In the mental health system the actor Julie has been held who plays the mother of a young woman with mental health problems in a brand new play the role extends theater Manchester by Ruby Tendo who says that food should waltz in sync with the mood in the appetite and by Judd Surtees whose new collection peaks at 30 puts in the gym is John Betjeman. Adorable and twice as slim as I who labored in the gym your muscle solid during a hard as a hard would bend to a chair with a wristband hairband the rest to kill kill me with Barker if you will kill me with barbells crush miters break the assurance of my nose assume your Amazonian pose but love me when the chain doors close to shopping in a western bruised Bahrain I think of your beauty once again done Dawlish hill along the tube my fingers crushing my ox Okupe I'm back in the gym I'm lifting plates while all the while my hunter s. Waits kill me with arrows burn my prose Lord how I pray will make come to blows but love me when the team dollars clues dear love me when the gym doors closed. Do I love the bit where he crushes the angst or Q. Why's he want you to see him so if you Ga look to us. I think it because it a rhyme basically and so you know the. Great emptiness of the sky too but orcs so. To me I could just see him with his pockets going. I thought I lost your genius he got stronger through going to the gym what exactly do you. Take most was there just across no I don't think nothing of the exercise some of his gab. Welcome back to George for more on the cedilla verse pumping irony for his old lady to now turn to I'm fascinated by the idea of the recipe of 100 down by people like I got a 90 who knew how to make perfect packing and she under this recipe down written on the back of an envelope and people often think of a recipe as a simple set of instructions but how much more is a recipe do you think I think a recipe is anything that prepares you to eat so actually I think we. Stick into it for in our definition a recipe could be opened in can a soup or it could even be choosing the kind of soup from from the supermarket IOW that is a recipe in my books is the kind of cloud of unknowing before you actually approach the food you know what it is isn't it is it in a sense is it is an unwrapping it whether that's like a literal or figurative unwrapping of a food to prepare it to be consumed in your book one of the recipes is for 3 day we ski gingerbread last kick and the name of the speech self is like a point you saying that time is the secret ingredient here and in the book you say that time is important in both cooking and eating so one way is that obviously time is massively important in cooking in general I think is the under scrutinized ingredient in any recipe obviously onions once often unless you had to time to the mix say that's one thing but also in general I think taking time to feed yourself taking the time to eat is so important and the meal with that you can stream in 5 minutes is a completely different meal to exactly the same stuff consumed over the course of an hour so it really does change things what like about your book is that actually it was my going to do depends on the fact that if we need to do in 5 minutes or if we need to do now we're still having a fantastic experience and what I like as well as the book includes is to take pleasure in the act of eating whatever it may be so could you read your hymn of praise to the cream maker to start carefully choose your egg restless through the display into you find the on yoke with the scannable barcode in its bright for oil intact by it and slip it into your jacket pocket carry the egg with you all day feeling the weight of it in your pocket noticing it gently rolling around as you walk sit 3 meetings lectures coffee date with your thoughts fixed on the heavy just within grabbing distance of your greedy fingertips imagine the works in us of the chocolate on your lips think about dipping your tongue into the sickly sweet funds and inside and deftly explicitly like you know then when the moment is right. Absolutely that is beautiful and you've got a will of iron the book is full of rich language is the word language to describe food in the pleasures of food dumplings transform from palate little bowls to fat steaming glorious clouds hot and heavy and beautiful little babies and it seems to me you're taking great responsibility here to describe the food not only specifically but also beautifully to me a huge power of enjoying food is translating it across different areas of understanding in my life so for example I might if it and I might be thinking of some time I've seen that food in a film I might be thinking of how Like for example a menu I read menus I like poetry I'm terrible with poetry but boy do I love a man you like the way the words feel it's a huge part of building up an appetite I think now George your family came across from Hungary in the 1950 s. And food in the language of food is often the link isn't it that ties people to home and I do the forms I wonder how important were written are maybe juice remembered recipes for you well my mother had them I mean if mood is the last thing that stays with you even many many years after you've left where you were born it's what you came along with and it's what you look for when you begin cooking again but then you have to find the ingredients and it's not always easy and so you would carry in your head all the family would carry in their head a kind of perfect memory of food that you then try and replicate it on the English politicus Well you can never quite decide which is a best image is perfect even back at home but you do have an ideal chicken pup Reka you do have an ideal kind of goulash and you do have ideals of cabbage and all these sort of terribly sort of Mittel-Europa your open things you know with which your whole body is kind of furnished. I think being a writer is a quest in the end isn't it for the ideal coverage. Has been how do you from Akron to him and I wonder if we're recipes under down by your mom and by women particularly the family and is that a particular accident in delicacy that won't trouble foreigners I like and well for a while in my life I thought I'd actually imagined the phenomenon of the black eyed peas on bonfire night because I couldn't find them anywhere yet and outside I was really small but every slangs where me and Melissa. Couldn't find and started to come but now did you put them in the paper. In the whole lot you know with all to vinegar Are you sure you should have a pope but it became a court eventually but I think it started off from the people you did when you got married to the market and also homes of like new