5 Days Which Changed Everything

Episode 1

It’s a strange thing to be living in this beautiful city, Edinburgh, in the middle of this amazing festival

And I can’t bear to see any of it.

I tell myself to at least look, at least look and see what’s happening

But somehow I can’t do that either.

And why I can’t is bound up with this play. Because it tells a true story.

It began in 2004. Maybe it was spring. I was over in Cove Park, an arts centre in a remote place off the west coast, working with a dance artist on a new dance/text piece about memory.

Which meant it was very hard for my family to get in touch to tell me that out of nowhere my partner, Susie, had had a stroke.

When I got back I found her in deep deep distress in the hospital; but over the next few days we negotiated her release, and got her back home, and she seemed to have recovered.

But it was a strange kind of stroke, I couldn’t help thinking, because one side did not seem any weaker than the other, but I had to go down to Birmingham for rehearsals and there wasn’t time to think it through.

And then a wee bit later we all went to Portugal on holiday together. We went to the lovely northern seaside town of Moledo do Minho, as we usually did, but it wasn’t right somehow, and we spent a few days in Porto on the way back.

As we usually did. And me and my daughter Rebecca went across to the port lodges to sample the port and get a bit tiddly, as we usually did.

But it wasn’t fun any more. 

We were staying in a small hotel, and Susie was getting lost trying to find the way from reception back to our room, and we had all been telling ourselves that she would get better, and life would go on as before…

But that afternoon we knew, Rebecca and I, with our hearts full of dread, we knew she wasn’t going to get better and things weren’t ever going to be as they were again.

And then I think I had to go back to Birmingham again, and rehearsals were a nightmare, but at last I got to get home and we could be together for the beginning of the festival.

That was always such a special time for us.

Back then we lived in an old brewery on Calton Road, just off the Royal Mile, and we’d walk slowly up the hill to the castle and down Johnston Terrace to the Traverse Theatre and catch the opening play, and there was always this sense of excitement and pleasure and celebration of creativity in the air, and so walking through the crowds would be such a pleasure.

But not that year. Susie kept bumping into people, though she perceived them as bumping into her…

And we could neither of us understand what was going on, and it frightened us.

And I perceived for the first time that this is a festival for able-bodied people.

And if you happen not to be able-bodied, you’re treated with no consideration at all.

And the energy of the crowd, which used to be so exciting, now had the energy of a nightmare.

I think it was that day the headaches started.

Each day they got worse, and the doctor would come round, and leave a stronger prescription, and I would struggle up the crowds to the chemist by the Storytelling Centre to get the stronger painkillers.

It was an important chemist in those days, and maybe still is, for heroin addicts to pick up their methadone, and there’d always be couple just outside the door, or waiting at the counter and their suffering added to the nightmarish feeling I was getting from the crowds outside.

It was as if the air of celebration in the streets wasn’t a real celebration, but a kind of facade covering something very ugly.

Something everyone should be looking at it but was running away from, somehow…

I had the same feeling  yesterday in George Square, amidst all the fast food shacks and the leaflets and the unbearably loud music.

I was on my way to lead a workshop, and my watch got worried the noise would damage my eardrums, and I felt as if it was hurting my soul.

Because it was all wrong somehow, we shouldn’t just be hurtling heedlessly on, we need to stop and be together and consider.

Consider what we can do about the catastrophe approaching us…

But we can’t, somehow, just as I couldn’t during that festival all those years ago.

That festival that I can’t get out of my mind, that I need to look at and reflect upon.

Way way back in the winter of 1962 after my mum died I never spoke about it.

You weren’t supposed to talk about grief. You just soldiered on as best you could and the idea was that with time passing it would get better all by itself.

But it didn’t, of course. Just as the much greater disaster confronting all of us will not get better all by itself.

We have to find the courage to confront it.

Something I said once has been put up on a sign outside the Lyceum Theatre:

“Empathy is a muscle. Theatre is the gym.”

Maybe that’s what these short plays are. Like weight training for beginners.

That learning to confront this individual tragedy will maybe give us the strength to confront our own.

If this somehow speaks to any experience of grief you might have had, do feel free to share it if you wish

I hope you understand my reasons for putting the actual script behind a firewall: it’s the product of much suffering and skill and deserves to be valued.

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On the other hand - and perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this - you can listen for free via BBC Sounds. You can find it here:

5 Days Which... ep 1

And I have been paid for this. It was the money coming from the BBC to extend their broadcast rights that reminded me of this play and made me want to share it….

You can share it too…