ANAMNESIS NOW! AN EVENING OF ORPH(AN)IC MYSTICISM AND VOODOO MODELLING

Daisy Eris has Hit The North and I’m in an IKEA. This has happened before. On the way to the Belper performance of PIGSPURT’S DAUGHTER, my co-pilots stopped off at IKEA for some fortifying faux meatballs and two years later, we find ourselves repeating the same pre-show ritual. Different store, same meatballs.

As fully paid up members of The 400, our chats have a tendency to quick reach a kind of conversational critical mass, as tangents begat tangents begat tangents.

Within 2min23seconds of discussing the Four Horsemen (Coaches) Of The Apocalypse transporting patients with the corona virus to The Wirral…

…we move swiftly through Ken Campbell’s adventures in Kirkby

…onto Sylvester McCoy’s work (with David Rappaport) in Vision On and Jigsaw.

…”wait Ken Campbell was in The Omen”.

“No. But he did play the Devil in a KitKat ad.”

…then onto utterly terrifying memories of Noseybonk and our mutual love and ownership of the Scarred For Life book.

It turns out that there is an evening of celebration of all that Scarred For Life represents in Halifax next Friday. But Halifax is not Sheffield. It is too far for a Friday night drive. But wait, I’m not in Nottingham on Friday, I’m in Sale. It’s my destiny to go.

I’ve been booked into three workshops for 2019/20. The first took me to the NorthWest the day before Toxteth Day Of The Dead. The third gets me in place for Liverpool PsychFest in April. But the middle date seemed devoid of purpose, except for the pursuit of excellence in the teaching of Mathematics.

So, as the penultimate faux meatball is being chewed, I book the penultimate seat for an evening of childhood terror and a month of childhood nightmares.

We arrive in Sheffield, fashionably early, then retreat to the nearby Red Lion for IPA and catch-ups with my 400 faves. There are still introductions to be made as more synapses of the superbrain fizzle and fuse.

“Where you there, in Liverpool?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then you’ll understand.”

No pre-amble required.

We’ve all done the reading.

We return to the venue, just in time to buy refreshments and secure comfy chairs. Seekers have come from far and wide, Scotland even, and The Liverpool Arts Lab have sent their envoys. The stage set up is a table of books and other assorted ephemera and a tiny, detailed landscape of a Snowdonian hillside.

Is it tiny or are we all giants?

Daisy begins at 9pm and 90mins later we find ourselves with extended reading lists, new synchronicities and an orphan to voodoo model. Wavering in the space between a monologue and a confession, ANAMNESIS NOW is best described, in the words of its creator, as a heralding.

What happens next has already happened, otherwise there would be no point in doing it.

I was able to chat briefly with Daisy in the interval and give her copies of the first two parts of the FOREVER TRILOGY, the trilogy that ends another trilogy. Her suggestion that the third book, FR3VR, should be itself a trilogy, is, of course, brilliant. Typical Campbell. Giving people impossible tasks. But if it wasn’t impossible it probably would be worth doing would it?