What Happened Next...

The last time I wrote we were at the start of a strange time with the restrictions of the Covid 19 landscape and the unknowns at large. Recently I have been pondering the idea of giving you a what-happened-next update, wondering to what extent one shares a life-story versus simply sticking to one's professional persona and I suppose I have realised that for me there is no differentiation. Despite my being a professional actress, when it comes to real life I cannot be anything other than exactly who I am. There must always be truth, or there is no point.

In the post I wrote at the start of lockdown I was describing the cross-roads I was at with Acting Up and with my pub Little White Pig, which, like all public houses at the time, was required to close. As it happened the Linked-In article put me in touch with an old acquaintance from way back, Angus Forsyth who then joined me for a couple of years in running things. Angus was a wonderful ally, having had a similar gastro pub business himself a few years back; his jovial manner and sage advice remains to this day a ray of sunshine in my life. But ultimately Little White Pig (AKA The Pig) closed its doors after hanging in there by the skin of its teeth for 5 years. There were many happy times, we were a loved local business, but there are also times I'd sooner forget. There's a whole novel in The Pig's story - I keep beginning to write it...perhaps that is what I am starting to do here? But actually, I don't yet know what I'm hoping to discover in writing this.

At night I dream about The Pig, and wonder who I am without it, who will see me, what my role is now that it has slipped away from me. The people I met in that environment, the young staff, the suppliers, the customers - it was a whole cast set upon a wonderful and quirky stage set in a show where I played Mother, or Duchess, or Queen. The end of The Pig also coincides with my youngest child leaving home and the end of other roles too - the John Byrne Award, a charity for which I had become chair, the stepping back from the St George's School for Girls Alumni Association and other things too. In fact life has been stripped down to the bare bones. I have moved house too and I now split my time and possessions between Edinburgh and London. I got married to a man who frequented The Pig, the novelist Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (as well as multiple other novels and scripts). So I have a new name Emma Welsh to add to the mix.

Over the years I have had many monikers. Some people called me the Duchess of Dublin Street for a while, since The Pig and my flat were both located in this particular spot in Edinburgh's New Town and I got to know everyone locally, became a gathering place, the centre of the community. To be given a nick-name by others, as one might have been given at school, feels good. It shows that you are part of a community of people. Not having a nick-name now makes me remember how lonely it can feel to be back in the freelance saddle hoping that someone will let you join their gang, even if it's just for a day. Is this why I have turned to Linked-In to essay through this landscape? I suppose the goal, the purpose of this article is to assist myself in working out whose gang I am now in.

I accompany Irvine on many of his literary tours. It's a privilege to listen to him talking about his work and to encounter the strange 'gang' that authors form as they emerge from their sheds/studies/cafés to promote their latest book (Irvine's preferred place of work tends to be a café or at least an establishment that serves a bit of food and a cup of tea, which is why he frequented The Pig...at least I think that's why he came in so often...). The fact that Irvine and other writers can even write one book is amazing to me and when I am amongst them I want so much to be in that gang, which makes me think that I should write a book. But if I was going to write a book, I'd write a book, if you catch my drift. No point in talking about it beforehand. I think I just want to be part of something. I want to play with the other kids. The Pig satisfied that need in me.

I suppose I do get a taster here and there as an actress, of being in a gang. I seem slightly to have returned to my original profession as an actor and have this year been in Irvine's Crime 2 on ITV X and also played a role in River City, a Scottish BBC Soap. The feeling of being part of a production is supreme and every actor on set knows it. The talent, the endeavour, from the lowliest to the top brass, is inspiring. The sweetness of being briefly in on it spoils me and again, perversely reenforces the loneliness of the precariat. There may be more TV work to come, one just has to wait and polish one's showreel, live one's life, wait for the phone to ring. Patience is a virtue... but I have never really been very good at waiting for other people to make decisions about whether or not to allow me to play in their gang. Perhaps I should write a TV script? But then again, if I write a TV script I write a TV script. No point in talking about it beforehand.

It is fair to say that I have emerged from the experience of running The Pig shaken AND stirred. While Acting Up and my acting services as a whole provide me with great moments of togetherness, a room full of people connecting, talking, imagining what if? who are stimulated by the process and being given the chance to talk and listen (simple, yet not, to achieve), The Pig was an ensemble piece every day 24/7. To say it has left a hole is an understatement, but O! the cost of running it, the way the business is harvested by the great Neo-liberal machine, the impossibility of ever getting on to the front foot financially and the horror of choices I had to make in order to get off that miserable financial wheel has the biggest price-tag of all! I need to sleep at night...I care WAY too much to be on such a financial knife edge day-in day out. I could not have carried on like that. The thing that was filling me up emotionally was draining twice as much from my being as it was giving. It was an addiction to a drug that ultimately was not serving me.

Where does that leave me now? Acting Up was quiet during the lockdown years and is now springing into a slight rebirth. Part of me is resistant to the idea of going back into something I have done for the best part of 30 years, for fear of repeating myself, but then again it is a joy to deliver a process that I know works and to perform Gail's Shoes and other monologues, they never seem to get old. I am in a very lucky situation and I suppose I must recognise that the experience of having five years in a business I had never expected to come my way, one that put me to work, gave me a community, that healed me from various wounds and acted as cross-pollination to my other worlds, my other professions, my experience of it all, that THAT is the real story. The experience which now informs all and which has brought me so much. I may have spent the equivalent of a Business Masters degree's worth of fees plugging the years of debt Little White Pig generated but I have had an education that one could never buy. And I am open to what will be next. All I need to do is remain open and when I feel lonely and without community, reach out to the sea of freelancers and small business owners, of actors, of creatives, of those of us peddling our wares in whatever way we can and to recognise that we are a gang, that the community is virtual and that I am part of it.

The Pig lives on (even if I technically do not own it now, this company and all its liabilities has been sold), because I am human and I am the sum of its parts. The machine makes it impossible for all but the corporate chains to survive, but ultimately nothing except the human experience matters and I refuse to wait until I meet my maker to realise that. It never was about money and I think, at the end of this article, I realise that this idea, this notion, this mindset, is the only gang in town worth being part of. Whatever I have taken from this time is all part of the experience that this holiday on earth has offered me. They gave me a nick-name too. It's Emma.