A Life Out of the Theatre

On a sunny afternoon in June 1969 I arrived outside the Theatre Royal in Bury St Edmunds, I tried the front foyer doors which were locked so I went down the alley at the side of the building, through some tall doors, into a workshop and through onto the stage. A man was there by himself tying a backcloth onto a flying bar.
“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m the new ASM” I said.

“Well you better tie that on there then” he said and I did.

Almost exactly forty-five years later to the day I tottered out of the First Night of Terry Gilliam’s production of ‘Benvenuto Cellini’  at English National Opera and thought “That’s it. I don’t want to do this anymore” No reflection on the production which had been excellent and, on the whole fun to do, with a cast of more than a hundred on stage and 9m high inflatable of the bottom half of a naked man (well statue actually), but it seemed to me to be a good show to go out on.

All of which is fine but I still need to work, I need to earn a living. In financial terms I have, in general, been a grasshopper rather than an ant. There is no massive pension pot to retire on nor a second home in Florida. So what to do? Many of you may know that I have been flogging old postcards and ephemera on ebay for some years so my wife and I have decided that I should try and  expand this into a full time occupation. So as well as continuing to sell on ebay we get up astonishingly early one day a weekend, load up the car and drive off to a postcard/stamp/collector’s fair and we enjoy it. It’s good fun. We have to go to auctions to buy new stock, I am one of the leathery old gits that you see in the background of 'Flog-It' or 'Cash in the Attic'. Can we make enough to survive? Well  when a Chinese politician was once  asked “Was the French Revolution a good thing?” he replied “It’s too soon to tell”.

What about cycling? I have come up with a few schemes. Favourite is ‘Basingstoke to St Petersburg’. I have done some calculations and reckon it’s an 18 day ride from Calais to Gdansk and another 20/21 to St Petersburg. Almost identical to my Danube trip. Unfortunately I can’t afford to be away that long, I need to be manning my postcard stall  at Haywards Heath/Canterbury/Bath/ Birmingham at the weekends. For a while I toyed with the idea of a “Nowheresville Tour” which involved an entirely random cycle ride around England the only condition being that I should stay every night in a place that I have never heard of. The randomness was attractive but I am extremely well travelled and I would end up cycling in ever decreasing circles round rural Lincolnshire. Finally the bookshelves in the downstairs loo which house the travel section of my library came to my aid. I picked up an old favourite, Paul Theroux’s “The Kingdom by the Sea”, written in 1982 the year of the Falklands War. Theroux, an American, had lived in London for eleven years but had rarely ventured far beyond the M25 (not surprising since it wasn’t built until 1986) and certainly never to Lincolnshire. He decided to circumnavigate the UK in a clockwise direction using coastal railways where possible and walking where not. Coincidentally another travel writer Jonathan Raban chose to sail round the UK, though in an anti-clockwise direction at the same time and wrote about his journey in a book called “Coasting”. This also used to be on the shelves in the downstairs loo but seems not to have survived one of my periodic culls. I do remember that the two travel writing titans did have an awkward meeting somewhere along the way.

So a ride round the Coastline of England and Wales with a possible excursion along Hadrian’s Wall. What are the rules? Rules! What rules? Why do there have to be rules? Because without rules we will all go to Hell in a handcart. I will try and ride as close to the sea as seems sensibly possible but not along the high tide mark nor along the coastal path which is a nightmare of steps, stiles, gates and mud. Tarmac only.  Due to my postcard dealing commitments the journey will have to be done in fits and starts, two days here, three days there but somehow it will be done.