I’m so excited

You will note that I resisted capitalising the s word or adding ‘O’s as my iphone predictive texts suggests I might like to do (as if it were the OED).  The use of that particular s word has become one of the features of the changes in modern life on which I am not keen.  For example, I strongly resent its frequent use at the beginning of spoken replies by authority figures, particularly on the radio, as if its use leant a greater credence to their answer. 

Anyway why am I so excited I hear you ask?  I am so excited I hardly know where to begin.  I’m girlie excited.  Before we move on I want to claim some masculine possession of that word.  Girlie.  Why should all the girls have all the finger stretching, hands waving by face, screaming wild-eyed excitement?  Boys can scream too. It’s only you can’t add ‘ie’ to boy.  Sounds really odd. Boyie. It even claims a red underscore on my Mac to say, 'I don’t have that word in my dictionary.'  Unlike girlie. Gender stereotyping infiltrates it all.  I’m that excited and I’m now going to explain why.

I am designing my first dress.  Yes Dress.  Frock.  Skirt. (Sorry I’ve never been educated into the difference.  Why would I? I’m a boy.  I wear boxers not panties.  A strong manly thing to do.  Box.)

Well the dress has grown from the character, if not the underlying persona.  I puzzle, as you know, about the difference, but let’s stick with the safer ‘character’ for now.  It all started with my segway board.  Regular readers will know that I bought one of those dangerous electrical contraptions (of course I would) and I’ve been religiously practising on it (actually just had another idea about a Segway character, but I will keep quiet about that for now). The thing allows a wonderful gliding movement, is totally controllable just by shifting weight minutely on the feet and can achieve all that silently and without undue danger to the rider (although I did have a few falls initially, so beware.  Wear a helmet…  I didn’t.)

So (there it is again) I started thinking about what character could glide about, wear a costume that hid the board and even suit my penchant for pink. I am sure you are now with me.  A divine dress designer called Daisy from Ilfracombe (email address on application) is, as I blog, tickling the tension of her Singer and running me up a hysterical hooped Victorian number, the design of which is below.  I love it.  (I soberly resisted the over-excited capitalisation again.) No sod it, I LOOOOVE it.  I can’t wait.  It is to be in pink with whooshes of lace, flowers, long pink damask gloves, a wide brim hat with flowers; the wonderful wicked works. The wig is ordered.  I am contemplating the Face and need advice.  Current thinking is a mask.  The character has a name.  I hereby publicly name her Verity V. Victoria.  Or maybe Victoria V. Verity. Don't ask what the middle V. is for. 

She will silently float around the venue and her first outing (I use the word advisedly) will be in Ilfracombe.  She will have two little white dogs on glitter pink leads. I will use embedded music (if I can afford it, the slightly larger and better Segway board has Bluetooth speakers in-built) but meanwhile a portable unit in a wheelie shopper or the Victorian equivalent.  Maybe a vintage pram… It also gives me something to hold on to until I am a little more confident on the board.

But here’s where you come in.  In the pram or shopper will be gifts for girls and boys.  I need you to help.  The next time you are in the pound shop (I know you don’t like to admit it) please look out for and buy for me the most genderised (my word) stereotypical plastic nonsenses you can find.  Or point me in their direction. No guns or weapons please, but anything else goes.  I will reimburse you. Keep the receipt. I will wrap them in Blue and Pink tissue paper, and yes of course the boys get the pink gift and the girls the blue.

Verity V. is to be the Mother Christmas of the gender questioning society, starting in Ilfracombe…

That’s why I’m SOOO excited.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander (aka Verity V. )

Armageddon in Malvern and beyond

The Spring Garden Show at Malvern has become a favourite in my calendar.  The location is wonderful, nestling at the foot of the Malvern Hills with superb views in every direction.  The site itself is spacious with plenty of room for everyone to spread a little and there is so much to see and do.  My own pitch must be one of the nicest with my back to the Learning Garden - a permanent walled garden run for people with learning difficulties and an avenue of white cherry blossom trees running alongside.  Plenty of room for me and all my stuff.  The new lorry painting could be seen to great advantage and provoked much interest.  I almost offered guided tours.  Something I might do at some point in the future.  People love to have a good nose into other people’s living spaces and mine is, to say the least, a bit different.  I could offer tea, cakes and close up magic, with a little Alexander life story thrown in. Some people might even pay for that.  The shows went wonderfully and I found a new gag about Bow tie shops on my impro about real bow ties.  Ties R Us. I thought it was funny.  It was followed up by my other retail outlet joke - Where do Goths shop? ArGoth. Probably not enough to give up the day job yet, but quite good I thought.

