Author: ThirdCat

Time passes and the things that don’t get done keep not getting done. I did want to leave myself some notes about this year’s Adelaide Fringe experience, but as it fades further into the past the things I wanted to remember also fade. But I was just messing around in my (also neglected) substack account and found a draft that has definitely passed its time for being a newsletter update, but will do just nicely here.

So here it is, a quick reminder of something else I learnt from this year’s Adelaide Fringe:

👀 For the last few years, Adrian and I have been discussing my approach to ticket sales. My aim has always been to sell out the season. He has long maintained that at a certain point of your career, setting up a season to sell out is not a good business decision. His argument is that at this stage, it limits the potential growth of my audience. That there’s no opportunity for people to make last minute decisions or for word of mouth to do its thing.

💼 Let’s face it, he clearly has a better brain for business than I do. And it seemed that this season while I was wanting to put on all six shows (a creative, not a business decision) it would be a good opportunity to experiment with added capacity.

🎯 Long story short: he isn’t wrong. Just over half the nights have been sold out, and they’ve nearly all been nearly sold out. But not all tickets sold. However, even without selling out, I’ve sold more tickets this year than any other year. And I do think it’s been a good chance to grow my audience beyond my lovely friends (I love my friends, and I’m deeply grateful that so many have been so supportive across so many years and so many bad jokes).

🎲 It does feel somewhat disconcerting to not sell out every night, but it’s also kind of freeing as the release of tightly held boundaries can often be. I’ve learnt a lot from this fringe season.

I told myself I’d go to the 7.15 gym class, but then I couldn’t wake up at 6, at 6.15 and at 6.30 I made a deal with myself. I told myself that I could go to the 9.15 class which would give me time to get an hour’s writing done before my class.

This, I told myself, would actually set me up for a better writing day. With an hour’s thinking done before I got to class my thoughts would be percolating even as I exercised. A double win.

I have been able to get myself to my desk, but I haven’t been able to settle into my writing task. And as I sat, I suddenly understood something about myself. I thought: I’ve forgotten how to write. By which I meant that I’ve forgotten how to go through the actual physical process of doing the writing.

Then I realised something even more sobering: I haven’t actually taught myself to write. I’ve done a quick look back on the things I’ve finished, a very quick assessment: two novels, six shows, three Christmas letters, some essays, a few newsletters, countless blog posts. And what I see is an utterly scrappy process, and what I remember is my mind constantly berating itself for not doing better, for not having done better, for never truly being in the flow, feeling the words unfold.

As I type that thought, I realise it isn’t strictly true. That there have been moments when I have been in the flow, and those moments were primarily writing blog posts, short intense pieces that felt enormously satisfying in their execution.

The upshot of all this–and why I’m writing this as a blog post now–is that I feel like I have finally arrived at a certain moment I’ve been building to for about eighteen months. After all of the sifting and sorting through thoughts (some written on scraps of paper, some in dropbox folders, some rolling around in my mind); after all of the planning (physical folders with labels; virtual folders with labels; journals; notebooks); after all of the projecting (what if I do this, what happens if I do that); after all of this, I feel an emotional, physical and creative certainty. It is time to sit and write. I finally have a picture of myself in my head, sitting here, leaving here but always returning here to get things written.

And this is probably the only thing I’ve learn about how to write. That sooner or later (apparently later, much, much later in my case) there will be nothing left to do but to sit with a pen, a keyboard, a self-made pad of stapled paper, a document open on the screen, and a bunch of thoughts which require nothing more than to be written one by one, word by word, page by page. Find a thought, start from there and just keep going.

The Adelaide Fringe has kind of started, but not officially, I’m not exactly sure what this preview week is about. But the city has definitely started talking about it. Lovely Deb Tribe invited me on to her show this morning to talk about my season. I really love her show, she has the same kind of warmth that makes me enjoy listening to Zan Rowe so much. Like they really do want you to have a good day.

I was all primed to go and sitting with my phone ready to make sure I could answer as soon as the producer rang. I had the radio on, but I was all ready to turn it off as soon as the phone rang. But as the time approached, I could tell it wasn’t me coming up next. Gah! I didn’t read the confirmation text properly, and I just assumed it said 6.45 because the show is filled up with so many regular segments like gardening. But it actually said 7.45. So I was up way ahead of time.

It wasn’t actually all that hard to wake up. I mean, I’d been awake most of the night anyway, worrying about my superannuation. Which is obviously an excellent use of sleeping time. But I did feel bad because I asked Adrian to set an alarm as insurance.

Anyway, the interview went really well, Deb is always super prepared and asks interesting questions. And at the end, there was a truly beautiful moment when someone texted in to say that I had helped her with her husband’s funeral and how well the funeral went. Sometimes, I just love living in this big-town city.

Then, because I was up, I made it to a gym class and now I will spend the rest of the day worrying about which show I should be working on. I might write more about that tomorrow.

Talk soon!

Throwback to when I was teaching myself free motion stitching so that I could stitch the text of Pearls onto my unstitched wedding dress.

