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DAY THIRTY THREE
Today we’re acknowledging the conceit of this thing, but also what it does….
Richard said on day 6 that we hadn’t stopped. We still haven’t stopped. I’m writing this now, on day 31, sitting cross-legged on my sofa after dinner. I started writing it on day 8, in response to the thing that Richard wrote on days 4 and 5 for day 6, but I’ve only just now – almost two weeks later – had the time to turn my scribbled thoughts into something co-hesive/-herent enough to send over. That’s how this has been working. We’ve all been writing or finding things and sending them to Richard who is piecing them together along with things he’s written or found too. It’s a sort of conversation between us. We’re having it in public, but let’s not pretend it’s not edited or curated. We’ve definitely been showing you the bits we want you to see. And Richard, with our permission in advance, has made changes to what we’ve written. I didn’t even write that – or this – line. He did.
We still haven’t stopped. But we have been finding moments for pause. Together, around tables, and on our own, in private.
I started writing this sat in the car outside the house. I’d pulled over to write down the things that were in my head before I forgot them. I often find myself writing things sat outside of somewhere, or on buses, or just before bed with a toothbrush in my other hand.
Moments of pause don’t always come where we expect them.
In February this year I was 31. When Quarantine was being formed I was 11. In another 20 years I will be 51. I cannot imagine what I will be doing then. I can’t find any image or sensation that tells me what being 51 will be like. (Please help if you can: info@qtine.com).
It’s an interesting process being involved in thinking about what comes next. What we will become. There’s an awful lot of stuff that’s gone before me. More than XXXXXXXX time of thinking and processes and performances and events. I imagine there will be a lot of stuff that comes after me too. Sometimes I really feel the weight of all that history. But in the end I don’t suppose it matters all that much. There will always be stuff that goes before and stuff that comes after.
I moved to Manchester in 2012. I didn’t mean to stay a long time.
My Grandparents on my Dad’s side lived in Clackmannanshire for their entire lives.
My Grandparents on my Mum’s side lived in Edinburgh for their entire lives.
Sometimes I think about what I might be doing with my life if I wasn’t part of Quarantine. When I was 18 I was offered a job as a Manager in Lidl. I turned it down and instead I went to Japan and China and Vietnam and Laos and Thailand and Singapore and came back with no money at all. If I’d taken that job I’d probably have worked my way up a career ladder. I’d be earning double what I do now. There’s a chance I would have stayed in Edinburgh my whole life.
I moved to Manchester in 2012. I didn’t mean to stay a long time, but now I’m here, I’m not sure where to go next.
Sometimes stopping is over-rated. Sometimes stopping is not an intentional act.
Sometimes stopping means treading water. Running out of ideas. Standing still while the rest of the world continues to move around you. Some kinds of stopping distort time and meaning and all the days begin to run together.
Eventually, I don’t know in how many years, I’ll live somewhere near the sea.
Of course the moon and the stars will be the same ones.
Today and tomorrow, we’ll keep going.
We’ll have conversations about the events we’re going to do as part of Tenancy next year. We’ll imagine what our next touring show will look like. We’ll think about how we might bring in some more funding to make things happen. We’ll discuss how to talk about the work that we are making with the people that might come to see it. We’ll argue about who and what counts as ‘the public’ as we construct a competition to design public space. We’ll read books and watch films and try to see the world from a different angle. We’ll joke about making a musical so often that it will end up happening.
Postscript
Earlier I was in House of Fraser on Deansgate. Kendals as everyone in Manchester calls it. I only went in to use the toilet. On my way through the store, I was reminded that they are closing down by the huge signs announcing that everything is now 20% off. In the ladies bathroom on the third floor, all but one of the soap dispensers were out of order. I wondered if they had stopped buying new stock because eventually, soon, everything else there was going to stop anyway.
Post-postscript
p.s. – i was so busy writing about time that I lost track of time, forgot I was running a bath, and almost flooded our bathroom… (!)
p.p.s. – don’t tell the people on the Aldi Lovers Facebook page that I was once offered a job at Lidl. I don’t want them to kick me out of the group…
Made by Quarantine