reflections on an August trip to Edinburgh

the ways in which I fail myself recur: on performing a micro-run of a self-produced micro-budget solo comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Towards the end of my time in Edinburgh, following the final performance of my solo show, Bald Personality Disorder, I sat (solo, of course) in a Sri Lankan restaurant having enjoyed a delicious meal I was about to pay for with money I’d been given in exchange for live performance¹. As I pulled the unfamiliar Scottish bank notes from my wallet², I saw a quotation on it from a writer called Nan Shepherd (whose work, I must admit, I do not know), and that line was: “It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.”

And although my moment reflecting on this statement was interrupted by the all-of-a-sudden extremely present waiter whose style of service had switched from distant to close as soon as he saw the flickering of cash against the tabletop, the phrase stuck in my head.

Because what else was my trip to the Fringe if not a moment of just exactly that?

This trip to Edinburgh – a little over a week – was the longest amount of time I’d been away from my child since he was born about two years ago, and – I realised just before I got the train home – this was the longest amount of days I’d consistently slept alone in a bed probably since 2018³, when I was doing my last bit of (imo) very successful living: hanging out in a beautiful non-English city with my dog and enough work to cover food, rent, cheap cava and all of the anti-depressants I felt like I needed, with enough free time to produce the initial/continued/final drafts of essentially all of the best writing I would (to date!) produce⁴. 

This August, I was staying in student halls in a flat with five or six other people, only one of whom I knew personally in advance, and only two of whom (including the one I already knew) that I ever saw in the flat for long enough to chat to. There were other people in there, I think: I heard snoring through the indiscreetly thin walls and encountered total strangers for moments in the middle of the night in the flat’s corridor, though it is possible that these flashes of personhood weren’t flat-sharing strangers, but rather phantasms, ghosts, spirits; the lost or flagging souls of previous tenants of these halls; perhaps students who never made it through the whole four years of a standard Scottish degree, or maybe other Fringe performers who didn’t make it through previous Augusts, decades ago…

I’m not saying those lost souls were necessarily the remnants of the dead, either; I think it’s quite possible for a body to continue moving forward in space and time without there really being any personhood, any hope, any reality, left echoing inside them.

Certainly, until very recently, that had been me.

My body functioning like a ghost, haunting myself and maybe the bodies and minds it had encountered before it all shut down, gave up, fell apart…

And maybe I’m not quite that empty shell any more, but I’m deeply worried I will become that again, soon, and I am deeply worried that it won’t be possible for me to move onwards and into a hopeful future without any real self.

Because, the way in which I fail myself recurs.

The issue that repeats and repeats and repeats is the lack of a sense of self worth. A failure to be able to hold onto self-knowledge and act in support of it.

I do the thing that I don’t want to do but feel “obliged” to, knowing it will make me miserable, and then make me miserable it does.

And I’m not vilified internally by knowing the outcome in advance, I instead lose a little bit of the self-respect again, because each time I take a step that will knowingly immiserate⁵ me, I see myself as pathetic, unredeemable, unable to escape the cycle and the chain that I have trapped myself within.

I don’t push at the things that are hard yet have the potential for solace or joy.

I don’t live where I want to live. I haven’t worked in years in a way that feels compatible with living⁶.

What should I be doing? Pursuing, relentlessly and properly, the things that bring me joy? That’s impractical, yes, of course; but should it be the focus, the purpose, of all acts, rather than the mere “getting by”? Maybe?

Every act that is pragmatic instead of passionate leads, inevitably, to misery. And I know it.

–///–

I had a great time at the Edinburgh Fringe.

I performed in several busy rooms and I had a couple of my own shows hit the audience and ticket sales targets that I had (a couple of times, alas, out of seven), and I felt a little smug and a little smart that I’d done it all without pissing over and away the budget that I’d set myself.

I ate one meal in a restaurant the whole time I was there and otherwise survived on homemade sandwiches, LIDL tortellini and Tesco/Sainsbury meal deals.

I watched several shows and didn’t toss money away on bland lagers (that’s a compliment for a lager) or vodka-sodas.

I didn’t throw thousands of pounds at hiring a venue with a famous name or location, I didn’t spend hundreds of pounds on a team of flyerers and I didn’t get window-sized posters of myself pasted all over the city.

And, creatively, too, I didn’t push myself as hard as in a dream scenario I would have/could have done.

