A neat ripple appears on the surface of the swimming pool as my dad pierces through the water. Hot silence.

Red eels shoot towards the glimmering surface as if confusing a predator, their curved paths synchronised away from the centre.

The crusted edges of my eyes scrunch together. My little sister, wise beyond her eleven years, follows her gut, and, heroically disobedient to my mother’s cries, belly flops into the orange puff that’s spread across the pool. What follows is in slow motion. Because that’s the way I remember it.

A singular bubble forms in the middle and pops, pierced by a jagged shell. A harsh light blinds me, a blink of the eye, enough to miss the exact moment that it emerges. Memory is a storyteller, and I see it as clearly as I didn’t then. Pale, greyish, perhaps an old potato beige... round if not for the tiniest of ridges, a huge, great big monstrous TOE. My sister’s crustacean coloured fingernails clasping it like a prize. Time speeds up and she emerges arm first in a puff of orange. The unnatural blue is now a strange kind of spaghetti soup.

My dad has crawled his way to the edge of a beach chair where he wipes his chlorinated hands on a garishly yellow beach towel before pressing it against the stub where his toe once was. He lights a cigarette and my sister drops the toe in my napkin. It stares up at me, throbbing, hot, unused to the glare of the sun.

The ICE! My sister cries before emptying my coca cola trapping the ice with her fingers. PUT IT ON ICE! I freeze. She picks it up, throws it in my glass, screaming with delight. The scream of a younger sibling who‘s done better than you in an emergency. The blue lights and the stretcher appear. Dad insists on walking. My sister in tow with his toe.

Share

I look down at my hot dog, its blunt toe-like tip sweats against my loose fingers. Mum screams at me to get in the car. I swallow the hot dog in one bite. I’m disgusted at my ability to eat a toe-like thing.

What can I say, blood makes me hungry?

This is a short story from my archive of “Stretching the Truth for a Better Story,” an archive that doesn’t yet exist but could. I wrote it based on a slightly truer story in a frenzied afternoon after my show in Edinburgh Fringe, to have something for a spoken word night that evening that I ended up not speaking at because everyone was so good, I was embarrassed. SO now I am publishing it without edits for you to read. There are surely better endings to this story, and in time I might think of one.

Happy Easter, bunnies. I hope you keep your toes.

Subscribe now

Welcome.

I started writing my solo show, Dead Air, in my head about a year and a half before I put it to paper. I was graduating from an MA in Creative Writing, and after a few years in Iceland, going through some of the most difficult things I’ve ever been through, my dad died, and my world came crashing down around me.

The play is an AI resurrection story (that ironically doesn’t use any AI). Alfie doesn’t need therapy; she just needs her dad to make her laugh. So she uploads her dad’s data into an AI griefbot. Their relationship is better than ever, and whenever it gets weird, she just phones the AIR helpline and adjusts his temperament. What could go wrong? A heartfelt, funny, and glitchy deep dive into grief, ghosts, and digital obsession and human connection.

Strangely, in the last couple of weeks before he died, I had been randomly asked to go on tour with a band. I hadn’t really worked in the music industry for a few years and I was hesitant to leave my dad at the time, but it ended up being a really positive experience. The tour itself was unfortunately hijacked by some sort of European-wide signal failure and all of our planes were cancelled and delayed, so I spent a lot of time at airports meditating on the importance of maintaining a sense of perspective and calm in the face of stressors that are outside of our control. I phoned my dad, the old manager every day to tell him what was going on, ask him for advice and show him where I was - an airport hotel in Frankfurt, twice, a festival in Romania, which he had never been to and a beach in Poland. I like to think it was the last tour he went on with the last band that he discovered and loved.

My journey in the arts had got to a point where I felt out of control, my self-esteem was at rock bottom, and even though I was doing an MA in Creative Writing, I felt like an imposter as a writer. What being around the band really helped me with was picking up tit bits of their process. Specifically, that their albums were like diaries that they made. That’s it, I thought, I don’t have to make something that is going to be the thing that outperforms Shakespeare, I just have to write the now, the thing that interests me right now, and then I can write the next thing. Unlike writers, musicians tend to have to book studio time, or “go to the studio” wherever that is, to write. Often writing scripts can feel like a 24-hour job where you sort of sit in front of a laptop and write reams of crap or scroll through social media and feel bad about yourself with no deadline except for your own self-made, often unrealistic one. I realised that I had been thinking about it as if it was an endless quest for perfection when in fact, it could be a 30-day stint in a studio by the end of which I just had to have something, however good or bad. Easier said than done when no one is actually asking you to write the thing. So eventually, almost 2 years later, I set myself an immovable deadline: The Edinburgh Fringe.

I hadn’t written a word but had been ruminating on an idea. I was fascinated by my own reaction to something my cousin had told me only weeks after dad died. Namely that dad had come to him in a dream. I was furious. Not with my cousin, but with my dad. I was angry that he had abandoned me and then turned up to someone else to reassure them. Obviously I realised at the time that my emotions were irrational, I, like my dad, don’t really believe in any of that stuff. I reasoned that even if he was a ghost he wouldn’t turn up to a seance because he wouldn’t want to abandon his life-long commitment to atheism. He was stubborn like that. I started to wonder why I was so anti-woowoo. My favourite books are in the genre of magical realism. I think because truth really is stranger than fiction and I think true stories very quickly become partly or wholly fictional to serve a more profound narrative. This is how our oral story telling traditions have developed and it is the reason that really good stories become universal, because they touch on something about the human condition. I often wonder what it would be like to be religious or spiritual and I realise now that loving stories is a sort of spirituality, it is a connection to the human spirit, a need for understanding our condition. Anyway, all that aside, I was fascinated by my irrational reaction and tickled by it. Why was I so determined not to counjour up a ghost of my dad, or find comfort in his being a bird in the garden. Weirdly ever since I wrote in my play that I imagine that if he was any bird, he’d be a raven, ravens follow me around. I opened the door to the idea and it has magically infiltrated my reality. Whether it is my dad or not is really not important to me. What’s important to me is that it makes me smile every time I see a raven, it comforts me that I have allowed a bit of magic in. And that is, I suppose the nature of stories; they alchemise experiences into something meaningful. You didn’t just see a funeral director casually carrying a huge oversized cross on a skateboard down a busy road (to use a true example), you wondered where he was taking it and if this was a daily occurrence that had just passed you by all these years. Most likely it’s for a church, did it break? Why did it break? I digress, but you know what I mean. Funnily enough, I think now that one of my dad’s many gifts to me was to notice things. He would always notice something random on the bus or wonder why this or that. Not big things, just small, seemingly insignificant things that he made magical with his observation of them.

So when I watched a truly eye-opening documentary about how AI was being used as a grief companion, which I did not know was a thing at all. I had barely touched AI, thinking it was something that I would probably never understand or use, like TikTok or Snapchat - a trend that would pass me by, and I would be that person with a typewriter long after everyone got a home computer.

Share

It had such a strange effect on me. I was horrified, but I also understood the need, the want to have a conversation in the present about what’s happening to me now with my dad. Mainly because I was struggling to remember anything about the past. For a long time, I couldn’t even remember things that he said on repeat for 36 years. I wondered if I would even be able to upload enough of my dad’s data to make a coherent version of him that I would recognise. His text messages read: Coffee? And, I miss you. His social media was that of a punk boomer; he had photoshopped his head onto the image of an ice skater and captioned it Gis Von Ice and he commented an ironic “Wow” on everyone’s posts. Anyway, which dad would I choose? The most recent version had been really unwell and low, but the one from my teenage years might not recognise me as I am now.

It stuck with me. And I knew I had to make the show about that. That was my diary entry. Someone who really wants to talk to their loved one but has no inclination towards the spiritual.

The question I get asked the most is did I do it. Simple answer: No. I never even considered it, to be honest. From a personal perspective, it feels like a violation, not only of my dad and his data. I am not sure he would have cared about his data as much as he would have found it unsettling to become a non-corporeal being - he might have thought it was a cool experiment, but I don’t have his consent to use natural resources to birth his ghost. I think he would have been horrified by that. To be honest, as we’re here; I have mixed feelings about the ownership of data. Does anyone own their own data, really? We have to give it away at every turn, and the vampiric appetite of tech enterprises for our information has turned into such a feeding frenzy that I am more concerned that my data owns me at this point. I also really don’t want to risk my mental health. It is hard enough writing about grief and performing a show that is a rollercoaster of funny and sad, politically pointed and intensely personal, I don’t think seeing a bad version of my dad would have helped. Mary Shelly didn’t rob graveyards and attempt to create Frankenstein’s monster. I worried that it would take over my life and become about me rather than about a fictional character. I don’t have to commit a murder to write about it.

The show plays with and stretches the idea of self as an attempt to comment on AI and generating a person from limited data. I play a character with my name and some of my experiences, but it is not me. The AI dad in the show is guided by my dad’s sense of humour, but it is not him; it is an AI version of a character I created. Writing drama is not about making up stuff that might exist on the moon - unless you are doing that. It is about putting characters into situations and seeing how they react. And you write characters by observing real people. You gather data and create a character who reacts to a situation that tells a story about something that you want to say about the world or question. Side note - more and more it seems to me that storytelling is attention-grabbing with negative hooks - something you know will get a reaction, because people relate to it or aspire to be it because you’ve made them feel like shit about themselves so that they will buy whatever snakeoil you’re peddling, which is what social media and Hollywood do.

However abstract or cynical you get, you are still grounding it in something real…

Like most people who hear that this is a real thing that exists, I reacted with disdain that people’s grief is being exploited in this way. Researching grief, rituals of death and people’s experiences of the technology has led me to a more nuanced place. The show is written from the perspective of a woman who really believes that this AI griefbot can help her through her pain. And in many user experiences that I have read about in research journals and Reddit forums, people say that they do find it helpful. Although I should caveat that with the fact that very limited research has been done, and lawmakers are currently scrambling to provide ethical limits and guidelines on everything from the legalities of who owns your data after death and how vulnerable users experience such tools. I’ll get into that more later. My show is not positive about the outcomes, but I did attempt to try and understand why it is something that people are attracted to using and how it might be helpful in grief. Although I did not use the technology myself, I researched it a lot and in the show the I don’t use any AI, it is very analogue, perhaps ironically and pointedly so but I did stay true to the way in which grief companion technology really works.

I’ll stop here today and write more about user experiences that I have read about tomorrow.

I am bringing Dead Air back for four nights only at Greenwich Theatre in May. I will also be doing a work in progress for my new project, Dream House - a renovation farce/horror - a farror? or a hoarce?

The idea is to explore home ownership and the housing crisis with the backdrop of the rise of nationalism and climate change… It is inspired by my move back to the town where I grew up and living with my sister as an adult. Will write about this more in subsequent posts.

