Madame Galina's Doings Diary

...and Nicola Tranah fell over!

Pavlova would haul her art anywhere, and so will I. This week, I'm registering with National Rural Touring Forum members country-wide in the hope that they will put my shows on their menus for village hall committees to order.

In the 2005/6 season I had six gigs in North Devon, four in Cornwall, two in Oxfordshire...but...but...but...but...but in Hampshire - the Hog's Back is to me as Spain is to Don Giovanni - twenty!

Please, sir. I want some more!

I get to perform in villages where Agatha Christie adaptations are filmed, the fees are good, and I get ferry'd and fed by committee members.

True, I've asked how big the stage is and got the answer "what stage?". Is the heating fully on in the dressing room? "We've left a fan heater in the corridor next to the stool with the vanity mirror propped up on it". Will the piano be tuned? "Margaret's bringing in her daughter's Casio. The top octave doesn't work and she can't switch off whatever makes it harmonise with a chord in the bass two beats after you've played a note and gone on to another one".

But the atmosphere, the keyhole onto village life, and the home made quiche more than compensate.

One thing, though: the performers being offered to the villages on a menu tends to result in the same joke being repeated each time.

"We hope you'll enjoy being eaten by us this evening..."

Clearly, they don't watch enough porn to know what they're saying.

While I was sipping orange juice at my hosts for the evening somewhere in Hampshire, the phone rang and: “It’s Eric Tranah for you, Ben.”

It was Nicola Tranah’s father. Nicola, aka Nikya Tranahnovna, was coming to watch me that evening. It was a surprise. Well, it was before Ben told me. Ah, and that was why the name of the village was so familiar: Nicola got married there.

The stage in the hall was so raked and I so didn’t deal with it, she had to fall back at curtain down on saying how funny my patter had been and how gorgeous my arms and hands.

“You couldn’t have done fouettes up there. And who would want to see you try?”

Still, it made a change from her falling on the floor. Or sitting in the Royal Opera House canteen taking part in a how much hot chocolate can I scald you with competition with her mother, the Baroness. (For the record, the Baroness won by a completely doused left leg and partially stained right boob).

Weapon Of Mass Destruction

I so hope I get a gig at the village hall run by a woman who spoke at the recent Essex On Tour showcase. She was dressed head to foot in bright red. She had Enid Blyton hair, Dorothy's shoes and an Alf-Roberts look-alike husband. I missed the opening of her speech, but caught the part about acts she had booked.

"We've had everything through my hall. A disabled performer who we nicknamed Hattie Jacques In A Wheelchair. She was loved, apparently, by Yehudi Menhuin. And who will ever forget - sorry, my fellow councilors won't know I'm talking about, unless they do - the trio. One in a kilt, one in baggy stockings and the other just funny because he was so tall. They ended their playing of all sorts of things on all sorts of musical instruments with the funny one upside down, head in a goldfish bowl with a goldfish in it, playing his violin perfectly in front. Of course, they aren't a trio any more because he died earlier this year. The other two are carrying on, but that's a Duo, of course, and you may definitely want a trio and, as part of the nature of the scheme, you are entitled to that. Perfectly entitled to it."

I thought: in a minute she'll be calling for an exhumation to ensure you get the trio if you want it.

Imagine the Grand Finale now. The goldfish wouldn't forget that every three seconds.

Lord Denning's Background To My Gargouillades

I thought we should have an update on the building work next door. Five months now and counting.

I e-mailed the owner to ask: is the house like the Tardis, with a Great of China's worth of Wall inside to be whacked with an entrenching tool? Or are the walls themselves like the heads of the Hydra – do an Anna Ryder Richardson on one and another springs up in its place?

No reply.

There was a positive last week. But like a Mayfly, it lasted but a day.

I was on my way to the Marylebone library to sneak back a CD of Faure's Requiem. A couple of nights before when I was renewing my items online, I saw that it was still on loan to me. I was sure I'd returned it. The next day I rang the library, told them I didn't have it, and asked them to check if it was on the shelf. It wasn't; and it was a week overdue. I went into a full yes, I'm absolutely positive I returned it, and it was on such and such a day at such and such a time, to the female librarian who looks like the man with the whip in The Willow Pattern looked at with a magnifying glass, and she said to me and I said to her and the world said and the consequence was.

I do this a lot at the library. Or on the phone to it. Sounding just like Lizzie Borden giving evidence.

