fringe benefits

The Edinburgh Fringe is one of my favourite places in the world. Although that statement does come with the caveat that there are a bunch of places in the world I still haven't been, it cannot be denied that the Fringe makes me so excited I do that thing where my hands wave about and my voice goes all high-pitched; let me tell you, the internet, that is MIGHTY EXCITED. I've been every summer for the last four years, either watching or performing, which I suppose makes it my annual holiday destination in much the same way that some people visit the south of France every year or whatever, except that it rains a shit ton more in Edinburgh than on your average holibags location of choice (I got back yesterday morning and some of the things I own are still damp). When I think of the best and the worst theatre and comedy that I've seen in my life, so much of both have been at the Fringe - trapped in tiny hot rooms where the door's too near the stage and there's too much audience on either side of you, thinking, 'can I leave? no, no, I can't possibly, but when will this end'; packed into venues that used to be conference rooms and backs of pubs and myriad other things, crying with laughter; stuffing my face with too much pie. I include the bad as well as the good in my remembrances because in a lot of ways they're just as important. I like that I've seen terrible, terrible things in Edinburgh because I like that it exists as a platform for Anyone Who Wants to Make Theatre to just do it and it's right that inevitably some of those things don't work. If theatre was easy, there'd be no point slogging away at it, would there? It should be hard. It should fail sometimes. That's why it's art.

This year I went to the Fringe for six days, travelling up with my boyfriend on Thursday night, on the overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, which was a little bit rough, because how can it not be, but better than I expected. We arrived at 7.30am and saw shows pretty solidly for two days. Some had been made by our friends, some by people we were fans of and with some of them we had absolutely no idea what to expect; in addition to this, we socialised, had a few drinks, ate pie (how many times can I mention pie in this blog? Let's get a tally going: ii), got flyered a LOT and went on and on about how beautiful Edinburgh is. I have been known to shriek "look at the VISTAS" almost constantly in that city. Look at them though!! After he went home to do Real Life Stuff (i.e. earn money like a grown-up), I stayed on for a few extra days with my friends, who are working at the Pleasance and being put up in student halls. I've been a punter and a performer at the Fringe but I've never been staff, and I've got to say that while it looks awesome in lots of ways it also looks super tough - my friends are flyering for sometimes twelve, thirteen hours a day on the Pleasance's street team and I am amazed they're not dead. Be nice to the flyerers, guys; you've been in the rain for ten minutes between venues, and yes it's shit, but they've been in it all day for the last million days. The older I get, the more I realise the extent to which hungover students are the glue holding the Fringe together.

