Getting Lost In My Home Town

I really like, 'Getting Lost In My Home Town' as a title, I fully intend to use it for a show at some point. Possibly for the next solo-ish show? No, I've got a title for that already, so maybe for a third show, which will inevitably tour mid-next year once I'm bored of 'Short Plays For Lanky People', which tours in November and that's a show I've not actually written yet? No, I'm getting ahead of myself. Calm down, Richards. But with, 'Getting Lost In My Home Town' there is a certain relevance to my current feelings which makes me feel like I should be writing this one now instead - the uncertainty of a lot of things; the need to actually find a home rather than a base, to feel comfortable and stop for just a second rather than having to constantly readjust: we're half way through a year where my employment history has been, well, complicated to say the least. I was bored anyway, change is important, but it's exhausting sometimes, isn't it? And the last week has proved that things are never simple, I think I just attract complications. On a literal level, I did kind of get lost in my home town last night - Royston is 7 minutes from the flat I live in, it took me 40 minutes to find the venue due to the somewhat confusing one-way system. But also, I'm getting bored of Cambridgeshire - and I get the sense it's getting bored of me, too. It's an age-old rant about the constant battle of trying to win over a genuine following rather than having to rely on friends all the time for local events, but the problem with that is that my friends are just so wonderful so I get lazy when it comes down to promotion.

Tonight we had our second fringe fundraiser of the week, it's a big ask - two events in one week (not that anyone made it to the first one anyway), and it was just a reminder that we're doing too much in Cambridge. We put a lot of work into the 'alternative games' night tonight, making up games isn't easy. Two people turned up (I'm so very grateful to both of them - Cat, who is from Dowsing but whom I'd never actually met before, and her housemate Luke), and Claudia played some cracking solo tunes afterwards. It was fun - even with just myself, Izzy, Claudia, Cat and Luke - 'Broken Relationship Bingo' would probably work better with more people (it involved a new short story I wrote this afternoon called, 'Cheap Love' and 60 names and bingo cards), and other nice moments include, 'What's Paul Cooking' - a new game Izzy devised, and my 5 questions about cheese seemed to go down well. We could really do this evening again, somewhere else...remember that buzz I got taking the show to various different bits of the UK a couple months ago? The thrill of new audiences looking suspicious at me but eventually being won over? Sometimes 'eventually' can feel like quite a long time, but we always get there, somehow. I know tonight was only the smallest of fundraisers and was a games/quiz night, not a show as such - but it was still a show. The two actual audience members (ie; non-performers) enjoyed it, we stayed for drinks after and it was lovely, in a strange kind of way it was a cracking evening. But it is just a reminder that I do too much around here - I'm in bands that barely play in Cambridge anymore even though we're from here and it makes perfect sense to me, and I need to take on this mentality with my theatre work too before nights like tonight become the norm.

These are slightly unsettling times, creatively a bonus but make or break times...but one thing is for sure: I've just rediscovered an old Lightning Seeds playlist I made myself and it sounds fucking awesome. Who would have thought that a bunch of slightly dated late-90's, synth-heavy tunes would still sound so timeless?