Songs of Friendship: A Storytelling Cycle

Team Viking / A Hundred Different Words for Love / Revelations

James Rowland

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786825339
• eBook ISBN: 9781786825346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care

JAMES ROWLAND'S STORYTELLING TRILOGY Over three years Songs of Friendship was assembled at VAULT Festival. Team Viking charts the course of his lifelong friendship with Sarah and Tom, and what happened when Tom was diagnosed with incurable heart cancer. In A Hundred Different Words for Love Sarah gets engaged at the same time as James meets someone he really likes. Revelations is James's account of being around for Sarah and her partner Emma as they take the huge step of becoming parents (and the small matter of his donating sperm for the baby). The stories are about growing up, grief, falling in love, life and death. Also lots of jokes about bums and stuff. Songs of Friendship contains additional material and appendices detailing the making of the shows plus annotated scripts with notes from the author. The Edinburgh Fringe performance was described by The Stage as 'Joyous - heart-lifting and incredibly moving...as accomplished a piece of storytelling as you could hope to see.'

TEAM VIKING

*

Set: Stage right a microphone, loop pedal and Casio keyboard.

Upstage centre an old amp with a plastic Viking helmet and can of Lynx Africa sitting on it.^*

A pre-amble, talking about the venue/weather/my health/the attractiveness of the audience (always positive regardless of my feelings). After clearance from front of house I ask if anyone has serious respiratory issues. ^†

I’m sure that you know that we perfume the bodies of the dead, Vikings did as well. Smell is also apparently the most potent of the senses when it comes to remembering.

I lightly spritz the audience with Lynx Africa unless someone has declared their asthma in which case I explain what would be otherwise happening.

Now I’m going to go and do the lights and when I come back I will be a performer and all the rest of this will be artifice.^‡

I go and dim the house lights.^§

Hello my name is James, I’m gonna tell you a story and all of it is true.^*

I call upon Odin, King of the Gods and father of stories to aid me in this account.^†

Music. ^‡

So.^*

The sun was shining down; warm, not too hot, still and bright, really bright; like God had turned the contrast up on the world. Seeing the sharp, sharp edges of yourself and everything else. It wasn’t just the light, I also had that cotton wool feeling, y’know, thick wads of cotton wool insulating you and at the same time you’re observing things more than usual because of the awareness of separation between yourself and the outside world and…

People were milling about, lots of people, so many people, I think there were eight hundred or something; more people than I could be friends with or know, and I was grief-handing which is like glad handing but at a sad time, ‘Hi nice to –’ ‘University, I see –’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ ‘Thank you my speech was very good’ (I didn’t say that obviously), but people were being, Dad’s old friends they were being very kind, they said that what I said was good, I think one of them described it as profoundly moving, which I found profoundly gratifying.

It was lovely, I s’pose. In fact there were so many people there that all of Dad’s old students had to go in the church hall, the overflow, they’d set up some sort of audio relay so they could hear the whole ceremony, my speech.^†

It’s great at a funeral, if you can hold it together (obviously not emotionally, let that shit^* out), but if you don’t think you’re a funny person and you want to do a joke and have people laugh, just save it for a funeral, or when someone’s suffering from the profound effects of grief because it makes people really susceptible, you can do anything, knock-knock jokes, funny noises, even mime, people will love it. I’d done all three – yeah my speech was pretty weird. There I was in the aftermath, people milling around, lost in my own hazy daze.

Tom and Sarah approach, Tom a proud peacock.^†

‘Great speech mate –’ (course he’d say that he helped me write it) ‘– shame about the delivery.’

‘…’

Sarah: ‘It was great, you did him proud.’

‘I’m going over there now,’ Tom, motioning to a group of my Dad’s old students.

Sarah: ‘He’s pretending to be you to try and pull.’

Tom: ‘They’re really pretty Jim, besides, it’s what your old man would have wanted.’^*

Sarah, lighting a cigarette, ‘Sure, but is it what they want?’

Tom, on his way, ‘Absolutely.’

We laugh.

Sarah assesses my face.

‘You okay Jim?’

‘…’

and she gives me a hug, one of those glorious world-beating hugs where you realise what a weight you’ve been carrying because it’s not there in that instant.

Tom and Sarah my best friends since…forever. We grew up together, the three of us, in a suburban, middle class, middle England – there was nothing middling about it though because it was fucking extraordinary. Of course now I’ve grown up, I’ve seen a lot more of the world and I understand that so much of it was this privileged idyll, surrounded by enough money for a lot of imagination, but you see, we were the last generation who played outside, and looking back on us now I understand why people really push the computers because if all the other kids are like we were. I’m very happy they’re sat inside quietly glued to a screen because:

‘Oh look there’s a window, oh and here are some stones… hey guys I’ve just thought of the best game!’^* Yeah, we were dangerous. We were so dangerous we got banned from reading the Just William books because we did too many of the things in them.^† So watch out.