Yes, I went out to the barn, so was in the one place that's out of sight of the house.
Yes, in over a hundred degree heat.
I went there to eat the pear that fell off the tree into where my father had thrown the contents of his potty that morning.
I was there for exactly the amount of time for someone to take the axe and give my mother forty whacks.
While the lunatic, who must have hidden in the cupboard at the top of the stairs for an hour and half, gave my father forty-one whacks I had gone out again.
To the barn.
Yes, the one place that's out of sight of the house.
This time I was looking for lead to make into a sinker to put on my fishing rod that I haven't used for ten years or even seen for five but suddenly remembered was sinker-less.

Lizzie Borden. Such an inspiration. Parents: you have been warned.

Lizzie got away with it. And found lesbianism. I found the CD. But didn't get away with it. Having sneaked it back onto the F shelf, I went home and rang the library to have them look for it again. They found it. But they said it must have been put back since the day before and couldn't have come officially through them at the desk as the security casing wasn't on it. They would take it off my card, but wouldn't waive the one pound twenty-five fine.

Oops.

I refused to pay the fine. It was the principal of it. I'm not wasting my Borden-esque baloney on people who think that skin that looks cheese-grated, egg stained cardigans and BO are bohemian. In high dudgeon I will hand back my card today.

Not that kind of Bag Lady, Bruce. Was trying to insult librarians.

Anyway, back to the May Fly analogy. Remember that? On the very day that I laid the fuse for Uncased Faure's Requiem-Gate to blow up in my face, I noticed that next door had put in some gorgeous distressed wrought iron curlicue railings. That evening, I came back to find them smothered in black gloss.

Next door have partially moved in now. Er? There are still dust sheets I spy making the first floor look like the ET dying in the medics' tent scene. All over the area at the front are gutting from inside wrapped in tarpaulin. Dumped by Northerners now instead of Poles. It's the last thing I see before I go to bed. Non-stop from eight till six we get the Ilkley Moor Baht 'At yabbering. No wonder I've had nightmares about Judgment Day at the Bronte Parsonage.

But still, they're half-in. Sadly, the half includes a kid that practises kick-flips on his skateboard outside until someone (yes, me) tells him to stop. And there's someone on the other side of the hardened-Reddy Brek thick wall from my room that plays the guitar until well past nine o'clock. I went round to complain.

The owner was just coming back from walking a chocolate Labrador so fat it looked like a basking shark on a stand. I made a mental note to ring the RSPCA.

"Please", I called up the front steps, "we have bang crash wallop all day every day and have had for months – and we've all really had enough now, really – so can whoever it is stop strumming on the other side of the wall from my bed".

"Which room are you in?"

"That one with the lights on."

"Well, it really isn't very late…"

"Yes, but as I get woken up every morning at eight by your builders…"

A practically toddler version of the skateboard kid looked out of an upstairs window. He was holding a guitar. And grinning.

You know those things that are never to hand when you need them? Policeman, taxis, remote controls, the end of the sellotape, car keys, Rizlas, working cash points, condoms, clean knickers, wet wipes and glitter spray guns, for example? Where at the mewling and puking stage of this grouting-faced, transported-eighteenth-century-whore-haired, bling bedecked, soya milk and peanut butter reeking, BUPA tooth capped, wannabe It Girl and Hobbit begotten freak was King Herod?

"Look", I said, turning to go, "I'm sorry and everything. But he has the whole of your house to play the guitar in. It doesn't have to be right next to the adjoining wall. I really have to have an early night."

Like Madame Butterfly going behind the Japanese paper screen, I exited left. And whiled away the two or so hours before the double-episode repeats of This Life on after Newsnight playing Klondike Solitaire on my pc.

But I'm still going ahead with the nuisance complaint against next door that I've lodged with Camden Council. A delegate is dealing with me.

Delegate.

Must everything not be what it is? Must shit shovellers be Faececal Matter Relocating Facilitatists? Must GNER guards' be, in the fairyland of their tanoi calls, trolley-dollies on Barbara Cartland Airways? Must my mate Maria be an undiscovered diva rather than a trog with tiny talent and an ego over-wheened on Betty Shine books?

Delegate.

But I'm listening, tell me.

The delegate says my complaint has to be law-bolstered.