potatoes with little to get out of a little farm there was a market so what we're doing here is doing what you're book doing it's turning food into stories isn't it goes yeah it is a storybook and in a sense it's another tip in itself isn't Yeah and that's the thing that interests me I've done I've done recipe books like straight up recipe books before and that was fun in its way but the thing that's always interested me more is the stuff that happens just off the side of the plate so you know I'm not really interested in like molecular gastronomy or anything like that what I want to know is what inspired that chef what did their mom say to them that made them improve the recipe what cooking tips to give them things like that and as you mentioned there's a lot of food in film a lot of food in literature and all of the fun of the films of Nora Ephron and she seems to say that when we seem to be talking about food with actually really talking about food you know so the food itself almost becomes I don't know a language or a metaphor for what we really mean to say yes and actually Nora Ephron uses food as a really really. A metaphor so many times like in that really famous scene in When Harry Met Sally where she fussily orders this sandwich on white bread and I think it maybe has Turkey or in it or maybe it's him something like that anyway and he orders pastrami on raw and it's this contrast of this a wasp e. Type fussy woman and then this Jewish man and that is all expressed through the feet so to me in your book as well you celebrate food of all kinds and your book is all about pleasures a fantastic bit where you talk about even a floppy soggy cheese no name pasty rescued from the tepid purgatory of a station cafe sandwich cabinet or food if you eat it as I once did on the way home visiting your sick grandad in hospital so that's what it is isn't it somehow with think about where we were when we're this thing but also the negatives of polarized between so-called good food and so-called junk food out there that can be a problem coming it's a problem because you know what like food is only one tiny part of the equation that makes up you know it's the way that we eat the other things involved in the equation context who are you eating with and when and why and you as the eater like you can't just discount those things and say here's one perfect diet one size fits so that's the one and when we talk about well being in relation to food it's become tied up with this idea of clean foods of super foods and in the book you say there's a kind of mindfulness in cooking eating anything in this pasty that we talked about before and you've talked about your own difficult relationship with food and it is the book trying to repair do you think our own fractured relationship with food and medicine feel better about it. Fisch sure I mean we live in a difficult time right if it was like sometimes you wake up you turn on news if those are the whole world's falling apart and I think for that reason so many of us channel our anxiety into one of the few things we can control which is the food we you know it's dire straits when that's all you can really control in life but obviously that's created is this beast of an industry that Toshi what's good and what's birds and I mean these are bit euro shift around every day and that's really harmful not least because the language they use is really moralizing a lot of what we're talking about this week is how our notions of wellbeing are centered around fractured relationships with food or with language or with other people and with ourselves Melissa could reduce mouth from your put your collection sunshine I've never read this before I would like to just say as well this describes a being in a region I think you might have compared the Queen Elizabeth Hall Yes I remember that reading mouth and then and all quick thing happened someone shouted put a spoon in her mouth as the woman in pink seizure interrupted the poetry reading the stage was lit purple like for a pantomime villain and the woman in pink fell back onto the stranger panicking behind her as 200 ambivalent audience members watched on the poet kept uttering is there a doctor in the house but doctors are scarce these days my dots are only answers the phone if he suspects something far in fall play or an impending death it is so filled with an overwhelming degree of conviction. I mean consistent This is my biggest floor in Shane's and my doctor's biggest insult to me Shane writes every year to reinvestigate still qualitative yet on fulfilling hatred Ifill's for me if I was consistent I would have died prematurely and previously and Debbie would have already filled out the monotonous paperwork for ditching me and signing me off the doctor's extensive books she tells me time I call in mouth the words positive desperation into the receiver she tells me to sing to me it's about not thinking negatively I agree with everything she say's I just want to die in my red lace dress which after all these fact years fits me perfectly Robert McGarvey ate too much elephant on his birthday and fell down exactly how much elephant must one dictates to fall down and have it televised after until I killed over I get giddy on the asphyxiating radiance of imaginary in Cope ability my heart is ever swollen or shrunken and we don't know which but it's pains in pulp potations have become part of my daily and nightly routine when I can't very I get on my knees and pray last night I got on my knees and took him in my mouth and my heart raced wildly I told the excitable stork who told me her life story or to poetry reading Life is for celebrating I told her I'd spent approximately 2 and a half years of my life in psychiatric hospitals I said it is now a long time out of life but I resent have recycled of it she smiled on behalf of her dad's mother I took the knee of fog her to my lips and sipped. Puts a spoon in my mouth kiss me I'm waiting for nothing and nothing going for me I sleep with my mouth open I sleep like a corpse when you find me please gently close my mouth I will not alter sound from now on that point I do like that point very much but the last line I will alter not to sound from now on is very powerful but it just seems it seems a painful thing for a poet to say. I think this silence is a very important aspects of poetry in writing and I think sometimes a poet has always no use and the trying to assimilate all these sounds and images everything they they absorb I feel like I absorb things and here I am speaking on behalf of all poets Olson and but I absolve things and the the the silence at the end of a poem is the most profound. It's the most profound experience