Making ready for the road

There’s a growing surge of adrenalin as the first gig of the season approaches.  Trying to make sure everything that needs varnishing or painting has been, the do lists of details ticked down to the last remaining few. The nerves come from worrying that everything will work ok or that I forget some vital widget, left in the corner of the workshop.  One of these days I will count the number of components that make up the show and are moved in and out of place in the setup.  It must run to over a thousand. I know each of them almost intimately.  Every one not only plays a fundamental part but also has a quality that I enjoy and has become important, not only for its use but its particular value.  For example, I have a small wooden box that contains the bolts and wingnuts that I use to fix the flats of the stage together.  There are just the right number of wingnuts in the box for the job so once empty I know that I haven’t forgotten to fix something down.  The box has a Use, it holds the bolts and wingnuts but it also has a Quality - it is the list of the things I have to fix down so when it’s empty the list has been all ticked off.  The wingnuts themselves have a Use and a Quality.  Some are new and shiny and are good for places they can’t be seen, but on some flats I need to use the older, blacker ones that can’t be seen by the audience or they would stand out.  To me at any rate, and therefore potentially to the audience!  Use and Quality.  Utility and Beauty, and preferably both, make up the things I like to surround myself with.

Today I am at the garage having the lorry oil and filters changed and final checks that the vintage lorry will survive till its thirtieth next year.  Tomorrow it’s the turn of the trailer stage.  Every year I renew the trailer axle bearings and have the brakes checked.

And then it’s the final pack and tie down.  Tying down things in the lorry and trailer after the winter is always interesting.  It dawns how many things have been moved about since I last drove it.  Most of the contents in my home are held down with bungees, on shelves with ridges along the front or fixed down so I am always pleasantly surprised how few things fall down on the road or fly about as we drive along, but there is often something I forget and find it has rolled around the back when we arrive.  The dogs use the cab as a dayroom when I am static and when it suddenly becomes a cab with me in there too, they look at me as though I am invading their space, which I suppose I am!  I discover all sorts of bits they have purloined and taken in there, old chewed pencils and forgotten ends of dog chews.  Yeuch!

But then it’s time for the off, the tenth final check that everything is there and the road beckons and I become my other self, the one that is really me, the nomad traveller eccentric showman.  'The last little show at the end of the world', as someone once called it.

A day later and now I am beginning to panic!  I just took the trailer in for the service and bearing change to discover that there’s something else that has to be done to it to make it safe and usable.  The guy says ‘We’re not cheap but we do a good job…’ and he needs it until 4.00pm Friday which means I wont arrive in Llandudno till late Friday with all the holiday traffic and then an overnight setup.  And I will have to squeeze the last juice from my credit card!  I am trying to avoid overnight setups because of the work and stress involved but there’s really no option.  And I daren't think about the credit card. At least I will have extra time to finish of some of the things off at the workshop, but it’s going to be a pain whatever.  I hope it’s not a portent of the summer!

I had a postcard from my mystery benefactor with some interesting clues as to their identity and location!  Multifarious mysterious messages! I’m on your trail!

Hope to see some of my friends at the Extravaganza in Llandudno this weekend.  Come and say hello if you are there, in the meantime,

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Stowaway

My life is so full of the extraordinary and another incident has just occurred I would like to tell you about.  Three nights ago, Mimi, Blue and I were out in the little garden courtyard place that is close to the lorry.  It was our late night ramble and sniff before bed.  I noticed Blue nosing at something on the ground and my immediate reaction was it was a dead bird or mouse.  There are many feral cats around here as it is remote(ish) from human habitation.  They often leave the carcasses and entrails around.  It wasn’t though.  It was alive and it was a hamster!  I scooped it up and gave it a quick once over to check for injury but it seemed fine.  It tried to jump away but I put it in my log carrier and found a box some straw and a few smaller boxes it could sleep in while I contemplated its predicament and fate.