Anyway, I could go on and on and ON about how great Edinburgh is and how much I love it - you may have guessed this - but that won't get us anywhere and, contrary to appearances, I do actually have stuff to get done. So I'm going rely on the preserve of the blogger, i.e. some arbitrary self-imposed rules, and instead name my Top Five Fringe Shows 2011. Although I've talked about theatre a lot here, I'm actually a massive comedy fan too - I just find the former easier to talk about because I know more about how it's put together and works, whereas I love comedy in the same way I love magic, in total ignorance of how they have managed to do this thing - so I was almost tempted to do three comedy and three theatre. But five is the perfect arbitrary self-imposed number, I'm afraid. So, in no particular order (and entirely subjectively), here are my five favourite shows from this year's Edinburgh Festival:
1) Translunar Paradise, 15.40 at the Pleasance Dome, then touring the UK I think? A beautiful story about love and bereavement told entirely without words, using only mime, live accordion music, masks and movement, and it made me cry lots. There are only two actors (and one accordionist) on stage, playing a couple who have grown old together - the actors use incredibly realistic hand-held masks in the old-age sequences which can easily be removed to show that the line between youth and age is actually not a huge one. It was just stunningly performed and all I can say is that if you have the opportunity to see it, you should take it. Aside from being charming and ridiculously well staged, rehearsed, directed and performed, it is genuinely one of the most moving pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
2) Alex Horne: Seven Years in the Bathroom, 20.20 at the Pleasance Courtyard. Alex Horne has a very likeable manner and I was pretty certain that I would enjoy the show even before it began, because just watching him talk is enjoyable. I've been aware of Horne for a little while; I'd seen We Need Answers, his BBC4 forgotten sports programme and was generally aware of his involvement with the Cowards/Mark Watson ex-Footlights set. But this show far outstripped my expectations - in addition to his engaging persona, Horne's chosen conceit works really well. It is that the average man will live for 79 years and spend 7 of those in the bathroom, and he then breaks down not only the average amount of time spent doing most things (sleeping, eating, driving, whatever) but also divides the hour of his show into the equivalent percentages of time spent doing these things. If that makes sense. So, 5 minutes in the bathroom, however many minutes 'working' or 'dreaming'... He eats a Rustler's burger, gets an audience member to paint his portrait and another to do the housework, a panda talks with his voice - it's really quite something. And the main thing, of course, is that it's very, very, very funny. Also on the night we saw it he accidentally covered two audience members in sauce and I nearly fell off my chair.
3) Swamp Juice, 14.00 at the Underbelly. A very charming, weirdly exhilarating show, ostensibly for kids, but also for wide-eyed grown-up kids like me. Bunk Puppets, the company, had a piece up last year called Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones, which was also very beautiful and even made me do a little cry (this list is making me look like a wussy, but in reality I am extremely tough and manly and in my defence I was quite hungover that day); both are one-man shows performed by Mr. Bunk himself, a semi-mute clown character played by Montreal's Jeff Achtem. In both shows, he brings a bunch of shadow puppets to life; Swamp Juice is more narrative-based than its predecessor and the finale is stunning - first he brings the puppets out into the audience, with various audience members having to hold things up to create the scenery, and then HE MAKES THE SHADOWS GO 3D. I think Swamp Juice is my favourite for that reason (you've never heard a room of so many adults go "ohhh my gooooodddd" with such pure amazed happiness), but Sticks and Stones is returning to the Fringe for a brief run at the Udderbelly towards the end of the month and is also very, very worth watching. In conclusion: I love puppets so so much and Bunk Puppets shows are better than real life.
4) Humphrey Ker is Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher!, 19.15 at the Pleasance Courtyard. All three members of my favourite sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls have gone solo this year, which is sad in some ways (no Penny Dreadfuls show!) and great in others (three hours of Dreadfuls instead of one!), but mostly it is Interesting. I've been a big fan of theirs since 2008 - can't recommend their Brothers Faversham radio show highly enough - and seeing the very different directions all of their shows have gone in is fascinating. Thom Tuck's confessional Straight to DVD show, in which he discusses straight-to-DVD Disney films and heartbreak, and David Reed's Shamblehouse, off-the-wall one-man sketch comedy featuring a moving doughnut acrobatics tale, are both very funny and very much worth watching, as well as being admirably different to what I think of as characterising their previous work. But Ker's show is just so silly, so tightly written, packed with ridiculous accents and a tiny Romanian dog that it was one of the highlights of my Fringe. It's slightly Milliganesque in its pure beautiful silliness and it made me laugh so, so much.
5) The Behemoth, 16.45 at the Pleasance Courtyard. I'd seen John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil do a few bits and pieces at Latitude 2009 and 2010 and couldn't wait to finally see their whole show because they just make me laugh so much; I saw John-Luke Roberts' solo show last year and loved it, but seeing them together is even better. Much like my last recommendation, it's glorious silliness throughout, right from the beginning, which features a truly special rendition of Stand By Me. After we left, my boyfriend was like, 'You know when you can tell from the first minute that you're going to like something...?' In addition to the show being generally hilarious, Roberts and Kamil have a fantastic rapport and make each other laugh a lot on stage, which I LOVE. I adore the transience of comedy, the feeling that the performance you see is special for you as an audience, so when something goes awry or people adlib it is just my favourite thing, and they were great at it. Also (and here's a shallow extra point for you), ALL of Nadia Kamil's outfits are super awesome. Ugh it's hard to talk about comedy, isn't it? Because just saying "it was really funny!!" doesn't really sum up why that is true, but we quoted this show a lot throughout the rest of the Fringe because it is packed with good stuff and I can't wait to see future offerings from them.

