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Down in the dumps this morning. Never has a saying been further off the mark. The dump is the happiest place on earth and I love everything about being there. I managed to haul a large love-seat armchair up the steps and tip it into the skip all on my own. I have never felt more manly. One car load of furniture and burned rugs and graffitied furniture (we let the kids decorate their own bedroom stuff if they wanted) disposed of. What a perfect start to the day. I wish I could come here every day, but it's closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and I only have a finite amount of stuff. Maybe I will set up a business dumping stiff for others, like a reverse Bagpuss. I wouldn't even charge.
The good news is I have enough stuff for at least one more visit.
Then on to Reading- a place that we love so much in our house that we have this picture celebrating its sexiness. I don't think I've ever had sex in Reading (do get in touch if I have forgotten having sex with you there) but that just makes it sexier. One day, fingers crossed I will break this tension. Though please God, not with any of the mutated humans who live there. What a town!
I worked on the outskirts of Reading in 1985 on an archaeological dig. It was the second (and final) dig I went on in those month after leaving school and formed some of the basis for my play, Excavating Rita.
You can read it here.Mostly the play is based on the first dig that was in Hampshire, where it was gloriously sunny and we camped out in a field and drank in country pubs and ate potatoes that had fallen off the back of a truck trundling past. When I think of it, I think of this photo with me with a mattock over my shoulders, feeling happy, having fallen for one of the other people on the dig (who would eventually spend a fairly innocent night snogging me in her tent). I think I was only there for 3 or 4 weeks, but it was my first taste of time away from home and it occupies a bigger portion of my memory banks than it should. I was absolutely useless on the dig and as naive as it's possible for an 18 year old to be, but I earned £30 a week and that was enough to keep me in beer.
The Reading dig, I recall as being cold and bleak - we slept in a mouse infested abandoned building with lighting hastily added, which occasionally fizzed and smoked. No one was interested in kissing me and it was a less immediately interesting dig as it was a Neolithic site (the other one had been Saxon) and I was unable to tell the difference between a worked and unworked piece of flint.
I sometimes walked into Reading, which in the 1980s had not moved on very far from its Neolithic roots. But I had no money and though I did better with the actual work, I was homesick and lonely and had an impending sense of doom about the whole thing (which to be fair, I have had about nearly everything in my life).
But it was here that after a very boozy party with some archeologists from another dig that one of our team got in a car to take him between the pub and the party, which missed a turning and the driver tried to rectify his mistake too quickly, turning the car over and killing my new friend (and another person).
Everyone else carried on as if nothing had happened, but I was too young and sensitive to cope with this loss and went home.
I think of Bruce every time I come here. And often at other times. He was maybe 21 and didn't like poofy glasses (this was the 1980s where it was OK to say that) and that was a senseless way to go.
I remember my 90 year old grandad talking about one of his friends from 70 or so years before, who he'd talked to as he cycled up the hill and who had died shortly afterwards (on his bike? Not sure) and he remarked that the more time that passed the more tragic the loss of that young man had been. You live the life that they didn't get to live and it brings home how much they lost.
It feels like another world and that stony field (is this where it started for me?) doesn't feel like it was located anywhere, let alone in Reading and I have always enjoyed coming here. When Lee and Herring played the Hexagon (as I am sure I have mentioned before) there were a small group of young women waiting outside the venue, who we assumed were for Boyzone or someone that might have been playing a nearby venue. But they were there for us. Was this the beginning of something? Herringmania?
As it turned out. No. That never really happened again.
I have played self-playing snooker at the Hexagon and played all sizes of venue here. I loved the tiny South Street Arts, but now I have progressed up to maybe 40% filling the large Concert Hall (approaching 300 in tonight which is a great result for me). Great crowd, lots of fun and I didn't make a joke about the huge organ behind me. Mainly cos it was blocked by my screen. A couple of women in the merch queue said they'd been coming to see me since the Lee and Herring days. I didn't ask if they had once waited outside the Reading Hexagon for me to show up.
