Edinburgh news and notes on small joys
Gone to the Dogs goes to the Fringe - plus keeping track of the day to day
Greetings Ornaments fans,
If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome to the club. This newsletter is where I post the latest updates from my strange cabaret folk-pop world, and also share some stories from behind the scenes - the moments we don’t tend to see so much on the socials: moments of reluctance, doubt, and occasionally just outright failure. My own path to making stuff and performing has taken a long time and been anything but straightforward, so I try to use this little corner as a space to explore the ins and outs of what prevents us pushing forward with what we love.
News! Sound the trumpets!
First things first - two exciting announcements to share with you.
Item the First: Gone to the Dogs is going to Edinburgh!
I’m so thrilled to tell you that Gone to the Dogs, my strange show about an equally strange land, is going to be at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
Aug 2-27 at Gilded Balloon - the Wine Bar (hilarious to those who know me)
Tickets will be on sale on the EdFringe website from 11 May. Until then, I’d love if you’d give the show a follow either on Twitter or Instagram (both, if you’re feeling flash). I’ve set Britannia up with her own socials and may god forgive me.
Like most beautiful projects that you pour your heart into and dream the biggest dreams for before they can even walk, I have been impatient from the start for my errant and maniacally funereal Brit to go on to greater things. After doing the first few shows around this time last year, I felt like I should be able to go straight to Edinburgh - even though I almost certainly wasn’t ready. I worried that the idea would stagnate if left for another summer, and this thing I had been building with so much love and blind faith throughout lockdown would go to waste if it didn’t happen right then.
As it turns out, a year with an actual coronation where our incumbent sovereign suggests we swear an oath of allegiance and intone a collective chant for his eternal life (May the King live Forever!) couldn’t be a more perfect backdrop for a show about a personified England losing her marbles as she replays the glories of a nostalgic past.
2023, you have delivered. Let this unplanned but fortuitous delay stand as testament to all those who waver to hold your nerve, follow your nose, and trust that things happen in the time they are supposed to.
Gone to the Dogs at Gilded Balloon Aug 2-27 - read about the show here
The Edinburgh run is being produced by Thistle & Rose Arts, a fantastic new production company who are taking a clutch of brilliant shows up to the Festival this year. See the full programme here and chuck a few coins in the fundraiser if you’re able.
Item the Second: Bad Attitudes at Calm Down Dear Festival
I’m really thrilled to be part of the - peerlessly named - Calm Down Dear festival at Camden People’s Theatre in London next month.
The festival happens across May and June and this year is the 10th anniversary, curated by innovator-extraordinaires RashDash Theatre.
I’ll be bringing a very very early scratch version of my next project Bad Attitudes to their Big Bang scratch night on Monday 5 June.
This is the seed of what I hope will become my next show, inspired by my research last year into Emma Hamilton and her performance art depictions of Greek myth (the eponymous ‘attitudes’). It’s about lots of things - women as art objects, the notion of public vs private audiences, and what we think we’re owed by someone we find desirable.
At the moment, however, it’s just a short 20 minute piece of assorted bits and pieces as I try out ways to play with all the ideas I’ve been mulling over for 12 months. It’s a chance to see a show before it becomes a Thing, properly - to see it in its messy, discombobulated initial stages. Most likely it will be a chance to see me make a prat of myself, as it’s the first time I’m trying to articulate any of this onstage.
So come along! What’s not to like about a bit of joyous calamity?
Get tickets here for the Big Bang scratch night at Camden People’s Theatre.
announcements finit.
Making progress, keeping track
This week I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s excellent anti-productivity manual Four Thousand Weeks. Well, it’s not anti-productivity per se, more an indictment of the endless productivity hacks and self-help guides that promise to deliver the perfect formula to your day so that you can finally get everything done. In it, he takes a sobering unapologetic view of the fact that the average human gets about 4000 weeks to do all their human-ing in - and that’s your lot. Time, in other words, is finite. There is no magic trick to achieving everything you want to. You can’t - so you may as well make your peace with it and embrace your imperfect productive-but-only-up-to-a-point life.
