Cabin fever

It’s hardly stopped raining for the last two days.  I’ve been stuck inside this metal box and I’m beginning to climb the walls. Yesterday it left off for an hour and I put some rhubarb roots into the corner of my patch.  The first real planting since I took it over as it’s been mainly clearing up all the junk and rubbish that had been left all over the site.  And I LOVE rhubarb.  I have a great new recipe for rhubarb and strawberry flan, and there is already a huge strawberry bed in the new garden.

But then a major thunderstorm stopped all that and we had to retreat back home.  Nothing to do but hold onto two terrified dogs as the thunder raged the sky and hail and rain lashed the lorry and we had a biblical event for twenty minutes! One of those storms that you really can only watch and be awed by.  It is always an even more physical experience in the lorry as the whole thing rocks with the storm.  It’s like being on a ship. More of those to come I guess as we go through the climate changes we are promised.

After the worst was over it was obviously going to be another one of those days when the rain wouldn’t leave off.  A good time to catch up on the tv programmes I’d missed.  I didn’t go further than Benefit Street, Channel 4’s examination of the street in Birmingham where most people are on benefits.  I found the programme fascinating but very uncomfortable.  Maybe that is what the makers intended, as the people it focused on seemed to lack some basic human dimensions.

There were three people who showed real humanity.  An Indian man who gave food to a group of Romanians who were penniless and being conned, a Jamaican young man who gave free goods to a penniless family and an older white man who left allotment vegetables on people’s doorsteps.  Almost all the rest of the hour and a half of programmes I watched dealt with people who were dishonest, immoral or self-centred.  Some were all three. It is compelling watching, even though I felt rather ashamed of humanity afterwards.

Just then the phone rings.  I had made an arrangement to visit Crich Tramway near Matlock and I had completely forgotten.  Nick, one of their volunteers, was waiting there for me, two hours’ drive away!  I apologised and said I would leave immediately and we did, off down the motorway and across the country towards Derby.  The place was charming.  By the time I arrived the rain had stopped, the sun was out and the reconstructed village, including many buildings taken down brick by brick from places across the region and reconstructed there, was very impressive (http://www.tramway.co.uk).  I’m booked to be there May 26^th - 29^th inclusive and you will find me alongside the Red Lion pub.  Very suitable location I thought for me, especially now I’m not drinking!

And on the way back I have another phone call, this one from Ken at Betws Y Coed.  The 2014 Ferret Derby has been cancelled.  This is sad for them and very sad for me.  I’ve been attending the Ferret Derby for maybe twenty-five years. Previously it was a Donkey Derby but they turned the church field into a carpark a few years ago and didn’t have room for the donkeys, so it became ferrets instead.  Certainly I remember my daughter Jayne trying to coax an unwilling donkey round the field.  She must have been twelve or so at the time.  They (the Church) raise money for great charities around the world and I loved the event.  Mimi, Blue and I are the judges at some of the pet competitions, and I always pitched up early there, have a great breakfast at a café in the town that welcomes dogs (how rare is that these days?) and enjoy a lovely day at the smallest event I visit in the year.  It’s really sad that it isn’t going to happen in 2014.  Apparently those who do the really hard work are getting on a bit and they aren’t being replaced.  Now that is a common story…

Ah well one door closes, and another opens.  Farewell Betws Y Coed and Hello Matlock Tramway.  Heigh ho, the life of a travelling show.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Rhyl High

As you will know if you read my last blog I wasn’t looking forward to Cat’s Paw Theatre’s visit to Rhyl High School.  In late Victorian times Rhyl must have been an attractive and burgeoning resort.  The train line had brought a new prosperity to the beautiful North Wales coast and its lovely beaches, with excursions out from Liverpool and Manchester, and here and there the place has a hint of what it might have been like.  You have to look very carefully though because the twentieth century was not kind and the twenty-first has been cruel to Rhyl.

The place is desperately run down, it has one of the highest deprivation indexes in Wales and as I said last time it has the reputation as the drug capital of North Wales.  Rhyl High is an observation not just an abbreviation! The sea front is a mixture of peeling, seedy hotels, guest houses and arcades and the town centre has a larger than average number of boarded shopfronts, bargain stores, and charity shops. The school itself was on special measures a few years ago when we last performed there and I was expecting a four hour battle for hearts and minds and was armed ready with all my teacher’s control tricks.

