One Step Ahead Of The Plague - Mon Jul 20

Yes – it is possible, even in these paranoid times of plague and fever, to catch a normal cold. They are Common, after all. So what are the odds? And besides, it hasn’t knocked me out completely, just slowed me down a little. So I’m going with it being Man Flu not Swine. Amen.

Right. The weekend. Korfstock was a bit of a bust, all told. Yes, as ever it was a great international event, well-organised… for those who like Korfball and generally being sporty on a playing field. But those same athleticky types certainly were ambivalent at best and disinterested at worst to the two or three dirty acoustic types strumming incomprehensible tunes next to their gazebos. And with only Brian and Cathy there to act as a fanbase (Murray: “I'm calling it a fan BASE from now on. It makes it sound better. If you call and say 'the fan will be there' they can tell it's only one person”) it was just a wee bit weird. We weren't really needed. Still – a lovely sunny day at least. I topped up my tan nicely, both Phil Sky and Vodka Boy got to play some rarities, and we had a few beers from the picturesquely Oriental-design Milton Keynes Hockey Club.

When I got in I discovered “Superman IV: The Quest For Peace” was on. I know I must have seen it before, but if so it would have been more than twenty years ago now (!) and so I sat down to have a watch, knowing I was mainly waiting for the scenes they filmed in Milton Keynes. And I wasn’t disappointed! Look… there’s Gene Hackman and Jon Cryer in the Winter Gardens, just outside what was Duke’s Wine Bar! And coming up the stairs from Bannatyne’s Health Club!! And look… Superman’s giving a press conference on the concourse outside the train station!!! Man. It’s not quite “Wired For Sound”, but it’s another of those important cultural moments in our city's history nonetheless. Just wish the rest of the film wasn’t so shit!

Then Sunday night despite the worsening inside my immune system I made it to MADCAP for Tongue In Chic. And it was superb – I can’t adequately express using mere words how well I think these guys are doing. This was the fourth night since they began in January, and they’ve already progressed to the point where they’ve managed to fill the upstairs theatre at MADCAP and attract John Hegley to headline. Perhaps I should try and express it via gestures then. (holds out arms wide in amazement and praise. beams widely)

What’s also great to see (from the back, behind the curtain, or up on the balcony where I variously lurked with my germs) is the quality of the local Open Mic performers improving noticeably with each night they have. That’s the key, as I think I said before once, and it’s paying off. I sincerely hope the extra audience they attracted via the reputation of Mr H will come back again for the next TiC night (Sunday 13th September). Great both for MADCAP and poetry in MK.

I didn’t quite make it to the end – I’d sold enough books during the interval to be able to afford one of the last buses home, and there’s something grass-roots poetical about that too. But also I was clearly flagging – and the last thing I want to do now is succumb to poorliness. Not when we’re off to Brittany in just (counts on fingers) five days! Yeeeeeeha!

(checks weather forecast for Brittany next week)

(pouts)

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When the Internet first came out, I was overjoyed – finally a way of slowly and painstakingly compiling a list of all the obscurest Julian Cope b-sides and rarities: in order to one day track them down in crazy backstreet vinyl stores and compile the ultimate “Vagaries Rarities” (as Lee used to call them) collection. Now of course you can just actually skip straight over the entire process and go straight to listening to most of them for nowt on Spotify. Somewhere, somehow the thrill of the chase has been lost… but then there’s still something to be said for instant gratification. Oo-er.

Across The A5130 Frontier - Thu Jul 16

Regular readers or people who see me frequently in Real Life™ will probably appreciate that there are things that have been going on that I’m not blogging about; there are things that are still going on that I’m not blogging about; and an endless supply of terrible new storylines round every corner, apparently. I’m still not going to blog about them – suffice it to say that it feels a bit like we must have run over a whole family of black cats… driving a van full of broken mirror shards… on Friday 13th Feb. Man.

Anyway, the other afternoon I decided enough was enough and it was time for a Milton Keynes Walk to somewhere that I could blog about instead. It’s been a while, right? And I’ve been seeing this new place on the front of buses: Magna Park. “Well, I think I’ll head off to Magna Park then, see what that’s like”, mused I. And off I went.

And of course I hadn’t gone much further than the bottom corner of Fishermead when the heavens opened and one of those seasonal downpours drenched me and my hot summer afternoon clothes. I was seriously thinking of turning back, when I had a Blog-related Epiphanical moment! Not three seconds after “Clubbed To Death” (The Matrix Song) came on my mp3, who should sweep out of the underpass from Eaglestone but the Dog Whisperer and his pack! He was cycling for a change, and within a moment he and his hounds had passed me, but from then on I knew my journey was blessed. The Dog Whisperer and The Matrix music?? It’s a double Blog-sign of approval.

