Regret

Like many of the things in life which one should avoid, one should avoid regret. I am sorry I have wasted so much time on it. Regrets about people I have wronged, friends I have lost, dignity I have sacrificed, charges I should have denied. But such is the soup of life; the bread of existence, the umbilical coax connecting us with the nether.

It would be pretentious of me to say that acting is the easiest of the arts. You don't need paint, you don't need a chisel (unless you are using the same dressing table as Vanessa Feltz) and you don't need glue (again, Feltz). It is of course the hardest of the arts. In fact, I would go as far as to say it is the most important and vital work ever, encompassing danger, solitude, safety and camaraderie the like of which much of humanity can only dream. Oh! But that our world leaders were actors. What joy would be injected into the nations' hearts as they told us they were taxing our pensions, levying a variable charge on our properties or cutting our funding. They would do it not with the sombre and serious tone, but with subtle underplay, weaving betwixt text and meaning, between emotion and action, between bond market results and disappointing long term growth yield.

Imagine hearing a factory in Cleethorpes is to close with the loss of five hundred jobs, but the news to be broken by Peter Bowles. I dare say they applaud his fine performance, and as the critics rushed out their reviews, those families affected would be delighted to be part of the story itself, a sort of living addendum, by moving to smaller premises.

Or the complete crash of the stock market, making all monies and bartering tender obsolete, bringing our very society back to a feudal time. But announced by John Simm. I'm sure our so-called Newspapers would be full of praise for Simms moving performance as the everyman, the face of us all, battling insurmountable odds to simply survive, and asking for his fee in cash.

Or a terrible pandemic, likely to cost the lives of billions of innocent people as it cuts through the population leaving only disease and pestilence in its' wake narrated by Graham Norton.

You see my point? Everything is made better by theatre and the merry coterie of workers who present you that illusion. The idea could be extended to the emergency services. I recently ventured to suggest the idea to a Fire Brigade bigwig during a impromptu but highly controlled barbeque.

"What if" I opined "the..." I struggled to express the words at first, while his gaze on me was uninterrupted, despite his garibaldi. "The Fire Brigade is in a lot of financial quagmire, and I have a solution to your woes" I stood there waiting for his reaction, which consisted of poking me in the lapel with his biscuit. I took this to be an improvised 'go on'. "You currently take twenty minutes on average to get to a blaze. What if - what if the Fire Brigade financed a small theatre troupe to perform at blazes before you turn up. This would do two things" Bloody hell! There was no going back now "This would firstly expose these people - or as you call them victims - to contemporary theatre, tackling the issues of the day and making them think about themselves and their fellow man, but it would also take their mind off, to a certain extent, the deadly blazing inferno which was destroying their home and possessions" he chewed his garibaldi. My idea was getting through! One last push, like the final thrust of the copulate act, and I would attain paradise "also it would keep the noise down for the neighbours as making a fuss during a live performance is considered very rude. So we would discourage screaming". My words had got to him. Garibaldi despatched, he moved on to talk to someone else, no doubt about this great idea 'he' had just had.