Skip to main content

Putting a Rocket up my Manifesting

                                             

                                                                                Madame Galina backstage at the Blackpool Grand



I would visualise and visualise my character-comedy character, Madame Galina, on tour. London and Blackpool, wearing a fur, dragging a trunk, staying in old-school theatrical digs, being partnered by either Michael Nunn or William Trevitt, Royal Ballet principals. 



About to move back to London from Aldeburgh, I was walking past the Sue Ryder shop when volunteer Janet banged on the window. 

Looking furtive, Janet dragged a blue trunk out of the stockroom.  'Don't open it till you get home.  Inside's for you to wear as Madame Galina. Thrilled you've got yourself that London residency. You've worked so hard.' My residency was at Murray's Cabaret Club. 'My aunt forbade us girls ever to go on to Murray's in the sixties,' Janet added. '"Filth goes in there!  The Krays, that Keeler monstrosity. Filth!".'

At home I opened the trunk.  Inside was a rabbit skin fur. 


For cheapness' sake on tour, I would book myself into the standard of B and B that thought it was too posh for hot chocolate sachets, reeked of Zoflora, and had patterned settees, walls and carpets to, as my Nan Silcox used to say, 'turn your unsuspecting eyes all kaleidoscopic.'

One retro-Blackpool landlady led me across the road to listen at the open window of a  rival's establishment:

'Hear that hoover going, chick?  Notice there's no fluctuation in the tone. She's just left it on under the table, window open, trying to kid on that she runs a clean establishment. And she injects her eggs with tartrazine to make the yolks look more like the chickens that lay them have room to manoeuvre. And she wouldn't do you the courtesy - which it is really - of checking your room for tidiness before you go off to the Tower Ballroom and do your theatrics.' 

 
In 2004 my dancing idols MIchael Nunn and William Trevitt, having left the Royal Ballet and started George Piper Dances, asked me to be in their Channel 4 series The Rough Guide to Choreography. Michael was Prince Siegfried to my Odette. 'You really have some kind of balletic Asperger's, Galina.'



But just now, in a funk - possibly dopamine deficiency (the true global pandemic, surely?) - I'm unable to let myself go fully into a visualisation. 

'And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true...'

I used to be all over that idea. Well, as far as it went - you've seen above what I managed to manifest. But now, not so much. 

I've been trying to visualise a dream escape. A writing sabbatical in a clean and airy bothy in the Highlands. I see myself arrive there in early autumn, swinging my tweed portmanteau, smiling up at the leaves on their earliest turn, wearing a Victorian train driver's hat. 

But almost immediately, I switch to seeing winter coming on. And there's only an open fireplace in the bothy, not so much single as spikiest hermit glazing; and I don't drive, so how would I fetch logs? And no Amazon deliveries, so whence thermals, slipper-socks and balaclavas? I see myself begin to die slowly like an orchid, meanwhile hearing that first howl from circling wolves. 

There goes my Costa biography prize. 

The film option. 

The invitation to one of Leonardo di Caprio's parties. 

Actually, there goes any manifested aspect of my life just now other than the being found dead one I'm putting so much Third Eye into, apparently. 


The solution? Dealing with the season first, I remember the quote from John Donne: 'In heaven, it is always autumn', and hold that most gorgeous time of year in mind. I see the pages of my future best-sellers pile up on my desk. I read the title. I hear the title announced along with my name by the man giving out the Costa Award. I hear the applause as I go up to the platform. I see the envy - no, let's keep this positive - I see the congratulation in people's expressions. 

My acceptance speech is a hymn of gratitude, to...


Ah, that's what's been missing. Gratitude. I haven't been starting and ending my day with gratitude. I've instead been starting it with, 'Oh, God, this again,' and ending it with, 'That was it, was it, again?'

So, what do I expect? 


Exactly - a tiny pile of pages on the bothy table, a larger pile of my bones on the stone floor. 



#thesecret #visualisations #positivevisualisations #rulesofattraction #manifestingabundance #manifestation

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

     I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media:   We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden.  He's between tour dates of  The Bodyguard,  and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements.  The latter, he says, being all about making his product better.   Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February.  I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters.  That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world.  That's why you've been noticing the combat photos.  I...
1 comment
Read more

Some Favourite Books - But Please don't Lesbify Dame Agatha's Denouements

  I'm too tired to read anything new so have been round the libraries taking out my default-setting books to read over Christmas. These include:    The Pursuit of Love , Nancy Mitford.   The blood-stained entrenching tool displayed above the fireplace, child-hunting over Shenley Common, Jassy traumatising the local children telling them the facts of life.  The scene at the Gare du Nord where Linda sits on her luggage to cry and meets Fabrice always takes me back to the first reading of the novel, sitting wrapped in my Welsh Tweed shawl, in a tiny bedroom on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise in Kennington.   The Pursuit of Love is romantic, hilarious and bleakly eccentric.    Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady , Florence King. When I entertained troops on the American base in Kandahar, four South Carolina army captains made me an Honorary Southern Belle. Madame Galina, they said, in all her unreasonable, high-blooded,...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to...Self-Assessment Tax

   As we near the end of the year a performer's thoughts will turn to the dreaded self assessment tax return.  Eight years ago I made a pact with myself never again to put myself through those two days of surfing receipts; forging official contracts for looking after Lady Carter's pug Mr Timothy; wondering if I would get away with claiming for two pints of Fullers Honeydew, bought to silence a city boy smoking outside the Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, after he saw me help myself to some of the festive flora on the railings of St Barts church to arrange in my hair having forgotten my tiara for a Christmas gig at Club Kabaret .    I now do a mini-tax return each month when my bank statements come, and simply tot up the running total on April 6th when I submit my HMRC self-assessment return.    Of all the self-employed professions, performers and cab drivers most frequently underpay tax; ergo they are the two professions most likely to be audited by HMRC ...
4 comments
Read more