Tickets available here: https://greenwichtheatre.org.uk/events/dead-air/

Ok Bye!

Subscribe now

Share

I know, I know! It’s not realistic to think that I could just film 15 videos on a Sunday, schedule them on Monday and go viral by Tuesday. I’m pretty sure it’s a long slog, and let’s face it, it probably eats into the time when I should be challenging those screaming people in my head to calm the fuck down and say something coherent for a change so I can write my literary masterpiece. And maybe the acting thing is just a matter of time…

But then again, I could be telling funny stories on Instagram and being creatively fulfilled and get 5 nutribullets from a sponsorship deal with Nutribullet. Nutribullet are my favourite bullet. Much better than gun bullets.

I never thought I’d be nostalgic for the early days of SEO when you just had to write a keyword over and over again and make it sound “natural,” like the healthy natural stuff you might put in a Nutribullet - and you would be top of the Yahoo search engine faster than you can make a smoothie with a Nutribullet. When I was a teenager I had a part time job wroting these enthusiastic endorsements of products to optimise their brands in the search engines. But these days, I wouldn’t know where to start. The technology is more sophisticated, the market is oversaturated, and the internet is bigger. So how does little me self promote? How do I take back the reigns and make shit happen? I certainly can’t rely on being found no matter how many times I yell MARCO… I’ve yet to get a POLO.

I’ve spent about 2 years dithering over whether I’m going to give my social media some welly, try and optimise my brand and get my face out there so a big Hollywood Director will notice my talent, or more likely a producer notice my following and see the opportunity to translate my face into ticket sales. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not the only way, but it’s the only way that I feel I have any power over. I have been with a top talent agency for longer than I’d care to admit and since Covid, it’s been slower than a dead snail on a sloth. I don’t feel bad about it. I had some big life stuff going on. A year after dad died, I graduated with an MA in Creative Writing and I decided to get my shit together, and relaunch myself as a writer and performer, and everything would get back on track. Covid was over. Writer’s strike was over. But I, I was not over! I would rise like a phoenix, sail on the Eastern wind and land on the sacred tree of opportunity. And like every good capitalist knows, you make your own luck kiddo.

Don’t worry, I managed my expectations. That mantra has been drilled into me since I was young. My parents worked with young musicians and knew the ups and downs of the creative industry first hand. I was prepared for it all to go tits up. But secretly I thought, maybe, just maybe, it might all go really really well. And it did. But not so well that I am walking a red carpet with Charlie XCX or booked to do a huge TV show; two of the people doing their debut Edinburgh Fringe in the same venue as me have had that happen to them. I’m not jealous. At all.

My point is this. Those people don’t even have a big social media presence. They did all that on their talent, gumption, and hard work, not on their social media presence. And I would love to do the same. I would love to get the call. “Hey Alfie, a big feminist director saw your show and she wants you to play the lead in her new series which will go on to be a massive break out hit and you will finally have a career and a stylist who sources clothes from charity shops and tailors them to make you look fucking amazing every day and you can buy a sauna and live in a soft water area. All my dreams come true. Not. Yet.

And you know, it’s dumb to think that one way is the right way or the only way. Trying to crack the social media thing is actually pretty interesting and, honestly, hard. It is a marketing challenge which involves hooking people within a second to stop them scrolling past you, then watch a video and like, comment or share it as a result. My instinct, everything inside me just wants to take the piss out of the whole exercise by making the worst reels ever made. But not even my sister can be bothered to watch that.

Share

I’m just going to do it. I’m going to try. I know it might seem absolutely mental that a cynical millennial who doesn’t really get the appeal of TickTock (and refuses to spell it “correctly”), gave up on Twitter after two posts and regularly forgets her phone at home, could even consider trying to build a social media profile but it is the cheapest way to do marketing and build an audience. So, I bought a green wig, it’s coming tomorrow, and I’m filming people telling me ghost stories on Sunday. I haven’t fully worked out the bit or found the funny so…

Wish me luck! Cross your fingers and pray that me selling my soul in an experiment to get work translates into bums on seats, sold-out shows and raging misogynists commenting on my every post. Like me. Share my humiliation, but whatever you do, DON’T UNFOLLOW. My ego can’t take it. Emotional blackmail is one way to reach a million followers. But will it make me happy?

Yes.

Follow me because then you can say, I knew that girl when she was more desperate than she is now she’s being sponsored by Nutribullet.

XoXo Gassy girl.

Did I ever tell you that I once saw Noel Gallagher crossing the road near Oxford Circus and shouted, “Look, it’s Noel Edmunds!” As if screaming the wrong name at a famously angry rock star and his 9 months pregnant wife wasn’t enough, I threw my head back and howling with laughter at my mistake.

Sensing danger and bravely ignoring the red man, the rock star dragged his pregnant missus away from my outstretched finger as fast as he could. I suppose what I’m saying is, my faux pas came close to ending the possibility of an Oasis reunion forever.

I know what you’re thinking. What the hell were you doing in that fourth circle of hell? It was the summer of ‘07 and I was working in the flagship fashion store on Oxford Circus. It was 4 floors of teenage dreams, skinny jeans and tourists. I was kept in the windowless basement along with the tulle and the sequins. The “boutique” section.

While endlessly re-hanging clothes, we would keep ourselves entertained by guessing people’s nationalities based on their spatial awareness. Icelanders had none. I could always spot an Icelander coming down the escalator - they’d stand in the middle of it while a Brit made terse sounds and tried to squeeze past them whilst saying “please, thank you, sorry, excuse me, pardon, don’t mind me” all at once and not meaning a word of it. Londoners lithely squeezed past any old fucker, dodging slow walkers, zigzaggers and large gaggles of dehydrated teenagers who shouted abuse at anyone who didn’t pluck their eyebrows.

Subscribe now

Share

A couple of weeks earlier, I had sat on a grey two-seater in a glass waiting room, memorising the September issue of Vogue one last time. Jewel tones, mushroom taupe, Sienna Miller in feathers. That morning, I had stopped the ladder in my tights with red nail varnish, straightened my already poker straight hair and doused myself with half a bottle of my mum’s Coco Chanel Mademoiselle.

Mandy, an ex-military chick turned recruiter, led me into her glass office where she ushered me to sit on another grey two-seater without looking at me. “What would you say is this season’s colour?” She asked. “Beige. It’s neutral, classy, autumnal. Not Jane, but champagne.” She smiled. Tilted her head. Was she laughing at my enthusiasm for brown or impressed that I had memorised my lines? “And why do you want to work at TopShop?” “Some might say I’m deluded to think that I would be making the world a more aesthetically pleasing and therefore kinder place by selling people clothes, but I think they give people confidence and allow them to express who they are on the inside.” Mandy ticked the relevant boxes on her clipboard and I secured my role as a fast fashion foot soldier.

Training was held in an office on the top floor of a tall 20-something-story building. Blue carpets, low ceilings, fluorescent overheads. We were shown “REAL” video footage of an ex-employee jumping over the service counter to ninja kick a customer. It was impressive. And an example of what not to do, no matter what the customer says. The customer is always right.

Years later, I would remember this when I was working behind a bar and a man threatened to wait outside for me, follow me home and rape me because I dared tell him to “drink up, we’re closing.”

We all laugh at the ninja kick. The training manager smirks as if he told a joke. As if he had won all of our affection and respect when we all knew that he was only there to press play and make us sign a piece of paper waiving our rights to sue the company in the event that… well, anything happened.

“How could we resolve this issue better?” He asked, as if it were a genuine question that needed answering, not a sarcastic comment or a way to pass the allotted time so that the company could say they had done their due diligence. I put my hand up. Teacher’s pet. He didn’t pick me, too desperate…

“Anything else.” A confident voice caressed the felted air.

At school, we would have snickered. But her tone didn’t invite the childish behaviour.

The training manager blushed a little, gestured for her to expand by rolling his wrist…

“Yes, can you give me an example?…”

“Cynthia.”

He fancied her. It was clear by her stillness that Cynthia was too clever to answer such a simple question. A long silence, filled only with the sound of her stare toasting his face a deep shade of raspberry.

Sunburn is never expected.

After an eternity, he answered his own question, opened his palms in a sweeping motion to indicate that it was quite obvious:

“SMILE”

Cynthia didn’t smile.

We left for lunch with a little “gift from head office”, our new motto that the training manager had spent his morning photocopying and cutting up with a blunt guillotine.

S.M.I.L.E.

S – Serve with a Positive Attitude
M – Make a Connection
I – Identify Needs
L – Listen & Learn
E – Ensure Satisfaction

Share

Subscribe now

“I read somewhere that smiling gives you wrinkles,” I said to Cynthia, who had recently moved to London from South Africa to study fashion. She didn’t smile but offered a sympathetic eyebrow raise. As if to say, it’s possible or shut up, I’m hungry. I never quite worked it out.

Cynthia told me she wanted to treat herself to a sandwich; she knew a good deli. I wasn’t sure if it was an invite, but I strode alongside her to keep up. “I treat myself three times a day,” I said, grabbing at my chubby belly. I had seen a comedian talk about how fat he was on TV once; people laughed as if they had all been thinking it and were just relieved that he’d noticed. Bread made Cynthia bloated. “I was joking,” I confessed, ashamed of my assumption that she would think my self-flagellation was funny.

Cynthia had miscalculated how far away the deli was. We were at the traffic lights, wondering if we’d get to the deli and back in time. What would happen if we didn’t get back in time? Could we smile our way out of it?

“IT’S NOEL EDMUNDS!”

Cynthia raised her left eyebrow as she slapped my finger-pointing hand down. I wasn’t sure I knew Cynthia well enough to be reprimanded. It took me a moment to realise that out of context, I was pointing and screaming at a heavily pregnant lady.

How do you explain Noel Edmond’s House Party to someone who has never seen it. How do you explain Mister Blobby without a smartphone?”

“He was like a big, not quite inflated, pink thumb with yellow spots, googly eyes, a permanent smile, a bow tie and flappy arms that crept up behind people and shouted Blobby, Blobby, Blobby, with an electronic voice machine. That’s all he could say, his name.” I explained with decreasing enthusiasm. “It was the 90s. Lads and custard pies, you know?”

I couldn’t tell if Cynthia’s right eyebrow raise meant that she was annoyed with me or if she just thought I was stupid for making the 90s sound insignificant to a black South African.

At the Deli counter, I tried to get a Brit on my side, to keep Cynthia on my side. So she would know I wasn’t in the habit of screaming at pregnant women and making up 90s TV shows/ “It’s funny because that was Noel Gallagher from Oasis and I shouted Noel Edmonds at him! I think I might have hurt his feelings.”

“Never liked them.” He wrapped the sandwich sharply and spun it across the counter.

“What’s South African TV like?”

“Funny.” And with that pithy remark, Cynthia tucked into her sandwich.

