Taken aback, I searched for an answer. Life doesn't get much better than this. Here I was in a cafe in Walthamstow with a very dear friend, thoroughly enjoying her company and conversation after seeing the most fabulous Palestinian circus show, Step and a Half (I'll get to that in the next post). The window of Ganashe had caught our eye with its trompe l'oeil of fruit that was actually pure patisserie. An edible pair of ballet shoes called to mind the ticket I have next weekend to see Carlos Acosta at the Royal Ballet. We were drawn in, and a statue of Laurel and Hardy on the counter confirmed that this really was the place to clown around with our food. The woman behind the counter wore a hijab, serving up Cordon Bleu délices, Arabic floating in the background, French pâtisserie and another language and culture layered together.
I chose a passion fruit, in honour of passion fruit drink I'd snapped up and necked down that morning post parkrun, called Guilty Passion. What's yours? I had wondered on Instagram. I have a fair few, circus obviously, but I don't feel remotely guilty about that. My friend, also Lucy, opted for a nice pear.
So what was the matter? I feel vulnerable, I began. In the past 24 hours I have set my profile on Instagram to public, for circus companies to share on stories I post to spread the word, especially with many off to Edinburgh Fringe in the offing. But that doesn't come naturally to me. I've been a teacher for six years with all social media locked down. Private lives should absolutely not be shared with students, though I like to think now that if any were to come across my account it would simply inspire them to get up and out of their comfort zone. I practice what I preach.
I make mistakes though. My friend Lucy had been to see the Tao of Glass as well, and as we discussed it in the cafe, along with Step and a Half, I realised how incomplete my post was, and how it could do with a good edit. I'd left the house legging it to Soho Theatre but had clocked that in the past 24 hours since posting it had over 500 hits, and dear lord, I haven't got it right yet. It was clunky, this piece that means so much to me on a personal level. And then I'd shared on Instagram a friend's photo of the final bow. I was not worried about the theatre injunction on taking footage during performance, as it was taken of the curtain call, but chatting to Lucy with her outside eye, I realised that the photos did not do justice to the beauty of the show, and would do nothing to entice and encourage people to check it out. A quick edit later removed them, but again, I felt uncomfortable that they had been up overnight.
I was also still reeling from a blunder I had made post show at the Palestinian Circus, when I had mistaken one female performer for another afterwards and launched into a well-meaning supportive accolade before she gently had to correct me on my mistake. I was mortified. As a teacher, I pride myself on names and noticing every individual student. As a blogger, the care and craft I put into my writing is dependent on my skills of observation. But recently I have felt myself slipping. Is it overwhelm, too many shows, too many ideas, lost in words? Is it something darker? I had just seen Kook Ensemble's SAND at Jacksons Lane again the day before pre Edinburgh Fringe (see chapter 234 - click here and response to show chapter 225 - click here), where the wife is slowly losing herself to dementia, and the spinning spirals of disintegrating sand balls represent so powerfully the sense of loss of self to the windmill of her memories. Or is it simply menopausal brain fog? I wondered about that to friends at the Lido this morning after introducing myself to a friend, who lifted her glasses up and looked at me: "It's me, Lucy!" To be fair, it had been a while. I then went on to ask about her twins, too quick to name them, using the name of another set of twins, same age, another friend. Someone pass me the shovel. "It's not fair," I said to my friends later, "I used to be good at this, how does Coach Mel do it?" Mel being the legend behind Open Air Fit, who never forgets a face, a name, an instant. It is staggering. They laughed, and impressively in unison they both said, "Men don't get brain fog, Lucy!" Still, Mel is in a league of his own.
Still, there is that. I am religious about creatine in my coffee to help my brain function. Maybe if I stopped worrying so much that would free up brain power to actually engage.
But consciousness, coma, potential loss of memory, the true death for me, is very much at the forefront of my mind with the shows I have seen this week, and what they have triggered. And the news of death, like Glen Hansard's (chapter 242 - click here). And then seeing this Palestinian show, such a celebration, a resistance in the face of tragedy, and the thought of all the suffering in the world, beyond borders, well, that got to me too.
So I am circling back to images and events that made an impression. The trompe l'oeil and the trompe langue, my own tongue slips, caught gently, yet still caught out. The continuation of an Arabic atmosphere in a French patisserie post Levantine show, and from there, thinking about levadura, yeast, that raising agent, uplifting, the yearning for hope, ¡ojalá! inshallah, may it be so. A Pizza Pilgrims box at press night for Tao with its caption "This is how we dough it" reminding me of Riss Oblensky's Stinky Little Pilgrim (see chapter 238 - click here), milestones and the journey of the second half of life. Sand spinning through a juggler's fingers as a woman loses her grip on reality.
None of these pieces match. That's rather the point. I wrote about Glass on Friday, re-edited it Saturday, and here I am again on Sunday, still circling. Tao of Glass brings the practice of kintsugi into play as metaphor, the gold that holds a broken thing together without pretending it was never broken. I don't think I understood, writing that, how quickly I'd need the same idea turned on myself, not on a show I'd watched, but on a week of grieving the death of a musician who felt so familiar, oversharing and undersharing, getting names wrong, and wondering if any of it meant something worse than tiredness, like a radio tower picking up all sorts of frequencies and trying to make sense of them before transmitting the programme.
Maybe that's the real call here. To be present, rather than three steps ahead, already drafting the next post, the next caption, before I've finished living this one.
Still time to catch Palestinian Circus "Step and a half" at Soho Theatre Walthamstow today, Sunday 2 August at 2.30pm, and then at Edinburgh Fringe.
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