for me to have to have got that and then quiet and it stops I find that very beautiful thing and I suppose I'm most of in that line and to support it in the real how do you know if I just want to gets the end now I'm maybe just you know psychically always feel in a sense of my God can it not just be quiet in the reeds and somebody had to terrible politics and it went so quiet and nobody knew and if you had any idea what sense is there's some research I'd put spoon in a mouth we have never heard anything like it but it was really interesting because the woman herself she must have been quite House of it but when she came around she simply wanted to finish enjoying the read in us but we were all still in a state of having to witness as often she didn't witness as so she was out of it and I felt like 1st I don't think that poem is a successful poem because it was very hard to assimilate all those things in my head and I was trying to work our felafel very I don't know how I felt and even write in the poem I don't have a set for the silence that was so profound when that was happening when somebody was suffering and people were looking on I guess at the time I felt a bit like that myself you know but I think it's an interesting thing about not of sound because it also almost implies a question. Making a noise. Not a sound and that not a sound is a natural way of putting it together of not utter a sound not a sound there's a sort of a question in there which is that aren't said which makes it sound so if you like more dramatic more and more final I felt the point of the poems in the book some of them are raw they're brutal their odds with the joint title definitely but I find I'm composing and what I was really interested in was the length of your lines you write very long lines and the length of the lines propels the reader forward it seems to me is not the idea of the long lines there's no idea behind it's just what I started to do I think it propels me to write it because I thought happens very very rapidly doesn't it when you when you write the poem those thoughts they overtake me the overtake my ability to set them down sometimes and it provides a sense of flow doesn't it and would it be the the length of lines could then if you wanted to sleep over into proves So you know there are pieces in New York you'd say you know you could call them a prose poem when I'm rushed him there's an aspect of oats must be rotten in I'm really going to a very adept have no idea what I'm going to say and if I don't use line breaks it would be a mess it would be absolute nonsense there's music that I understand the rhythm I understand where the accent goes and. It forms itself really but they couldn't be prose do you handwrite Yes it is and right it's interesting because I'm the same I think very very fast but I found myself starting a next word before it finished the previous where I was. Really getting into horrible unreadable mess I can't nobody can read my poetry that I live by and because it is like that and a half of the page isn't big enough and it's just an upset upset best but I understand what it says in the us this is the fearful it's the way you see the purge isn't big enough. Is there actually going to be an experiment I don't know where you could you could run a bigger piece. There's no I think if limitations a wonderful things you have to follow the path that you the poem is set you have to set the pace. If it decides it wants to go that then you just going to have to do it. You can't think in terms of well that come up with published in a book that bake because you had saying this is something I have to do you have to disregard all that stuff I'm just caught with I thing so George the line length is a big decision isn't it you get into a way of writing something makes you work you know I don't try to slog up sometimes on it but it's not by natural thing that I've had to make myself do it it's worked out fine that's Ok but it may be something to do with breath it may also be something to do with how you want to end your lines you know overlaps you asked me about your. Oxford you know you judge about me and that's that's the smartest bit of cooking. But you know what happens is that. Too so the word what goes cube goes and then looks so as I said it just sort of your peers and you suddenly see the Oxo cube so one thing is a productive the other so if you're writing these long lines and that is if you like your it's like a breathing pattern almost as not it was me very very you have to have a lot of music you have to very conscious of breath and pace and rhythm embassy would fall apart easily when Melissa you also used I knew in your poor Oh yeah but we we're always wary that we are in the poem doesn't have to be the writer of the poem and the you can be the people but using I knew gives you all kinds of leeway to do all kinds of things yes when I was a kid I just love them all and write a letter to somebody so this was obviously ingrained in my head haven't and I just say became just important functions where because to have that level of focus to get all these words out. Had to be an object so this you is an object it is not necessarily a person if it's a person to me it's irrelevant because nobody's ever know who it was if it's 10 p. . Pl it makes no difference to anybody but also you're addressing an audience then you're involving them in the complicity in my views happen in the poem and it provides me distance more than it provides real intimacy because this guy is not really me so kind of it maybe is the source of the writing is the eye but not necessarily anything to do with me it just works is a great great literary device you've said the poems for you a life affirming reading them can be hand I'd put down every now and then a step away from me in order to miss out on to digest it in combat to it but what it did for me challenge me every one of a challenge me to move myself and to look at the people around me and I relate to these people so what for you is life affirming about the writing of. This so much that you have to be conscious of to ripen but it's the inconscious things that come through you need to know something the end of rights in that poem that you had no idea you knew the thing that he can tell you from poaching has to be injurious if and the rights needs to breach the debt with themselves it's a it's a relationship and also I feel stronger there's a kind of aspects of transference that happens between a writer and a reader filled with it so there's a trance friends with that I and the audience which I felt like huge and I've been doing readings and that's fairy very deep and powerful thing to experience