Edinburgh Fringe Festival (16 years later)

I was scrolling through photographs earlier today and I came across this:

If I went through the archives there’s possibly a copy of it back at the time it was taken. Although there’s every chance the image has long been gobbled up by the domain transfers and the pixabucket or whatever it was I was using to host photos (it wasn’t flickr because for some reason that was blocked in the UAE at the time, along with skype).

It is taken outside the venue where I performed my show when I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009. My first solo show, had never even done more than a ten-minute spot before, and I went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with it.

WHAT WAS I THINKING.

Well, 2009 was the year after the year when a decade of experiences happened to me in the space of eighteen months and then we moved to Abu Dhabi. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was barely clinging on. So I guess I wasn’t thinking, eh?

In many ways, this show did my head in and when we left I was pretty convinced I’d never be performing again.

I had one reviewer who came, fell asleep, then gave it two and half stars, or maybe it was two stars and I’m just talking myself up 🤣. But mostly, it did my head in, because I left utterly and completely consumed by a belief that I didn’t belong in that world. I knew stand-up wasn’t for me. By then I’d been on enough line-ups and backstage with enough people who said they were nervous, who said they had no self-confidence and yet … out they went and looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. I had no theatre training so it didn’t occur to me that there was any kind of performance that would work for me.

At this stage the only person I’d seen who was doing what I could see myself doing was TJ Dawe. But he was a trained actor, and I was really wary of stepping into that world.

I still couldn’t see anyone doing the kind of performance that I wanted to do, which wasn’t standup and wasn’t acting. Edinburgh also made me think that the fringe circuit isn’t just brutal…it’s a blood sport. I just couldn’t see how someone who was quiet and wrote quiet shows could possibly find their way through it all.

Looking at that show now from the distance of sixteen years, I can, however, see that I was working my way towards the work I would be able to do. This show in Edinburgh was was on the way to where I wanted to be. A draft. A draft that probably shouldn’t have been shared publicly, but that’s what you get at an open access festival I guess. So this show is full of my early stand-up work, but is also clearly the foundation script for what would become An Evening With the Vegetarian Librarian.

It has taken me a long, long time to find my way through to the writing I want to write and the performing I want to perform. I mean, so many of my friends are talking about their plans for retirement (not immediately but coming up), where I’m thinking, ‘But I’ve only just worked out what I’m supposed to be doing!’

But Edinburgh wasn’t only about the performing and the show and what it taught me about being an artist. It was hard and it did my head in, but as part of my parenting life, this moment here is one of the absolute favourite times of my life. It was magic.

Saturday Late Afternoon

I went for a walk on the beach yesterday evening. It was a baking hot day and I had thought that it be one of those beautiful calm evenings where you just want to somehow breathe it all in.

By 6pm, I had run three of my shows, and I was drawn to take a walk to help with the solidifying and memorising of it all. Usually at this time of the year, I’m refining a script and evening walks along the beach are an essential part of the process.

It was, however, quite blustery, although it doesn’t look like that in the photo. But you can tell it was a little blustery because there aren’t many people on the beach.

And I didn’t get the photo of the sunset I was thinking about.

But I’ve seen some of the photos from this evening, and the sky is red, because of the smoke from the bushfires in Victoria.

I was surprised to see a group of three young people getting themselves packed back into their car after their swim, and one of them had a large packet of burger rings that he was sharing with his friends. My assumption would be that he has inherited a love of Burger Rings from one of his parents, because would a young person spontaneously select Burger Rings from the whole range of chips and chips-adjacent choices?

Summer tomatoes eaten at room temperature please

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.

Like Winnie-the-Pooh says about eating honey*

There’s a little moment in writing that falls in the space between the gathering of ideas (and the subsequent brain dump of those ideas), and the start of the actual writing. In that space, I always feel like I’m in complete control of both the process and the project. It’s like the say in the classics

I know exactly what I want to say … all I have to do is write it.

I think it’s lucky that I do have this little space where I believe all this. If I truly remembered how hard that next stage is–the stage where I have to start forming the thoughts and ideas into coherent sentences–then nothing would ever get started.

*“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”

Blackwork Embroidery

I’m enrolled in the Royal School of Needlework certificate of embroidery, mostly because I wanted to get more into their teachings on blackwork embroidery. I started with the self-paced course, which I finished during my long, slow recovery from my first bout of covid in 2022. I stitched the puffin.

I loved the intricacy and detail of it, but also its order and symmetry (that’s what I love about knitting too). For someone who doesn’t excel at maths, I have a deep love for counting (here’s a whole lot more maths than I could ever make sense of). But I was especially drawn to the shaded techniques the Royal School of Needlework have been developing and promoting. I did a bit of reading and researching, but I felt like it was something I needed to be taught rather than something I would be able to instinctively learn.