I liked Cynthia.

A couple of weeks in, changing room duty, counting in people’s items and taking back the mountains of clothes that they had tried on and not put back on the hanger. Cynthia was diligently organising the clothes into size order and I stood at the booth giving people pieces of plastic with numbers on them - enthusiastically checking that they weren’t trying to get an extra item past me.

As per the rules, I obnoxiously counted their items by separating each hanger and gliding my hand between the garments.

Share

The customers didn’t always appreciate this delay but this lady was keen to encourage my work. “God, you’re thorough! I bet they love you! I hope you get paid double for working in a basement on a Saturday! Thank you ever so much.” She skipped into the white tunnel of artificially lit changing rooms, reassured by her act of kindness that she was, in fact, a good person despite what her teenage children told her.

No queue. I looked at the clock on the wall. I would have to go and collect hangers and rubbish in 5 minutes. Time to make space on the clothes racks…

When a clothes hanger flew past my face.

FUCK!

As this stranger screamed, she carried on throwing hangers, I dodged them like a matador dodging a bull.

“Why…

HANGER

Haven’t

HANGER

You

HANGER

Checked

HANGER

The

HANGER

changing rooms for

HANGER

hangers?!”

I later found out that this stranger who I’d never met before was a stock room manager on a rampage. There was a ladder. You would get paid 50p more an hour to become a supervisor, 50p more again to be an assistant manager. There were about 10 rungs of the ladder until you were able to exert any real power, so most of the managers just spent their days raging at the one below and filing complaints about the one above. That was the dream, but you had to be a lot of other people’s nightmare to get it. So this bitch had presumably been trampled on by her superior, and had come over to make me feel like a fork in a world of soup. So, I leapt over the booth door and ninja-kicked her in the face.

Obviously not. I held back tears and went a shade of volcanic red as another supervisor interviened and told me to stop with the attitude. When she finally left Cynthia worked in silence while I fumed. I didn’t return the next day. And that was all she wrote.

On reflection, I like to think a pregnant Patsy Kensit secretly enjoyed me taking Noel down a peg or two on the street. Although it can’t have been Patsy, the dates don’t line up. None of the women he had a child with does.*

So after googling it, I’m not definite that it was Noel. Maybe it was Liam. In which case I think I got off lightly with the hangers. **

I didn’t dare set foot to that giant alter to capitalism covered in period blood for years. Until one day.

The story of the haunted house often involves a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, and it’s always raining. There is always a choice to enter, a point of no return. There is always a basement. And so it was that I found myself emerging from Oxford Circus underground station into a thunderstorm. The square entrance of a soon-to-disappear Top Shop with a mouth like a nutcracker. The security guards eyed me up greedily as I fed myself to the escalator.

Share

Subscribe now

How many people had touched the handrail? Had it been replaced in the 10 or so years since I steadied myself against its smooth rubber. Cassette tape, rewinding time. Beige is back in, except it’s less sand now, more camel. Pantone colour of the year: Mocha Moose.

I queue, whilst eating the remains of my tuna sandwich, in a windowless room full of tourists who think this is all there is to London.

The queue at the till snakes around metal barriers. I remember when the big boss used to waltz in, and we’d all be told to drop what we were doing and go to the till to make it seem like there was no queue or else he’d start firing people on the spot. Some could boast that they had been fired multiple times. The offences ranged from having messy hair to not saying “Sir”, but really, it was the girls he found unattractive that got the chop.

It’s not until I get to the bend that I see her, wearing a camel power suit, covered in lanyards, directing a man who leans his seemingly endless ladder up against the wall. It wobbles. She jabs her finger into the recycled air, first in one direction and then in my direction. Our eyes lock in a momentary fever dream of pink and yellow. A raised cheekbone.

She turns to the lanyard-wearing man in matching white ankle socks and puts on a SMILE, and cuts through the air with her sharply manicured nails, pointing past me as if I am already gone.

A pang of disappointment as I lingered on the memory of the girl who refused to be optimised by a company that sought to patronise her into smiling. I still wondered what she thought of my outfit, or if I pointed at her and laughed, she’d come over and swat at my hand or call security. I was as foreign to her life as I was to Noel Gallagher’s. Yet for a few seconds, once, our paths had collided. Blobby.

* This just confirms what I always suspected: googling gets in the way of a good story, and Liam is probably messing with Noel’s Wikipedia page. Who knows who’s who and what’s fact and what’s fiction? All I know is I still have a pink tulle skirt from Topshop that I have worn a handful of times, but is as much a part of my personality as cheese.

Notes:

I don’t know when I wrote this, but it was before the Oasis reunion was announced, and before Cynthia Erivo starred in Wicked and became a household name. I wonder if I’m culturally psychic, or if the doubling of names in this essay is just a series of self-referential and colliding indicators that will lead to a Mr Blobby comeback. Names are both nonsensical sounds that are structured indicators of meaning, pointing at heritage, class, time periods - or, in the case of Noel, a reminder that you are born around Christmas.

I don’t think this post is very “finished” in the sense that the through line or argument is vague or completely lacking. I need to pull out the themes of doubling and disorientation a bit more and maybe say something explicit about how companies prey on people’s deep psychology to optimise people through systems that ensure a competitive and toxic work environment that encourages abuses of power from the beginning to the end of the process. But it has sat in my drafts folder long enough, and for some reason, I like it anyway.

Welcome back to the second instalment of my series on producing, writing and performing in a play that’s going to Edinburgh in three months. As you might have noticed, three months came and went. Edinburgh happened and I kept it all to myself. Rude.

In case you missed my first post, a fever dream of WTF have I done? I’ll catch you up. In April last year, I started a series called: “How (not) to Produce a Play.” I optimistically thought that if I were writing a play, producing it and performing in it I would definitely have time to blog about the process, become famous on Substack and translate this into ticket sales. It turns out that optimism doesn’t add extra hours to your day. I realised quite quickly that if I was avoiding phone calls from my director about how little, if any, writing I had done in a day, I couldn’t reasonably write a Substack about it. Might have been awkward.

A few years ago, a friend of mine went on a training course about group dynamics, you know, the Myers-Briggs personality test that men put on their dating profiles… SFWD (that’s mine, it stands for “sometimes fun when drunk”).

I never got on with acronyms; early phone texting was a nightmare. I remember taking two days to work out what BTW meant… By the water…? Tea at Bluewater? Bitch to Waste? It was an IYKYK situation, I wasn’t going to admit that I didn’t know and I couldn’t Ask Jeeves on dial-up internet - he didn’t know anything in those days anyway, more like a yellow pages phone directory than the “omniscient” search engines we use today.

Subscribe now

So instead of that CAPSLOCK nightmare, my friend had learned a friendly colour-coded personality test. Each colour indicates where your strengths/weaknesses might lie and where you fit in a group. Blue, green, red and yellow.

Colour - strength/weakness:

• Blue - an organiser/inflexible

• Green - a listener/takes a back seat

• Red - a leader/doesn’t listen,

• Yellow - an ideas person/overly optimistic.

I said, I think I’m a… And get this, she turned to me and said: “Alfie, you’re a yellow.” WTF!

A blank-faced sunflower? A ripe banana on the edge of brown! A Hupplefluff! AN OVER-AMBITIOUS UNDERACHIEVER?! I went into a yellow spiral.

For weeks, I asked anyone who’d listen what they thought. I got all the colours, depending on who I talked to. Am I really that unsolvable? Does that make me a chameleon? A sociopath? Years later I am prepared to admit that when it comes to this series “How (not) to Produce a Play” (and nothing else), it turns out that she was right; I am a yellow belly in a yellow car at a yellow light, bathing in yellow sunshiny delusion.

Perhaps predictably to the “blues” among us, it turns out that being a producer/writer/performer with three months to put on a show is really time-consuming.

I suppose the cheeky “not” in the title should have been in capital letters, not brackets. “How NOT to Produce a Play.”

It shouldn’t shock me that I have failed, once again, to keep a diary. Despite years of desperately wanting to be “that” girl, it eludes me. Like many young girls of my age and older, I read Anne Frank’s Diary at the age of 8. I should leave something important behind, I reasoned, in case I too was murdered by Nazis. My neighbour, Eddie, a 2nd world war veteran, promised he would protect me and gave me a whole pound for sweets. I ran down to the Newagents to buy a tiny notepad and a curly wurly. “Dear Kitty… my sister is really annoying.” I never wrote in it again. Many failed attempts at much fancier diaries later, ones with locks and invisible ink and fabric covers, I realised that it just isn’t for me. My private scrawling is painfully slow, boring and self-indulgent.

And honestly, when I’m dead, all I really want people to know is that my sister is annoying. So my work here is done. (That’s a joke, mum.)

Subscribe now

Yet still I have this painfully optimistic ambition to write down everything that happened in the lead up to Edinburgh, all the decisions I made, the things I discovered and the realities of going it alone at the Fringe. Might be useful for others in a similar situation to me, and interesting to those who don’t know how these things work and want to get some behind the scenes insight.

I am aiming to do a few posts about what happened, perhaps one subject at a time: The writing process, the performance/rehearsals, the Edinburgh Fringe itself - maybe by week or by subject. Perhaps I’ll mix it up and do some videos too.

I will also be taking you on side quests about acronyms and sharing the first stages of the new project I am chopping the vegetables for!

WHAT?!

I know!

I’m bananas!

Here’s what I’m thinking:

A solo storytelling hour. Intimate narration and embodied comedic performance create a warm, unsettling and sharply comic portrait of two sisters, one house and a world that is changing too fast for any of them to keep up.

Dream House, a dramedy about home ownership, paint colours, and mysterious drafts.

Part Changing Rooms, part The Haunting of Hill House, with a backdrop of a climate crisis.

An exploration of the concept of home through the relationship between two very different sisters bound together by bricks and mortar.

Share

Very excited to explore this idea optimistically and share the journey with you all. I leave you with this.

K THX CU L8A G8A

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Share

I listened to Lily Allen’s new album twenty times in one day. My intention was simple: join the conversation while the blood was still warm. Within days of West End Girl’s release, the critical feeding frenzy had become nauseating. I felt myself become sceptical of the album’s merits without having listened to it. Every angle had already been explored: divorce narrative, parasocial heartbreak, celebrity vengeance, revenge-fantasy for scorned women, humiliation as empowerment, the return of confessional pop, the decline of monogamy, the failure of David Harbour’s masculinity, the future of the butt plug economy, even its musical merits, although those articles were harder to come by. There was no stone left unturned. So I decided I didn’t want to be influenced by the algorithm and listened with the intention of writing about it myself.

But as soon as I had something to say, I got the ick. Was writing about West End Girl adding anything? Or was I volunteering as an unpaid appendage of her marketing department? Worse: was I joining the public dissection of a woman’s body?