a career in the porn career Mark girl and move yes. Mad girl in love when I scream in the NY econ Salmi in fear the by wakes with nightmares of his own and we can listen with sweat in the morning the bike comes to my bedside in case it's me away when he kisses me sweetly on the lips I instinctively case back. The love is a love of centuries of love and genes and progress landed in the lap of our fortunate reproduction the pie is perfect in love there is hope the tangled and fibrous mass of lost and longing grows like an on our arms of ever loving caresses and I claim that the paying covers me like a cold sheath the cold holds me to the nerve root of death I cannot undress from it and the terror of the distance love has regretfully incurred is like a marching band in my reveal a spine each could a picturesque pang of pain the pain pulls me why. You console me have bitch really were often without Can you tell me are you give me Gussie looks and won't talk and I am pressing down on your beating hearts and make the balance right all of my blood pumps in favor of this armistice and your follower was is not a war unless each party is sure our war is both futile and impure a war has concert my bad and we will fight the fight that love is sworn to meet in the its engines burning up if I fire your going you must be aware I have all the ammunition I will have a need I have my finger on your trigger forever you know the curse of my disease in your philosophies when I am ill you awful when I cry you swallow my cries and stone my pain with backwards logic I am your anti christ and your saying and your cross with my slit scars and my blood soaked knickers and my closed thighs No if without you and if I go home in the rain on a Sunday afternoon with the whole a balloon of love in my chest and I love with its searching fingers its love of evidence and support of advice with its legality is questionable and its motives just defiantly tragic leave me alone in love and let me hurt in my own juices let me live a life of and less and less ness I enjoy it 30 sad songs in case my heart which is a chalice of flies and where when the birds come to pack their eruptions I open my chest as skies you are my Emperor a month night vision and I were talking give me hope because hope will undo the I hope and lay down its black lace Give me how because love and always above our heads sunshine. I pace the pain like a long distance runner count and 2 seconds alert at the finish line which is only the beginning of where we want to be my little girl is playing the piano in the boys' bath is warm and the air hooks their bodies the atoms of our future's love cling to their skins and it is our love you will be a father like love is a father that my love needs a father that my father never loved this love is ours my love my pain rings out like the church bells on a Sunday morning I want them to feel my pain all the ringing singing lovers under their warm she is the miles between us are just a membrane I can cross them in a poem leaving somebody behind is no option I tear across the like a smile thank you very much Melissa you listen to the verb with me him and it's not long now 2 and he will trip to Sage get said for the free thinking 1st of all record 2 editions of the show with guests including the own Thanks and she said Morrissey where they're on the 10th and 11th of March We'd love to see their tickets available soon watch this space in a literal Jewel has been held plays the mother of a young woman who's been diagnosed with a severe mental health illness and they are much too sometimes like Melissa's work takes an unflinching look at the mental health system that can be inflexible So Julie can relax struct forest could you introduce your character but what about here this is from the Almighty sometimes by candle fever and my character's Vinay who is the mother and he was in the mental health system and has been for many years. But I didn't make the decision to come here I did I was the one who found your contact details I asked for the referral I gave you her stories I told you what I thought they meant and I filled all those questionnaires in do you remember the words you gave me a list of behaviors and I had to circle the announcer to indicate had previous If they were never always sometimes never always sometimes 4 more often than not I was circling the word sometimes over and over again sometimes she has nightmares sometimes she displays aggressive behavior towards all those sometimes she has exaggerated ideas about herself and her abilities but within that word sometimes is a vast expanse of all the moments when she was perfectly capable and gold and kind and the idea that in circling that one word I might have set off on a course that you are now telling me she cannot come back from I don't think I don't think I can cope with being responsible for that. So I could do with the so much in the short passage but near the beginning of the passage I gave you her stories yeah soul basically is a human woman she's now nearly 19 bought in her childhood was writing these very very vague and visceral stories that we've very dark and quite disturbing and this run alongside some behaviors that were very difficult for her mother as well and she was always convinced that there was something wrong with that something needed to be sorted that she needed help she couldn't cope with it basically soul she found this psychiatry very sort of eminence child psychiatry ist and asked for a referral to it gave the psychiatry and the stories and said What do you think this is this preoccupation with death and dying and violence and these vivid images . I think that this is disturbing story along with the behavior what shall we do and soul so basically at the moment as a child and to use the Sacket trick system what the play doesn't do is judge that decision particularly questions about it but the girl's older she stops writing saw a she becomes well or she stops writing and the pull a examines thought about where her creativity and deed and where the mental illness began and the blurred line between those 2 things and so interesting eerie Melissa talk about it and the way that you express yourself through your poetry and so my fam of that's been taken away from their thought happened to me it is really amazing to solicits it because I was very soft a big I was always section I was 21 and it was even. My girlfriend had committed suicide so I had a lot going on where there was a single mother book and they just took my books off Bell walked in there was so Theodora don't know when a member of the or something instantly said this won't do you any good and they looked. And then they