Steve's blog

I woke edgy, even before I opened my eyes. I couldn’t hide it any more, it was going to happen - this thing had to be born. I’d told my friends and colleagues at work almost two months earlier, only to be met with silence as if to say, surely he’s not going to go through with this.

What held me to the date, apart from a contract and the exchange of money, was the kind words of those close to me urging me on, and the stubborn belief that it simply had to be done.

My lover helped me to find the right venue. But even then it wasn’t completely real, until the morning and the rapidly gathering hours. Thankfully though, I did have the opportunity of a very short practice run, for five minutes on each of the three previous Saturdays. They were cause for concern in themselves. Street theatre. How was I to attract an audience without begging or appearing, rather ironically, to be mad?

Sometimes I like to think of myself as an actor; I’ve played in several amateur performances to very welcoming local crowds in a village hall and I’ve taken classes in improvisation. I have also performed some of my poems but I’m a long way from the open stage.

You only have to say ‘poetry’ to some people and it’s as if a light has suddenly gone out. They switch off, as if it meant tea at the vicar’s with cucumber sandwiches. They’re unaware of the energy that can accompany mastery of the spoken word, the rhythm, the imagery, the whole sound.

18th May 2008. After the extravagance of performing at two book launches for friends and relations, (when Fast Train Approaching… first became an e-book and then a paperback) this moment was to be the first time for me to go public, in the raw and at the Komedia Club in the Brighton Festival Fringe. I was to describe my experience of breakdown, and survival. My name was in the programme, I was committed (in a manner of speaking). So what was the performance called? It was to be ‘An Acute Psychotic Episode.’

So where did it all begin? Childhood?...perhaps, but somehow it seems to have been triggered by this experience …Picture a café in Garrick Street in London’s West End, over ten years ago, on the evening of the 14th January 1997. And this is what happened as I was drinking a cappuccino with my friend, also an Environmental Health Officer.

Teabag in a wineglass

There are many dainty rules
of etiquette intended to avoid
the incongruous, designed
not to upset, like picking up

a bone china tea cup between
thumb and forefinger
with little finger cocked…

or tipping a soup bowl away
from you, to finish
the very last drop...

But when the dried, gritty clump
of chocolate powder (is it?)
caught between your teeth

turns out to have legs,
etiquette can go stuff itself.
Waiter: there’s a flipping
cockroach in my cappuccino!

…And there really was! I picked it out of my mouth
from between my teeth.

For more on what happened next, the show, street theatre, coming out, standing up to be counted… see you in a couple of weeks.