In case news of Lily Allen’s first album in seven years and its subject matter hasn’t reached you, I’ll explain. Lily Allen of the noughties MySpace/hit single Smile/Gold-hoop-wearing fame wrote an album in 14 days about the breakup of her relationship with hit Netflix series, Stranger Things actor, David Harbour. The album is a contained drama tracking the breakdown of their relationship due to Harbour wanting to be non-monogamous and then not following the rules that he agreed to within that arrangement. With the precision of a surgeon, Allen cuts into herself and reveals her insides to us, in all their bloody, muscular, pulsating beauty.

Share

Subscribe now

Is it Art if it Really Happened?

Juke box musicals, tedious biopics, and documentaries that jam the tabloid titbits and tragedies into a bland hero’s journey. Without the gossip, what even is a pop star? Not popular, that’s for sure. Is art always personal? I would say, probably. Others would seek to ringfence the personal, separate it from the made-up imaginative bits and point to that bit as the art, and the rest as inspiration. The Descartian logic-emotion / brain-body duality has a strong hold on our interpretations. I’m kind of bored by the debate and wish we’d all just get on with making the art. Allen admits that it’s not the exact truth, but an artistic retelling. I think we’ve all collectively decided that the butt plug bit is too specific to be made up. Right? Does it matter?

Sex Sells

What I do know is that celebrity gossip has historically treated men with a cheeky wink and women as shameful whores and emotional gossips. On Allen’s latest offering, CNN playfully wrote, “forget hot girl summer, we’re excited about TMI autumn.” Read: forget sexy women, how about when they cry? Yahoo wonders if “Lily Allen’s album will derail David Harbour’s career.” Read: A woman’s emotions hurt a man’s money. House and Garden has “Lily Allen’s designer bedsheets on [their] wish list.” Read: We’re thinking about Lily Allen in bed. Sex sells. Or so the adage goes.

Share

Their Misery makes us Nicer to each other

As long as pop music has been around, so has our fascination with the person behind the microphone. The continued life of a pop star in the public consciousness has as much to do with the tragedies of their personal lives. Like a vampiric newborn that needs constant feeding and never sleeps, our addiction to gossip has reached new heights. Some might say that gossip is an important social activity, a way in which to vent frustrations, warn or keep people in line. And perhaps outsourcing gossip to celebrities is a way in which to reflect on our own relationships or just not be as mean about each other. My friend, who lives in a small town in Iceland, once quipped that the Kardashians had made everyone nicer to each other because they had finally stopped gossiping about each other.

A Pop-Culture Bloodletting

Lily Allen’s latest album, her first in 7 years, written in 14 days about her breakup from David Harbour, has become the latest pop culture bloodletting. The auto-fictional nature of her writing, draws from folk music, soul and confessional poetry. It is offset against the upbeat percussive, dance-influenced, international sounds of the London music scene. The album, West End Girl is as you’d expect from Allen whose outwardly don’t-give-a-fuck persona matches the sardonic storytelling, with her vulnerability shining through the lyrical and musical contradictions. Lily Allen has never been a hard exterior, she is that friend that we all have, the one who is so sensitive that she gets to the punch line before anyone else does. But is it her music that moves us or are we just happy to have some gossip to sink our teeth into?

Share

An Algorithm Scorned

The reactions in the press have ranged from calling her an iconic, brave girl, lauding a heroine’s glorious return, to being disgusted at her airing her dirty laundry. Rage baiting is the word of the year, and unsurprisingly, the internet loves a controversy that feeds the algorithm. And the controversy is not that her husband cheated on her. The controversy is that she is daring to talk about it so candidly and shamelessly. Nevermind the album itself, Allen is not perfect. She cheated on her ex-husband with sex workers, she was rude about other musicians, and worst of all, she doesn’t remember how many abortions she’s had. Equally as intense as the manosphere, and perhaps harder to pin down, are the internet sleuths who are disappointed with Taylor Swift’s newfound happiness, are all over the search for Madeleine. A confessional album-come-dark fantasy of every woman scorned. Who wouldn’t want their arsehole ex to be tortured with hilarious butt plug memes? If we can’t agree on anything else, we can agree that THAT was a marketing masterstroke.

Sell Out to Sell Out

On top of all this shamelessness, Lily Allen has been unapologetic about her need to make some money because she’s getting a divorce, or she’s a single mum or something. She’s better off than most of us, how dare she exploit her painful divorce for dolla? And worse, as an artist, in a capitalist society, want money. I can hear the noughties refrain “sell out” coming back from the grave of Indie music magazines. It will no doubt fill her with glee that she is selling out her tour next year.

Emotionally Literate Women in their 40s made me do it

I would not say I am a Lily Allen fan. I was annoyed when her new podcast “Miss Me?” kept popping up on my Instagram feed. I hate when my algorithm is so on the nose. I mainly listen to political podcasts and tbh emotionally literate women in their 40s talking about issues that affect me make me squirm. I find the one leg in the blue stocking of feminist rhetoric and the other in the designer shoe of capitalism a bit irritating. Then, one day, out of the blue, all those emotionally literate women in their 40s that I definitely follow anyway on Instagram were “obsessed” with Lily Allen’s new album. I was being marketed to. And it pissed me off. How dare they target me with Lily Allen? They had no business putting me in such obvious categories. But of course, I couldn’t help but click.

Share

What do I really think?

The first time I listened to the album I felt that it was refreshingly conceived of as an album, a whole thing as opposed to a hero song and padding. I find myself wanting the physical copy - I don’t know which song I would sing along to on the radio, a standard I think pop albums have always been held to. I decided that to get past the noise and into the album itself, to judge whether I really liked it or whether it was simply a great marketing campaign for the modern age, I would have to listen to the album as many times as I possibly could on repeat, like I used to do when I’d spent £9.99 on a CD and wanted to get my money’s worth. Luckily, the week of the album release, I had to fly to Iceland. A whole day of listening to the album, I would write a Substack on the plane and, like Lily, I would write so fast that I would release it within a day, ride the SEO wave of Lily Allen posts and get loads of hits for my Substack. If she was going to target me so outrageously, I might as well be equally cynical and pick up some new Substack followers. Quid pro quo.

Share

I am only a couple of years younger than Lily Allen and hard relate to the lyrics in Sleepwalking: “I don’t know if you do it intentionally, but somehow it’s always my fault” I’m not shocked by the confessional nature of the album. I am partial to auto-fiction, or that I relate to it as someone of a similar age who has been betrayed and humiliated in love. It’s easy to see why there has been a “you go girl” sentiment in my algorithm. There are some standout lyrics, and I love the way that she weaves her own brand of noughties hoopwearing outrage with her distinct voice coming through in an almost comical repeat of “who’s Madeleine?” “But really, who the fuck’s Madeleine?” My favourite song on the album is Ruminating, a bop that I can see people dancing to in the club and expresses the desperation of not knowing what’s going on in a relationship when your gut tells you it’s falling apart. The sparse lyrics that overlay the drum and bass beat build up of one line choruses with an autotune effect, “you’re mine…if it has to happen baby, do you want to know?…What a fucking line!” a double entendre about doing a line of coke, that circles back on itself to become a repeated line, “Line, line, line” that moves just like the boundaries of her relationship, until they become disassociated with the original meaning. Was it a line that he fed her, or a line that he crossed, or even a line that she imagined and wrote?

Infinitely Human

To those of us who stood in the long toilet queue of the 2000s. More likely than not, we’ve asked the stranger offering us eyeliner in the bathroom mirror, “why me?” Maybe that stranger was even Lily Allen. And maybe she fucked your boyfriend and laughed about it afterwards. Maybe you fucked hers. Perhaps, like me, you never thought “it” could happen to you. Then one day you found yourself silently crying on a bathroom floor, wishing you were braver. Heartbreak is infinitely human. As I suspect, is gossip. Lily Allen is offering us both with the dexterity of an artist who understands where we’re at culturally. Not only is she the moment, but she’s curating it in her image. And by us I mean emotionally literate women in their 40s. Who hasn’t given away their power to a man and mistaken a Pussy Palace for a Dojo? We know what it is to be brutalised by new age men who question the need for feminism in this all-too-equal world, where men feel unstable in their masculinity and take power where they can just because they can.

We know, Lily, we’re with you. And we like the songs too. Can I borrow your vape?

Share

Subscribe now

Apparently, I have a hard time getting to the point, I go on tangents, so, a tangerine. Sounds cute. And it would have been, if it hadn’t been said with a snarl. A contempt for my storytelling abilities. An attack on my innermost thoughts that I was generously making available to a stranger.

Let me explain. A man was flirting with me. Aggressively. And by aggressively flirting, I mean he had the audacity to imagine a future where he wouldn’t “share me.” THAT was his response to my question, “Are you an only child, by any chance?” He didn’t know what I meant by that. He did, but he didn’t like what I was implying. “I’m just direct.” He matter-of-facted. “It’s okay, most of my friends are only children.” I backpedalled, although it’s true (and I’m sorry best friends, it’s a lazy stereotype). His lips tightened into a bemused smile: “What does being an only child have to do with anything?” I looked down, in my attempt to be cute, fight back on the entitlement of the man thinking I was his to share, a naked tangerine segment, I’d hit a nerve. I should have aggressively ended the conversation there. But I wanted to know where he’d hidden the bodies.

“Well, maybe you don’t like sharing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t share you.”
”But tangerines are for sharing. They come in segments.”
“So you want to be shared?”

Subscribe now

Why do I attract serial killers? I didn’t say that to his face but to my sister who I sent a 7 minute voicemail straight after this terrifying interaction. I listened back to it today, thinking that it would be funny - but it sounds more like someone trying to piece together their whereabouts after hearing about a crime committed on their street.

“He did say one funny thing. He called me a tangerine because I go on tangents.”

“You DO always turn left”, my sister reminds me of a fact long-established. By her. My sister likes to establish funny facts about me, they’re sort of metaphors for my personality. In this case she’s referring to the fact that I am terrible with directions and when I’m lost I would always take a chance on a left turn. I don’t remember when or if this happened, but it’s become a part of my lore.

He asked me what book I’d read recently, a question I seem to get asked a lot by men these days. I don’t remember men caring about whether I read books before. They used to care if I knew about the obscure indie band they’d read about in NME. Maybe it’s a test of my intelligence. I wonder what would happen if I said I exclusively read Ancient Greek literature. Maybe this is a new middle aged thing, a graduation from the manic-pixie-dream-girl to the vegetablegrowing-big-breasted-bookworm woman (read: mummy). Men don’t find my secret reality TV fetish attractive. In fact, they find the whole genre confusing and stupid and often bemoan how the most intelligent women they know irredeemably lose their respect over that drivel. To which I have one word. Football. And no, I won’t explain. Dribble.

