Edinburgh Diary: Part 1

Over the last twelve years, I’ve sporadically kept a diary. ‘Sporadically’ being the operative word, since I’ve tended to abandon every record I’ve begun once it stretches to three weeks or so, on account of my being both quite boring and very lazy. Which, funnily enough, is the overriding impression I get of myself when reading the fucking things.

Until now, I’ve kept this fact pretty quiet – ever since I came downstairs aged eleven and found my parents reading passages from my first effort out loud to each other, both doubled up in laughter (yeah, true story). However, I’ve decided to make public my account of the two weeks I spent last month in Edinburgh shepherding a play into existence, mostly in the hope of dissuading anyone else from doing the same.

Some exposition: GLUE is a trilogy of plays, all about half an hour in length, that run in succession one after the other. Oh, and they’re all about sperm. All the major players (who, with the exception of JC, lived for the duration in a flat I rented on Hunter Square) are referred to by their initials. The first play was performed by Vicky Hingley (VH) and Holly Gorne (HG), and was directed by Livi Dunlop (LD). Jack Chisnall (JC) performed the second (a monologue) and was directed by Michael Comba (MC). Jack Taylor (JT) and Alannah Jones (AJ) performed the final piece, and were directed by Michael Roderick (MR). Everything else was my responsibility. Perhaps that explains what follows.

Saturday 9^th

I arrive in Edinburgh with a fabric ovum, three large sperm tails, a microscope and a sperm sample in tow. Unfortunately, the script necessitates I should also have a full-sized door with a handle and letterbox in my possession, and I have neither this nor any plan for obtaining one. I spend the first part of the afternoon cursing myself for not cutting any mention of it from the script when I had the chance. I try then vainly to track down a door for a few hours. I give up at about five pm and have a Greggs.

When MR arrives I make him accompany me to B&Q on the outskirts of town. I think it’s the first time either of us have been to B&Q. MR keeps sniffing things suspiciously. Deciding that buying a proper door will cause us too many headaches down the line (too heavy, hard to support upright, etc), we make up our minds to build one instead. We ask one of the floor staff for some advice but, perhaps frightened by MR’s flowery shirt and earring, he scampers off to hide amongst the Black & Decker drills. We end up buying a big sheet of MDF, a saw, a door handle and a canister of ‘No More Nails’. After carting it on foot halfway across Edinburgh to our wonderfully central pad on Hunter Square, we realise that we don’t have an applicator for the No More Nails. Despairing, MR goes in search of some booze at 22:05. At 22:10 he remembers that they don’t sell booze past ten in Edinburgh. We are inconsolable, and sleep in our own tears.

Sunday 10^th

Our get in. We turn up at the theatre with one cast member (JC) and only half our props, and spend most of the time apologising to the technician. After a fruitless two hours we abandon the get in and make our way back to the flat.

The rest of the cast arrive. It’s the first time they’ve all met each other, having rehearsed the separate plays independently. Nobody knows what to do about the door. At six pm LD remembers that she has an engineer friend who lives in Edinburgh and is handy with tools. He turns up ten minutes later. His name is Freddie, and is built like a brick shithouse. I trust him completely. Within five minutes I’m sawing a piece of plywood down the centre in the bathroom. I’ve never used a saw before. For a while it’s all I can do to waggle the blade in total bafflement, but I gradually pick up the knack and can soon practically feel my testicles descending in tandem with the progress of the blade. Four hours and what seems like entire pubic development later, I emerge with my bit of wood to find the rest of the door assembled in the living room. Unsurprisingly, it looks shit. Determined not to acknowledge this, I thank Freddie, who’s looking vaguely appalled at the monstrosity he’s been roped in to create – a muscle-bound Igor to my hubristic Victor F. The rest of the cast get an early night ahead of our first performance, and I lie awake, imagining I can hear the door breathing.

Monday 11^th

The day of our first performance. Also the first time we will have run the plays all the way through in succession. We are let into the theatre at ten thirty, and the actors desperately try to make sense of their surroundings in the half hour we have until our debut. They spend the first ten minutes stumbling uncertainly across the unfamiliar stage, like new-born gazelles learning to walk. With five minutes to go I remember that we’ve forgotten to build a support to hold the door up (or, for that matter, to paint it). LD decides that instead we can simply tie it to the lighting rig with string. Unsurprisingly, this looks shit. Determined not to acknowledge this, I run around merrily swearing at everybody in a cheerful panic until it’s time to let the audience in. It comprises of my parents, their two friends, and an assortment of bemused Fringe regulars.

The performance starts. LD is controlling the lights, and I’m in charge of the sound cues. I manage to fuck this up in a way that’s only minorly perceptible, and aside from having to prompt a few times, everything proceeds more or less swimmingly. Halfway through the first play the door tilts forward and dangles on its strings at a 45 degree angle, but the actors play it off as somehow symbolic of the destabilising atmosphere of the piece, and we just about cobble through. However, cobbling takes ten minutes longer than our slot time, and once we’ve left the theatre (and made apologies to the justifiably pissed-off performers of the production that follows our own) the stage manager takes me aside and quietly tears me a new one. Still, flushed with success, we go to Nandos, and a few hours later I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa in all my clothes.

Tuesday 12^th

The second performance, and despite having yet to give out a single flyer, thirty-five people turn up. We’ve made several cuts to the text, and with the help of the stage-manager’s assorted oaths ringing in everyone’s ears, we shave fifteen minutes off the performance time.

Our other performance issues remain small – the door gamefully pitches forward midway through the first play but is once again caught by the strings tied to the lighting rig. The one issue that isn’t remaining small, however, is JT’s own rig. Having no place to hide inside the skin-tight morph suit he’s forced to wear, he’s elected to stuff his crotch with tissue paper to disguise the outline – a policy that backfires spectacularly, since it serves only to accentuate and signpost his bulge. Today I’m pretty sure it arrives on stage a full two minutes before he does. No one in the audience can look at anything else. By the end of the play, given its commanding stage presence, I’m starting to feel I ought to have written some lines for it.

After three days of misuse, the flat is beginning to look decidedly ramshackle. MC is laid up on the sofa in the living room complaining of a sore throat. It’s a bad omen. I try to get a bit more sleep during the early evening but am kept up by the sound of an Irish busker performing outside our window. He makes his way through a selection of everyone’s favourite Grade 1 acoustic guitar classics, including Hey Jude, Happy, Champagne Supernova, and, inevitable, Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley. He repeats this set-list four times. Deferring my need for sleep for another day, I spur myself on to enjoy a night at Cabaret Voltaire, the club across the street. Ever keen to spread the cheer, MR ends up spending north of £80 on drinks for everyone. As the night ends I imagine I spot a tear of joy in the corner of his eye.

Wednesday 13^th

At 9.30 in the morning I persuade the rest of the cast and crew to power through our collective hangover and hand out flyers on the Royal Mile. To ensure that we stand out, I’ve made an extra two sperm outfits (white morphsuits with makeshift tails secured at the back with safety pins) for people to wear, though at present the only person stupid enough to consent to this plan is myself. As I walk to the theatre following an hour’s flyering, I begin to see why Scotland might be veering towards independence – having endured more than a thousand years of English interference and oppression, the sight of my frigid nipples thrusting up through the front of my costume is probably enough to send them over the edge.

The rest of the team get a better reception, though it’s not all rosy; MR and JT leaving at least one elderly couple spluttering with outrage at the suggestion that they both ‘enjoy sperm’. Others are simply perplexed. When told that the show involves ‘three short plays about spermatozoa’ a woman stares at the flyer in confusion for a moment before appealing for clarity. ‘D’you mean cum?’ she asks – though when this is confirmed she does at least pocket the flyer.