I met Tom first, when we were very young (we went to the same crèche and stuff) his mum was on her own, so he used to come over to our house when she went out on dates. Which was quite a lot. A very organised lady in a pre-internet dating world.

We played Knights, we played Robin Hood but mostly and most importantly we played Vikings. Inspired by the 1958 film with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.^‡ Has anyone seen it? It’s amazing isn’t it? And it exploded like a glorious atom bomb in our nascent consciousnesses.

The story of Vikings is this: you have Kirk Douglas, blond hair, bum chin, he is Prince Einar, the anti-hero. His likes include: quaffing, wenching and fighting. His dislikes: everything else. Total Viking. Then there’s Tony Curtis, honest faced, wearing only a beard, a burning sense of justice and some historically inaccurate very revealing leather hot pants, he is Erik, the illegitimate son of the English Queen and the Viking King, Erik the bastard, our hero. Then there’s a princess that both of our boys are in love with, eye gouging hawks, flesh eating crabs, man eating wolves (nature is all very dangerous in Vikings) castles being scaled, evil Kings – it’s got everything.

I would always be Einar because blond hair, bum chin before the beard and Tom: Erik the bastard cos No Dad…^* and from the age of four or five you would find us conquering the castles of England in the drizzle of our back-gardens on a daily basis. It was great fun.^†

Enter Sarah, from over the fence next door. Perfect, we needed a princess to ravish.

‘Would you like to play with us?’

‘That depends. What are you playing?’^‡

‘Vikings, have you seen it?’

‘Don’t think so.’

Fast forward two hours later –

‘So that was pretty great.’

‘Yep. So you can be the Princess –’

‘I’m not going to be her. She’s boring. I’ll be Eric.’

Tom made it clear that that was not gonna happen, over his dead body.

‘In that case, I’ll be the other one, Einar.’

‘But I’m Einar.’

‘Probably not anymore,’ was their consensus.

So from then on I would be the dangerous animals, or the castle, or the beautiful princess (I was a wonderful beautiful princess). Whatever was necessary to keep the narrative spinning because we just had to do the whole film over and over.

We could only do the final scene one time though (cos our special effects budget was quite small). We got my paddling pool filled up, Playmobile pirate ship, covered in twigs and set ablaze with my gerbil Ragnar on board. Best. Day. Ever.

It’s important to point out that Ragnar was dead already, we weren’t psychopaths.^*

And that was the beginning of Tom, Sarah and me. We were Team Viking.

I had a drag of Sarah’s cigarette, made more small talk with strangers, watched Tom get not one but two numbers and in his words a ‘cheeky goodbye kiss’ and whsssh, everyone vanished, I’ve never seen eight hundred people disappear so quickly, we went to the crematorium, weird sad music played something woefully inappropriate, the curtains closed. The curtains closed and that was that. We went for dinner (Pizza Express obviously) my family, Tom, Sarah, my girlfriend Esther, lest I forget, she’d been there, she’d been with my mum all day, she’d been great. The next day I had to come back to London – the pub had only given me a few days off. Sarah gave me a lift (I had a train ticket but she was coming back to continue her PhD at Imperial so she drove).

Mum kept the Ashes, I still don’t know what she did with them – I should probably ask…

Music.^*

Back down in London, I just carried on in a sort of mechanical way. Funny thing about machines: they’re not very good at relationships, but I had computed that Esther was sad, and I calculated that that was because I was sad, so I thought we’d do a lovely thing, try and press restart: go to Victoria Park, hire a rowing boat and go out on the lake. Romantic. Then the guy running the boats was a real prick for no reason, it’s not like his job’s shit – so just be kind alright and if you can’t be kind be nice. But no, he was an arse about me not having the right change, then when we did get a boat one of the oars was split – and he was just so rude it was a relief when Esther suggested we just sack the whole thing off and go back to her place.

So we went back to her house and she broke up with me.

Two days later, getting home from a day shift at the pub. Tom and Sarah sitting on my doorstep. Ooof, so fucking nice, oh yeah, apparently Esther had called Sarah and said, ‘Just so you know, I’ve broken up with James, I don’t think he’s gonna be alright, so maybe you guys should…’ Nice, right? But before you think that she’s really cool and awesome for doing that, y...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by Charlie Covell
• Dedication
• Team Viking
• A Hundred Different Words for Love
• Easy Peelers
• Revelations
• Thanks
• Appendix I – How We Make the Shows
• Appendix II – Working with Dan
• Appendix III – By Daniel Goldman
• Appendix IV – Advice for Edinburgh
• Appendix V – Artwork
• Appendix VI – Team Viking: The Truth
• Appendix VII – A Hundred Different Words For Love: Paths Untaken
• Appendix VIII – Revelations: Getting Naked