On getting the part

At last, I have a real reason to celebrate...I have landed a fabulous part in a new musical, which is going to be on at the Ashcroft Theatre in Croydon in September. The producers are hoping to be able to turn it into a longer run, with the possibility of taking it to India. This makes sense when you read the script; the premise is that a Bollywood actor and his entourage arrive in England to perform Romeo and Juliet. I play a member of the entourage, a Russian wannabe actress with a chequered history named Yogi. The potential for silliness looms large. But its a funny thing about getting what you want- so it may be a small step, but its a step in the right direction nonetheless - it can overwhelm a girl, and make it all seem remote and surreal. So I celebrated by getting a nasty head cold, and going for a run around Richmond Park with a packet of tissues in one hand.

On dashing through Oswestry

I love mornings. I have fond memories of my seven-year old self tearing gleefully around our garden in the Singaporean jungle at five 'o clock on Sunday mornings. By the time Mummy roused herself and laid on brunch, I was ravenous and her gingerbread pancakes were ambrosial. How I miss those gorgeous, leisurely Sunday feasts with Daddy buried in the papers and the four of us around a table groaning with food... But my enthusiasm for the dawn is still with me. Yesterday I threw up the sash window of my hotel room in Oswestry, in Shropshire, and breathed in a fine new day. I could have done with an extra hour of sleep but my trainers were calling to me, so I pulled on the usual gear and stood on the hushed pavement outside the hotel for a moment, wondering where the good running was at. Everywhere, as it turned out. Oswestry is a little town in pretty farmland, but the quiet cobbled streets of the town centre boasted elegant shop fronts, curry houses, a few larger grocery stores and a sweet town square presided over by a bronze statue of a farmer with his sheep. Every street seemed to end in a park, or a graveyard dreaming quietly beside an ancient stone church. (Or ancient to me; I still see English history through South African eyes, where old means three hundred years.) Rising out of a well-manicured bed of geraniums was a stone monument to the men of the town who died in the South African war. How different the red earth heaped on their graves must be to the dark loamy soil their families lie in. The town seemed to shake itself as the church bells tolled eight and ladies in tracksuits began to collect outside Greggs, the baked goods chain, awaiting the key holder. Back at the hotel, I hit the shower before grazing my way through the muesli selection of the buffet. Nothing tastes as good as food you've earned with your trainers on! I was sorry to leave the place. Perhaps its a good area to go for a quick cycle tour some summer weekend...

On crossing the Severn

At last, I see why the Welsh are a proud race. As we crossed over the river on the Severn bridge, I felt my spirit soaring up to join the free-wheeling seagulls. The bridge is geometric steel confectionery, and delicious to behold. It made me quite goosepimply. Then the man at the toll booth was friendly and the vegetation got ever more lush and verdant. We stopped for lunch in a pub built like a ship overlooking Cardiff Bay and watched the rain prick the choppy water. Even Welsh rain is tolerable, particularly after Birmingham, which not even the sunshine could paint pretty! Then we ventured up north, along rolling green lanes made into tunnels by ancient hedgerows and broken by gates that boasted views of happy cows. I was hugely entertained by the road signs, which proclaimed destinations I couldn't pronounce without spitting on anyone in a two mile radius. Every village we passed looked like it had recently been buffed and polished. And everyone was calm and sunny, despite the sky regularly emptying its contents on their heads. Whatever their secret is, I plan to go back and find out...

On Saturday activities

I had an audition this afternoon, for a family-oriented show called Bink And The Hairy Fairy (Chekov it sure ain't). Auditions are strange beasts. Like first dates with stage fright thrown in. The more you do, the better you get, or so the adage goes. But I've been auditioning since I was 13 and I'm still wondering when I'll be able to pass myself as a rational, cognizant human being when faced with an audition panel. I become a bundle of stress and fluff for hours beforehand, and manage to convince myself that ironing the contents of the washing basket is a task of vital importance over, say, running through my monologues, or warming up my voice. I could turn procrastination into an Olympic sport. But once there, the audition went better than I feared. The top notes came out clear, and the monologue I've recently added to my repertoire went alright, even if it still needs a lot of polishing. (A piece from a lovely play called My Mother Said I Never Should by Charlotte Keatley, incidentally; well worth a read.) Then I jumped on the train for London again and went to a dance class at Pineapple. I had missed my favourite class, a high energy jazz class by Andrew, but I was in time for body-conditioning with the biddy brigade. This is a class of ladies of advanced years who gather for their weekly tune up. I took my place at the barre behind a stern matron who was kind enough to holler the routines at me. Such devotion to the precise swing of a head or curve of a finger, and I had to suppress a smile more than once... But the best part is the leaps. Before I broke my foot (onstage in a pantomime in 2006), I was a reluctant jumper on a good day. And when I returned to dancing, the bare floor terrified me. I simply couldn't face the grand allegro. But recently that's begun to change. Perhaps it was realising that the worst that can happen is you might break something-which will heal in time. Or perhaps its all the running and cycling, which have given me formidable thigh muscles... Whatever the cause, I am beginning to love flinging myself into empty space, and I'm trying to leap longer and further and higher than ever before. Gelsey Kirkland's phrase The Shape of Love comes to mind. Sweaty and happy, I cycled home along the teeming South Bank, which was thronged with Londoners and tourists in Saturday war paint. I marvel at how humanity in great numbers ebbs and flows like water, each individual pulled by an invisible force spun by need. And then I arrived home to a grumpy husband, who had disappointed himself in his cycle race and was on the sofa in a funk. Luckily, we live within range of a great Italian place and a grocery store that stocks the complete range of Green and Black's chocolate!

