I think I should declare this chapter of poorlyness over. I would love to know what’s working but I don’t suppose anyone knows. Painkillers, chemo increased dose, radiotherapy, natural settling down of damage from a Covid like cough three months ago – any or all could have helped but I am super super glad something has.
I am moving and sitting for short periods. I stay awake most of the day and I am only on two regular strong painkillers and one instant fix. I can do things again. I am not going to wait until I am as good as I was 3 months ago to declare I am sorted, although I have no reason to believe that given time I will get even better. This is good enough to no longer warrant my outpourings of self pity and I have to admit concern that i was going to be permanently prone. So no more regular health updates from now on. If I have anything to report, you know me, I won’t hold back. Thank you to everyone who has been so kind and particularly those sending me late night/early morning reading/thinking matter, please keep that up. Whatever treatment I get next, almost certainly long nights of bedentertainment are ahead. (See what I did there).
A and L chose the coldest weather we have had in years to stay in a remote cottage on the Northumbrian coast. On the way back to London they popped in to deliver me a birthday gift. The story of said gift is
Mooching idly round a second hand bookstore, I think it’s quite famous, near Alnwick I believe – I don’t have much grasp of the detail and it doesn’t matter. They chanced upon a book, I guess a book in the media, film, music, theatre section. An unpublished review edition of a book about a touring opera company in the 1980’s. Would Dad be interested in this? Opens it and behold.
Yes probably the only book in the whole world that has a mention of me. Not only a mention but a mention that frames me as one of the ‘Peter Brooks’ of directing the lightweight Viennese operetta repertoire. It’s positively guru like in its resonances. The Newell School, the Newell method, short residential courses in Newell. On the scale of extraordinary coincidences this has got to be up there. I was delighted, spooked and moved in one go. Now it is a fixture on my bedside table, to be read at night, like a Gideon, to be memorised sufficient that for the duration of at least one short very camp (I was very camp then) operatic, nostalgic dream I will be that person. Of course I could, I should, burst the bubble by providing context sufficient to make it clear that the illusion of genius posited by Freddie Stockdale is only that, a misplaced illusion, but I am enjoying the ban on self deprecation imposed on me, so just for now – what a brilliant director I was and it seems a pretty good looking young man to boot.
Hoping that things will start to improve but since having the radiotherapy I have spent all my time lying on my back finding ways of avoiding pain with bolsters, cushions, pillows, hot water bottles and of course drugs. So let’s be dead honest – at times this hurts enough to cause me to squeal = owwww!. It’s nothing compared to childbirth or many other much more painful conditions, kidney stones and shingles are supposed to be horrendous but on the scale of pains I have experienced it now at number three.
After the radiotherapy I was warned there might be a flare up and I think, but don’t know, that’s what’s happening. Hard to tell because any walking or indeed sitting I do sets it off, so its possible that just the hospital visit (walking around with my zimmer) rather than the treatment itself may be responsible. I can still get myself drugged up enough and in a comfortablish position for the pain to abate, thank goodness otherwise I would be in a proper state, because I am not brave I am weak but I think most people are so I don’t hate myself for it. It’s not a competition. Macho, teeth gritting and grinning and bearing is not my style.
