timetravel

I woke up sick with fear, sick to the back of my teeth. I boarded the plane and sat clenched hands, praying gravity would take no notice. The tray around my lap was like a duvet, but I got no sleep. Not once was I able to accept this marvel, this silver object bulleting through the clouds, screaming through the air, supported by nothing but its own momentum. A tonne of steel, glistening steel, a truckload of people minus the ground. Look! No Strings! The miles I’m covering in this hollow metal tube; I’m streaking across the sky, shedding the hours behind me. Time is lost, sixty minutes is a morning, we arrive before we left. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometers have past and I‘m having a second breakfast. A miracle of human nature. We have conquered the elements; drag, lift, resistance all turned to our devices. And now I board a second plane, I’m travelling at 554 miles per hour, I’m 11887 metres above the ground, I've covered four thousand miles in a day. Distance is a joke, this plane the punchline. On the screen is a map, on the map is the plane, the little plane jerks a red line forward. One half of the map is covered in light, whilst outside the window is the night. We are outrunning the sun, and it’s so little effort.

The Power Within

Too much self-help can be a bad thing, especially at meal times, but a little now and again helps to keep the house in order. There is a line of course, nothing worse than someone so self-involved they address themselves in the third person. And Gurus of course, always draw the line at a Guru. A guru is always helping, but usually the only people they're helping are themselves. I once did something called the Landmark Forum. The Landmark is one of these companies that refer to their teachings as technologies and charge a fortune for it. Nowadays, anytime that someone charges money for wisdom, like it’s a commodity or something, alarm bells go off in my head. But that is now, and this was then. Using the Landmark technology can change your life, they said. And what is this technology? They shut you in a room for four days and spout philosophy at you. That’s not to say it’s all bad, on the contrary, it’s pretty good stuff, quite existentialist, lots of Nietzsche, much of an Übermensch kinda vibe, but life-changing in a super positive way if you embrace it. You’ll never be late again for a start. The organisation itself though is a little more questionable. They make the Scientologists look like the Church of England. Every night they prescribe three telephone calls, to a friend or a mother or an ex-lover, letting them know you’re doing the course and getting you to fess up to any long standing resentments. All very well, but the course runs from something like 9am to 11pm, so you ain’t gonna make those calls until midnight at the earliest. A friend of mine who ran a very successful company a few years ago went through a phase with his work where the Landmark course spread like wildfire. Every night he'd be woken up with a call from one of his employees telling him how much they disliked him, or how much they resented him, or how he made their lives hell and they just wanted to let him know they have forgiven him for it. A week of this and he didn’t feel very good about himself. Which of course made him the perfect candidate for the Landmark Forum.

E.J. Thribb

1.
You know, sometimes,
when you come down to it,
It's just the escalators
going up and
going down
that keep us all going

2.
it's like i'm falling,
it's like, i feel like i'm falling
and when i hold her,
and when i hold her,
it's like i'm no longer falling,
for her love is like concrete,
and from a great height,
i fall at her feet.

3.
There is a quiet in the city,
Beneath all the rush,
Here I can hear it,
A soft low hush.

4.
i'm out with the drunks, the punks and the shunks,
the floozies, the woozies, the see you next tuesdays,
the pricks, the dicks, the tricks on a stick,
and lastly, and leastly, i'm out without you.

Stomach Turning

Here is a story you may not want to hear. I repeat: you really, really may not want to have this information in your head. Still reading? Then here goes. When I first got sick five years ago, they struggled to pin down exactly what it was. Many options presented themselves, one of them being Crohn's disease. Now Crohn's is about as much fun as drinking bleach, but without the deep cleansing benefits. One of the signs they tell you to watch out for is blood in your stools. And we’re not talking home furnishings here. If you're shitting blood my friend, your number's coming in. So, one time, I'm in St Thomas' Hospital for the third time in two months, getting sicker with each passing day. I'm on the toilet, where I spent most of that week, listening to the chimes of Big Ben across the river, when I look down and see red. I freak out. I pull the emergency cord as if my life depended on it, which, at that point, I think it does. The nurses come rushing in, carried away by the possibility of disaster, one even brings a crash trolley. And there I am, pants around my ankles, screaming, 'there's blood in my diarreoh! Theresbludinmydierearrr!!!' Oh, they say, and I see a definite look of disappointment cross their faces. Well, take a sample and we'll send it off for you. They hand me a pot with a spoon. Oh geez. So it's come to this, I think. I roll up my sleeves and kneel down. As I scoop up my own feces, as I lift the bloody, shitty mucus into the pot something strange happens. The blood comes up in one piece. That's odd, I thought. And in one slow shift, like the rising of the sun, it dawns on me that this is not blood. It's red pepper. From the pizza I had last night. There is a long moment of silence as I come to terms with this new development. I can hear the nurses chattering outside the door. I decide it would be best if nobody knew about this. So I continue to scoop. I put the lid on, and hand the pot over without a word. I'm sure they got a surprise in the lab that day. What blood type is he? Err... Cajun.

Voices

I've started to talk to God at night; around two or three in the morning when no one is around but Him and Me. In those silent spaces when I can hear him, when everyone else has shut up, and that includes me, we talk of small things. A book I've read. The day I've had. The larger questions are best left 'til morning. Sometimes, I forget myself, I gritch and moan, gripe and snipe, and the room softly stills. I remember the blackness of my pot and I say that I'm sorry. It's not much, but it's all I've got. Tonight I tell Him I went to mass. It was good to be there, I say. The father said, you're almost welcome. My heart sank. And then I heard the pause. You're all most welcome. I can almost hear Him laughing.

Magicians Anonymous

Hi. My name's John, and... I'm a magician. [hi john] Thanks... umm... well, it's good to be here. It's been about five months since I last found the four of diamonds, almost a year since I’ve sawn anyone in two, but... umm... I’ve had a bad week. It started off ok, it was my niece's birthday, my brother invited me to the party. She's three. As soon as I arrived I knew I was in trouble. They'd saved up and bought her a rabbit, it was sitting in the garden chewing a leaf. The way it was nibbling, I couldn't help myself, it just looked so... produceable. While they were cutting the cake I snuck out and stuffed it in my baseball cap. I came back in as they were singing Happy Birthday, I was going to pull it out right there, but they kept adding bits to the song. By the time they'd sung 'for she's a jolly good fellow' I looked inside the hat and he was limp. I put him back outside with a carrot in his mouth, but you could tell, even from distance. I left without saying goodbye, without even a slice of cake. On the way home I didn’t have money for the bus, so I pulled a coin from a boy’s ear. His mother punched me in the face. I lost it after that, I went to the park and started producing doves, hundreds and hundreds of them, startled ones, sleepy ones, hungry ones and scrawny ones. They massed on the fountain, ravenous for breadcrumbs. I levitated myself high above them and began to pull cards from the air, plucking handfuls from clouds, fistfuls from nowhere. As the doves arced over me I got carried away, I produced scarves and silks, small red balls, small yellow balls, candles, canes, boxes of dancing girls, cages of lions, I produced a full size bear and turned him into a rug. People came from miles around to watch, they clapped and cheered, and I played them like the saps they were. I know I've let myself down, but for a minute there, it was almost worth it.

Online Hating

Here's an invitation to those on facebook, bebo, myspace, friendster, friendsreunited, or whatever the new craze is by the time you’re reading this: stop writing to me. Invite me no more to your little corner of cyberspace, I don't want to be your online friend/buddy/chump, I’m quite happy eating my crisps in the corner. Maybe it's just me, but I'm tired of these social networking sites. What are they anyway but tools to judge one another? So we can log on and look up the most popular kid in class to see where he stacks shelves now? Sure we pretend we just want to get back in touch, but we all know deep down we're hoping for the very worst. Seven kids, three wives and no job. That's the jackpot we're spinning for. The bottom line is that if I wanted to stay in touch with you, we'd be talking. Perhaps that's a little harsh, it's just I get grumpy when I receive an email from the biggest social loser I know and he has 897 friends on facebook. Having more friends than I have sterling is just plain greedy as far as I'm concerned. And it's no better when you get a mail from some poor cracker who has a paltry ten friends. Having ten friends on facebook is like having minus friends in real life. You're the social equivalent of a cup. And a novelty cup at that.

