Creation and evolution

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with creative people and the idea of creativity in general, and a lot of that is because the creative person was never me.

I think the reason is that my creative years had been and gone by the time I was thirteen. People from Staple Hill Primary School, for instance, are probably still talking about my precocious starring role in the musical version of Aladdin, where I played the evil wizard Abashuffle. I belted out a couple of numbers and, as you may be able to tell from my character’s name, a soft shoe dance routine was also involved.

That wasn’t even the first time I had got up in front of people; when I was four or five my parents used to take us to bingo, no doubt desperate for a night out where a couple of hyperactive children could be slightly diluted by a crowd of dribbling Bristolians. During the interval there was always a section where people could go to the front and tell a joke. It was impossible to stop me from frogmarching onto the stage and showing off and once I was up there it was just as much of a challenge to drag me off. All right, so I usually had to get my dad to write my material back then but that hardly seemed important. He’d written an awful lot of my genetic material anyway.

With hindsight, I’m thankful I grew up before the proliferation of stage schools and shows like Britain’s Got Talent, because I have a nasty feeling I would have been in serious danger of trying to get into both of them. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been a Jehovah’s Witness, or - horror of horrors - a child vegetarian.

It’s strange, you know. Just typing those paragraphs makes me wonder who in heaven’s name that child can have been, because he certainly doesn’t sound like me. I don’t know where that shamelessness came from and perhaps more to the point, I don’t know when it disappeared. Increasingly nowadays, I find myself wishing it hadn’t. I often think that what I envy about creative people – well, people in general – is not their talent or even necessarily their application, more the fact that they seem to live their life free from the fear of looking like an unmitigated berk. We all have an unmade bed (well, I often do), but only a few of us have the courage and total self-belief to call it art.

Someone else who doesn’t sound at all like me is the kid who played Jeeves the Butler in our primary school’s production of Cinderella, a part I was fundamentally given because I “sounded posh”. Still hopelessly precocious, this time I not only memorised my lines but the entire script, which made me an excellent onstage prompt. I reckon that everybody concerned was extremely lucky that I didn’t just take it on myself to play all the parts, though it would have made some of the scenes between Cinderella and Prince Charming even more disturbing - so disturbing, in fact, that it probably would have concluded in somebody calling the police.

There were, I’m sorry to say, further excursions into the world of amateur dramatics. At the end of primary school I appeared in a musical version of the mythical tale of Perseus and the Gorgon. I was as skinny as a rake and the teacher in charge of casting obviously got a colossal and sadistic kick out of giving me the part of Atlas. My only scene in the production involved me humiliatingly clad in a loincloth, holding a cardboard cut-out of the globe aloft and performing a rather natty showtune, the idea being that I was weedy enough to literally look as if I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I valiantly tried to blot out the world of difference between “laughing at” and “laughing with”, but in my heart of hearts I knew it was going to be the former.

The whole thing backfired spectacularly when flu swept the cast days before the first performance. If you’d had your eyes shut you could have mistaken our dress rehearsal for Darth Vader: The Musical. On the opening night my moment of glory arrived to find me in no fit state to make the most of it. Drenched with perspiration, red eyes like burning coals, I staggered deliriously onto the stage looking even feebler than usual before wheezing my way through my song looking to all the world like the wrong kind of conspicuous consumption. It was only a show stopper in so far as it sounded suspiciously like a death rattle set to music. It’s a wonder the kids in the audience didn’t flee in terror. It’s a minor miracle that I didn’t.

My swansong was a spell in the “Woodley Young Players”. By this stage, I think a career as a teenage vegetarian Jehovah’s Witness might have been preferable. Me and my brother both eagerly signed up and acted alongside one another a couple of times, including one play which particularly sticks in my mind. It was meant to be a parody of Victorian melodramas and I played the narrator, sitting off to one side at a rickety table and linking the scenes together with a series of what were apparently meant to be comic monologues. Regrettably, because as usual the play had been written by one of the grown-ups with too many literary aspirations and not enough talent, it had less jokes than a bad eulogy. Always looking to push the envelope, we decided it would add a certain edginess to the production if I pretended to get progressively more drunk as the evening unfolded. This was the mid-80s and I can only assume we’d been watching far too much of The Young Ones. Like so many things from the 80s – Global Hypercolour t-shirts, Russ Abbot, the music of Simple Minds - it seemed like a superb idea at the time.

On the first night I thought it worked perfectly well, but my brother must have felt that a certain something was missing. I can’t think of any other explanation why, on the second night, he spiked the water jug with the best part of a bottle of vodka.

It made for an evening everyone would find memorable except me.