Scheduling the drugs is stupidly complicated and time consuming but I think I have found the best of a bad bunch of Apps and I will stick with that for now. It’s the Apple health App that’s built into IOS. It has a medications alert feature and it will update across your devices (stupidly some of the other apps don’t) Without it I would definitely be underdosing or no dosing or perhaps more worryingly overdosing. I don’t suppose that would be super serious but I am not in the mood to negotiate drug fuelled anarchy and psychedelic hallucinations like at a Woodstock tribute gig – my preferred vibe is more “the very best of Neil Sedaka” on a long playing record or “Fred Dibner shares his Traction Engine Tips ” on a black and white television set, lying on the settee with my hotee and a cup of Horlicks. Basically I am a horizontal, bore, that watches Tv and video shows that only old guys that used to work in car parking would choose to watch, demanding 24 hour love, that squeals occasionally and moans frequently
Talking of antique technologies, communication between the hospital and the GP might as well be by morse or carrier pigeon. All I want, is to be sure I am taking a sensible combination of pain killers and that I can collect them at the surgery (30 minute return journey) not at the hospital (90 minute return journey). The GP messaging system is a classic of absolutely appalling design that a first-year interaction design student at Hull could knock out over the Christmas break. When you do something it doesn’t want you to do, (any kind of error as it perceives it) eg. trying to send an attachment that’s too big a file size – rather than telling you what the issue and letting you fix it, is it simply shows an incomprehensible default error message, (something along the lines of “you can’t do that” – no mention of what that might be) then logs you out and you have to start again from scratch.IT IS SO ANNOYING. It took me five attempts to send a photo of my drug packet for the doctor to use as a reference. Too big a file, wrong file format, only one attachment per message, you have tried that once and we have cached that attempt so you can’t do that again till you login again. who are you again, I HATE YOU SO MUCH YOU HAVE TO REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER – NAH. All in all I have spent the last one and a half hours trying to sort out my repeats and I suspect that I will end up with calls from the surgery tomorrow asking for further clarification. Just to add to the confusion I have only just realised that the gabapentin could take a week or more to have any effect so really I am pretty much in the dark regarding what is actually having an effect. I could be just rattling with chemicals that are doing nothing other than giving me constipation and putting me in a strop. Oh boy!
In order not to confuse things I will leave writing up a positive update on all this to the next post. Suffice to say later in the day things got a lot better pain wise. I don’t really know why, but I don’t want to jinx it yet.
Strangely my mood is quite jolly. I seem to be able to endure absurdist chaos better than most but on the other hand I am utterly utterly utterly dependent on Maria to keep my pecker up. Without her I believe I would be reduced to some sort of moping amoeba – and that’s not being melodramatic.
This blog past was written in bits over the course of the day while G&A were here for my birthday. I am so fortunate to have had visits from all my four lovelies even when I spend half the time in bed being incredibly boring (see note below). They visit me in the bedroom and sprawl over our bizarre bed cover inherited from Nonna, get beaten up by a cantankerous tabby who believes he owns the bed and in concert they all make me feel a whole load better (if still boring – yes I am very conscious and a bit neurotic about being an illness bore – I don’t like it in others but here I am doing it myself over 6 blog posts – sorry readers). It’s now bed time and G&A have just got back home. It worked out really well having the four of them spread over two weekends it gave Maria and I lots of spread out playtime. They all got me such thoughtful pressies. It has to be said some pretty bizarre and extreme stuff but so kind. Let’s just say plenty of perfect reading, one so perfect because it actually has a bit about me in it. And some oh so wacky eating materials designed specifically to cut through the neutralising taste bud killer side effects that my drugs manifest with flavours from an Asian version of ‘master street chef goes rogue’
I will let you know how things go over the next day (fingers crossed) and then hopefully, maybe, possibly shut up for a bit and get on with something else and stop thinking about me me me. fat chance!
ahhhhhhhhh 5:21am – pain significantly reduced. This is such a treat.
quite a coincidence but on Friday my next door neighbour and I are booked in at the exact same time for radio therapy scans in Leeds. So Maria is driving both of us together at 9:00 am. What a party eh!
‘Twas a good day today. My numbers from the NAC are going in the right direction. That will be down to double dose chemo hurrah! and somewhat to our surprise everything at Leeds was well organised and not unpleasant. It’s a nice big hospital I actually like it better than York and the drive is not bad. Walking about hurt quite a bit as did lying flat for the scan but I only have to do that for 20 minutes, so I prepared by syringing down a good dose of morphine in the lavs before the scan. Felt very naughty and a bit ‘breaking bad.’ Nothing chaotic to report. We hung out in Costa with an older couple who were also waiting for something and talked musicals. She couldn’t see much and he couldn’t hear much but that were massive fans and very impressed by Maria but because of the background noise Maria and I couldn’t hear either, so it was quite challenging to share our Andrew Lloyd Webber reflections without doing a very loud performance to to all the Costa customers. Still the time flew by.
So tomorrow for some reason I get a further telephone consultation then on Friday one big dose of Radiotherapy that will hopefully deal with the pain. Just one dose I am glad to say. We worked out that every day bar one this week Maria will have been driving somewhere to get medication or to take me to a hospital now she has added another responsibility just to keep her that bit busier.