As we are setting up, we discover someone has misplaced the string to tie the door with. I take this as my cue to throw a massive wobbler, but LD assures me that the black curtain backdrop is heavy enough to support the weight of the door if we rest it against it. For the first twenty minutes of the show this seems to do the trick, though without the strings there’s nothing to hold it back if it tilts forward, which, when the time comes for JC to post the envelope containing the sperm sample through the letter slot from backstage (the climax of the play, ho-ho), it inevitably does. I look on with a kind of dumb, serene horror as it dithers on its axis before plunging to floor with an almighty crash. VH and HG stand frozen for a moment, unsure of what to do, until JC’s hand emerges from the gap in the curtain and limply drops the envelope to lie alongside it. To the relief of all involved, the blackout comes five seconds later - though not wishing to be outdone, I mess up the sound cue.

So far exhaustion has kept us from seeing anything other than a few student shows of average-decent quality, but tonight brings us the first real gem of the festival – an hour long drag act called Margaret Thatcher: Queen of Soho. By the end of it I’m screaming like a teenage girl at a Beatles gig in 1964. I’d have thrown my underwear, only since they’re the only thing I have to help maintain even a shred of dignity whilst wearing the sperm outfit, I’m careful to hang on to them.

Thursday 14^th

Our audience figures continue to dwindle, and I’m beginning to wonder whether the few people who do turn up aren’t doing so in the hope of some aspect of the production going drastically wrong. A couple in the back row keep their eyes glued to the door for the whole of the first piece, and, when it somehow fails to fall over (the string is still AWOL), lapse into bored indifference. At the end of the second piece they leave, and I’m forced to get up and close the doors behind them – the technician/playwright’s personal walk of shame.

By some miracle I’ve managed to wangle us an entry into the National Student Drama Festival, meaning that a theatre professional has been booked in to see our show on Friday morning and provide us with feedback afterwards. Keen to impress (or at least, not to appal) her, I bar everyone from going out and getting drunk in the evening (as is our collective wont). This gives us the chance to see JT in the other production he’s involved in – a ‘steampunk opera’ called The Dolls of New Albion. The cast give it their all, but I’m unfamiliar with the musical, and can’t quite decide whether I’m meant to take it seriously or not. It’s an epic love story spanning several generations, but one that contains the lines (sung during a climactic dinner time break-up scene);

‘I had the prawns with mango,
She had the cod with miso.
I would have had the lime pie
But I was dying inside.’

After the performance, we unanimously agree to adopt these last lines as our official cast motto.

Friday 15^th       

The day of judgement. I wake up at half-eight, make coffee, rouse everybody into reluctant action, check my phone, and find an email from our NSDF selector, ASJ, saying that she’s booked a TV spot for her own production which will take up the whole morning, and will thus be unable to see the show until next week.

I try to keep everyone’s spirits high the performance but it’s clear the wind has gone from under our sails, and as the audience of >10 filter in, it dissipates completely. Perhaps trying to compensate for this, the still tetherless door takes another swan-dive to the stage floor towards the end of the first play, narrowly missing the back of VH’s head. I’m almost pleased. Shonky and mortifying as it is, you can’t fault its taste for the theatrical. It invests every performance with a palpable air of chaos and menace. If it chose to start a double-act with JT’s swaddled member it could have a glittering career ahead of it.

After the performance MR (who has been sitting in the audience) tells us he was sitting next to what was quite clearly a reviewer. The auspices, apparently, aren’t good. Seemingly mistaking him for another reviewer, MR says the bloke kept catching his eye and audibly sighing in an ‘I don’t know, some of the dross we have to sit through, eh?’ sort of way. Not even my post-show Greggs is enough to banish the doldrums.

Saturday 16^th

Everyone is ill, and the flat is turning to ashes. The cast slope around it in a daze, clutching blankets to their throats. Mounds of snotty tissues have erupted on every surface. We’re now in possession of at least seven boxes of lemsip – not that we need this much, but as Hunter S. Thompson once (sort of) wrote, ‘when you get locked into a serious lemsip collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can’. Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah filters through the window from morning until night.

I finally take it upon myself to buy some more string, and with the prospect of a full day’s break looming, the cast gee themselves up for their final performance of the week – all except VH, who’s so ill it takes all her power to stand at a vaguely upright angle whenever the script demands it. As the piece draws to a close, mine and LD’s sense of relief is palpable – a sense that entirely dissipates as we watch what is clearly not the sperm sample envelope flop through the letter slot. VH picks it up and unwraps it, revealing it to be, not the sperm sample, but an eye-dropper from the microscope kit used in the second piece. The audience is baffled, as is VH, who studies it with confusion until the blackout, perhaps thinking that we’ve chosen to deliver her an obscure vial of medicine from backstage. After the performance it’s revealed that she herself had misplaced the sample backstage in a moment of fevered madness.

Feeling more than a little feverish and mad myself, I take the afternoon off, and spend the evening sitting in a quiet corner of Cabaret Voltaire, coughing into my hands. 

Part 2 to follow next week

Confessions of a True Thesp

This Saturday I’ll be travelling up to Edinburgh ahead of the start of a two week run of a play I’ve written. I’m quite excited about this. This shouldn’t be all that surprising; but taking into account my past experiences of both going to Scotland and doing theatre, I’m at pains to explain to myself why I’m not quaking with cold dread.

Until last year, I’d never visited the Edinburgh fringe. In fact, I’d only ever been to Scotland once, on a family holiday to some remote Hebridean farmhouse when I was ten. All I can remember about the week was somehow getting a tick embedded in my forearm and losing my new kite at the beach. Returning home heavy with grief and convinced that I was about to die at the hands of some obscure blood-borne pathogen, I suggested that we never venture north of the border again. So we never did. Until my pretensions of artistic validation got the better of me, that is.

Such pretensions are also a relatively recent development. We weren’t a big theatre-going family – the one notable exception being the time my Dad took me to see the musical RENT when it came on tour to Sydney, where we then lived. In case you’re unaware, RENT is a musical about a community of artists and bohemians living in New York’s East village and coping with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I was five years old. The usher had to get a padded cushion for me to sit on just so I could see the stage. He probably needn’t have bothered; I was so ignorant of what was going on that all I can remember about the show was confusing a transvestite called Angel for an actual angel. Even now I’m at pains to understand quite why my Dad thought this would be a suitable induction into the world of theatre, though since in the same year I was enrolled in ‘Street Funk’ dance classes and was taken out of school for the day by my mum to see the Spice World movie, I can only conclude it was part of a brief assault on my heteronormative sexual development, and a partially successful one at that. Despite turning out basically straight, I was still the only five year old boy I knew who had a favourite Spice girl (Baby, if you’re interested) and pictured God’s spiritual helpers wearing thigh-highs and fishnet stockings.

Having become, in my Uncle’s words, ‘a bit of a nancy’, it seemed fitting that I got my first big break as an actor a few years later playing Nancy in a junior school production of Oliver! Never one to pass up a chance to emasculate me, my mother promptly went out and bought me what she considered to be a suitable costume – a bright red bodycon dress with the word ‘SUGAR’ spelled out in sequins across the front. I narrowly managed to avoid wearing it on the grounds that it didn’t fit the period, an argument that wasn’t able to spare me from the non-sartorial demands of the role – breasts, make-up and long hair being pretty much ubiquitous throughout recorded history. I stumbled out to meet an audience of around three-hundred doting Cheshire parents looking a bit like Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver, and though nobody ended up shooting a major world leader in an attempt to win my heart, the night wouldn’t have gone that much worse for me if they had. Actually, it would have been a welcome distraction. I haven’t had the twenty or so years of therapy necessary for me to relate the story in full here, but it involves such fun moments as 1) me leaving the stage twice in tears 2) the Headmaster apologising to the parents on my behalf and 3) a kindly old man sending me a letter encouraging me to keep away from tall bridges and train platforms from here on out. Or words to that effect.