On the price of hope

I, with gardening gloves on, was pottering happily before breakfast this morning. I may have managed to effectively exterminate almost every plant that has passed through my hands thus far in my life, but I hope to be a better gardener. And that, I'm realising, is the point of gardening. You hope. Hope that it will rain, or shine, or that the tiny seedling will find life and get bigger, or that the straggly-looking plant will somehow look healthier and greener in the morning. But then Radio Four intruded on my happy philosophising. They were interviewing a boy in northern Zimbabwe named Patrick. He is in his early teens, and his mother is dying of AIDS, which he is too afraid to admit to for fear of the stigma that would befall his family. He watches his friends walk off to school in the morning, and then returns to the task of being both mother and father to his younger siblings and nursing his mother, whom he needs to carry to the toilet. He'll never know what a hero he is, because he will never leave his village, except if he is forced to migrate to a city in search of food or work. And I, while I may be a struggling actress, at least can afford hope. But it really shouldn't be a commodity.

On thunder in an English dawn

There was a strange shivering in the air in the witching hour just before dawn today. A curious, familiar rumbling was shaking me from sleep and I lay still for a moment, trying to frame the word. It was thunder. Real tummy-rumbling thunder, in a sky fizzing with lightning. I was amazed. Since leaving South Africa two years ago, I haven't met real thunder. I was beginning to believe that English skies were incapable of producing such. Rain they have in every permutation, bar the monsoon-kind, but thunder, it never does. Until this morning. I slipped out of bed and knelt on the windowsill overlooking my little garden, watching the fat drops pelt my roses and pool in the geranium leaves, and marvelled at the electric sky. Glorious. I surged a million miles back to that place I used to call home, that incredible land of Highveld skies, where the lightning shows are spectacular and free and can constitute a happy evening's entertainment from the stoep of a farmhouse. Wild and magical and powerful are those storms. In Johannesburg, the cumulonimbus would bubble and rise like dough on a sweltering afternoon and, come four o' clock, the resultant shower would bathe the city clean of its heat and dust and she'd become a woman decking herself in a sunset-tinted dress for a balmy evening under starry skies. So much have I gained by moving to this little island (see previous post) but so much have I lost. The irrepressible rhythm of African drums that would erupt into full cry in the feet of the man selling newspapers at a city traffic light, dancing to music only he could hear but everyone could see. The retina-searing indigo of the jacaranda trees that make Pretoria in October into a hazy purple heaven. The absurd, childlike cry of the hadida bird, mocking from an Camel's foot tree. The smell of the veld grass after the autumn fires have roared through and left the land scorched and barren. But I crept back to bed smiling, because at least the thunder has found me again.

On making my mark

I voted yesterday, for the first time in my life! Oh wondrous elation! I got home from work, went for a run (to stretch the legs prior to a 10k race around Richmond Park tomorrow) and then, when David arrived home, we took a stroll over to our local polling station and did our civic duty in the local council and European parliamentary elections. It was so simple, and civilised. The only elections I have to compare the experience to are the South African kind, which I viewed with the dispassionate interest of the uninvolved. As a permanent resident, I wasn't invited to the polling party, so I drove past long queues of would-be voters burning in the sun and wondered idly what it was that compelled people to endure such inconvenience. Now I know. As I walked back out into the pretty evening, past the well-suited Conservative member sporting his standard issue blue rosette and enquiring of us what our address was for their records, I felt like I had finally become British. And that is a very good feeling indeed.

Sunday Chores

The sirens
wailing on the wind
in the summer city
sing of death
while Sunday's sheets
set sail
and my clothes dance like dervishes
to barbeques
and babies trying on new lungs for size.