As is my way, I got a bit too drawn into the idea of mastering it, to the extent that this time last year I was enrolled in the certificate of visual arts at the Adelaide Central School of Art.

I’ve been looking around for some inspiration and ideas from previous or current students, especially the ones working on the blackwork unit. It’s brought home to me, how much richer the internet was in the days of blogging, especially now that instagram has evolved into whatever instagram is these days. There are some posts on instagram and on pinterest, but I’m finding instagram especially hard to search and filter these days (why, why, why did instagram have to take away the ‘most recent’ tab from the searches). Anyway, no use complaining about what isn’t, because instagram isn’t there to help us find beautiful things, it’s there to help people sell stuff to us.

If you’ve come to this while you were looking for blackwork embroidery, here’s some links to some of the instagram accounts and other more in-depth blog posts I’ve found.

Given that she quite literally wrote the book on it, it isn’t surprising that Jen Goodwin probably has the most to look at it in both quantity and quality. Her instagram feed is gorgeous and her shop is one of the few places to sell shaded blackwork kits.

Christina MacDonald (@stinamacdo) has many beautiful examples of blackwork on her insta feed

Alex at Elara Embroidery has so far finished the crewelwork module, and the blackwork module with good overview posts at different stages.

I can’t work out what this person’s name is, but she finished the module in 2018 and has a good number of update posts on her blog.

It’s an old blog, but here’s someone getting started on teaching themselves shaded blackwork techniques.

The String or Nothing blog has a bunch of posts and resources on blackwork all linked on this comprehensive page. It’s not dedicated to shaded blackwork which is my main fixation at the moment, but if you’re getting started on blackwork, you’ll definitely find something here.

I’ll add more as I come across them.

November Can be Hot

The first truly hot day of the year. By which I mean it’s a hot day that followed another hot day so cumulatively it feels like summer. I’ve got the Christmas lights on now, and I sat up late last night, lying on the couch looking at them reflecting off the windows and the glass in the doors. I’ve been rewatching The Detectorists and it’s making me melancholy. In a good way. The theme song is perhaps the most pitch perfect theme song of any television series ever.

I went into the market today for lunch with one of my children. It was buzzing, but in a languid way. The way that November Fridays do. It made me sink even further into November. Lots of good things happened, but the best part was getting out of the car, seeing the carpark flooded with tradies, all laughing and yelling. It had just hit 37.5 on the building site. Anything over 37 means tools down. Their glee gave perfect Friday afternoon vibes.

For years–years and years–I’ve been working to establish rhythms and routines. I’ve been writing it on every plan I’ve ever made (which is a lot, given that I make annual plans almost weekly). But of course you can’t create rhythms and routines, they create themselves. I’ve been reminded of that this October and November. As the first year since 2018 that I haven’t been trying to get together a new show for the next year’s fringe there’s been a freedom I wasn’t expecting. I keep looking around me, trying to understand what this feeling is, but it’s the feeling of not having a new show to create. And it’s left my body and my brain with all sorts of space, and time and energy to think about what comes next. Except that today it’s too hot to think.

I love you, strange little blog

I subscribe to the substack newsletter, Embedded, because it describes itself as ‘your essential guide to what’s good on the internet.’ And each week (I think each week, maybe each fortnight, but very regularly anyway) it includes a piece about someone who is chronically online. They don’t exactly describe it as ‘chronically online’ but I can’t be bothered going to to find out the exact words they use and for all in tents and porpoises it’s what they mean.

Anyhoo, I subscribed to it because I thought it might help me better understand what happens and what is happening on the internet. I think it might help me to make sense of things. And it sort of did in a somewhat paradoxical way.

This morning, I was reading a piece titled ‘Close Friends don’t let Close Friends Snitch,’ and it’s about the close friends function on instagram. I was overwhelmed once again by the feeling that I can’t keep up. I can’t keep up with the number of people, I can’t keep up with who I’m supposed to know and who I’m not supposed to know, I can’t keep up with how it works technically, I can’t keep up with how it works socially. I can’t absorb all of the things that all of the people are doing and I don’t know where to put my attention. And all the while, I have this constant, lingering anxiety about my complete inability to have ever properly established a social media presence. And this ongoing thought that I need to somehow work it out. To make it work for me so that my career (finally) takes off.

There is so much discussion at the moment about what is wrong with social media. But the answer is pretty simple in my mind. In the same way we still call our phones ‘phones’ although they have long since stopped acting as phones, we continue to call social media ‘social media’ although it has long since stopped being about our social lives. Once friendship became truly commodified its socialness was doomed.

Just as I was overwhelmed by the sense that I can’t keep up, my mind did a kind thing and said to me, ‘You don’t have to keep up with it, you know.’ And then my mind kindly answered itself by saying, ‘That’s a good point, you really don’t.’

For a while, I’ve been thinking that my substack newsletter might become an all-in-one replacement for my social media and blog. But I’ve been thinking it for years and it’s never worked that way. I think that’s because I’m mindful that a newsletter lands in someone’s inbox. So it needs to be worth those someones’ whiles. It needs to have substance.

I have many thoughts that I’d like to share more publicly than in just one of my many notebooks. Sharing thoughts and ideas always helps those thoughts and ideas grow stronger. But often I know they will never be strong enough to merit someone’s inbox. In a blog post, you’re simply saying it, and if someone wants to stay and listen they can

I keep making notes in the margins ‘this would be a good blog post’, ‘blog?’ So I guess in a way, this is kind of the footnotes to the newsletter. The appendices perhaps.

Truly, I’ve never found anything as perfect as you, my beautiful strange little blog, for the perfect balance of sharing thoughts and keeping them to myself at the same time.

This endless conversation I have with myself is so boring

I have been down the rabbit hole of looking at people who have made a success of their lives in the way that I wanted to make a success of mine. When I was younger (by which I mean quite young in my twenties and so forth), I was always looking at how old the people I wanted to be were. I spent hours looking for hints about dates of birth and then doing the sums from there. And because I was young, they were inevitably older than I was, I thought that the secret ingredient was age. The reason things hadn’t come together for me was simply a matter of being too young.

Now, of course, all the people who have success in the domains I want to have success are a lot younger than I am. So I was right, in that there is an age where it all comes together. But I have passed that age.

It turns out that the ingredient wasn’t simply time, but what was happening during that time. What I was doing with that time. And what I was doing with that time was sometimes, but not enough, writing.

With the result that here I am in my mid-fifties, and I’m feeling two highly contradictory things about my writing work. One is that I really did miss my chance. I feel that the years I spent wishing I were a writer but not doing the writing have led to here, a bit of finished work, but not all that much. The second thing I feel is that I am here to do the work now, and that I have good projects to lose myself in, and if I just focus on them it really will all come together.

Of course the other thing is the constant question: if I’m not going to sit down and do the writing then what am I going to do with that time? And if I get to the end of another five years and I still haven’t finished this or that, then I’ll be even more frustrated than I am now.

So back to the (writing) work it is.

Sunday night

I had a busy weekend cleaning and tidying things in preparation for December visitors. I whipped all the weeds and I swept all the cobwebs. And instead of being grumpy when the vacuum cleaner bumped into things, I tried to focus on how good it would feel to sit and work in a lovely, shiny, glistening space. It kind of worked, but still housework makes me way more grumpy than it seems to make other people.

Tonight, just now before I sat down on the couch to write this, I looked in the box of Favourites. The Favouries aren’t mine, but they were given to another person in the house as a gift and he has kindly said that I’m allowed to have some. In order of choosing, I chose Crunchie, Cherry Ripe and Milk Chocolate. That is also the order in which I ate them. Which seems strange, because I would have thought I chose the Crunchie first because that was the one I wanted the most, but then why did I eat it first instead of saving it to last? While I was eating the Crunchie I did indeed think I’d made a mistake by eating it first, but as I was eating the milk chocolate, I knew that I’d made the right decision to eat it last.

I feel like if I could unravel the cognitive flow underlying each of the decisions in that small sequence of events that I would have enormous insight into myself and possibly learn the secret to making only the very best of decisions for myself.

Making promises

I think I did actually believe myself when I told myself that I’d be finished the first draft of my script by the end of this week. Actually I’m pretty sure I did believe it, even though I have zero evidence of this being even a possibility. Like, have I ever finished anything that quickly before? However, the promise to myself has at least had the effect of spurring me on to work a little faster. So by the end of the week I’ll be closer to finished than I was at the beginning of the week, and I’ll have to be satisfied with that.

If I have one thing I’m going to focus on in this new phase of my working life, it is on working faster. Or it might be more accurate to say that I’m going to focus on completing things more quickly. And the only way to do that is to sit at my desk more often and just blat words onto the page.

Whenever I do sit down and blat things onto the page, I’m satisfied with myself for doing that. But at the same time, I’m grumpy with myself for having spent so much of my life not doing that. I can’t help thinking I’ve got so little to show for my time. Oh, more angst! How surprising.

Despite the angst I also mean it when I say that I am satisfied with myself for how much I’ve been sitting at my desk to get things done. I feel like I’m (re)training myself and finding a new working groove. This is kind of along the lines of ‘better late than never’ but it’s also along the lines of ‘right place, right time.’

I’m also going well on my ‘tidy person’ quest. It takes up a lot of time though, constantly picking up after myself. But it’s always nice to walk into a room and think, ‘oh, this is tidy.’

Nearly time for me to log off, but there’s one other change I think I should mention about myself. I’ve started having large iced lattes instead of small. But I’m also having them skim milk or low fat which is fine when they’re iced, but might not be so great when it’s time to switch back to normal (that is, not iced).

Talk tomorrow! Or the day after, or the day after that or sometime later anyway.