Love Me Tinder

Painted gold with wet leaves, the streets of Bristol look like runways to enchanted lands, and my weekly walk to the Llandoger Trow takes on an air of unreality as the rains and dark nights of November unclutters the city of its people. I pass no-one as I reach the river, and see no life in the pubs and restaurants in the centre.  I half-glimpse hurried figures in doorways and distant avenues, like hunted spies in haunted spaces. Taxis roam the dark lonely streets, looking for fares.  Ghostly double-deckers pass by the empty bus stops. Nobody is here.  Everybody is home, in the warm, with Netflix and uncertainty about what we’ve all become now in this Brexit-Trump cold new world.

Follow the yellow brick road.

Mad Dreams

Naomi tells me that she is often murdered in her dreams, like a doomed femme fatale from some long-forgotten film noir B movie. Freud says that dreams are weird and twisted wish fulfilment fantasies, but I’ve seen enough David Lynch films to know that dreams are just meaningless scenes of dwarfs dancing and talking backwards.  I reassure Naomi that dreams don’t mean anything, and then as the conversation shifts onto our shared anxiety about the US Presidential Election I also reassure her that there is just no way Trump can win the White House.  Then the world goes mad and suddenly everything is wrong, and I too now dream of being murdered.  By Freud and his dancing dwarves.

".dne lliw dlrow eht dna tnediserP eb lliw pmurT .mees yeht tahw ton era slwo ehT"

The Heat is On

We sit opposite each other in our usual spot of the long table by the window and drink tea or pineapple juice or coke or lime and soda or sometimes a beer, and we start by talking to each other about life, like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat.

Staggering Coincidences

It was dark and cold and windy. Heavy rain soaked me to the bones.  The full moon was swallowed by Wagnerian storm clouds as I hurried through the night, wishing I had taken the bus, or that I had the foresight to wear an overcoat, or that I lived with a harem of the world's most beautiful and brilliant women in a chateau near a sun-kissed beach in the south of France, and that my aimable fiancée was perfectly happy with such an arrangement.  There is a hole in the bottom of my shoe, and my back hurts.

Euphemism City

At dusk, golden light spills onto the river as the galleries and bars switch on their night illumination, and Bristol is lent a soft romanticism.  I stand on the bridge, briefly, pausing my journey to watch rowers pull their little boat through the water; they are perfectly in sync, each oar cutting down and pulling up at precisely the same time.  A thin cloud crosses the bright moon like a tentative brushstroke, and the first stars flicker in the ultramarine night.  Then someone violently throws up a lamb Donner kebab, someone else starts shouting drunk obscenities at a defiant bouncer guarding a cheap pub, and urgent police sirens pierce the air, mingling with the cries of angry gulls.  Ah, Bristol, at 7pm on a Monday.  It never loses its charm.

The Art of the Arse

Just about everything was different.  It was a different day, at a different time, in a different place.  But for all that was different, we immediately got into the writing groove and set to work on the tricky bit of the big thing. It might be that it doesn't really matter where we write, or at what time, or in whatever language.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say somewhere different.  I have absolutely no idea what it means, but it sounds good.

Advanced Post-Structuralist Scriptwriting Theory with Elvis Presley

When it reaches Bristol, the River Avon courses through the deep Avon Gorge, spanned by Brunel's wonderous Clifton Suspension Bridge, and then snakes its way seductively through the great city.  Along the riverbanks, harbours, locks, and beaches there live thousands of creatures, from ducks, gulls and other seabirds, and rare dragonflies and hundreds of other insects, to voles and badgers and squirrels and mice, foxes, beavers and bats.  And every week as I casually stroll along the river to our usual meeting place, every single bloody one of these bastard creatures tries to kill me.

The secret sex lives of skeletons

Naomi was telling me about her days at University.  In Biology class, Naomi led a cabal of michief-makers who would routinely muck around with the full size human anatomical model skeletons, positioning them into rude or silly poses.  It was a waiting game to see how long it would take the lecturer to notice, possibly when they became very suspicious of all the sniggering.  As the term progressed, the skeleton poses would get more and more outlandish (props such as cigars, wigs, or vegetables might be introduced), and the sniggering would get louder and longer. The lecturers, of course, have over the long years learned to expect a certain amount of ribbing.  Education is a wonderful thing.

