Week Three

Visit to Kirkby-in-Ashfield
Thursday 19 June 2008

Paper kisses the car shop next to D and C Memorials opposite the Nags Head. A name to remember them by. Venus Video. Gateways – Coal Action Plan. Moneymakers. Ladbrokes open. The only thing still open is the bookies. Newlife. Leg of Mutton pub. Boarded up. Dry cleaners. Kirkby News. Diamond Avenue working man’s club. Regency Suite Cinema. Kingsway Hotel. Pavilion only bit left. been my seat for years. Exhibition game. White fence. Boundary rope. In Loving memory of Frank. He’s got his hand in’till. Look at Lenny he’s at it an all. There’s Rosa my wife to be. Scuse me duck… How you going?

Week Two

Where else, you ask, can England’s game be seen
Rooted so deep as the village green?
Here, in the slum, where doubtful sunlight falls,
To gild three stumps chalked on decaying walls
Cricket – Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton

This is an image of Harold Larwood and Bill Voce in the pavilion at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. They were the Nottinghamshire spearhead of the English bowling attack in 1931-32. The image shows the two men in their later years at a memorial match in the seventies. I am drawn to the way they wear their ties over their cardigans. Their smile. I think I am approaching a way of writing where we are seeing something that has happened through an old man's eyes. Possibly Larwood or Voce. Sitting on a bench and remembering. And as they narrate our story we revist and relive moments from their lives. I was out with a friend last night and he heard himself speak on an answer phone message and said 'I've forgotten how I speak'. This made me wonder if our narrator overhears himself as a younger man and says 'I've forgotten how I spoke.' What this does is introduce a time loop into the piece and enable it to be more contemporary in the way in which the narrative unfolds. There is something of The Christmas Carol here. Or to locate in more in terms of sport - Field of Dreams. I am also interested in Beckett and the way he often places people in their later years in positions of remembering e.g. Krapp's Last Tape, Rockabye, The Old Tune. The Old Tune in particular features two old men reunited on a bench reminiscing about the past. This could be Larwood and Voce. This reminiscence could be the beginning of the play.

Week One

I am a writer. I am writing a new play for Nottingham Playhouse. So far I have written the ending of the play. So as someone pointed out all I have to do is get to the beginning and then it will be finished. I don’t know what I’m writing yet but I think it’s got something to do with statues. It’s about what gets left behind when you die and how you remember loss. It's about cricket. It's about politics. It's about relationships between countries and people breaking down. It's about teams and hierarchies and class and sport. It's about ashes. I've been having some problems getting started because I've had my mind on other projects but now I have a desk in a studio for three months before the deadline and I thought I would keep this blog as documentation of a process that often remains private. It is also a conscious effort to keep busy. To keep writing. To keep typing. To stop myself drifting off and throwing a cricket ball up and down. So here goes. Time to start writing The Ashes. Someone is sitting on a bench. On the bench is a plaque that reads 'Sit with me for a moment and remember.' This is the beginning and the end of the play. By the way - it's called The Ashes - The story of the play because this is what it said in news reports at the time the play is set. So in a way - this is the story of the story of the play.