Mind the gap

Had a blasts from the past last week , not since my dark distant art college years of heavy pot smoking have I had such an intense sense of fear and suffucation !
Like the cannabis madness I experienced during an Art school occupation in 86 (Education Minister Norman Fowler was threatening to cut arts budgets , sound familiar !)
I experienced the disembodied sensation combined with the fear of my imminent mortality with out the 8 hot knives we inhaled on that first thick heady night .
This high octane feeling is of course a panic attack , seemed to come from no where and can effect people in many different ways , a good friend of mine settled on the sceaming running around approach . For some reason I took on the role of a Noel Coward movie and with a stiff British upper lip managed to lean toward my lovely wife and proclaim my fear of my immanent demise !
Trying to trace back the source of this reaction has been hard as apart from the usual melée of family life (trying to control the relentless surge of everyday residue ) I had only visited a friends contemporary art exhibition . Now I would love to say that the content of her pieces , fired up by the infidelity of her husband had sown a seed in my male brain that had caused old sins of my pre Noel days to surface and haunt me but the sharpened stakes and the wilted wax figures just left me wondering what we shared if anything under that wide umbrella that is Art !
Maybe it's my subconscious screaming out to me to pickle a few sharks , drink a bottle of turps and paint with my own excrement but that really all sound a bit exhausting, I'll stick to smoking the odd joint and then eating half a box of ginger chocolates .

Dads Army

I have survived show week ! It's like getting through a military campaign , Noel as the Artistic Director is the General ( a sort of beautiful female Winston Churchill, if that's possible !) I meanwhile , am the Arthor Lowe character , head of the home guard , keeping the home fires burning and painting my legs with gravey browning whilst looking out for enemy parachutist " They don't like it up 'em "..... sorry ! I think I got a little carried away there !!!
That's what show week does to you ,if you're not a little bit crackers before then the 6 months of build up to those 5 shows can test any one , and I wasn't even involved with putting on "Our House" a Madness extravaganza .
Noel has been directing shows for Encore Youth Theatre for over Ten years but has been marinating in thespian soup for over 30 years !!! Their shows are fantastic thanks to her incedibly strong support from her brigadiers .
My role as head of the Home guard is as much about listening to intelligence from the front , trying to rebuild moral and luckily not having to cook whale fritters as Noel is very good at planning our rations .
We now have Noel back on leave for 6 months nursing her trench foot and suffering flash backs ( more after show blues !) until the call up papers slip through the door and she gets that sparkle of battle fever in her eyes again.