Here We Are, Then

The last six months of 2015 (and first of 2016) had been great but then directing, which had been a major part of my life since that first production of Chekhov’s The Anniversary at Newcastle Uni back in 1966, was suddenly gone.

Things felt pretty bleak for a while but as you get older you learn to live with change, even with losing the ability to do things you enjoy.

(For a long time I've realised that I'll never again stand on the top of Great Gable, for example, breathing in the Lakeland air and enjoying the panorama of those wonderful fells. Unless someone who has a helicopter can give me a lift... No? Ah well!)

It’s part of the aging process and you have to console yourself with what you can still do and the accumulated memories of what you could do at one time.

These memoirs (as I suppose you might call them) are some of those memories, those which have been the most personally significant to me, and, as for what I can still do, there’s the British Theatre Guide with news stories (when there are any; this is being written during COVID-19 lockdown) and reviews (when theatre starts up again, whenever that may be) to be written, as well as feature ideas which present themselves from time to time.

And there’s my creative writing. My subconscious seems to be adjusting (albeit a bit slowly) to my new situation so that what I’m writing now is changing, becoming a sort of hybrid, a mixture of monologue and poem and reflection. Or something. Definitely not a play though.

It’s stimulated by the effects of COVID-19 but there’s a touch of Beaudelaire’s "Le Flacôn" from Les Fleurs du Mal along with some nursery rhymes (one of which I made up) and the Butterstone on Cotherstone Moor, but where it’s going I do not have the faintest idea.

And that’s great, because it feels like there’s something new happening. Of course it could all turn out to be a complete blind alley, but what the hell? It is something new and different, and at my time of life that’s very precious!

Other ideas keep occurring. I start writing and then, suddenly, everything goes blank. As I write this, I have three different Word files open, all new ideas, and I keep flitting from one to another and back again like a drunken butterfly.

We shall see. We shall see.