In this little courtyard there are four cages.  Each has some kind of creature in.  The Big House bosses are gradually establishing a petting farm here and I think this is a first step.  The hamster had been living rough and surviving on the little bits of food dropped around these cages.  His pouches were full when we happened upon him and we had obviously disturbed his nightly foray.  How he had arrived there is a mystery.  The local houses are at least two miles away and there are no hamsters allowed in the Big House. 

The next morning he was still in the box and had eaten the Hobnobs and the lettuce and drank some of the milk and water.  He had made a nest of the straw. Various members of my family fought over who would give him a permanent home and arrived during the day to inspect him and provide me with some of the basics that a hamster might like.  A wheel, a proper water bottle, some things to wriggle in and out of.  And of course a name, which was Jim.  They agreed Jim was an old boy, and had been round the block a few times.  He reminded them of me!  All good.  We looked on Ebay for a decent cage and found one locally, finishing Sunday.  I messaged them but they wouldn’t accept a Buy It Now.  I put a good bid on to make sure I would win. They all thought he would be fine in a box till Sunday. Jim slept all through yesterday. 

Last night Jim was very active.  You probably know they are nocturnal creatures, but not really being one for little furry things, I didn’t, until last night.  Mimi and Blue are really the smallest creatures I could live with permanently. Jim spent half an hour on his wheel and I took him out for a while, but he was very active and wanted all the time to be off and away.  He had enjoyed a taste of freedom and wanted it back. He spent a lot of time trying to climb out of the box. His determination to escape concerned me.  I don’t like the idea of confining creatures.  Apart from the very occasional piece of chicken I have been veggie for some time and hate the idea of any creature being husbanded by humankind.  I know, I know, there are huge holes in this argument, I'm inconsistent and I haven’t thought it through, but his desperation to escape bothered me. His natural instinct kicking in of course.  He wanted freedom, despite the near certainty that he would be such easy prey for the local wild cats and a tasty meal, no doubt, for one such. We finally went to sleep listening to the sound of Jim scrabbling about in his place.

I woke up this morning to find no sign of Jim. And a little hole nibbled in the box.  A desperate search revealed nothing. Jim was gone. Maybe he will show up tonight and pop out from a little nook in the corner of the lorry, but I suspect not.

In many ways I am pleased.  I would never have set him free or not picked him up, but the fact that he has made an, albeit unknowing choice to chance his luck in the patch of ground alongside the lorry and not live out his remaining time being provided for and scampering nightly in a plastic wheel is something I can really identify with.  Put me in a warm retirement home with three meals daily, a cosy bed and occasional visits from friends and family would make me bite holes in the wall too.

Good luck and bon voyage Jim.  At least he’s had a couple of quiet day’s sleep and a belly full of hamster food.  A taste of the ‘good life’.  Or was it?

For sale; a hamster cage, a wheel and a packet of hamster food.  Hardly used.  Any reasonable offer accepted.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Another brown envelope

For those of you following the episodes of this blog, and I know there are a few, you will no doubt wonder if I have received another mystery donation, (all except one of you who will know it wasn’t them!) but, no, it wasn’t the kind that arrive in the post.  This one had been sitting in an old box file for several years since my mother had died with her (or maybe my father's) handwriting on it with the daunting words ‘David – Christ’s Hospital’.  I was prompted to open it as a result of recently looking through the parcel of old photographs my sister sent me.

Those who have read my previous scribblings will also know that Christ’s Hospital was the school I was sent to.  I always used to say ‘was sent to’, not just because it is deliberately ungrammatical, but also because that what it always felt like.  The school felt like a punishment for a life crime, although I was too young and far too immature at the time to understand the nature of the crime I may have committed.  Perhaps CH was the place I would find out.  It was certainly Jesuitical enough to be that for many, and why not me?  It took me seven years to begin to realise and now almost seventy to fully realise it was just supposed to be a great school.  It wasn’t.  I hit my knuckles time and time again on the regime and the school hit me back.  Forty strokes of the cane on my pink behind during my incarceration and endless ‘miles’ and ‘loops’, the running punishment older boys (strangely called ‘Grecians’) could impose on the feckless and frightened ‘squits’ as the first years were unaffectionately called.