“I recently joined a book club and we were reading Miranda July’s All Fours, and it was funny because one of the women at the book club was a bit of a prude. I should explain, I just moved back to London and all my friends have had kids and moved to Bristol. The ones that are left live all over the city…”

“What was the woman being prudish about?”

His distaste for my detour was palpable.

Share

I was a bit taken aback by his sharp questioning, offended that he didn’t find my verbal road trips as endearing as I imagine most people do. I mean, he got off light. I was about to list all the books I have on the go, the fact that I listen to an audiobook on my morning walk and have a book on my bedside table, and on my Kindle. Not to show off, perhaps to be truthful, but mainly because I wanted to keep the conversation going. Despite the prickles in the back of my neck telling me to throw my pint in his face and run, my people-pleasing instincts kicked in, and for a moment, I wanted to be the perfect woman for him. If I’d have said all of that, perhaps it would lead to follow-up questions: Can you really count audiobooks as reading? To which I’d respond, Do you have to use your eyes to read? Well, no, because some people use their fingers to read Braille. And he would tell me that his mother was blind and would open up to me about his childhood.

So you see, to my mind, I had answered his question quite concisely, and I was definitely getting to the part where I told him why she was being prude, but I had to establish the reason I joined the book club in the first place. I don’t know why. Maybe I thought it sounded a bit geeky. God! Am I still worried about seeming cool to bullies?! Just a moment, I’m dunking my own head in the toilet.

Cut away to a Carrie Bradshaw moment:

In that moment, I wondered if I was more squirrel than fox; hoarding emotional nuts for a winter that never comes. Then again, the foxes in my garden aren’t exactly sleek predators. One left half-eaten burger out there last night. Maybe the point is we’re all just rummaging through each other’s bins, mistaking scraps for connection.

“I don’t think I can tell you without giving away the story.”
“I won’t read it, tell me.”
“She’s just so physical, you know, her writing is unashamedly sexual. She gets into an affair with a married man, and she masturbates a lot.”
“What kind of masturbation?”
“I don’t want to sleep with you.”
“Why would you assume that? I was just asking about a book. You’re really trying to second-guess my motives. I was just curious if there was something special about the masturbation; you said she was a performance artist.”
“Did I? Yeah, sorry, I misinterpreted. Not special, she just does it a lot and anyway, that’s not what the woman was being prude about…”

My sister’s diagnosis didn’t require an X-ray: “OBVIOUSLY, he wanted to talk about masturbation because he wanted to have sex with you. What a prick!”

“I mean he probably didn’t. On reflection, I never really get flirted with, and when I do I do the opposite of leaning into it, I get tinnitus and heart palpitations - maybe I was a bit harsh.”

“He was negging you!”

Sigh. Negging, the millennial love language of lads and ladettes. We graduated from dead baby jokes and calling each other pricks to finding new ways to weaponise self-doubt. All in the name of connection.

“Maybe it’s because I’m Icelandic, I said, trying to save face. The sagas are written like that, you don’t get to the main bit until you know everything about their family, sometimes generations back that might explain their relationship with the now.”“You’re so confusing.”
“You said it yourself, I’m a tangerine.”
“WHAT was she being prude about?”
“She was upset that the protagonist calls her best friend and tells her everything; she felt like that was a worse form of cheating than the sexual encounters that she has with a younger man. And she had to skip over the sex bits; they made her uncomfortable.”

I could tell this answer disappointed my self-proclaimed “direct” friend.

“You really don’t want to answer my question.”
“I answered the question.”
“You’re evasive.”

“You’re INVASIVE! I didn’t say that, I wish I had.” I giggled to my sister.

“I’m just direct? DIRECT is just an excuse to be an arsehole,” my sister scathed.

Subscribe now

Another Carrie cut away:
I thought about the tangerines in the fruit bowl, how juicy they were. I wondered, as I often do, why do tangerines taste so bland at certain times of year. It’s peak tangerine season and there really isn’t anything better than a good tangerine; easy peel, no seeds, but not straight after brushing your teeth. I like them better than oranges anyway.

Does this bother everyone about me? I wondered on my morning walk, half listening to Slags, a book by Emma Jane Unsworth that I have on the go. A raven hops alongside me. As it always does in this neck of the woods. I started thinking about the symbolism of ravens after Dad’s death. And then I saw them everywhere. I follow it as it glides onto a huge fallen branch that looks like a whale skeleton; carcass-like, sinking in the mulch of fallen autumn leaves, something like rotting flesh. A runaway dog bursts onto the scene, barking.

The book comes to the foreground. Something poignant about sisters being able to push each other’s buttons with surgical precision. And it occurs to me that some people have never had a sister or a friend willing to share their unexpectedly really-good-you-HAVE-to-try-it tangerine.

Maybe I could make him understand.
“It’s hard being a woman in this world,” I sighed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He asked, as if I’d accused him of something. Which I had.
“If you don’t kill me, you might kill someone else, and my instinct is to be the hero, but I’ve promised to take my niece to school tomorrow.”

“That shut him up! Obviously, I didn’t say that. I don’t have a death wish.”
“Obviously! Why would you say that to a serial killer? Can you pick the kids up from school today?”

Check out:

The White Cube

Miranda July’s Substack

All Fours by Miranda July

Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth

Krisprolls

Tickets to my upcoming show of Dead Air in Iceland 8&9 Nov.

Share

Of late, Louis Theroux has become a bit of a parody of himself. Consciously, I think. He dabbles in the whimsical and the ironic, his sighs pregnant with schoolboy smirks. Perhaps it’s a bid to stay relevant, or maybe he’s simply taken the temperature of the modern media landscape and realised that everyone loves a meme. And if you are a living meme, why not lean into it?

Yet Louis Theroux is more than a meme. I, for one, hope he loosens the shackles of being a “national treasure” and says what he really thinks more often. His interview style has always been to let his subjects talk, to ask difficult questions, sometimes out of genuine curiosity, sometimes with feigned innocence. Many have thought they could beat him at his own game. Many have exposed themselves in the attempt.

All this is to say: Bob Vylan, like a true political punk, didn’t let Louis blather about the price of cereal at Aldi for too long. Some might argue he was saving him from himself. Louis Theroux talking about supermarket savings at best sounds disingenuous; like a scholar picking apart a thought experiment for his own amusement, and nobody else’s.

Bob Vylan walked a tightrope in that interview. As a punk, he had to be punk - to not give a shit. “I’d say it again tomorrow and twice on Sunday.” But as a Black man fighting white supremacy on a platform listened to primarily by the white, middle-class mainstream, he was audibly relieved when Louis asked about his educational background rather than his home life growing up; a measure of how skilled Louis is at his game; he got to that later.

At times, Bob Vylan seemed almost defensive. Then came the turning point: he asked Louis, “What do you think of what I just said?” And Louis answered, not with his usual detached curiosity, but with substance, describing Israeli zionism as a dangerous and pervasive prototype for ethno-nationalism. I breathed a sigh of relief.

He clearly likes Bob Vylan. He gets it. He wasn’t going to throw him under the bus. But wouldn’t it be nice to hear more of what Louis Theroux actually thinks? It’s refreshing, even radical, to hear someone with his reach and influence use his voice with conviction. For a man who has made a career out of listening, it would be fascinating to see what happens when he decides to speak his mind.

When I wrote this essay, I wanted to write about my miscarriage that I had at 12 weeks that winter, but I couldn’t. It was too close, or the loss too hard to bear under the weight of the shame I felt about the abortion I had had a few years previous. Let me be clear, having an abortion was a hard decision, but I felt at the time that it was the right one and still do for reasons that are too complicated and personal to go into here.

If you're against abortion, I can only ask that you consider how long they’ve existed, and what happens when access is taken away. The reality is that restricted or banned abortions endanger women’s lives; backstreet abortions are dangerous as hell. Amnesty International explains why abortion is, fundamentally, a human rights issue: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/sexual-and-reproductive-rights/abortion-facts/

Of course, it’s not cut and dry. It never is. It’s a wave pressed into sand. With every incoming tide, every loss, the salt crystallises. Maybe I wrote this to unburden myself. Maybe to hold onto the joy I felt during that pregnancy, even after it ended. This piece is a kind of excavation; a flight of thought.

It’s about three years old. The Elon Musk mentioned here is slightly dated; pre-Nazi, post-creep.

I hope you will read this with care and an open heart.

A three-minute journey to motherhood

  The timer was set to three minutes. I was in a tiny toilet cubicle in Gatwick airport on my way back to Iceland, where I was living. The symptoms were the same as last time. Rancid smells of sweaty feet and existential desperation that soak London’s pavements had wafted directly up my nose all week. Last time I was pregnant, I had an abortion. I didn’t regret it, but the experience still haunted me, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it again. When I ran into my boyfriend’s arms at the airport, I didn’t want the moment to be spoiled by the words, “let’s take a test to be sure.” I knew that would send my anxiety-driven mind into a tailspin of questions about whether he wanted the baby, and by proxy, whether I did. No, this time I was sure that I was sure. Definitely. Besides, I was 34 years old, it was now or never or get your eggs frozen, and I could still barely afford shampoo. I couldn’t wait for things to be right, to be successful or thin or sure about the meaning of love. Life is just a series of compromises. And children promise a kind of do-over, a distraction from your own failures. A hug in a can. A constant worry. A reason to go camping. The truth was I didn’t know how anyone made the decision that they wanted children based on logic alone, but I did know that I didn’t want to miss out on it.   

Two minutes and 50 seconds 

Hovering over the toilet seat, I had a pregnancy test in one hand and a phone with a timer on in the other. Women all over this airport were hovering over the toilet to avoid the pee on the seat from the last woman who hovered, and there were no hooks on the door to hang your coat. The warm piss on my fingers couldn’t distract me from the patch of sweat spreading across my back. I looked down at the test. Why didn’t I just wait until I got back to Iceland, to my boyfriend, to a place where I could take my coat off? I was too far gone, I had peed on the stick, I couldn’t just close my eyes, throw it in the bin and pretend I hadn’t. For one thing I wasn’t sure I could open the bin with my eyes closed. My eyes flickered to my phone. 

Two minutes and 40 seconds.

It suddenly dawned on me that my plan was to keep this to myself for the next 5 hours, and I could barely distract my mind for 10 seconds. I desperately needed to focus on something. I stared at the toilet door, willing it to inspire me. A thought: Why don’t they put hooks on the back of toilet doors? An obscure question and answer column for a design magazine, perhaps? I tried to work out how much it would cost to put hooks on the back of all the doors in the airport. I would reply to this question with a scathing review of the terminal becoming as bad as the low-cost airlines it served: minimising space, maximising profit. Having children was surely an anti-capitalist act as they minimise space and minimise profit. But Elon Musk had made his wishes clear: the world (Mars) needs more children. On the one hand, it meant job security, on the other, would I just be producing human workers to maximise someone else’s profit whilst I scoured the kitchen for sustenance before convincing myself that baby food was basically the same as a smoothie? Urban legends of women giving birth in toilets pushed themselves into my thoughts - my mind was already on birth, and not even a statistically realistic one. I wanted to Google how many women gave birth in toilets and if any of them had complained of the indignity of not being able to hang their cardigan up while they grunted through labour on a suspiciously sticky floor. 