I rang blond Andy Garcia look-alike barrister Daniel, who I bedded once because he was so turned on by wannabe dominatrix Sally being even more turned on by the thought of it. Or something.

How bored we used to get front of house during Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Dan worked at Covent Garden during his law conversion. And, co-incidentally, attended Dawn Oliver's lectures.

I knew Dawn from Aldeburgh. Dan was able to verify that she did, yes, treat the new intake each year to the same two jokes.

"When I mention the crown, I mean that in the sense of the prosecution and not in the sense of what a queen might wear on her head."

Thank you.

"And when I mention the cabinet, I mean the highest ranking people other than the Prime Minister in the government, and not something in the corner of the sitting room with sherry, napkins and Kerplunk in it."

Thank you again.

From what Daniel said having heard my case, my getting anywhere officially with it is sounded as likely as a Royal Marine Commando playing murder ball neither naked nor wearing a tea gown.

But I thought back to when Daniel and I used to sit on the sofas in the Royal Opera House foyer. He would read accounts of trials to me and I would have to apply my Miss Marple brain to guessing what Lord Denning's ruling had been in each case. Just typing the words Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking [1971] 1 All ER 686 (CA); Central London Property Trust Ltd [1947] K.B.; and 130 George Mitchell (Chesterhall) Ltd v Finney Lock Seeds Ltd [1982] 3 WLR 1036 (CA) is making me moist.

One of the cases was about some people "coming to a nuisance". Lord Denning ruled that the plaintiffs, people who had moved to live beside a cricket field, aka "to the nuisance", were not entitled to compensation for smashed windows because the land, aka cricket pitch, had always been intended for such use, i.e. for the playing on of cricket, and therefore it was reasonable to assume that balls might be hit for six and if the aforementioned windows of the aforementioned people were in the way of the flight of the ball, tough titty.

I may have paraphrased there.

"Out with the interlopers. Rest for the wicked", he might say.

Technically, we're dealing with "derogation from grant" here, do you see that? I'm armed now. I shall get next door on "derogation from grant" of South Villas dwellings being intended as bed-sits for the illicit liasons of bankers with ballet girls.

Which they were. Okay, mostly were. But they were definitely not intended for whole-house use by a single family. Next door have "bought a nuisance". Said nuisance is detrimental to the efforts of a present day ballet girl to uphold the intended South Villas lifestyle. The raven croaketh.

An Edwardian city boy installed his ballet girl mistress in the bed-sit I rent today. He hopped on the five nineteen out of Euston via Hampstead Garden Suburbs, hopped off at Camden Road, hopped on his bun-headed beauty, hopped off back to Camden Road, hopped on what would by then be the six nineteen out of Euston and home.

Convenient (s)natch?

I look out of the same second floor window as he did while (I imagine) he was combing his hair or checking his clothes for whiffs of her perfume. The view would be the same, other than for the electric street lighting and modern blinds and curtains.

In the room itself, she would have looked in the same mirror as I do today, and switched on either one or both bars of the same Belling heater. And from the look of it before I finally talked my landlord into replacing it last year she might well have got burns from the same carpet.

I'm continuing history. In all sorts of ways. Take the reason I moved in in the first place.

My landlord, a great opera and ballet buff, rented the top floor here in the 'forties. Through a sitting tenancy agreement, a death and an emigration he eventually acquired the whole house.

"But I felt it just wasn't right. When we pulled everything out to put in what is now your fitted wardrobe, we found an odd tight and a jar of the stuff they used to spit on to use as mascara. I felt it was anti-tradition not to carry any of that on."

He put a card on the notice-board outside the Royal Opera House staff canteen, and brought on the dancing girls, one after another over forty odd years, passing the room down. And here I am. (Lis, before me, was a contralto aberration. Ignore her).

I perform in the regional theatres my Edwardian forebear would have done – the Sheffield City Hall, Leeds City Varieties, the Theatre Royals at Margate and Bury.

As she would, I save money by staying in B. and B.'s run by the type of landlady people wistfully and mistakenly think has died out. .

I always hankered for a fur diva coat. Out of the blue, the Galina fan who ran the Sue Ryder shop in Aldeburgh handed me a bin liner hissing that I was not to open it in the shop in case her over there rifling through tops that wouldn't fit round one arm let alone anywhere else had a fit. Inside was a rabbit fur and it was in just my size. I hope the city boy gave my girl a fur.