Digging it

"You know in films where men who are about to be killed are made to dig their own graves?" asked Naomi, as I looked around nervously.  We were in our usual spot in our usual place, and it was a warm and happy night, seemingly tailor-made for writing a very silly play.  A breeze was drifting in from the river, carrying with it the sound of excited gulls and cool jazz music.  Naomi had spent the day with her fellow, digging a hole.  He was now exhausted, apparently, after doing all the spade work in the blistering sun.  He was at home, relaxing his aching bones and watching Martin Scorsese films.  Or at least I hoped he was.  I thought about sending him a text message, just to see if he was actually still alive.  "Do you think," she continued, sipping thoughtfully on her beer, "Do you think they know they're about to die when they dig their graves?  And do you think it really happened, or is it made up for films?"  I wondered if we could add a scene into the script in which New York wiseguys are whacked at night in the lonely LA desert after being forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves by a rival set of mobsters. Fogeddaboudit.

X marks the spot for Dr Frankenstein and friend.

We talked a bit about hangovers, childhoods in Wiltshire, the costs of weddings, anxiety attacks, and street parties.  But mostly we ploughed through with the script, and laughed a lot.  We're making excellent progress.  Then my laptop died at precisely 10pm, and as angry gulls started attacking the jazz musicians, we called it a night.

Death to Hipsters

For the second time, someone had taken our usual seat at the table in the corner by the window.  A young man nursing a pint and fiddling with his phone.  He looked like a hipster.  I briefly considered killing him and dumping his body in the river.

Dr Who (William Hartnell) reads the welcolming sign for London's East End

We talked about astonishing acts of valour in WW2, epic doomed love affairs from the 1990s, Whistler's Mother, how to cook a perfectly edible lasagne in a slow cooker, and decapitation.  At least one of those things made its way into the script.

We are now into the second part of the Thing We're Doing, and it was really good fun setting up characters, repeated gags and situations.  At one point Naomi weirdly started acting out a complicated stage direction but it looked to me like she'd dropped something on the floor and was trying to cover up for it.  Then I dropped my notebook on the floor but Naomi had gone to the bar so she didn't see it.  I think the hipster who had stolen our seat saw me drop my notebook, which gave me another reason to kill him. 

We made good progress and laughed a lot and nobody died. You couldn't ask for much more from a writing session.

A Moose Goes into Anaphylactic Shock

anaphylactic shock

noun

Medicine

noun: anaphylactic shock; plural noun: anaphylactic shocks

1. an extreme, often life-threatening allergic reaction to an antigen to which the body has become hypersensitive.

   
   

   

    A moose, yesterday.

    

   We discussed venues, dates, and exciting plans for the Next Big Thing.  We're nothing if not very modestly ambitious.  Naomi had returned from Canada having left behind a bit of the flesh of one of her big toes, which took some explaining, and involved rather grizly diagrams.  There are lots of bears and moose in Canada, but none of them came back with Naomi.  That we know of.

   I remembered a birthday party I had attended, aged around seven, where a poor lad had gone into anaphylactic shock, just before episode three of the Dr Who story "The Face of Evil".  Someone very clever could probably piece together the plot of what we're writing based on all the nonsense I put in these blog posts, and I'd actually love to read what they come up with.  It might even make more sense than the very silly thing we're doing.

   
   

   After all that we bashed away at some of the script, and Naomi has taken away what we've got so far to finish it up at home, with her pet moose.  We're just about there with a first draft of this segment of the play.  But there's lots and lots more to do, and we're really just getting started.  Just you wait till we get to the bit with the thing that does the thing with the thing and we reveal that the thing is actually the thing with the thing, only German.

   
   

   
   

Major Energy Vortex

We started late because we got engrossed in a discussion about how pressure placed on a specific acupuncture point on the soul of a foot can immediately stop a woman in the throes of labour from killing everyone in the room (brilliantly, it's all part of something about a "major energy vortex").

Don't try this at home, kids

And there was a further delay as Naomi recorded some (perfect) German dialogue as a guide to a thing to a thing I'm doing for a thing.  And even further delays as we mused on ways to have characters disembowelled on stage.

Then we started, and we raced through lots of things, powering through this really funny script, and we laughed a lot.  We got stuck on a bit about a glass of water, but then we had loads of ideas and there was a lot more laughter.

Naomi stayed sober.  I had a beer.  It was delightfully warm and the Bristol night felt welcoming and creative.  But that was probably the beer.

Animal impersonations and Spanish Waiters

We met this evening to begin writing our new comedy play, which we're hoping to get on stage in late October/early November, possibly in Bath, where people have more money, and voted to stay in the EU probably because they're really into the Nordic noir thriller Forbrydelsen.

We started by talking about starting. Then we talked some more. Then we talked about how some stand up comics start their routines, and this led to Naomi talking about how she started her stand up by impersonating animals. We talked some more about starting. Then we started.

We have a good idea for our new play, and we made a good start with the writing, and we did some atrocious impersonations of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.  And we stayed sober.