Saturday 29 June 2013

So, this time last week (God, has it been a week already? How the hell did that happen?) I tried to organise a picnic/barbecue thing on the beach. Of course, I know, and you know, that as soon as you say those sort of things out loud, then the weather will be against you. And so it came to pass that there were pretty healthy winds all day long, which effectively (very effectively, in fact) put paid to any chances of spending time whatsoever outside. This Saturday, things are different. This Saturday, there was a full day rehearsal with the youth theatre, so it was pretty much inevitable that today would be the first day of 2013 where there would be more than two hours of uninterrupted warm sunlight (please don't message me to tell you that, actually,  you've had loads of days of brilliant sunshine: we're talking about my experience here. My experience may admittedly be significantly a lot more boring than yours, but we happen to be on my blog, and not yours. Of course, you could argue - very successfully - that the reason that you don't have a blog is precisely because your experience is less boring than mine, and I'm really not going to argue with you on that point). 

Like most people who write a blog (with the honorable exception of Richard Herring) I've let it go a bit fallow without updates this month. This is mainly because of the festival fringe production I was directing (which I really, really will chat about in more detail in a couple of posts time), but a few other things have happened in the meantime. I guess the main thing most recently was turning forty. This, in fact, was the main reason for attempting a beach picnic/barbecue type of thing. Many people have been asking me - quite intensely, in fact - if I've bothered by this milestone. They ask with such intensity, in fact, that I've begun to wonder if it isn't to facilitate their own sense of glee at a fellow human being falling apart and crumbling to dust before them than any actual concern they might have for my well-being. But the fact is, I feel like I was born at the age of forty, so getting to the actual physical age is no great hardship. Of course, traditionally, this is the point in time when a man is supposed to have a  mid-life crisis, but since I'm not exactly adverse to the idea of suddenly having a classic car and a girlfriend who's all sorts of wrong for me, I'm not exactly sure that it will be any kind of crisis at all. 

There are probably lots of things that did or didn't happen while I was far-too-busy to keep the blog updated, but the thing that springs to mind was getting to the long list for a writing competition. Now, I'm hopelessly naive about these sort of things. I wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as a long list. I know, logically, that there must be - that would make a lot more sense of the phrase 'short list', but it wasn't really something that I gave much thought. So when I originally got the email telling me that I hadn't made the short list, I took that as a standard rejection, and thought no further about it, other than to redraft the story (for what was probably about the tenth time, now). I rewrote it with the critical eye of a story that had, in fact, been rejected. I think the changes that I made were actually pretty important, and vital - indeed, how had I missed them the first nine times? - and made the story a helluva lot better. That done, I sent the story off again (to its third chance). 

I hadn't really read the rejection email until weeks later, and it was only then that I discovered that my name was on the long list. Sure, it was still a 'rejected' entry, but I wasn't exactly sure what long list actually meant, believe it or not. For a moment there, I did wonder if it was simply a list of all the stories that had been entered - literally, a long list. Turns out, not. Apparently, there was over a thousand entries, and the long list was under 100 stories. As 'rejections' go, that's pretty good odds. As I say, I have already redrafted the story and improved it. The long list (now that I actually know what that phrase means) gets announced at the end of next week. It might not be third time lucky. 

But, then again .. 

A Day Off. Sort Of.

Within the finishing line (for me) of Edinburgh this year, as I'll be leaving in a couple of days. I've enjoyed it more than I did last year, although it feels more like hard work this time round - the reviews I've been writing have felt like more of a struggle, particuarly in the instances where I've attempted to review things that are somewhat outside my 'comfort zone'. There have been a couple of things this year that I knew I was never going to review, simply because I liked the performer too much. I'm thinking specfically here of the likes of Daniel Kitson and Josie Long, who I happened to see on the same day. I knew that I didn't want to review them,  just see them as a punter, because I wanted to simply watch them without the need to make notes, and also (this may the more important point) there comes a time when it's entirely pointless to review performers you already expect to like and be positive about. There are a couple of acts this year that, keeping that in mind, I suspect I have written my last review for.

However, I feel like I've become a true Fringe veteran today because I 'almost' had a day off. In years past, I would feel like I was wasting a day up in Edinburgh if I wasn't seeing five or six shows. Considering it takes about five years to truly get a measure of the city, and there can be less than three minutes between shows, this way madness lies. But today was somewhat relaxed, and I had no desire to complicate matters. I still had one show to review at the end of the night, but the rest of the day was fairly empty. Which is not to say that I didn't fill it with a couple of shows anyway - Richard Herring's Talking Cock (actually the first time I've seen him live), and earlier in the day, Angela Barnes and Matt Richardson on the Free Fringe. Both shows were great fun, and both were crammed to the rafters with punters. It's very delightful to see such huge audiences attend shows headlined by performers you have at least a nodding aquaintance with. I'm sure I'll be boring people with 'I knew them' type anedoctes in less than a year.

The other way I know I'm a Fringe veteran actually started a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd gotten over it. However, it kicked in again today (or was it yesterday? It's the Fringe, I have no idea). It's the point where, as an audience member, you begin to take as keen an interest in the sightlines and lighting rig as you do the act on stage. I get frustrated by this, this niggling hope that at some point I might have the chance to bring a production up to the festival. Of course, at the moment, without recourse to a lottery win, this seems to be pretty much impossible.

These latter days of my Fringe visits are the most cruel - surronded by thousands of creative people, relaxed after a couple of weeks off, my mind begins to start actually having a couple of good ideas that might genuinely work as Fringe ideas, and just today I had an idea how to rewrite my Brighton Fringe play from a couple of years ago to get it to a Edfringe-manageable time of at least a hour and a half. Nobody seems to have told my head that in a very short time, it'll be back at work. It seems a shame to let it know ...