Foreign Body

We don't speak. I sit in the kitchen and we don't speak. Just smile nervously. Tick tick goes the kitchen clock. Did he just wink at me? Hurry up in the toilet Emelié. As we drive to the city we pass green fields. Where's the snow? I was promised snow and there's no snow! I love snow! In London everyone is trapped under blankets of it, and I'm missing it all! On the way Emelié points out a huge billboard, a poster for some cellular network or other... which she is the face of!! She smiles down at us from fifty feet and I'm dating a Polish model now am I? Well that's just great. We sit through a gorgeous lunch full of cold hams and stewed herrings, no-one speaks English. I smile more and look uncertain. My inability to drink causes a stir and I am castigated by the vodka gang. Fortunately I'm not a vegetarian as well, otherwise I would be staked through the heart. I sip my orange juice while trying not to notice more winking from the father. On the way back, flakes of pure wonderess whiteness fall from the sky. Oh the majesty! I exclaim- until we're stuck for three hours in a traffic jam. When we arrive back we trudge through the newly fallen snow and reach the village theatre, where in two hours I will do a show for fifty Poles. One of the children has a birthday, so the enterprising mother has invited 30 of the local kids here instead of holding a party. Great. But then to be fair, they sit there like the village of the damned; polite, beautifully behaved, and none of them speaking a word of English. My jokes go down like a Marxist rallying cry. At the end of the show they ask me back. At home as I go to leave, the brother gives me a deck of naked lady cards from one of their porn magazines. The Polish seem to have a streak of brutal honesty, as the magazine's entitled 'Twoj Weekend' - quite literally Your Weekend.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

We are a people of static, a people of fixed points and scientific fact, raised in the facts and the factual, the what is and what isn't. We swallow irrefutable laws of physics as gospel, and when further revelation refutes them, we unquestioning digest the upgrades. We are believers in the still, the unchanging, and this is how it's always been. Relationships are just the attempts to create a shared set of reference points, mutual experiences to halt the corrode and slide caused by the changing nature of personality. Opinions, feelings, words, all become fixed markers for us to join the dots between. But how false we all are. We know no-one as we create factual evidence based on changing data. We take a word, a promise, a wish, and cement it in stone. Yet as soon as a word is spoken it is rendered open to change. The people I know around me are all mere maps of our conversations and I, unaware of the warping and remorphing, stand idly by while the viscous flow of their personas moves from one state to the next. Fear becomes love becomes hate becomes apathy.

From the horse's mouth

Today is Boxing Day, traditionally the time to repackage the unwanted gifts and fight with the siblings; hence the name. I tend to be on a bit of a downer after the Christmas rush. It doesn't matter how many years pass, I always get way too over-excited by the nature and possiblities of presents. It's the mystery of what is in those boxes that does it, filling me with an abundance of cat-killing curiosity. Those shiny boxes could contain anything! Absolutely anything! A ham flavoured jaffa cake; a travelling freak show of mice and cufflinks; an elephant with a truffle; anything! The disappointment comes when I open the package and find it's yet another pair of socks, or another book I forgot I requested, or, worst of all, cash. Which is why all the excitement. You see I'm not excited about the present, I just hate the disappointment so much that I can't wait to get it over with.

Over Excitement

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a- oh wait wait wait, who's that clacking on the keys? Damn it, why am I still awake? Watch me stir. Oh look at my stir of great awakening, sigh as I sleep not a wink not a slip. Even on a regular night I suffer from insomnia, so how do you think I cope with Christmas Eve? The excitement of all those unwrapped boxes, a tree full of anti-climaxes just waiting for their moment. But I am so tired tonight. I have done gig after gig this season, show after show after show and the world is a blur of card tricks and sleights. So many names forgotten in an instant, jumbled with the laughter of mushed up faces, their features twisted in astonishment. I decline from day to day. Each night I lie for longer and longer until sleep takes; when I wake my dreams are so much more lucid to me than my day. The world in which I slumber has become the reality, the reality bleeds into the fictional, a slur of space I all but inhabit. In the darkness I am alive, creative and creating, but when the day breaks with the egg shells I wake exhausted and depleted, the twelve hours ahead one long hold tone until the next naptime. I need to go home.

I cannot forget you

I am 93 years old. Twenty-one years past 72, twenty-one years since she passed on, away, evapourated like a ghost, leaving an empty shell slouched in front of an open fire. Twenty-one years. In that time men have come of age, boys have become men and men have begot boys, but I have sat here, sat here spent. I have slept with my eyes open, these two glass marbles reflecting whatever appears before me. Staring at the glaring of the low buzz of the television, turned to low to hear, just images flickering in a corner like fish in a tank. I have never felt older than today as time passes me by while I queue to die.