And the weather on Saturday was perfect.  A superb spring day all round.  That is until about 7.00 after most people had gone, I’d walked the dogs and tidied up, settling in for a night of relaxation and catchup tv.  Then it happened.  The severest thunderstorm I’ve ever experienced in the lorry.  It went on for at least an hour, the thunder and lightning hitting simultaneously, and more rain and wind than anyone could cope with.  The dogs, especially Blue, were terrified and cowered in a corner. Within minutes, there were various lorry leaks I had to deal with. The lorry awning was buffeted dangerously and just about managed to stay pinned down. Everything was flying round the site with people obviously suffering from only having flimsy canvas shelters. All you could do was sit it out and contemplate the end of the world.  And as you know I’m good at that.

By the end of the evening it had gone, almost as quickly as it had come, leaving a lot of mopping and restoring. I guess we have to expect more of that as time goes by.  We have done such crazy things to our planet and it’s beginning to pay us back.

My own personal inevitable, if not impending, demise was made more apparent when I got back to Chester.  I had been feeling decidedly odd for a few days.  A feeling of being not quite there (put your hand up if you’re not here and I would have done for real or maybe not real...) is how I can best describe it, together with a numbness (which has been growing for a while) in my left centre toes and the pad of that foot and pins and needles at odd times in arms and legs.  All a bit ominous...

Anyway I got out of bed to try on a new crinoline which had arrived the day before.  That’s something not every man can say. (More about my new frock design in the next episode.)  I think it was too much for whatever Master Puppeteer is pulling my strings because He (or maybe She) let go of all my strings at once and I found myself on the lorry floor, the whole lorry having done a horizontal somersault.  Whatever divine retribution I was expecting for the first time I had stepped into a frock for many years, it wasn’t that.  I staggered back to bed with the lorry now spinning to contemplate the new change of circumstance, and that had nothing to do with the crinoline.

After some thought I called 111 Health Service’s non-emergency line, explained my symptoms and they said I should see a doctor within three hours.  I made the appointment and had a range of tests there followed up with blood and ecg the next day.  We will see.  The thought of that happening whilst on top of three chairs is not a happy thought so it needs sorting. 

As does my frock.  But more of that next time…

All the best from a floor near you,

Mr Alexander

No overnight sleeping

The latest in my series of Mr Alexander/Authority interfaces occurred today when I returned to the Ilfracombe coach and lorry park from a frustrating foray into the town of Ilfracombe attempting to drum up support for the Victorian Celebration to find a Parking Penalty charge notice sellotaped to my windscreen. Strange, because I had prepaid for a four day stay.

I had heard previously from other residents of this quaint sleepy seaside town that the parking wardens were ferocious and had on one occasion fallen foul of their attention when I overnight parked in the carpark alongside the Museum with the knowledge and agreement of its Curator.  On that occasion I had returned from an early dog walk to find the man’s pen poised provocatively over a ticket.  Using all the renowned Alexander eloquence I managed to prevent the penalty, but I had the feeling he felt cheated and had stored up my existence in some primordial memory ready for future bloody retribution.  He had the sniff of me and he didn’t approve.

It’s partly my own fault.  As perusers of these pages will know I am not reticent about about my itinerant state.  I tell most people, as I did him, within a few minutes of meeting that I live on the road.  Yesterday, for example, I was again attempting to sell the idea of the Celebration as a community event worth supporting to the town’s Rotary Club and fell into conversation with some of it cornerstone members.  They also knew I was contemplating a return to being a Rotary member.  (I have been a Rotarian in a previous incarnation.) Almost the first question asked is “So you are living in Ilfracombe now?” To which my reply is something like ‘Yes currently Broadgate Carpark.’  There is palpable shock in their eyes when they hear of my perfectly legal choice to live permanently as a vagabond, a vagrant, a man of no fixed abode.  Of course I don’t use those words.  Or any of the more pejorative ones.  On my last but one visit I was called a gyppo by one resident of the town on the town community Facebook page. I have yet to be called a Pikey, but it can only be a matter of time. No, I usually try to make it sound romantic and interesting which of course I think it is, but Rotary Club members and parking wardens are not really convinced. They live in the world of solid bricks and mortar, mortgages and rentbooks and anyone choosing not to do so has to be suspect.  I must be up to something. Probably at night.

