Wip Flash

The Obsessive Diary

Who remembers the old Colony rooms in Soho where Francis Bacon fell off bar stools and Lucien Freud gave those eyes? Not me, I’m making that bit up but I imagine. I have read enough about it. It closed and was recreated in a basement room off Regents Street, complete with everything exact, the pictures on the wall, the bar and piano, and that’s where I whipped off too as soon as Jessica Fellowes and I said goodbye on our Obsessive LIVE conversation of Tuesday night - to Wip Flash Open Mic Lit Salon at The Colony Green. I wasn’t going to read. I’d done enough of that lately. My boots were not empty of attention, adrenaline, and risk. I was going to sit at the back while my friends did their thing. But the back turned out to be the front, a low slung room of padded benches against the wall, chairs and those Francis Bacon bar stools, a mic, a piano, a bar and a hat with my name in it and there was no where to hide.

J and H read in turn - what a thrill to see friends be brilliant. The break brought a whiskey at the bar and the barman shy and confessing it was his third time there and yes he did have something but no he really wasn’t ready and J saying, come on and so he did: name in hat along with mine - it was supposed to be random calling but when we sat down first mine came up then his. I remember the heartbeat, the terror of taking words and me on their first public outing ever - an open mic in Betterton Street a hundred years ago - and I watched it crawl all over his body, his lips close to the sound, his hand disbelieving these were really the private lines he’d written that morning being spoke aloud, the room quiet to his touch. This will be a beginning for him and we witnessed it.

There was a French woman, confident and curly in yellow tights and ripped skirt, poetry she had skills for. A long woman in leather sang to tripping guitar. A pot-bellied grey hair got up with doubt and made us all laugh with surprise at his candour and gift. A glasses, dyed blonde performed the play of another’s words that had the beauty of Alan Bennett all over it. Clever. Talk. Talking heads. And on top of all that, the many more who wiped the floor with such high standards in that basement room, came an old friend who at first I didn’t register at all until she said, remember me? and the woman who’d be kneeling on the carpet to my left morphed like magic into B who I’d not seen for thirty years. It was a night.

Like Cinderella I ran for the tube before midnight, J & R with me till Bond Street and Holland Park. Didn’t sleep much. It was like catching a flight and knowing I had to be up early, my brain wouldn’t allow the deep rest of nothing going on the next day. I try to be cool and calm about big adrenaline moments like this, be at the studio for 9:15, call time from 9:30 but my heart knows different. I walked from West London to Portland Place just to calm my nerves. I lay on the floor of the green room. I joked with the producer about pronunciations of my name. When M turned up I gabbled about anything and nothing to get my voice working and lips tuned up and mind on anything but that any minute they were going to push open that glass door and say, we can take you through now and that would be it; no going back.

When it happened it was a relief to let go and let the river take me. Down the carpeted hall, through the heavy sound barrier to the studio, lights, and booths and cans and large red mics with Women’s Hour printed on them so there could be no mistake. Of course my stomach started rumbling, of course my mouth went dry but something else happened, too. She who exists inside me who loves this kind of thing, who turns up reliably and with full relaxed fun took her place instead of me and I found myself smiling at Chloe Tilly across the huge round desk and there we were, getting into conversation as if it was just the two of us, chatting on a park bench. Twelve minutes was over in a flash, and I loved it. If you want to listen on catch up, here’s the link to BBC Sounds. You’ll find me at the 45:21 mark (I’m the last on).

Met D for a spot of lunch yesterday and dinner with R. Another late night, a walk home through lighted streets past the house I lived in when I was a twenty-something me and these past thirty years were all to come. God we had fun there. I feel that lightness of spirit again. The endless possibility. I walk easy.

What happens when two friends publish at the same time? A book swap of course. Join me 6pm today on The Obsessive LIVE with Louise Fein to talk about her latest, Book of Forbidden Words and Fallout….