Dead typewriter

Found in the brook next to school.

It's seen better days.


A word from my Dad, who always prefers to type.


'Watched the other night a 30 minute program on BBC 2 on the 50th anniversary of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, where I worked as State Manager 1968 -1969 when it was based in a former doss-house and brothel just off the Royal Mile. It was basically two largish flats on the first and second floor which you ascended via a damp and barely-lit circular stone stairway smelling of pee. What you finally entered was a brilliant gem of an environment set amidst the grimness of a grey city that had yet to find its cultural and cosmopolitan feet. For me the tiny Traverse was like coming home to a dreamland with its busy friendly bar, it's miniscule art gallery, it's cosy restaurant with its cheap mouth-watering food created by the inestimable Ruth Hand and - of course - the wee 60 seat Traverse stage where both magic and realism were enacted.

The Traverse was always skint - everything was done on a shoe-string - but the atmosphere was electrifying. Everyone - actors, writers, designers, directors, artists, poets, audience - mingled in together, conversed, argued, sang and shared.
I worked on plays and productions at the Traverse that gave me new insights into the nature of being human, into the drama of relationships, into the tragedy and comedy of the human condition, the politics, the manifestations of evil, the enduring beauty of love, the downfalls and the aspirations of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the downtrodden and the elevated. The plays at the Traverse were never merely entertainments to be savoured and enjoyed and then forgotten about - they were arrows aimed directly at the hearts and minds not only of the onlookers but of the performers themselves. I remember particularly the youthful American Project Theater who arrived from New York with two plays by Lanford Wilson and who set the Traverse alight with the kind of theatre rarely seen in dear old gloomy Edinburgh. I fell in love with the entire company - all five of them - and even offered to quit my job at the Trav and travel with them to Paris for their next gig. They were the hippest, coolest, most laid-back, funny, irreverent and generous bunch of theatre-folk I'd every had the good luck to run into. I vowed that when my time was up at the Traverse I would follow them back to New York but of course other things intervened and I remained in the UK.

The Traverse experience was pretty unique and very much part of the more youthful and adventurous spirit of my times. I look back on it from the perspective of an older and less adventurous old geezer nowadays but always - as they say - with fond memories.

Love Dad'