Two minutes and 20 seconds. 

Perhaps it could evolve into an opinion piece about the general design of bathrooms. I had heard, for example, that toilets were no longer designed with flat surfaces in nightclubs so that people couldn’t snort coke off them. It is said that if it weren’t for the constant flow of cocaine, it would never snow in London. So when it snowed on the day of my abortion, it felt like a sign. Transport stopped, the pipes froze over and I was sure my appointment would be cancelled. But against all odds, the hospital staff had made it to work. After checking me in, the receptionist called me back to tell me that they’d dispose of the foetus respectfully, as if she were working at a motel and had forgotten to tell me the TV didn’t work. I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I didn’t ask. There would be no funeral, no people gathered to memorialise a life that hadn’t been lived except for in my mind’s eye. I had long decided that there is no dignity in death; funerals are only the puppetry of a financially privileged life. Only two days before, I had read about a woman who had a stillbirth in a prison toilet after screaming for help for hours. Where was her baby buried? I didn’t need to know where the cells that had just graduated to 8 weeks and were the size of a kidney bean ended up. I reassured myself that we were ultimately just atoms made from the same stuff as the blue in the sky. 

Two minutes 

Waiting for two lines to appear is a torturous use of time. Waiting is what all modern technology is geared towards eliminating. Soon we’ll just order babies from an Amazon Prime lab, next-day delivery included. By my calculations, I was 5 weeks, and I would spend the next 7 weeks waiting to announce my news. 8 months waiting for a baby, who would in turn wait for me to change its nappy, as I would patiently wait for it to start pissing in a toilet. My mind went back to the waiting room I sat in four years ago alone with a dozen other women. We were all there, doing the same thing, having a surgical abortion, essentially putting a vacuum to our wombs. I decided on this method rather than the pill, which causes you to bleed. It is more discreet, and for women who cannot or would rather not spend the day at a hospital, it is preferable. But from friends I’d heard it could also be extremely bloody, lonely and painful. We sat in our hospital-issued adult nappies waiting to be called. Somebody broke the silence with a joke. Somebody else stifled a cry. I couldn’t help but feel that I was just one in a long line of women being brutally infantilised by the healthcare system. It felt as though we were being subjected to some sort of dystopian punishment for not fulfilling our biological purpose. “What’s your name?” the anaesthetist asked. “Alfrun.” “Count down from 10 for me, Alison.” I knew he wasn’t getting my name wrong on purpose; he was just English, and I didn’t stand to gain anything by correcting him. Or maybe this was another sign that I wasn’t meant to do this. I was here now. Best not to cause a fuss. “10, 9, 8…” 

One minute and 40 seconds. 

 Are hooks, in fact dangerous? If you tried to hang yourself from a hook on the back of the door, you couldn’t, the toilet would be in the way. Are women all over this airport unable to take their cardigans off because intermittently suicidal fantasists like me decide to take pregnancy tests in secret, and the thought of not sleeping for 18 years sends them over the edge? I imagined myself hanging from a rope fashioned from a bra. It’s not as poetic as putting your head in the oven but my obscure design magazine would no doubt use the opportunity to write a scathing review of the hook’s screw fastenings – “too tight.” After my sister gave birth, I had a motto, that if a woman could go through the pain and sometimes near-death experience of childbirth, I could bear whatever existential or self-induced pain I was going through. This was mainly reserved for exercise, the last 2 km of a run on a hot day. But I have since stopped exercising and am far too heavy to successfully hang myself from a hook on a door however well screwed in they are. 

One minute and 30 seconds

Toiletry solace is fleeting. A jumbo jet must have parked up at the terminal. The toilets were filling up, and someone tried to open the door. I lifted my foot to hold it fast. A pistol squat, or as it’s called in yoga, a one-legged garland, apt as I was not so much in the cubicle as decorating it with my limbs. Disembodied feet walked towards the gap under the door and stood there as if threatening to come through it before running into the cubicle next to mine. For a long time after my abortion, I felt that death was looking for me, and I it, and when we finally found each other, we’d laugh. I fantasised about getting lost, walking into the river like Virginia Woolf, meeting the tide before it swallowed me whole. Ultimately, though, I worried about the bloat and the embarrassment it would cause my family to have a double XL coffin. My suicidal thoughts weren’t born from self-pity but they promised a release from the grief. What was frightening was when I realised the consequence of having these thoughts might mean death. Should a person who thinks like that be a mother? What if the baby doesn’t like hugging or has no interest in reading or is just a little shit that likes setting fire to things? Will following them around with a fire hydrant finally cause me to set fire to myself just to see if they care enough to put me out? 

One minute and 20 seconds

There’s nothing worse than someone asking you to pass them toilet paper whilst you’re in a pistol squat and your hands are full. I pretended I wasn’t there. The feet had grown fists which knocked furiously on the cubicle wall and asked if I was ok. “No, I’m not fucking okay I haven’t even given birth to the child and I’m already setting fire to myself.” I thought as I gave in to the toilet seat, unhooked my foot from the door and threw my phone on the floor to politely pass her some toilet paper. I would like to tell you that I am the only pregnant person who is not sure they want children, and that there is a solution. We must all go through psychological evaluations like job interviews with checklists that, if answered correctly, show that on the scale of ready, we’re at the “can’t wait, just so excited, already picked their name” end before being allowed to have a child in our care. But somehow that puts too much power into the hands of psychiatry, which hasn’t got the best record when it comes to women’s issues. As detailed in Gina Rippon’s excellent breakdown on the continued male bias in psychiatry, “The Gendered Brain,” our modern understanding of female hormones aren’t far removed from the Ancient Greek’s concept of the wondering womb, an animal within an animal, so eager to procreate that it starts wondering around the body suffocating its airways when it can’t. Hormones were discovered in the 20th century, and rather than being treated objectively, scientific studies have been used to prove long-established theories and social norms about women. It’s no accident that oestrogen is an acronym of the Ancient Greek terms, oistrus (mad desire) and gennan (to produce). Women are uncontrollably horny on Venus whilst men and Elon Musk do important work on Mars. Is the maternal instinct anything more than a romanticised and much capitalised upon biological imperative not to let the little fuckers die? If I am rational at all times, would the patriarchy win or lose? Or should I be like my mother, and hers before her, work at least two full-time jobs and stay up till 6 am baking or making costumes for the school play or washing clothes until my kids hate me for being too tired to get them a plaster for their imagined wounds. 

One minute 

Since I was now sitting on the toilet seat trying to wish away the spots of other people’s wee on my thigh, I could relax, I was already in it, there was nothing I could do - I wasn’t going to wash my arse in the sink. I willed myself not to think about all the disgusting things motherhood involved; my cousin peeing in my face the first time I changed his nappy, or how sore my sister’s nipples were after trying desperately to breastfeed her baby for the first two weeks of his life. Or the postnatal depression that has driven more than one of my friends close to the edge of sanity. There is no chapter in the pregnancy book that says; Do you really want a baby? Or, it’s okay to change your mind. 

One minute 

All roads lead to this. Everyone shits but not everyone gets pregnant. It haunts me that by the time I realise that I want children, I might have missed the fertility boat, and I will resent myself for having an abortion. So I am sort of trying, sad and relieved in equal measure, when I come on my period every month. At the moment, I change my mind every day. I count the months every time I ovulate, don’t try too hard in April because that would clash with Christmas. I compare star signs, despite not believing in them at all. I really want my kids to like me, and what’s wrong with trying harder for a water sign if it gives me a better chance? I float between dreams of gurgling babies with toothless grins and nightmares of waking up old and unhappy with a teenager who hates me for locking myself away to finish a novel instead of being present in their every moment. I show them the mountain pose, the bend over backwards, the cow, and the middle finger. All hell breaks loose, and we don’t meet again until their grandmother, who was there for them but not me, dies. 

One minute 

I kicked my phone. Somehow, time had stopped. I looked at the test. Two lines. I knew it. I fumbled my way out of the cubicle, touching nothing, stuffed the test in its box, put it in my coat pocket and ran to the nearest open space to take off as many clothes as I could without getting arrested by airport security. Although if they did carry me to the cells, I would joyously scream, “I’m pregnant” at them. To which they would surely respond, “You’re naked and you’re scaring the kids.”

Share

If you like my writing and want to support me on my journey, or if you just want to buy me a drink while I spill all my secrets, I’ve given up drinking. Instead, consider paying for a subscription to my Substack. I’ll keep all my writing free, but your support helps me keep going.

Check out my website for upcoming Work-In-Progress sharings of my new play, Dead Air: www.alfrunrose.com

Subscribe now

Below is the extract that I sent in my applications for Dead Air. It probably won’t make it into the production but I think it is a sort of proof of concept. It is basically a journal entry, was written in half an hour, not much editing, except for lopping off the rest of what I wrote, which was twice as long and three times as nonsensical. I don’t know exactly what purpose it would serve in the play, but extracts or bits of it might be useful later.

The Old Man in the Samovar

My dad hasn’t come to me in my dreams. Not that he would. It would be completely against everything he believed in. How do I know what he believed in? He was a Gemini. A twin soul. What he projected and what he felt might have been two different things. His exterior clown, the fiendish grin, the hard judgements were him on a Sunday, on a Monday he was leaking, as if he had worn the exterior for too long, stretched himself too far, sweat too heavily under the weight of it. The seams worn, his insides would leak with empathy, with self-doubt, with the humility of someone who knows what we all know – we are not long for this world, so what does it really matter? What does it really matter if we achieve something, the volcano will erupt, and we will be lucky to be preserved in the ash and picked apart by an archaeologist who will base all of his knowledge of our times around a fragment of a person. What do they care that he was a Gemini? Unless you are a king, a person of great and unusual impact, you are a mere artefact. If archaeologists found my dad in his current state, his ashes in a silver (metal) samovar from 1980s Russia they might assume he was a big fan of Chekov’s Three Sisters or that he really loved tea. Neither of which could be further from the truth. They might extrapolate that burial practices in our era have like names become increasingly quirky and individualised. They might assume that he was Russian. How would they know that he has been burned to a crisp along with a pack of his favourite cigarettes, a letter from the President and coffee so that he can spend an afterlife he didn’t believe in in the same way he spent his life, nauseated on coffee and cigarettes both hating and deeply enjoying a letter that he doesn’t think belongs to him at all. We forgot to give him anything to eat. But that might not matter at all, I’m sure heaven has a buffet. Except he’s not in heaven, obviously, he’s not in hell either, he’s in a samovar.