Some honourable mentions of things that very nearly made the list go to Death Song by You Need Me theatre company (I've seen and adored everything YNM have done after stumbling across How it Ended in 2008 and definitely not crying everywhere because, as we have discussed, I am So Manly), the brilliant Max and Ivan are Holmes & Watson and high-energy one-man-show Bane. Also I wanted to mention LUDS' Cagebirds, 13.35 at Greenside, which everyone should definitely see, but I felt this blog post had come a little late to do so properly, as it closes tomorrow; nonetheless, it's full of my friends and they're all bloody great in it, so GO if you can.

In conclusion: Edinburgh is great, I love lots of stuff, my body is still trying to process all the pie carbs I put into it (pie tally: iii) and I'm not sure my brain has recovered yet from two overnight coaches and lots of late nights. Bring on the next Fringe please.

as changed itself to past without a word.

First night of my first ever play at university was tonight, which I spent tottering about the place with grey-sprayed hair and faux wrinkles and a big fake limp and oh, it was excellent fun. The Crucible's gone from being something I tentatively enjoyed to something I really rather liked, to something I looked forward to, to finally - after all this time - something I adore and am heartbroken to see the beginning of the end of. I'm going to miss it/the cast so freaking much and feel utterly privileged to have been involved. Touchingly, one of my housemates came along alone this evening (he says he will come again on Friday with everyone else) and met me at the stage door afterwards with a Double Decker, and the show went WELL and ugh, I love doing it so much.

HOWEVER. After all the joys of this afternoon/evening, I came home only to be relaunched into yet more conversations about the great housing debate of '09 - something that has been ambling along for days now. The stress of everyone from our group of friends trying to work out who's living with who is genuinely doing my head in; we're supposed to live in a seven, which I think (and all my non-first year friends have told me) is too many by far and, really, you shouldn't go above five-ish due to the mess, the stress, the attempts to coordinate that many people's wildly divergent wants and needs, you know. Too much. Pretty much everyone in the Prospective Flatmates camp thinks that I am making a fuss over nothing by wanting to split us in two, but I cannot face living with so many people, I genuinely think it'll cause so much fuss and hassle and the house will be ungood and, just, ugh. But I have nobody else to live with. At the moment, it looks like my choice is going to be: live in a house of seven or live in a gosh darned box. Or go into halls again or something, but obviously I wouldn't do THAT if I could avoid it. The whole situation is depressing me so much, when all I want to do is get excited about ~*~theatre~*~ and christmas. CHRISTMAS.

I'm not even that excited about Christmas Actual Holidays, for a whole set of other reasons which I don't really want to detail on here in, you know, public and that, although I am excited about all the friends & plays & comedy I'll be able to see in a week. But, yeah. I just feel like there's all these Issues at home and now all these Issues at university and I really can't be bothered with any of it any more. I just want to sleep forever.

AND MY HAIR IS FULL OF GREY-SPRAY. STILL.

Basically this whole stupid post can be summed up like this:

Dear Life,

Be less up and down for just five minutes, please? Please.

Love,
Me xxx

we don't want perfection, we want knitting.

I accidentally stayed out until 3am on Friday, got rather drunker than I intended (it just sort of hit me; one of those evenings, I suppose, where it inexplicably does) and was in an - let us be delicate and say an interesting state, when my family arrived on Saturday morning. Not awful, not even the worst this week, but I did have a cracking headache - unusual for me, I never get them - and hadn't had even nearly enough sleep. Thank the gods of hats and irn bru, anyway, because I survived, albeit rather narrowly.

It was an odd beast, the prospect of my family visiting; I love them but I don't really suffer from homesickness, for whatever reason, and could probably survive okay on the odd phonecall hither and thither. Some of my flatmates call home almost every day, but I just don't need to: I suppose I've always been allowed a lot of freedom, running off to London all the time from the age of about fifteen and Edinburgh when I was seventeen and Glasgow every new years, etc etc. But unlike a lot of my friends up here, I'm an only child, so my parents are able to come and see me because they sort of may as well, if that makes sense - they've not got a lot else on?