I only really came to consider drama as something enjoyable and relevant when, despite having vowed never to tread the boards again, I was enrolled in a production of The History Boys during my first year of Sixth Form. For some reason I found playing a pupil at an all-boys northern grammar school less of a stretch than attempting to portray a Victorian-era sex worker, and at the same time began to see how I might write something that reflected my own experiences. Before this moment, the world of theatre never seemed to contain anything I could related to on a personal level. Much of what had been avant-garde only a generation or two before now seemed dated and foreign. How could my generation sympathise with the listless plight of Vladimir and Estragon when we’d been raised on Mario and Luigi – two other displaced persons of dubious trade who coped rather better with their lack of personal agency? I mean, why wait for Godot when you could go and save a princess or curbstomp a turtle to pass the time?

Appropriately, my first produced play was set in a school – a largely unbroken stream of cock-jokes masquerading as a penetrating exploration of teenage idealism and political radicalism. I’d like to say I’ve matured since then, but on the face of it I’ve only become, if anything, more juvenile. I’m currently in the process of assembling the props and costumes for the latest one, and have spent the afternoon diligently whipping up a batch of fake semen. That’s right. Fake semen. Well, I say faked. I guess you’ll have to come and see the show to find out. 

Fiesta de Mi Padre

Jon Platt, making up his rassoodocks with what to do with the morning.

If you were to take a cursory glance at my family unit, you might conclude that my dad is cooler than me. People have been saying as much for years. The first time anyone did was at a Damien Marley gig at Leeds University student union that I accompanied him to when I was twelve years old. At the end of the set the girl standing next to us inclined her dreadlocks towards me and yelled ‘Your dad is the coolest man alive!’ in my ear. I wanted to correct her – clearly she had no idea that he had printed maps of three alternate routes to the venue and a diagram of the parking situation folded up in his jacket pocket – but perhaps as a consequence of having spent two hours in a poorly ventilated room with a crowd of aspiring Rastafarians I was finding it strangely difficult to give a flying fuck about anything at all.

That I’m reluctant to agree with this assessment isn’t a result of believing I’m cooler than my Dad – since I once spent a good three months trying to bring back double denim I think it’d be a bit rich of me to assume I was cooler than pretty much anybody. It’s just that I don’t think ‘cool’ is a word you can use to describe him. He doesn’t fit on the scale of ‘cool’. He can’t be assessed by the standards of ‘cool’. It’d be like trying to measure a quantum singularity with a plastic ruler.

If my dad can be considered cool, it’s because, over the course of his adult life (and much like myself over the course of the Damien Marley concert) he’s gradually stopped giving a shit about anything. If you were to judge him based on photographs from his early adulthood in the late seventies and early eighties, you’d probably think of him as just another dignified, earnest ad man; dressed voguishly yet soberly in black turtlenecks and high-waisted trousers. Yet as the years have gone by and any pretence at conformity has drained away, he’s incorporated increasingly eccentric items into his wardrobe; to the extent that a tartan-pastel flat-cap and a Hawaiian shirt patterned with pictures of farting dogs are today firm staples of his repertoire.

It’s the same story with his music taste. Having grown up listening to prog rock bands like Yes and Jethro Tull, he sought to redeem himself throughout the eighties and nineties by jumping on the ‘Madchester’ bandwagon and becoming a devotee of New Order and the Stone Roses. By the noughties, however, he’d stopped seeking any kind of uniformity and instead started following anyone that took his fancy. Nelly, the Black Eyed Peas, Goldfrapp, La Roux, Amy Winehouse, MIA – all of them found a home on CD shelves in our kitchen. This cosmopolitanism is something I’ve learned to emulate, and though I'm not sure I’ll ever understand his affection for Fergie, nor he mine for Blind Lemon Jefferson, I like to think the ‘Home Sharing’ function on iTunes has benefited us both.

Last weekend I went with him and my little brother to Latitude Festival in Suffolk. It was my Dad’s third festival, and my third time going with him. The first time I was told this was happening (my mother booked him a ticket for his birthday, again to Latitude, after I’d already told her I was going myself) I threw a mild paddy. ‘How can I go to a festival?’ I protested. ‘He hates camping. And getting wet. And shitting into a hole with bits of pissy tissue dangling from the edges. There’s no way he’ll have a good time.’

But as it turns out, my dad was made for festivals. He has a belter. You see, he’s prodigious organiser, and as I discover to my detriment every year, festivals were designed for organised people. He spends several months beforehand gathering every possible bit of camping equipment he might need into a pile in the living room and calling me up every other night to ask if I’ve done the same. Once there, he buys a programme and spends each morning writing an exhaustive list of all the things he wants to see, then sticks to it religiously. He leaves the camp-site at ten am and returns at midnight having seen twenty bands, three comedy acts and a recital of anonymous poems composed during the 1984 miner’s strike (they have things like this at Latitude). Meanwhile, I spend virtually the entire festival curled up on the floor of my tent; hungover, soaking wet, and trying to muster up the courage to go for a shit. Though that didn't happen this year because he bought us all passes to the luxury toilets. The fucking hero.

As a consequence, I can’t really imagine going to a festival without my dad. Sure, it can be mildly embarrassing when he whips out his white man’s overbite in the middle of a set, but I feel like he’s earned the right (actually, given the number of years he’s been rocking the expression I’m not sure he didn’t invent it). That might be the crux of the difference between us. When I first started going to festivals, it was because I thought it would make people think I was cool. When he first started going, it was because he was cool enough not to care.

In tribute to this, I can offer you all an exclusive chance to experience a festival with my dad, since he’ll be going to the one they have up in Edinburgh every August to see a play I’m putting on (on from the 11th to the 23rd). I can't promise that you’ll see his white man’s overbite, but I can promise the chance to see three short plays about sperm – and who could refuse that?

No More Heroes

This Saturday was International Women’s day. Marked by events and demonstrations across the globe, it's a chance both to celebrate the ongoing political, social, and economic achievements of women and raise awareness of the myriad struggles they still face, and has been observed by millions the world over for more than a hundred years – in particular by those who advance and support feminist causes. I chose to do my bit by hosting an entirely apolitical shindig at my new London residence. You might think this sounds a little disengaged of me – a little enabling, a little supportive of the status quo – and you’d be right, of course. The problem is, I’m growing a bit suspicious of this whole ‘feminism’ thing. Being the paranoid man that I am, I’m starting to wonder whether it isn’t a movement designed solely to rob me of all my childhood heroes. For surely, the more active interest I’ve taken in gender equality issues of late has seen me shedding adolescent role models like a rescue dog sheds hair.

Take Alan Moore. Moore, the writer of Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and other cast iron standards of the graphic novel canon, was one of the figures I navigated my sense of self by through the developmental hinterland that lies between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. I’m airing my dirty teen-geek wares by admitting it, but Watchmen changed me. I came away from it more politicised, more sceptical, more inquiring, and above all, with a greater empathetic concern for humanity (plus the illustrations were bloody stellar). So when I heard recently that Moore was retiring from public life, due in part to the strain of answering repeated allegations about ‘the prevalence of sexual violence towards women…[particularly] rape’ in his stories, I was all set to leap to his defence. Except then I gave the matter five minutes thought, and realised that, based on what I’d read of his works, he did seem to be somewhat fixated upon sex of a non-consensual persuasion. Indeed, if you happen to be a woman in an Alan Moore story, the chances are that someone is going to try and stick something in you without your say-so. The original Silk Spectre is raped in Watchmen. Evie nearly gets raped in V for Vendetta. The Invisible Man rapes a whole host of school girls in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And From Hell, his epic re-telling of the Jack the Ripper case, is essentially 572 pages of unmitigated violence against women. Even Batgirl isn’t spared being stripped naked and photographed by the Joker in his Batman story The Killing Joke. Renowned for his ‘gritty reinventions’ of previously frivolous pop-culture works, Moore’s formula in this case appears to be simple; take out Ace the Bat-Hound, insert gratuitous sexual brutality. I’m only glad he never lent his hand to a Beano story; I’m not sure Minnie the Minx would enjoy herself very much.