It’s a strangely hopeful book, given that it is in essence one big fat NO to all your plans for infinite self-improvement, with a side helping of inevitable mortality. I would recommend it to anyone feeling swamped - and I would especially recommend it to those of you who are still convinced that you CAN to all of that to-do list (and then some) if you just make the right tweaks to your schedule.
If the stars align just for one week. If you just get a few days to yourself. You can’t. Stop beating yourself up for it.
However, as much as I enjoyed it, reading it I realised how much of this thinking I have already relinquished. I’d like to take credit for this enlightenment, but - as I wrote in the very first episode of this newsletter - embracing the more contemplative life in the slow lane was largely thrust upon me when I got sick last year and all my plans fell through. Doing less became de rigeur. And just like that, I became Buddha.
So I read much of Burkeman’s book not with a sense of inspiration but rather the sage knowing of one who used to live very much in the hope of a productivity rapture, but has since laid off the kool aid and come to terms with the fact that this mortal life is it, baby.
How shall I love my life? Let me count the ways
But what I did realise is that it is not just about what we do (or don’t) and accepting that it will fall short of everything we want to do. For me, in this last year I’ve come to appreciate how much I need to record the things I am doing in a meaningful way.
All in all, I found it relatively easy, once my hand was forced, to step back a little. To take my foot off the pedal, be less conspicuous and more mindful of the world around me. To participate only to the degree that I had energy for it, to enjoy things for their own sake rather than the end result they might produce, and to stop defining progress solely by achievements.
But what I did find myself looking for was a way to meaningfully record this new expansive sense of time. Dialling down the tyranny of the To-Do list, allowing things to take longer and not necessarily be in pursuit of a definite goal, meant there was more space in my life where before there had been either frenetic action or guilt about not enough frenetic action. I didn’t find it hard to enjoy a more curious less goal-oriented engagement with the world, but I did find it hard to remember what I did each week.
If I was focused on doing less, and not defining myself exclusively by what I did, how could I reliably keep a record of the passing time, day to day?
I wanted a way to record all the aspects of the life that surrounded me - a life of sometimes things that could be quantified by work (a piece of work, a gig, a pitch, a niggling bit of admin) and also leisure (a trip to the cinema, a swim, a museum - I am a nerd - a book) - but which also was made up of intangible stuff that was harder to define (help from friends, a sense of peace, excitement for new research topics, a podcast I enjoyed).
Journalling is good but can be daunting day to day, especially when you start to feel the weight of expectation (if only from yourself) that it must carry all the things that have happened, and all the emotions you have felt, and all the things you are thankful for, and all the little moments that don’t quite fit in any grand account of What Happened Last Week, but which made you grateful to stop and take notice.
I do keep a journal, but it’s expansive, inconsistent, tangential, both lofty and petty, and frankly I pity my future biographers (I’m sure there’ll be several) having to trawl through it to work out what happened when.
I realised, in unshackling my life from constant interaction and achievement, how much I needed a quick, reliable and comprehensive way to record a little version of the day in its entirety. Something that was not paragraphs and inner monologues; but something that wasn’t bullet lists and only tangible things either.
The rule of three
This is what I did instead. In a beautiful twist of fate that a novelist would probably find a bit too trite, I began doing it in a diary that I had bought exclusively to keep track of work projects. Oh life, you symbolic sentimentalist.
The diary was one of those small pocket ones. It only had three lines per day. When the work fell through or dried up, I had little use for it. What kind of maniac only needs 3 lines in a day?
But I do not believe in throwing stationery away (not a maniac) - instead, this was the perfect opportunity to create a short-form daily record. One that meant something to me, specifically. This is what I did:
on the first line I wrote one thing I got done that day. Sometimes this was a big thing (pitch! gig! cracked another sequence of the show! finished a book! had a new idea!) - but often it was not (laundry. answered emails. did a food shop finally). this was immensely helpful for the days when everything was hard, and the smallest thing was an achievement.
on the second line I wrote something I was grateful for. I’m grateful for a huge amount in my life but I find gratitude journals on their own entirely nauseating - it starts to feel like the Positivity Police slapping you with a Could Be Worse! order anytime you dare to say you’re struggling a bit. One line a day I can cope with, however.
on the last line I wrote something that brought me joy that day. This was the most important of all the three.