“What is happening?”

I say this about one thousand times every day. Adrian says it’s like living with a toddler 🤣. Actually it’s my way of getting myself to stop for a minute and possibly calm the chatter in my brain and reorient myself. (Also, I do like to know what people are up to, and it’s not my fault that my hearing is better than anyone else’s in this house and that I can usually hear most, but not all, of their conversations and if I have missed a crucial part then why wouldn’t I come into the room and ask, ‘What’s happening?’).

When I was doing the test stitching, I thought I would use some of these dodgy test pieces as gifts for my family. I thought they would be great in frames and be a cool family joke. However, when I showed it to my youngest son he said, ‘That looks like something the swot team would find on the wall when they broke into the main suspect’s house.’

So I just left the test pieces in my box of test pieces.

But geez.

What actually is happening? For my own context, when I’m looking back over these posts and re-reading them, today is the day after POTUS told the world that it would be okay if he built a golf course in Gaza. That’s not exactly what he said, but what he actually said is so hideous I can’t bring myself to type it out.

What is happening? And how long until we get to swipe right and tell ourselves, ‘All good.’? I know that we have to push back, but it is almost impossible to know what to do and how to act.

At the moment, I’m rehearsing ready for my upcoming Adelaide Fringe season, and I must admit that whenever I am rehearsing or going over lines I’m very often overcome by the questions: ‘What’s the point? There’s urgent work to be done. How is this helping?’

Something has been keeping me going. Partly the fear of being on stage and not knowing my lines, that’s definitely a motivating factor. But last night it kind of clicked to me. There is purpose in rehearsing.

One thing I think we need more of, and urgently, is less combative conversation. To talk to and with each other. To sit quietly, to listen, to let people explain themselves to us, and to explain ourselves to them.

And I guess this one way I can be part of that. By creating one more place for gentle conversations and connections. I mean, in the scheme of things it isn’t much and it isn’t enough. But it’s better than the alternative which is scrolling the news trying to understand what is happening. I can’t understand it, but I won’t accept it either.

Here is a photo of me at a time when I was still pretty unhappy, but not entirely unhappy in this moment.

I can’t remember the exact name of the place where we were staying, but it was a kind of desert glamping which I think would have been somewhere between Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

I had taken along a bienenstich cake, or as we call them ‘bee sting’ cakes. I hadn’t realised that it was yeast cake, nor had I realised just how many components it had. But I was extremely proud of the result. Haven’t made one since.

Some expats who live in Abu Dhabi really get into the desert camping, but I never did. I mean, I spent my whole childhood camping and I was mostly in the car reading and willing the time to pass. But I did love the desert sunsets. They were so gentle and peaceful and created such evocative colours.

I remember being not unhappy because I had a friend who had invited me to go away; because I’d made a beienstich cake; and because the sunset reminded me that even the harshest of days have gentle moments.

As for the present day, I spent this morning working my way through some admin tasks, then the mid-morning until the afternoon running two shows. It’s only three weeks now until I open with Pearls and Stitches so I’ll be running shows every day from now until the end of March.

After I’d finished rehearsing I spent ages tidying up after myself. I feel like I’m a tidy person, but the evidence suggests otherwise. There are always piles of clothes in my bedroom just for starters. At this stage of your life, do you try to change yourself, or do you just accept this is what you’ve got to work with and go from there?

Every morning, I take a tomato out of the fridge and put it either on the kitchen bench or the table on the deck. I do this because one of the real joys of a summer garden is the tomatoes. And one of the real joys of a tomato harvest is tomato on toast for breakfast. And everyone knows that tomatoes are at their most flavourful when eaten at room temperature. So I take my tomato out of the fridge and put it in the morning sun to warm it.

Invariably someone will pick up the tomato and put it back in the fridge, or into a shaded part of the kitchen bench. I’m not sure why this happens–we aren’t an especially tidy kind of people in this house and you could easily go back to a coffee cup you put down somewhere and come back three days later to find it there. I guess that isn’t strictly true. I’m not an especially tidy person, but there are tidy people in this house, and they’re the people who move my tomato.

Anyway, I’ve made my feelings known and no one will be moving my tomato again.

(Of course on the other hand, one of the real disappointments of summer is when the tomatoes don’t flourish and all summer you look at the spindly plants that are refusing to give you anything more than the odd speckly fruit).

The tomatoes are growing so well because we put in some raised garden wicking beds that are filled with all the good stuff. However raised garden wicking beds that are filled with all the good stuff do have limitations for some things. Such as the cosmos. Watching the cosmos grow, I have really been looking forward to their flowering. But all they are is enormous foliage with very few blooms. The lettuce bolted almost as soon as it had leaves. And one of the spinach plants has grown so enormous that the leaves look like the ears of elephants and are overshadowing everything else.

But the tomatoes. The tomatoes are amazing.

The cosmos we do have are gorgeous. I thought I’d planted white, so these were a bit of a surprise, but a lovely one.