What Does 'Alone Time' Mean To You?

Time spent by yourself can be a precious, enjoyable and indeed necessary thing.

Some of us spend more time alone than we would like and others not enough, so what is it that we do with these snatched moments of 'me time'? What does 'alone time' mean to you?

Time to reflect
Time to recharge
Time to listen
Time to plan
Time to create
Time to cheat
Time to indulge
Time to pamper
Time to work out
Time to sweat
Time to hurt
Time to strip back
Time to be naked
Time to examine
Time to mend
Time to prepare
Time to scrub and polish 
Time to play
Time to fantasise
Time to reorganise
Time to analyse
Time to be weak
Time to break down
Time to rebuild
Time to be free
Time to just be

What we're going to do right here is go back, way back, back into time...

Loving the retro experience of playing with tape again.

Been listening to Blondie and the sound quality is awful. I think we forget how bad it was. But I love the whirring sound of the machine, the number counter, the tedious process of 'fast' forward and rewinding to the exact spot, the sound of the record button clunking on and off caught forever on tape.

When I came to play with it I remembered that you either needed to leave the 'pips' in or cover the hole up with cellotape so you can record over it and I don't have any cellotape with me but luckily there is a tape with Coldplay (BLEUGH!!!) that still has the pips in so I can still play...

It's doing exactly what it is supposed to do and is taking me back to my childhood. Mum still has the tape I made when, aged 6, she was decorating our flat and to keep me occupied she told me to record myself reading stories and singing songs including such classics as Tiger Tiger and The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Then there were the many, many, MANY Sunday afternoons in my teens spent glued to the charts trying to catch the songs JUST RIGHT to avoid getting too much of the DJ's voice, and finally the anguished taped love letters sent to my boyfriend back home when I went to work for a touring theatre company aged 18.

It's pretty evocative stuff and I hope it will find it's way in to the show somehow...

There is something here about the layering of sound, the imperfection of it, the direct address, of the 'liveness' of a recorded voice in a pre-Skype era and the disembodied voice reaching out to connect over distance.

(Big thanks to Third Angel for the equipment!)

Embracing my inner child

It's funny how everything has changed, in the most subtle ways in some cases.

Being on my own in my own space, talking to myself in my own space. These things are fine. Here? It's is different. It's difficult. But then it was supposed to be. Isn't that the point?

Even just playing ball. Everytime the ball hits the floor it gets dirtier so everytime I catch it my hands get dirtier. This bothers me more than I would like. When I was a kid I would be doing this in my Grandma's back yard, the side of Dad's house, the back of my Mum's best friend's house, the street, at school - not a recently cleaned studio. So what's wrong with getting a bit mucky? All the best things in life involve a little bit of mess. I am not a neat freak. I can do this.

Hang on a sec, must just go wash my hands again...

Meet my Imaginary Friend

In preparation for my show One, I am thinking about loneliness.

• I am thinking about how to populate an empty space, how to bring more than just myself to the stage.
• I am thinking about my childhood, being an only child.
• I am thinking about Imaginary Friends and why we invent them.

I never had one so I am thinking about collecting stories of other people's Imaginary Friends.

Please tell me about an Imaginary Friend you or someone you know has/had. If you didn't ever have one as a child, what would your imaginary friend be like if you invented one now? What would they look like? What special skills/powers would they have?

At this point I am unsure exactly if/how this might be used but anything you do choose to tell me may be referred to on this blog and/or in the show. If you would prefer me not to use your name please tell me and I will make sure that I do not.

Please email all responses to: jayekearney61@googlemail.com and please feel free to forward on to others.

Thank you.

On loneliness #1

Thinking forward to the solo piece I want to make. Solo for a number of reasons not least because it is about loneliness, so being alone seems the natural place to start. Doesn't it?

Also natural for me because on the whole this is what I am, what I have always been.

Alone. Not necessarily lonely. The two are not the same thing. I would like to stress this now. I actually like being alone. I miss living alone; being sensitive only to my own rhythms, which of late don't seem to fit much with anyone else's. I liked being an only child. Other children don't always buy in to your imaginary world view and tend to inflict their own desires upon it. Plus, and yes OK I must admit it is true, they divide your parents' attentions leaving less time for you. Well who else should the world revolve around?

This is not to say that I want to be alone all the time. I have a lot of friends and family that I care very deeply about and I miss terribly (as most of them live hours away). It is more that I have always valued one-to-one relationships more than others. My mother was a single parent. My father dislikes crowds. I like to see my close friends separately if I can. And in love... I give a lot. I like to make that person the centre of my world (but I expect them to do the same in return - only child, remember?).

Even in work I find that I do my best work after everyone else has gone home for the day.

And yet, I think most people would describe me as sociable, companionable and a good team player. I think I am all of these things but my dirty secret is also that I really, really like being alone. I spend a lot of time listening to my iPod, walking around, enjoying my environment from the cosy room inside my head. Although I grumble about the distance and the traffic and the unreliability of public transport I like spending a chunk of my day on a bus, watching the world go by while the soundtrack to my life, subject only to MY moods, plays.

It will be interesting to see how this affects and manifests itself in a performance space, once I get in there. perhaps despite my intentions to make a theatre show I should be looking to make another one-to-one performance? But then again sometimes it's good to get out of ones comfort zone too.