Work in progress

I’ve been trying to write something significant about Shopping and Fucking. I’m chasing rabbits down holes with the research at the moment, completely reorganising and restructuring as soon as I find a new trail of breadcrumbs. (I find ultra-violence and fairytale analogies go hand in hand. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.) I’ve bought a book about Diana, and I’ve been reading everything I can lay my hands on about the in-yer-face playwrights. I’m friends with Mark Ravenhill on Facebook now; his posts are like missives from an imaginary character I’ve grown in my mind. I’ve read all his old Guardian blogs, interviews, transcripts of speeches and talks. He’s no longer real to me; that feels like a final cognitive stage that my brain will only get to once I finally email him and ask him for a coffee. You’re a real boy now Pinocchio.

Something happens when you spend a lot of time reading about in-yer-face plays. Two things actually.

The first: the death of Princess Diana caused a seismic shift in the collective psychology of British people.

The second: so did the murder of James Bulger, four and a half years earlier.

That in-between period, in which schoolboys became visions of evil, in which we eavesdropped on a beautiful divorcee by calling a premium rate phone line, in which the mutilated body of a two year old soaked our bedsheets at night… we were clawing at things, trying to cling on and climb out, panicked and disgusted and bloodying our fingernails. The mourning of Diana’s death was really just a collective duvet day. We said ‘fuck this’ to the struggle, and we called in sick.