Because I read for pleasure and I write for a living, if I’m not careful I can spend too much time inside my own head.  Every month I resolve to get out more, to seek out new experiences, to live life to the full.  Sounds impressive, this relentless questing after novelty and thrills?  In practice, it’s all rather tame and disappointing.  Whether this is on account of my advancing age or my lack of ambition, I cannot say.  The latter, I suspect.  For example this month, for the first time ever, I roasted a duck.  It was a successful enterprise but not a particularly noteworthy one. 

When I was younger, I used to go out dancing two or three times a week, every week.  On Saturdays I would dance, as if it were my right, from midnight till eight o’clock in the morning.  Whether sewing fancy dress costumes for drag balls or dancing on the podium in gay clubs (what must they have thought?) or dancing in my sunglasses in dodgy after hours clubs, I thought that I was engaging with the world; living life to the full.  Gyrating in a semi-sexual way to the music in a nightclub is emphatically not a team sport and it was an activity I found I was particularly suited to.  

I remember worrying about what would happen when I got too old to go to nightclubs but nature is kind and I simply don’t want to go any more.  The queues for the toilets, the taxi ride home – who needs any of that?  So what is left to me to do these days?  Well, I go to the theatre, an activity that generally disappoints.  I go to art galleries, I walk the dog, I go swimming.  Gah…

 When I leave the house, I want to be entertained, moved, thrilled, entranced and to feel part of something.  You used to be able to get that on the top deck at the front of the no. 59 bus travelling north from Brixton over Waterloo Bridge until they went and fitted TV screens inside the bus that broadcast adverts on a loop.

 I want that feeling you get with the first five minutes of watching a firework display or the first drink of the evening or that moment when you go diving and you sink below the surface of the water and enter a new world.   Yes, I have been to see Cirque de Soleil – it left me unmoved.  I’ve come to suspect that to get the most out of any experience you have to participate rather than be a spectator.  However I am shy, unsporty, uncompetitive, uncoordinated, grumpy and lazy.  I cannot play tennis, football, the piano, the guitar or any acting role on the stage.  In short, participation-wise, I am a bit stuffed.

This month, buoyed up by the novelty of cooking the duck, I went all-out for a new experience and attended a Shamanic Dreaming workshop.  A charismatic man drummed and told wise stories and then you closed your eyes and went into a dream, a kind of guided vision where you could meet your animal spirit guide (mine was a huge tiger) and have adventures.  I sat in a cave and wrote a novel in mine, while a glorious purple light streamed down from the top of a volcano and filled my head. It was the most fun I’ve had in ages. 

 Technically, you could say the Shamanic Dreaming was just another way of living in my head.  But I sat in a church hall and held hands with real people while I went down into that cave with a tiger for a companion.  And when we got back above ground, the tiger told me it would turn into a small attractive bird and remain close by.  And I’ve seen the bird several times since, in the apple tree in my garden.