Had a McDonald’s as a treat on the way home from Leeds. Slightly regret that although the caramel frappe was nice. Exhausted this afternoon with all the excitement and somewhat concerned that we have weather warnings for Friday. As you know one breath of wind or drop of rain means power cuts for the whole village so both our neighbours are setting up their extension leads to our petrol generator in readiness. We then WhatsApp each other to say if we are boiling a kettle because we can’t have more than one kettle at a time unless we want the generator to go into lift off. It’s actually quite good fun. Feel like survivalists. Won’t it be funny if it’s a lovely sunny day without a cloud in the sky and we are set up or the apocalypse.
I am still chasing down the correct prescription for my painkillers. So one of the haematology nurses and I have a daily chat about where they might be in the system today. Seems they are delaying trying to get the GP to issue them and now the order could be sitting on my consultants desk waiting to be actioned (hate that expression) if those get delayed I must admit I will be in trouble by the weekend.
I do feel sorry for the NHS. I believe we do pretty well but only really by taking tons of responsibility ourselves and being reasonably capable. They are just miles too busy and don’t have enough people working for them. I have had only one bad experience in 11 years so I think we have been very fortunate. Everybody is trying but it’s impossible with so much demand and a system that is just not joined up either digitally of physically. So often one person has no idea what another person has done or should be doing. The administrative cockups are annoying but perfectly bearable if you don’t get into a state and take the time to talk them through. My retirement is undoubtedly well timed. If I were still working I would have long since gone completely crazy.
never had it before but looking forward after a frustrating day yesterday. Got a call from Leeds hospital early in the morning saying can you come along tomorrow so we can sort out some radio therapy. I said That sounds lovely but I don’t know anything about it. Coincidentally my neighbour is getting radio therapy tomorrow do you mean him or is there another Chris Newell with cancer. Anyway she went away to find out. I rang York hospital to verify that this was a cock up because they had said there was nothing on the MRI to cause the back ache or any treatment. Anyway when I first got ill they had reported some damage to my spine but nothing to warrant an intervention now I think they have decided on a precautionary basis to deal with it in case it causes problems down the line. It may be starting to press on the spine. They just forgot to tell me. I spent a good while on the phone trying to unravel the mess and get my appointment for 11:30 in Leeds for this morning back. Anyway I am very happy to report that it looks like I haven’t made up my back pain in order to get some attention or brought it about by excessive hoopla hooping, there is a reason for it and they will have a go at fixing it. My hoped for result is no more back pain and no more pain killers – hurrah. I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life in this state of gentle numbness and its rubbish for St Maria although she never ever complains even when she has to do 5 individual trips up and down the stairs to collect all my medicaments, books, music, laptops, chargers, socks, phones sticks and zimmers – during which time I have developed a urge for a slice of toast please. We are beginning to expect something to go wrong administratively at every stage of this latest episode of illness but as long as we move forward I don’t care and it gives me blogging material. Everyone is always very nice and trying their best, always full of apologies – the situation tends toward the absurd and yes a bit ‘Kafkaesque’ as I try to negotiate the phone speech recognition system that seems to favour the words ‘eye hospital’ over ‘radio therapy.’ Thank goodness I have the time with Maria’s critical support to spend a good chunk of a day sorting it out. Hey but no doubt later on this morning I will find myself being booked for someone else’s cataract op. If I hadn’t had both of them done already there was a time with year long waiting lists it might have been worth doing a swapsie – onward we go.
As a rule rabbbits don’t look forward to Christmas. After all it has nothing to do with them, unlike Easter, when they are stars, along with Jesus. That is for just one Rabbit who lived in Hastings and had a cross shaped marking on his tummy so his mistress called him Jesus for a joke. The joke stuck and in their house at Christmas lunch he would have a seat at the head of the table and at the end he be given all the sprouts that the other children had left on their plates. True to form on Christmas Eve at 9:00 o’clock Jesus woke up and after a light snack of grass, did his stretches, even though he didn’t need to as rabbits stay quite fit without doing stretches. At 10:30 he smartened up his hutch and straightened his straw bed so that after lunch he could have an extra long nap in the comfy warm straw. At 12:00 o’clock he licked this coat white and fluffy so he looked like a king about to be crowned or a snowball and waited to be collected. At 1:00 o’clock nobody came. Instead his mistress played with her Nintendo and the game was so good she ate all her spouts and completely forgot about Jesus. Everybody did.