I arrived in plenty of time.  Too early really so I popped into Sainsbury’s Café down the road for a coffee and a read.  The great thing about Sainsbury’s café is the subsidised coffee and the free papers.  I took the Times and found a couple of relevant blogworthy reports.  The first was the news that only a quarter of the numbers of British ‘travellers’, or gypsies as we now can’t call them, actually travel anymore.  As a fellow traveller, well anyway a traveller, this is a very interesting statistic, and I will devote an entire blog to it at some time in the future.  The other article was an amusing tale from Wrexham, just down the road and where we perform regularly.  The Poundland at Wrexham was due to close so the manager had a half price sale!  Everything at 50p!  The place was mobbed apparently (Wrexham is very poor too) and the place was almost stripped to the shelves in no time.  It was so popular that when Head Office heard about it, they gave the store a reprieve and ordered the manager to go back to the original prices.  The manager foolishly decided to do what he was told straight away and the result was revolution at the tills, with people dumping their baskets of 50p bargains, berating the unfortunate staff, swearing and angrily storming out, threatening retribution, revolution and revenge.  The manager was forced to offer a BOGOF deal to pacify the seething citizens!  Poverty, poverty, knock!

Anyway, back to Rhyl High. We set up in the school and stood by ready to repel borders.  One of my longstanding teacher’s tricks with a group I am expecting to be difficult is to establish strong control right from the start of a session.  It’s much much easier to relax discipline later if a group behaves itself than try to pull it back after a relaxed start.  So I start with stern looks and tough clear speech, introducing the session and expecting excellent behaviour.  Very quickly I realise that these 14 year olds from this terribly deprived area were paying rapt attention.  After the brief introduction, there is a twenty minute theatre piece about the subject which, if you’ve read previous blogs, you will know is about rape and sexual consent.  Not a murmur.  You could hear a pin drop in the studio theatre.  The core scenes of the story were very strong, the actors picking up and responding to the focused attention the story was receiving.  And it went on in exactly the same vein for two hours.  The young people’s questions and responses were respectful and intelligent.  They demonstrated real emotional maturity when talking about the subject and using the words around the subject like ‘have sex’ without giggles and the usual Year 9 nudges and whispers.  In short they were a fantastic audience.  The feedback from them and the teachers (we ask them to complete written feedback forms) was excellent and they went away having learned much from the session.  And I had learned much about Rhyl High School.

An entirely different response from the one we were expecting.  And thinking now about the day, the school had a different atmosphere from the one I remember.  Something had changed in the interim years.  Something definitely for the better. Probably a new Head, definitely a newly committed staff.

So despite the current citizens of Rhyl being what they are now, I feel the future ones, anyway those we met there yesterday, might have a bit of a chance to make a difference and turn the town’s fortunes and future around.  There's a touch of high class about Rhyl High. Good luck to them! They deserve to succeed.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Special Measures

I’m knackered. A few days of gardening followed today by four hours with 80 fourteen year olds getting them to talk about sex.  I feel wiped out, but in a good way.  The groups in the school today were bristling with hormonal life and the subject of course was right up that street.  The school was in Wrexham and on special measures, Ofsted’s warning shot that the school has to do better.  I can see why. The children were tough to control (mostly my job), provocative and easy to set giggling for all the wrong reasons.  And it’s a two hour traffic on the stage.  By the end I feel the traffic had mainly been steam rollers!  However they go away knowing what rape means, what true consent is, that they can say no even if they said yes previously and that there is help available if they need it.  And they’ve grown up a bit.  They come in as wide eyed just past innocents but leave with the strong and unmistakable taste of impending adulthood.  And theatre in general and Cat’s Paw Theatre in particular has achieved that.  So I’m pleased. Pleased and knackered.

I think Richard (my now deceased dad) would have been proud of the work (as children we always called our parents, Richard and Pat, by their first names). I learned a very great deal from him all those years ago when he was a Primary School Head and we lived alongside the school.  Even though I resisted the career for years he had planted the seed of good teaching practice in me and though it took some time for it to germinate, grow and flower, I did eventually become a real teacher and I am still very involved with encouraging young people to learn.  One truth I learned from him was the clear and in some ways obvious fact that a good teacher must also be a good performer.  It’s no good just knowing something well if you can’t make learners inspired by it.  It takes energy and enthusiasm, belief and dedication to make the magic work.  There must be truth in the words but there must also be power in the voice and animation in the body!  Richard had all that and he was a superb teacher and taught me most of my teaching skill.  The only thing I didn’t inherit from him was his hair, which I’m very pleased about.  I’ve inherited Pat’s hair!

