Denmark 10

The last show is here, Denmark, Western Australia. Earlier, Elke took Thierry and I for long drives through forest, woodland, desert and beaches from Katanning here. We stopped off, dove into the clear cool salty water, lay on the beach a while, returned to the car, sped off again. We visited a honey farm/honey winery - who knew such things existed? - visited Elke's artist and friend in his gorgeous exhibition space and studio, before arriving at the venue for the show. We pulled into the parking lot and Colin, our production assistant had a barbecue cooking in the back of the tour van. Onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, bread, cheese and the meat was Kangaroo - sausages, burger and a steak so fresh, it was hopping. Thierry couldn't contain his excitement, kept hugging and thanking Colin as a child might for a new toy. The steak was finished medium rare, diced and we tucked into the meat, our legs dangling from the back of the van, talking excitedly in the perfect perfect weather. Our mouths full. There are a many things I will never forget about this journey. Of the team with me; playing Bob Marley's 'No woman no cry' as loudly as we could in Katanning and singing - if you could call it that - as loudly as we could in the town hall, and this moment, our fingers stained in the parking lot, goats cheese, cherry tomatoes, content. The meal is done. I persuade Thierry to come play basket ball with me and a few kids who played locally and halfway through the game, Rob, our production manager calls us to begin the tech for the show and we return to the venue to begin. Thierry sits in the dark, I field questions to him on positioning and he answers, asking Rob other questions for clarification. But, the more I ask Thierry, the shorter his answers get. Thierry, says I, are you okay? I don't, know says he, I'm feeling hot. He comes to the edge of the stage in the pitch darkness of the theatre, I shine my torch light on his face, and gasp. His face is swollen, red and blotchy. He darts out of the theatre and I follow seconds after, into the men's room, he is doubled over at the sink, his eyes reddening. He gets steadily worse outside and we try to figure out if it is something he ate?...

Thierry says he once had a similar reaction to Ostrich meat. His chest is tightening, his throat closing up. We call Elke, the qualified nurse, who takes one look at Thierry and asks him into the car. As they drive off, Colin, Rob and I hop on the side of the road like Kangaroos, laughing at Thierry who is good humoured enough to throw up his middle finger. We return, finish the tech and just before the show starts, Elke returns and we realise how much danger Thierry was in.

His throat was closing up, he chest tightening and he could not breathe Elke says. She considered contingency plans as they sped to the hospital. She would have to resuscitate him on the roadside if he passed out, or cut a hole in his throat and stick a straw down so he could breathe. They got the hospital, finally checked him in and even then, the nurse had a shot of adrenaline ready just incase everything failed. I gulp in the changing room, imagining how close it came, but the show must go on. I am called to the side of the stage and before I go on, do the obvious thing of dedicating the show to Thierry.

But also to Australia. It is the last performance and I want to make it count. I think of Elke's advice of living in the moment. Of the life I lead in London and things I want to, must change. I think of this vast, sprawling conitinent-country, its triumphs, truths, lies, and tragedies. I imagine a current of stories - spinning in all this out of controlling, all this dreamtime and waking - I imagine something flowing from here, to Thierry in the hospital, to those at Fuel who got me here, family, to poetry itself, I say the rather egotistical funny lil prayer I say before stepping on stage "God, grant me wings, I'm too fly not too fly". I sit down, the light goes up and I begging telling the 14th Tale. "The light that limps across the hospital floor is as tired as I feel..."

Epilogue. It is 6.18 am right now. I have been awake since 4.40 a.m. My body still operates on Australia time and I just had a nightmare. The last seven since I returned have been crazy. One of my closet friends left London for South Sudan to work for Medicine Sans Frontier. The part of the county she is working in is a strong hold of a malicious, merciless rebel group called the LRA and a couple of days ago Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA hit global mainstream media for his crimes. I fear for my friend. I miss her terribly. Later today, Black T-Shirt Collection, my new play, will open to an audience in Liverpool. I am as excited as I am terrified of how it will be received. The changes I promised to make to my life here, I think I am making them, only time will tell, but I must focus on Black T-Shirt Collection today. I am convinced of the transformative power of language and storytelling; it got me to the other side of the world and back. James Baldwin said that "...while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." and tonight I hope to shine something bright...