Slow Death

It's time for the annual award for the worst gig of the year! This may be a bit presumptuous as I still have one gig tomorrow and one in Poland before the New Year, but surely it can't get any worse than... Cabaret in RADA! Congratulations you guys! And here's why:

At the insistence of the overzealous organisers I arrive at 7pm, an hour in advance of my slot. I'm greeted by various states of sound check disarray and a request to extend my ten minutes requested to twenty. I have to leave by 8.30 to make a dinner at 9, but ok, I say, I'll do it. Looks of horror spread across faces as I mention I may do some things they've seen before... or in other words, my act. They appear to believe I have miracles up my sleeve and tell me not to worry, I'll think of something. An hour later and sound is still being checked, I realise my dinner is not going to happen. Rubbish. So poor I can't even afford a packet of crisps, I go hungry and suffer for my art. Forty minutes pass and they start, opening with a song, but oh? what's this? Yep, after all the sound checking and rechecking the guitar doesn't work. Hmm, never mind. Here comes the compere to liven things up and make it all better- wait, what's she talking about? Yeh, so she gets up and decides the best way to open the show would be a brief rundown of all the death, rape, aids, tsunami's and earthquakes that have made this such an enjoyable year. Never mind, she chirps, we're here to bring a little sunshine... But not yet! because it's straight over to the charity spokesman who's obviously stuck behind a desk all day and relishes his 15 minutes of lame in which he bleats on at the poor people who've shelled out ten golden nuggets for this privilege. He follows his wonderful oration with a video of yet more death/aids/rape/etc just to get us in the mood for the first act of the evening! A girl who knocks out a couple of so-so numbers before announcing the closing of her trilogy with a song and dance! Start the cd! she cries. What cd? sound-guy replies. A brief 10 minute interval while cd is located in dressing room. They start the cd. One girl is dancing too near the cd player and the track skips. They restart the track. She jogs the cd. They restart. Over and over they do this, before finally, pitifully, woefully this song comes to an end fifteen minutes later. Off guard, I'm drowning my sorrows in sparkling mineral water at the bar by this point when I hear the compere announce: and now for the magician! What better build up could you want? Well it's funny you should ask, because as I walk to the front, so swayed by the stage is she that she decides to adlib... 'now last time John was here, he made the audience disappear! So don't do that again John!' I pause in disbelief, only to watch her ditch the only available mic off stage leaving me to wrestle with a stand.

I'd like to say I made a stunning recovery... but let's not kid ourselves. I survived. And the best thing of all? Yep, didn't even get paid.

Untitled No Longer

I am a Master of Performance. Officially. Last week I wore a gown and shook some lady's hand which apparently makes it all official. And it's great! I haven't been Master since I was little, when I very occasionally got letters addressed to Master John van der Put. Then I grew up and became a Mister and that's where it all went wrong. If you ask me, they call you Master in childhood because when you are young you think you know everything. And maybe you do know everything, it's just as you grow older that you begin to forget it all, until eventually you come of age and know nothing. And things get mistier and you miss the boat, and they call you the mist-er, the missed-a, the Mister. And you live through life decaying and dismaying the regrets and regressions... Where's the medicine cabinet?

Ordition

I'm in a converted warehouse wearing nothing but a one piece lycra body suit covered in silver balls. I'm surrounded by dwarves bitching about panto, adverts and a fellow colleague of height deficiency they've all taken exception to. I talk to a rather pretty and deeply amusing australian-asian girl as I wait to physicalise a dragon. Let me explain that last bit before I get arrested. In Starbucks one fine Thursday morning I get a call for an audition in Oxford, something about a tv show with a dragon in it; they've recorded the voices and need actors to provide the appropriate movements. Visions of Barney sway me and I agree to go. And so it is that I find myself at nine in the morning naked apart from my lycra skin, with the taste of two breakfast bananas still lingering in my mouth. As the director explains his vision, I shiver and pimple, looking nervously at a huge video screen where a large green dragon mimics my every motion. The dwarf I'm working with is scouse, exceptionally friendly, and happily explaining that the last advert he shot will make him a millionaire. I can't quite get over the fact that dwarves are possibly the only exploited minority who have agents. Action is called, the soundtrack started and I act out the movements to this clown of a dragon, ruffling the hair of my fluffy little dwarf friend. Take after take we do, as the temperature drops and the embarrassment soars. The computers aren't working, and every time I turn my head, on the screen the dragon's head falls off. After two hours they let me go, reimburse my travel expenses and I'm on a train home praying for rejection. Three weeks later I bump into the girl in Leicester Square who informs me they recast the lead dragon as a dwarf as well, so now she spends weeks on end surrounded by the little people, unwittingly submerged in a subculture she has a distinct phobia for.