I have just downloaded an app to help me manage my drugs. I know I keep moaning but given the number of variables it really is incredibly complicated. I even have to schedule breakfast to ensure that one drug is accompanied by food, needless to say there is another that must be taken without food. Some drugs must not be taken close to other drugs. It’s like overseeing the Oscar ceremony dinner table arrangements.
Anyway, this post will round off my autobiographical series with a reflection on the years I spent as a pretend academic.
Some of you may not know just how unsuited I was for the final chapter of my career. I have been accused of being annoyingly self-deprecating and I think there may be some truth in that but by any normal standards of measurement I am only of average intelligence and in some areas well below average. To teach at a university and to do academic research in general the expectation is that you are smart. During my 20 odd years at Hull I struggled. Of course, there are some things that I am good at and some of those things helped me get by, but I never shook off the feeling that in comparison with what I would call proper academics I was a cheap knock off. I should have had a bit more confidence. My wonderfully encouraging supervisor Alistair guided me to what he said was a rare achievement in his department, a dissertation with no corrections. I entered the examination room a mere mister and left a Doctor. I was bloody proud of myself the comprehensive school failure but my Dad was beyond proud he was witnessing his own coronation as a father who had not failed his son, something he had always felt very deeply because I didn’t do the 11 plus. I didn’t do the 11 plus cos he thought i was too thick. I kind of loved him for that directness and for his unwavering insight. He got it right
Once I began to settle into my new role as lecturer academic I was obliged to go to conferences. I was profoundly impressed by some of the academics attending particularly those from disciplines I admired such as engineering or computer science. I confess to being less impressed by academics from the arts and humanities but I think that was based on the mistaken belief that I could do what they were doing and be less boring (they tend to read their papers word for word at conferences even though you have the printed version in front of you) whereas with the engineers I definitely couldn’t do what they did and they made things and showed the gizmo off or showed videos. Surprisingly they were often better presenters than some of those presenting at performance conferences who in some cases claimed to be performers.
You may have gathered theoretical academics are not keen on those that come from a practice background and the reverse applies. My CV was by their standards impressive but when I tried a few ’I worked with Dustin Hoffman’ show offs it did NOT go down well and after about a year I didn’t ever mention my past professional career.
Bizarrely for someone who grew up quite scared of the world I had one redeeming quality, I was not afraid of having a go. I have no idea where that came from. It certainly wasn’t my upbringing I don’t think it was school. I have never been physically brave but even though my parents weren’t personally adventurous it’s possible they created such a strong safety net around me that I felt able to fail safely. Perhaps that was their gift to me and if so I should be bloody grateful. This certainly helped established me as a dooer and consequently I attracted responsibility much too quickly. Within a year I was running an entire subject area in Digital Media after my boss went off to China. I made so many cockups but survived as the students liked me. Other than me everybody else in my team were visiting lecturers, none of them including me knew or cared about module handbooks, assessment grids or marking schemes and had we been inspected my academic career might have been very short. Anyway, we had quite a nice time and I believe the students actually did learn about design after all every one of these visiting lecturers were practitioners and good ones at that. Not academics.
That said I really liked the fact that academics tended to avoid small talk. In the reception area where we all hung around propping a danish pastry in one hand and the conference schedule in the other we would be forced to talk. I loved that fact that the opening gambit was not the dreaded ‘hold up on the M3′ conversation but what is it you are researching, what’s your field, something useful, informative maybe an opportunity to share something you have in common. I may be glamorising it – some conversations I recall were excruciating when it became quite clear that this person had zero interest in anything other than pterodactyl flight modes and you weren’t going to be adding any great insights to that. Mind you his flying model pterodactyl was soo cool.
I didn’t like the fact that academics could not take direct criticism. I once pointed out to a colleague in the Q&A session that his definition of coloratura soprano was wrong. It was, I knew I am married to one. The room went silent and I never did it again. Academics are quite precious creatures by and large. Easily offended and can be quite highly strung. I tended to make friends with the ones that weren’t and once again they tended to be the ones that made things not wrote about them.