Anyway, the long and short of it is that we had a lovely time, a nice meal and I showed them (it was my mother and grandparents, by the by, interested parties) around a little. Most adorably of all, they brought me an utterly unexpected sort of "care package" - a big cardboard box filled with a few foods and useful things, some nice shower gel, lots of exciting tea and canned gin & tonics. How sweet is that?!

So currently, it is a Sunday night and I'm putting off doing my washing because it means going on the biggest walk ever to find change for the machines and it is FAR too jolly cold. Instead, I'm listening to The Smiths, writing one of these new-fangled blog things and drinking green tea with "a hint of lemon". Rather more than a hint if you ask me. It's like I'm entering some kind of competition to be the tweest person ever - today, my flatmate and I went for lunch in a cute little cafe and then to a day of knitting at the Bluecoat, sort of our local arts centre. It was a collaboration between the Festival of Nordic Art and Culture (NICE) and a local knitting shop called Purlesque; I can already knit with needles, or at the very least hold my own with a simple straight or purl, though I've not attempted anything particularly interesting yet. Still, I learned to finger-knit and my flatmate, a newcomer, received an interesting introduction to something I adore. They run a knitting circle at a local tea shop on tuesday nights & I think I might go: university is a very intense experience, and wonderful of course, but it can't help to meet and socialise with people who are slightly outside of it.

picture from here.

The highlight for me, anyway, was meeting this fellow and adding a few lines to the terribly interesting piece of knitting art on the left there, which he told me he's been working on for about two years. Anyone and everyone could just roll up, add to it a bit and move on - a really beautiful piece of collaborative art. Made me wish I'd discovered the Bluecoat earlier than last week: so much seems to be happening there all the time, it's a really lovely place. Flatmate and I just spent a cheerful hour or so there, listening to them play charming music - Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, I was very happy - having a bit of a chat, meeting people and learning. An excellent afternoon. I'm considering writing about it/him for the English Soc magazine, if I ever get around to writing anything at all for them; my friend said that I could, that they need writers rather desperately, but I'm so dreadfully unfocused.

Must be quiet now and get on with things, but before I do, the reasons for making this post are twofold:
1) my previous one was too depressing to leave up there. I didn't feel down when I wrote it or anything, but it reads incredibly bleakly and I don't want wandering passers-by to think I have given up on all of it and ended myself.
2) I mustn't get too caught up in all the fun of university - because it really is fun, it is, so much, especially now that I'm getting to know & love my excellent cast better and better all the time - and forget just how much there is to DO in a city. Lots of things! I don't want to look back on these three years with any regrets. Or at least...with as few as I can manage, I suppose.

ha.

now say hello.

Well, I have an insane amount of work to do, so of course, of COURSE I have remembered this blog! As I type, I am sat in my no-frills single-berth room in my University halls (although the walls are plastered with photos, leaflets, flyers and I can't keep an inch of it clean to save my life; it could, at the very least, never be called "impersonal"), listening to two of my flatmates play-fighting in the next room & supposedly doing my history reading.

I took that subsidiary after all.

It's two months this Thursday since I moved to Liverpool and in that time I have not been home since, though I have visited M. once and been to London a couple of times, so I'm not sure what the reasoning behing that is. At the beginning, I felt like it would be simply too strange to see my childhood bedroom and all those old familiar sights, and then return to my new friends and home and life - I still think that it will be strange, but now it feels like a decision motivated more by Let's Just See If I Can than anything else. Anyway, it doesn't seriously count because my family have visited once (for my birthday, of which more later) and are doing so again in a couple of weeks.

Ironically, after I said all that "oh who even meets people through their accommodation" stuff, all my closest friends up here are people from my accommodation who I met in the first few weeks. Unfortunately, this has made it easier for me to not socialise with other people than to socialise and my neighbour-friends are, in many ways, my only friends up here. I know a couple of people on my course enough to chat to, and am beginning to get to know my castmates better (hindered by the incredible discomfort and sense of being on the back foot that I always experience when I first meet drama people, because I am not confident enough to make my voice heard and feel, for at least the initial few weeks, like the most horrendous and unfunny person who has ever lived), but still. It's not quite the social whirl I imagined? Like, I thought I'd instantly know THOUSANDS of people and be forever going to, you know, to beat poetry readings and underground bars and tiny theatres and so on, and wouldn't be able to sleep for all the hot jazz playing on a loop in the room downstairs.

Okay, of course that isn't exactly true; I have enough older friends to know that you get out of university only what you put in, that people have wildly different experiences and that almost everyone is disappointed. But then one of my closest friends up here said today, she's considering dropping out: not because she hates her course or isn't having fun, but because she cannot shake the sensation that she is merely drifting. She wants to go travelling and take photographs and I am jealous because even if the decision maddens her, even if it drives her out of her skull, at least there is something she wants to be doing.

If I dropped out of university, I would have no idea, no clue at all, what I wanted to be doing or how I should go about achieving it. By staying, all I am doing is ignoring this fact: I have exactly as little reason to want to leave as I have to want to stay.

The problem is what the problem has always been, basically - that I am not good enough at anything, not a single thing, to deserve a) payment in return for doing it and b) to continue it on for any real amount of time. I like writing and acting and music, and I am not particularly terrible at these things but neither am I very good at any of them, basically. Well, I'm pretty awful at the last one and the first two depend on the night, but no matter. I said all this to a friend the other day, only casually, but really rather upset myself - as I always do when I get onto this subject - because I realised that it is so incredibly true.

Remember when you were a kid and you said, I want to be an actress/a spy/an astronaut/a whatever? And your parents said to you, well dear, that's lovely, but don't forget that lots of people want to do these things and only a few people can, so most of them just grow up to be tax accountants and office workers and that is okay. You shrugged it off, because yes, of course - most people did grow up to do these things instead of the thing that you wanted to do, but obviously none of them wanted it as much as you did. Otherwise they'd have done it. And it was that simple, because you were young, and then you grew up and realised that you are not special either. When I had to learn that, it was, it really was okay.

The only really hard thing is that, nowadays, I don't want anything very much.

My flatmates got me a commonplace book for my birthday because they know I like to write, and they stuck photographs and messages into the first couple of pages, and it was one of the sweetest gifts I have ever received. Why do I have to care so much about being good at everything? Isn't it enough to just do things because you like them? I would tell anyone else that it is, because it is, and I'm nineteen now, I must at least attempt to recognise that ridiculous double-standard of mine for what it is.

CHRIST. I only opened this window to say that I was sorry I abandoned my (incredibly well-intentioned) university blog as soon as I actually made it to the fucking place. What's wrong with me! It's definitely time to go and read about the first crusade.

Sorry, lovely blog. I will try to find something to do with you soon.

p.s. the money worries got sorted out fine. Sorry I called you a pack of dicks so many times, student finance?

try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms.

I spent the tail-end of the bank holiday weekend circling things in red pen and writing down masses of phone numbers and so on, keying myself up for all the ringing around I was going to do on Tuesday morning, in an attempt to sort out some goddamn private accommodation already, goddamn it. Luckily, I decided to check my emails on Tuesday morning before I launched, head-first, into the cut and thrust of the thing. This is what I found there:
"Dear [lozopus]

Re: Room Offer

We are pleased to offer you a room in University Halls of Residence at Liverpool.  For security reasons we are not able to give you details about the offer in this email. To view and respond to the offer please login to the University Student Portal..."

Oh dear, I thought, how terrifying. I'd already made up my mind to turn it down if it was another catered offer, not reapply through the university and utilise all the scouting around I'd done over the weekend. Luckily, I didn't have to bother - in just over two weeks I shall be moving into some self-catered, uni-owned halls which are, to boot, the ones I wanted all along; the ones that are close to campus and right in the heart of the city.