Moore has defended this predilection by arguing that the amount of sexual violence in his work reflects the amount that takes place in the real world. It’s hard to understate this amount - one in five women in England and Wales has been the victim of a sexual offence or attempted offence, according to the Office of National Statistics – and bringing attention to it is always a good thing. But portraying violence against women to this extent is problematic since it becomes the defining experience of female characters in his work – to be a woman is to be a victim. The acts of violence and rape end up subsuming the identities and experiences of the figures who suffer them to the extent that they have no character, other than in relation to the act itself. Can you remember anything about Silk Spectre 1 other than that she was a 1940’s costumed hero pin-up who got raped (and who fell in love with her rapist, even more troublingly)? I don’t doubt that Moore’s intentions are good; if nothing else, his work is coloured by a deep concern for the marginalised. I’d even go so far as to say that his writing has gone some way towards making me the feminist I am today. But it reflects an attitude towards the lives and experiences of women that I can no longer gloss over or ignore. So he’s off the hero roster. Sorry Al, but you don’t cut the feminist mustard.

Then there’s been the recent Woody Allen debacle. I should say at this juncture that I haven’t come to any conclusion about his guilt, since I have no concrete evidence on which to make the call. But I will admit that my near-worship of much of his artistic output initially pre-disposed me in favour of arguments proclaiming his innocence – and thereby damning the testimony of his alleged victim, Dylan/Malone Farrow. I swallowed much of the Robert B. Weide article without question, and found myself bristling against the voices of those who seemed to have condemned him outright. But increasingly I began to question my own reasoning. Why was I believing the account of an alleged abuser, and not an alleged victim? Why did I think the words of a hugely successful male celebrity contained more veracity than those of a young woman who had testified to being the victim of a horrific crime aged only six years old, and who was still prepared to testify twenty-two years later? Why was my first instinct to question her motives (and those of her mother) rather than to listen to her?

The whole thing left me feeling unsure, conflicted, and generally sort of shitty. Which is about the only appropriate response, as those who chose to make different ones amply demonstrated. Stephen King, who wrote pretty much every single thing I read from the age of eleven up until I went to university (give or take the occasional cereal box or Alan Moore rape fantasy) and whose footprints I would formally have gladly licked, took to Twitter to opine that Dylan/Malone’s account had an ‘element of palpable bitchery’ to it. I hadn’t previously considered that a rape accusation could be ‘bitchy’, but if I was to continue in my unbridled hero-worship of the King, I would have believe so – so King was forced to leave the Platt Idol boot camp at my reluctant request. As for Allen, I finally concluded that, though I didn’t actively consider him guilty, continuing to tout him as an artistic influence and personal hero of mine would be to make a political statement that was antithetical to everything I currently stood for. Which meant that the picture of him I had on my bedroom wall should probably go. Until I find a replacement, he’s been flipped around to face the wall – staring into the blank face of ideological limbo.

It's ended up being quite difficult, all this commitment to gender equality. I used to think that being a feminist was easy. I thought that being broadly in favour of equal rights and opportunities for women was all that it required. That I could continue to chuckle ‘ironically’ at sexist jokes and to feel put out by any argument that too radically questioned my place in the sexual hierarchy. Hey, I was a liberal-minded, forward-thinking, stand-up guy – of course I was a feminist!  Instead, my choice to embrace the movement beyond a token, superficial level has caused me an almost unrelenting degree of mental turmoil and misery. Feminism has climbed inside my belief system and kicked seven bells of shit out of it. It’s made me question everything; my reading choices, my reaction to other peoples’ views, even my own writing (I mean, I made a pretty flippant joke about animal abuse at the end of the opening paragraph that’s only been left in as a marker of my growing self-awareness). It’s reduced me to a quivering, conflicted mess, thrashing around in my own acknowledged hypocrisy – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I may have lost my love of Moore, Allen and King, but I’ve left the way clear for others to take their place – Joan Didion, Caryl Churchill, Alison Bechdel, Toni Morrison, and hopefully many more.

Still, it would be nice to come through the feminist crucible with at least one or two of my formative allegiances intact. If it turns out Bob Dylan ever molested anything other than the Christmas favourite ‘Must Be Santa’ then I may as well write off my childhood completely. 

Tube Crush

I love the Tube. Without caveat. Having used it almost daily for the past three months, I thought I’d speak up during this temporary cessation in its functioning to confess my unbridled affection for it. A bit like how you might declare your love for a comatose relative as they dribble into the pillow. Sorry ladies, but you’re off the radar for now. I've got a stonking great Tube crush.

I think this infatuation stems from childhood. One side effect of having been in single-sex education from the ages of five to eighteen is that I tend to understand the world primarily in terms of excretory metaphors. In light of this, there’s something pleasantly colonic about the Tube; merrily shunting impacted passengers through the bowels of the city and defecating them onto the pavement. Yes, it’s taken a lot of shit over the years, but you can’t fault it: it keeps London regular.

In addition, since I've only recently set up shop in the capital, I’m still struck by the Tube’s superiority to all the forms of transport I used during my younger years (discounting the quad bike I rode during a friend’s eighth birthday party, because that was off-the-scale bitchin’). Compared to Manchester’s Metrolink system – a transport network staffed entirely by drivers who take pleasure in waiting at the station as you hurriedly stuff your ≈ £17.98 single fare to Piccadilly Gardens into the ticket machine and then pulling off just before you’re able to get on – it’s a paragon of speed and convenience. Whilst the Tube is on the verge of introducing a 24 hour service and mobile contactless payments, the only major innovation the Metrolink has introduced in the last twenty years is the ability to travel to Droylsden. The wonders of the modern world, eh?

Its sheer efficiency astounds me. We’re talking fascist Italy levels of regularity. On average, passengers travelling in Zones 1 and 2 have to wait only two minutes between tubes. Compare that to the 38 hour wait I’m sure I once suffered at Cornbrook Met station and you begin to see my point. A few weeks ago my commute to work was diverted due to a line closure – the cause of which turned out to be a man having thrown himself under a train. Whilst this faceless individual preyed on my mind and conscience for the rest of the day, the TFL staff needed only half an hour with the power hose to completely remove him from the Victoria line. It’s enough to make Mussolini spin on his meat hook in his grave

Sure, there are downsides – overcrowding and a general lack of respect for personal space chief amongst them. But bemoaning the presence of other passengers is like complaining that your favourite obscure band has gotten too popular. Can’t we all just appreciate the role they play in our lives? Plus there’s nothing better than the vaguely ambiguous thrill you get when your crotch is forced up against the central pole during rush hour. Brrrrr!

Which is why I don’t resent the strike – if only for reminding me how good I normally have it. Actually, I support the strikers. If this miracle of modern transport is able to keep a 950-strong semi-redundant ticketing staff on its payroll, in addition to everything else it achieves on a daily basis, then I say good for it. I’m even a fan of Bob Crow. Partly because in this age of gormless PR inoffensiveness, he’s not afraid to seem unappealing in the eyes of the general public whilst serving the interests of RMT members, and partly because he dresses like a bloody champion. I mean, look at the top photo. Look at it and tell me that if his wardrobe was being worn by an ethnically ambiguous Parisian twenty-something it wouldn’t be stickied to the front page of The Sartorialist until the end of time. So here’s to you, Bob. And you, central pole. (Call me? X)

Ankle-losing Despondylitis

I took a brief trip to London at the weekend. Having spent half of the last three years living in the south of England, I'd pretty much divested myself of any residual provincialism inherited from countless generations of Cheshire Platts, so it was with some surprise that I had one of those mythically cataclysmic trips to the capital that my relatives had always warned me about. In the space of twenty four hours I managed to lose two jobs, the ability to walk, and the option of wearing anything other than a natty pair of pale blue NHS hospital ward trousers. As the feculant air of the underground billowed through my now permanently open fly, I began to think my grandmother may have been right after all; nowt good can come of such a place.

