Enjoying The Tunnel
Even/Especially when you can see the light at the end of it
Hey team,
Somehow we have made it to July. In two weeks time I will have finished my tour, and in three weeks time my son will be one year old, and I’m not quite sure how we got to either. I am also putting the finishing touches on my 100 poems for my new book, so much so that I’ve been laying them all out on the kitchen table to play around with the order (see image below), a vision I’ve had since the very beginning that was everything as nerdy and creative as I hoped it would be. It does however mean that it is a particularly hectic moment where it feels like the rest of my life is being put on hold, with a view that very soon all that I will have to worry about is seeing my friends, recording a Schöfferhofer music video and whether I can eat everything that the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate on the Saturday of my son’s birthday week (particularly excited about the pickle/slice of cheese/chocolate cake combo).
With this is mind a friend suggested that if I was too busy I could get my son to write this month’s newsletter given how popular Grace’s effort was. I put this to him and he came up with:
V gjbnmvtgn ygyfcgv v
which we can all agree is very profound. What I think he is getting at is that it is very tempting to use the idea of a brighter future to get through the present. To think of a time when I am not refreshing the ticket page for my last couple of London gigs daily now that I am getting them filmed (!) and I want it to look and feel as vibey as possible, or when of an evening I might decide to actually read a book rather than continue to obsess over the one I am writing. The problem with this mindset is I absolutely love it. Not only are the gigs my favourite thing to do, that you can bet your bottom dollar I’m going to be enjoying every second of after all of this buildup (including hiring a 50-person choir for the London shows!), but I am finding the writing process for this book completely fascinating and enthralling and part of me will feel at a loss when it is done. To be writing about something that I believe in (and to have a chance to try it out at gigs as I go) is never something I will take for granted, so I am making sure I enjoy it while I am in it, as well as letting myself look forward to a nice cold Schöff well-earned break when it is done !
Speaking of Those Final Gigs
The only three tour dates that still have tickets left are Leicester (11th July), Norwich (12th July Matinee), and London (19th July Matinee and Evening) - I have just released the final 50 tickets for the London evening show, and I would love for it to be full of beautiful newsletter readers (and/or their friends) so if you or anyone you think might like it is free you can get tickets here. By the time next month’s newsletter comes around you may never have to see this glorious umbrella/welly combo again so here is the full poster in all its glory one last time to see how far we’ve come.
Any Other Business
Keeping it short and sweet this month due to the aforementioned hecticness (hecticity?), but we had a lovely three week trip to scotland with some gigs in the middle, thanks for asking. In keeping with the rest of my life, most pictures from our trip are of my son (or a topless shoot of my brother-in-law to entice people to sponsor a 5k swim he is doing to raise money for Gaza), however I did particularly love the below picture of me at Solas festival, I think it’s the best photo of me ever taken in front of a toilet (so far). Meanwhile I may have stopped the live Something Borrowed gigs for summer but the recordings keep on coming, the latest being with the fab Vanessa Kisuule who will be joining me for some Christmas shows in December if you like to plan that far ahead. Someone just emailed me to say that the Airbnb they checked into in Athens had some lines of my poetry spelt out on the fridge, a fact that requires two people in a row to be familiar with my work in that scenario, which is a very lovely thing. I think that’s it for now. I know that I love you. I hope that I will see you in London/Leicester/Norwich in the next week or two. Stay brilliant x