Particularly in the arts but also in other ‘softer disciplines’ academics worry about being taken seriously after all its just possible your career mulling over new interpretations of the interpretation of the Victorian gothic novel by the early interpreters could be just a never ending circle of interpretations or to put it another way a indecipherable cloud of words that no one dares contradict because it cannot be proven, tested or evaluated even if they think its just plain wrong – like the coloratura incident. In the arts nothing is wrong and of course that’s right but how you go about communicating it’s absence of wrongness can be wrong or at least bum numbingly boring or brain numbingly confusing.
No I didn’t like the Arty discipline I was a supposed academic in, I just wanted to make things and certainly did not wish to write about them.
I tried to move up the ranks to senior lecturer (more money) but never succeeded. Ok that I wasn’t smart enough couldn’t have helped. I didn’t join a single committee. I avoided external validation like the plague (going to other institutions that were using our name for their degrees) I didn’t accept offers to review other peoples work. I hardly ever published, I certainly wasn’t going to write a book. But I did make installations, concerts, films, shows, software and a roadshow. I also won some modest grants and made a bit of a splash at the odd conference and built a very positive relationship with Newcastle Uni and York.
I am really not bitter. I didn’t deserve it. I was not a committed academic, I was a frustrated artist maker and now finally in retirement that’s exactly what I am – without the frustrated bit.
Hurrah again for me.
My academic career at least the research side, the bit I liked best came to an end just as the Crest roadshow finished and I went to the doctor with backache and indigestion. He sent off a blood test and received results that made no sense. My blood was screwed and within a few weeks and umpteen tubes down the throat I was told I had multiple myeloma and amyloidosis. The GP had to look that one up. There was no cure but there was treatment. I was on and off work for the next two years. Frequently working from home and this is before lockdown when it became mainstream do it was not easy. The university of Hull were very very good to me and I continued to have a teaching job from 2014 till 2023 when I retired.
Getting near the end now no more cap ‘i’s as I rush to the finish line at 4:35. Had a break watching an easy German Video on eating German food in New York which has made me very hungry another side effect of steroids and I also read some more of the translation into German of ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night’ which I was told was easy but they lied. Slightly more concerning is the degree to which I appear to have inadvertently filched the style for some of my Tuffin stories despite having never read it
I cant say i loved teaching but i liked my students and was always nice to them. If not that useful. I didn’t get stressed although i worked hard. I hated marking and giving feedback so i introduced video feedback instead of written feedback which went down very well with the other staff in my team and students much preferred it. It’s probably halved the time it takes us to mark and we can comment and show their work at the same time.
Summarising my academic foray. More than anything i longed to do the job i was originally hoping to do at the Scarborough campus which was to float between the digital, musical and theatrical curriculums and encourage interdisciplinarity – but universities work in silos and although i tried several times i could never garner an effective level of support with a few exceptions, either from the students or staff. This was made worst once we were moved to the Hull campus where the stakes were higher with more gear and more students to satisfy. 18 year olds in general are quite conservative. ‘I have come hear to play in bands and that all I want to do. I don’t want to collaborate with film makers and actors.’ Sad that.
That’s its for autobiography. Thank you Keith and Barbara for inspiring me to do it. I have not enjoyed it but that’s not anybody’s fault. I somehow thought that the opportunity to reflect might be fun but it isn’t after all I know what’s going to happen next and in my normal posts poems and stories I don’t.
if you made it this far you deserve acclaim and love – thank you.
last minute medical update 4:49 – despite the complexity of my pain killer drug choices I really am starting to think we may be cracking it. I have several optional drugs I can take as top ups and I am using those much much less. I think I am moving toward just gabapentin for the nerve pinching pain and oxycodone for the other pains – that could mean just 5 doses a day which would be so much easier to manage than my current theoretical inventory of 17 separate doses not including my chemo and other regular drugs. My drug reminder app seems to be dinging all day. Anyway despite being left a bit high and dry to sort it out for myself with Maria’s stern support things look like they are moving forward. Here I am writing and reading and watching for a couple of hours with zero pain. Hurrah.