Basically, I've broken my bastard ankle. Having managed, if only briefly, to fly the coop, shack up in Cheltenham, and find gainful employment at a bloody book festival of all places (n.b. my very first post), I've ended up back home, re-unemployed, and unable to do anything other than write self-pitying blog posts and abortively attempt tasks such as making sandwiches or cups of tea. Call me pessimistic, but there's something about having to coax your dog to lick drips of PG Tips off your toes that makes the prospect of spending the next six to eight weeks in plaster seem less than rosy.

And to think, how romantic a broken bone used to be. How I used to long for a snapped fibula or a shattered metatarsal. To be pitied by friends and teachers, to be waited upon hand and foot, to have all one's courage and manly fortitude affirmed by one brief parting of bone...I ached to break something. It might well be the only reason I ever participated in team sports; every P.E. and Gym lesson spent failing to get out of the way of an oncoming ball or classmate. It was hopeless. I never broke anything, except maybe my father's heart.

But no, turns out a fractured ankle is an unmitigated chore. Turns out in the adult world you don't get to shirk your manual responsibilities for a few weeks as people fawn over you; you have to give them up, and the money they earnt you along with it. Turns out it's only the second time you're forced to ask someone to fetch something for you that they start on the endlessly amusing 'Ooh, aren't you the Queen of Sheba' routine. I sat next to one such elderly joker in the A&E after someone kindly gave me the seat next to him. He was even more pleased to see me being pushed past in a wheelchair through the corridor a half hour later. 'Still getting the royal treatment are we?' he joshed, chuckling to himself as he walked away on his two perfectly functioning ankles. The commoner.

So, here I am; housebound and tea-stained and vaguely ticked off at just about everything. To anyone who might read this, sorry; though I value your interest and attention, I much prefer being able to walk to every single one of you. Walking is fucking boss. Yes, I'll probably have cheered up in a day or so, and yes, I plan to be stacked as hell after 8 weeks getting around on my arms alone, but for now, permit me a bit of teenage sulking. Christ, even our copy of GTA V is broken. Truly, we live in a godless universe.

Et in Porncadia non ego

Commiserations, onanism fans (and judging by its backlog of content, I'm assuming you make up a large chunk of this blog's loyal readership); the days of an all-access, open prairie internet are numbered. No longer will every man or woman with a few bars of wi-fi signal be able to set out from the doorstep of the incognito search window and go tramping over the wilds of digitised adult content. For ever more, their right of passage will be policed by their internet service providers, who themselves shall be cowering under the kosh of the UK government. Yes, the porn-pastoral is dead; long live the age of internet feudalism. 

The testicle-faced puppeteer pulling the strings in this extended metaphor is our old friend David Cameron, who today outlined plans to block all access to internet pornography by UK household by default unless over-18 users choose to be allowed to see it. It forms part of a group of new laws relating to the regulation of internet use designed to prevent online pornography 'corrupting childhood'. Such measures are a way of combating the paedophilia epidemic that the conservative government seems to believe we're currently undergoing; a belief I was going to use this blog to caustically debunk, until I realised that the laws were unveiled on the very same day that the entire nation was breathlessly waiting for just one glimpse of a naked, gluey child to flash up on their screens. It seems we might have a problem after all. 

Outlining his plan at a press conference (where he was accompanied by a prominent NSPCC logo hovering in the background, in a display of moral symbolism so cloying it seemed to rival actual child pornography in the stockpile of sickening images), Cameron declared that the two major 'challenges' an open internet posed to the well-being of children were firstly 'criminal' - i.e. the availability of images depicting actual abuse - and secondly 'cultural' - i.e., children accessing 'damaging material at a very early age'. To his credit, Cameron did accept that the 'two challenges are very distinct and very different'. Basically they amount to the difference between actively seeking, producing or deseminating images of abuse, and simply ignoring the little parental guidance warning that pops up at the beginning of online porn videos. If you need further clarification, the former is a crime committed by a small number of disturbed individuals, and the latter a crime that your little brother has probably committed at least three times this very afternoon. 

Yet despite this, Cameron went on to argue that 'both these challenges have something in common. They are about how our collective lack of action has led to harmful and in some places truly dreadful consequences for children.' Now, I might be generalising, but I'd be willing to bet that even the most histrionic amongst you would agree that only one of these 'challenges' had led to objectively 'dreadful' consequences for children. Though its obvious that a large amount of legal adult material is somewhat morally questionable, its not really feasible for us to judge what effect such material has on the minds of those who view it whilst under the age-limit. Certainly it doesn't seem to have has a negative effect on me. Alright, perhaps that's a bad example.

Cameron argued that these measures single out the internet as a source of the corruption of childhood (whatever that might mean) since 'in no other market, and in no other industry, do we have such an extraordinarily light touch when it comes to protecting our children'; conveniently ignoring markets and industries such as those which produce children's toys and which, unlike pornographers, actively target children. Whilst, he continued, 'Children can’t go into the shops and the cinema to buy things meant for adults,' (sorry to burst your bubble of innocence, naive parents, but they can), they can access anything they chose if they bypass the relatively light strictures of the internet. 

(Now, at this point, I feel obliged to point out to any concerned parents or guardians who might be reading that it is entirely possible to put a filter on online pornography to prevent your child accessing it without the need to waste countless man-hours and money imposing a similar filter on a national scale, but seeing as you clearly possess enough intelligence to a) use a computer, b) read basic English and c) make it this far into the blog without once forgetting to breathe properly and passing out, I really, really hope that you knew this already. Similarly, I'd like to assume that you're in possession of enough subsequent intelligence to work out that installing such a filter is only going to lead to your child being forced to masturbate in the local library, or even over the family pet photograph album, and that as a result you may as well not bother. But I suppose this blog should cater to all types). 

Presumably it's out of Cameron's slightly skewed belief that it is impossible for a child to buy adult material in shops that he simultaneously refused to back a ban on topless images in the Sun newspaper. Never mind that the Sun is ostensibly a source of news and not of photographs of nude women possessing incongrously considered opinions on current events, and which has no age limit preventing minors from buying it; clearly redtube is the sole villain of the peace. Those who believe Cameron to far too pliant to the Murdoch whip can believe what they want, but its obvious to the rest of us that Moral-Indigancy Man, the UK's formost pink and polished superhero, has the best interests of the kiddies at heart. 

Seeing as the aforementioned adhesive baby has entered the world in the time that it's taken me to write this blog, it's entirely possible that my (hopefully) evident dismay at these regulations will be buried under a ream of my facebook friends's witty suggestions for the name, but if you have managed to read it, you can do your bit by signing this e-petition to get the measures revoked. In the mean time, I'm off to try and persuade my mother that my wanting us to opt-in to being allowed to access pornographic material is a form of political protest, and not just because I can't think of any other way to spend my Tuesday afternoons. And also that I'll start looking for jobs tomorrow.

The Lost Years

Let me tell you about Shakespeare. In 1585, Shakespeare is somewhat fucked. Not yet twenty one, he finds himself the husband of a woman eight years his senior and the father of three children, with little money and resources to speak of, seemingly destined to carry on in the family trade of glove-making and live out his days as yet another provincial tradesman and domestic provider. Which is not to say that such a life is a particularly tragic one; but, see, Shakespeare doesn't want to be a glove-maker. He wants to write plays. So the very fact that, in 1592, we find him living in London having established himself as a young playwright of some repute seems, in light of his situation seven years prior, something of a miracle.

How Shakespeare achieved this trick – how he managed to shrug off the strictures of a steady career and his obligations as head of a household to emerge, unencumbered, as a major player on London’s theatrical scene – is a question that has puzzled scholars for decades. It’s puzzling to me even now. How did he convince his wife and kids? Did he call a family meeting (possibly in one of those obscure Elizabethan rooms they don’t have any more, like the buttery or the dysentery closet) and declare his intention to abandon them?

