I can forcast foreboding winds of depression like a weatherman. It’s a debilitating season. Look on my web page at the top left, Oct Nov December and January are omitted. They are the dark months when I find it difficult to construct a sentence because life is like living one. Getting rid of it is like trying to shake off your own skin. So I wait.
It’s virtually spring. The Journalist whose book has been released in The US has a review in The Washington Post. Considering Washington is the Habersha capital outside Addis it’s important. Considering it’s the Washington post it’s important. I am requested
to read the review aloud at the kitchen table. It’s a wonderful start to the day.
And so I will buy a bike. On Wednesday I am being filmed riding my bicycle to the
Southbank Centre. It is a great excuse to buy a new one. I’ll give the old one to The Journalists brother. Carlos at Londonfield cycles gives us great service and after an hour or two we ride home. What a treat. It’s been quite the week. I returned from new York and had to turn down an offer to read at a literature festival in Kenya because I’m booked to teach in Devon. My father went to Kenya as a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines.
Today I am in the Guardian Newspaper as one of the performers at a brand new venue at The Southbank called The Udderbelly. The piece also mentions my play Why I Don’t Hate White people which shall be at The Udderbelly. It is tremendous news that The Southbank centre has a new four hundred seater venue. It opens in July I think. It’s
going to be an amazing summer.
The bicycle is beautiful but there is no time to ride it. By 6pm the journalist and I are off to see Warhorse at The Lyttleton Theatre in the grand National on the southbank of the thames and two minutes from my office. There are only a few days left before iWarhorse ends its run here and goes on to The West End. It’s sold out but thankfully I know someone. It is directed by Tom Morris whom helped commission a play of mine, Something Dark, at Battersea Arts Centre.
We sit down on the second row facing the stage and I start chatting to the woman to my right. We realise that we know each other . She is Tamsin who used to work at The ICA twenty years ago. We both remember the specific gig where we met. It was an event with
Tony Benn, Test Department and Jazzie B. Curtis Flowers kindly got us tickets but was so humble about the part he played. Because warhorse is jawdropping. It felt like a child’s first time at the theatre. The journalist and I are aghast at the entire beauty of the piece
and the horses. But it was Curtis that won the day for The Journalist and I. He was brilliant. I am honoured that he was once in a play of mine at Contact Theatre in Manchester called Storm. He since went to the RSC and now he is here. Incredible.
As the play ends and the audience is in floods of tears I hear “Lemn, Lemn” and a guy with a hat on looks at me smiling. Who is it? I look at him again. I know I know him. But who is it? Rowan Heath. Rowan Heath used to be my keyboard player (or I used to be his poet) in my band called Secret Society. His father is a Guyanese writer and we knew each other. He once had a record that he asked me to write a rap for the b side. That record became “The key. The Secret”. He ahd to live my band to go and make himself a million pounds and travelled the world. And he did. He moved from manchester to live in Hampstead.
The Journalist and I meet curtis afterwards, in the artists bar backstage for a drink and gush like kids towards him. Then waving bye we walk under waterloo bridge to the southbank centre to see Aida Kaisy and Omar who had taken their parents to see the London Philarmonic Orchestra. The Thames is dark, a slow motion charge of black stallions. What a day. What a great great day and beautiful night. The taxi bolts home. Spring is here. I predict clear skies ahead and a warm front and red skies to come, at night.