A memory returns. I am offering a boy a Quality Street chocolate on what may have been my first day in the place.  The large tin had been a going away present from the little old lady (she was probably in her forties) for whom I worked on Saturday morning delivering flowers from her flower shop on the High Street. We are standing in the Day Room waiting for the bell.  (Even that sentence sums up the regime.)  I am feeling desperate and alone.  I open the chocolates and offer the tin to a stranger who might have been a year older than me. “You don’t offer us chocolates. You don’t even talk to us.” His curt reply laid the first brick in the foundation of the walls I built around myself from then on.

Don’t misunderstand me.  Those walls have had their uses over the years.  Without them I would not be the self-sufficient eccentric show-off you see today, emerging from the shadows of my subconscious to amuse and entertain! And I have a strong in-built scepticism about religion and the power of the Church to do good.  I also think I have, by default, a real sense of what a good education can be. But overall I hated every aspect of what the place was and I don’t think any of the positives outweighed the terrible negatives.

So what did the envelope contain?  A selection of the finely crafted letters I wrote home every week for seven years? Some reminder of an excellent piece of learning I had achieved?  No of course, you guessed.  The envelope contained letters from the Headmaster saying I was in trouble, eventually expelled (‘asked to leave’ he called it), Richard’s (my father’s) appeal to them to have me reinstated, and a few of my letters all dealing with all the occasions on which I was in such deep trouble there and my apparent shame and contrition.

So, once again, the fact of my past crimes and misdemeanours return to haunt my present and my memories of ‘what might have been and what has been Point toward one end, which is always present’ (TS Eliot). No wonder I had strange dreams last night!

The moral is burn all boarding schools, confine them with Mr M'Choakumchild to Room 101 or rather confine them to history so we don’t forget them and their lasting legacy. Raise your children at home, however hard it is.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

The end is nigh!

It looks as though I’m going to make it through!  Grab all the clichés – the light at the end of the tunnel, the silver lining and there’s a welcome in the hillsides.  Three weeks till Llandudno and I’ve done the sums.  Baring any unforeseen disaster I can just make it through to my season financially without having to borrow any more money.  OK I have used the credit cards more than I should and they will have to be repaid and, as you know, my mystery patron has stepped in to support me and the popular performing arts, but the worst winter I’ve ever had is almost over.  Of course it helped to have stopped drinking and Aldi have played their heroic part but I’m vowing never to have another winter like this one.  Somehow I have to store up an emergency fund against these disasters. 

Some were not my fault.  I’ve been screwed by two people in a really horrible way, especially after I’d been so considerate to their predicament.  I don’t want to go into detail but they have cost me over £4000 over the past five months, which is almost exactly my current overdraft.  I need to be tougher and not be led in by sob stories.  And I need to disentangle myself from that business so I’m not vulnerable to them.

On a much more positive note, I have to say the stage is looking especially fine.  New blacks along the front of the stage ( black velvet remnants from Abakhan (www.abakhan.co.uk - well worth a visit if you’re in North Wales or Liverpool and are into fabric making) and a new audience groundrow (the thing that stops the audience invading my space, the piece on the ground along the invisible fourth wall).  I thought about renovating it but it suffers from the daily onslaught of urchins on my front row and has therefore been well worn.  I’m going to have a stab at painting it myself, so that should be interesting.  A change of design too I think.  It was originally a piece of scenery from the olden days which ran across the front edge of the old lorry stage (which some may remember preceded the trailer stage I have now) so really it never quite looked right sitting on the ground.  I think the new groundrow should look like the front of a mahogany orchestra pit in miniature, so a wooden scumbled and grained effect.  If you know what scumbling and graining is then you are well informed.  It is (or perhaps one should say was) the art of making cheap wood look like expensive.  Originally developed in Victorian times when people wanted their homes to look posh but couldn’t afford real hardwood panelling so employed the scumbler to create the effect of grained expensive wood using paint.  Next time you see my show you can see scumbling and graining on the back door of the trailer and on the floor of the stage (both achieved by artist and expert grainer and scumbler, Tony Lewery).  He uses the technique as you can see (http://www.canaljunction.com/canal/lewery.htm) on the wonderful barges he decorates with that technique and he writes about it in his books on canal art.