“Well, err, so, I know the apprenticeship has been coming along nicely, and we’re just about able to make ends meet as it is, but, you see, I’ve been having a think about it, and I’ve decided the best thing for all of us is if I move down to London for a while and do my acting and writing and things. What do we all think?”

“Would we come too Dad?”

“Umm, well, no actually, I think it would be best if you all stayed up here in Stratford, and I went down and then sent you back money when I earned any. Of course, I can’t exactly say when that will be, so I suppose you’ll just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best in the meantime.”

“But Will dear, do you really think you’ll make enough to support the whole family?”

“Oh, I would imagine so. Besides, Hamnet’s clearly not going to last much longer, so we shan’t have to set aside much for him. Look at him. He’s all peaky.”

There are no extant documents from the period that account for Shakespeare’s situation or whereabouts in the years between 1585 and 1592, and thus these years are commonly referred to as ‘the lost years’. They have been the subject of considerable academic study and speculation, and are, at the moment, a major source of fascination for me personally since, being not yet twenty one and similarly living in the vain hope of moving to London and becoming a playwright, I’m desperate to know how the jammy bastard pulled it off.

True, Shakespeare was faced with several hurdles that I’m lucky enough to have avoided. I don’t have the wife and kids to worry about, and no matter how pessimistic you might chose to be about Britain’s transport system, it’s plainly much quicker and easier to make it down south via Virgin Pendolino that it is on the back of, say, a malnourished mare (even if the latter might offer you more legroom. Ho ho ho). Still, Shakespeare never had to endure twenty plus years of cultural conditioning in concepts such as ‘employability’ and ‘financial security’, and so the decision to up sticks and leave a steady job behind to try to make a living scribbling poetry was probably more tenable than it seems today. Put it this way; if getting stabbed to death in a tavern brawl or developing plague are realistic, day-to-day concerns, you probably don’t feel as much need to worry about whether you’ve got enough names on your CV for ‘Plan B’.

But as inconceivable as Shakespeare’s career trajectory seems to modern eyes, it gives me hope to think that, as he reached a position of some security, and from which the remainder of his progression through life seemed mapped and certain, he instead chose to become perhaps the least typical human being in British history. I find comfort in the notion that, as he stood at his workbench practising how to thread a welt through the seam of a fourchette, with the clamour of his wife and children ringing in his ears, his mind was not fixated on the burden of responsibility he shouldered, or on the many long identical years of labour he faced, but instead was bristling with ideas and poetic constructions; ‘a rose by any other name’, ‘to be or not to be’, all that jazz.

In this spirit, having left the prolonged gestation period more commonly known as higher education, I’ve decided to dub the forthcoming years of my existence ‘the lost years’. Partly to render any seeming setbacks or disappointments as somehow excusable, or even beneficial (‘Hey, it doesn’t matter that I’m twenty five and living in my parent’s basement, I’m in my lost years), and partly to convince/delude myself that, in all my aimlessness, I’m heading towards some eventual goal. Whatever it might be.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to give the blog a bit of a reboot, and will hopefully be updating it much more frequently than it has been in the past few months. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing, keep an eye out.

And if you fancy supporting me in my lost years, you could do a lot worse than to come and see the Edinburgh fringe show I’ve written (https://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/gabe-day), on from the 2^nd to the 17^th of August, which promises to be, at the very least, charmingly shambolic. Failing that, a ticket to Euston on a Virgin Pendolino would suit me just fine. 

Ziggy Snowflake and the Glider from (A)Far

It's Christmas Eve, and since I've been neglecting you of late, and in lieu of a real gift or indeed anything of much actual substance to say, here's an anecdote about my day's listless internet surfing. Hey, notice how no one calls it 'surfing' anymore? It's probably because the sense of fun has worn off. Using the internet at the close of 2012 feels more like slowly drowning. By this point I can almost hear the rattle of water in my lungs.

But anyway, I'm here to talk about The Snowman, the classic Christmas family cartoon and staple of the late December TV schedule for the past thirty years. You might have heard that tonight a sequel is being shown on Channel 4, The Snowman and the Snowdog, which judging from the title promises to be an 'out-there' conceptual re-imagining of truly pedestrian proportions. I was reading one of those typically hand-wringing articles about it on the Guardian website when I discovered that The Snowman was once introduced in a short video opening by a peroxided David Bowie dressed in beige chinos and a pastel sweater. AND that the whole thing was available on YouTube. Christmas, for me at least, had clearly come early this year.

We see David pottering around a darkened attic, wistfully resting on an old rocking-horse and reminiscing about his childhood. He speaks about this using the pronoun 'we', suggesting either that a) he still lives with his parents, or b) he's suffering from some form of split personality disorder, both of which would go some way to explaining the beige chinos and paisley sweater. Then he pulls a Snowman-decorated scarf from a drawer and tells us he was given it by 'a real snowman', and we cut to the beginning of the cartoon. The implication is that the child in it grows up to be David Bowie, which is a brilliant idea. It lends what has previously seemed a simple tale about childish wonder and the loss of innocence a new and nutty layer of meaning; as he clutches the sodden scarf and hat of his deceased friend at the cartoon's close, is he already dreaming up the piano riff for Ashes to Ashes? Is Starman, his hymn to an elusive, mind-blowing celestial figure who refuses to visit him, simply a veiled reference to another magical 'man' he once knew?  It's a psychoanalytical goldmine.

What was even more satisfying than then video. however, was reading the YouTube comments (always a fertile breeding ground for genius insight) and stumbling across this one, by  user TheRealVeterans.

At first this struck me as an odd observation. Seeing as the Snowman never speaks, it seems difficult to determine what his attitudes might be - for all we know he could be mentally reciting his favourite passages of Mein Kampf or chuckling at the memory of old road safety videos in which toddlers are catapulted through windshields as he gallivants around in the snow. Thus the only clue we have to his attitudes come from his actions - which, as I don't need to remind you, mainly involve abducting a small child and flying him to Lapland in clothing patently unsuited to the freezing conditions. Indeed, at one point the Snowman flies showily low over a Mosque, as if to say 'Look at the broken state of the nation we're escaping', before whisking him off to a gathering attended exclusively by giant white men for a spot of ritualistic chanting and dancing. None of which is suggestive of a particularly tolerant, enlightened mind. 

And as a final marker of his sheer callousness, the child having developed an evident emotional attachment to him, the Snowman chooses to melt in his back garden, leaving the poor kid to wake up on Christmas morning to the sight of his watery corpse. Yes, I know that the coming daylight meant that he was doomed to die, but if we acknowledge that this same Snowman only moments before waving goodbye to the boy had the power to fucking fly, you'd think he'd have done the decent thing and nipped off to behind a bush before dissolving into a messy pile of coal and knitwear. It's the equivalent of an elderly relative who, upon sensing the end is near, chooses not to go quietly but curl up underneath the Christmas Tree so that the kids come down not to presents but to the sight of Grandma's dead, bloated face. It rather puts a crimp in the festive spirit.

The video opening only reveals the extent of the psychological damaged cause; the boy has grown up to be weird, lilting manchild, pottering around an attic, fondling childhood heirlooms and talking to no one. It only takes one night with the Snowman, the cartoon suggests, to turn you forever into a living Ken doll. I can't help thinking that more people possessing the Snowman's attitudes can only make for a more disturbing, pastel-shaded world.

But then I realised - this isn't any old freak in an attic and jumper, it's David Bowie; possibly the greatest and most innovative British solo artist in the history of popular music. Seen in this light, it all begins to make sense; it isn't hard to see how the attentions of a child-abducting, racist and sadomasochistic Snowman might lead to you wanting to wear make-up and write The Laughing Gnome, and my golly isn't the world better off for it. What with today's charts being as bland and mass-produced as they are, we could probably do with a couple more snowmen to liven things up. Just imagine how much more exciting Ed Sheeran might sound if he'd had to face a bit more dismembered slush as he was growing up. So hear hear, I say to the TheRealVeterans's diagnosis. Bring on the frozen kid-snatchers. The rebirth of pop starts here.

