Iestyn Edwards Wonders...is it Lumpy or Runny?

Stacks's Review - or Looking Scary on the Poop Deck The man himself has just written me an email - he's been reading the Kindle edition onboard a ship that he's protecting from marauders.   'Mate, good on you!  It's a proper book now after all the trial and error you've had with it.  Made up for you.  And it's great, it really is. But I would say that!  But I think I'd even be enjoying it even if I wasn't sitting here bored off my bollocks.  Even though I know a lot of the stuff that's in it through one, knowing you like I do, and two making sure you didn't write ​Hercules when you meant helicopter ​there's still a lot of stuff that has had me chuckling.  It's weird taking in how you see me. Ray and Rink-Dink said the same.   'Rink's gone back to the hills.  He said he'd seen you in Colchester.  You're so his favourite. Don't try and say I'm yours. I always felt left out from the time you met him in Kabul...

  Very moved by something that happened on Friday.  I was in Aldeburgh High Street, having left some author copies of My Tutu Went AWOL for display at the book shop, when Cynthia called after me. Cynthia used to own the grocer's shop.  She said how touched she'd been to read my back page thank you to her mother, Mrs Cooney, as one of the lookers-on and cheerers as I got Madame Galina from church hall to west end, via Blackpool, Iraq and Afghanistan.   'Lovely things you said.  And about Margaret, too. She was a one, that one. People - or is just me - over time are getting more diluted.  Oh, I just wish I still had the shop for you to go smack in the front window!'   As she walked on towards the Old Customs House I smiled, remembering the first time I ever bought anything at Cynthia’s. It was August 1985.  I had looked for a basket, not found one, and begun taking items off the shelves.  Excusing herself from a customer, Cynthia had politel...

  First, because my mother speaks below, let's discuss her attitude to mortality. I recently told her that I had reached the death-aware stage of life.    She said, 'Even the great and the good die, Iestyn.  Jane Austen, Maria Callas, Margot Fonteyn...to name some favourites of yours.'   I asked who she might list as favourites of hers that are no longer with us.  She answered. 'Oh, very much the usual.  Lena Zavaroni, Elsa the Lioness and Arthur Askey.'   There are two five star reviews for my book so far on Amazon. From strangers, too. My family, merely strange, are adding to the feedback with ansaphone messages.   My stepmother: ‘Iestyn, I’m on page eighty-five…don’t know what chapter that is.’   My mother: ‘You’ve got your Mairs confused. The Mair I bought all the elastic for over however many years was the one who broke her television and had her leg amputated — she’s very much on her way out. The other Mair lived in Pimlic...

 Because I need your help, you see, nicely.  Namely: reviews to be posted on Amazon now you've, hopefully, enjoyed Tutu . Read on for more...   Have I told you about Rachel, the mezzo-soprano?  The one who thought that her most recent public appearance could be classed as a gala because at the tea between rehearsal and performance the scotch eggs were cut into sixteenths?  Just saw her, the other day in Oxford Street; dressed as usual for that Disney kibbutz.  Then when she she took off her fuchsia chintz headscarf – her hair was vast!   She said something along these lines: ‘I’m growing it to sell to a doll factory in Puerto Rico, proceeds going to the Hacienda Verde.  Year’s growth: they’re offering three thousand five hundred. Just off to the treatment clinic.  They put on it Kamatakan mung-dynasty beans, Tregothnan Manuka honey and Watneys pale, then leave it to do its thing for a fortnight. Then they drain...

  On my walk along the disused railway, I was stopped by a twitcher.  She was in comfortable blues and a khaki pashmina threaded through a plus-sized woggle.  In a rich, beautifully modulated voice she said that I'd been probably wondering about the noise out there - meaning the conservation area.  'It's probably a duck, rather than a goose; except that the call is so low and raspy. Can't actually see what it might be.  I'm puzzled, frankly.'   I said, 'I'll ask Carol from the shop when I walk back.  She always knows.'   The twitcher nodded, clearly accepting one of the wisdoms of Thorpeness.  

My Tutu Went AWOL Book Launch...event now LIVE...   Henry Bonas Events rang today - the actual Henry himself - to wonder tersely did I expect a bloody book launch now somewhere near him?    'Yes, but only if I can have linen like you provided for that Honourable's wedding, where I could see the pleats in it even when I was dancing twenty five metres away.'   'Do Waterstones have linen on their tables when the new Jonathan Coe's out?  And, more importantly, have you learned to bloody drive yet?  I can't keep picking you up from the station.'   'Henry, you've picked me up once, the other times you've sent Barry in his taxi.  And I can order taxis myself in future...'   'What, you'd know how to get hold of Barry, would you, who I send specially for you because I know how your little heart is gladdened by hearing how he's been driving around Nicholas Parsons, Camilla Parker-Bowles and Jilly Cooper?  Don't be so bloody ...

Asked in an interview what was my  favourite ballet by Sir Kenneth MacMillan:    'Song of the Earth ...no, wait... Concerto: when the Second Movement girl is supported doing  ports de bras.  Actually,  The Judas Tree  totally  stuns me.  Different Drummer.   When you  feel like someone's been at your insides with  the de-icer? When as Mother Goose I was dipped  in the Lake of True Beauty, I would see poor Wozzeck drowning himself in the bath. No wonder my  Dame Transformation Ballet - Own Frock -  went a bit Wayne McGregor...'

   Some people will always crave a cathedral...   First tell your nearest and dearest, then your family, then your work colleagues; then the butcher, the baker the candlestick maker;  open the door to tell Jehovah's Witnesses.   I've been doing just that.  Though I decided not to disturb the thoughts of a woman this morning, who was gazing out across the marshes from the Aldeburgh Road across to the abandoned railway. But she spoke first:   'Yes, I'm sure it is a borderline spectacular view,' she said.  'But when, as I do, you live in real Fen country, then here you gaze and gaze and quite crave a cathedral.'

I did yesterday...and it wasn't good.   I swirled the dregs of my tea three times, upended the cup into the saucer, then righted it again; but left the actual reading of the tea leaves until after I'd done my February-March tax return.   When I went back to them, the leaves had dried up and the images were fuzzy.   And, yes, all that's ever in my tea leaves is the inevitable half a Mona Lisa, a seahorse and a tutti-frutti cup-and-ball game, but this time might have been different.     So, don't procrastinate: buy your tickets for my one man book festival, Matcham Theatre, Hipppodrome Casino, London.  April 3rd, 7.30pm.

  You're winning.  Or you're not.  But come on: we'll try.   Let's remember what opera producer Norman Ayrton said to soprano Dame Joan Sutherland:   'You walk eagerly to the window to look out at a magical night.  You do not totter in its vague direction as though you were expecting someone to shoot you through it!'      

   This is - guess - more advice from my passive-aggressive screw-up of a future self.  'What would you never usually react favourably to, Iestyn?  Well - point out the joy in it today with an exclamation of rapt delight!'   'Oh, look, hoorah, lock-off cameras!'   'How glorious, see, window cleaning in progress!'   'Woohoo, its stock-taking day at the book shop!'   'Larks a mercy, it's the Pinney's Oysters Van!'   'My day in the hills, they've painted the wrong colour around that drainpipe!'   'The Wifi is deliciously,   deliciously slow!'   'How divine, darling, Judge Judy episodes are only available on YouTube posted in little onscreen boxes, with leaves falling around, played at the wrong speed!'   'Yippee, I'm still owed nearly three grand after two years and am about to resort to small claims myself!'          

My adventures as the only drag act ever taken to entertain troops in Iraq and Afghanistan!