And tomorrow it’s the same all over again and this time at Rhyl High School.  Another real challenge of a school.  Rhyl, drug capital of North Wales.  But there we are, it’s important work and no-one else is doing it so I just think that maybe someone in the audience will not put themselves into harm’s way as a result of what they’ve learned and in many ways, that’s inspiration enough.  That and the thought of a free school dinner!  Today’s was a fresh mixed grill followed by fruit sponge and custard, and a big glass of fresh orange juice.  School dinners have come on since my days in school! 

So not all bad by any means and it all helps towards the economy drive, which, since you ask, is on track.  More or less managing on £30 a week for food, including feeding the two fluffy spoiled ones who have their chicken rice and peas and look as though they’re thriving on it.  In case you’re wondering, they sit in the car in the school car park and I take them for lunch time and breaktime walks.  They have water and a few treats in the car and seem ok with the arrangement.

At the long break today I manged to drive out into the town and bought a new gas bottle, my onboard tank being nearly empty and no clutch meaning I can’t drive out to the garage for LPG.  So tonight it’s everything on, gas heating and water, chicken in the oven and no worries about running out in the middle of dinner.  What luxury hey!

I managed to send of the faulty control unit for mending and heard that the financial problem I’ve been having with my other business may be one step towards a solution.  But that’s another story for another blog. In the meantime, on mission, in budget and undaunted!

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Back to work

I think I mentioned that I had some vehicle problems recently.  One of them was with the lorry that has a problem with the clutch.  In fact I only just limped back into the yard on my final time out just before Christmas and I’ve been putting off doing anything about it.  Until today anyway, when I tried to take it out of the yard so I could shuffle the stage trailer into the workshop for the annual makeover.  Oh dear it hadn’t improved and I had real problems moving it into gear, but just managed to move it out of the way of the workshop door enough so I could shift the trailer in.

Next I try to move the trailer.  Now this has one of those neat electric trailer movers on it so when I’m at a gig and have to shift it a few yards (yes still imperial after all these years) I can just press a button on a remote and the trailer chugs along under its own steam.  So now the mover refuses to work.  Dead as a dodo. Double jeopardy!  After a few calls I find I have to remove the mover controller box to send it away to be diagnosed and mended and my mechanic would come out later in the week to diagnose the lorry.

After a little while I think maybe I can move the trailer with the onboard winch that I use to pull up the stage.  Alleluliah!  With some careful padding so the winch wire doesn’t damage the paintwork I manage to manipulate the trailer into the workshop. Then in the lorry, by pumping the clutch a few times a second (I think the problem is something to do with the hydraulics) I manage to engage reverse and pull the lorry back to its usual place in front of the workshop doors! Job done!!!  But not in the way I had planned.

But hey I didn’t give up, instead I thought outside the box and achieved all that I set out to do.  Sometimes I really miss not having someone around to say ‘Well done’.  I guess I will just have to say it to myself.  ‘Well done Mr A!’

And tomorrow and the rest of the week I’m in schools with Cat’s Paw Theatre, our amazing theatre company.  We’re in our fifth year presenting a two hour barnstorming piece of theatre for Year 9s about sexual consent and rape.  We’ve once again been commissioned to visit every High School in North Wales and I’m very proud of this work.  It’s very different from the Travelling Show but it neatly fills in the gaps as when I’m not working in events, I put on shirt and tie and become the facilitator for the company.  This means I have to engage the young people and encourage them to respond to the subject and open up and talk about it.  Very interesting, as of course it’s a subject that all fourteen year olds are thinking about a lot of the time, but asking them to talk about it seriously and in public is a completely different story!  I have three other very able actor/teachers and a specially trained police officer who attends every performance so I am not on my own.

The piece of theatre we present is what we call Forum Theatre, which basically allows the audience to interact with the characters in several unique ways.  The core story is about a fifteen year old schoolgirl, two weeks short of her sixteenth birthday, who says she has been raped by her boyfriend.  He says she gave consent.  It becomes down to the audience to decide on the truth as they are enrolled into the piece as the jury in the trial of the boyfriend.  The students are encouraged to ask questions of the characters and the actors stay in character and improvise the answers, and we work through the story a second time stopping and discussing the key features of the action. I act as facilitator and the police officer steps in to tell the audience about the details of the law.