Babel Fable

International relations are like tea leaves: often strained. But what do you expect when you start renaming each other just for the hell of it. What do you call your country? Deutschland? Right, well, ah, we’ll just call it Germany. I’d be kinda pissed if someone did that to me. John is it? Right, well, you’re more of a Timothy in this neck of the woods. Everyone’s at it, the French renaming the English, the English renaming the Welsh, the Welsh renaming themselves and the Americans renaming just about everything else. I think we should just agree the one set of names, and since English is the only language I speak, let’s go for that. Anyway, Deutschland is a bit of a mouthful.

Out to Dry

a laundrette
watching the clothes spin
on a sunday morning
and only one thought
tumbling around
how did i get here?

Twelve Steps

She's moving her lips to the sound of somebody else's voice. I don't want to see you anymore, she tells me. So shut your eyes, I reply. I twist my glass between my fingers and watch the mark circle round. I think it would be better if you left, she says. There's a long pause as I wait for her to continue. The smoke pours from her nostrils, it rolls from her lips and red paint sticks to the filter. Whatever they said, that girl had some class. You won't get over me, she says, they never do. You'll regret this moment for as long as you have breath. I wait for more, but it seems she's run out of words. I eat a pistachio, dropping the shell in the glass. Her eyes are lowered, she evades my gaze. A girl walks past, slim, black dress, blonde hair, pock pock pock. I think for the moment of the power of a good pair of heels. My gaze sticks his thumb out and waits for a ride.

A Portrait of the Slippy

You see them by the south bank, jeans slung low, caps pushed back, hair cut shaggy. Their skills inversely proportional to their presentation. One sunrat on the left, barely in a string vest, is proving particularly fly, like someone has nailed the skateboard to his feet and banned him from gravity. The rest of them? I’m not so sure. The whole demeanor of these concrete surf monkeys is lackadaisical to say the least. They pull tricks like crackers in a retirement home, the idea of landing one as foreign as the hot dog sellers. It’s a curious mix of adolescent terror at being seen to care, and a healthy English repression of any display of skill or achievement. These drop-out idols have combined these two forces of indifference into a pursuit with all the energy of a mackerel fillet, and for their lack of efforts have somehow been rewarded with the worship of a hundred walk-by tourists. Where are my rollerblades?

The Borrowers

‘Professional thieves operate in this area’; always a sign that's puzzled me. What? Are there hobbyists around? People removing property on a strictly amateur basis? So long as they're not charging money for it, that’s ok? And how professional do you have to be before you become liable for tax? Surely we could prosecute solely on the strength of their VAT returns? Basically, I have a lot of questions. And operate is such a technical term; surgeons operate, the military operates, thieves? They pinch stuff. Nick, fleece, plunder, grab, swipe, none of these words implies any care, so lets not give these opportunists the glory of precision. It may be a fair point when it comes to the pickpockets, I’ve always had a grudging respect for the artful dodgers; if I, as a magician, didn't feel it go, well fair enough, they probably earnt it.

Egg on Fan

Chump chump chump. Mhm, what's that I'm eating? Humble pie! Sweet tasting, meek-making, Humble Pie. And why? See I’ve been working on a new effect for quite some time and desperately needed some help. I turned to the internet, and who should I discover to be the world expert in this particular field? None other than Geoffrey Durham. Well, I was still a bit upset over the whole cinema episode, but one of my closest friends had done some work with him, so I thought it was worth a shot. Although he had no idea who I was (I hid my disappointment once again), help me he did. A thirty-five minute phone conversation, a set of printed instructions, and an offer to call anytime I got stuck. Geoffrey Durham turns out to be a rather wonderful human being after all. Maybe this was one of my rare mistakes. Wait, all I'm saying is, it's possible. Let's look at it again. He had just come out of the cinema. Maybe he hadn't just seen Shrek 3. The last film I saw was The Lives of Others (not be confused with The Lives of Otters) and I came out weeping like a baby. I can understand you wouldn't be up for a chinwag there. Also, I was quite shocked to see him, so perhaps, I could have been a bit politer. Or, in fact, polite. I tend to lose my social skills when I'm startled, just call me up at 7am and see for yourself. And finally, I am part of the last generation on the cusp of reality, the generation of the analogue to digital switch, I still have one foot in reality, but I can't deny I don't have the other in Reality TV. To me, celebrities feel as accessible as late night groceries, I spent more time as a child with the cast of Neighbours than I did with my Grandfather. Sometimes when I see someone famous, I forget that wall of glass and expect a bit of recognition. So as I mop up the gravy of bad grace with the crust of contrition and add the salt of regret to my chips of acknowledgment, I ask Geoffrey, please, accept my apolocheese.