Barbara and Keith – I am ploughing ahead with the promised autobiographical blurt despite feeling quite uninspired. This experience has made it crystal clear that any thoughts I might have of writing a ‘My life in Art’ should be permanently shelved. When writing about myself I feel a responsibility to be interesting and of course most of my life I have not been very interesting so I end up cherry picking the few interesting bits a bit like instagram where you share just the glamorous locations or the attractive salads and it all starts to come across as contrived. Anyway contrived it will have to be – just two more chunks to go – this one is about my entrepreneurial years with yo-yo.uk.com and my break into academia (without really knowing that I had) and the next one- about being in academia – (I haven’t ever written about that I don’t think, so it might be quite fun) then I am done with reflection and can go back to Tuffin and my medical moans. They are still there by the way and bizarrely I have just been told by a nurse that I don’t have malignant spinal chord compression despite the fact that I have been carrying a card saying I do have it for 11 years. Isn’t illness a topsy turvy experience.
yo-yo.uk.com
Yo-yo.uk.com must have been one of the first businesses named after its website address. In some ways we were innovators. Website design had been something I had become interested in while working with Paul and Caro on Modern Music Theatre Troupe, we had won an ‘innovative site’ award from British Telecom. The site was not great but in those days doing anything that wasn’t just text with a photo was innovative. If I remember correctly we had some music playing along with the images – WOW! . Anyway this was the start of Chris Newell 2.0 the digital designer. I relied on Barry to be the visual designer, a skill I have never had. Jumping ahead this lack of confidence in my visual design skills, something I eventually ended up teaching at the university, was one of the reasons why teaching for me, was not as pleasing an experience as it could have been. I was usually just a step or two ahead of the level of some of the better students and far behind the best ones who could draw especially the Chinese exchange students. I thought I could offer them something alternative /non commercial, or rather I had to offer them alternative because I couldn’t offer them commercial which is what they wanted and needed and should have been given.
Back to yo-yo.uk.com. I like to think it was a success in all but one respect. I didn’t make enough money. Even with the opera gigs and some teaching we were skint in a perilously close to repossession, not bohemian and lovely way and we had two children and Maria was ill and couldn’t work. At yo-yo we had good clients and we produced good quality work with high ethical standards of fairness and honesty in other words we were crap at business and at one time worked out that we were paying ourselves 50p an hour. The problem was that we had to innovate on every job we did. Everything was new, everything had to be learnt from scratch and this meant hours and hours of unpaid study and research.
Fortunately this fed into my MSc and accounts for my success and it also subconsciously steered me toward Chris 3.00, Chris the academic. My third but not final role for which I was only partly suited. Chris the opera director (good at the funny ones), Chris the entrepreneur (good at innovating but bad at making money) Chris the academic – well we will see…
Barry and I should be proud of what we achieved and I still feel bad that I took the academic job at Hull without properly consulting with him. My excuse is I didn’t really know what I was going for and I certainly didn’t think I would get it. It required a PhD and I had only just started mine but it was in a department that combined digital media, theatre and music so I should have figured that they would want me. Talk about a perfect fit. I knew that I could straddle all three of these worlds and that I could relate them to my PhD research in Computer Science at York which was about using human acting techniques and musical expression to enhance computer generated speech. So from their point of view I had the practical skills and commercial chops, I emphasised those in the interview because I knew their gatekeepers in recruitment would be wary at my lack of PhD and the only antidote in academic recruitment is to have commercial experience. They get so lambasted by government for not being business orientated enough that anyone who can run a successful vegetable stall in York market could be up for vice chancellor. Wo betide you if your research interests are in the Victorian pastoral novel you need to relate it to engineering solutions to resolve confusion in dementia sufferers. I jest not. I witnessed dozens of dedicated academics do similarly bizarre intellectual backflips to make their research fulfil the ‘impact’ criteria.
Back to the interview. I didn’t tell them how much I hated commerce, that I could not do commercial visual design without Barry and I earned 50p an hour from it. I had interdisciplinarity in spade loads, something they were very keen on in theory but in practise found impossible to deliver (that will be in my next post). In academia you have to be a specialist, in many ways the narrower your field the better. That way there are so few of you publishing in the area of blah blah that the only quality publication covering blah blah is full of your work and you are probably the editor anyway. Of course, all universities have been trying to produce research with more ‘impact’ which can mean getting more multidisciplinary, but academics are motivated by doing their thing, they don’t need others to do their thing with, nor do they want to do other peoples things. I remember getting a call while working at the yo-yo office in York telling me I had got the job and shouting “yes!” Fist pumping as if I were in a football stadium. Barry had little idea what was going on, that he was witnessing a totally unexpected joyful abandonment by his official business partner of 5 years, unofficially closer to 10, who was giving him just a month to figure out how the business and he could survive without his digital designer. Happily yo-yo thrived for many years without me but it was not my finest hour and frankly he would have been justified in never speaking to me again. It’s a mark of him and his wife’s decency that they did speak to me and they are still dear friends. I can be a right selfish bastard.