I've worn mine to strut onstage at Club Kabaret, Bush Hall and the Cobden Club, where over years I've danced ballet solos as part of variety bills. As she would have.

And walked home to save cab fare.

So, getting home in the early hours lungs sanded down, left calf throbbing, feet bollocks'd, would you wish on either of us being woken at eight by builders employed by a man who wears brown cords and a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches? Married to a woman that I feel sure baited her husband trap with Laura Ashley under Crew Clothing, Lady Penelope hair and no defining points anywhere from knee to ankle, wittering on about being an executive in fund-raising to conjure an image of her power dressed behind a desk the size of Newcastle with Lesley Garrett's people on hold, whereas the true picture is one of her on the wheelchair access slope outside Budgens sticking flags on people’s lapels? With children that you want to make justify out loud you their reason, when they're attending minor English prep-schools, for styling themselves like Harlem pimps?

You wouldn’t.

So, wish me luck with the Drag Ballerina Edwardian Hoofer Throwback v. Building Bricks of Society Bods (2006. DV)

Hm…not so moist now.

And while we're at it…where's my city boy?

Does he look minted enough, do you think?

Two Little Words That Mean Just So Much...

Death Of A Discarded Solor

Feel free. It's the back wheel, after all...

Lis and I were saying it must be silly season at the moment.

The owner of the T shirt shop in Aldeburgh came upon the town's ex-florist cocking her leg on the back wheel of a car.

"Come into the shop", he tried to talk her out of it, "use my loo. You shouldn't be doing that there."

"You're allowed to by law as long as it's the back wheel", she replied.

The headmaster where Lis teaches decreed that any pupil awarded ten merit points could go to the front of the lunch queue with their chosen best friend and sit at a special table with them. He also set the whole school a work book test. Anyone who filled it in would automatically gain five merit points. Last Wednesday, only a handful out of the thousand plus pupils had less than ten merits points and weren’t kicking off about the places at the front of the lunch queue and on the special table.

On the same Wednesday, I watched an elderly woman (who might easily I thought have been on her way to an Anne Widdecombe look-alike convention) try to reverse park from the summit of a speed bump.

This did cheer me up. And I needed it. Earlier, I’d watched part of a You Tube video e-mailed me by a friend, “Not to scare you, but to remind you why you perform Galina for the troops”. The video contained footage of service people’s funerals in Afghanistan to a sound track of The Last Post. I nearly knocked my pc off the desk during my assault on the little red box with the white cross in it. But too late. I saw “Babe” Luke’s photograph.

I had wondered why he stopped e-mailing but tried to put the worst possible case scenario out of my mind.

I hung out with Luke a lot in Iraq after the night I discarded him from the Solor auditions because he was too pretty. As I explained to him,

“I’ve been sternly reminded by various directors to go for the comic-rather than the lush- potential in my Solors”.

And I’ve made some mistakes over the years. I’ve chosen an Etonian who started hyperventilating when I demonstrated finger turns and had to be helped offstage. There was the dusky beauty in Derby whose comebacks were about as sharp as bread pudding, until I said, “You’re the type always told you’re beautiful,” waited for him to simper, and got him with, “So you’ve never bothered with developing a personality”. And I nearly got decked by a Sports Psychology student in Bath when I moved his hands so that he was miming “love” over his heart rather his appendix.

Yes, with Byron at the Battersea Arts Centre I was vindicated my choice of beauty over repartee. But it was just the once. Epic Aussie Byron insisted on performing shirtless to show off his surfer’s muscles, spent almost a minute killing the tiger with his bare hands, and irrelevantly interrupted me in the middle of the back story to share that Gam-whatever-her-name-is gave crap head.

Byron waxing lyrical. See what I did there?

I decided not to risk it with Luke in Iraq, though, and discarded him. Nicky Ness, aka miss, was surprised.

“But, miss”, I said, “He was such a babe. I thought…”

“He was hilarious. I think you could turn down your comic-over-babe filter a little. But only a little”, she added, seeing my gaze turn to the two 2 Para Captains sitting at the bar.

Sorry, Luke. Again. But we’ll do the Scarf Pas De Deux when I get where you are, I promise.

Let’s just hope it’s up the ramp and not down…

Sorry, I’m forgetting the silly season aspect: why e-mail me a video like the You Tube one? But freakishness runs in the family. The brother of the bod that sent it had my name engraved on a bullet.

"Thought you'd like this before you go to Afghanistan", read the note that came with it. "If there's a bullet out there with your name on as they say and you know where yours is, then surely that means you'll be safe? Hee hee."

And I’ve kept the bullet in my spare make-up bag, for Christ’s sake.

I should have put it straight back into the jiffy bag and round to the post box with it.

Return To Tosser...

And talking of bad taste. Louisa has moved to Silvertown.

Where Louisa lives. Taken during the blitz. Not much better now.

Louisa Duggan. On harp when I’m on on lungs in anything more operatic than The Lonely Goatherd. And Silvertown (with everything else it has not going for it) is too far to go on legs.

See, I do London transport as little as I have to. Morrissons, the library and the fruit 'n' veg-cum-pants stall at Camden Cross run by the supremely ogleable Mark Wahlberg look-alike are all walkable. But on the Wednesday I saw Anne Widdecombe woman getting herself reported to the RSPCEP (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Exhaust Pipes) I was on my way to a rehearsal with Louisa. On...because of her move…I can hardly type it…London Transport.

I enjoyed the art deco escalators at St. John's Wood, but it all went downhill (see what I did there?) after that.

At Canary Wharf I followed the signs from the Jubilee Line to the DLR. They pointed into the river, into a dead end subway, had a second go with the river - and I spent enough time avoiding either drowning or becoming defunct down a hole for the two dogs and the cat to have made The Incredible Journey.

There and back.

Desperate now to get to the station so I could do an Anna Karenina with the train, I had a look at what other people were doing. They were going somewhere. That looked hopeful. Sheep-like, I followed them into a glass house with an Abbey National, stalls like in the background on Sex And The City and...oh look! - the Canary Wharf DLR. (But maybe I should be keeping that a secret. London Transport clearly is).

Canary Wharf. Yes it is. It says so on the building.

I waited on platform three for eight minutes before my train came. And went. On platform six. I checked the line map again. The train really ought to have come and gone via platform three. I went to information to complain.

"Oh, but you see, sir," the nice lady explained, "The train doors open on two consecutive platforms."

"That would be three and four then, not three and six."

"No, sir. It stops at five and six."

"But that's just my point. The line map says the train I want stops at platform three."

"In that case, then, it would open at four as well..."

"No, the line map is wrong."

"Where?"

"At platform three."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Poplar."

"I can only apologise."

By the time I changed onto the Silverlink, it was well into the rehearsal time. And my throat was tightening with frustration.

A voice came over the intercom regretting that the next Silverlink Train was cancelled. Tuts and sighs from the city boys, a string of expletives from me. I sat down with my Patricia Highsmith and Peanut M&M's.

Another voice came over the intercom reminding us that pre-paid Oyster Cards were not valid on this service.

"What f***- cl**- c**k w**king service?!"

And then another telling us to keep the station tidy.

I looked for a bin.

To empty onto the platform.

The rehearsal went well, but I left early to get to Covent Garden for Sleeping Beauty. We were off again with the silly season. There was no change of cast slip, I’m sure of it, and nobody said anything, but Rupert Pennefather didn’t come on as Florestan, Bennet Gartside did. Steven Macrae appeared with Laura Morera as the Bluebirds instead of Yohei Sasaki and Belinda Hatley. By the time we got to the entrance of the recently married couple, I was agog to see who we’d get: Burke and Hare, Renee and Renato, the Crankies…

And that’s where we came in. Lis and I went off about the silly season, taking in all of the above and that Kiri Te Kanawa has recorded a duet with Katherine Jenkins, because of a serious misprint in the Sleeping Beauty programme. It says that the Royal's Ballet Mistress is Ursula Hageli.

Surely that's just too silly?

Anglia News

"...and the goose has finished being fat..."

In February nineteen ninety-eight, two weeks before the first performance of what got mewled and puked into being Anything For A Tenor/Madame Galina New Forces’ Sweetheart, I got a photo and some useful column inches in the East Anglian Times.

Researchers for Anglia News saw it and rang saying they wanted to cover me. Me prize heifer, them randy bull, but bring it on every time if it gets me on TV, I say.

It was still dark when we started filming. And freezing. I had on thermal knickers, four pairs of tights and a purple baby grow over my tutu. I had already done my make up to save time. It didn’t: Louise, the director, who had one green eye and one blue one, wanted a sequence of me getting tutu’d, knicker’d and masacara’d up, so I had to take everything off and start again.

“And while you’re doing that – obviously we won’t show the nuts and bolts bit of you changing – but while you’re putting the make up on, if it’s not going to affect your concentration, could you be answering the question, starting by repeating the question as I’m sure you know how to do: how and why you created Galina?”

“That’s fine” I said. “It’s quite interesting to explore that side of it - what creation of something is bound up with”.

See, I need to concentrate on doing my make-up. On the finished news item, I talk total bollocks.

“My mum’s been a. Thing. She had quite. Hang on, this line under the eye always stumps me. She’s been. Come on: how about you give it to me first time for a change? Mum’s always been. At home. Where I was brought up. Influencing. And in my late teens my mate Marcus did these. Things while we were at the. Place. And parody, parody, parody. Of Blue Peter. Ever since he’d been on that course, Paul who played Simon, we all worked front of house at Covent Garden together except when we weren’t. There. He was in them, and he and I used to tease Marcus saying that, that I just said: Marcus, ever since you’ve been on that course. Except he hadn’t been by then, because the films we made (I played Janet Ellis) were for him to take to the course as. A thing. Not exhibit. And for some reason if you watch them, you’ll see that for some reason I play Janet as frosty and imperious, not wanting to make things like the Easter Egg or the Santa’s Hat. But there is a serious side in that I try to have my ballet arms in the right place and my legs. Not just boinging about. Them. As accurate. As I can get them. And Jean Laurent Dreyer-Dufer. Never liked me. Oh, bum, why can’t they make special non-falling-all-over-the-floor Kirby grips? Saw me do a private party. For himself, actually, I’d forgotten that it was his party, and said I must have a proper tutu because back then I had one made out of a body from M and S with feathers we practically found in the park stuck on and Jean Laurent, who makes them in Paris now, said it was too simplistic. I got it caught over the metal lippy thing on the ladder-on-wheels off-stage on my first ever Swan Lake, but that was the dress rehearsal so it was the safe opposite of the theatrical bromide good dress rehearsal, bad opening night. It was all right on the night, actually, except that Peter Snipp, playing Prince Siegfried, had got the stage management to make him a lake as a joke, so when I mimed for him to look upstage, he looked down at the floor at a piece of tin foil, and I wanted to know what he was looking at so looked down too, and corpsed slightly bourreeing back downstage (slower than when you’re trying to simulate flight when they must be really fast) into my mother’s tears. And going back to playing Janet opposite Paul as Simon or Mark Curry – I had to have a mask when I played Caron Keating – he really kept you up to the mark with the standard of his ad-libbing. When we did the Christmas Special. Did Janet get killed by her stalker with the knitting needles and the ball of wool in that one? Can’t remember. But in that one Janet dead or alive, Paul said totally off the cuff:

“And we’ll be showing you how to recycle all those Christmas cards, on thirteenth night, when you’re giving the Halls a hand up again forgiving and forgetting, and the goose has finished being fat.”

"And it's all led to. Cabaret cabaret cabaret. All along like that, really."

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Though content more appropriate to the other end.

Treating the two imposters both the same. As blog fodder.

I did a charity corporate in Edinburgh last week. It was for a truly worthy cause involving children somewhere humid overseas, so I waived my fee.

The organizer was Mrs. Jellaby.

I won an award once for climbing up here in my dress suit shoes. Thank you.

The star guest was Heather Small. Hoorah! When I was in the throes of giving up my full-time teaching job and moving to Aldeburgh with no real reason for doing either of those things and starting to panic, I switched on the TV in the middle of Top of the Pops and caught Heather performing her single Search for the Hero inside Yourself. That’s why I’m doing this, I decided.

Carol, my teacher’s pet singer at Guildford, took me to the Star for a drink to ask “but why are you leaving? What about my chest and head voice mix?” and before I could answer, smiled and sang “Search for the hero inside yourself.”

In Ipswich, with my money fast running out and no work coming in I really started to panic and made myself go into the Buttermarket where there were people. Search for the Hero inside Yourself was the muzac being piped at the very moment I walked in.

So, I was thrilled to be working with Heather. And that was the end of the joy.

For Scotland Today ITV Galina did a stint as a tour guide and referred to this as barnacled Thunderbird 3. Thank you.