forbid me to write because they said it was part of the illness the writing on it went silent but in some way in the worst possible way so it's very. This happens to people but if they cannot voice things how can they possibly help themselves to heal is very very important to be able to describe and articulate because until you do that sometimes a person says has no idea where it all comes from you've got all mining of ego mind or loves if you use system in writing for me I think the best way to do. Obviously we're very keen to say this is people need medication you know that that's that's not in question you know that there is some illnesses that absolutely need it ball but in making somebody while in helping somebody to be better and healthier mentally what cost is that that sometimes you know in terms of their creativity and their self-expression and I think that's a a big question because obviously so many great poets and writers and artists all over the years before we had the words to describe mental illness in the way that we do now clearly suffered from from various psychiatric disorder is and how much of that was the disorder right in and enabling them city thou How do the Kalak to get bill through the words they speak so in other words how different is Renee's language to the other daughter. Very different very very different Lysol the mother is very present age she's a teacher but she she actually has a lovely way with words sport. She she is on hold her creativity her expression is completely on hold a life is about her daughter and her daughter's survival now it's all very much for the a language in the play that these incredible stories that we bring to life and the actualize my courage to raise is very for me very warm very normal invented commas and the way that she speaks absolutely expresses and somewhere in the play all these carries his cause is a boyfriend in a psychiatry. Meet somewhere somewhere with all the different ways of expressing themselves they have to me and they have to find a way forward to co-exist and I wonder how not to you begin to inhabit a character or Rene she sounded like you were you not put in a different voice I'm not sure you did that so is it true you know Melissa talked about creating these long lines the breath the speech problems is that how you do it or do you have to create a history for them in advance before you watch and stuff just when you know how you actually inhabit a character and yeah yeah I what I do and everyone does it differently I can I create an entire By story bit more I start here since I fill in all the Gauss so I have a whole story of where she grew warp all the people that she went out with before she met a whole spend why she lives where she lives all but if. Nobody will ever know all those things but it but it's there and I also went with Nora Nora Lopez hold a news play in there and we talked about our shared history because we it was important for us to apply good more as well and things like happy times between is that we have a a shared history and a shared understanding and shared language actually and and that wonderful mother daughter thing where you can go from being absolutely fearless and war than each other to been absolutely fine with each other in the next 2nd certainly and it's like yeah it's all we just yeah that's an interesting linguistic thing George goes in a bit we're going to hear you sue more of your 30 push to go to the gym but I wonder if when you write them you're doing what Julie do is in a can of to sway your You're inhabited Oh yeah this puts him in the same gun owner . Well the c.e.o. Voice it's their voice that you're listening to and you're trying to take that voice on the what characterizes that was you don't make a list of these things consciously but I think I know inside her Plath science or don't Thomas answer any of these people do have lived with them a long time so when the idea comes that I would do that then one naturally goes into that part the difference being of course is I'm parodying them yes so I'm within the park but I'm also outside looking at it because I'm up a little you're turning the knots of their language up I don't know that the volume up to 11 in the way you're turning up the gas a little bit in every case the heart of the play Julie It seems to me is the notion of who decides what's good for us yeah I think that's exactly what it is and when you're having to make decisions for other people based on very little knowledge because the whole world of psychiatry and mental health is so shrouded in mystery you know it's not a physiological thing you know often it's like it is not an x. Ray that you can show someone as they are this is the bit the fog of the brain you need to work on and this pill deals that it's a it's an experiment and. What what's wonderful about it is it by the relationships at the center of it and it's a very For me play you know Kendall a really funny writer and it's like it's not completely without its like before. And also talking about these things that it sounds like is boy it's about you know when we need dealing with things in a very human way just how you put one foot in front of the author and I you survive and you get out the next day after another battery in and just carry on and often humor Wolf is the way to do you know well thank you very much from the all mighty sometimes runs were exchanged their dream on just from the 9th to 24th of February now I think it's time to go back to the gym with George Surtees and Dylan Thomas. All day long it was running it was squatting their earnings high as the ceiling my earphones filled with a playlist that was playing for ever and fit I was drinking water an apple juice the light through the window pounding and capering Gleick goats or like sparrows or ferrets and I was cull man and go to my own and Sparrow ferret vaulting with night jars golden and purple in a daze high days of youth happy years hairy spinning brilliant carefree and toned as a universe and its mild cups that point to falls of the thread. That's not just you you've written in this lovely poem flit from gonna stick pressed 30 different poems parted in the style of 30 different points going to Jim I wonder what set you off on these sweaty quest while going to cheer him on in fact I had a serious operation the beginning of last year and it was one of the obvious things to do and I remember going into the gym and those I was beginning to do things this voice of I normally are a little co-occurring into mind you know. You must change your life which is the last line of a poem about the archaic tours of Apollo I was supposed to become the architect. So there's