Thursday 29th January 2015

I used to live near a Waitrose. And it was a Waitrose in Brighton, less than five minutes from the beach, so it was pretty bloody Waitrose. Obviously, your expectation might be that everything in Waitrose is going to be markedly more expensive than elsewhere - the Sainsburys down the road, for instance, or the Aldi. But that's not actually the case: in the main, and considering the quality, the difference in price isn't that much higher. 

By the way, a word about places like Aldi and Lidl. By now, you'll have worked out that you can get some pretty good stuff there - there's stories of Guardian readers loading up the 4x4 with cheaply priced imported meats and lobster, all under five quid. I think Aldi and Lidl are missing several tricks here. It would be a simple matter to open up a little bespoke shop, all hewn wood and exposed brickwork - somewhere in Kensington (or less than five minutes walk from Brighton beach), get a job lot of cured hams from Aldi, repackage them in wax paper , and sell it on for £8 a pop. It would be a huge success. I would say you can't have that idea, it's mine, but I'd be stunned if someone hasn't already beaten me to it. 

Anyway, Waitrose. They've always been pretty savvy about  making the customer feel important. There's doubtless a few people who will disagree with my interpretation of events, but the staff at my local Waitrose always seem pretty friendly and genuinely willing to help. A lot of this appears to be - and again, maybe some will disagree - that the staff generally seem happy to be there. This is a marked difference to many other supermarkets. 

A while back, Waitrose pulled a masterstroke, and offered free coffee to anyone who had a store loyalty card. That, and the fact you could claim a free newspaper if you were spending more than £5, meant that the shop pretty much owned you, in a very similar way to a cult. But a cult that kept you jacked up on caffeine and daily news and comment. There was a very good chance that you'd make a slight diversion from a nearer store in order to pick up a free newspaper, or, if you had only intended to pick up a tea, you would end up buying a muffin as well, as a example of your co-dependent relationship. It was fine, you both knew what you were getting into. A Fifty Shades Of Earl Grey, if you like. 

The Brighton Waitrose doesn't have a coffee shop, meaning that anyone who wants that free drink either drinks it while shopping, or takes it straight out. There's nowhere to sit down and drink. This appears not to be the case everywhere, though, because Waitrose sent out an email this morning asking (OK, stating) that customers claiming their free drink would now also buy a cake or something. This inevitably prompted an impressive slew of people babbling on twitter who ably demonstrated that they could complain, but couldn't actually read: Waitrose had to keep repeating that coffees got from a machine were still free, it was just that if you sat down in a coffee shop, you had to pay for something. This wasn't good enough for twitter customers, who, unable to see that they were screwing up a good deal by sitting for free with a coffee for six hours like a failed Hollywood screenwriter in Starbucks. ’It isn't free’, one customer sniffed. Well, maybe he sniffed. It was on twitter, it probably isn't wise to speculate too much about the bodily functions people get up to on twitter. 

I can only imagine that this is exactly what's happened: Waitrose coffee shops have been crammed by people who have claimed their free coffee and their free table and spoiling it for everyone else. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can't have nice things. At least the failed Hollywood screenwriter might actually pay for a coffee every four hours or so. 

At the very worst, you might think that customers would go “oh, well, free coffee was nice while it lasted, guess we're going to have to go back to the traditional methods of actually PAYING FOR STUFF and / or SHOPLIFTING now”. But, no. Like a toddler being told they have to put the action figure back on the display when leaving the toy shop, these people kicked, screamed and bawled. The last time I saw such embarrassing MINE IT'S MINE behaviour was - well, actually, back at Waitrose, on Christmas Eve, when the shop managed to annoy everyone with the controversial announcement that they were not going to reduce prices on the turkeys just before the store closed. This was met with absolute fury (I'm not kidding: fury), particularly when people were told that the turkeys were going to be donated to the homeless. This annoyed a lot of people. Especially the people holding their free coffees. 

I'll say it again. This is why we can't have nice things. 

Back To Brighton

I'm in a coffee shop in Brighton making two significant mistakes. The first is having chosen a coffee shop that comes with its own wifi access, meaning that the first real bit of writing that I've done this afternoon is the sentence and a half you've just read, and the second mistae is reading a book called The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

It's always the same at this time of year. Having not been at work for a couple of weeks means that I'm beginning to feel - well, you know, a human being, and having spent a week at the Fringe seeing a variety of great (and terrible) shows reminds me how possible it is to do the same. At the moment, my days aren't packed hour to hour with demands on my time, and so, despite my claim earlier, I am actually completing a bit of writing, and my mind is firing on at least two cylinders, trying to work out how easy (or at least possible) it would be to bring a show up to Edinburgh.

It is, of course, all about the time and money. Even those performers and companies that latch on to the valuable free festivals that have become so important in recent years have at least some disposable income to make a month away from real life a viable option. I've always claimed, and indeed assumed, that I'm in no way bitter - that's the way that the cards have been dealt, and in any case, I don't personally know of a single performer who hasn't worked incredibly hard for whatever degree of success they've achieved. But now I'm thinking I may as well get a little bitter. It's something to do, isn't it?

I spoke to a lot of performers this year who had found themselves in terrible shows, the quality of which was reflected in low audience numbers, and savage reviews. One actor I spoke to mentioned the review that the show in which he was appearing. Not only was the review better writen that the show, it struggled to give one star: 'And that was generous,' he muttered darkly. It must be disheartening for a company to repeat a show for at least two weeks of what's one of the world's biggest arts festivals to increasingly dwindling audiences, fighting against the positive word of mouth that's buzzing around - as far as you can tell - any other show in town.

What seemed to link these shows - apart from the fact that they were by all accounts dire - was that they were bankrolled by the director. At this point we should acknowledge that in these cases, 'director' refers only to the person with money and an ego, and not, as you might hope, any detecable charisma or talent. In at least two of these cases, the 'director' was doing the show as part of their PHD. I'm still not entirely sure what this indicates.

All of this doesn't stop me, each year, from coming back to Brighton in a slightly more creative frame of mind, finally working out what cuts and changes are needed in the show that people have been telling me for about ten years now that I really MUST bring to the Fringe, of having new ideas for stories/plays/stand up that invariably jostle for postion alongside the incomplete ideas I had this time last year before real life got back in the way. I often read of all these people who managed to complete their first novel in the half hour between waking up and going to work, and I honestly don't know how they managed it.

This year, then, I'm going to see if there's any value in the small and short. There's plenty of short story and short play competitions out there, all with, if not some critical recognition, then at least cash prizes. In some respect, this is what this blog is about. While there are few things more boring than a writer talking about what s/he's writing about (while they're talking about it, chances are they're no-where near getting to actually writing about it), I can understand why they do it: if they announce they're working on something, they have witnesses. Not an audience, but witnesses - people who can pull them up in a years time and ask them how that novel/play/joke/to do list is going. And if they've got nowhere with it: well, clearly they're not serious about it all.

Goodbye To Edinburgh

Yesterday morning was my last in Edinburgh, so I spent some of it in the Elephant House cafe, which I hadn't had a chance to do so previously this year. The cafe gets an extraordinary amount of negative feedback on sites like tripadvisor and foursquare, simply because it trades on the fact that JK Rowling is supposed to have begun writing her Harry Potter books there. This - the negative feedback - is a trifle unfair on the Elephant House, as it's an entirely understandable angle to pull. People who gripe about the cafe celebrating its (admittedly probably quite weak) connection with the world of Harry Potter are like those who'd want to firebomb an old house just because it had a blue plauqe stating that Arthur Conan Doyle once lived there.

Why wouldn't you celebrate the fact that JK Rowling (probably) wrote (some of) the early drafts of Harry Potter there? Frankly, I'm somewhat unconvinced that the story is entirely true as it stands, since popular myth tells us that JKR began writing the books while a young mum, and there doesn't seem to be a great deal of room to get a buggy in there. Although I'll acknowledge that it's probably got a hell of a lot busier in the last ten years.

Of course, that's one of the main reasons people complain on tripadvisor: that it's always so busy, packed with Harry Potter fans (thereby presumably overlooking the resason they were there in the first place). It's probably about as busy as the Black Medicine cafe on the other side of town which is smaller and a lot more awkwardly designed, but has a better system for reducing waiting time and lines at the counter. Plus, it seems slightly cooler than the Elephant House. Well, I once sat next to Will Poulter just before Son Of Rambow came out. I assume that counts for something.

What the Elephant House doesn't have, apart from the sign outside declaring that JK Rowling started writing her books here, is any mention of the boy wizard at all. There are, in respect of the cafe's name, a great deal of ceramic elephants, but Harry Potter appears to be wearing an invisibilty cloak.There's not even any reference to anything vaugely magical - not even a twig repesenting a wand, and you pretty quickly realise that the figure that Must Not Be Named is Warner Bros, doing everything it can to protect its product. That's understandable, but its a shame that its strength is so overeaching that the Elephant House can't even have anything on display like a witches hat, which by and large predate JK Rowling and the films by at least a couple of years.

I'm now wondering if it might not be a little too mean to write a film for Warner Bros that excusively deals with the adventures of a gang of elephants. Who live in a house. See how the cafe and WBs copyright department cope with that ...

What Show Are You Doing?

My last evening at the Edinburgh Fringe. I'm out in about a hour or so to see a couple of shows (and that in itself indicates all that is crazy about the Fringe ... for some performers and audiences, the day only really kicks in at around 6pm). One show that I'm seeing is research, of a kind. I'd meant to do a lot more research in the types of shows that I saw up here. I've got an improv show coming up in May, for the Brighton Festival Fringe, and since it's a long form style show, I thought that it would be instructive to see a few, 'specially as it's a type of improv I only have a bit of experience with.

But here's the thing. There weren't really a great deal of improv shows that leapt out at me. I think improv can be a bit of a tough sell, it's instructive to see how such a show can come across to me, someone who's actively seeking one out. The improv show that I'll be working on, due in May 2013 (since when did my calender start getting booked years in advance? Isn't that supposed to be a sign of success, or something?) won't exactly be an easy ride. Whatever else improvisation is meant to be, it certainly isn't simply making things up as you go along.

Had a lovely chat and coffee with a friend on what was her last day at the Fringe. Almost predictably, we got to lamenting how difficult it is to bring a show up here. Although, if we're being pedantic (which, all of a sudden, we are) she's already brought a show up here,last year. By sheer chance, it was the last show I saw at the Fringe before leaving in 2011, long before I'd met her. It was very good.

To be fair to her, and our shared laments, it was the uni that she was studying with at the time that paid most of the costs, otherwise it's doubtful that she would have been able to afford it. It's a depressing fact that money is a significantly more important factor in getting a show to the fringe than, say, talent. I've spoken to at least two people this year - who I didn't know - who felt trapped in shows that they absolutely hated, being directed by people who they thought were talentless idiots. The reason, then, that the show existed was because these directors had a bit of cash to throw around. And, bizarely, in both cases, because the directors were completing a PHD in Theatre. However, in both cases, the depressed actors involved said that I should really get along to see the show. Presumably after nearly a month, the flyering instinct never leaves you.