This was written for New Escapologist‘s now-defunct Patreon situation in 2020. It was part of a show-and-tell series called Hypocrite Minimalist.
Object Number 2 in our inventory is a ticket stub.
It’s rare to regret offloading something in a minimalist purge, but I almost regret discarding a matchbox of ticket stubs dating from 1994 to about 2005.
I stopped saving my stubs when most UK cinemas and music venues moved away from stylish cardboard tickets to scrunchable receipt-like ones evocative of little but corporate efficiency.
I could have kept the old ones though, couldn’t I? The decision to ditch them seems a bit hard-line now. Then again, do I really need physical evidence that I saw The Mask at the UCI Cinema, Dudley in 1994? Probably not.
I now have a tendency to keep a cinema or concert ticket only if I can stuff it into a related book. This takes up no space and it’s nice to chance upon the stub, with the associated memories, when you’ve forgotten about it.
One such retained ticket is from the screening of a documentary picture called Dreams With Sharp Teeth and it lives inside a book of the same name.
Going to see Dreams With Sharp Teeth on 25 June 2008 was an important night out.
First, it was the night I met my friend Unclef. We’d spoken online but had never met in person. We’d appeared on each other’s radars as the only people to list “Glasgow” and “Harlan Ellison” as interests on Livejournal (RIPLJ).
Harlan Ellison, a cantankerous science-fiction writer, was the subject of Dreams With Sharp Teeth and it was going to be screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival. I emailed Unclef to say, “Look, I know you’re not big on meeting strange humans in Meatspace, but there’s a good chance we’ll be the only two people in the cinema and I don’t want to spend the movie wondering if that other creep is you or not.”
We remain fast friends — drinking buddies, collaborators, co-conspirators, a shambolic two-person book club — to this day.
Even more importantly, this was the night I decided to become an Escapologist for reals.
I’d already put together Issues One and Two of New Escapologist, which I saw as a tongue-in-cheek three-issue project. It was a serialised English Opium Eater-like insight into the lives of some idle pseudonyms who refused to tolerate the things I struggled with: work, family, class loyalty, social expectations.
Obviously, the magazine would completely take over my life for the next decade, but so did the idea. After tonight, I decided, I was going to do it properly and escape.
As pipped as I was to meet Unclef, I was feelin’ blue when we went into that cinema. I’d recently met Samara (now my partner of 16 years or so) but she’d returned to Canada a few days earlier and the thought of a transatlantic relationship didn’t strike me as a good time. I’d also been working in an office for over a year on what was initially a three-month contract, was extremely fed up of it, and I was increasingly unsure how I could support my writing habit in terms of time and energy if not money.
Anyway, there’s a bit in the film where Harlan says something like:
“A lot of people ask me how to get published, how do I start out as a writer, and I say to them, I DON’T KNOW, FIGURE IT OUT! Some things in life aren’t easy! Some things in life shouldn’t be easy!”
That’s not a verbatim quote. It’s just the gist of the thing as I remember it. I don’t own a copy of the film. (There’s a moment in the trailer though, where Harlan says “Art is supposed to be hard, art is supposed to be demanding, that’s the way I feel,” so it was probably that.)
Anyway, it struck me like an articulated lorry with EPIPHANY OVERNIGHT FREIGHT LTD printed in exciting red letters on its livery. Some things in life aren’t easy, the man had said. Some things shouldn’t be easy.
I’d bloody do it then. I’d go to Canada to sort things out with the person I wanted to be with. And I’d become Robert Wringham, a writer of (as I defined it there in the darkened room) “unmarketable short works.”
I now live with the consequences of the thoughts I had from an unreserved seat in the Edinburgh Filmhouse.
Well, I may have holes in my shoes today but it beats the alternative. Locally-sourced life partner? Mortgage? Job? Kids? In London? In Birmingham? With a lawn? A car? No thanks. No regrets.