The idea of my dad, Gísli’s (known as Gis von Ice), ashes being in a samovar makes me giggle and is also quite jarring considering the war in Ukraine had broken out the year before he died. But the samovar was part of my parents’ love story—sweet but contradictory that he should live in it, considering he never drank tea. He should have been put in a French press. Our bodies are supposed to be 60% water; his was infused with coffee. In fact, he would never be caught dead drinking Tetley’s. That and salt and vinegar crisps were things he never acclimatised to about the English. Did the old lady who lived in a shoe have a foot phobia? These are things that I think about as I try to sleep. Twisted logic, but somehow it works—just the way he liked it.

Dying of Boredom

I like the idea that someone might see this object and make lots of assumptions, none of which turn out to be true. We place so much value in objects that people leave behind. My dad left behind his phone and his headphones, and a coat with cigarettes in the pocket. Some of his last words were to the nurse to ask her when he could have his headphones back because he was dying of boredom. The nurse laughed as she told me it as his fingertips lost their last drop of warm blood. Just the kind of sick irony he revelled in. Even typing this, I am laughing.

Share

Hot Tears and Silver Spoons

The Three Sister’s stuff is a bit niche and is very personal. It probably only makes sense to the poor fuckers who stood in a room with me in the first year of Drama school repeating Irina’s speech over and over again, until smoke came out of my ears while my teacher gleefully goaded me “What’s in the samovar? What’s in the samovar?!”

Subscribe now

Enter CHEBUTYKIN, and behind him a soldier carrying a silver samovar; cries of astonishment and dismay.

OLGA: A samovar! This is terrible!

I failed Chekov. Maybe because I fundamentally disagree with this line:

“Lord, never mind being human even – better to be an ox, better to be a simple horse, just so long as you work – anything rather than a young lady who rises at noon, then drinks her coffee in bed, then takes two hours to dress... that’s terrible!” - Three Sisters, Chekov

Typical upper class bullshit, think the rest of us are so happy because it’s our job to smile when we sell them organic hemp and craft beer on a minimum wage. I’m not bitter but I do like my tea extra strong.

The text at the top of the post was edited from an exercise I did. I set a 10 minute timer and wrote about grief, without thinking or stopping. I tend to just word vomit with these exercises, so it might not make sense in parts. I have a tendency to go off on tangents to try to catch up with random trains of thought.

Murdering Chekov

A little extra for those who care to read what I cut from the above text (stream of consciousness unedited and unfact checked):

The samovar has a cute story – my mum and dad went to Russia a long time ago and almost got married, even though they don’t didn’t believe in marriage.  Are they both in the past tense, even though only one of them is dead? Past tense might be a construction that I’ve grown uncomfortable with, but I’ll come to that later. For now, we’re in a romance in Russia. They weren’t allowed to get married, not because they declared themselves atheists who were doing it on a whim, but because of some other legal loophole. It doesn’t matter now, but it wasn’t until 30 years later that their relationship was finally verified in a small room with a civil servant and signatures from their adult daughters, one of who had been married and divorced within the preceding year. For some reason they bought a samovar to commemorate their moment of Russian whimsy and it lived in the attic for the rest of their lives together, only to be found shortly before my dad passed away, no doubt bringing with it the memories of the passionate love that they had for each other. The samovar, untouched, an ornament of domesticity, not a drop of hot water had gone through it. It unnerved me after he died and perhaps even before, to have such an impractical object take up so much space in their new living room. In the middle of a war with Ukraine, a war that seeks to take Russia back to its days of empire. I didn’t argue with my mum when she rehoused my dad in the samovar but I did have an uncomfortable revelation.

Back in my days training to be an actor, we did a study on Chekov’s Three Sisters. I played the Disney princess character, the hopeful ingénue, the pretty little sister, Irina. None of those words would be used to describe me. I am much more of an Olga, the reserved, anxious, older sister trying to do what I’m meant to do, looking after the family with a tense grip on the practical. Irina’s energy is so Leo, it drained me but what killed me was the judgement that it placed on me, this was the character that was meant to stretch me but I couldn’t go there, to a puppy like happiness, it marked me as a bad actress and worse an intensely boring person, like Olga.

The scene study was this: It is Irina’s name day (something like a birthday) and she is making a speech about all the great things that she wants to do, that she wants to be unbound. She comes across as innocent and hopeful or annoying and unaware of the world. Either way she’ll probably get what she wants because she’s pretty… said I, the bitter ugly fat girl who’s passionate speeches about the hypocrisy of men at their birthday parties. Of course, I realise that pretty privilege also leads to the pain of not being seen for who you are really, but it does get you into night clubs. So, Irina is making a misguided speech about the life that she envisages for herself, her hopes and dreams… and in the middle of it a man, her recently deceases dad’s friend, a drunk and a creep, interrupts her word vomit which is really the playwright getting in some thematic ideas. He interrupts her holding a silver samovar. And I was meant to be horrified. Over and over again, I failed to answer the question, what does it mean? I really couldn’t tell you, even after I was told, it was a wedding present or a marriage proposal or something creepy like that from her Uncle/dad’s drunk friend.

It was a ridiculously flamboyant gift but more than that, a signal that Irina should know her place as a domestic ornament. I was tortured with this turn, this moment that I was supposed to react to in perfect horror, I was made to repeat it over and over again, until the other actor, whose impression of a drunk person looked like a flapping duck skidding on ice with a spit filled grin, started doing things to try and shock me. The stress of it all got to me.

My insecurities about doing things right, not pleasing my teachers, about being the wrong person in the wrong body took over and instead of reacting, I went into freeze mode – the one that is not fight or flight. It is stand there and block, hope that not too much time passes and you don’t melt. Don’t show any weakness, don’t react, don’t let them think you’ve broken away from the ice cap and are melting into the sea of desperation. I broke out in hives and had a well timed panic attack at lunch time.

When I cam back, my tutor helpfully recited my insecurities back to me until a single tear flowed down my flushed hot cheeks. “That’s it.” He said gleefully. “Do that.” So for the next three years whenever I needed to cry I told myself everyone hated me and that I was a fat unlovable pig. Drama school is so healthy. I long to go back to that moment, 10 years ago now and say to my young self, the samovar is your father burnt to a crisp, it is your father, Irina, who has bound you to this house, to this role of infantalised hope, to this understanding of a woman as a vessel that once dented and used can only become a sullen Olga or a mad Maya. I would go to that girl and say, it is more ridiculous than it is serious. Throw yourself on the ground, slam your hands against the cold dusty floor and cry out for your father. In short, do something. Don’t just stand there and encase yourself in hurtful words to use them against the next hurtful words. I’ve already heard them, they are here on my body, there’s no space for yours.

It is your father in a silver samovar. It is not equivalent to a vacuum cleaner or a set of fancy china from John Lewis that you’ll never use until one day the shelf that is holding it up falls down, it is a silver samovar with your father’s ashes in them. It is an unholy alliance between death and object. An object that was previously unused is now rendered unusable. It is the most frightening thing that has happened to me since my dad reached his arms out and fell backwards through the air for the last time. It is an anecdote that only a few select friends that sighed their way through this ordeal with me could get the irony of. It’s a “you had to be there” moment which never make for good anecdotes unless you are David Sedaris and somehow land in meaningfully quirky situations that anyone would enjoy. 

Milk goes in after, not before

I think I made the right decision. Editing is often easier when you know what you’re writing for. Conversely writing is often harder when you know what you’re writing for. This is to say that 10 minutes of writing is better than no minutes and sometimes things make sense later. Give them time to brew.

For more information on me and the show that I am writing: www.alfrunrose.com

The link to my work in progress date in London on July 16th is live. Click here to buy tickets: https://www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/dead-air/

Click here to see when and where I am performing: https://alfrunrose.com/dead-air/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alfrunrose/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alfrunrose/

Share

I love sleeping. But I don’t love going to bed. As an adult I live out my childhood fantasy of having no bedtime every day. I was raised by a mum who got up at 6am and a dad who woke up at 1pm. A and B people. It was clear from the start which category I fell into. The Bees. Alarm clocks buzzing, singing or shrieking at me do nothing to wake me up. In fact they make me fall into a deeper sleep. Alarms trigger a pavlovian response all of my own. My brain goes into fight and flight, short circuits, cancels itself out and turns into soup. I’d be the first to die in a war - the air raid siren would put me in a coma.

Share

Training for a peaceful death

I can remember very clearly the times that I have woken up with a clear head. I can count them on one hand. They were times that I had, for some reason, had a good night’s sleep after going to bed at a reasonable time. I felt ready for the day. If only I could recreate them. But I just can’t, after 30 odd years of training my body to sleep through anything; I once slept through an engine failure in turbulence on a plane after saying to my panicked dad, “stop panicking, we either live or die, I’d rather die sleeping than screaming” I closed my eyes and went to sleep. I woke up on the tarmac. The plane in tact. My dad shook for days, his nervous system went into overdrive if we so much as crossed a bridge with potholes in it. The number of cigarettes he smoked in response to my insensitivity probably took a few years off his life. 

Subscribe now

Feeding the machine

I am very aware, from all the wellness media that I consume, that I am a lesser person. Every day I tell myself, this will be the day when I get in my pyjamas, drink a cup of tea, put a sleep podcast on, close my eyes and fall asleep so that I can get 9 hours and wake up at 8am. Every night I end up watching one more episode of Real Housewives (until I complete the series), eating cheese and listening to podcasts about the world ending until 2am. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this life. The freelance life I mean, I am shit at the self imposed routine, I need a job that relies on me being there at 7am to or else there are serious consequences. I need pressure. I need to work within a capitalist framework where my time is dictated by someone else and even if I’m not being productive, somewhere the machine can feed on my freedom.

All or nothing

So when I told Anna, one of my closest friends, that I needed to get up at 6am from now on, have no screen time for 2 hours at least, do yoga, vocal exercises and journal in the morning before going out for a walk every day and write and produce my play she laughed at me. “That’s so you, Alfie. All or nothing. Why don’t you just start little by little.” Sigh. That’s so easy to say, but hard to keep up with. I’d rather just do everything until I burn out. It gives me an excuse to eat pizza at midnight and numb my feelings of inadequacy the next day with exhaustion. 

Midnight is for hotdogs

This Easter weekend, I found myself buying a hot dog at 11.30pm after forgetting to eat all day. I was writing a Substack, instead of my play. Good producer, bad writer.I had sat in my coat and shoes at the kitchen table all day, each time I got up to go I remembered that I needed to add a link somewhere or italicise something. When I finally went outside, I realised I didn’t have my coat on anymore. It was 9pm, I had to write something, anything. And I really had to leave the house. After scouring the house 5 times, up and down the stairs, turning it all over, looking in the fridge and the bin, I found my coat in the bathtub. Who knows why. At least I hadn’t flushed it down the loo. 