Katanning 9

Elke speaks again of her mistakes in working with the Aboriginal community, how once an older lady of a nomadic group, a desert woman, fell sick and was admitted to hospital. As with hospital etiquette, you gotta take a shower most mornings but this lady wildly fought Elke as she tried to bathe her. Elke said in hindsight, it was probably because she saw such use of water as a waste. Think of it, to roam the desert for generations, water takes on a higher significance and its scarcity is the line between life and death. To have then buckets of this precious thing wasted on your thigh or head, every other morning, just because it is what is done... But Elke describes something further, she says that as she eventually got her way and began to wash this old woman's body, she realised she was remoing layers, years of the finest dust and honey mixture used to protect the lady' skin against the harsh desert climate. 'Beneath' says Elke, 'lay the softest and most beautiful skin I have ever seen'.

The following morning, over breakfast, I ask Elke about her work promoting health in the mining world of Western Australia. The laboures are very lowly skilled or qualified. The managers do no want people who can think, they want people who can press a button over and over again in the glaring heat and not ask any question, not complicate things, just do. The kinds of people then, tend to be less educated and they quarrel and fight and drink like fountains. Her job is to sail in and teach these sun drenched men how to look after themselves, how to think. She does it using the arts, she creates plays, stories, songs, theatre, interactive, playful ways of learning and she is one of the very few doing something like this in western Oz. She has won awards for her Helathy and Safety Campaigns, but, she says, the companies are apalling.

These men earn up to $100,000 dollars a year, but treated as if disposable. If they get any sort of injury they are fired, so they never complain, never report, just work and work till they burn out. Our breakfast is light with olives, goats cheese, croissants, hot cups of tea and fruit spread out evenly between us, the relentless good weather sprawling in from the window. However what descends on us is morbid sense of how life is treated here and in parts of the west world. We lift the individual over the group and celebrate that individuality and mourn the loss of a single life, yet, with as much gusto, we belittle and cripple individuals and cast them aside till men are treated as beasts. They are opposing ideas that tug against each other. I think how things will fall apart, the centre will not hold and else something changes, mere anarchy will be loosened on the world.

Katanning 8

Her name is Elke. I am terrible at guessing ages of the fairer sex, so I put her at early 60s. I don't do this because of how she looks, but because of what she has done in her life and I think it is impossible for anyone to have done so much. We meet her at the Albany Entertainment Centre and she is to be our guide / assistant as we tour these parts of the country. Elke is a trained nurse, she has worked with indigenous Australians for three decades, living with them far into the desert. She is learning to play the saxophone, rides motorbikes on the weekends, was a sailor in her youth, is an amateur pilot, is more comfortable driving trucks and big cars than her little sports convertible, which though her twin daughters make fun of her about, she loves because it is perfect for driving down to the beach where she windsurfs. When she has spare time, or needs money, works in health promotions for the huge mining companies in this part of Oz. When she has more time, she gets away to a meditation centre and speaks openly about the deeply personal experience. Thierry reaches out to touch my arm as she speaks. On the night I really get to know her, we talk about everything and anything, from new scientific discoveries on the way we make decisions, to the global financial crisis, to how the milky way shifts on cloudless desert nights. She is German, taller than I am, blonde and her accent is strong. Inspiring is too reductive, there is a glowing tangle of things I feel about her. If I had come to Oz and just met her, I would not have been entirely disappointed. She is 52. My last play was called 'Untitled' about a child that grows up with no name and the repercussions of that - political, personal, occupational, tribal, mythological and cultural. Old witchcraft , it is said, works when you call something by its true name; you gain power over it. Even as a child, my mother would warn me that if I heard my name called out faintly, I should not answer until I made sure it was an actual person. When I came to writing the play I dug around to discover different attitudes to names, had I meat Elke, I think I might have written something different...

She tells me that in indigenous culture, death is dealt with once and for all. We in the west thrive on guilt and suffering; perhaps it comes from our religions; when someone dies, we hold wakes, bury, mourn, we keep photographs that haunt us, we return to the graves over and over again. The indigenous people mourn for a period, but once the short space of time is passed they destroy everything, everything of the person who died. Burn possessions, clothing, jewellery, everything and - this is what got me - if anyone else within the community shares the same name, or a similar sounding name, they loose that name. They have to change it, they become... Elke spoke a word that sounds like 'commoner' and go nameless for a while. She says in one lifetime, a tribesman could change his name up to ten times. Imagine the chaos this would causes in banking, health care, education and you begin to see the deep difficulty with reconciling the aboriginal people with the "developed" parts of Australia...

