Iestyn Edwards is...what?

                                                                             The Mother Superior's eye-view...                                              Listen to My Tutu Went AWOL! on Audible I’ve been on the   My Tutu Went AWOL!  book tour for ten years. I started the tour on my fiftieth birthday, two years before actual publication. Well — Mendelssohn had his  Songs without Words , so I didn’t see why I shouldn’t have a book launch without a book. I advertised the talks as, ‘Previews with pirouettes and pianissimos’. Oh, dear Lord. AKA abasing myself for the sake of presales. My first event was at Metrodeco in Brighton. During it, a superfluity of nuns stopped a...

                                                                                    ‘Please do not squeeze…’ Among other fiscal challenges, we face the effects of conflict, climate change, dick — waver tariffs and other budget shitstorms. How are we possibly going to save up enough to emigrate to Mars? We must tighten our belts.  Mr Micawber said, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ Money can be such a misery, banks resort to the trick of calling it by other names — credit cards, stocks and shares, the ever-so-pretty sounding hedge fund… Let’s consider the Apple store. Apple knows we are more likely pay o...

                                                             The wildlife vet didn't want to be photographed... I keep my onstage material clean. As the booker from Bocking (I know, sorry…) said to me, over the phone, ‘Thank for you for the reassuring guarantee your material is squeaky clean.’ See? Squeaky clean. ‘And thank you in advance for bowdlerising your Royal Marine chum…’ I had, as I do, forewarned of one potential issue when I’m telling about that Royal Marine chum, Stacks. He and I met in Basra; and after I let slip that I was being paid to entertain troops there, I saw he was giving me side-eye like a rhinoceros having an enema. I said, ‘They have to pay us so they can insure our lives. Can you imagine getting a letter saying re going out to Iraq or Afghanistan, we in all honestly can only guarantee your safety up to ninety...

I get sad around this time. On a public level because we're leading up to the Crucifixion; on the personal, because it was in Easter week that Thea, one of my closest friends, died. A year or so earlier, when she had been in remission, we had bumped into each other on a busy high street Saturday.  'Right, you,' she had begun, briskly. 'I need you to sing at my funeral. I have a year to live. Now, now - we're concentrating here, not going into pre-mourning. Thank you. You're please going to sing. And not something quiet and maudlin. I don't want to be sitting up there on my cloud and shouting down at you to pull your soppy self together! I want  The Holy City. And here's how I want you to sing it...' She had leaned in and whispered.  When she stopped me in the Saxmundham Station carpark a year or so later and said that she was now definitely dying - 'And being quick about it, too!' - she reminded me of my promise to sing, then insisted I go be...

                                                                 I'm clearly about to kick off... I once boasted to Michael Dale, the local graphic designer in Deaven Hatherley, about how much the Avery’s art gallery were sponsoring me. Avery’s were putting their logo on the posters for my post-Edinburgh tour. ‘To the value of, basically, five months’ rent!’  I wasn’t paying quite as little as peppercorn rent, more nutmeg husk, but still. I had designed the poster myself; had a great image; excellent puffa quotes. I only needed Michael at Michael Dale Aids to the Visual (geddit? ) to make the design into a document to send to the printers. That was all. Well, who really would ask for more input from Michael than that, knowing he had previously produced such work as the Deaven Hatherley Amateur Arts Trail brochure, compl...

  Joseph Campbell - author of The Masks of God , The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Myths to Live by -  asked his followers, 'What did you do as a child that made you forget time? There lies the myth to live by.' I'm on a mission - sixty next birthday, my Second Saturn Return in the offing, never been truly happy. I'm overhauling my mindset. (Someone needs to make the cake for my sixtieth, please, I'm swamped.) Anyway, re my mindset. First, I quiet my mind with the following grounding technique. Always useful, I find. Let me know in the comments if it's useful to you. We're all in this together, after all. Find five things to look at, meanwhile naming them. Then four things you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste. I do this grounding technique in tandem with my ten thousand steps. Having no clue what breed of tree I'm looking at ever, I tend to name them, a 'Lacks the last degree of festive vibe to be a holly' tree; ...

                                                             Two of the Jehovah's Witnesses on a break... Outside Primark this morning three Jehovah's Witnesses sang, impromptu, "Give Me Oil in My Lamp". A few feet from them sat a man holding a sign that read, I have no voice in this world. A woman passing (in biscuit tweed, green felt hat) chid the Jehovah's Witnesses. 'Hardly a level playing field for begging is it? You three singing while this poor man's dumb.' #begging#beggar#jehovahswitnesses#jehovahswitness#observation#comedy#funny#humor#humour#publicspeaker#afterdinnerspeaker