That’s it for the yo-yo years. I remember bits of it with great affection and some pride but the bottom line was I was having to go to work by bike and unscrupulously scrounge the money for the mortgage from my Dad. Without the academic job I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. As it was Maria got a teaching job at around the same time and we found ourselves for the first time ever with jobs that finished before dark, where if you were ill you got paid, had pensions attached and very long holidays. The life of an academic at least at the start of the 21st century was bloody bliss.
Gerald
It was Christmas Eve. The shops were so busy Gerald started to feel sick. He told his mother but she said if he was sick then he wouldn’t get any presents because Santa hated boys who vomitted. Gerald held onto to it for as long as he could but when they arrived at the sweet stall he couldn’t stand the smell and he was sick all over the chocolate Santas.
His mother said that this was the limit and that Santa will never forgive him because he was sick on an effigy which was twice as bad. Gerald wanted to cry but he felt too sick.
On the way home on the tube he still felt sick, in fact he felt even sicker because they had to stand and the train was wobbling about and it was very hot. At Charing Cross Santa got onto the train and everyone cheered and laughed. But Gerald still had enough sick in him to fill Santas sack (which was full of presents) with some fresh sick. And he did. Everyone was disgusted, Gerald’s mother pretended he wasn’t hers and Santa said Fuck and Fuck Christmas and Fuck again many many times.
It was too late for Santa to make more presents so that night the children got presents covered in Gerald’s sick which made them feel sick until Christmas dinner and their mothers told them that if they were sick at Christmas dinner Santa would come and take their presents away but not give them new clean ones but leave them with nothing. So the children tried to keep the sick in but it was too much and in the end they were sick too.
And that’s why children are always sick at Christmas. It’s not from eating too many sweets it all because of Gerald.
I meant to publish this about a week ago. I told Barbara and Keith to expect it. Then I lost interest and then i got distracted. Then I sent you all a message about how I wanted your news, then I got lots of your news. Meanwhile I thought I would drop in some images, then I couldn’t be bothered . Then I could … below = Barber of Seville + The Magic Flute + Tales of Hoffmann + Cenerentola – All Mid Wales Opera productions
It starts here
Two dear friends from my opera directing past sent us a Christmas card. I checked that the e-mail address I had for them was still connected and to my delight they responded by saying yes and I responded by saying that I would fill them in on all that has come to pass since I arrived at my operatic apogee and started on my descent back to earth via yo-yo.uk.com, lots of ‘learning for life’, an academia job and illness. This may end up being a stroll through the last twenty five year of my life so, Barbara and Keith buckle up. Don’t worry it’s not an end of life review in order that the kids know for future autobiographies when dad flipped from a kind of cool theatre director type to very dull academic type and they determine never to make a similar mistake, but if it does come to serve that purpose ….The rest of you have probably heard it all before in previous self indulgent history posts so you can skip again TO THE END. That probably means you have been able to skip all but about four lines of this post – so RESULT.
I have had time to assess how interesting or otherwise this post might be and I have concluded that it isn’t super interesting. However I have started and I will finish but I will conclude this post as my operatic career hits the buffers rather than following through to the point when my entrepreneurial career also hits the buffers and then my academic one meets the same fate. They will come later. Let’s call this bit
Opera and why I went off it or perhaps it went off me
Barbara and Keith (Mid Wales Opera) represent in so many ways the best days of my opera directing career both artistically, (I did some good quality work) and emotionally, from the point of enjoyment, (I really had a great time doing it.) Barbara and Keith used to laugh at my jokes and so did the Newtown audiences where all the shows premiered. I would say there is no better way to judge a decent production of a comic opera than getting a laugh in Newtown. Of course the singing matters more but that wasn’t my job.
I had stumbled into opera directing through pure bravado while at college. “Would anyone like to direct an Opera?” “Yes please” I said. I stuck at it, became somewhat better, never that good but by the time of Mid Wales Opera I think (like a middling quality wine) I wasn’t going to get any better however long I was ‘put down.’