So it was with great interest that I opened the sellotaped billet from the Ilfracombe Car Parks Authority.  It wasn’t a ticket.  Or rather it was a ticket but not a penalty.  It was a little handwritten letter on a ticket paper from the little man. He wrote, ‘Please note that parking overnight is OK but no overnight sleeping in vehicle. (See main entrance sign)’. He was right of course.  There is such a sign.  Not a particularly obvious one but a sign nonetheless. It is next to the ‘No ball games’ sign, ignored by the local children who use the space as a football ground.

I wonder about the man’s motivation.  Is he told by his line manager that he has to point this out to possible transgressors of the notice, or has he taken this mission on of his own passionate volition? I suspect the latter.  He seemed to be a man of high moral stance when we last met.  Morals which don’t allow for the existence of itinerant artistes. Or people who sometimes choose not to sleep at night.

Anyway I am obeying.  Of course I obey when Authority dictates.  I am writing this in the small hours of the night as I sometimes like to do. I occasionally enjoy the quiet and creative peace a sleepless night affords.  ‘What hath night to do with sleep?’ as the young John Milton wrote. So ‘no overnight sleeping’ tonight.  In a minute I shall walk down to the beach, watch the sun emerge and will sleep tomorrow afternoon before pressing on to Malvern, leaving this pretty little Devon town to its somewhat sad devices, demonic wardens and incredulous Rotarians.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Ilfracombe doesn’t do irony

For the first time in many years I’m not working and it’s early Spring Bank Holiday weekend. If my memory serves me right (and as you know if you read my blog it might not) it was as a result of falling out with Llandudno Victorian Extravaganza that perhaps fifteen years ago resulted in the same thing.

This time I don’t mind really.  It’s wet and cold and Llandudno in the wet is not nice.  I really need a good three day event I can snuggle up with over the next few years.  I went through Upton on Severn in Worcestershire on Saturday with a lovely event in full swing.  It looked very busy and seemed to be a folk festival if the number of Morris dancers I saw is anything to go by. And very close to the Three Counties Showground the home of the Malvern Spring Garden Festival where I am next week.  So a nice gentle fifteen minute drive from one to the next.  Sounds my sort of plan. They have a website and some contacts so Marketing Letter One on its way… Isn’t it so great we can just find out these things and make contact with the right people so quickly?

Here I am sitting in a lorry park in Ilfracombe and I can post this blog and send emails to potential customers and all before I’ve even got dressed. I love my life.

So yes I’m in Ilfracombe drumming up support for the Kickstarter project which ends next week and still has a way to go.  There’s still time to give if you haven’t yet. 

(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/990902434/ilfracombe-victorian-celebration) 

Even a small pledge would be very welcome and the event is going to be superb and needs supporting. It’s a strange parochial little place rather stuck in Victorian ways and still refusing to believe it’s in the twentieth let alone the twenty-first century.  One of the twenty-first century icons of the place has become Damien Hurst’s controversial and dominating bronze of a pregnant woman holding a vast sword aloft over the harbour.  Half her bulging belly is cut away to reveal the growing baby as is half her face, but from some angles she looks whole. It is a very impressive statement and has been given the name Verity.  I think there may be some theme emerging from it, truth maybe? Many local people hate her and the apparent ease with which she found her way to the location. (Damien lives locally and invests in local projects.  Not yet, sadly, ours)

So overall she stirs up opinions.  Maybe that’s what art should do. I wanted to tie the idea into the Victorian Celebration in some way and the event needs a logo.  Hence the emergence of the brief for the logo for my Victorian Verity and the result below above a photo of the original.  Although I think because ours is Victorian she is actually the original inspiration for Damien’s version.  In my dreams anyway.

The reaction from the committee was interesting.  The Chairman said that Ilfracombe ‘doesn’t do irony’.  Several disapproved because they thought that a pregnant young Victorian woman in a bathing costume would never have been seen in Victorian times. Ah well perhaps he’s right about the irony, certainly amongst members of the committee.  I don’t really mind.  I like being on the edge.  As well you know.

Listening to the wonderful Grayson Perry on Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ talking about gender.  Great stuff.  I might just change my mind again about Mr Alexander stepping out in a frock.  If I am going to be damned for irony I might as well go the whole hog and be thoroughly damned.  Ilfracombe would definitely be the place to do it.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander