Christmas innit?

A long train ride home in the mist and rain

Everyone under twenty one looks just the same

Big tired bags, two under their eyes

Macbooks and laptops restin' on thighs

Slumped silhouettes leaking texts and sighs

Plugged in and shipped out, back home for a while

With shoes that need mendin' and a big washin' pile

Big woolly jumpers and coloured courderoys

Over grown hair and headphones of noise

Lads thinkin' of lasses

And girls dreamin' of boys

No longer toys

Barbie's and Batman

Street fighter and Pac Man

Or a sneak peak at the fat man.

Now it's new clothes, and shiny shoes

Electronics and booze

Arguments and queues 

And maybe a shag or two

Or a fight in the loos of the local

Where your loud vocal tones frequent each year

Warm breath in your ear from alumni you feared

Who's icy demeanor has been speared by the working world

The cocky swagger damaged by that one brown eyed girl

With her hair in a twirl

And her knickers in a twist

And an over make-upped face to hide the shadow of his fist

'But love he's in a BAND!'

And you soon get the gist

Slaggy little elves, and the Ho Ho Ho's

Can't get to the bar, for 'em stepping on your toes

Old lovers stir stomachs as gin fills heads

But not much can be done in your old single bed

A stones throw away from Aunt Brenda and Uncle Ted

Who crash every year for the consumerist event

Where you don't hear whats said, only whats meant

'The tele is shit'

'Sofas are on sale'

'The road is too icy'

'There's too much of a gale'

'Hope it don't bloody snow!'

Everyone with colds, and the car won't go

Every shows got a special

Spoilt rivalry in the bar

Moneys all gone, you came a cropper, got a scar

The bags are much worse on the long train back

The ones under their eyes, and on the rack

A bright cold new year brings another stint in debt

Living off beans, damp walls and night regrets

But when watching Toy Story with your brother, and your dog

Being warm dry and sick from an overdose of yule log

When the crap joke in your cracker brings a blast from childlike past

It reminds you that 'Shitmas' goes too fucking fast.

Four Fringe Days...

Cobblestones

And raining hard

Mars bars sunk in vats of lard

Kitch rake girls and 'topman' men

I won’t go up to the Fringe again.

More southern tongues than Scottish drawl

Natives out in heels: and fall

Everything’s five stars,  buggar it give ‘em ten!

I won’t go up to the Fringe again

Stage make-up in 2 o’clock stark

With all the leaflets, we could build an ark.

‘There’s too many hills” Fuck off then!

I won’t go up to the Fringe again.

Beers outside in sleet and snow

Shit show, shit show, shit show, shit show.

English money’s looked at like Yen

I won’t go up to the Fringe again

Four hours on tracks, I laughed to bits

On the Royal Mile, acting like twits

Rich Fulcher had us all in fits

Australian drag queens showed us their tits

He had tape on his face and oven mits

Kristen as a whoopee cushion and fully commits

Carrying on dancing when we should have called it quits

Dared to kiss: and twenty one hits!

Champagne, and cupcakes sprinkled in glitz

Airbeds, crepes and Gaelic tidbits

Turning twenty one, nowhere near 'on me sen'

 I might go up to the Fringe again…

To Blog or not to Blog...

That’s the question….

Blogging is a medium completely alien to me. The reason I write plays (well one), bits of TV (that have never actually felt the sweet touch of an actor) and Monologues (…that aren’t bad actually, but they’re only 2-3 minutes) Is because I can make them up. I can create characters and make up scenarios. It’s what I’ve been doing since I discovered my love of Barbie’s. I had an entire vanity case of them, I saved every bit of pocket money to buy them and asked for them every Christmas and birthday, and yes, I would say I played with Barbie’s way beyond the age I should have. Mainly because my plots became so addictive that they would often result in spin-offs and double bill episodes on Sundays. At one point, I’m proud to say, we had 15 Barbie’s in one house for Ken’s 30^th, which was a challenge but we got through it.  Unfortunately dark times were just around the corner for the couple, in the form of adolescence, and also because in 2000 (episode 6, season 12) Barbie was to discover that Ken had been having an affair with Dentist Barbie that lived on the estate opposite, and she knew in that closing scene that things were never going to be the same. So you see readers, I have been destined for the entertainment world for a long time, but writing a blog, about a subject I can choose, about ‘what’s going on with me’ is all, well 1. A bit daunting 2. Full of unimaginable pressures and 3. Just a little bit difficult to be honest.

See, even now you can probably tell I’m an amateur, I’ve rambled on about Barbie’s for half a blog. I’m sure Diablo Cody never did that (I.E. The immense coolness behind Juno) Diablo started as blogger, writing about her time as a secretary in Belarus, and then as a stripper in her debut memoir. From this, some incredibly smart producer was like ‘she’d be a great screenwriter’ BOOM – Juno = Academy Award. She is one of my inspirations as a writer, She writes so wonderfully weird and yet it’s completely real at the same time.

To me, Blogging is very much like novel writing isn’t it? Something I have tried and failed (not properly like, I once thought: ‘Maybe I should…like..write something about….no, nah) Before even starting I’ve become completely daunted by the sheer SCALE of writing a friggin’ book, there’s no breaks! No interval, no action sequences, no emotionally charged pauses; That’s scary man! Then I start thinking of ‘To Kill A Mocking Bird’ by my second writing inspiration, Harper Lee. This was and remains to be the best book I have ever read, and not many people I think can say that about a novel that was cleverly disguised and shoved at us brandishing the label ‘GCSE  ENG LIT TEXT’. I think of how wonderful it was and how easy it was to see what she was seeing, and I cower at the challenge ahead. I still have my GCSE copy, full of scribbling’s and highlighted blocks of genius, all dog eared and fancy free. The amount of times I came out of class to be greeted by my peers singing huge exclamations of  ‘Lord of the Flies make’s me wanna die’ and ‘It would be cooler if there were mice as well as men’ made me sad face.

Maybe it was the syllabus, maybe it was the teachers, maybe it was the inhumane raking through every word for meaning and symbolism that ruined Steinbeck, Golding, Shakespeare, Miller, Shelley, Priestly for us GCSE-ers, to name but an incredible few. Luckily, I had one of the best English teachers ever, who not only managed to make getting an A at English GCSE a soak in the bath, but she also managed to… hone…something in all of us, which would ultimately make us better people. A well read person, is a…much...better person. Get a load of that paragraph concluder.

My last and most prominent writing inspiration is my life, If it wasn’t for the things that people in my life say everyday I’d have nothing at all to write about ever; my auntie talking about a new style of pegs which are apparently groundbreaking, my brother trying to argue the reasons why I can’t eat three Pepperami’s in one go, or the slags falling down the stairs in Halo. The best inspiration is in conversations you hear everyday, start with the truth and then make it watchable.

I was supposed to blog about something intelligent and theatre-esqu. But lets take this one as a test blog, a ‘heat’ if you will (those awful things you had to do to determine who would race in sports day, ergh…maybe I could get another blog out of my hate for sports day?) But, I promise next time to write about something other than Barbie’s, Juno, GCSE’s and pegs, honest to blog.

KAT