Vocal Objections

I don't really get stage fright. I'll get nervous, sure, but a genuine fear of the ring? Not me bob. I love the spotlight, I live for the limelight, hey, I'll dance the fandango under a torchlight if that's the best you can do. The stage is my home, which is why it's so odd I'm scared to death of Karaoke. And when I say death I mean if there was a funeral, I'd rather be in the box than singing the hymns. It may be because I carry a tune about as well as a handful of wasps, but whatever it is, when that blue auto-cue of fear fires up, the terror of performance paralyses me from my toes to my nose. For me, death on a stage in front of a thousand strangers is small fry compared to possibility of embarrassment in front of eight friends. So tonight I'm shaking in my boots at the thought of having to duet 'Angels', when all I want to do is sit there and find out where all the hip-hop samples come from. But my friends, knowing what's good for me, push me to do it. And you know what? It's a release. It's actually a big release. And not just for me, but for all of us. Those with babies relish the chance to scream the place down on their terms for once, those who work in accounts hog the limelight as if they'd found salvation, I bodypop to Vanilla Ice for all those who ever wanted to break-it-down, and one by one we each get over ourselves.

- for sophia -

Money Troubles

Once when I was fourteen, old enough to know better, young enough to play dumb, I bought a pen and told my mum it cost more than it did. Pretty stupid I know. The fib gained me two extra pounds that I blew on coke, or crisps, or something equally empty. As it turned out, my joy was short lived; an hour later she found the receipt in the bin and confronted me. Boy, that money was small change compared to what I lost, the deep, hot humiliation at being caught in a barefaced lie, made all the worse as she told me I could have kept the change anyway. Swallow me up, I prayed to the ground. At 11.30am today I had a meeting with the bank. At 11.46am they rang me to ask where I was. I'm terrible with money. Currently I'm bouncing my cash around like a bunny on burning coals, from credit cards to debit cards, overdrafts to savings accounts. I'm terrified of being found out. So you know what I did? I pretended the meeting was next week. I could have just said I'd rather not make it, but no, I didn't want to lose face. So I lied. The guy on the phone apologised for the mistake, said he'd have a word with whoever arranged the meeting. I said it was probably my fault, maybe I got it wrong, but when I put down the phone I felt pretty bad. Money and I don't mix, when it floods in I drown, when it's absent I starve, I've got seven days until that meeting now and already I've got that sinking feeling.

Visionary

Yesterday I got new glasses. A little too new. As soon as I put them on it was like somebody put my eyes into Warp Factor Five, and Scottie was in the engine room shouting 'I just cannae get the power Cap'n!' They were way way too strong, I walked out of the shop and nearly got run over, stepping off the pavement was like falling off a cliff, my spatial awareness was about as good as a mother-of-three on her mobile phone whilst reverse parking her 4x4. I dropped off a costume at RADA and bumped into Alan Rickman, wearing a mustache like a swashbuckling cravat. That Alan Rickman could make anything look good; if he wore a dead fish on his face I'm sure the effect would be nothing but pleasing. As I knocked him sideways he gave me both barrells of full on glare and I peered into his face before recognition dawned, and bowing and scraping, fumbled for the revolving door. Falling on to street I ricocheted my way to meet a friend and when I arrived, promptly clonked him on the head with my folder. The thing is, all that magnificent slapstick filled me with nothing but happiness and peace, it stripped back my pretensions. I'm no slick-wheeler, and being that bumpy little clown in the surly streets of London reminded me of my place. I must hold that place lightly. Sometimes in life, large objects may be closer than they appear.