Thank You Universe

 Text © Liz Bentley 2006 

Soundscape © Stuart Bowditch 2008 

Performance: Joanna Swain, directed by Rebeccah Hannah

video by Dan Thurley and Nicola Field

recorded at 15Hz Studios, Peckham, by Adrian Newman

Play the video

Thank you Universe, for those beautiful hand-embroidered pictures that Auntie Brenda made last Christmas that I forgot to thank her for.

Thank you Universe, for our times of celebration: Christmas, New Year, Easter, Diwali; all those wonderful bank holidays when we get together with our families. Thank you for the happiness and great joy it brings to us all.

Thank you Universe, for the amazing gift of life, Jesus’s life, Jeremy Irons’s life - all life. Thank you to my mother and father for bringing me into this life.

Thank you for the wonderful education I had, without which I wouldn’t have been told recently how unique my ignorance is.

Thank you for the joy of love, sex and sexually transmitted diseases that gave my sister and me something in common.

Thank you for my boyfriend, Mark Sidnell, for not walking me home from the pub on the 29th of July 1981 so that Janet Bloomfield could beat me up in confidence, so I will never forget the date when Charles and Diana got married - which often comes up in pub quizzes.

Thank you, Auntie Brenda, for never taking me to France like you promised because I eventually went to Paris via the Channel Tunnel instead of a crappy old boat trip to Calais.

Thank you Princess Diana, for dying on the 31st of August 1997 and making my day trip to Paris so much more exciting and memorable and making me want to thank Auntie Brenda even more.

Thank you Janet Bloomfield, for apologising for beating me up because you got the wrong person and thank you to my mother for giving me her passive-aggressive genes, so I would forgive Janet Bloomfield but suppress my anger which then made my legs numb and my eyes blurred.

Thank you Dr Bari, for diagnosing these symptoms as Multiple Sclerosis, without which I would not be driving my brand new Motorbility Vauxhall Zafira 2.2 with air conditioning and power-steering, complete with the blue badge for parking, the Freedom Pass and exemption from the congestion charge.

Thank you Ronald MacDonald for providing me with soft white toilet paper for all the years I was unemployed and thank you Ronald MacDonald for putting locks on your toilet-roll holders, giving me the incentive to look for a job.

Thank you to my old flute teacher Mr Long (a short man who abused me at school), without him I would never have gone into therapy, psychoanalysed my Multiple Sclerosis symptoms away and found a career in therapy and thank you to all the other Mr Longs out there who keep me in employment.

And lastly, thank you Universe for the Rasta Father Christmasses that can occasionally be seen inside a whole peanut.  If you look really closely.