Tag: Edinburgh

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A Conversation With My Father at Northern Stage at St Stephen’s

I AM PROPERLY STUPIDLY EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE A 10 DAY RUN OF A Conversation With… IN EDINBURGH THIS AUGUST AS PART OF THE NORTHERN STAGE AT ST. STEPHEN’S  PROGRAMME. AAAAAAAH.

Times will be 8.05pm each night, at a 65minute run time. You can book tickets RIGHT NOW on the Northern Stage site. The rest of the programme is also really properly good (Alex Kelly of Third Angel who I made this show with has a brilliant solo show IN A VAN), and there’s a multi-buy deal on tickets, so do check that out. So. Much. Good. Stuff.

Otherwise, here’s a shiny trailer wot my brother made to mark the occasion. WOO YEAH!

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At Home

my tent
August 2004

The Tl;dr version of this post is this link. But please do just read it.

Edinburgh is a fucking beautiful place. Despite my inner-midlander that wept at the sight of every incline, I felt remarkably at home there.

Feeling at home is something it’s been hard to cultivate since turning 18, really. I’ve lived in 14 different houses in the 8 years since I made my first home away from home. In a tent. In the Ardeche region of France. It became home when I tied several old crates together on their side and built a makeshift bookcase. That and the Marmite my mum sent in shoebox-wrapped packages.

My books used to mean home for me, but my relationship to my books has changed since they became part of my living (PhD), and now the familiar wallpaper of my desktop feels like home. The small idiosyncrasies I’ve set up as short cuts, the things I keep on each ‘space’, right hand top for emails, bottom right for calendar, top left for internet, bottom left the exotic realms of ‘miscellaneous’.

Home is always when me, my brother and our mum find ourselves together. Home is Christmas-time jokes about stockings that still appear (but this time before we get up, not after we go to bed, which tends to be via the local pub these xmas eves). Home is the slightly stilted conversation of more extended family trying not to bring up global warming or gender equality in our company.

Home has also been mashed potato and toad-in-the-hole. The smell of Jean Paul-Gautier on someone’s neck. Smokey hair. The very slightly different texture of a tattoo shaped like a star.

Home is Big Skies. Lincolnshire sausages. And horizons that go on forever.

Edinburgh is a fucking beautiful place. I felt remarkably at home there. Despite the hills.

And that, of course, has a lot to do with the people. The wonderful amazing constantly confounding people that make up my small corner of the theatre industry. But it also has a lot to do with a place. A single place that while I was there was like an oasis. The Forest Cafe. Continue reading At Home