I walked a good twenty minutes up the mound from the station to my hotel. Put my nightshirt on the pillow, ate the complementary shortbread, turned the loo roll to run the other way. From there I walked a further half an hour to the venue. I would have walked anyway to warm up my legs and feet, but the offer of a lift would have been nice.

Mrs. Jellaby greeted me with,

“Can you just come and sit over here for a minute, please?”

Not “cup of tea?” or “a look at the dressing room?” or “an airing for your tutu?”…

She went on,

"Now, I don't know what you do or anything..."

But from the way she pitched the evening to me back in June, you’d have thought that armageddic amounts of fiery lava would wend its way through Old Town once again if I didn't grace her evening with what comedian Kevin McCarthy calls my tiddle tiddle thud in three dozen doilies sewn together…

"And I have to say I just read something that makes me think you might be a bit inappropriate for the evening."

I wanted to quote Confucius/Buddha/Thumper’s Mother or whoever it is at her: "If you don't know, don't condemn."

But from then on I ceased to exist anyway because Heather Small was either on the phone, on her way, or on stage and Mrs. Jellaby hardly came near me.


My beloved Jenners. Got a new bag for my tutu... Thank you.

I did my sound check, set my props, asked for the sandwiches and water I'd been promised (nothing doing) and was shown upstairs to a bar “this’ll have to do for your dressing room” to wait four hours till I went on.

I had to get out of the way of waiters herding about with non-Vegan starters while I was trying to shimmy into my nad tuck-away pants. The “compere” checked in with me. He was one of those over-styled people who are absent in the way that Grinny the alien granny in Nicholas Fisk’s book is absent. Mrs. Jellaby came up and they had a discussion about the birthday boy. Some twelve year old whose father is CO of Prontaprint. Which is why the kid had won some competition or other and was being treated to a cake during dinner.

One of the waiters told me that there would also be a little girl there whose birthday it was...

I got onstage after a terrible introduction and had to call six times to the techy to put my music on. While I was dancing my opening number, I noticed that not all of my props were on the table. The scarf, water, salt and bread were gone. Ballonees. I sent a waitress for replacements, and when it came to the Scarf Pas De Deux I had to use "this old piece of tat" – actually the most gorgeous and expensive embroidered pashmina - off the back of the richest woman in the room. She said I was wonderful, so it was okay.

Mrs. Jellaby, the compere and how many bloody more? other people walked to and fro across the room for whispered discussions with one another all during my set, and while I was mid set-up for the Pas De Deux with Martin Hannan, Scotland On Sunday Sports reporter, Mrs. Jellaby brought Heather's entourage in right through the middle of the room to sit at the front table with her. That was it. I got off the stage.

"I hear we have another birthday in the room?” I called out. “Rhiannon, where are you?"

I went over to her. She was on beautiful, beautiful Peter’s table. I had just discarded him from the Pas De Deux competition, because had he won it would have been for the sex- rather than comic-potential. And Nicky Ness aka “miss!” at Combined Services Entertainment doesn't like it when I do that...

"No-one else gave a shit about your birthday here tonight”, I told Rhiannon, “yet they all knew. And you didn’t win a competition. And why not? Because your father isn't CO of Prontaprint and didn’t do all the flyers and photos for tonight for free..."

Round the room they were either doubled up or gasping in horror.

When nobody, not Mrs. Jellaby, the compere, nobody, came to say cheers afterward, I left. I sent a loaded e-mail next day to Mrs. J. though, saying how sorry I was not to have stuck around, but when I perform as Galina I tend to leave quickly and with no fuss so as not to be seen as me, and to leave them with her, sort of thing, and I was sure I must have missed out on a thank me speech from the stage and presentation of flowers, champagne and/or other gift?...

“I wondered where you’d gone”, she wrote back. “Your champagne is in my fridge. You were amazingxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”.

Don’t care. Too rude.

Next day I stopped off in Durham to take my mate Rupert out to lunch.

Rupes is afraid to go in here alone after the dream he had about his own ascension. Thank you. But he needs to for his engineering course...

I’m nicking a lot the stuff that Rupert comes stream of consciousness out with for a sketch show. I got two napkins worth from him, so to speak, including:

“For someone, like, way older than me, I was surprised at how inexperienced she was in bed. She just, like, lay there. But then I think I heard somewhere that her last boyfriend was German? I’m not, like, saying that I’m, like, way experienced, but I watch porn. To be good in bed all you have to do is do what they do but with more emotion and respect.”

Rupes showing another skill.

After lunch, back on the train, a quick turn around in Camden and off again to a gig at the Swindon Arts Centre. Out front were lots of service people that had seen the stuff about me in Soldier Magazine. When I came on as Galina, there was so much applause I couldn’t hear the music. Sadly, re. the twin imposters to be treated the same, I let myself bask. Set off on the wrong foot for the Pas De Chat, tried to correct myself, got it more wrong, had to save myself from falling down.

Said an ex-airman afterward in the bar,

“For a good few seconds, with your legs going all over the place like that, it looked like Mr. Punch setting about the sausages.”

Not the way to do it.

GROOAAAN!

Quiet down, now!

Diomed Of The Loud War Cry!

Bless him!

Aka Craig Davidson, ex-US Marine Corps, he is now a model and fitness ambassador. I found his page when I was browsing Myspace, because we both have Don Quixote listed as favourite book. He replied to my holler of “comrade” with a gracious thank you for looking after his fellow service members on base in Kandahar.

When I read his blog, I found just what I needed…

You see, Galina is twenty-one today. Sort of. On November 6th 1985 I danced excerpts from Swan Lake in the living room of Jean Laurent Dreyer-Dufer’s flat in Balham. It was my first out-of-foyer experience, so I count it as Galina’s debut and as the day of her birth.

Oddly, throughout my time playing Galina, no matter how bouncy and youthful I think I have made her - and Aurora, for one example, is twenty in Act One - people time and again reckoned her age to be around forty-two or -three.

I’ve tried to ignore them.

But things came to a head at lunch in the Lighthouse, Aldeburgh, where our waiter was Frederick James Mortimer Turner, older brother of Maximilian and heroic stooge Solor at one of my Edinburgh previews in 2002. I told him about Galina’s approaching birthday.

“That’s my birthday.”

“Oh, sweet. But she’s a little older than you.”

“She is. I was actually born on that day. Galina’s old.”

I was straight back to Diomed’s blog for his advice on diet, his psychology of discipline and his seven minute workout of Jumping Jacks, squat thrusts, press-and sit-ups, high knee raises, toe touches, another round of Jumping Jacks, repeat if you have time – you can almost hear his admonishing “make time!” – and “then if you really want a body of an African God, add a 30 min run at 60% max heart rate 3 times a week. You'll thank me for it!”

I’m never going to get that ripped. But, with Diomed's help, my Beauty will bounce for a good while yet!

See what I mean?
www.myspace.com/diomed1

My CD would make such a lovely gift...

Me about to sing for Her Majesty The Queen. Photo Jeff Brinded

...indeed it would. Or just have one yourself.

It's called The Battle And The Breeze. Sea Songs given the relevant welly by myself on the lungs and Ross Power on the ivories.

The Queen had one to take away after I sang for her on the HMS Victory. (The rest of us got a slice of HMS Victory Chocolate Cake). And one greatly enjoyed it, I heard.

Joanna Lumley has one. We gigged together at the Whte Bait Supper and she signed my menu "to the fabulous Iestyn with admiration and love, cheers sweetie! xx".

My mother doesn't have one.

"If it's what Gareth David was telling me about; you singing on it; it isn't a tape like for the car is it?"

"You don't drive, mum."

"But Gareth David does when he picks me up at Woking station, and he won't be able to play it if it's a CD."

"He will, he has a CD player."

"But I haven't. I need the old tapes."

I then remembered that she had a DVD player; she could play it on that.

"What? And you'll appear like some kind of hieroglyphic?"

"You mean hologram. And no."

She has no DVDS but needs the player to check that the pirate DVDs she buys for my nieces (yes, we've told her time and time again, but she's Welsh) are what they say they are on the boxes. She bought them Bedknobs And Broomsticks when they were six and four respectively. Angela Lansbury was nowhere to be seen. But the knobs were bed ones, in a way...

GROOOOOAAAAAN!

Quiet down...

So, I need you to buy you of my CDs so I feel loved. Contact me through my website www.iestynedwards.com and we'll arrange one being sent out to you for six of your English pounds and fifty of the pence inc postage and packaging.

Help poor little me - as Dame Nellie Melba used to say before she dragged another stage hand into her dressing room and got out, first, her "everyday"-purse...