Alien Therapy

A bootleg Princess Leia belts it out whilst a bass playing stormtrooper tries to avoid getting his amp lead tangled up in his armoured codpiece. You don’t see that every day do you?

Today was our local Party In The Park, which attracts fifteen to twenty thousand people and this year had a science fiction theme. I therefore covered my face and hands with green make up, donned a white lab coat, put on a pair of bright green crocks, and pretended to be an alien scientist (see extra photo).

For some reason this simple transformation attracted a lot of attention. I got high fived by a bunch of young black teenage girls, asked to pose with a baby by a young couple, snapped by two local newspaper photographers, and seized on by dozens of people with young children. One woman had a very grumpy young boy who shut up when he saw me and who I chatted to. “Did you know there is a stall selling star wars lego down there?” I said and his face lit up. “Oh thank you so much” said the grateful mother as they went off, family happiness restored. At the local amphibian society stall I perused the various creatures in their tanks and suggested I might be related to some of them, to the amusement of the stallholders.  One woman pointed out that my feet were a different colour green to the rest of me. “That happens to my species during the mating season” I said, winking. Laugh a minute me.

It was a very well organised event. They had Dr Who’s Tardis, a Dalek, and even HG Wells Victorian Time Machine, being driven ‘round by a couple in Victorian costume. And lots of performance art of course. 

Every time I felt tired I went and sat in one of the many deckchairs that were dotted around (always choosing a green one of course) but even here I got accosted and photographed. After a couple of hours TSM and The Yoga Mama joined me and we had a picnic and walked around. I saw my old dance company colleagues, people I worked with when we were preparing for the Olympics in 2012, neighbours, the young lad with learning disabilities who gardened for us for a while, people I worked with twenty five years ago … real community stuff. For a while we sat on blankets in front of the main stage, and I stretched out and fell asleep, looking at the clouds through the holes in my straw hat as the sounds of the music drifted through my consciousness. It took the main theme from Star Wars at full volume to properly wake me up.

We headed home late afternoon. The Dizzle and Mr G went off later to meet Top Gun as they were doing an open air showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to round off the day’s celebrations. This to be followed by Star Wars: The Pub Beckons I suspect.

When we got home I got in the shower, washed off most of the green stuff, then fell into a very deep sleep. After which TSM cooked curry and we sat in the garden.

I had woken very early again this morning, sweating and panicky about work. As usual the first couple of hours of my day  were about anxiety and trying to suppress it.  But after that, today was probably the most switched off I have been in a long time, maybe because when transforming into an alien I took off my normal self and donned an alternative persona which had no connection with work or stress at all. For a while I felt like a great burden had been lifted. I realised that I’ve just had enough of deadlines, of tension, of lists of things to do that are longer than the hours available to fill them. I realised I want simplicity and human interaction not being driven over a cliff every day like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, only to be resurrected the next morning to do it all again, repeating the same stress endlessly.

It’s a truism that when you realise you’ve had enough, you want more. Not of the same, but different. My job is essentially about managing complex deadlines and maintaining systems of governance, but as a clever man once said we do often end up specialising in what we hate; what I want now is a chance to be creative and relaxed. My fatigue is of the soul not the body.

At this point my alter ego looks astonished and says “you got all that just from a day wearing green make-up?” Well why not. Maybe the prozac and the break from work is helping. But maybe we all need to become what we are not for a day just to realise what we really want to be.