In the Glare of the Neon Yak is a rip roaring piece of spoken word storytelling set on a sleeper service in the middle of winter. A train full of circus performers are being stalked by a mysterious entity which seems to mean more than just its eerie manifestation. A portent, an omen, the Neon Yak symbolises dark times. Will our hero find love? Will Jacques, the tightrope walker, get back together again with his ex, the circus clown? Does the secret of the Neon Yak lie in the hands of a randy old lady? Has the buffet car run out of sausage rolls? Will Tony the Train Manager find where they’ve put Carriage F?
An hour show combining poetry, storytelling and music, In the Glare of the Neon Yak is by turns delightful, magical, disturbing. It’s a veritable modern fairy tale!
Some golden rules to start enjoying life, for Pete’s sake. By Robert Garnham
Being a cheerful, optimistic sort of person, but also a poet, people often ask me for advice to get through the day. So here are my top golden rules which, hopefully, will benefit many of you.
1. No one is ever worth writing a poem for, though every now and then you’ll meet someone who’s worth a limerick, particularly if they come from Chard.
2. It’s easy to get a personalised number plate, according to my friend PUV 621R.
3. A two-day old baguette will stop your car rolling down the street.
4. Hold on to your nostalgia, otherwise you’ll have nothing to be nostalgic about, except possibly for the time you used to be nostalgic about things, so maybe you can be nostalgic about that.
5. Every fear can be overcome. Do it with a smile! (Unless your fear is crushing loneliness).
6. It’s never too late to learn. It’s never too early to forget.
7. Only concentrate on that which requires no thought.
8. You might not mention the elephant in the room, but you can certainly wonder how it got up the stairs and through the door.
9. Look at the mirror every morning and say, ‘I am loved, I am loved’. At least this way you’re prepared for any other claptrap that comes along.
10. Everyone you see or meet or talk to has been born. Even Avril Lavigne. And if you think being born was difficult, try getting a dentist during the weekend.
11. Go on, help yourself to the last cake in life. Living is all about grabbing the last cake. Go on, have it. Enjoy it. The dog licked it.
12. Get up early one morning, when the dew is still on the grass, and go for a walk barefoot in the park. Let me know when you’re doing this so that I can come round and borrow your vacuum cleaner.
13.Do something that excites you every day. Subvert the rules. Turn things on their head. (Naturally it’s best not to attempt this if you’re an airline pilot.)
14. How do we know that opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck? Who was the first person to discover this? How many similar things do we do which are good or bad luck without us knowing? Brandishing a vase on a Thursday? Sitting on a pouffe just after lunch? The mind boggles, Mrs Trubshaw, the mind boggles.
15. Give as much joy to the small things in life as you do to the large. Which is why me and my ex split up.
16. If at first you don’t succeed, then maybe catching bullets between your teeth isn’t the job for you.
17. If you don’t think you can get it out, don’t stick it in there in the first place.
Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of performing at many venues and entertaining audiences. I’ve been lucky enough to have some of these filmed, either as snippets, or the whole show. Collected here are some of those which I didn’t put on YouTube, fearing that to put my best work on social media would leave me with nothing to perform in public.
So here, for a limited time, are the recordings of some of my favourite poems. The audio from these and others appear on my CD, Juicy, which can be ordered here: https://robertgarnham.bigcartel.com/product/juicy
I’d like to thank those who have filmed me including Laura Jury and Danny Pandolfi
Had an amazing time at Milk last night in Bristol at the Wardrobe Theatre and I managed to record my set. I was asked to choose a poem to ‘cover’, but instead chose Holding Out for a Hero, the Bonnie Tyler song.
For the first time in three years I’ve been on the road again with my comedy performance poetry. Over the pandemic years and lockdown I’d become quite used to my own company and not going anywhere, and it felt like my world had just narrowed down to my flat and the town I live in. Going places and performing no longer seemed the sort of thing that someone like me did.
The last time I had a bit of a tour was in 2019 when I undertook the Hammer and Tongue tour, performing in six different cities over nine days. This time around is less exuberant, three cities over five days, but the logistics of travelling and making connections and getting to places to perform to people I’d never met was still the same.
Indeed, I’d quite forgotten how nervous the logistical side of it can be. The first gig was in Penzance, right at the end of the country. I caught a train to Bodmin Parkway and was then picked up by Rob Barratt, and after our joint show he drove me back to Bodmin Moor, where he lives, and let me sleep in his lounge. Logistically, this was the easy one.
I then came back from Bodmin, and spent the night at my mothers in Brixham, then the next morning caught a bus, a train, a rail replacement bus, another train and then another train, each time stressing about the connections and the timings and the links, in order to get from Brixham in Devon to Wolverhampton. Thankfully, every part of the journey went well, although there was an amusing incident at Newton Abbot where we all got on the rail replacement bus, and were then told to get off the rail replacement bus, and then they said, sorry, our mistake, and we all had to get back on the rail replacement bus.
After the gig in Wolverhampton, I got the train to Birmingham New Street, waited an hour, and then caught the train down to Bristol Temple Meads for gig number three. I arrived here last night around nine, by which time I’d done about ten hours on trains and buses. Thankfully, today is a day off.
But what about the actual gigs? I’ve had an amazing time. Penzance was a joy. I performed with Rob Barratt in our show, The Two Robbies, which we’ve put on all over the UK in recent years. The venue was an arts centre / theatre called The Acorn, with a proper stage and a cabaret seating arrangement. We even had our own green room with kettle, microwave and washing machine. If I’d known, I’d have brought my laundry! Rob was magnificent as ever and the whole evening was warm and friendly. We even had our own photographer supplied by the venue!
The Wolverhampton gig took place in a nightclub, though this was at three in the afternoon. A day of solo shows as part of the Wolverhampton Literature Festival, I was incredibly nervous beforehand, but the audience was a respectable size and my show was greeted very well indeed. By which I mean they laughed at all the good bits and the applause seemed genuine and generous. I was on a high which lasted all the way back to Bristol. I then had the joy of watching Elizabeth McGeown’s new show, Cockroach, which I enjoyed immensely.
Tomorrow night I’ll be performing at the Wardrobe Theatre here in Bristol as part of Milk, but for now I have a day of leisure in Bristol, and I’ll be meeting up with my dear poetry friend Melanie Branton. Tonight, I shall be rehearsing and fine tuning my set for tomorrow.
Seriously, it feels like I’ve hardly stopped moving since Thursday morning, but today should be somewhat less harried!
Over the last few weeks I’ve been making videos of some of the short poems that I’ve been writing. Usually little more than a minute long, they give me a chance to have a little fun! I hope you like them.
Robert Garnham 