Bard Times

After a summer in which I became a patriot, didn't get a job, barely wrote anything and discovered that braiding the hair around my gooch and tugging it until my eyes water is a painful but surprisingly pleasant way to spend a Sunday, I've headed back to Uni. Which of course means facing all of the holiday reading I so merrily consigned to the bottom of a drawer in late June. This summer's serving was a decidedly hearty selection of the complete works of Shakespeare and the American author Philip Roth. My Uni has a endearing quirk of offering handy 3-hour 'tests' at the end of every holiday as a way of making sure you're been sacrificing your free time with the required aplomb, which means I'm facing a morning's grilling of my Bard knowledge at the end of this week.

Now, contrary to form, I actually did do a small bit of reading over the summer; yet faced with a choice between the works of the most revered and established writer in English history, and those known mostly for their portraits of desperate men wanking themselves to death, it may come as little surprise that my efforts skewed mostly towards the latter option. So, as a way of testing how hot I currently am on Stratford's greatest son, and finding out the areas I need to bone up on, whilst at the same time perhaps providing you readers with a little enlightenment along the way, I present to you everything I currently know about the 38 plays of Shakespeare. Or maybe it's 39. We're off to a cracking start.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Four young people - two lovers, a suitor, and a suitor of the suitor - run off into the forest. Elsewhere a bunch of amateur dramatists are rehearsing a play. Fairies turn up. Everyone keeps falling asleep. One of the actors gets his head turned into a donkey's and back again. All the painful unrequited longing is cured with magic fairy dust, and everyone returns home and watches the play. There's a bit of innuendo with a wall. It's quite good.

All's Well That End's Well

Helen miraculously cures a the King of France but her chosen husband runs away to war to avoid her. He attempts to court the virtuous, virginal Diana (named after the goddess of virginity; it's that subtle) but Helen swaps beds with her in the dark and he's forced to marry her. This isn't weird or awful at all. The title is a beautifully bleak ironic joke.

Anthony and Cleopatra

A roman general spends all his time shagging some Egyptian floozy. She turns out to be a terrible fighter and they both commit suicide. There's some more innuedo with a fig, because they totally look like ladybits when they're cut open. I know this because I've had intimate experience of both. The seeds are the tastiest bit.

As You Like It

Features cross-dressing, another forest, and a lion. As well as the 'All The World's A Stage' speech, which you'll find embossed on the pencil-cases of every Japanese tourist ever. (Aporogies).

Coriolanus

Long, apparently. Has a lot of war. They did a film recently with Voldemort and the bloke from 300, go see that.

Cymbeline

A mash-up of every Shakespeare plot device ever. Despite that, it isn't great, though my mate Sam reminded me it does have one character planning to shag a princess on top of her decapitated husband, so maybe it's worth a re-read.

Hamlet

One of the obscure ones. Lol jk, it's the greatest work ever written in the English Language. Hamlet has to avenge his father's death by killing his uncle. He decides to put this off by going a bit bonkers, taunting his mum, killing and old man and driving his girlfriend to commit suicide, which all seems a bit counter-productive. Generally I find RedTube a much better way to procrastinate. His wi-fi must have been down.

Henry IV Part 1 

Prince Harry and his mate Falstaff spend their time drinking and sleeping around London. The king meanwhile, faces a rebellion by Hotspur, some jacked up little white-bread squit. The King tells his son he's disappointed him; the Prince immediately reforms, kills Hotspur, and saves the day. Falstaff gets to galavant around being a sot in a seemingly entirely separate play. It's brilliant. There's even a bit where they make fun of the Welsh.

Henry IV Part 2

The King faces another rebellion. Prince Harry grows up some more. Falstaff does more whoring and weedling. The King dies and Harry is crowned. Ends on a rather sour note when the English make a fake truce with the rebelling lords then have them executed, and Falstaff is permanently exiled from the court and thrown in prison, so is one of the 'darker' sequels. A bit like The Empire Strikes Back. 

Henry V

Essentially a further sequel. King Henry fights the french. Lots of rousing speeches, no Falstaff. I've not read it yet, but I'm pretty sure there's no Ewoks.

King Henry VI Part 1

King Henry VI Part 2

King Henry VI Part 3

I've no clue. Supposedly the first things Shakespeare wrote. Universally acknowledged to be pretty dismal. I'll probably end up reading them just to score some brownie points with the tutors however, because I lick arsehole like nobody's business.

King Henry VIII

Given that this play's subject is a king who had two of his wives beheaded and needed a system of pulleys to get out of bed, you'd hope it was a nice juicy barnstormer. Apparently not; since King James was a relative, Shakespeare was duty bound to portray him in a reverently bland light. But maybe it was a bigger hit with Jacobean audiences; cannons fired at its first performance led to the Globe Theatre burning down, so you might say it really set the house on fire! I'll stop now.

Julius Caesar

Caesar is popular but undemocratic. He's killed by Brutus and Cassius, but the popular Mark Anthony rouses the public against the conspirators and they are eventually killed. I've not read this one either, and it's supposed to be one of the stone-cold classics. I refuse to listen to your theoretically mentally judging me. Lalalalala.

King John 

King John is king despite his nephew Arthur having a stronger claim. He's at war with France, and they are both vying for the loyalty of a town. They come to a truce, which then ends; the Pope gets involved; the King orders Arthur to be executed; he takes it back; Arthur falls off a wall to his death anyway; the King is deposed. Oh, and a character called Philip the Bastard gets all portentous about things. Famously rubbish, I struggled through it in August when I could have been off enjoying myself, and now find I can't remember any of it except Arthur's death and Philip thanking his mother for shagging King Richard behind her husbands back. Fuck. I'm really hacked off now.

King Lear

King Lear divides his kingdom to his daughters corresponding to their professions of love for him; instead of playing along Cordelia decides to make a sarky point and ends up losing her stake, driving the King mad, plunging Britain into civil war and getting herself killed. I maintain she's the real villain of the piece. Nobody likes a smart arse. (Also as lots of good bits where Lear yells at his daughters and wishes they were infertile. A good 'un).

Love's Labour's Lost

Three male academics swear off women to concentrate on work; women turn up, breezy comedy ensues. Again, I bloody read this one and can't remember it at all. Has a 'lost' sequel. I hope they don't find it.

Macbeth

Scotland! Witches! Murder! What more do you want? Read it in year 9. The Roman Polanski version features the most depressing collection of naked breasts you've ever seen; they look like empty, fleshy socks.

Measure for Measure

No clue. One of the lesser comedies. Coincidentally, Measure for Measure is the name of a Shakespearean drinking game I've just invented, whereby two players attempt to match their drinks 'measure for measure' whilst not reading any Shakespeare. I'm planning on playing it every night for the rest of the year.

Much Ado About Nothing

Beatrice and Benedick wittily insult each-other until they're tricked into realising their mutual love for one another. Meanwhile, Claudio is tricked by Don John into believing his fiance Hero is unfaithful, and humiliates her at the alter. A priest comes up with a plan to pretend she's died that no one thinks is weird; Claudio forgives her, and everyone gets married. Actually has some relatively enlightened sexual politics for a change. It's probably my favourite.

Othello

Iago, resenting his master the moor Othello, convinces him his wife is being unfaithful. Othello fumes for a while and then suffocates her. Finding out the truth, he kills himself. Proof that inter-racial marriages don't work sexual jealousy is a destructive force.

Pericles

Of contentious authorship. Uhh. I've got nothing else.

Richard II

A prequel to the Henry IV's and V. Richard II is a vain, manipulative king. He's challenged and killed by Henry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV. A bit sincere.

