominic Le Foe and Maria St Clare from the Players Theatre, who put on Victorian Music Hall shows. It was very jolly.
There had been talk of Rick Skye and me possibly playing the cabaret at Too2Much, where I'd been performing One Night At The Caravan Club two days earlier, but by the time I got there it was clear that wasn't going to happen, which was fine as it was good just to sit and watch a funny show. Walked Rick back to his hotel (what a thoroughly nice guy he is) and went for a coffee at Bar Italia, which was a nightly stop-off on this trip.
The first night I'd caught up with Xavior and David Ryder Prangley there, and after David left we met Vanessa, who was wearing a stunning scarf with extreme elegance, and her friend Mark. Pestered by a rose-seller as one is at that time of night outside Soho cafes, somehow they ended up giving me a rose, which brightened up my hotel room for the whole trip and is now drying in my kitchen.
This time as I walked back (Rick had declined an invitation to join me earlier.. "too bright"...) I got the feeling I'd meet someone interesting. Soho on a Sunday is a bit like Edinburgh after the Festival - just a little bit too quiet. But at least it meant I could get a seat outside, and even on quiet Sundays Bar Italia still attracts the die-hards. I met Chris, Ashley, Martin, Marlon and Mark, and then along came Keith. Within five minutes of meeting each other we were old friends, and we talked long into the night till I finally trudged north to get the N10 back to Kensington. I have a feeling this is going to be a lasting friendship. I hope so.
Won't bore you with transport woes getting to the train on Monday - once on it was a lovely trip - things don't get much better than a 1st-class London-Edinburgh journey that someone else has paid for. I've been ricocheting back and forth on that East Coast line for three decades now - and having tried both classes of travel, not to mention standing room only, I can report with confidence that first is definitely better.
So... if you can't be bothered reading through all that, here are the pictorial highlights:
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And this is just a snatch of the view from the train (actually from a trip in July, but who's counting?). Now that's what I call commuting.
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