Corporate Dinner

Everyone is drunk. A cheap looking roast meal is served in bento boxes or are they cutlery trays?  Mine morphs leaving a cardboard sausage in the middle section.

The New Artwork

My most recent work is a performance where I create a fruit cocktail.
Halfway through, it dawns on me that I haven't thought up a punchline or developed a comedy persona so I am not able to be funny.  Still worse, I now see that everything about it is meaningless.

Poor Man's Meal

I eat off a plate piled high with baked potato, some indiscernible cabbage and a few baked beans.  There is a stack of three closed tins covered in a strange pattern reminiscent of the fabric design of London Tube seats. They are like a small pillar of precious metal looming out of this mound of too much potato.

Forbidden Juice

Dad explains that when I was a kid I had been desperate for this string of sweet juice that I thought was sex energy. I was mad to have it, but I'd misbehaved so it was being kept from me. He said it was just Ribena, but I remember it as this concentrated solution of yellow Space Dust and sherbet lemonade steeped in tobacco tins.

Meat Beat

I have heard about this art installation where participants are encouraged to paint with raw meat. At the entrance of a dark labyrinthine warehouse you buy a big slab of meat and then whack it against the walls of the building. Some have a much more delicate approach but everyone is covered in blood. I didn't really want to get dirty but now I find myself slamming the meat against the wall leaving red and yellow marks- its revolting but sort of pretty.

The Invisible Meal

The restaurant is in grey twilight. There is no real food but a waitress convincingly goes through the motions of serving up a meal. She suggests smells and tastes so precisely that some customers actually believe they are eating.

I go along with this game and make to pay her. It occurs to me that I am possibly being ripped off but I don't seem to mind too much as I enjoy the conversation with her where I describe the dish as tasting lighter than air.

"Did you fold it in on itself so that there were layers?" she asks me, "Because then it is quite crispy."

I admit that I did not and question whether I have in fact missed a genuine experience here.

Invasion Of Privacy

The ice creams at the New York stall are big and heavy and expensive. The androgynous saleswoman asks to see my cell phone and scrolls through my internet contacts and visits. Her eyebrows raise at a couple of them- "There are some surprises here," she says, " the best place for you is the old art cinema in Berlin - the Berlinerkino." 

We Miss The Bus In Malta

I am in -it could be - Malta with a young male friend who is vaguely familiar. We have missed our bus and so are taking a different route on the 38. There are no buses from this small village. The friend pops into a little Italian cafe. Is he asking for transport advice I wonder but no he is speaking in fluent Italian asking for Dorritos (of course he is half Italian himself). I can't quite remember what they are but end up asking for them as well.

Hectoring Professor

I am with a group of about 10 people involved in something similar to Desert Island Discs. If there were only 5 foods left in the world which would we each choose to survive on? Similarly which 5 books would we keep? A bearded professor chooses 5 unfamiliar spices from the Middle East. He thought he should be experimental. His books are all chosen from non-Western sources. He challenges one student (a smug devout Christian from my college days) on all his choices. I am slightly suspicious of this professor as he seems to be goading the others to alter their decisions. I am excluded from his hectoring due to my safe (and cowardly) choice to include the Qur'an in my otherwise Western selection.

A Legitimate Emergency

I am travelling on the tube. A friend jumps on carrying bundles of shopping, "I'm getting out at the next stop for the music shop," he tells me. The shop looks exciting but my friend accidently leaves his shopping behind. As the train departs I mime to him that I will get out at the following stop. Not sure he has understood. There is a huge bag of apples, a sack of other fruit, loads of paperwork and some body building powders. I only manage to drag half of it off. Will I have to pull the emergency cord? Is this a legitimate emergency? It seems so to me but I am not sure the authorities would agree.

Russian Epic

This is told like a great nineteenth century Russian novel, so it's a bit longer than usual.
The protagonist (occasionally me) is a professor in his early 50's. As the last of his students leaves his dark study, one young beautiful man, Dmitri, remains. The professor gazes at him and somehow they end up making love. This of course is totally illegal.
Outside in the snow, a massive bearded man with an impossibly wide back, his head tiny in proportion, returns to his apartment - for this study is his room. Strange, he thinks, he can hear no music from within: Dmitri must be sleeping. Quietly he unlocks the front door with its folding inner panel, and then enters his flat. We next hear such shouting and then cut to an interior view where Dmitri, an older and darker man, hurls the professor from the bedroom into the cold. The poor man stands in -20 degrees with no shoes and socks on. "How can I travel to my conference tomorrow?" he sobs.
There is some confusion in the narrative here because he is now standing on the booted feet of young Dmitri, his arms around him. "I love you, Dmitri. You can never love me, but I just want you to be my fancy man."
After the commotion the author, a sensitive woman, appears in a walk-on role as a waitress. She leaves a small bill in neat handwriting for the flan that was consumed, adding as an aside, "Here I used one of my favourite french flans."

Mum Goes Wandering

The family are in a French or Italian city. Mum has wandered off down a side street to a market and as the time passes and she still hasn't returned we begin to worry. I try texting her to tell her where we are but when I look around I realise we are inside a huge bank so there are no street signs anywhere. I run outside and find her just round the corner. Later we are in a big dining hall where the plates have run out. A friend gets us all to line up and spoonfeeds each of us a mouthful of blackberry crumble. "There must be a better way," I suggest, "find some saucers." But they are all covered in candle wax.

Sunshine Tea

In this kitchen, on this day, England is seen in an idealised form. Russian soldiers are being released and there is a sense that we have all been liberated. But the soldiers must all be supplied with sunflower or sunshine tea and for this, I, a teenage boy, am responsible. I have been waiting months or years for this moment and now I rush at top speed to fill the kettle with boiling water. We gather 100's of bags of the sunshine tea. Everything relies on my producing the full pot.

Gritty Leeks

I bake some leeks in a cheese sauce with fish or ham. It all looks delicious. When I start to eat it I realise I forgot to wash the leeks. They were organic and are gritty with sand.

Epic Journey

We start in an English gentlemen's outfitters where all the upper crust men are wearing 1920's suits, climb up to the top floor, stumbling over an antique obstacle course to more modern exclusive menswear. From there through back streets of Talinn and Dubrovnik, on to a vast crater. There I nervously lie on my front and gaze over the edge at two boys somersaulting down at an alarming rate. The crater shrinks until it is just 10 metres across and tourists are invited to roll their own pasta croissants down its floury slopes.

Woman's Death Is Predicted

We know this woman is destined to die by the end of the dream. Everything seems loaded with significance: the two strange men following her ; the unsettling mirror in the motel ; the strawberry crumble placed on her back as a poultice. All innocuous - we are reading signs when nothing is there. A young baker says he will make her another cake if she is worried - "It should be sweeter," he says , adding a Mars bar and loads of sugar.
We don't see her dying - just a chart showing she was diabetic.

Visit From The Dead

Kev (who died almost fifteen years ago) brings some fizzy orange to me in bed. I didn't want it but I am touched by the gesture. He pours it into a plastic flannel bag. "Don't worry," I say not wanting to hurt his feelings, "I'll drink it out of that. By the way, I don't really drink fizzy orange any more. Water will do next time."

The Purple Parsnips' Mother

A man shows me a group of purple parsnips in the ground and explains to me that they will have a purple turnip as a mother. As we dig down, the soil turns to thick black liquid and I find myself under the surface closely inspecting these parsnip/turnips. They are choked with ivy and water weeds. I pull one and deliver it up to the surface. It is now a small dog's tail and wags with pleasure at having been set free.

Teaching Essential

The rooms are crowded with teachers and support staff. One woman is painting a huge banner with the picture of an ugly insect on it. Every year not only does she take charge of the food but she always draws the same enormous image. When she leaves the others comment on how much she takes on, "It's too much. She doesn't have any calm space to teach. You have to have that space somewhere in your life, like a big calm sea."

No More Venison

Sal and I are in a forest. We have been instructed to shoot a deer as part of our training programme. I concede that I do eat the occasional venison sausage so we should not baulk at the task. A fawn is trapped behind a wooden gate. I load my gun and shoot straight for the heart. Nothing happens. I try again - still nothing. By my third attempt I say, "No, I can't do this. We are just frightening this beautiful creature - we have no real need to kill it." We set it free vowing never to eat venison again.