Joyrider
Last time I wrote about the daily grind of admin and how success often lies in the everyday-ness of the doing, not the finished nature of the having-got-it-done. I possibly painted quite a grumpy picture of day to day existence. But I also mentioned moments of joy - and lots of them.
What I found when I started keeping my little three-track diary last year is that, irrespective of what was going on in the rest of the day - a failed application, unanswered emails, low or no energy, a cancellation, a difficult conversation, frustrated plans - there was always at least one thing I could write in the last line. On days that were clouded by difficult emotions - uncertainty, shame, confusion - which could certainly not go down as a ‘good’ day in the personal annals, there was still something bright that slipped through. Perhaps not enough to redeem the day as ‘not that bad’ - but always worth recording.
The problem wasn’t a lack of joy in my life, it was having nowhere to put it.
What one line a day gave me was a way to record the small transcendent moments without making it a choice between ‘good’ day and ‘bad’ day. Because the bad days exist, and pretending they don’t, or trying to cancel them out with positive thoughts or focusing on happy moments, can do us a disservice - especially for those who are living more in struggle than not.
Spring clean
At the end of last year, I wrote up some of the best joys on a sheet of A3. I was having my usual existential crisis of thinking I had achieved less than half of what I set out to that year (yes, old habits die hard). In that moment, I couldn’t remember ANYTHING good that had happened that year. Life was TERRIBLE. I was a FAILURE. I couldn’t think of a SINGLE THING I enjoyed that year.
Enter the little diary.
It was like a flick book of small stupid things that made me happy. Much more than the ‘What I did’ line, the ‘Joy’ one gave me an immediate kaleidoscopic sense of how richly I had enjoyed the year in so many ways, and all the experiences I had had.
I wrote out some of the best ones, and there were so many they filled a whole sheet of A3, even in tiny writing. I marvelled - that I was so adept at forgetting so many good things; and that I was quite so obsessed with ham and cheese toasties.
Keeping this little diary has now become a standard part of my day, and it’s one that’s much more pleasurable than the 3 minute plank I also commit to but often ‘forget’.
We’ve just turned the page into another month and this year is clattering on with terrifying speed. I’m behind, again - despite my best attempts to be both kind and realistic with myself in my ambitions.
But I’ve been able to flick back through the last 30 days and see that, for all I feel behind and flustered, frustrated that I’ve spent the bank holiday weekend in bed with a cold, guilty that I still haven’t set up my new website, nervous about Edinburgh and annoyed I got less recording done than I planned this month, April has actually been jam packed with good things.
April joys
Some of the things that made me happy this month:
Excellent food made by friends
Good conversations
Playing with my cat
Yoga stretching (nothing like a good hip flex)
Driving through the Peak District in my way to a meeting - the light and the colours are beautiful this time of year
Messing around with new sounds on my synth (lose hours to this)
Hot bath (several)
Ridiculous songs made up impromptu (one about a pug I am living with; the other about sending a song to Ken Bruce on Radio 2)
Playing piano for no reason other than its soothing - finding tunes, enjoying the sound of the notes. Not to get better, not to practise existing songs, not to record something for posterity or build something for my ‘ouevre’ - just for the sake of doing it. Enjoying the skills you already have - not for self-development, just for yourself.
quesadilla (I decided to shake up the ham-cheese toastie regime. though this is arguably a Mexican variation)
Recording new ideas with vocal harmonies (this is happiness++++ for me)
booking onto a History festival last minute online to learn about new things just for the hell of it (like I say, nerd)
These things might seem commonplace or dull or entirely different to how you would choose to quantify your own joy. But they help me anchor a sense of who I am and how I like to spend my time when achievement isn’t involved - and they give a much fuller sense of what the last month consisted of than the usual roll call of ‘did - should have done - forgot to do - still haven’t done’.
And when I stagger to the end of the year, and inevitably start to descend into my customary spiral of self-flagellation, and feel I have achieved NOTHING, and begin to lament how there is NOTHING in my life, I know I can pull out the little diary and have an instant record of how much there is, and how much has happened, and all the things which in fact are well worth making a note of.
What are your daily joys? How do you keep track of the day to day? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading. Give me a follow me on Insta or Twitter - and let me know if you’re coming to a show!
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