The Comfort of Pigeons.

I went for a run. It happens a lot with me - a way of managing my gluttony. Around about the half-way point of my usual 6 mile route, I encountered a woman in a flap. Her car was parked at the side of the road, engine running. Her car was a large silver 4 x 4 - the type that ensures her children's safety on the school run whilst imperilling the lives of their classmates. At the woman's feet laying a pigeon that she had just clipped with her big silver car.

'I couldn't avoid it', she said. 'It was just sitting in the middle of the road'.

As she talked, the pigeon turned circles on the pavement, beating the ground with its one good wing. There was a large puncture hole in its chest.

'Do you know where I can get a box from?' the woman asked me. 'If I could get a box, I could put it in my car and take it to the vet's', she said.

The vet's in my village is located less than a minute's drive away from where the pigeon lay.

I said, 'I don't have a box'. The woman seemed disappointed. 'But anyway,' I continued. 'The vet won't be able to do anything for it. It's a goner'.

My prognosis seemed to distress the woman a bit more. 'No,' she said, 'I think it will be all right if we can find a box'.

Fatefully, next to the pigeon there was a large, heavy stone that had once been part of a long-demolished wall.

I offered to drop the stone on the pigeon to put it out of its misery.

I have experience of euthanizing birds. Made redundant in his mid fifties, my father embarked on a  canary breeding business, carried out in the detached body of a Luton van 'parked' at the side of our house. He wasn't very good at it and most of his canaries developed serious neuroses. It's a thing with canaries apparently. My dad's flock started pecking off their own legs. Canary prosthetics or psychiatric services were hard to come by in 1970s Belfast what with all the shootings and bombings, so my Dad drowned the legless neurotic canaries in a white bucket, specially set apart for this job. In this avian euthanasia programme he recruited my brother and me. Obviously psychologically damaged by the Troubles, my brother and I were enthusiastic canary-drowners. One held the legless canary under the water until the musical bubbles stopped rising from its beak. So, when it comes to dispatching our feathery friends to their eternal home in the sky, I know what I am about.

'Hmm..' considered the woman. 'I wouldn't be comfortable with you dropping that stone on it,' she said.

I thought, 'It's not about your level of comfort'. But I didn't say it. I am a nice bloke.

By  this point the pigeon had now mastered the art of moving along the ground with one wing and had sculled itself into the hedge by the side of the road, its journey from the roadside marked with a sticky trail of blood.

'Oh', said the woman. 'It's better now.'

'No', I said. 'It's dragged itself into the hedge to die.'

Undaunted, the woman said, 'I'm still going to get it that box. It will provide it with shelter overnight and then, in a few days, it will get better and fly away.'

'Or die or be eaten by a fox,' I said.

The woman was beginning to tire of my pessimism and, perhaps, concerned that she had sought help from a psychopath

'I'll get that box', she said and got back into her big silver car. She thanked me and drove off. I noticed that hanging from her rear-view mirror she had a white cardboard dove. I recognised it as an air freshener given to customers of a local car wash staffed by asylum seekers from Afghanistan. It is rumoured that the staff are bonded slaves but as they charge £5 for a full wash and wax, no one cares. They charge more for a full valet but they're the cheapest around. Most cars in the village feature the same white dove, fragrantly bestowing its in-car serenity upon the stressed-out driver.

After the woman drove off, I went over to the heavy stone and picked it up. It was sufficiently heavy for the task. I walked over to the pigeon. But, by this time, it had secured itself deep under the hedge. There was not a clear drop from above onto its head.  I tried to hook the pigeon out from under the hedge with my foot to administer the coup de grace but I couldn't reach it. I placed the heavy stone back where I had found it and, crouching down by the hedge, I wished the pigeon a speedy death. Its eye was obscured by its inner eyelid but, otherwise, it looked calm.

Two days later, I ran past the spot where the pigeon had settled down to die. I looked under the hedge again but it wasn't there. A few yards further along, however, I noticed that someone had stuffed a large cardboard box into the hedge. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was very clean and empty.

The Pacifist's Guide To The War on Cancer: A review

I hate cancer. It killed my dad and my mum. It is the reason why every couple of years I have to go off to hospital to be medically buggered by a man with a large hose pipe. I tell you this not to win your sympathy or your admiration, I tell you because, like millions and millions of people across the globe, my life has been affected by cancer.  Having cancer, or (in my case) being on a cancer-prevention screening programme, doesn't make me or anyone else special or virtuous. In fact, if you look at cancer statistics, it makes us quite normal.  The same point can be made about mental illness. Cancer and depression are so common that they are normal. They no longer hold any taboo.  My siblings and I compete over the number of polyps dug out of our lower bowels.  I have held forth at middle class dinner parties on the wonders of Rohypnol and the laxative power of Moviprep.  So, for good or evil, cancer, unlike our personal incomes, is not a topic that is off-limit.  Nor, in my opinion, does cancer bestow on those who suffer from it an aura of saintliness.  Byrony Kimmings, you are right on one point in your awful new show, 'cunts' do get cancer, as well as depression and every other known medical condition.  And I doubt whether it makes them any less 'cunty' or any more saintly.

This insight is the only redeeming moment in a very long and indulgent evening.  For me, the 'creatives' behind the all-singing, all-dancing cancer musical didn't really know what to say about cancer. Early on in the creative process they had spoken to cancer patients, but, like most ordinary punters who get cancer, their thoughts were not that insightful into the condition. Only the over-bearing mother stereotype expressed an opinion that added anything to the evening when she questioned whether Bryony Kimmings had a brain. Of course the director has a brain but, unfortunately, in my opinion, it wasn't fully engaged in the creation of this show.

The first Act is pure 1980s 'big issue' youth theatre, complete with simple-minded music, pointlessly energetic choreography and banal lyrics (excepting the reference to cunts).  Who knew that hospitals are places where you are required to wait around a lot and where medical staff speak in jargon?  Who would have guessed that social media is a platform for hypocrisy?  And who knew that tumours, if untreated, grow? (Many thanks to the designer for giving expression to this last point in giant inflatable tumours that invade the stage throughout the show).

If the first Act was bad (which it was), the second Act was truly appalling as we 'moved towards the real' in the words of Kimmings' voice over. (Yes, Kimmings appears in the show, right from the get go as a 'voice off'.)  This movement towards 'the real' began with the main character, spotlit on the stage for an absolute age, doing nothing while the sound of what I took to be a motorway pile-up played in the background.  And that, my friends, is what passes today for ground-breaking theatre these days. More deep insights followed.  Hospitals at night are eerie places apparently.  Mothers want to protect their children. Shocker!

Eventually and predictably, the show broke down, the music stopped (Thanks be to God!) and the actors began lip-synching to the actual words of the cancer patients whom they had been portraying. You see, we were moving towards the real in a very hippyish, therapeutic way.  The disembodied voice of Kimmings encouraged the actors to drop all artifice  and be real about their own encounters with cancer.  So, as one might expect, we got references to 'Grandad Bill' and 'Aunty Maureen'.  Then the audience were encouraged to join in. As before we had a random list of names.  I have little doubt that behind each name there lies a real personal tragedy.  But, in our post-Diana Princess of our Hearts world, there was, for me, a sense of my fellow audience members wallowing in this collective narcissistic grief. Personally, I wanted to puncture this 'grief-fest' by shouting out the name of my daughter's hamster who had lost her fight against cancer only days before. (Yes, people, hamsters get cancer too.) Even greater was the urge to proclaim loudly the death from their brush with cancer of the actors' careers, but I managed to restrain myself. Like all church services (good and bad) the evening ended with communal singing and we all congratulated ourselves on being 'real' and being survivors.  Standing ovations followed but it was hard to tell whether the audience were applauding the performers or themselves.

I have seen work by Complicite many times before and have been impressed by its inventiveness and originality.  Recently, I really liked Simon Mc Burney's one man show, 'The Encounter' and I spotted a couple of things from it that Kimmings had borrowed in her show.  I was therefore really disappointed by The Pacificist's Guide to the War on Cancer. A mash up of 80s 'big issue' youth theatre and a New Age church service, it offered me no new insights into cancer.  It simply wasn't dark enough, funny enough or clever enough.  But, here's the thing, the kids, generation Y, the safe-spacers, the snowflakes, all have taken to Twitter to say how much they truly loved it.  'Look how cool I am!  I went to see a musical about cancer! Get me!' It seems the 'expose' of social media, like all of the other messages in the show, went unnoticed. A truly irreverent, darkly comic show about cancer needs to be written.  Unfortunately, 'A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer' is nowhere near being it, despite what Twitter or Facebook might tell you.