My show – BALD PERSONALITY DISORDER (available to tour, email me!) – is something I’m absolutely happy with as a piece in that its structure coheres, it contains many sections I think are very funny, and it has an emotional and narrative arc that doesn’t end with intentional or bland false positivity; that said, the revelations of self are the same as covered in two of my half-decade old books, the pleasure of regret, which looks at class, sex, mental health and my personality disorder diagnosis; and hip-hop-o-crit, which explores gender and my relationship to my own sense of self, as well as creativity, hope and the risks of ossification⁷.

And although shifting creative form and embracing live performance is absolutely something that has a meaningful personal heft to it (I have done something I am not ashamed of, something that doesn’t feel like a mistake⁸, even if it sometimes does feel, obliquely, like something I shouldn’t have done, that I’m not allowed to do, that I don’t deserve to have done⁹), and I have no regrets about it, there’s a part of me that sees my peers and/or rivals commiserating about the slightly bigger successes they’ve had than me this Summer, but almost all of them flagging how much money – twice, thrice, quadruple, more than I spent – they spent on it. And this doesn’t make me feel sensible and mature, having made and stuck to an affordable budget based on the worst case scenario of absolutely nobody coming to see my show and/or absolutely no one PAYING to see my show, it makes me feel like I lacked the self-belief that all of these other people had in themselves as artists.

Because although the worst case scenario didn’t happen, the overall numbers involved weren’t significantly higher than that lol, but that was enough to mean I didn’t spend any of my pre-existing money on food or drink (as I mentioned, though, I did solely eat out of supermarkets and had one single “treat” meal out on the final day of my run, which cost me under £30).

So, yes, the show was an “economic success” in that it didn’t have any unexpected and unbudgeted costs.

But, maybe, if I had thrown every penny of accessible debt/credit I could get hold of at it, sinking a grand or two (or three? (or four? (many more?))) into PR, poster advertising, online advertising, a dramaturg, a script doctor, a costume designer, a technician, etc etc etc, I would have ended up with something mind-blowingly good and something flocked to by literally tens of people?

But I didn’t do that. And that didn’t feel like the right thing to do, the sensible thing to do. And as I wrote in a recent post here about the poetry collection Twist, being pragmatic doesn’t make me feel good. Being creatively fulfilled makes me feel good.

So, as much as I am unthrilled by my recent return to full time work, there is a part of me that thinks that (hopefully!) having a bit more financial rope to lean on in the longer term means that I will be able to flatter myself with taking a bigger financial risk on myself, performancewise.

But – and I suppose this is the thing that I keep coming back to when I think about it – if I had had more money and/or time to focus on the show these past few months, would prioritising marketing have been the best thing to do?

No, I don’t think it would have been.

I think creative collaboration would have been the thing to do, and that’s what I will choose to focus on next time.

I have a new WIP of a show being debuted in about six weeks as part of the Lambeth Fringe, and though only approximately two thirds of that shows exists at this point as something performable, I know that if the choice comes up in the developmental process of this show between performing to a near-empty room with some costumes and stagecraft that I love, or performing a professionally-marketed show to a busy room full of strangers, but where the cash spent in making that happen has come out of the props, costumes or technician budget, then – for me – it’s a no-brainer.

Until I’m confident that I’m making the best performances I can make on the topics/themes that I’ve chosen to focus on, then I would rather the people that show up are just other weird freaks like me who’ve read my blurb and made a conscious decision, without coercion, into giving lil ol’ scott manley hadley a punt and an hour of their time.

Yes, I learned some valuable lessons about what I like, creatively, what I want, creatively, and what I want to prioritise – artistically, economically, logistically – prior to making another show.

I had a good time. And I, ultimately, have no regrets.

Thank you, Edinburgh!

–///–

If you are interested in seeing what I do next, I’ll be onstage twice at the Lambeth Fringe in October, once performing a VERY EARLY think-through of my (maybe?) next solo show, SEVENTEEN SONGS ABOUT LONELY VAMPIRES, and once taking part in a live podcast recording of THE BIG BALD BOOK CLUB as the second part of a show where that podcast’s other host, Martin Corrigan, performs his first ever WIP of a potential future solo show.

Exciting times ahead!

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1. Let’s make this clear, I did not “make money” from the six-day Edinburgh Fringe run of BALD PERSONALITY DISORDER. I lost money, of course I did, but no more than (just about) I could afford to spend.
   Just because you have revenue doesn’t mean you have profit or taxable earnings.
   The total I made across seven solo performances and two nominally paid live shows (one of which paid me literally two pounds) was less than the cost of the train travel to Edinburgh, though (tbf) if I’d made as much at each performance as I did at the last and busiest one, the accommodation would have (again, just!) been covered. But to have a performance space that busy (or busier!) each day, would I have had to spend significantly more money on marketing (probably yes) and would I have had to have made a better (or at least slicker) show (probably also yes), both of which would have cost time and money that I simply haven’t had this year?
   I’ve put this bit in a footnote because I think it’s facile, boring and utterly against the point of doing a self-produced free show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to loudly complain about how much it cost you to do it.
   A labour of love, made affordable thanks to to the Free Fringe. I am, as we all so often forget, from a working class background of no cultural capital. I just don’t talk about this much much because no one really believes it any more without a long explanation and, alas, I find that explanation boring to regale. ↩︎
2. I mean any banknote would be unfamiliar to me at this point, and I don’t just mean because I don’t have much money…
   Although it is true that I don’t have much money, as mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I’ve recently gone back to full time work, so I have slightly more “not much money” than I have done for the past couple of years. But with slightly more “not much money”, I will also now have basically minimal time to ever “exist”.
   It is a bind and I hate that I’ve ended up in it and I hope, dream, wish, need, a cessation (or at least a realistic and achievable plan for its cessation) up and running at some point, I think. One month and already I feel like I may as well be back on all the medication and sleepwalking through life again…
   I already pay so little attention to myself that the simple things I need (work that isn’t undignified and/or ethically unjustifiable; a home somewhere that doesn’t require 30+hours of work a week to cover non-discretionary spending) feel utterly and eternally unacheiveable.
   I just yearn to be able to sit and think for a few hours more than once a month.
   I wish I had time to formulate, create, edit. And I know that I’m still pumping the blog out and that having a commute again is giving me a bit more space to be able to do this on the train each morning, but that isn’t what I mean.
   The blog is bare minimum.
   This is “doing a poo” level of self care, as in if I wasn’t doing this I’d probably be dead within a few weeks and though, yes, it is almost enjoyable to do, and does sometimes necessitate disgusting and embarrassing clean-ups.
   Sorry, this was meant to be a footnote about cash.
   I also meant that banknotes are unfamiliar because I very rarely have any need for cash.
   Cash is weird. Where do people who use it a lot get it from? Are they going out of their way to use cash points? Or just getting paid cash for work? Which employers do this? And where are those employers getting all the cash from? Where? Where? Where? How? How? How? ↩︎
3. Being lonely isn’t really something I ever complain about! ↩︎
4. Go go go go go and buy and read your own personal copies of the pleasure of regret and hip-hop-o-crit if you haven’t already!!! ↩︎
5. I’m pretty certain (though not 100%) that this a word other people also use to mean “make miserable”. ↩︎
6. This is going to become a frequent theme on the blog going forward. I’m (for now!) back in full time work, but not in an exciting and ethically unambiguous way. Alas. It does mean I can afford to buy myself a nice Cole Pulice tape as a birthday present, though… ↩︎
7. That first draft of hip-hop-o-crit was written in the Summer of 2018, even further ago. ↩︎
8. I had a handful of moments about three years ago that felt similarly like “very clear not mistakes”. These were:
   1)The first time I heard – through a machine in a scuzzy North London maternity ward where every pregnant person, from teens to nearly four decades older, seemed to be accompanied by a bald or balding masc person of about 40 – the heartbeat of Whamathan, my beloved child;
   2) The time I witnessed the full totality of a solar eclipse;
   3) The moments when I watched monkeys play and jump around the temples of Varanasi, when I took myself on a mini-break to India. ↩︎
9. I think this possibly does relate to the recent death of my mother in law (see a longer piece on her here). Having someone who genuinely and professionally knew about live performance – who had made a career making it and then teaching others how to do it – felt meaningful as a source of support. If she’s not telling me to fucking pack it in and go immiserate myself working longer hours in an office, then that’s a real weight saying it’s fine to do it. Sure, I have friends (and a partner) who approve of what I do, creatively, yes, but that’s not the same as someone who actually knew what they were talking about. It’s really not the same… ↩︎