Things most people take for granted, simple things like diction and syntax, began slipping away from me with every sip and before long my normally photographic powers of recall were completely shot to pieces. What must have seemed like an effortless piece of method acting to the audience was in fact an eleven year old getting utterly paralytic for the very first time and not even realising it. By rights, it should have been rather a scary experience for me, given that literally dozens of people were sitting slack-jawed in the audience hanging on my every (albeit badly slurred) word. But I was already too drunk to care; I was probably only half an hour away from telling the audience that they were all collectively my very best friend and the only person who truly understood me. Left to my own devices I would undoubtedly have ended up projectile vomiting over the poor unfortunates in the front row. Inexplicably, there appeared to be twice as many of them as there had been at the beginning of the performance.

The point where it dawned on the grown-ups that there was a problem came shortly afterwards when, halfway through the performance, I delivered the introduction. For the second time. I wish I could say it was because of my increasingly eccentric interpretation of the script that they decided to make a drastic intervention, but I suspect it’s actually the point when my brother made his confession. Very few plays have the stage direction Nervous looking heavily sweating bespectacled fortysomething youth worker in a tank-top sprints on halfway through lead character’s speech, frantically grabs half-full jug of diluted vodka and exits stage left and it’s not a feature of experimental theatre I would personally recommend.

The minor but most telling detail of that incident escaped me completely, although I think you can kind of see why. At the time, I didn’t ask myself questions about why my brother had such easy access to vodka. I wouldn’t figure out the answer to that one for another fifteen years.

Anyway, that was well and truly the final straw for my theatrical career, and after that I suppose I stopped seeing myself as a creative person. They were made of different stuff to me; they had inspiration, guts and ideas. I on the other hand had not particularly happy memories of what may well have been bronchitis, partial nudity and alcohol abuse, coupled with a phobia of carafes. It goes some way to explaining why I opted out, even if I had mixed feelings about it. My schoolfriends would form bands and I’d go and watch their gigs, always a little wistful of a world I couldn’t fit into. Similarly, I stayed on the sidelines at university. People I knew would appear in plays and I'd be there in the audience watching dutifully, a complicated amalgam of envy, regret and surprisingly traumatic flashbacks.

My friends’ creative efforts at university weren‘t restricted to the performing arts though; some of them wrote stuff too. I remember reading some of my friends’ poems while I was there and managing the trick of saying “Oh, these are really impressively intense” while thinking to myself It’s just a bunch of words you’ve put on a page in what looks like a random order. What does that even mean? Are you too cool for capital letters? I’d never have said that, mind you; I just assumed it was my fault. I was far too right-brained to get it, because of course I wasn’t a creative person.

That feeling never quite left me after that. I remember my dad showing me his poetry and me going to many, many poetry open mikes to watch him perform. The chilling things I experienced as a poetry cheerleader are probably a whole separate story in their own right; epic sagas about political torture in South Africa, crimes against rhyming couplets that even Clintons Cards would reject as twee. People using creative writing as therapy when they should have just done the decent thing and got some therapy, and some slightly more fetching outerwear while they were at it. Giant rambling introductions explaining what a poem was about, its allusions, its significance, its place in the pantheon of Western literature, which lasted about ten times as long as the poem itself.

Nobody should have to sit through that sort of thing, but the fact remained; that’s exactly what I was doing, just sitting on the sidelines carping. It was all very well criticising, but could I really have done any better? At least these people were living the dream, even if their efforts might have been better suited to a private rendition in a room with padded wallpaper. Why did I still feel envious?

Anyway, let’s fast forward to happier times. By which I mean last Sunday, because the conclusion of this particular story happens in the unlikely setting of our local.

Kelly and I had decided to brave the pub quiz so we traipsed along, ready for our weekly battle with the twin forces of trivia and our own ignorance. On this occasion we were joined by Jof and Jenny who have recently moved into our block of flats. Over a few pints on our meteoric ascent to the dizzying heights of second place we got to chatting about what we do for a living, what Reading’s like, where we like to hang out in town; all the smalltalk which inevitably features when you properly meet someone for the first time. They are young and cool in that way I try not to think too hard about. Spending time with people in their twenties is always a tricky thing for people in their thirties to do without suddenly feeling in your forties.

It was during that conversation that Jof inadvertently triggered all of this, because at one point he happened to mention that he was in a band.

I think that was the moment where I had my realisation, that one of the most magical things that has happened over the last year is that I don’t have that envy any more. I may still have some trepidation about seeming like an tool, but it’s largely confined to the dance floor these days. Meanwhile, I've quite cheerfully made myself look like an idiot by writing about about all manner of things, and somehow it doesn't seem to matter. In a way it’s a bit like standing on the stage at bingo in Bristol all over again, except this time it's my own material.

It’s been a tricky journey to get from there to here, but I’d recommend it to anyone. It’s been amazing, and now I’m here can gladly confirm that the view is well worth it. Before, when somebody told me they were in a band, or writing a novel, or performing stand-up, or doing photography I would have shrugged, indifferent on the outside. But inwardly I know I would have been thinking Oh, he’s creative. Lucky bastard, I wish I was, as if they knew another language I couldn’t speak and would never learn. But now I don’t, because I am creative too. I create things.

And you read them.