It has the audience on the edge of their seats for two hours and the feedback from teachers and students alike has been brilliant, which is why we’re in our fifth year of delivering it, I guess.  One of the challenges is for us to keep it fresh and interesting every time we do it.  We’ve now presented it to over 8000 Year 9 pupils over the four/five years and I am very pleased to report that the police have told us that the instances of reported rapes from under sixteens, which when we started the project all those years ago was shockingly high (over 50% of victims of rape in North Wales then were under 16) has now dropped considerably.  Of course there’s no way we can claim a direct co-relation, but for sure we can say that over the years of doing the project we have taught those 8000 young people the exact definitions of rape and sexual consent, and made sure they remember them by presenting them in a way that is memorable and engaging.

So when I’m not leaping around on the Travelling Show stage, that’s one of the things I’m doing.  As well as trying to move big bits of resisting and aging metal around my yard!

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

The economy and ecology of living in a lorry, Part 3

I’ve spoken about some of the practical and physiological aspects of lorry living in the first two parts of this occasional sub-series.  Today I’m moving up the triangle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (check it out at http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html ) towards the notions of self-fufillment and personal growth.

Maya Angelou writes

'My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style'

I agree with that but if someone asks me how I am just now I tend to say ‘Surviving’, and I am aware as I say it that it’s less than I would like to say.  Somehow there’s a back against the wall, stiff upper lip feel to the word, but that is how I feel, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling.  I mentioned the desperate faces in my last blog about Oswestry on Thursday.  I know I’m not the only person who is finding that life is really hard, and that survival is a battle.  They are faced daily with the bottom level of the triangle, the very basic needs – food, water, shelter and warmth.

I’m luckier than many because I have a life that involves creative work, and a way to make it pay enough to make a living, even if that basic living is often exactly that.  Basic.   But if, like me, you can find something that not only gives you a personal sense of achievement but that also earns you recognition and respect from others then you are well on the way to discovering a different meaning and purpose to life that lifts you above the basic.  My life as a performer does exactly that for me.  The persona of Mr Alexander is my on-going link to achieving my full potential.

If you watch my improvisation between shows, you will see that I tend to repeat and repeat the same routine.  It is more than just practice, it is being at one with what I do, a series of moments of achievement that I hope the audience can equate to personally and see as a metaphor of all types of life skills achievement. 

And out of these moments from time to time emerge observations and statements that I have used in shows and lessons and passed on to others on the path;

Failure is on the road to success

Don’t say ‘I can’t do it’, say ‘I can’t do it yet’

Practice makes progress

All three statements are linked.  Many people, instead of being liberated by their learning experiences have been stifled and mortified by them.  Teachers and schools leave many with a legacy which makes them terrified of failure; failure for them is something personally and morally reprehensible, and must never be admitted or sanctioned.  It has been built into the fabric of Western education and will probably always be there.  A ‘failing’ school is almost the worst statement Ofsted can make after an inspection; a failed exam will leave most students never wanting anything to do with that subject ever again.

In our education system failure is the worst judgment on a learner, it must be avoided at all costs and certainly never promoted as a learning tool!

But I believe that failure is a fundamental part of the positive learning process.  Understanding our attitude to failure, and where it comes from and moving through the barrier it has thrown down is a wonderfully liberating and positive experience and will help us grow and learn more in the future, and, importantly, learn more efficiently and effectively.

How can we understand success if we have never failed?  And of course the fear of failure is the thing that stops us even trying.  How many times have I heard someone I am teaching how to juggle throw the beanbags down and say ‘I can’t do it.’  And then with a few more moments of practice they discover that actually they can do it and go on and through that psychological learning barrier and really start achieving.

Of course it’s not always as easy as that and some people’s learning barriers can take a lifetime to dismantle.  But once the barriers start to come down there really is NOTHING that we cannot achieve.

So I’m trying to practice what I preach.  Having failed to earn enough money in 2013 to allow me to thrive through the winter, I’m learning that surviving is on the road to thriving and, like Maya, my mission in life is to thrive in 2014 and beyond!

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander