Kids In Care

There was a news story today that made me furious; which states that police are no longer prioritising searches for children who go missing from children's homes.  I have been working for some time now as a care worker in children's homes around Hereford and Worcester and only this week at a home I where I was doing a late shift, a fifteen-year-old girl ran off, and was later found by police with an older man in a hotel in Birmingham.  If she hadn't been found heaven knows what might have happened as this particular girl has a history of being exploited, particularly by an Asian gang of seven men, who it is believed are still at large; it's a sad fact that kids like this can fall into the hands of potential abusers very quickly.  Once again it's the poor and dispossessed who are paying the price for austerity cut backs - the bed tax is appalling enough, but this is surely one step too far.  The kids I work with sometimes present difficult and challenging behaviour, but this is because they are vulnerable and need our protection; it's not their fault they're in care; in most cases it's because of their parents, so why should they be treated like they're a problem?  But in future the definition of 'missing people' will be changed to 'absent' or missing after a risk assessment has been carried out, so police do not have to respond to every call out.  I am passionate about my work with these kids, and the carers who have been doing it a lot longer than me are to my eyes saints; they take abuse both physical and verbal from them and still battle for the souls of these neglected and abandoned young people.  We need every law at our disposal to help them, but now a vital service is being limited and I think the consequences could be disastrous.  The girl who ran away later asked me if anyone really cared that she had gone.  I assured her we all did; I had driven to the local station train station and had searched around town myself.  However it seems to me with this new definition of missing persons, that their safety isn't such big a priority any more as far as our government are concerned.  Whoever came up with this proposal - shame on your head.

River's Up

When the Larsen B ice shelf (an area the size of Wales) broke away from the Antarctic continent before the last millennium I knew the game was up as far as the environment was concerned, so I wrote River's Up commissioned by Alan Ayckbourn for the Stephen Joseph Theatre, about a middle-aged couple who lived by the River Severn in Worcester, who suddenly find themselves caught up in a cataclysmic global event when the flood waters don't recede.   It has since been produced by the Swan Theatre, Worcester, had a critically acclaimed BBC Radio production, two sell-out productions in Rome, where it is called Effetto Serra, and a rural tour with Oxfordshire Theatre Company, 2009.  It is sobering to think I wrote this play back in 2000, before the recent dreadful flooding in Worcester, when I found myself stuck in my home town of Malvern completely surrounded by water and cut off from the outside world.  Following the recent floods over the last couple of weeks (which are now becoming an annual occurrence), I thought I might try and plug the play again and try and get another production; but it is notoriously difficult for lesser known playwrights to get second productions, for some reason theatres like to have world premieres of plays.  But the play has proved itself and the subject matter is current, and as far as I am concerned really important.  I have been an environmental campaigner for as long as I can remember; more especially involved with Greenpeace, and therefore the state of the planet is something I have been writing about for some time, it's is an issue I feel passionately about and have been addressing dramatically for many years.  The first play I wrote touching on this subject was Canned Peaches In Syrup, a Romeo And Juliet story concerning a cannibal and vegetarian tribe set in a world fractured by global warming, which I wrote in the dressing room of the Birmingham Rep. This play has had many readings in this country, but no production here yet; a couple of near misses though, including the offer of a production at Nottingham Playhouse following a week of workshopping, but my agent at the time turned it down for a (supposedly) better opportunity which sadly never came off.  But the play had its world premier in America some years ago with fantastic reviews and was published there too; there was also a great production of the play in Italy.  I've been pushing this play for a while and more particularly River's Up, and always have great feedback; a few years ago though the literary manager of a major theatre contacted me after reading River's Up to tell me how much he'd enjoyed it, but couldn't offer a production as they had just been offered a script that was similar; "Actually," he said, sounding a little confused, "It's really very similar, amazingly similar in fact."  He then asked me about the history of the play and was suddenly very guarded about their upcoming production and steadfastly refused to reveal the name of the writer.  The production never happened, but alarm bells were ringing for me.  It's tough when things like this happen, and the possibility that someone out there might be simply ripping off your work is something that is so upsetting it can ruin you as a writer; make you depressed and question the point of writing anything at all.  So I'm still forging ahead with that play, and hope that I can get its message out there again, because as I said, the issues are really heartfelt.  Below is the synopsis:

'Tom and Sally Millington’s house is about to be flooded yet again!  Sally is worried and blames the icebergs, though Tom seems more concerned about the drunken Brummie revellers he has to sail up the Severn every weekend on his disco-boat.  But this time the water level shows no sign of retreating, and before long they’re drifting around a watery Worcester searching for the Malvern Hills.  Perhaps their resourceful son-in-law, Darren has made it to France with Caroline and little Sean and Jessica - it's a long way, but what choice do they have?  The irrepressible Millington's begin to realise they are witnessing the results of a global cock-up.  Join them on their poignant journey in a dilemma that pits them against cataclysmic odds in a comic/tragedy of epic proportions...'

You've got to laugh

I bumped into a local guy yesterday whom I hadn't seen for some time.  He asked how I was, so I told him 'I was doing fine now thanks.'  He hadn't heard that I'd been in hospital and had surgery, so I explained that I was recovering from cancer.  He asked me what kind and when I told him, he looked shocked and said, "Christ, you poor sod, it's incurable, that one!"  Since my diagnosis there's been many an occasion when someone has unintentionally 'put their foot in it' when I told them about my condition: my neighbour for instance noticed that I was looking a bit peaky and when I explained my diagnosis, she blurted out, "No, my dad died of that!" and then quickly added, "Oh, but you won't!"  I later had a card from her with the cheery message - "Let's hope they've got it in time!"  The night before I was admitted, my brother rang, "Well," he asked thoughtfully, "how do you think the operation will go?"  "Well Steve," I answered, "I'm hoping that it goes well."  When I finally got home following surgery and many complications, my sister rang to see how I was settling in, informing me that a cousin of ours we hadn't seen for many years had exactly the same cancer.  "How did it go?" I asked, totally sympathising with anyone who had to go through what I had suffered for many long weeks, "They got it," she told me, "but it came back again," she continued with dead pan seriousness.  Obviously it wasn't something I wanted to hear at that particular moment, and so I ended the call rather quickly.  Realising it probably wasn't a very good idea to break such uncomfortable news while I was still recovering, she rang back to tell me that - "They got it the second time, though... and er, I think he's all right now... but I haven't heard from him for ages so I can't be absolutely sure, but I think he's in the clear."  And when a mate of mine from Birmingham heard I was going to hospital, she rang to wish me luck, while assuring me that she wouldn't be praying for me because God doesn't exist.  I have to say the best reaction to my illness was the night I told my fellow band members.  After rehearsal, the night before my hospital admission I informed them I wouldn't be hanging out with them for a while and that I had colon cancer.  The room fell silent, no one knew quite what to say, but eventually our drummer announced, "I'm not surprised, you've had this coming is all I can say - I've told you about shoving bottles up your arse!"  Brilliant!  The one quip that literally made me laugh out loud, irreverent and totally what I needed at that moment...  By the way, the bottle thing - it's not true.

The Girl In The Box

There was a news story today that was deeply disturbing, citing that there are thousands of children being abused by gangs and groups in England every year.  The Office of Children's Commissioner study says there were 2,409 victims in the 14 months to October 2011, but the true number is likely to be far higher.  This report doesn't surprise me at all; I've been exploring these issues for a while for a play I wrote last year for East 15 drama school called The Girl In The Box.  Following that of course there came the horrific revelations about the Rochdale girls who were groomed, raped and abused by a Pakistani gang.  But it's all sorts of gangs that are involved in this sort of thing, and more often than not it can actually be teenage gangs that are exploiting very young girls too.

Some years ago I was paid to research a play that was commissioned for The Fetch Theatre Company about drug use in rural counties, and before long I was meeting users, carers, gang members and prostitutes.  The stories of the people I met were sad, moving and sometimes brutal.  But above all one person left a lasting impression on me; a young woman who had been groomed, hooked on heroin, and subjected to sexual acts that I couldn't quite comprehend.  Of course in city and urban towns, these problems are even greater and after seeing a documentary concerning the abuse of young girls by gangs, I knew it was a subject (as dark as it was) that I had to tackle, and so I began to investigate it as best I could.  It is worrying enough to even acknowledge that young girls could be subjected to such hellish ordeals, but this stuff really is happening all around us and we can't afford to turn our backs on it.  I hope my play in some small way shines a light on these significant issues and highlights a problem that we can no longer afford to ignore.  It's a dark play; even darker than my play Noise, and there is one particular event that has never been portrayed on stage before, but it's something that really happened to someone.  Sometimes the truth can be truly shocking, and for that reason alone we can't afford to ignore it; particularly when it affects the vulnerable and abused in our society.  I hope I can get a company to produce the play sometime, because it's an honest portrayal of something that our theatres should be addressing.  Below is a short description of what the play is about:

Monique sees X-Factor as an escape route from a life 'in care'; her best friend, Mel is keeping her options open and is seriously considering 6th form.  But Monique's ex boyfriend, gang member, Sam has other plans for them; unleashing a sequence of disturbing events that lead all the way to the girl in the box - A modern day parable tackling the worrying trend of sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls by gangs, and the dark consequences of drug crime.

Goodbye Mum

Today is the anniversary of my mum's death.  She died of cancer a few years ago, and boy do I miss her still.  I couldn't get over to the cemetery in the Black Country where she is buried, so I thought I would post this poem that I wrote about her as a kind of tribute, I guess.  I was there with her at the end of her life, and although she was amazingly brave, it was tough - how can those last moments be anything else?  The poem is called, Goodbye Mum.

GOODBYE MUM

The morphine kicks in,

Liquid lull of warm blood, mixing, melding,

Rinsing those last corpuscles of thought.

You are drifting away from me,

Bleary eyed,

Scared,

Tired and weary...

You are drifting away from me.

I hold your hand,

Knowing that I'll never be able to do this again,

Because you are drifting away,

And love and memory hammers at my heart and brain

As I feel the tremble of life in your fingers, fade...

Goodbye Mum,

God bless

And great big hugs.

It's the ecology, stupid!

On the eve of the American election, I'm hoping that Obama gets another term, because the thought of Mitt Romney as the next President is just too dreadful to contemplate; his acerbic rhetoric when talking about issues such as Iran sounds so much like Bush that alarm bells are ringing for me; frankly he sounds plain stupid.  The fact that there have been so many stupid American Presidents before him leads me to wonder how the American public can be so gullible when picking their prospective candidates, but I guess the fact that money plays such an important part in the race to the White House means that a person's intellectual attributes aren't particularly what is going to help them get elected - money talks, and in America it seems you need an awful lot of money behind you if you want to be President, not leaving American citizens with much of a choice.  I don't think Obama has been a great President though; in fact his term has been rather disappointing.  We all believed that the first black President might actually herald a new approach to American policy throughout the world, but he didn't close Guantanamo as he had promised, and he increased military capacity in many areas of the planet; including Afghanistan, a war that we hoped he might bring to a speedy conclusion.  Also his health reforms have failed miserably, but I do appreciate this is also because he is penned in somewhat by a hostile congress.  But for me the single most important issue that any American President should be focussed on is the environment, and I've yet to hear either candidate discuss this matter.  America and China are the two big superpowers that are most guilty of polluting the planet, but they both obstinately refuse to take responsibility for their actions, which have massive implications, especially for drought-stricken areas of the Third World.  The fact that extreme weather patterns are affecting all of us now in very significant and disturbing ways makes me wonder why the environment isn't right at the very top of every political agenda; but anything that might affect the economy of a country as powerful as the US just isn't going to make it on to the list of 'things to do'.  Rather disturbingly one of Obama's spokesmen announced that climate change would not be a major campaigning issue for Democrats, and this was while the US was recovering from the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy; an extreme weather event that scientists agree is a direct result of carbon emissions affecting the planet's eco-system.  But right from the very beginning of his Presidency, Obama steadfastly refused to commit to any reduction in emissions, and along with China were the only two countries that did not sign up to the Copenhagen agreement just after his election.  I think it's wonderful for the American people that they have a black President at last; it was a significant moment in the history of that country, and an example to the world that they had overcome their own prejudices, thanks in no small part to the struggles of the civil rights movement; but I do believe he was awarded the Nobel Prize a little prematurely; surely it was incumbent on those involved in the selection process to wait a while to see exactly what he might actually achieve in a job where he wielded so much power, and what he might contribute in the way of world peace.  He definitely in my opinion let us down with regards to the environment, and at the time of the Copenhagen summit I was concerned enough to write a letter to The Guardian newspaper titled - 'It's the environment stupid!'  It was never printed, but here it is anyway...

'Prime Minister Brown, President Obama and rest of our world leaders are obsessed with saving the global economic system, when what they should be focusing their energies on is saving the globe itself.  The reason our planet is facing a potential catastrophe is a direct result of market economies, which by their very structure have no interest in the future results of global warming, as there is no short-term financial benefit to be made from investing in something which has no instant return.  Surely this is a perfect moment in our history for the whole planet to pause and consider why we are where we are, and not how do we get to where we were before.  It's time for a change and to seriously debate the whole structure of commerce and technology; radical ideas such as doing away with personal transport all together, and actually paying third world countries to maintain the great rainforests that we all depend on for the very air we breathe.  Radical ideas for radical times, but I think its time to face the truth - President Clinton was wrong: it's not the economy - it's the ecology, stupid!'

50 Shades Of Black

I have a play on in London that is doing rather well.  A couple of months ago I was contacted out of the blue by the producer of the 'Terror Season' at Soho Theatre to contribute something for the event.  It turned out that he had heard about from me my association with the 'In Yer Face' group of writers and from my play Noise which was a big hit at Soho some years ago.  Terror is the UK's only annual festival of horror theatre and they have had some great writers contribute, so it was good to be asked.  The idea I came up was 50 Shades Of Black, a dark comic satire on that book - 50 Shades Of Grey.  Sarah and Lucy and I went down to London to see it together with some friends and made a weekend of it, taking in a few exhibitions too, including the Pre Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Modern; but I discovered that I had pretty much seen most of the paintings there previously, which were loaned from Birmingham and other galleries I had visited quite a lot.  It was interesting to see them all together in one complete collection though; it gave a good perspective of the whole movement I suppose; Millais still stands out for me as being the definitive painter amongst them; amazing visual technique and vivid use of colours.  This year's 'Terror Season' as a whole has had mixed reviews, but my play seems to have been singled out by some of the critics as worthy of mention, including a particularly good review in 'The Telegraph'.  It's good to have a play of mine out there again, particularly in London, and more particularly at Soho the scene of past triumphs.  I think there was some merit in parodying that book as well; it's baffling to me how something like that has become so popular - a soft porn world wide publishing sensation about S&M that's not even well written; and I'll bet if you haven't read it yourself you know someone who has.  So even though the brief was to write a short play that was essentially about scaring the audience in an entertaining way, I also saw it as an opportunity to take a pop at something I think is culturally rather dubious at the same time.  Other good news - recent blood tests were normal, so I can relax now for another 6 months!