Artist Liz Ellis (www.lizellissculpture.co.uk) is coming over today to look at my backdrop moon cloth which needs renewing.  I want to keep the full moon theme but change the backing.

I cropped the first rhubarb from my allotment garden yesterday.  Enough to make two mini rhubarb crumbles with an oat crumble as I found I had no flour, but they were delicious.  Spent the weekend in the garden and all the potatoes planted along with leeks and the first of the summer salads.  It’s beginning to look cared for and I regularly have four or five of the resident guys from the Big House helping out.  They insist that I take some magic over for our tea break which is why I’ve been going through the closeup magic box.

And finally, since writing the above, I’ve taken the first real step to extricate myself from the business that has been sapping my energy and funds for the last few years.  There’s no going back now so watch this space and we will see how it all pans out.  Should be interesting.

It's amazing how a few days of sunshine and light can make such a difference to my life.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

The plot thickens

Chapter 2 of the Mystery of the Materialising Money.  My bashful benefactor has struck again and this time with even more panache.  Same ‘Mister’ not Mr Alexander on a large envelope, posted in Worthing (theatrical home of THE Handbag) anyway BN11 on the stamp and a number of intriguing enclosures, not least of which was another £50 and this time is the form of a £50 note.  I’ve not had one of those in my hands for some time! This in a used envelope (no address) with a handwritten note ‘Here’s one I made this morning!’ A flamboyant hand and a flamboyant gesture.  Male I think but who knows? A graphologist I guess might.

Also enclosed, provocatively pasted to a handbill of Southend’s Cliff Pavilion, a handwritten description of and homage to Mr Alexander, his dogs, show and life.  All the words begin with the letter A in capitals.  It’s clever and must have taken a lot of working.  Here’s what was written:

All About A

Audiences All Around Are Anxiously Awaiting Alexander And Animals’ Articulated Arrival. Anticipating Amazing Artistic Ability As Articles Appear And Are Astonishingly Altered And Angled Away Again And Again, Audacious Acrobatic Activities And Adventurous Aerial Antics (Always Avoiding Ambulances!) Appropriately Aged And Aspiring Amateur Actors Aid And Abet As Asked And Achieve A’s Alliance and Admiration. Adoring Audience Approval And Applause Adds Animation At All Appearances. An April Allowance Avoids ‘Ardship As Actor Anticipates Approaching Annual Activities And Accompanying ‘Apennies:-

An Ardent Admirer

ANON

I think I’m going to have it made as a handbill for the show, apart from the final sentence.  I loved ‘Always Avoiding Ambulances’ and ‘Adoring Audience Approval And Applause Adds Animation At All Appearances’.  Really great copy!

So my benefactor knows the show.  Do I know them though?  I suspect I might do but whoever it is is being very canny at avoiding letting me know exactly who they are.  I think the South of England may be a smokescreen, as I haven’t played Worthing or Southend for many years (although I would love to do so) and I can’t say I know of anyone from down there any more.  I think they read the blog and will have read my previous entry on the Materialising Money as they have been deliberately even more intriguing this time.

Once again I have to say a real thanks and that the money will be properly invested in the show and not frittered on fanciful frippery (this alliteration is catching).  The times have been financially and fiscally frustrating (oh stop it, now) and the investment is very welcome.  I will now be able to buy new clever stick handsticks (which broke last year), some new collars for the dogs so they can Also Appeal, Amaze And Attract Attention At All Apperances.

There was also one other small enclosure which came with a sense of humour and a knowledge of my show but I am leaving this out of the blog so if the person does want me to know it was them when they see me they can tell me what it was as only they will know!!  I have a feeling the person would like me to know who they are…

Anyway it’s very touching and most welcome! As well as being wonderfully intriguing.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander