The Joyces of the World

Robin's Normally Weird Tour Diary - Part One

In begins in Macclesfield….

I alway try to arrive at my destination a little early so that I can see what I can see. It might be an eccentric building, a peculiar name for a tattoo parlour or kebab shop, something growing out of a gravestone.

When I have to change trains, if I have more than 20 minutes of anticipation, I leave the station and make a small dent into the town, whether Kettering or Tamworth. I like to feed my head with possibilities whenever I can.

Though I don’t think I will ever need to enter the kebab shop, I am increasingly attracted to the tattoo parlour (why be the last living human in England with ink-less skin?). If Judi Dench can, why can’t I?

I would have Kathy Burke’s “I’d rather be woke than an ignorant fucking twat” inked on a shoulder blade .

In Macclesfield, I smile and say hello as I enter a charity shop and get that look of suspicion that can come from people caught unawares by the friendliness of a stranger.

In Macclesfield, I think of Alan Garner, who enchanted the surrounded landscape. I remember the first time I heard Love Will Tear Us Apart,. 45 years ago and it remains one of my favourite songs and my regular choice for Karaoke. I remember chatting to the superb drummer Stephen Morris about watching Hawkwind with his mum and dad in the town. These were the days where the electronic extraterrestrial journeys were interpreted by the naked dancing of Stacia. Stephen’s mother soon left the hall, his father departed soon after. Stpehen described his next breakfast as “a cold morning over the marmalade”.

Usually, my reason to arrive in Macclesfield is usually to journey to Jodrell Bank, location of Brian Cox explaining the heat death of the Universe to me before burning his mouth on a hot steak pie. On this occasion, I am off to Siddington Village Hall. I am rural touring and more memorial halls await me over the next five days.

The organisers of event take me to their house and I admire the blossoms on their plum tree. My nature eyes are at their sharpest in Spring. I still fail to name most of the flowers, but I am enthralled by the transformation in their beauty. This week, the dandelions are transforming from bright suns to seed planets.

It is a long thin room and the crows (or is it rooks, I am bad on corvids as well as flowers) are creating a poe-is cacophony (yes yes I know that’s a raven).

Serenity Books from Stockport are in attendance, a partnership based on autism and ADHD, so we have much to talk about. One week until Normally Weird is officially out, so these are the first copies I see and sign.

I return to Levenshulme and my pal Carl’s fold out bed. He is off to Vienna the next morning and I warn him of the dancing horses. They dance traditionally and politely in the light, but stay up too late and walk the dark streets, and you may be trampled under hoof as the groomed.

I also start writing a film in my head. It is a world where matadors taunt unicorns rather than bulls. On one side of the arena sit leathery man and a zombie Ernest Hemingway, on the other sit eight year old children willing victory on the unicorns. In the final scene, the children slaughter the leathery men and the drops of blood that fly into the air are caught by beams of light to create a rainbow. It will be a My Little Pony movie written by Jodorowsky - I reckon it could be a sleeper hit, I just need to start writing the songs.

Two libraries the next day, Wilmslow by day and Hope Farm by night.

The toilet doll of Wilmslow Library

As I patrol the shelves in Wilmslow, I meet the parents of Chris Addison and have a lovely conversation with them which includes us wondering where we can find a history of Mills and Boon when there were a medical publisher. Somewhere in their evolution they realised that there was more cony to be made writing about doctors and nurses than writing for them - from the tourniquet to the torrid, from artery forceps to amorous flings.

I arrive early at Hope Farm and fall into conversation with a library user named Joyce. She is an artist, though family needs have slowed down her possibilities for now.

The small fairy chair of Hope Farm Library

I am collected by Erica and Alan and taken to West Kirby where I sit up with Alan’s parents enjoying too much wine.

The next day is Knutsford library. In the front row is another Joyce. The library is her haven. With only one surviving family member, the library is her place to be alive and connected. We talk after my talk and I am deeply moved by what she says. Later, I realise that I was thinking about what my mother would have been like had she reached her eighties or beyond and if she had not been blighted in her late sixties by dementia, most probably brought on by the brain injuries she suffered in a car crash. Who could she have become had a driver not been on the wrong side of the road driving at speed on a country lane.

I am fond of the name Joyce. A Joyce was the mother of a school friend and she became a very good friend to my mother before dementia took her too. She used to have a short haired dachshund called Lady Mindy Bacon.

I arrive in Plumley and soon meet some of the audience from two night before. They have come to another show as I never told them the promised stories about Peter Cushing and about Apollo 8 at Siddington.

I write a clerihew about Plumley station and my hosts ask if it can be placed on the wall of platform two, I happily agree.

Order a signed copy of Normally Weird from the Shambles shop here. Check out Robin’s many tour dates here.