Albany 7

It was going so well. One thing I was warned about was racism in Perth but nothing happened till the night before we left, walking back to the hotel on my own, a car pulled up, wound down its window and from the back seat. 'Do you have a dirty big black cock?!' I replied immediately, 'Do you have a small white one?' His friends started laughing at him and I cursed for sinking to his level, walked away disgusted with myself. That was the only dark patch in an otherwise glittering of memories. The shows went well, audiences have been very responsive. At the end of the first show, about 20 young girls from a school 400 miles away waited for me to sign The 14th Tale scripts they'd purchased and to thank me for the show. The second night was in the 600 seater venue, we sold about 500 tickets and afterwards, a lady walked to me, saying her father had just been admitted to intensive care and she chimed with everything I spoke of in the play. Her eyes watered as she spoke and I made sure to hold her hand till she settled before letting go. We left Perth at 4.30 am, flew to Albany where Rod, the festival programmer there collected us from the airport. Rod told about his dealings with the Noonga people, one of the eleven indigenous tribes of Australia, the ones local to this part of Oz. Rod spoke quietly and confidently. In his car, he made sure to stare into my eyes through the rear view mirror as he spoke, somehow paying the same amount of attention to Thierry, my director who sat in the front passenger seat. He tries to know as many of the indigenous people as he can; tries to spend time with them. He says he'd been taken on walkabouts, trips through the land he is sure no one else of white skin had been privileged enough to go on. He says when you go on a walkabout, you get a deeper sense of understanding, of connection with the land. 'As we walked, they sang the land and told me stories of dream time, when giants walked the waters, stuck a spear into the side of this mountain, gouging out the earth, dashed after this battle...' He says that they have been here for at least 30,000 years, there is archeological evidence to prove so. 'The British came about 200 years ago' he says. They are just blips in the aboriginal timeline. Yet, the rate of destruction and change has been incredible. 'Some tribes were almost entirely wiped out by the settlers' he says, and something gives way in his voice. I'm reminded of a saying that all thats needs to happen for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Rod is a good man, I wish for more like him.

We drive to Katanning. I'm in the back seat of a people carrier Elke - a fascinating woman of German heritage who works with the indigenous people on health matters, but also works for the festival, is speeding through the roads. Thierry is sat beside her in the front. On either side is the vast rolling countryside of Western Australia. They say there are trees here 300 feet tall, trunks so roads were built THROUGH them. There are questions equally large, ones I think into the flat brown lands; that the lands think back at me. How can the government make amends? What role can art play? If an indigenous tribesman came to see my show, would they get it? Does that matter? What is the 'it' to get? Am I part of the problem?

The show goes well in Katanning, it is the smallest audience at 30, but none of them left, they stayed to individually thank me. A young guy I'd accosted into coming early that afternoon, thanked me for pestering him, said he grandfather had a brain tumour and he understood and cried through the last 10 minutes of the show. There were no indigenous people there and the previous questions haunted me. Elke drives us back to the lodge we'd rented for the night, I step out of her car and for some reason glanced upwards, and gasp. I haven't seen the stars for a long time, London's smog pollutes their shining. Here, they are bright and close, vast, innumerable. Elke says that this is nothing, that I should see the stars in the desert where she works. 'It's like a ceiling, like you can just reach out and touch them, and if you lie back on the ground and watch, you notice the earth's tilt because they move and when you see how the milky way trails into the desert, you realise your insignificance again, you ask yourself why you worry about anything when you are nothing.'

Perth 6

Few nights ago, I watched a play. Essentially, a coming of age story, much like the 14th tale, but thus ends the similarity, it stops entirely there. It was called Jack Charles Vs The Crown. 'The Crown' represents Her Majesty's prisons and Jack Charles is an Australian legend, a veteran actor, activist and until recently - a heroin addict / cat-burgler. He is also aboriginal, one of the indigenous Australians, and the story he told that night is as much a personal tale as it is a history of the conscience of Australia. It was political in the way I like politics to be: personal. The play was 1hr 30mins, utterly, utterly captivating, Jack is I'd say in his late sixties, just over 5foot, grey hair and beard billowing and a startlingly deep, melodious voice lifts from him when he speaks. The lights come up and Jack is bent over a potter's well sculpting a vase from clay. He begins speaking the essential truth; from clay we come and must return. The story follows with a film clip of Jack injecting heroine into his veins, real footage of a man tearing his skin apart for hard drugs and explaining straight down the camera lens, why, and how it made him feel. He talks of his childhood, one of the stolen generation: aboriginal children taken from their families forcefully by the state and fostered in white homes. He talks of his alienation, his life of 'buggery and bastardy' in a care home, his deterioration into crime, his sexual confusion and his 22 imprisonments. He tells this vast and twisting tale lightly, with too much humour than I thought humanly possible given its tragedy. The rich text slips casually out of him as if it was a child's tale, but I can't get across the impact of his presence on stage. It something you have to see for yourself.

The entire story is underscored by a live jazz trio, and they support the emotion in Jack's words. The audience of about 200 people include only three black folks. Two of them are my director, and I. Jack is telling cold hard truths about what was done to him and his people. I, an outsider flinched at his truth, I imagine what goes through the mind of the Australians. Jack finds a common enemy with his audience; the English. The most startling sequence in the entire play begins with defiling an English flag. It began like this: 1) He takes out the flag from his pocket, spits on it and uses it to wipe a table. 2) He lifts the heavy table onto its side and it has his prison number 3944 carved into the wood, it is shaped as a grave stone. 3) He stands behind it and further back, the image of a crown is projected on the wall.

For an aboriginal man to spit on the English flag alone is quite a statement. To use it to wipe his own gravestone, is to clean his deathbed with the what has oppressed him throughout his life. He makes a comment that he was born a number and will die one, to have this carved on his gravestone (and not his name) then, is to suggest that he will be tormented even in his after life. And the crown, crowns it all. He stands there, his frail arms holding the sides of his gravestone, an aboriginal king, without a kingdom, his grey hair billowing, looking out at the world like a dirty, fallen god.

Jack addresses us as though we the audience were judges, pleading for his prison record to be wiped clean so he can start a new life, work with those who are making the same mistakes he did; with his record, he can't do much. He makes no excuses for his crimes, 'justifications roll easy off an addict's tongue' he says, 'ironically some of the houses I robbed where on land stolen from my mother's people, I used to think of it as collecting rent... but I've done my time'. 'We all are works in progress' - Jacks says - 'things change as we must'...

Perth 5

This is what I had hoped for. Pieces of myself. It is what has fuelled me all these years, belief that there is no 'other people', 'we' are everywhere. Pieces of ourselves in bits of other people. I'll begin at the beginning. A lady who works for the festival picked me up from the Seasons of Perth Hotel where I am now staying, drove me to a community radio station for an interview. She asks and I confirm that this is the first place I have travelled to outside the UK in just under a decade. The conversations twists and turns, searching for a theme and what arises is family. I talk of wanting my own, now, how a part of me is after the responsibility of having to provide, of mouths to feed, how regardless of how crazy work can be, such a thing grounds you, they are fixed points. There is an honest, indelible, simplicity in that. She smiles and wishes me luck. She speaks openly about her mid-life crisis. She has such a family, woke one morning and wondered 'is this all life is?' The thought turned her world upside down, and when this happens she says, some people leave their families, leave their partners... She quit her job, changed careers and that did the trick. It is hot, the hottest it has been since I arrived. After the interview, She and I duck into a cool cafe, grab a cup of lemon grass tea and she talks a little more on where she'd come from. Family turns to identity. She is an Arabic, Syrian, Palestinian, brought up Orthodox Christian, in Australia. Words fail me. She says that in Syria, Muslims who have lived in peace beside their Christian neighbours for decades turn now and say to those cross bearers 'soon as we are in power, you are all gone'. 'There will be bloodletting' she says, 'they killed a priest last week, it is more complicated than anyone thinks'. I think of Jos, Pleateau State where I am from, the sectarian violence there, this same topic that I cover in 'Black T-Shirt Collection' and I know that at some point, she and I have stared into our pasts, into our futures and shuddered at what we saw. She says that a part of her believes that the middle eastern countries are not ready for democracy. 'There will be civil war in Egypt, Iraqi refugees have spilled into Jordan and there are more of them there than there are Palestinians and the landlords are renting to the cashed up Iraqis and there will be repercussions as homelessness grows...' She tells a joke, of a bumper sticker she saw: an American flag which read "Do what we say or we will bring you democracy". She drives me back to the Festival Grounds, I thank her and try to pack a knowing understating into our parting handshake. And I'm gone, through the museum, to the streets, to my hotel room and a space to think.

In my youth, I burned with a wild ambition of trying to save the world. At 27 I have the flames still, but they've turned to flickers. Inevitably, with age, they will be snuffed out. Till then, my wish is to meet as many people as I can; to find those who are stuffed with the same sparks, the same pieces as I am, and by doing so, prove we are not alone. It is a small wish I think.

Perth 4

A few days ago, I swam in the Indian Ocean. I splashed about on the beach, in the place where land meets ocean. They say spirits and the other worldly are strong in place as this: where opposing worlds collide - doorways, shade, when sun shines and rain falls, twilight, perhaps even where one can walk and swim at the same time. I was a strong swimmer in my youth, could stroke with the best of them. I developed exercise induced asthma in my teens, meaning if I do anything too exerting for long a stretch of time, breathing gets tough, no oxygen in my blood, muscles seize up. The worst place for this to happen is in the ocean with its waves, its unpredictable currents. I swam with Adam and Jojo, who at 8 years old is a stronger swimmer than I am. Further out to the ocean, there's a yellow free-floating platform for folks to dive off into the clear salt water. We decided to swim there. A third of the way there, asthma kicked in and the incredible Nigerian Hulk/INUAMAN alter ego of mine saw the threat of life flashing before its eyes, shook its shuddering yellow heart and swam back to shore. But Adam came back and offered to swim with me. It was the longest 100meters of my life. I panicked a few times, grabbed Adam's back so tightly that my nails broke his skin and he bled there into the ocean. But I battled, reached the platform, climbed and felt like I'd overcome something dark. I dived off the platform a couple of times, finally returned to the shore, thought about my little victory, and again a few other things unlocked inside, things I'm still seeking the right arrangement of words for. It'll come. The following day, we go out to the skating rink as Becky, Adam's older daughter has ice skating lessons. We leave her to it, Adam, Jo and I go to Bibra Lake, a gorgeous park/playground/barbecue spot by water and we watch the black swans sunbathe for a while. I learn a few more things about the school system in Perth. As well as having a strong swimming curriculum, there are classes for Facebook and driving; learning the basics of how a car works, road safety and actual on-the-road driving lessons are on the syllabus! My phone rings for a 12:30 interview and we arrive back at the rink to pick up Rebecca before heading home.

Rob Pell-Walpole, who is essentially the voice of Fuel (who produce my theatre work), my production manger, and friend calls to say he has arrived in Perth and I head out to find him. The more I walk through the city, I imagine that it'll be perfect for a Midnight Run and make a mental note to suggest it. I find the Season of Perth Hotel finally, and call Rob from the reception. My attempts are futile and I wait a little frustrated on the sofa there. I overhear a conversation between two gentleman. 'I'm not gonna bother rehearsing' says the first one 'Why?' says the second. 'I'll be fine, didn't rehearse for Japan' says the first. 'Erm excuse me' Says I 'Are you playing at the Perth Festival?' 'Yes' says he 'You?' 'Yes' Says I, 'I have a show called The 14th Tale, I wrote and will perform it, its about (etc) what about you?' 'We are in a band, we're playing tonight' 'My name is Inua, you?' 'Pete' says the first man offering his hand, 'Tjinder' says the second one. 'So' Says I, 'What is your band called?...' 'CORNERSHOP'.

Perth 3

It started with a wild night of texts to friends in London, I could not sleep until 5 am, I finally turned in, woke up late, rushed out of the house, slept throughout the morning, missed the 11 a.m. phone interview, it was going so well. I woke up groggily and called back the number... The interview went okay, this time at 12.20 and I got a text to say the 12.30 interview had to be postponed, and a slow balance returned. The last run-through of Adam and Rachel's show went well and I helped Adam pack down the entire set, clean up the room. Becca, his daughter arrived there and we drove back home, took the girls to Adam's brother where they were to stay for the night, and we headed out to have some good clean fun. We went to watch a Dj called The Orb play at the Fringe Festival Bar. We arrived 3 hours early at 9 with time to kill. The bar was essentially a courtyard converted into a kinda makeshift garden with fake grass, flood lights, wooden loading palettes as stools, at the far left, a huge tank with alternating swimmers dressed as mermaids and mermen, diving in and waving at the crowds. One of the volunteers there was called Emma and my ears pricked up at her tough Irish accent. Wexford? I asked, Close says she, Waterford. She'd arrived a few weeks back and intends to travel the world this year, I tell her about my show and she says she will try to check it out. I chatted with a large group of friends who stood and slouched before me, half dancing in the generous lights of the courtyard. Jesse is a rugby player from New Zealand who had come to Perth to chase his dreams of playing Pro. Daniel is a close friend of his, married to Brittany's best friend. Sarah is that best friend's younger sister, and Brittany works for Virgin Airplanes, she is an flight attendant, ex model. Daniel is a manager for building projects in Perth and they are a close knit bunch of folks who attended church together as kids; it's their strongest bond and we talk of faith affairs, how it interrogate the personal, intersects their individual lives. I tell them these issues gave rise to Black T-Shirt Collection and Jesse pleads for the script which I promise to send to him. Daniel tells that he applied to work in London for the Olympics, got the job - I perked up that he might be in London for our summer - but turned it down because it wasn't perfect for his wife. I talk to Brittany for a long time about her work, Cambodia which she loves and spends a lot of time in. Soon it is time for them to leave... We all swap Facebook details and the night sweeps onwards. I go for a walk through the city down to Northbridge and somehow I do not get lost. When I return, The Orb, the main attraction of the night is spinning mayhem out the decks and I slip into his stream. It is incessant, textured varied and as much as possible, I try to loose myself in the divinity that is music. How it lifts and lies to us beautifully, sometimes, and in that lie, we find quiet places and personal truths. There are things I need to change about how I live in London. We get home, Adam already deeply sleepy, and we crawl into bed. It is morning as I type this, and I think I'm gonna be alright. There is a song playing, a cover of an original by a band called 'Split Enz' (Which coincidentally, Jesse mentioned last night) the chorus talks about celebrating the present, it goes 'Don't know about the future, that's just stuff and nonsense...' and right now, like, totally.

Perth 2

They call it 'Free' for short. Fremantle is close to where I'm staying at the moment and Adam and Rachel recommended I walk around. We parked outside their rehearsal space - They are working on a children's show called Aitshoo! - about a girl who has the sniffles, she goes to sleep has a fantastical dream of flying over seas and suns, chasing a bird. The entire show is on a white set, performed by a very talented young actress called Annmarie. I watch the first run through with the two Lucys who work at the arts centre, then head out to the shops to top up my mobile phone, and to get lost. I find a Western Union, an African Hair shop, and when I finally pluck up the courage to say 'G'day Mate' in my best Ozzie accent, the severely tanned man who replies does so with a cockney accent, lets me know he supports Spurs and walks off in disgust when I reply with ManU. I'm in London again. I keep walking past Adelaide Street, Phillimore Street to Victoria Quay and watch the ships for a while. The Indian Ocean is spread out exactly as it looks in maps; that ridiculous hue of blue, endless, vast and lapping laughing against the pier. Between the Maritime Museum and the Shipwreck Galleries there, I sit on Bathers Bay Beach and its sand is the purest and whitest I have seen in 15 years. It's just... there - you know what I mean? Beaches this great are standard here. I return to tell Adam, Rachel and Annmarie and they laugh at me like 'you ain't seen nothing yet'. Jet lag overpowers my manners and I fall asleep again, wilting into the chair. Rachel wakes me up and we drive round to pick up their daughters, Joanne and her older sister Becca. I have taught in schools, so I know a little about how they should look. They should look nothing like this, not like a Cambridge campus, not this big, green, huge fields, wide classrooms, space... It is another world.

Later, Rachel and I go to a meeting on the grounds of the festival and meet Jonathan who runs it. As we drive, Rachel talks about how much she loves the city - Fremantle and Kardinya (where they live) is a little away from the city of Perth. Compared to London, it is tiny, but it is quite a place. It is laid out like New York's grid system, but with none of its bustle. Rachel says that London's footfall count is 40 people to a square meter. In Perth, it is 4. I talk for a long while with David who heads up online communication for the festival, he wears a light grey t-shirt and has the same casual professionalism I try to emulate when I meet people. When David leaves, I go to the courtyard where Rachel holds her meeting for. It is close to midnight, relaxed and the voices mingle with the warm night. Just before we leave back to Kardinya, I talk with Jenny, a Swedish / Spanish lady who is Jonathan's wife. She is an accomplished theatre maker and organiser, they have two daughters and she talks vividly about their strong personalities, how on a train, she heard her older girl tell a stranger: 'I'm Swedish, Spanish, British living in Australia and in three years when my dad's job is done, I don't know where I'll be...' The nomadic blood in me thrills that such mindsets are alive in such young minds. And how do they deal with their parents working such crazy hours at this time of year? Jenny says that after a recent city-scale project, her daughter returning from the show that she loved 'Mum, it's okay you are not home all the time'...

Perth 1

The journey was 17 hours long. London, Singapore, Perth. I still don't understand why flight works. It is a metal bird. METAL and BIRD cancel each other out, they are not reconcilable. There is the gathering of speed, the plane is a wild animal, engine tensed like muscles. We leap into the air and I can't stifle the wild squeal of childish delight that whistles out of my mouth. Dan, a property developer from Manchester who sits beside me, laughs. We met just thirty minutes ago and he has told about his work, his love life, his pet Jack Russell and this holiday, taking three months off. I tell him I am impressed and hope to be able to do that, how relationships of mine have failed because of my unhealthy work ethic. He says this is also new for him, his first time not working in 16 years. Over Warsaw, Dan points out that we are 35,000 feet up, it is -58 degrees outside. On the T.V. Screen, he shows me the skycam, essentially, a camera strapped to the tail of the plane on the outside. At this height, we can see the curve of the planet, we are so high, Earth is bent. The night before I left, I went to a poetry event and listened to a gorgeous 10 line poem about dreams. How there are big dreams and little dreams. I forget the fine details, but it went something along the lines of a farmer dreams of a plough, a president dreams to his secretary, who dreams to his cabinet and soon, there is war. A man dreamt of crossing a field in the air, and we cross continents now. I consider the little horrors men do, how we divide and concquer one other, and consider now the evolutions, the hundreds of thousands of men it has taken to build ships for the air. A toast to those who dream big.

The reasons are complex, but I have not left the United Kingdom in just under a decade, in just under ten years of touring and trawling theatres, stages, trains and buses, searching, I think, for a place that I belong to. Once a rare while, with deepest conviction, I find such a place: in the tiniest of moments when I am conscious of being alive and simultaneously conscious of *thinking I'm alive, AND aware of everything else around me. Sort of like water suddenly being aware that it is wet. Over the weekend, I discovered I squandered away an opportunity to have such a place frequently and for a lifetime... I have a greater fear; that I might see as much of the world as I hope to, and realise that I might not belong anywhere specifically. Always at these points I think myself ridiculous and switch off, change topic to something more tangible and real, like rent. Something I can put my finger on and fix. I've been running.

I am in Perth, I am told that the closest city is on a whole other continent; there are places here where you stand, the stars look out to different parts of the galaxy. There is endless desert, water and you feel like you are at the edge of the world. There will be no place to run. I am absolutely terrified of what I will find there, but I'll go and seek that thing out.

Incredible

I think of perseverance when I see this.

Inua goes to Whitstable, Kent. // Candy Coated Tour

08/12/11 - Kent. I have no idea what to expect, again. I push the doorbell outside Peggy's house and wait, huffing into my cupped hands. She has a perfect smile, the kind Hollywood would pay for I think, as she leads me past her front room to the kitchen chatting lightly. When she speaks, I hear a diluted American lilt and things click into place. Peggy was in New York in November when I was planning the tour and I got the sense that she spent a lot of time there. She introduces her husband Graham who shakes my hand warmly. An actor and singer, has a very relaxed vibe about him and like a leech, I siphon his demeanour, shrug off my jacket and try to make myself at home as Peggy insists. They have a beautiful house, like something from a catalogue a pairing of wood & marble, neutrals & greys. Satchmo, Peggy's cat whose coat suggests a tuxedo, prowls about the slate floors meowing for her attention. She pays as much as she can dishing out the just baked dinner of vegetarian shepherd's pie. It is delicious, just right. I add a few twists of black pepper and go back for seconds. As we eat, we speak of how spending cuts have affected the arts world, how some theatres expect actors to work for free, how commendable Nick Hytner's run as director of the National Theatre in London had been so far.

I discover that Peggy is a writer of plays and novels and we discuss structure and the difference between both disciplines as Graham packs for a trip to London for an audition the following day. The guests begin to arrive, they are personal friends from the local writer's group that Peggy seems to be at the heart of. Some are strangers for Peggy's mailing list who knock on the door, and find a seat. The show begins. Peggy invited Tim, a friend and film maker, to begin the night and he shows delicate, emotive footage of birds haunting a dusk sky. After, he hands out thin strips of paper adorned with a single question and asks us to answer out loud without using any of the words written on the slips. I answer: 'I was 12, I gave my best friend money to buy a bar of Snickers, grabbed one off the shelf and stepped outside the shop to wait for him to pay. When he walked out, he had a Mars bar and my Snickers in his other hand. We ran away'. Tim records our answer and hopes to stitch them into one long story. The applause dies down, Peggy introduces me and suddenly, it is my time to hold their attention.

I take the high chair close to the glass sliding doors and with my back to their garden, sit still and speak to them poetry. There are only two love poems in the book, I read one and watch as Peggy clutches Graham's hand on the counter and he responds, squeezing her's back. Anita on my left leans in. Caroline, an english language teacher sits up right in rapt attention and I carry on riding the silence, filtering it with the rhythm and musicality I try to pack into my poems, hoping each one settles where I aim. It is a leap of faith every time. Finally, I am done and sign books for those who have been moved. A older man comments how he never, ever, goes to these sorts of things, but he'd been trying to keep his mind open so he came, "and you have opened my mind" he says. Graham runs for London, the guests thin until Tim, Anita, Zoe and Vinita are left. We gather in the kitchen and talk of narratives, film, t.v. series and theatre. Tim and Anita talk for 30 minutes non stop about a show they saw at the Gulbenkian Theatre called 'Going Dark' about a man who works in a planetarium, who is going blind. I tell them the show was produced by Fuel who produce my theatre work and Tim and Anita say after hearing my poems, it makes perfect sense, they see how I fit in such a company.

Zoe is a human rights lawyer and I mention a casual interest in human rights violations resulting from climate change in developing countries and she lights, up describing a growth in funding research on that exact field of law. Soon it is midnight and such brings sleep.

I wake up late, and after a light breakfast of toasted muffin, opt to walk through the town of Whitstable. It is picturesque and I get the sense everyone knows everyone here. There are small shops and a hand-painted to quality to most of the shop signs. I nod across the street to an older gentleman and he nods back, walking by an Optometrist's whose lone employee wipes the window with genuine happiness. I think this odd, then I think it is odd that I think this is odd. I walk further out leaving the tight roads and slow bustle of the town, walk out to Whitstable harbour where the North Sea touches the beach. I'm at the edge of England, there is no land left. I play one song, 'Swim Good' by Frank Ocean and sing along into the cold fresh sea air. Then, I let Mos Def's 'New Danger' album run, remembering something a poet friend said about hip hop 'you have to extract it from the urban element that created it and let the countryside illustrate it' I quote that too often, and think it is true, but for the first time, I wonder if he'd missed something. Surely, the oceans and sea know us better than hills? We are 70% water it flows inside us and those watery, flowing blank canvases will contrast the constraints of concrete better than trees. I return to Peggy's to grab my things, thank her for her hospitality, for holding the Kent leg of the tour, and promise to keep in touch. Making for London, I wonder if I have it in me to write a batch of poems about how cities meet the seas. As if in response, Kent answers with a sign: