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I’ve done some gigs in some odd places, but there are still many more odd places to go and today another one was ticked off as I performed in a teepee in front of a log fire. No I hadn’t travelled back in time and I wasn’t on a hippie commune, I was in the heart of London’s media district hosting a question and answer session about story-telling for the Metro. And it was a big teepee: there were maybe 50 people sitting in front of me, plus a panel of three guests. The crowd were sitting on the floor, under blankets and I felt it was a conducive atmosphere for a nice afternoon nap. Although we were in a pedestrianised section in a little courtyard we weren’t far from traffic. I’d asked the organisers if external noise was going to be a problem given we were performing under buffalo skin (it might have been canvas), but she said she’d been told it was sound-proofed and we wouldn’t need mics. I couldn’t really see how that was possible, but there wasn’t much we could do about it if she was wrong, except to talk a bit louder. Which is, of course, what we had to do, because a wigwam was never designed to cope with London traffic. As we sat down and chatted beforehand I couldn’t hear what the panellist furthest away from me was saying, which didn’t bode well for the conversation.
But I think we did OK. I opened up with ten minutes talking about how I tell stories, illustrated with examples from my blog and Metro column. It was just after lunch and my audience were lolling (though initially not lol-ing) on the floor under blankets in a wigwam, so it was quite a tough gig and my first story about a pigeon in Macdonalds didn’t elicit many laughs, but by the time I told them about my Ferrero Rocher contract with my wife I think they were on side and the question and answer session went fine and somehow I think everyone could hear everything.
It was interesting to be made to think about what makes a good story and to work out what it is that makes some blogs, articles or stand-up routines resonate. And what this blog has done for me has made me sharpen up my observational skills. Most of the more successful stories I have told come from me have noticed something that others might have failed to spot, or just dismissed and then explore them with a mixture of fact and imagination. The panel had met up in a nearby pizza restaurant before the talk and on the way out I had seen that one of the front windows of the restaurant had shattered (something I’d failed to notice on the way in, though I assume the damage hadn’t occurred in the 20 minutes that I was inside). That’s a story right there. Obviously there’s the true story of however the breakage happened, though it’s unlikely that I would ever find out what that was. Then there’s the best guess based on experience, which makes us conclude that in all likelihood, late at night, some drunk young man, in a fury over some romantic slight or other humiliation had kicked at the glass in his own frustration. Or perhaps, the more mundane, that somebody moving a ladder or some scaffolding had turned at the wrong moment and cracked the class. And next there is the fantastical and imaginative possibilities that the glass had shattered because of a stray assassin’s bullet or because a weak werewolf trapped in the restaurant had been attempting to escape the night before, but just knocked itself out and had been discovered this morning, now a groggy headed naked man, who’d been taken away by the police and made to pay for the damage.
But the point was there are stories everywhere, if you’ve got time to notice them. Which I suppose I usually do.
Some stories pass into folklore and live for generations and others fizz into our heads for a second and are never told to anyone and disappear. I doubt that the broken window at Zizzi’s will be talked about in a year’s time, let alone by our children’s children, but most of our own stories will die with us (and before us). Our grandchildren may retain a handful of our stories, our great-grandchildren may know our name and one or two facts. And then, we and our stories are gone. But thank goodness. Look at all the shit I have spouted in the last 13 years in this futile attempt to preserve a memory a day. Imagine if all stories had to be curated for ever more. There’d be no more stories because of all the effort required in keeping the old stories going.
With stories we attempt to explain and control our lives. In stories we can make things turn out the way we would like them to if life wasn’t so random and unfair. We construct a wall of words that we hope will keep out the ravaging hurricane of time and death, but they words will be scattered by the wind. All our stories are told in a teepee in the middle of traffic and they will be drowned out by the real world and extinguish themselves like the fire in front of us. Only embers will survive, then ash and then nothing.
As it should be.