certainly a line or. Walks in through the door and you think none of this is got to be rewritten I've got to go so I began with and changing your life but not having changing a life or changing something else in form and it's instant to me the gym is the setting for so Mt to me it's the juxtaposition if you like of the high language of butchery and the can of the base sweat groom of a gym and that's and that's the exciting thing with exciting things about the thing for me well it's baseless there's no time mixing high or low but it is exciting because what you're trying to do you have. Right and you think this aid to try to keep the voice in its proper register but then also clunk it now and then but it's got to be implicitly there Concord right as you said before to just turn it up a little bit not far off that in themselves so just push them over the edge a little just good exercise for them to go to clamber up again. Well let's see who started it all for us sometimes you hear a cry as a bird or a strong angel and a violent start on the corner such as you once heard in a forgotten street of your minds heart. And you think of bodies striding at her latest as you might well have done at you but listened to their singing and known the full a flater surf the stars were all the windows glistened with your childhood and so you entered in and paid your fee and learned to run or row with your whole body breathing through your skin you transcendental creature where would you go to be self and would you still be fitter next year says that you must change your kit. So so for people who might not be familiar with real what were the real cume qualities of those words that you then turned up a bit well in jewels consulate and with an angel assert your theory and the great Do we know how it is you get the kind of spiritual striving and high mindedness which then does Olva's rather beautifully into these natural images. So you begin to hear that Brule curve always which isn't because it is high minded it is not too difficult to parity but I don't want to push didn't want to push too much over the top because you have to kind of slightly believe in that ways as it's considering the spiritual exercise which is a physical exercise that is about to undergo what you're doing really is you're exploring and only you're exploring the form the forms the use the actual language the use you could spot real because language style voice there's a very interesting George Herbert parody which we won't hear because it because the shape of it is a thing when I 1st saw it I thought it was meant to look like an hourglass bring fact it looks like the most like breath is not what it looks like breath it's the poem which Herbert called Easter wings and I love this form because 8 makes a shape on a page but also makes the shape in. Because you start with 5 beats them forward and 38 and 2 to one and actually your lungs run out of their eyelids to do I think in George Herbert with the idea of death and resurrection so you run out of there and then a 2nd part is the lines get broader You can feel your chest expanding with it and I liked a stunning pull So really I mean. It was quite a difficult thing to take on because I so love the origin will put yes. But it's also kind of inspiring and I wonder if writing these pilot is kind of going to the gym because it's like doing new skills when you're learning the piano or it's like when you're learning to play the violin you do your skills this would help you I think to write poems that weren't part of it would help you were to write George Surtees poems Well I mean George I've been writing George cities poems for a very long time. So I know what George thirty's for him so like and it might be good in a way which is something I discovered after Collected Poems of 2008 I know what that guy is like but I don't know what else it's like so that guy's in a sort of serious and I'm underneath the serious but this is not unlikely Slike you know like the kind of adventure for me but then I thought yes in a way you're right it's a bit like doing your exercises can we get undressed skins of these things can be make these contraptions take on life let's finish with Sylvia Plath Oh I think is not a likely gym visit. She has problems with urgent issue. You do not do you do not do anymore Jim shoot your fascist pig with in soul full of goo my clothes are black and blue and who do I play yes you dirty I've had to dump you before your time was through your bloody laces like a noose just one left so no use although I once had to you're not sick eels you're terrible cuckoo you're tortured but now I torture you I pummel and pummel you with all your stitching talk about your flailing Polish tongue a new thread full of dried dung you'll wish you had never been born by the time that I am through. Your fascist plastic. Thank you very much to George Surtees and 30 quotes go to the gym is out now thank you to my other guests Julie has been held mostly Houghton and Ruby time doe next week is fighting top with Willie 14 and Ben Crystal and the 1st rule about fight verb is don't talk about 5 or rather the verb was presented by in Macmillan and produced and solved by seal right in 15 minutes this Friday night where off to Scotland. It's time again for the world on St James annual trip to one of the world's friendliest cities Glasgow a great celebration of Celtic music and its links to cultures across the globe cancer connections has hundreds of thousands it's Katey's and other events and we'll be bringing you some of the best of the lineup. From live for us. To glamorous visiting. Joint Catherine to kill the world on 3 Celtic Connections tonight as in their minds on b.b.c. Radio 3. Before that it's time now for the last of this week's Radio 3 essays on forgetting for saving the poet and playwright Amanda Dalton explores our an easy relationship with memory examines the role that material objects play in our quest to preserve or conjure our past I know I'm not alone in spending hours of my life searching for things I forgot the location of my keys the name of the film I saw last year the identity of the woman I've been talking to for the past 5 minutes I know I know you but I can't remember who the hell you are the anguish of trying to remember it's a good job I don't know the half of what I forget there have been times when forgetting has been a great way to manage the overload of life until the moment I remember that I forgot to renew the car insurance to meet a friend for lunch over the lurching got of suddenly remembering that's how it is for me anyway and of course the more I've got on my plate the more I forget the more I guess my brain is making decisions for me about what's important and what it's Ok to not remember I guess that's why I feel so guilty when I forget things like a family birthday forgetting implies that this wasn't really all that important to me how could you forget except it's not quite as simple as that is it I often remember the things I most want to forget serious stuff aside just this week surfing t.v. Channels I was unfortunate enough to catch a few seconds of middle of the road singing their classic hit chippy chirpy cheap cheap I've since resorted to hitting myself in the head quite hard in an attempt to forget it but no it's still there. Some things I'd love to forget or probably see it into my memory because they were upsetting traumatic even or just very embarrassing but Freud would say it's not as simple as that either if you're a Freudian you believe some of the most meaningfully difficult things that have happened to us may well be apparently forgotten but in fact they're just very well hidden repressed in the psychopath ology of everyday life one of his livelier texts fraud writes a lot about forgetting and forgetfulness as manifestations of unconscious thoughts and impulses the idea that we forget the past events that are associated with a memory likely to awaken a painful sensation from another time his theory of repression holds that things are not recalled because of the anxiety or the guilt they might activate this is one aspect of motivated forgetting I've been talking about this to my friend Andrea I think that she might be interested because she's in therapy every week she slips off the Cardiff recession so we called her therapist up to Cardiff Andrea says Dr Cardiff is trying to help her find some things she thinks she's lost bits of herself she guesses and in trying to remember stuff stuff that might help her peace or self together she says she's become very aware of how much she forgets being in therapy Andrea says is like braving the dark basement of her house not to Cardiff goes behind her holding a top to help another gate the broken steps and she's down there rooting through old boxes mainly full of junk stuff she thought she'd thrown away turns out to be in storage She says she's found a couple of things she'd completely forgotten about but there's others she's still searching for trouble if she can't remember what they are not to Cardiff says there might of course be nothing earth shattering there or it might be that Andrea would rather not discover things after all. Andrea likes her metaphors but listening to her got me thinking literally about all the stuff that lives in basements and lofts and on our shelves the old photos the cards childhood toys homemade mix tapes holiday souvenirs stuff that we can't quite throw away what's not about other things we keep objects that are neither beautiful no useful and attempts to hold on to the people we've loved when they're gone or perhaps the sensation of a special experience are they part of an attempt to never forget getting on for 40 years ago when my dad died I thought I'd be kind of all right just as long as I could picture his eyes his laugh in my head and remember the way he talked and to help me remember I kept his cigarette lighter Izzo cream cardigan his shoe cleaning kit letters he wrote me when I was away from home and of course a stack of photographs little symbols little spells to ward off the forgetting I displayed his cigarette lighter alongside some of the precious objects in one of those old wooden specimen trays and every time I glanced at it I'd remember it in his hand and I'd smell the lighter fluid as he sat at the table to refill it once I spent the best part of a weekend searching for locust sex tape that I couldn't believe I'd have thrown away back in 1974 I taped my dad reading that Rupert Brooke poem The soldier that begins if I should die think only this of me I got into a sighted for a school project about the 1st World War and when my teacher heard it she said is that Ralph Richardson which made both me and my dad chuckle and also tragically feel rather proud I never did find the tape of my dad if I threw it away I've no idea what I was thinking of I forget sorry Dad and now your voice is kind of at the edge of my memory so I often think I can grasp it like something glimpsed from the corner of my eye and it's gone. I don't really remember your laugh and sometimes I panic when I realise I can't picture your face I'm scared that of forgotten my dad a couple of years ago I adapted for theatre a fantastic Danish novel called nothing by yellow Tele I made it the man just as Royal Exchange Theatre for their young company and in the process I spent some time with the group developing ideas the story concerns a class of teenagers one of whom the existentially inclined to peer Anton has abandoned ordinary life and is insisting that existence has no meaning in their determination to prove him wrong his classmates create what they call the heap of meaning a pile of their own belongings pieces of themselves this begins as a kind of game with each person challenging another to give up a material possession that is so significant to them it will contribute to convincing their disillusioned friend that life is not meaningless in the story this venture goes fascinatingly and horrifyingly wrong but what interests me here is the conversations I had with the young people before I wrote the play I asked them what they would give up and what they believed they couldn't and that any circumstances part with and why and it turned out that their heap of meaning would be mostly to do with memory and forgetting overwhelmingly and often very touchingly they spoke of the meaning of the stuff in their lives a watch given by an absent father a color from their dog who died an old collection of D.V.D.'s that they like to watch when they're feeling down because they evoke a younger childhood a time when they felt safe no one chose the meaning the stuff that fills most of our lives in the end none of them cared about their cool trainers or x. Boxes even the one or 2 who said their phone was the thing they couldn't part with identified that this was because of what it represents the contacts the photos being in touch with the people they love especially those they don't see day to day . Their heap of meaning would be of things that symbolize loved ones that have gone and importantly Kompany an emotion in a sense theirs were all objects to ward off forgetting the anthropologist Daniel Miller writes about this in his book the comfort of things it portrays a street in London through 30 households and much of it focuses on material objects as the means through which people express their identity and their lives we meet Marjorie who speaks of the foster children who came to her without a single image of themselves or of anyone they knew and with almost nothing else besides not even a battered old teddy bear without anything to possess Marjorie asks what chance of they got to possess themselves and Louise who was reluctant to open a trunk of old toys from her childhood because she had a superstitious fear that what lay inside was some kind of Pandora's box that would release all kinds of demons from her past to haunt her sounds like Andrea in her basement sometimes was scared to remember but mostly we're scared to forget don't we and we have such an anxious awareness of our cognitive frailty Perhaps that's why we're so obsessed with taking photos documenting and posting every banal aspect of our lives Ironically though this probably results in his being less likely to remember I think the same about the Internet we Google instead of learning we take photos instead of looking instead of fully being there no wonder the bookshops are full of mindfulness and the cluttering we've become lousy at making our experiences felt experienced afraid of just being proper free. Most of the time of course forgetting is a boo word quite apart from what can feel like the moral and cultural imperative to never forget atrocities the horror and sacrifice of war for example to be remembered is to be memorable significant special to be forgotten is to be forgettable yesterdays news just think of the popular songs the Bee Gees' don't forget to remember May Nat King Cole unforgettable how a Nielson don't forget me and a little bit scary this one Sarah Vaughan I love you and don't you forget it if we're forgotten who are way if we can't go back how do we go on if we forget what we simply disappear now when do we create stories of our lives we need them in order to exist and no wonder material objects become a kind of evidence of that existence perhaps there are alibis this did happen and here's the proof it's true our memories are such frail tricksters Yes but this cardigan this champagne cork this plastic Eiffel Tower surely they can lie the essayist a novelist Siri Hustvedt described writing fiction as being like remembering what's never happened and goes on to argue that the faculties of memory and the imagination and not so different from one another if we recognize ourselves as creators of the stories of ourselves might we not see memory as an act of creativity and if so might forgetting be regarded as a failure of the imagination. Andrea says that Dr Cardiff talks about imagination he told her that every time she experiences something which recalls a memory her memory gets changed it's not so much about telling herself lies but more about forgetting as renewal creative reconstruction reshaping the story a bit to make it work for her in the circumstances of now Andrea likes that she likes that Dr Cardiff regards therapy as creative and she likes that she might not need to worry about the things she can't find in her basement so what about those literal material objects the pieces of our lives that we hope never to forget Should we just dump them send them to the charity shop or use them to tell different stories my photographs will fade and years ago my father's old cream cardigan lost its scent but essentially objects do not change is that another reason why we keep them other the only constant reliable bits of our lives in a constantly shifting and unreliable world I have another confession to my dad dad actually Dad years ago I threw your cardigan away it no longer embodied you I think it had forgotten itself one of my all time favorite books is Joe brain ards I remember in it He catalogs his past in a single list of simple declarative sentences each beginning I remember it's a funny moving extraordinary read I probably shouldn't make a game of it but I sometimes do turning it on its head is a kind of release forgetting as letting go I forget who made the trolley we rode down the hill I forget the color of our old front door I forget my bike I forget the feel of your winter coat and the button bag I forget the words I forget the day we fell into the water last and the pain and the end disco Pickel to sound they gave me a drug to forget I forget the curve of your nose. I forget your shoes completely forget your shoes I forget Miss Winter his face and the face of Jarvis the cap and the registration of the car you had after the rover which was a n r 387 c. I forget your birthday Dad I'm really sorry but I do I forget the Charmayne with a fried egg at the double look I forget the double look I forget Tess called Clinton who the hell was she if you hear this Tess I'm sorry I forget the river where he used to swim I forget how to get there I forget the night we had sex on the bowling green I forget all those empty beaches and churches and forests and lakes on the poles of holiday snaps I threw in the bin I forget your wedding day I forget the last thing I said to mum before I left before she died I forget what she said to me I forget what door this key is for I forget the tune now I don't unfold it up. That's what you are. Unfolding lonely. The savings essay was written and presented by Amanda Tolson and produced by Lisa Needham it was a spotlight production for b.b.c. Radio 3 beginning on Monday night the office of observing things closely in a series called Looking good yada story and James Fox presumes the fast of next week's I say is Monday night at 1045. On b.b.c. Radio 4 have already been rough sleepers around here. In months now Will Self is exploring pretty soon we were right and you know we've been here maybe 20 years meeting people on their home turf after playing any of the game to the reason. We 28 from. A 1000 mile road trip by public transport. Never resist a childish claim you get in the front seat from the top pick up the phone. Will Self grit British bus journey on b.b.c. Radio 4 next Monday to Friday at $145.00. This is b.b.c. Radio 3 it's Friday night it's 11 o'clock it's well done 3 with Catherine to cull Yes we're here at the center of a contemporary arts and Glasgow in the middle of the wondrous That is the city's unusual Celtic Connections festival thank you and the 60 is just jumping at the moment we've got a gloriously contrasting such as 3 houses for you here and the stream tonight but sweetest trio Vesa you've got Molly and guitarist the singer. But starting us off is a band that The New York Times described as the best folk band to have come out of Scotland in the last 20 years no doubt saying something and here they are starting over one of their own songs this is the Paul McKenna band Thank you.