Outside of MWO I was an ok director when dealing with comedy or fantasy but frankly hopeless with the tragic staples of the operatic repertoire. My attempts at Rigoletto, Carmen, Boheme and alike in all being quite bad. My productions of the middle ground that Mozart occupied between comedy and drama were ok. I don’t really know why this was but I suspect in the end I didn’t really care as much about the consumptive victims so rudely killed off by 19th century Italian misogynist musical masters as I cared about the dadaist chair choreography one could rustle up for a rousing comedic finale where plot and all things other than vocal virtuosity have long since left the building. My lack of belief in the virtues of serious art continues to this day. Serious art seems easy when compared to funny art (if that were true of course I should have done it better). Anyway as my career progressed, my confidence faded and so my anxieties increased. I can remember vividly nights not being able to sleep despite having the most luxurious accommodation with B&K at the top of a beautiful weavers house in a village in Wales, fretting about the show and why it wasn’t working. I must have still been working as an AD at Glyndebourne (my chronology is all shot), I taught at Birmingham Conservatoire (did some fun and crazily ambitious things with Keith there) was assisting Sir Peter Hall at the National, helping to run a modern music theatre company with my dearest oldest friend Paul Barker and Caroline Sharman and generally riding quite high, but my nerve was shot and it became inevitable I would have to bail out. The climax came in China when the show I was directing with the diva Ileana Cotrubas ran completely off the rails taking me with it and I ended up dragging a mattress around the corridors of a posh hotel in Macau trying to find a quiet place to rest my head after about a week with no sleep at all. I actually went pretty much crazy. That was after my previous hotel was evacuated in the middle of the night due to a fire, my costume designer left me to burn, and so many other absurd adventures and disasters that I keep thinking in that old man post career way, that I should write them down. Oh wait I am writing them down.
There is lots more opera career stuff I could recall but why?
So opera and I slowly parted company. It wasn’t overnight but I remember buying a thumping big tome on Human Computer Interaction (still got it) and reading it in McDonalds next to the Birmingham Conservatoire thinking I would rather be doing something like this than directing an Opera. Computers became an extension of my imaginative space, (can’t think of a less pretentious way of putting that) but as ever, I had a persistent inclination to take things apart to figure out how they worked. (I used to drive to a guy in Northampton and buy 20 broken Olivetti computers which me and a fireman in the village would turn into 10 working ones. We loved doing it but never made any money because we ended up keeping any good ones to play with and giving away all the left overs. Actually I gave some rain soaked ones to the wife of the richest man in North Yorkshire who planned to dry them in the airing cupboard). Meanwhile my skills accrued but only ever in a glib way, thought sufficient to persuade some of the more gullible that I was some kind of extraordinary polymath, equally comfortable in both art and science. This is absolutely not true. I am very uncomfortable in science and marginally more comfortable in art but possibly quite good at making quite interesting connections between the two. In the 90’s this was sufficiently on trend to get me onto a Masters degree in interactive media at Huddersfield University despite some appalling gaps in my academic CV eg. the absence of GCSE’s or A levels at a passing grade. I thrived and got a distinction and an MSc. My dearest beloved survived a bout of breast cancer which both enlivened us and scared us shitless. Meanwhile me and a dear friend Barry created a web design company in York and I set about keeping the wolf from the door by doing bits of opera directing including some said good work with Barbara and Keith and being an entrepreneur. Ha ha ha – you know what’s coming.
The End. Next episode soon. Although this is turning into a bit of a slog. So I may break it up into a fragmented blurt with commercial breaks songs and poems even a bit of ventriloquism.
Have seen the consultant re everything. He is a bit mystified by the pain and whatnot but does not seem too worried. Basically I have to be more generous with the painkillers to keep on top of it. We asked about getting a blue badge and he was so kind because as we were sitting in the waiting room he came and very quietly said – ‘they will automatically reject any application unless we say that you only have 6 months or less to live. Don’t worry that’s not the case but can we say it?’ We agreed to the fib. I would not have relished receiving my badge with covering letter. “Thank you for your application for a blue badge. We understand that you have less than six months to live, so no problem, here it is, enjoy.”
Nothing else has really changed, still waiting to find out what treatment options are open to me but the critical thing is that there are options so on we go.