Frankly, I'm so excited now that it's unreal. In all my life, I've never lived in a city, only in (fairly horrible) towns - I know that seems a silly thing to matter to a person, but the thought of not having to get on a fucking train to see good comedy or music or theatre is just a little overwhelming. I'd been reluctant but resigned to spending my first year of city-life two miles out of the bustle, a bus ride away from everything, but now I am within actual walking distance of everything cool - within WALKING DISTANCE. Bearing in mind that I am willing to walk quite a long way for things and not, er, expecting it to be ten minutes across either way or something.

I saw a group of friends during the week who asked if the accommodation thing had sorted itself out; I replied in the affirmative and received a very lovely cheer in the middle of the street. What a good bunch. Then we went to the London Tombs and nearly had a coronary, which would have been a shame, after all that fuss.

On a semi-related note, my dad visited Liverpool this week - he had booked his train tickets back before we knew I'd missed my grades for my first choice uni, so it was just a coincidence really - and spent a happy day wandering about on his own, geeking out. My dad's a huge Beatles fan, and his obsession made a weekend in Liverpool one of the first holidays I ever had, certainly the first I can really remember, when I was eight or nine years old. The entire reason I chose to apply to Liverpool was that I'd fallen in love with the city during visits past, so him calling me up to go, "er, is it John Moores you're going to?" (no) had a pleasantly cyclical feel to it. He made me love the city, and now I am going to live there, and the fact his only child is going to live there has, I suppose, made him look at the place in a different way.

He found my future campus (verdict: "massive") and took a photo of the map they supplied, which he sent me in a text. A rather touching gesture, all told, particularly in light of the fact that I had been not a little concerned in the past about how he viewed my going away; he's made no secret of being happy that I didn't get into my first choice, though - further away geographically and with a year in a different country - so I suppose it's really all worked out for the best in that regard.

Oh, look at that. It just turned midnight. Exactly two weeks to go, now.

For all the time, all the years I've spent looking forward to this and preparing, it really has rather snuck up on me. But these things have a way of doing that, don't they?

begin the beguine.

Being a 21st century lady and an all-round modern sort of cat, I got my first blog at the tender age of thirteen, a livejournal, in defiance of a friend who laughed in my face when I told him I was considering it. He said (and I know this, for I have my very first blog entry tabbed as I type; oh, the internet), "What interesting things have you got to say?"

I'm still not sure that I do have anything much to say for myself. But I was never serious about it, and over the years I dabbled, and continually told myself that one day, as an adult, as a real person, I would begin the process in earnest.

That same year, when I was thirteen, I was taken to Normandy on the only residential school trip I ever braved. For the most part I had a slightly miserable time, but we did spend a pleasant morning visiting a rather beautiful and secluded little orchard, the like of which is no doubt very common in northern France. While we were there, we were all given free samples of the orchard's apple juice, which I thought was - beautiful. Was just about the nicest thing I'd ever tasted. I bought a bottle with several of my scrunched up and carefully rationed-out euros, and I brought it home with me.

So enamoured was I with this drink that, in a fit of deferred gratification, I desperately saved it for a special occasion: I wouldn't let myself have any until I was ready, until I had earned it, and by the time that day arrived, I opened the bottle to discover that it had congealed and gone off. It had to be thrown away. My thirteen-year-old self was distraught.

I suppose the moral of the story is that if I put things off forever, eventually they...go...rotten. Rotten, like my soul.

Oh dear, no, that wasn't it at all. And I was sure I had a genuine point to make.

Okay, well, so, anyway. After a long and confusing and fairly drawn-out process, I learned today that I will definitely be spending the next three years in Liverpool, studying English (and some subsidiaries; I think I'll take history?) at the University of Liverpool. I want this blog to be, I don't know, a sort of chronicle of that embarkation; of the trials and the struggles and the excitements that a first generation university student, going up at the beginning of a big old recession, will really encounter. To be some kind of record.

Perhaps somebody will one day find it useful - or, more likely, perhaps I will rediscover it five years from now and laugh and laugh at all the silly things I thought and said. After all, there's no better place to keep a record than the internet. The shallow, eternally-logged thoughts of my thirteen-year-old self, drifiting about forever in cyberspace, are proof of that if they are proof of nothing else. And they really are proof of nothing else. Except perhaps that I spent altogether too much time thinking about chocolate.