Richard III

Richard, Earl of Gloucester, resentful of his physical deformity and ugliness, sets about seizing the British crown through a process of seduction, manipulation and murder. He marries the wife of the bloke he killed and has the two Princes murdered in the Tower of London (depicted as intelligent and willful youths, they come across as such insufferably smug little gits you'll want to smother them to death yourself). Despised as king, he's rendered horseless and dead in the battle of Bosworth Field by the future King Henry VII. A very blackly comic play. Richard's a wonderfully irredeemable git.  But LONG.

Romeo and Juliet

Two star-cross'd lovers from warring families marry and consummate in secret, before familial in-fighting drives them to another hastily contrived Priest-sanctioned pretend death plot that ends up with them both committing suicide. It's pretty wonderful. Fun fact; I played Friar Lawrence in a school production of this play that had a 'mods and rockers' theme. I got to smoke shisha on stage. It was probably the peak of my entire life.

The Comedy of Errors

Two sets of identical twins are separated at birth by a storm and then spend the rest of the play being mistaken for one another. An early, trashy one, but pretty funny. Don't let the long fucking bit of exposition at the start put you off.

The Merchant of Venice

Bassanio wins a Portia's hand in marriage in a game of 16th century Venetian Deal or No Deal and the merchant Antonio rashly borrows money from the Jewish moneylender Shylock on the promise of a pound of flesh if he can't pay it back on time. He can't; the case goes to court; Antonio is defended by a mysterious lawyer delivering a speech on the quality of mercy and some linguistic wheedling; Shylock is treated very unmercifully at the end. A pretty miserable one, despite being a comedy. Little known fact; Woody Allen once played Shylock in his own re-written version of the play. His 'Hath not a Jew eyes? Are you kidding? The only thing a Jew doesn't have is full golf-club privileges' speech is a must see.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff's back! Turning up in present day England for some reason, he plans to marry two Mistress's, who find out and play tricks on him. Lacks the weighty sullenness of the Henry IV plays for Falstaff to play against, but fun enough.

The Taming of the Shrew

Kate is a tempetuous, ill-mannered, difficult (n.b. read 'opinionated') woman who's refusal to marry prevents her hotter sister from doing so. All those with the hots for the sister employ Petruchio as wingman, who starves and imprisons Kate until her will breaks and she can make a speech bidding women to be servile to their husbands. If you can look past the misogyny it's actually pretty funny. But of course some people maintain it's all supposed to be ironic since the main plot is actually being performed for a drunken, foolish tramp. Meta! And bollocks.

The Tempest

A storm washes a bunch of people up on an island where the magician Prospero and his daugher live. The son of the captain falls in love with the daugher; the captain searches for his son, and two fools plot with Caliban to overthrow Prospero. More magic ensues everything turns out well, and Prospero forgoes his magic. A very late Shakespeare play. Saw a very nice out-door production at the beginning of the summer. Hangs together very well.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Unread. Presumably two gentleman from Verona are involved somehow. It's a comedy, so there'll probably be some cross dressing at some point to keep you occupied.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Ditto. Presumably two...uhh...I literally can't be fucked. Lets move on.

The Winter's Tale

Ditto. Has a bit where the statue of the heroine, who is presumed dead, comes to life. You'd have more fun throwing your coppers at a living statue and watching him desperately grub around for them in the gutter. I know I would.

Timon of Athens

Ditto. Often performed in tandem with Pumba of Crete. I'm trying my best here.

Titus Andronicus

Ditto. Not to be confused with Titus Androgynous, which deals with the sexual identity crisis of an accomplished Sunderland defender. WHEN WILL THIS END?

Troilus and Cressida

Ditto. It's based off Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, which I read last year, so I should be fine, right guys?

Twelfth Night

Two twins wash up on an another fucking island after another fucking storm. One dresses up as a boy once a-fucking-gain and acts as go between between a duke and a widow. She falls for the former and is fallen for by the latter. Meanwhile the despised pen-pusher Malvolio is tricked into thinking his mistress loves him and should dress in yellow stockings. This sub-plot is better than the rest of it, which is fairly hum-drum. Stephen Fry's in it at the moment, go see it! Actually, go see QI instead. They put that on iPlayer.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand that's all folks! Apart from the poetry, which I'm ignoring 'cause poems are for gays. But otherwise I've not done too bad, thought clearly I need to bone up on the T's. Do a bit of a 'T-bone', you might say. Oh, leave me alone. I just summarised Shakespeare, motherfuckers. What did you do today? Read some tosspot's blog. Exactly.

Lie Back And Think Of England

Ladies and gentlemen, I come today before you a changed man. Just two weeks ago I was your average, bog-standard prematurely-jaded middle-class layabout literature student. The ensuing fortnight has seen me utterly transformed; broken down beyond all recognition and built up again, piece by piece, into the unfathomable. As I sit, naked save for a Union flag draped around my shoulders, Mo Farah's name carved into my chest with a dirty biro, typing with one hand and spanking myself off over a photo-shopped image of Churchill fucking a double-decker bus with the other, I can proudly declare myself as that which I have hitherto always denounced. I am a British patriot.

Speaking of wankers who dress in the Union flag, Morrissey was kind enough to offer his ever-trenchant views on all the trumpeting that has taken place during the games. Accusing the flag wavers of "blustering jingoism" and asserting that "the spirit of 1939 Germany now pervades throughout media-brand Britain", he further cemented his likely candidacy for the country's worst theoretical party guest ever. At once a shrill cod-revolutionary and a shuddering racist, the only possible people who'd endure him in an intimate setting would be hardcore Morrissey fans, meaning that you'd have to invite an extra quotient of insufferable people just so things would proceed smoothly. Plus he'd complain about the cocktail sausages. The dick.

But it did get me thinking. Whilst I hope I've never voiced anything nearly as insensitive or idiotic, i've certainly felt versions of it. There isn't anything inherently wrong with love for one's country, but it has always seemed to me to have something 'off' about it, a whiff of curdled something hidden under the guise of zeal and passion. Obviously it's been used for centuries to make people to horrible things, or to justify sending them to pointless deaths, but even low-level affection has previously seemed a little untenable. Patriotism seemed like owning a pair of incontinency pants; you might justify having them, but you'll always go around giving off a faint whiff of urine. 

I've written before about how the British don't do patriotism very well. That was during the Royal Wedding, when we banded together as a nation to sort-of celebrate the union of two well-meaning but rather bland privileged people. Around a year later we had a jubilee, about which I felt much the same. This was the greatness of our nation personified; a sour-faced old pensioner being leisurely pursued by bunch of 'zany' monarchists in boats. Even the BBC couldn't seem to muster much enthusiasm; placing responsibility for presenting this moment to the country in the hands of Fearne Cotton, who always puts me in mind of a victim of child sex abuse desperately corroding the memories from her brain by chanting happy, meaningless phrases like 'Wicked!' and 'Mental!'

From here on in, we only had less to crow about. We crashed out of the Euro's on penalties, and reduced a man to tears through our own misguided expectations of him at Wimbledon. Elsewhere, little was changing; we were still ruled over by uncaring toffs, whose only chance of defeat lay with an overgrown sixth-former who looks like he's never touched a breast in his life. Our banks were run by shits. Our newspapers were run by shits. And all of them went to shit parties and came up with ways to spray more shit on everything. Britain was a diseased shambling mess, suited only to quietly committing suicide by shooting itself in the Scotland. 

And then the Olympics came. And suddenly we were celebrating things we could actually be proud of. Not a genetically-deficient dynasty but actual people from proper places who'd actually done real tangible things to get them where they were. And who could do things better than anyone else on the planet. And the music was great, and the experts and spectators were great, and this time the BBC wheeled out Clare Balding, who's so robust she probably eats child sex offenders for breakfast. And in just two weeks, a nation found its feet, and its reason to be.

So I'll hope you'll join me in performing a final act of mental celebration as you sink down into your beery, post closing-ceremony slumbers this evening. Lie back and think of England.