Share

Toxic listmaking

I have spent the last hour, since I spoke to Anna, writing potential routines. That wasn’t part of the plan. I suppose I have a slightly obsessive nature. I seem to have forgotten my rule: I don’t make lists. It’s my toxic vice. I can keep adding to them for hours and not get one thing done. But oh boy, it feels good to write them… it’s a wholesome, almost religious experience. I’m a list zealot. And a schedule sinner. A false believer.

Today’s routine (allegedly):

I’ll let you know what really happens later.

Subscribe now

The link to my work in progress date in London on July 16th is live. Click here to buy tickets: https://www.unrestrictedview.co.uk/dead-air/

Click here to see when and where I am performing: https://alfrunrose.com/dead-air/

Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alfrunrose/

Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alfrunrose/

Share

The last two weeks have been manic.

The good news is that I have a spot at one of the most renowned venues at the biggest theatre festival in the world this summer. I will be bringing my solo show, Dead Air, to Bunker 1 at The Pleasance Courtyard at Edinburgh Fringe Festival for 25 days between 30th July – 24th August. Yay!

Only one problem: I haven’t written the show.

Rewind, Let’s Talk About This

I have had an idea for a play for the last two years. The original premise was a comedy about grief based on my own experience of losing my beloved pabbi (dad), Gis von Ice.

The last show he saw me perform was as a burlesque act where he and my mum shared a table at the basement venue of the National Theatre in Iceland with two unwitting tourists. They must have been a bit surprised that my parents had come to see me jump up and down in a thong with blonde curtain tassels attached to it.

He said I belonged on the stage and that it was the best he’d ever seen me. He was known for his wry sense of humour and it wasn’t lost on him that this was a silly situation and could seem seedy to those who didn’t know us — but he was being genuine.

He’s never complimented me like that. He’s always told me his true opinion and there was always a sandwich, you know, the good and the bad. But this time, he just thought it was great.

Looking back, he had to leave early because he was so tired. He was always tired in the last few years. Weirdly, pabbi, who hated being the centre of attention or performing in any way, had done his own burlesque on national TV — a story for another time.

I thought it was all somehow a funny premise for a show about death and a father-daughter bond forged through burlesque.

Real Housewives of Procrastination

I had this idea and I have been sitting at a desk trying to write it at least since the end of last year.

As is so often the case, other things got in the way — in fact, anything else I could think of…
I started recording a podcast, The Romance Files (coming soon), I took on little writing and translation jobs, I went to the gym… a bit too much. And mainly I caught up on Real Housewives and knitted jumpers.

Hashtag mental health days.

A Pile of Unused Ideas

By the time April came around, my dream of taking the show to Edinburgh Fringe was passing me by.

With the deadline a week away I decided to apply anyway — and only to two of the biggest and most sought-after venues: The Underbelly and The Pleasance, knowing that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

I would book some work-in-progress venues over the next year… probably, and see how it went.
Maybe next year. Or maybe I would just put this in my pile of ideas.

Let’s Do It

On the Monday (deadline Wednesday), I emailed the venues to ask if there was any chance I would be getting an offer — I wanted to be prepared with everything needed in the application form, mainly the art.

To my surprise, on the Wednesday, at 3:30pm, I got an email from The Pleasance offering me a place — a 46-seater venue in a morning slot.
They said they had to move quickly.

I spent the evening talking it through with friends:

“You put it out there and the universe is answering, Alf!”
“It’s a shit time.”
“How will you pay for it?”
“Are you really ready for the pressure of it all?”

I emailed back at 7pm: “Let’s do it.”

Subscribe now

How I Wrote My Application

In the application, they ask you to give them a short summary of the play, a script, or a video.
I sent a document that was more like a treatment and a marketing plan.

In the Google Doc that I shared with the venues was:

• A logline

• A mock-up for the poster design (I made one with ChatGPT)

• A synopsis

• An extract from the play

• A character breakdown

• Themes and underlying questions

• A press release

• A social media plan

I like to work on Google Docs as it is shareable, and it keeps the version history.
Most importantly for me: a CONTENTS TABLE so that you, and the person reading, can navigate.

Screenshots of my Google Docs

Room for Change

Not all of this will make it into the show. For example, when it came to submitting the blurbs for the programme, I didn’t want to define whether the death was supposed to have been an accident or natural, and changed the wording to be a bit more obscure and give me flexibility to write whatever I want.

The 100-word blurb that will be published:

Since Alfie’s dad died, he’s visited everyone’s dreams but hers. Rude. Desperate to talk to him, she turns to AiR, an AI chatbot designed to reconnect the living with the lost. What starts as a simple conversation between daddy and his little princess spirals into chaos. Each chat uncovers more about her dad’s life — and death — than she ever bargained for. Was his death suspicious or is it just a glitch in the machine? A heartfelt and darkly funny dive into grief, technology, and the consequences of talking to ghosts.

Alfie, Are You Okay?

Why didn’t you write the show and then apply? Like a sane person?, I hear you cry.

Okay! Okay! Stop screaming at me! So I would have liked to have had the show written by now. It would be better, and I highly recommend doing it that way, if you can.

It is well known that most people, especially comedians, apply to the Fringe without knowing exactly what their show will be — and I felt that I had a strong enough idea that I could sell it.

From a producer’s point of view, they want to be able to visualise the concept clearly and know that you know what you are doing and are realistic about your capabilities.
I don’t have much money, so I pitched it with hardly any tech and had a few strong marketing ideas. (More on that later.)

What can I say, I need an immovable deadline and a mild sense of panic.

I Love to Talk

I have spent two years conceptualising the show.
I first pitched it to a teacher that I had at university in a one-on-one session that was about something else. He encouraged me and told me it was a great idea.

I have since been talking about it to friends and family. Along the way, I went to hear the successful Icelandic writer, Andri Snær, talk about his process — which is that he will tell people his idea at any opportunity, talking through it and changing it over time, honing it that way.

Writing isn’t a linear process and it is not only committing pen to paper — it is thinking.
I have realised that I am a talker. I like to talk, and that is how I connect to my intentions.

There are a lot of "how to write" books out there, and they are helpful, but there is no writer or creative that doesn’t have community.
In any case, this is where I’m at.

Things I have done to hone my idea:

• Talk to anyone who’ll listen

• Bullet point, journal in a notepad

• Create a document called “junk pages” where I write all sorts of bullshit

• Read solo shows by other people

• Read around the subject

• Watch documentaries

• Take an online workshop at Theatre 503 with writer Brad Birch

• Soundboarded ideas with ChatGPT (don’t come at me — my show is about AI and we’ll go into this another time)

Game Plan

My take on it: I gave myself an immovable deadline and I work well under pressure.
Luckily, I had already produced a show that I took to Edinburgh in 2015, so I knew what needed to be done.
I had also already made a document for the application, which gave me a game plan.

Applications can be annoying and long-winded, but they are also useful because they are an opportunity to think about your audience.

What are you selling? What do you want the outcome to be? How are you interesting?

Crashing Back Down to Earth

When they accepted my application, on the day of the deadline, I had two hours to accept their terms.
I didn’t see the email.

The next day they withdrew the offer, and I crashed back down to reality.
Oh well, it wasn’t meant to be.

I sent a semi-polite email saying that I was disappointed but understood and would leap at the opportunity if something else came up.

Two hours later, it did.
Someone had cancelled — would I like a slightly bigger venue with the same terms? Yes.

Then I waited, and waited for them to tell me what to do… but they were obviously so busy that they ended up sending an email on Friday at 4pm stating that I had to get everything to them by 5:30pm.
Fuck. Again.

I didn’t see it til 8pm. And everyone was out of the office.

Subscribe now

A Banana and a Vision

I only had this AI-generated mock-up of the poster and I really, really wanted a photo.
So I held my nerve and called my talented friend Alda Valentína Rós, who agreed to do an impromptu photo shoot for my poster.

I got to her studio with a huge bag of props that I had bought from Tiger on the way. A plastic tiara, a wand, a couple of easter chicks, a box of origami paper, two sets of PJs, a nightgown, a lot of eyeliner and three meters of black tulle that I planned to use as a mourning shroud. For an hour’s photo shoot. Let’s just say I had to kill a lot of darlings. Explode them all at once. Boom boom boom. Make room.

Alda indulged my every idea and I tried to speed up the process by showing her the prototype poster - “why the banana?” Alda asked a legitimate question. “I was worried it wouldn’t read funny and everyone knows bananas are funny.” Sometimes you say things out loud and you realise how ridiculous it sounds but you can’t quite let go… just incase there’s something in it. I reasoned that it might be a talking point.

It wasn’t the easiest premise I could have asked for — and in retrospect maybe I should have just had a zany picture of my face.
We live and learn.

Nevertheless, Alda is a consummate pro and went along with my fantasy.
And I approached it like I do all collaborative work: well prepared, but ready to be flexible and make quick decisions.

After a good half an hour of me holding a banana in one hand, the phone with a small green light in the other, and draping a nightgown over the plastic tiara on my head, we lost the banana and the nightgown. Boom boom banana.

Alda went home and worked the images for me, elongating my pinky in Photoshop to give a nod to AI — which I didn’t notice until three days later and loved! Honestly even if I hadn’t I’ve come to understand that controlling every element of a project is toxic. Collaboration requires you to trust other artists’ instincts as well as your own.
That was all on a Sunday.

At this point I already feel like I’ve won the friend lottery and am aware that I am super lucky to have such loving people around me who are prepared to take the leap into the unknown and go with the rapid crazy flow that is like a burst pipe leaking bananas from my brain.

My Prototype Made with ChatGPT

Photo by Alda Valentína Rós

My Fate

Monday morning came around and I called seven times before I got through to The Pleasance office.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself how crazy busy they must be.

"Hi, I’m Alfrun, I know you’re crazy busy but I was just wondering — is my application still going through? I didn’t want to make the payment in case I lost my spot again."

"Hi Alfrun, yes, the Fringe are waiting for it."

YES! Thank fuck I don’t have to tell my mum she has wasted her money booking flights to Edinburgh in August.
Relief. Luck. Blind faith.

This has to work.

Standby…

Standby for the next installment of How (Not) To Produce and Write a Play, Part 2:
Recycling Ideas, AI and Themes.

Thanks for reading my first long-form post! Let me know what else you want to know by leaving a comment.

Website: www.alfrunrose.com
Instagram @alfrunrose

Subscribe now

By becoming a paid subscriber you are supporting the show and those who work on it.

Share Alfie_Writes’s Substack

By sharing my work you are supporting my career.

Thank you!

Share

Leave a comment