Jarkko Lehmus Diary

Tales From The Carbon Trail: Country-Hopping and Alien Babies

My apologies for my extended absence. Feel free to extend your complaints to the totally useless TalkTalk on http://www.talktalk.co.uk/talktalk/servlet/gben-LLU-ContactUs and uncharasterically bad service from Orange on http://www.orange.co.uk/contact/internet/default.htm?linkfrom=contact_&link=link_1&article=contactussplitterwanadoo. Needless to say I already have.

It has been three months since the last entry, but good things come to those who wait and I'm finally here again getting the Sunday evening on the roll with some of Scotland's finest, thick cubanos and some pumping reggaeton. The age-old question rings in my head: "Where on earth do I start?" Mr T states the obvious answer: "From the begining, you fool!" For us mallards with an attentions span of five seconds exercising the tried and tested formula over and over again has a whiff of staleness to it, so instead I will start from last night, hop, skip and jump through the autumn with some sort of garbled logic and finish off with a look in the future. Enjoy the ride!

Saturday 9th of December 12.43pm I'm at my local Oddbins check-out paying for three bottles of better-than average prosecco. 12.58pm I'm at the Theatre Royal sitting in my seat anxious for the show to start. During those 15 minutes I've been spinning, sliding and wheelying the bike through the town, delivered the bottles and given the last minute pep-talks. Sitting there it really hits home: I'm in the audience. Paul Liburd is about to deliver his debut as Cinderella's father.

The show is over. I wash away excess emotion in the sauna and pool and head back to the theatre for more punishment. This time it's the first cast and the first night proper with Robert Docherty delivering the father's role. What a rocking show! The company is on top form with beautiful full movement, strong emotion and crisp slap-stick all enhanced by the strong and accurate playing of the orchestra. A couple of drinks, a few commisserations and thank-yous later I'm in the restaurant across the road with Ashley, his wife Nic, Nick Kok the conductor and Antony MacDonald the designer having an intense conversation about the challenges of conducting for dance, the beauty of Sibelius, the dark art of naming children and the gayness of pandas.

There can only be true love between two men. ©

In the hazy corners of my memory lurk patchy images of a weekend in Amsterdam. September was giving it's finest, the Edinburgh axis of evil was celebrating Rob's birthday and I was following in the footsteps of Mr Sheen with both barrels blazing.

What did Charlie Sheen do last night? ©

A dinner at The Supper Club distilled to all the movers and shakers rocking up at our flat: freaky boys, their lovely girlfriends, even freakier boys without girlfriends, gorgeous girlfriends lookig for boyfriends, dodgy DJs, funky waiters and assorted shady characters from the night of the Dam did their best party tricks. The taxi arrived, Heineken went down for breakfast at 6am and jaw clenched through airport security I went back to the UK. Boomschluppe was the word of the day.

The rest of the week was a surreal journey that was the first leg of the small-scale national tour spiced up with a rubbish French restaurant in Perth and a regular rainstorm turned into a t-shirt heatwave in Ullapool ending up with a fantasy weekend in Palma, Mallorca. I can't thank you enough, Mika!

A far cry from... just about anything. ©

A blur of some of God's most beautiful creations and the ugliest aberrations followed in the form of the stunning Scottish countryside, idyllic villages and the inbred beast inhabiting them. I shouldn't really say anything, for all the towns we visited were at least as big as my home town of Juankoski in the forests of Finland. So what does that make me? A dancing beast?

Bang in the middle of the small scale tour was deviously inserted a two week stint of a totally different programme with some of the heaviest pieces we have in the repertory to be performed in Aberdeen and the Tramway in Glasgow. Way back in last April in London it only brushed my mind that stuffing a kilo of cow into a starved digestive tract in the middle of the night might not have been a great idea, but man need food so man eat. Woman need fly so man lift and belly go pop. Living in pain is a part and parcel with the business, so I didn't think much of it at the time. Not much partnering was involved during the spring and the summer I spent on a liquid diet and sitting on the bike, but that Tramway gig really did me in and now I've got a lovely little alien baby growing in my lower abdomen.

Two weeks of the small-scale tour with a hole in my gut was not a lot of fun, but it had to be done. Due to the financial strains on both me and the company there was no private medical insurance to rely on, so we agreed to rely on the NHS. Six weeks after the initial visit to the GP I'm still waiting for the date for my operation and the festive season is closing in at an alarming pace. If I don't get myself sliced open and sown up again by mid-January, I won't be fit enough to perform in April! I did have a consultation with a surgeon last week, but a week obviously isn't enough time for these guys to look at their schedules and write a letter to let me know what's going on. Then again a week wasn't enough for my GP to write the referral either and he obviously misunderstood something in my apparently obvious wording of "constant discomfort" and "unable to do my job" since he put me forward as a standard referral with no particular urgency. Dancing's easy, really: you just do a few pretty twirls and the girls fly through the air by themselves. Yeah, right! I'm not one to limp around shouting about my discomfort, but I guess I should do just that to get some attention. Nah. I'll be on the lookout for a GP who actually has some inkling of the physical demands on a dancer's body. Dr Chiah, up yours.

While helping out with the steps and the character work I've been keeping myself busy so as not to notice my frustration during my free time by visiting some old friends and getting to know some new ones in Gothenburg, Paris and London over the weekends and doing some cultural research to my roots by listening to the major works of Jean Sibelius played to perfection by the BBC Scottish Symphonic Orchestra.

Why Gothenburg? Let's just say that I saw something I liked while in Edinburgh during the Festival. Over the months passed more and more reasons to visit the second city of Sweden were placed in front of me, so eventually I was unable to resist the temptation and braced myself to face the trials and tribulations that come attached to being a customer of the adventure tour operator Ryanair and headed to the windy western coast of Sweden. An old friend of mine was doing a brilliant new version of Cats in the opera house, another work-buddy from a decade back is still pouring her love into a rocking street dance group called Bounce, my cousin living in Gothenburg was getting married and another friend of mine had extended an open invitation to stay at hers. So I wasn't really chasing after a woman... Some life-enhancing cultural experiences, miraculous cancelled flights, soul-elevating church action and some free-diving conversations ensued.

Them Swedes know their statues. Check out that saucy smile. ©

And Paris? Well... I've never been! That's a good anough reason, right? My amazing friend Josie and I have semi-accidentally fallen into the habit of frequenting the metropoles of the world: NYC, London and now Paris. Our relationship might not quite be carbon-neutral, but one day I'll plant a forest just for the joy of knowing her, the most intelligent, dedicated and loving piss-artist ever to cross my path.

Tits grow out of walls in the gay Paris. ©

Even the Santa has hard time dealing with the locals. ©

Secretly I've always wanted to be a big-hair rocker. ©

London was my old stomping ground and still is my regular retreat. Dwight is my best friend, responsible of force-feeding me the earlier mentioned small cow and highly likely to be my best man one of these days. So lying in his bed burping and farting while being informed that I'm the eight most eligible batchelor in Scotland was quite humorous. I smelled so eligible at that very moment. I have no problems confessing to being a bachelor, but would you really introduce me to your mother?

That's us back to the present day again. So what's in store for the future? I'll be on the phone trying to chase up my treatment leaving some fire-breathing messages to some unfortunate secretaries and finding out about the British Association of Performing Arts Medicine and the MRI scans through the Equity dancers' insurance. I want some closure and I want it now! But before that comes I dream petrol dreams.