The rain continued on and off as I stuck pretty closely to Chaffron Way for several grid squares heading east. As I passed Oakgrove School it was kicking out time – I still forget sometimes that there are other schools kicking out all over MK at the same time! Historically all I’ve ever really had to deal with were Stantonbury or Radcliffe, but there’s loads of schools now. I suppose there has been for ages. Durr...

Having dodged the kids and made it through the backwaters of Kingston industry, I finally found the place where Magna Park begins. If you’ve not yet come across it, Magna Park is a large expanse of land between Kingston and the M1, almost exclusively taken up with gargantuan River Island and John Lewis warehouses. According to the latest version of the Official MK Map it’s still not part of the city – whose borders historically haven’t crossed the A5130 at any point between Wavendon and the Coachway – but clearly it’s designed to fill that triangle which was never going to do well as residential land cos it’s so near the motorway junction.

What it also doesn’t do at the moment though is allow easy access for pedestrians, so I still don’t know how much there is to see there yet. Instead I turned north and took a long loop round for home via the ongoing Broughton (Gate? South Broughton?) developments. I realised (when I read it on a sign!) that the MK to Bedford Canal is going to ultimately be directed this way – the elaborate bridge thing in the middle of the new conurbation makes a lot more sense when you factor that in. Still, it’s already looking nicer than it did when I was out this way last. It’ll be even nicer with a canal through the middle.

(daydreams wistfully of barges)

Performance Autist - Mon Jul 13

And then it’s all over. As it tends to be, in the end. Two weeks’ hard graft – thankfully cocooned from the rest of the world – and then back down to business again. What have I missed?

It was a great show in the end, as we’d all hoped. Just a really nice bunch of kids who got their acts together ahead of our usual tight schedule (always makes it easier!) – and cos this year’s rotation policy meant that it was A Comedy Musical again we had our biggest and most enthusiastic audiences since… well, since our last Comedy Musical! Let’s hope they come back again in July 2010 and see our dark interpretation of “Pinocchio”! ;-)

I was also lucky enough (and somehow found the stamina to watch before doing our own final show!) to take in a Saturday matinee of another MK Theatrical production, the brilliant MK Theatre Of Comedy’s stage adaptation of Palin & Jones’ post-Python vehicle “Ripping Yarns”. I’d expected it to be a good show – judging by “The Ladykillers” and of course the SO-good-it-even-had-ME-in-it-which-is-one-of-my-highest-Theatre-accolades “Allo Allo” – but what I hadn't expected was for it at times to even come out funnier than the original source material…

Not to be too harsh on one of my all-time heroes M E Palin of course, but I often felt some of the “Ripping Yarns” felt a bit flat given his previous output. Maybe cos so much of it was on film? Maybe the half-hour format was a bit of a leap from the sketches of Python, leaving some of the less impressive stories floundering a little? Anyway, I’d always actually rather preferred reading the scripts for them in the book my Dad had around the house when we were growing up. Which is probably why the MKTOC show scored so high with me! Given a live audience to bounce off and the enthusiasm of the assembled actors, awkward “episodes” such as “Murder At Moorstones Manor” and “Across The Andes By Frog” seemed to spring almost surprisingly into life and reaffirm themselves as the pieces of great off-kilter comedy writing I’d always wanted them to be. And kudos to the guys for cleverly selecting yet another oft-forgotten gem of British comedy to put on the stage. A treat.

Okay then. I suppose I’d better open up my email and see what’s what. I’m sure there’s poetry magazines to administrate and local arts projects to do minutes for and mates who’ve developed Swine Flu to worry about. Also – less than two weeks till our Holiday! I am so ready for it now. C’est tres magnifique!

And while I’m on, perhaps I should spare a moment to muse on the Untimely Passing Of The King Of Pop a couple of weeks back already. While I was never really a fan of his music (other than a few of the singles off “Thriller” and “Bad” back in the day) it’s always slightly unsettling to lose a long-present figure from your cultural panorama - no matter how bizarre his life seemed to have become. So perhaps we shouldn’t think of him as having left us at all… we should just imagine him eternally orbiting the planet for ever more playing some weird futuristic version of squash in his all-white spaceship and occasionally peering down on us from above. I think he’d like that.

A Line Of Picnic Benches - Fri Jul 10

Something’s been biting us – those of us who’ve been wearing three-quarter length shorts, anyway. I think it’s something in the Suffolk Punch Beer Garden where we dutifully arrive post-workshop, -rehearsal and –show almost every evening in Ludamus Fortnight. As t’was and t’is and shalt ever be. Lug the picnic benches into a long line down the bottom end and ruminate on the day’s labour. Although this year we’re getting moaned at by the bar staff cos they’ve got to walk a few yards down to us to collect the empties! Honestly… I can’t believe we have the temerity to expect them to do that! I mean, it’s not as if it’s their job or anything! ;-)

Anyway, something’s been biting us. One of them bites that when you scratch it it gets worse. My calves look like I’ve got the plague.

Don’t worry though, I’m not going to segue excruciatingly into some kind of “bitten by the Theatre Bug” trope. We were all long-since bitten by that particular insect anyway – and infected with a fatal dose of whatever poison it happens to carry. (Typhus Andronicus? Molièria? Bard Flu? Hmmm…. Ahem.)

There are precious few joys in life akin to the all-embracing feeling of Doing A Show, especially so cheerful and friendly a show as a Ludamus Show (but I’ve found it with other companies too over the years). The camaraderie that develops when you’re squashed into tiny changing rooms, buttock-to-chin with your fellow actors; when you're frantically running around scouring the barely-lit dock for lost props; when you're wearily running the weaker scenes over and over again at the end of a twelve-hour day; and when you're trying to work out how to move a full-scale shed on and off stage as subtly as possible etc. It can’t be matched.

Has there been time for anything else? Well, not really – that’s part of the fun! Everything else gets pushed to one side for a couple of weeks, and for some reason I find that really quite a pleasant thing. I’m sure it’ll all still be there next week, when I can address it all in the post-Show comedown.

Having said that, I’ve found the odd hour here and there to plod ever on through the Monkey Kettle Inbox. And Diane and I have finally started our epic quest to explore and map the Brickhill Woods. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do for years – our ultimate aim is to produce a giant canvas replica of the paths and clearings of that beautiful place.

And because my brain’s too fatigued to concentrate on anything too heavy, I’ve put Ulysses and the Canterbury Tales to one side for a bit and have been flipping once again through The Letters Of J R R Tolkien. I was particularly glad to rediscover that he has the same views on The Hobbit as I do:

“It was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a ‘children’s story’, and as I had not learned sense then, and my children were not quite old enough to correct me, it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me, as Chaucer may catch a minstrel tag. I deeply regret them. So do intelligent children.”

Amen, John Ronald. I say again, if in doubt, hit The Silmarillion.

Right then. Second Night. What have I forgotten? “How come when MY Nanna come round, SHE’S always naked and covered in blood?” “MY Nanna”. “MY Nanna”. “SHE’S always”. “SHE’S always”.

(wanders off, still muttering lines under breath)

Who The Hell Ate Mah Cheese? - Mon Jul 6

Obviously we are in the midst of my traditional "blog lull" during Ludamus Fortnight - have been even more off-world than usual cos I splashed out and took two weeks off work instead of the usual one this year, but it's paid off. Am having a smashing time - building, organising, singing and laughing. If you haven't spotted any of my many and various adverts which I'm whacking up every time I get the chance on any of my electronic outlets then here's another one:

Dracula Vs The Boy Band
Ludamus Theatre Company
Thursday 9th - Saturday 11th July
Stantonbury Theatre, 7.30pm
£4 / £3

"Ludamus return for 2009 with another riotous musical comedy. The Monster Movie industry is in decline, and the studio in danger of closing unless Vlad and his rock band can win the $17,576 they need at the upcoming Battle Of The Bands... but they've reckoned without their mortal enemy Van Helsing and his freshly cloned Boy Band! Can the Monsters triumph over the forces of blandness? Only one way to find out...

Ludamus have been producing and performing plays at Stantonbury annually since 1991, largely using performers from the current student populace but written, produced and co-directed by a core team made up from past students and peformers. This is their 19th show."

So there. And if you already know all about Ludamus, then here - they discovered some new dinosaurs!! I am very excited about this too!

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And for some proper unbiased reportage on the Waterside Festival, here's AMPJam Craig's comprehensive reviews of the Saturday and the Sunday - with loads of great pics into the bargain!

I often idly wonder what the Real World makes of my ongoing half-baked fantasy existence... here is a glimpse through a window. Cheers fella.