viewing

she lightly whispers
gentle whispers
softly in my ear

her wisps of hair
and wisps of air
encroaching ever near

with breath she warms
the cheek she scorns
as leaning past she brushes

a flash of eyes
a lash of lies
her prey in jaws she crushes

legal drugs i have taken

Pethidine Cyclizine Amitrypilene Dihydrocodiene Metaclopromide

Severedol Morphine Tramadol Codiene Fentanyl

Fluoxetine Zopiclone Tamazepan Voltarol Lemsip

Politically Driven

There is an advert out on the streets of London which reads 'To find out what an illegal minicab could cost you, ask a rape victim'... Surely that's not the most appropriate thing you could do is it? I don't think at a woman's place of innermost violation she's really going to want to talk about the price comparisons of sub-shady taxi fares. I know I'm being flippant, but no more so than a society that thinks that handy living advice can be boiled down to catchy phrases administered by jacket-and-jeans-wearing advertising executives. And anyway, surely it would be much easier just to ask an illegal minicab.

Broke as a Stoat

I am so poor right now. Ah man. So so poor. Coffee is a luxury way out of my reach, cds and videos a long distant memory, travel is barely affordable, and my social life is so empty that the nearest I've come to going for a drink recently is licking the pavement after a rainstorm. Being sick is draining my resources. Badly. My funds are so depleted they print my statements in blue so the red matches better. There is however some light at the end of tunnel; some draft at the end of the over. Very slowly the situation is on the mend. I've started a bit of gigging again recently, I've got a couple of shows upcoming, I've started the comedy again, and who know's what tomorrow will bring for the acting and writing. Still, if anyone feels the urge to send large brown envelopes of cold hard cash through my letterbox, or to purchase the publishing rights to this blog for unfeasible sums of currency, both I and my creditors would be eternally grateful.

A Collaboration

Piccadilly line passing Leicester Square and a million people push in to the carriages drunken out of their heads, laughing, talking to everyone around, boy-chatting girls half naked falling off their feet from the excited abundance of alcohol and God knows what else. I am surrounded by people that cannot see me, so pissed that alcohol clears their vision and I blip on to their drunken radar, all talk and smiles. So I ask myself: am I the same? Do people perceive me as I perceive people? Sadly, the answer is probably... yes. But I try. I smile. I give up my seat. I always say please and thank you and excuse me. My friend Monica came over from Texas; typical American; happy, jolly, bubbly, smiley, chatty and the like. We were on the tube, the quiet juxtaposing the busy, full of people. The girl next to Monica was happily reading the paper when out of the clear sky blue, Monica chirps 'Hey! Do you know what's up in town tonight?' I turned red; paper-girl, purple. Speechless, she managed a whisper: 'I don't know. But… you can have a look in the paper, if you want'. I wanted to pretend that I was there alone, knowing no-one. And then I thought, get over yourself! Sure it's London, but we are free to be the way we want to be even if it means challenging the status-quo. I say no more.

words by emelié, arranged by john

E45 or P45

How long did they spend creating the 44 other E-Creams before they found the one that actually does nothing!? This is it guys! This one has no discernable benefits whatsoever! The milkybars are on me!'

Another Way

Some people are financially driven; I am economically pedestrian. Terrified of the stability money can buy, I prefer to stick my head in the sand whilst the go-getters and jet-setters around me spend their lives pursuing the green. I just don't swing that way man, finances bore me, savings snore me, paychecks abhor me. If I didn't have to earn a wage, if I could survive on grass and raindrops, that would suit me down to the ground. To compound my lacklust further, this week my bank has charged me yet again for dabbling in the red. A mere £8.50 overdrawn has raised the status of charges levied in the last three months to £149. For what? Nothing! How much of my money have I lent them over the years? All of it! And they can't spare £8.50?! They are absolute bastards. So did they even consult me about the deficit? Ring me up to let me know my precarious predicament? Of course not, they just rinse my account further and further of all paltry funds available. I rang them this week to register my disgust, and the conversation was cut short by their quick retort that 'I was not an important enough customer to bother with'. Their exact words! Bastards! So I threatened to close all my accounts with them. They said fine. So I did! Hah! You see! Hah! So who's laughing now eh?... Well... They are. Obviously.