On Adventures in Hampstead, Serendipity & Richard Tyrone Jones and his Big Heart

You know what it’s like. You’re in London for a long weekend and you think you’ll go and see some of the stuff that you’re always hearing and reading about. Something cultural. Literary. Something you can write about on your blog. So you think you’ll have a look at the culture guide in the Guardian over breakfast, but when you get to the cafe you realise it’s only Friday, and the guide comes with the Saturday paper.

So you walk across Hampstead Heath instead, admiring the variety and happiness of all the walking dogs. After you're caught in a downpour, you’re forced to fight your way past the baby buggies and get into a cafe and order a latte. And you hear that A House Where Keats Lived is just down the hill so you go and have a look, but it costs a fiver to go in so you just peer in through the window and then go to the library next door. The Keats Community Library, which has a beautiful stained glass dome in the ceiling and a lot of books you’d like to read. 

The papers you sit down with all have listings in the back of things to go to, but you don’t know where anywhere is in London. How far is it to Chalk Farm? Would Holland Park entail a lot of tube changes? And you want it to be good, whatever you choose. You’re going to be investing time and money and expectation to get there, a heavy burden for an exhibition that might well turn out to be two prints and a video installation of a cat. Maybe you should just stick to the Tate.

Then you pick up a copy of Time Out. An entry catches your eye, and you turn to your boyfriend to say, this looks interesting, it’s poetry about heart failure. And to pre-empt a momentary expression of doubt from crossing his face, you offer a get-out clause. It’s at the Royal Free Hospital, is that too far? But instead he leans over, says, that’s just down the road. Five minutes, max. Shall we go?

You reach for your phone to look at the time and see that you have a couple of hours to spare. Not long enough to go far and, after all, there’s no need to factor in travel time. More coffee? Beer, even? But somewhere you’ve seen a signpost for a National Trust house. You think you remember where, so you go up the wrong road, stop at a pub with cushions on the chairs that are too big and push you off the seat. There are more babies, more quietly filled buggies pushed by young women with long hair. Au pairs? What are they giving the babies to keep them so quiet? Intravenous Mozart?

You find the signpost but not the road it is pointing to, so you make a diversion into an antiquarian bookshop where the gaps between the shelves are so full of crap that you can’t get past, and you lean at a ridiculous angle to try and see the titles, but you can’t, so you make a polite excuse and go back to the signpost.

And this time, you go the right way, and end up back where you started. And the National Trust house is there, a poured concrete Modernist block of flats designed by, and for, Ernö Goldfinger. And your boyfriend tells you that the Goldfinger in James Bond is named after this Goldfinger, because Ian Fleming met him and they didn’t hit it off, or Ian Fleming met Goldfinger's cousin and didn’t like what he heard. And Goldfinger is a great name, after all. You admire the house and the paintings and the view over Hampstead and wish that you lived there, and all the paintings were yours. But you’re glad that you don’t have the name of an Ian Fleming character. Pussy Galore. Mary Goodnight. Tracy.

And so to the hospital, where there are sandwiches laid out in the Atrium for those who have come to watch the performance, but food in a hospital feels a bit icky, so you just sit down and drink some water. And Richard Tyrone Jones, six foot of ginger charm, wanders out and begins the show.

He is active, engaging. We cycle with him on his way to poetry performances, wonder why we are so tired, struggle with breathlessness, and marvel at the colour, viscosity and quantity of our phlegm. Richard Tyrone Jones and his Big Heart. A heart that swelled and failed and landed him in the intensive care ward of the hospital. Animations flicker around him as he explains what it was like. Much fun is made of bodily functions going awry, of heart-stopping nurses and the fear of ending up back in Dudley. And we know he got better, because here he is in front of us, but still we hold our breath as the treatments fail to work, as his steps get slower, his prospects darker.

In between are poems. Poems from his hospital bed, from his hopeless seat on a featureless street in Dudley, from the moments when it looks as if it’s all getting better and times when it appears that never will. Because, when you’re a writer, all experience is copy, and life-threatening and messy illnesses are better copy than most. Especially when you end up back on your feet, even if you do need an implant next to your heart which will shock you back to existence if your pulse gets too slow.

The bravura end is a declamation of the genetic baddies who are lurking in our collective DNA, mostly without answers, seeming to come from nowhere. You hope you never have to hear too much about them. We can’t stay for the Q&A session which is, after all, perhaps aimed more at the patients who are here because they have heart disease, because they are being treated in this very hospital. Just like Richard himself.

Richard Tyrone Jones's Big Heart has already been a success in Buxton. This summer, it will be happening again at the Edinburgh Fringe, and then touring the UK. You should go and see it. You really should.

Details about Richard Tyrone Jones's Big Heart can be found on his website here. A book and ebook, Big Heart (& other sickness) will be coming out later in 2012.

Photograph or memory?

I've been thinking about memory lately, about how and what we remember, about what is real and what just a construct from long-heard stories and family pictures.

Memory is not trustworthy. I remember a time when I thought that everything I remembered was true, but then my brother said, do you remember the time I dared you to pull your pants down at your bedroom window? And I didn’t. I know I didn’t.

Then there are photographs. Do I remember sitting on the top of Beachy Head with the calor gas stove boiling water for tea, or is it just because I’ve seen the photograph in the album so many times, my brother and I smiling up at the camera and my Dad reaching out towards the boot of the car? My memory of Beachy Head is wrapped around with a strong wind, though, bending us double so that we run back from the edge and crouch behind the car so that the flame from the stove doesn’t go out, so that must be another time. We went to Eastbourne every year for my whole life, I once thought, but now I realise that it can only have been for two, or maybe three, years in a row. I know that one of them was in 1976, because it was a family joke that we went on holiday for the only week of that summer when it rained.

I remember standing on the school field that year, the unaccustomed heat of the air keeping me in one place, Stephanie Yates running up and announcing a new temperature high. It seemed very significant, and a bit scary.

Is it only because of photographs that I remember certain things, though? Not necessarily the action in the photograph, but what was happening close around. There’s one of my brother and I sitting on a ladder which is leaning up against a wall, a small wooden ladder with six rungs that was as familiar as the apple tree and the garage door. It is only me, however, that can remember that, before the photo was taken, I sat on the bottom rung and looked up at my brother, a four year old hero, sitting all the way up on the dizzying heights of the top rung, level with the top of the garden wall.

My first ever memories are bracketed with photographs. My Dad holding me on his hip, his hair still dark. I am wearing a blue-checked dress and my blondeish hair is blowing across my eyes. What you wouldn’t know is that we drove down to Newquay in our Morris Traveller. No seatbelts in those days, and the back seat had a flat back which opened into the boot. I think we played the game all of the way down. I would close my eyes, and my brother would lean over and hide a tissue in amongst the suitcases. Then I would lean over in my turn to find it. And then we’d exchange roles. And when we got to Newquay, we could see the hotel, but couldn’t reach it through the one way system.

I know from later information that the hotel was owned by friends of my parents, but who they were I don’t know. If it was just memory I was going on, I’d have to say that we never went inside the hotel, ate any meals, or slept. A faceless girl - bigger than me, a daughter of the hotel, I think - sits behind me on a miniature railway, and I cry every time we go past my parents and the train takes me away.

Going home from a holiday is not something that leaves an imprint. Maybe we had run out of film.

I don’t see my brother a lot these days. He puts some photos up on Facebook, old slides which he has digitally transferred. They open up doors into the past, not always the obvious ones. My cousins comment, we feel nostalgic. I even buy a Formica table when I see it at a vintage fair.

One day, my brother may be the only other person to have a window on these moments, one that is open and not just for viewing through. When I think of this, I want to call him, give him a hug. My children look through photographs as well. They say, do you remember when we did this? Sometimes they are remembering things that happened before they were born, travelling on the back of a family tale. But there will always be times when they will look back and, beyond the edges of the photographs, they will remember more than is shown and they will laugh and hug each other.