I listen to Sally Wainwright’s Desert Island discs from 2016. I’m driving on the A27. It’s cloudy. A meblahblaaablaaa kind of Sunday. Sally is one of our guests at the Conference. I’m excited to meet her. And hear what she has to say. She will be in conversation with Dr. Judith Johnson. She is a writer and a director and a producer. She embodies the three strands of our SAILMAKERS project. She’s a total legend. She talks about Victoria Wood being an inspiration. Me too. Desert Island DJ Kirsty – for it was Kirsty spinning the discs/guests then – plays ‘I want to be 14 again’
I want to be fourteen again
When sex was just called number ten
And I was up to seven and a half
Boys were for love, girls were for fun
You burst out laughing if you saw a nun
Sophistication was a sports car and a chiffon scarf
I want to be fourteen again
Tattoo myself with a fountain pen
Being 14 again from time to time is good. Seeing your own toes in the sandy beach. Not being burdened by the horizon.
I get out of the car. I do washing. Loads. It’s been a long week. My blacks are covered in the rehearsal room floor and my whites have gone grey in solidarity. I eat a cheese and mustard pitta bread. Toasted and left to go cold. An Iceland gelato wafer thing. I have a cup of tea. The milk’s still good. It’s been a week. Don’t question it. I look at the Ox Eye daisies through the window. Bent out of shape by the rain. Battered. Add gardening to the list. Maybe.
I think about the covers for our SAILMAKERS coffee table photo book. I see water. The beach. A young woman with a yacht or a message in a bottle. Dropping pebbles from the pier. I book Jacqui the photographer and Lily our Advisory Board member and make plans for a dawn shoot in late August. Sea and air and rain and light have been creatively central to all three of the SAILMAKERS projects. Writing, Directing and Producing theatre. Our writers have shaped turbulent worlds past and present. Storms and floods. Beaches and pebbles. Drowning too. Loads of drowning. Directors have shaped human stories transient as the breeze. Producers have grappled with audiences’ connection to the waves of interest. Waves that we know come and go.
Lily on the beach at sunrise makes total sense.
