This whole building, apparently so conventional, is actually the product of a quiet revolution.

Created by two sisters who lived in the 1850’s

And who didn’t do what they were supposed to

And never got married

And lived with their mother instead

And after their dad died they took over his business

Because he bequeathed it to them

He must have known they were good

Good at business, shrewd in all their dealings, hard working

And with an amazing detailed knowledge of property law

And between them those two sisters ran the business between them

While their big brother was some bigwig in court

And kept a teenage mistress and their children in a secret location

These two sisters built this end of the new town

plot by plot, house by house, street by street

But there were some things their friends and associates couldn’t understand

Why they built Melville street so ridiculously wide

when they could have put another street in there and made ever so much more money

and then this site here, just under our feet, prime land worth an absolute fortune

but they refused to build on it because they had other ideas

Their idea was to build a cathedral and call it St Mary’s after their mother

Call it St Mary’s after their mother because they loved her

And if you look at their photograph over there in the corner

So conventional so dull looking in their ugly black

You could never imagine they had in them

But they did.

They understood the law and they understood money

They were clever they were hard working and they were persistent

and they amassed a huge fortune

which they tied up in a trust that could only be used to build this place after their death.

And that’s what happened.

And here we are standing in Barbara and Mary Walker’s cathedral.

They died before a single stone was laid

but still they were the ones that built it.

And so Gothic cathedral in its own so massive and apparently so traditional way

is the product of a quiet revolution

Because it is such a massive reminder that there is more to life than making money

And I wonder what they’d think, those two dear sisters

if they walked round the building

Would it be as they imagined it

What would they make of it?

And those two sisters would they sit on the benches

so beautifully placed out there by the labyrinth

Would they sit and contemplate the habitats we are losing?

And the species we are destroying in the process.

Would they sit with us and marvel at the beauty of the names.

Carved in the wood of the benches

Capercaillie, Snow Bunting, Atlantic Salmon, Whorl Snail, Sand Deceiver

And the beauty of the creatures these names represent.

Would they be inspired by the installation to take action against natures destruction?

Will we?

As we sit in this building and marvel of this product of the two sisters dreams

And we’re all of us dreamers, all of us prophets too, We all of us hate injustice and suffering.

We all of us want the world to be better and sometimes we’re given the words and the actions to make it.

And we’re all of us here because we know, just like those sisters did

That there’s more important things to do in life

Than make war or make money…

Thank you so much for being here and reading this.

Beyond the paywall, I’m putting one of my favourite stories that brings this short series to its end.

If you want to hear it or read it you know what to do…

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I’m away to Gothenburg, Sweden, tomorrow to see the Swedish premiere of “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven”

So I doubt I’ll post anything here for a week.

I hope we all have a good one.

And now for the story….

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It’s amazing how the Christian Church, founded by a wise teacher who blessed peacemakers, has been such a source of deadly conflict.

How a church, founded by a wise teacher who said “Behold, I make all things new”, has become such a deadly source of reaction and conservatism.

And yet, at the same time, has inspired and welcome peace activist and justice activists…

And the Church of England, for all its sexism, has suddenly elected a female Archbishop as its head..

And the Episcopal Church here in Edinburgh has chosen a woman to be its bishop.

These wild contradictions within such a traditional organisation somehow reflect the wilder contradictions and vicious culture wars at play in our wider society.

And the bells are at the centre of it all…

And the bells in all the church towers were there when it happened

and they rang out every Sunday

and they rang out to celebrate what everyone wanted to believe was a victory.

victory in the first world war

and victory in the second

Just as they rang for the Edinburgh Commonwealth games and rang for the ceasefire in Vietnam

and for the marriage of prince Charles to Lady Di and in memory of lady Di 26 years later.

And to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth the second And then the coronation of Charles the third

And what are they telling us, these bells? That nothing really ever changes?

Because these beautiful mathematical sequences that bell ringersare following

Have been unchanged for centuries. It all began quite simply.

With Paulinus. Round about 420.

He’d rebuilt a church in honour of Saint Felix, because he loved him

And if you have a church, and want to hold services in it, you want people to know about them.

That’s when it’s handy to have a bell

But nobody’s going to hear a little bell in a church building

So you make a bigger bell, and you put it up a tower

And that’s how church bells started

And when a few hundred years later Muslims started building mosques and wanted people to come to their prayers

They built high towers too

Only they put a bloke with a loud voice on top of their high towers so people wouldn’t get confused.

And then when wars started between Christians and Muslims

Whenever the Muslims took control of a Christian church, they ‘d take down the bells.

And then when the Christians took the church back, they’d put the bells back up again.

And then, when Christianity split into Protestant and Catholic, the protestants didn’t like the way Catholics rang bells

They thought it was superstitious and Papist So they started to take bells down too

But then they thought

How we going to tell people its time for church

so they hung the bells up again,

Only they hung them on wheels so they sounded different

And people started to do clever things with them

All the intricate and beautiful sounds that come from church towers

That began to be rung

in 1600 and something.

And that’s when a bloke called John Bunyan would’ve learnt them

Round about the time of the English Civil War

He used to love bell ringing and having a drink afterwards And then playing games on the village green.

Until one Sunday he heard a voice from heaven saying

Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to Heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to Hell?”

And he got so frightened he could not bear to keep company with bellringers

Them being so dissolute and everything

And he couldn’t enjoy ringing bells any more either Because when he got to the steeple door

He became convinced that God in his wrath at his sinfulness Would cause a bell to fall down on his head and crush him.

And then he went and wrote Pilgrim’s Progress

And became one of the most famous authors in the english language.

But he always disapproved.

And he became a preacher in a sect that forbade anyone to ring Church bells.

And up here in Scotland John Knox didn’t really approve of bells either. He thought they were idolatrous.

And blokes got very angry about bells And doctrines and bishops and things And killed each other over them.

But that is not the whole story…

The full story is available behind this paywall.

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In Australia and in America they call this Acknowledgement of Country.

And they do it to acknowledge the first inhabitants of the earth on which the venue stands

The first peoples who were dispossessed and driven out the land by the European colonists

If you’re white like me then most of your ancestors too were those first colonists , the ones that got onto wooden ships

And made the perilous journey to distant and unknown lands

Which they imagined they had discovered.

And once they landed they’d set up a union jack

And say they were claiming the country in the name of King George,

or Queen Victoria, or whoever the head royal thief was at the time

And then as the years past they set about systematically plundering the country’s natural wealth and resources

And shipping the profits back home to be the foundations of our country’s wealth.

That’s what we Brits did wherever we went America, Africa, India, the far east, Australia… In Africa we did worse.

We enslaved entire populations and shipped them across the Atlantic in atrocious conditions

and forced them to work on our tobacco and sugar plantations

IIt’s not for us to feel guilty

but it is for us to acknowledge what happened

and do what we can to make amends.

Colonialism and slavery are terrible crimes

And have left deep wounds.

Deep wounds on our hearts

deep wounds on the face of our mother earth.

And I think it’s part of my job as an artist to heal these wounds heal them as best I can

And maybe that’s something else this hour is about. This hour that we are spending together…

Let’s think about those men in their leaky wooden boats.

Setting off on dangerous journeys across the oceans to conquer the world.

They did it because they were men.

They did it because they were manly.

And almost always when they went to places like America and Africa andIndia south east Asia and Australia.

They came across people like me.

People assigned male at birth but wearing women’s clothes and performing women’s tasks.

The two spirit people of America, Yan Daudu of West Africa, Khwaja Sara of Pakistan, Hijra of India, and many more besides.

We tend to call them trans but that’s not really accurate.

They had and still have identities that don’t fit Western categories of gender, of male and female and that being all there is

We belong to a third gender or maybe a fourth or a fifth, who knows

And when the first colonists came across people like me in their new colonies

They found us disgusting and tried their best to destroy and suppress us

Just as my teachers and elders did their best to suppress and destroy the woman in me

And failed.

Huge thanks to all those who have subscribed recently; and special thanks to those who have paid for their subscription.

Thank you for reading.

If you want to keep on reading, this episode, please consider taking out a paid subscription….

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This is part one of my four part prose adaptation of “Ringing Out The Changes” which I created with the lovely bellringers of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh.

PART ONE

Hello. Good afternoon ladies, good afternoon gentlemen,

Good afternoon those of you who are not ladies and not gentlemen but like me maybe a bit of both

or maybe somewhere in between

Or maybe someone somewhere that we are all about to discover together.

And I wish I could introduce you to my colleagues,

Eli, Barbara, Susannah, Ian and Geoffrey.

They do bells, so beautifully and skilfully and I hope one day you get the chance to meet them in the flesh.

But their real and beautiful selves do not fit among the lines of this text.

So you’ll have to imagine.

(Or maybe seek out a recording of handbells change ringing,

And listen as you read).

So they did bells,

And I’m Jo and I do words

Words that even on their own will be able to take you somewhere different

And hopefully somewhere of deep pleasure.

… and you’ll find the rest of the this episode behind the paywall.

Thank you for following me this far; I really appreciate everyone who subscribes.

I owe special gratitude to those who have become paid subscribers; and I want to give you a special reward.

So behind the paywall, you’ll find the full text of part one; and a voice recording of me reading it.

I hope it gives you pleasure….

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I want to publish the text of the show I performed at the beginning of this year’s Edinburgh Festival with St. Mary’s Cathedral bellringers.

I wrote about it in my last post:

It’s called “Ringing Out The Changes” and I think you’ll understand when you read it why I’m proud of it.

We devised it together, me and the ringers.

I remember at the beginning of last year climbing with great difficulty up the steps to their domain in the bell tower and exploring with them how my words and their bells might work together.

It was a wild experiment to create it at the time, but never got recognised or celebrated as such.

A group of bellringers performing with a trans woman in the nave of a cathedral doesn’t quite fit with how people imagine experimental theatre to be.

But there it was, and we loved doing it, and it made me very happy to be able to perform the show again this year.

Even if it was only once…

And it was a bit strange to perform, because I generally like to memorise the text

Only last year I became quite disabled just before the opening, so never learnt it. and there was no time to memorise it this year,

so I couldn’t do that.

Generally, I like to move around when I’m performing.

But because we were performing on a dais with two steps leading up to it, kind of steps you don’t notice when you’re able-bodied, but you become painfully aware of them when you start to become disabled.

So I couldn’t do that.

And generally I like to move my arms about,

But because I was given a handheld mic at the last minute and not the lapel mic i was expecting,

I couldn’t do that.

And generally I like to look at the audience and catch their eyes,

But because I was very preoccupied with holding onto the script and figuring out how to turn the pages

And hold the mic at the right distance from me at the same time,

I couldn’t do that, either.

So I was really quite seriously encumbered,

And the whole thing could so very easily have been a disaster.

So I’m not quite sure why it wasn’t.

I think it was something to do with the fact that I gave up.

Not so much gave up trying

But more gave up worrying.

Many years ago, my old yoga teacher used to quote the Bhagavad Gita to us:

“Thine is the labour, but not the fruits thereof”.

Which I took to mean that we need to do the work that is given us to do,

But without being concerned as to whether we’re being successful or not.

And so somehow I was able to be very present with the text,

Without thinking of anything, just being open to it,

and open up to the cues from my fellow performers.

It all made it astonishingly joyful to do, and the applause at the end was quite something.

And we felt proud and happy , and felt we’d really created something special.

I think that shines out in these photographs.

I remember that as I think about how to share the text with you.

Because of course I want to have been able to record the sound of the bells,

But I don’t have the equipment to do that,

And I know it would make the loveliest film,

But I don’t have the equipment or the skills or the resources to do that either.

So for a bit I thought there was no point in publishing the words.

But I’m remembering the message I got from the performance:

that it’s important to trust that if you work with what’s available to you,

work with what’s there,

even if it doesn’t seem enough or it seems wrong,

Just work with it anyway,

And be content.

So you’ll start to be able to read the text tomorrow…

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So it’s Sunday morning and I’m lying in bed drinking coffee,

and doing some rewrites,

and I’ve just posted a reel about a performance I’m doing on Friday.

(which is what the rewrites are about)

And here’s the reel:

And I’m looking a bit furtive because I think it’s the first time I’ve made one of these things in a public place,

and the cathedral organist is practicing,

and I’m slightly apprehensive because I’ve a feeling that at any moment

he’s going to turn the volume up and blast us with the noise of his extraordinary instrument.

And then my earpiece starts to fall out,

and then actually just as I’ve finished, he really does blast us with this astonishing volume of sound.

Which is ironic because I got up early on Saturday morning partly to go to early service, which I’d missed the day before, long story,

and partly because I thought the cathedral would be quiet.

But there’s something about that place that is always drawing people into it.

They keep it open during daylight hours, and people come in because I think it meets a need.

A need for somewhere quiet.

A need for somewhere spiritual,

(though I don’t think we really know what that word means.)

A need I imagine that the two sisters who built it must have known about and foreseen.

And that’s one of the things the performance is about…

A story I love to tell in this performance is how the building came into existence.

It was two Victorian sisters defying all the expectations of their sex and their time to look after their late father’s property business,

which was about building this west end of the new town.

They seem to have had no interest in marrying or having children,

but they were very good at making money.

And their dream was to use the money to build a cathedral and name it St Mary’s in memory of their mother.

They did in fact succeed in getting together a huge fortune and tying it up in a trust that could only be used to build this cathedral,

and it only happened after their death,

so they didn’t live to see a single stone being laid,

and yet they built it.

They made it happen.

In a real sense, it’s their cathedral.

This is one of these facts that’s often only mentioned in passing.

It’s almost as if the overwhelmingly male ecclesiastical authorities were a bit embarrassed,

and so the sisters’ only memorial is a small, dusty, not very distinguished photograph in a corner of the building.

And I like, whenever I can, to give them credit.

But I think the real stars of the show are the bell ringers.

Every Sunday morning, they’re up in their bell tower creating sounds that bring comfort and reassurance somehow of the things that remain in a changing world.

But for our performance together, they come down and they stand in the centre of the nave where everyone can see them and marvel at their coordination, collaboration, and skill as they play their handbells.

The sound they make is out of this world beautiful.

It’s a very, very special event.

We’re only doing it once this year, and if you’re around in Edinburgh, I’d really recommend you come and see it.

Friday 7th August at 3.30 in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Palmerston Place, Edinburgh.

Tickets

I really also just wanted to say hello to all the people who have subscribed and joined us.

It’s lovely to see you here.

I would explain in more detail a little bit more of what this Substack is about,

but I have to say I don’t really know myself.

It’s a project that’s being discovered.

Right now, I’m trying to catch up with the very profound experiences I had on Iona.

And I’m also trying to understand how this all relates to my life, to the story of my life.

And I’m also trying to make sure a copy of each one of my 115 playscripts is placed in the special collections of the library of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

And I’m also getting ready to welcome my daughter, Katie,

Whose beautiful and moving Substack is here…

Crocuses in the snow

who’s moving up from London to Edinburgh with her partner this coming Saturday.

And I’m also getting ready to travel to Gothenburg in Sweden to see the Swedish production of my “Gospel According to Jesus: Queen of Heaven,” which is part of the theatre festival there.

Me and Ro, my electric wheelchair, are travelling by train, so there’s quite a lot of preparations to be made.

And the sun is shining this Sunday morning,

and I’m drinking coffee in bed

and feeling happy and sending to you this extraordinary morning

love and wishes for your happiness, too….

Jo xxxx

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My good friend Marianne sent me this link earlier this week. It made me so happy to receive it.

Trans blockers

She was so very kind to me the last time I was in Australia, and made it possible for me to perform Queen Jesus in Sydney.

And I got to meet her lovely family.

Her younger daughter Kassie is trans. It moved her so profoundly to meet her, because i was never able to come out to my parents or receive any kind of support from them.

Back in the fifties and sixties, it just wasn’t possible; and so it wasn’t until I was in my early fifties that I was really able to experience what it feels like to be comfortable in your own skin.

And one of the aims of my work is to try to ensure that no-one has to go through that lonely misery again.

Because Kassie has a loving family, she hasn’t had to suffer that way.

Because she was able to live as herself in primary school, she has known what it’s like be herself in her own body…

And when I met her a couple of years ago, it turns out she was troubled by having to go through adolescence, and find her body being taken over by, and turning into a young man’s body.

A body that would be utterly strange to her, and absolutely not in accord with the person she knows herself to be.

So it’s wonderful to see her in the press interview, and in the TV news item that accompanies it, speaking with quiet courage and dignity as she bears witness to the effectiveness of gender affirming care.

ABC news

She is flourishing, as adolescents like her tend to…

Press coverage here in the UK, and I’m sure in the States, never actually gives us the chance to hear the lived experience of the young people and parents caught up in this particularly cruel front of the trans culture war.

It is heartbreaking that we are turning our backs on such an effective way of easing trans adolescents’ suffering, and choosing to torment them instead.

Nothing justifies this, except prejudice and cruelty.

When the tide turns back, and we start to see sense again, it will owe a lot to the courage of young people like Kassie and her mum Marianne.

I hope I live to see the day….

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The bus driver’s name was Michael

though one of his workmates called him Mike.

For no other reason than to rile him.

So I made a point of calling him Michael,

Because I know, perhaps more than most, that being called the wrong name can cause suffering.

He told us he was the only driver to have banged his bus against a bridge in Tobermory,

On the journey to the island’s north end,

and it was kind of obvious that his workmates gave him a bad time for it

So he went extra special slowly and carefully across a narrow bridge on our journey to the south end,

and everyone applauded him for getting across safely

Because this was a big bus to be driving on the narrow single track roads

this double decker with a toilet that we weren’t allowed to use

with every possible space filled up with luggage

Luggage that Michael had to load and unload by hand.

And when he’d unloaded me and the wheelchair

We hurried off to the ferry slipway

Feeling so grateful not to have to deal with the dread

The dread of a journey on foot that I knew would cause me pain.

Instead of limping on and off I just glided

And then along the wee road through the fields

And so moved by the first sight of the abbey.

Feeling like a pilgrim who had finally found her way home…..

This is me after getting up especially early on the first morning in Iona, making my way to a side chapel in the Abbey, one of my favourite places, and trying to express in words and images what it felt like to be there.

Here’s a transcript of what I said:

“The journey here began on Friday morning when me and my wheelchair traveled through the streets of Edinburgh for about an hour till we got to the railway station.

And then we took a train to Glasgow, and then another train from Glasgow to Oban.

And then we paused.

Good place to pause. .

Oban, they say, is the gateway to the Isles.

But for us, for me, it was a threshold to another place.

And on Saturday, that’s yesterday, we took the ferry from Oban over to Mull. And then on Mull, we caught a bus down to Fionnphort where the ferry is,

through roads that always seemed to get narrower and narrower.

And then we took another ferry across to Iona.

And on Iona, me and my wheelchair went on the little road through the fields to the abbey.

And it was very moving to see the tower in the distance and to arrive here yesterday.

And now, another journey begins.

It’s a journey through landscape.

A journey inside me, too, I think.

And I don’t know where it’s leading. .

But here I am.

And it’s good to be here.”

The aim over the next few days is to try to keep recording what happened to me there.

As I try to navigate my way through this world which seems to be spiralling ever deeper into self-destructive madness,

I feel very fortunate to have this recent memory of a place of community and hope.

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And this one if you’d like to write to me….

And thank you for joining me.

Have a lovely day….

I can’t remember when it was, exactly, that I began to find it difficult to get out of the bath.

I didn’t seem to have the strength to do it somehow.

Eventually I discovered I could wriggle myself round in the bath

Push up on the sides of the bath to get up on my knees

And eventually take one leg out the bath

And then the other…

Not very dignified, but not too unsafe I thought

Until walking became harder last summer

And I lost the confidence to do that.

I imagined how horrible it would be to die stuck in the bath

And used the shower instead.

And this year, bit by bit,

I began to get my confidence back again.

Keeping my phone nearby in case I needed it….

And after I’d had my journey outside in Oban

I took another journey inside my bathroom.

And this is what happened..

I’d asked for a wet room, but they gave me the bath.

“It’s only shallow”, they said,

And I really did get all excited last night when I saw it.

this’ll be great, I thought,

I’ll sit on this ledge here,

and then I’ll drop me legs into the bath,

and I will glide in gracefully.

Only, of course, I didn’t .

Because the surface of the bath was all slippy with the water in it.,

and the grab rail wasn’t in the right place for me to grab it,

and I just went down in a splash,

splashed everything, and got my towel wet.

But never mind, it was a lovely bath.

I hadn’t thought about how to get out, but I thought, well,

somehow these grab rails will help me.

even if they didn’t on the way down.

Perhaps they will on the way up…

And it was quite complicated.

I had to wriggle round, get on my knees, stand up,

and then there was a difficult moment.

One leg in the bath, one leg out.

So in morning, I thought, well, I’ll have a shower.

And it was a LOVELY shower.

Really enjoyed it…

But same problem.

Difficult to get out.

One leg in, one leg out.

I consoled myself with the thought:

these are just little voyages of exploration,

wondering how I’m going to get from X to Y,

from in the shower to out the shower.

But I did it.

And there I was. Ready to go to Iona the next morning…

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I’ve never really noticed how beautiful it is here.

In the past, it’s either been on the way to somewhere else

Or, the last time I was here, somewhere I could barely explore because it was too sore to walk any distance.

But this time we whizzed about, me and the wheelchair, from one end of the Esplanade to the other

Celebrating the beauty of the light, and the sense that somehow this was an opening into another dimension

That while they called it the ‘Gateway to the Isles’

It was certainly the gateway to somewhere else

…and that operhaps, the next day, when I made my way to the Isles

I would discover where and what that somewhere else might be.

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I get anxious catching trains.

When I was travelling on crutches, and being wheeled to the trains, or wheeled round airports, it was difficult because in those situations you lose agency.

You become a parcel.

And that makes me anxious.

I always have to try to fight against the anxiety,

And tell myself I’ve not been lost or left behind, or forgotten.

And now I can drive myself to the platform on the wheelchair I still get anxious.

Maybe because driving it up the ramp onto the train scares me a little, in case I fall off.

Or maybe it’s because it’s really difficult to do all the manoeuvring and the twists and turns in tight places to get the chair to the place where it’s supposed to go…

Or maybe, I realise this time, it’s because it all triggers memories.

Traveling to my first boarding school involved traveling big distances.

And sometimes I’d have to make the journeys alone.

My mum would drive me to Cheltenham station and put me on the train.

So there was just me and my tiny suitcase and a label attached to me giving my name and address and where I was going.

And then I would travel from there to Swanage in the south of England on my own.

And I imagine it must have taken at least four hours or so, with one change at Poole.

and I’d be clutching my ticket, frightened of losing it, frightened of missing my connection.

And all that, as well as feeling miserable at leaving home and going back to school.

Maybe the school authorities did the same for going home at the end of term.

Maybe they, too, put me on the train and my mum would meet me at the other end.

I have a vivid memory of the old cardboard railway tickets and how I’d find it comforting to feel the shape of mine in my pocket and terrified that one day I would go to my pocket and the ticket wouldn’t be there.

It’s almost as if I was literally a parcel in those days with a label attached to me to say where I was supposed to be going.

So I wonder how much of all my present fears and anxieties have nothing to do with the present moment.

But are like recordings of old emotions being replayed again and again and again…

And collectively, as nations, are we also in the same trap?

The train passes through an empty landscape formed by the trauma of the Highland Clearances…

It’s an old suburban train, completely unsuitable for the journey.

Can we believe, in Scotland , in our self worth to insist on better?

Are we all so exhausted and discouraged by the cruelties and injustice of the capitalist world that we cannot in our heart of hearts believe in the possibility of a better way of organising our societies?

And her’es me, on my little journey, trying to negotiate my way through old age and disability

Trying to keep faith in my life and my writing…

Perhaps there’ll be answers on Iona.

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ACCESSIBILITY IS JUSTICE

The slogan says,

And I should remember this to stop me getting too starry eyed about Passenger Assist.

The thing is that it’s a wonderful thing when it works.

You get help getting on the train and help getting off it when you arrive.

And help changing trains if you need to.

When I was travelling on crutches it made such a difference to be wheeled to and from the train instead of making the long painful journey to the platform.

And because people tend to enjoy helping - especially when they’re being paid to do it - I’ve had so many lovely encounters with the staff involved.

It doesn’t always work.

But when it does, it makes such a difference, and in this mean-minded age that wants to charge for everything. it feels like some sort of free gift

It’s not just a gift, I tell myself, but also a right,.

Something that was fought and campaigned for.

It’s not as if the railway companies or the bus companies or the airlines are going to do such a thing out of the goodness of their hearts.

They do it because they’re required to

As they should be….

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The thing about old age is that it’s crept up on me.

And with it has come a shrinking of possibility.

And so the world gets smaller.

It’s tempting just to accept its diminishment.

And then just allow the world to get smaller still.

Or keep doing what I’ve been doing for years:

Deny what’s happening, and just keep trying to live as before.

And so the world gets more painful, and still unavoidably even smaller.

I seem to be trying to do the two opposite things at the same time.

I had a chance to go back to the Isle of Iona last autumn, and when it came to making the journey, I realised I just would not be able to do it.

Somehow I’d just become too disabled, and knew it would be horribly painful and difficult to manage all the different stages in the journey.

Perhaps the sensible thing would have been just to accept that I’d just never be able to go back there again..

And then I got an invitation to perform my Queen Jesus there in the abbey church,.

I knew I had to accept somehow,

And so I had to find a way of doing so.

Which is why I bought an electric wheelchair with money I don’t really have and why she’s there in my sitting room, all loaded up and ready to go.

Loaded up with my CPAP machine under the seat, and the Queen Jesus dress,and everything I needed in the rucksack.

And so we set off just over a week ago.

The plan was for me and the wheelchair to take the tram up to the railway station.

But we couldn’t do that.

There’s been a big fire on an old department store on Princes Street, which made it unsafe, and so stopped the trams running.

And that means that the buses are intolerably full, and traffic tends to get jammed up.

So me and my wheelchair had to drive up Leith Walk.

And I couldn’t help wondering why.

Princes Street is still closed because they are trying to preserve as much of the building’s façade as they can,.

When really it would be easier and cheaper and quicker just to knock the whole building down and start again.

But the assumption is that would be a terrible thing to do.

The assumption is that we must preserve the old at all costs, in the belief that everything that replaces an old building is ugly and inferior and slipshod.

And behind all that is our fear of the future and our longing to go back to the past.

That’s because that our society has lost all faith in the future.

But the thing is-

-I couldn’t help thinking as I trundled rather uncomfortably along -

There certainly are talented architects in the city and talented builders and craftspeople who could replace that rather mediocre Edwardian building with something better.

And the reason that doesn’t happen is not because the talent isn’t there,

But because capitalism allows that talent no scope.

And that’s because the site that’s been burnt has been earmarked by a developer whose sole intention is to make a good profit.

But what I couldn’t help imagining as I manoeuvered my way into the lift to get into the station, was this:

What if the impetus behind creating the new building wasn’t about making a profit for an individual speculator,

But instead came from the need to createsomething beautiful for the good of the city?

What then?

And that’s what my work is all about :

Trying to imagine a better post-capitalist future in which the economic structures of society are there to promote the common good.

Because it’s to reinforce that imagination and that longing that I’m making this journey

Because that’s what the Iona Community is all about.

Audio version here:

And here’s the video I made just before leaving:

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Hope my Sydney friends can see it….

Tickets for Thiry-Six

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. Welcome. It’s lovely that you’ve come.

And I so appreciate your presence here.

One of the things that’s always good about these moments is that it is an invitation for me to think about what this Substack is about, what’s it for, and how can I make it a more effective means of changing the world.

Meantime, so many things are changing in my life.

This electric wheelchair is just one of them…

A lot of work I’ve been doing on myself lately has been about accepting that I’ve become disabled…

Wondering what I’m capable of, and trying to extend it…

And at the same time trying to accept the things I can no longer do.

I’m going to Iona tomorrow, to perform Queen Jesus in the Abbey.

It’s a journey you don’t think about too much when you’re able-bodied, but is painful and difficult when you’re not.

I don’t know how it’ll work out with this amazing machine.

But I’m about to find out….

I have a play running in Sydney just now, by the way.

Thirty-Six, it’s called, a piece I’ve co-written with Bayley Turner.

Watch out for it.

Get a ticket if you can…

36 Tickets

Something else that’s changed is that people seem to be far more interested in 3 minute videos than in pieces of my writing.

But because the videos will eventually get pieced together to tell the story of my life, I want to keep them here.

I want to tell my life story not because it’s interesting in itself, but because of the light it shines on the extraordinary changes we’re all living through.

And maybe it helps us all to understand better what’s going on.

I also want to share my past work with you.

And this may be a good reason for paying for your subscription, because I’ll be putting this behind a paywall.

Lately I discovered the very first play I sent out to someone in the hope it might be performed.

It’s called ALL YOU NEED and I wrote it maybe in 1988.

I sent it to BBC Radio Scotland drama, and it led to a commission.

A radio play called DESERT PLACES, inspired by my first visit to Iona in 1982.

I’ve digitised the cassette recording, and I’ll make that available behind the paywall when I’m ready to.

Another thing I’ve been doing has been to share my daily bible readings.

This has been a bit of a bad move maybe because the Christian Bible has such a terrible reputation…

And Christianity in general is being used as a weapon against LGBTI+ people like myself.

And that makes it all the more important to reclaim it as stool for human liberation.

The thing is that I’m convinced there’s a spiritual dimension to our lives, and it’s important we respect and pay attention to it.

Capitalist society operates on a material level, and I think that’s one reason there is so much deep desperate suffering in the world.

So while I’ll keep posting here to “The Light Inside”

I also propose a new Substack called

A QUIET MOMENT IN THE MORNING.

I’ll be describing it a bit like this:

“I have a practice of pausing every morning before the day begins.

I look out my window.

I look at the world around me and try to see it through fresh eyes.

I read a portion of a sacred text and think about it and reflect on it as I look out over the world.

I find it calms and grounds me.

I’ve been sharing this practice with my friends,

and now I want to share it with you. “

What I meant to do is get it up and running before leaving for Iona, but there’s so much happening right now I haven’t had time.

So let me know if you like the sound of it

(or if you don’t!)

And watch this space.

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Iona is what they call a “thin place”.

Somewhere where there’s not so strong a barrier between earth and heaven.

I may not want to post for the next 7-10 days; I may not be able to; and it may not be appropriate for me to do so.

So don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me.

But please wish me well…

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When I was a child, my dad always told me that Sheffield steel was the best in the world.

Sheffield cutlery was the best in the world.

He was a great believer in Britain being the best country in the world,

and the British Empire being the best, and British pottery being the best, and British food being the best, and the British parliamentary system being the best.

He would have been really distressed, I think, to be alive today and to see how the British parliamentary system is totally failing to meet the demands of the present time.

And he would have been upset, I think, to learn that the Industrial Revolution in Britain, of which he was so proud, was actually funded by profits from the slave trade.

Or that the industrial success that he was so proud of actually came from the fact that because we had an empire, we were able to rig the economy in our favour.

And once the empire had gone, that no longer held .

And that destroyed his own business, the pottery business, and much else besides.

He always used to tell us to look at the back of a spoon to see what it said.:

“Stainless steel. Made in Vietnam”.

It’s a hard thing to manage the decline of an empire, as you’re discovering in the United States, and it’s always tempting to try to go back to some imaginary past.

That’s kind of what the whole Brexit nonsense was about here in Britain,

And it’s very much more dangerous and destructive over in the States.

We have to move forward. We have to accept change.

I was performing in a town near Sheffield, my play, “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven,” which tries to imagine a different form of religious expression, a different form of understanding what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman ,

And that helps us dream of a post-capitalist world.

The was a beautiful choir in the Australian production of “Queen Jesus.”

And their last words as the show ended were:

“Change is coming.

Change is coming,

And one day the world will be free.”

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Otherwise we may lose them forever…

We have been entrusted with the world… and if we misuse that trust,

we will suffer.

Not ‘will’.

‘Are’.

We are suffering…

You could read it as being about the arbitrary nature of disasters.

When a tsunami comes, who is swept away and who stays safe?

But perhaps it’s also about revelation, about the moment of inspiration that just seems to come out of nowhere.

But whether good or bad, these great natural forces have nothing to do with our sense of what is good or what is bad.

They just happen. Hugely happen.

And we are helpless in the face of them. In some ways helpless.

All the more important to live in a way that is open and aware and trusting.

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