Relentless

What's the distance on a computer keyboard between the "9" and the "0"? A finger width? A gnat's crotchet? About a centimetre?

I make it 13,512 miles and still measuring.

I make snap judgements sometimes. Like last Christmas, when I saw that my sister had bought me a DVD. Track record suggests it'll be some tv nostalgia, my heart sinks a little as I'm not feeling that nostalgic these days. Putting away childish things and all that. But how wrong I was. Hugely so. Because it was a DVD of a live Stomp show. And we all got engrossed, and energised. We're pretty much full-time domestic percussionists now: not just pots and pans, but waiting at train stations, in the woods. And I've unleashed a bit of Stomp at school too, which can make it tricky for them to keep still in assembly.

Anyway, back in March I emailed someone at the Stomp UK office to say:

Hi there

I hope you'll be able to help.

I live in Rugby, England, and my kids Miriam (5) and Theo (3) have been going crazy for Stomp since we got the Stomp Live dvd for Christmas (I know we're a bit behind the times, but we're slowly catching up...) We just got the Pulse dvd too, and they were glad to see a familiar face in Keith (who they have nicknamed "Dreadlocks")

Anyway, Miriam's drawn a picture for him, and I said I'd try to find the best place to post it to him.

(Keith's their main favourite performer. He looks like this:)

Anyway, they emailed back and said we should try...

Keith Middleton

Stomp New York

720 7th Avenue 12th Fl

New York, NY 10019

USA

But a couple of weeks later the letter came back, return to sender. So I googled the street address, and from my research I thought maybe the Zip Code was wrong. Tried again with a fresh envelope (this time with an Aslan stamp, 97p's worth of pure Narnian allegory in the top right corner, so it wasn't a tame stamp.) But on Wednesday this second effort plonked on our porch again, return to sender.

By this stage I'm wondering how much nouse the standard New York postman or postwoman has got. I mean, how big can the office blocks on 7th Avenue be? But there's me getting all nostalgic about English postmen in the 1970s who, working from a rain-soaked smudge of an elderly person's spider crawl could somehow work out how to deliver the nephew's birthday card in the middle of a teeming metropolis with a wink and a spring in his step.

A bit more research and I try a different approach - the stateside artiste representatives. They fire back an email pretty much straightaway (shouldn't they be glued to the NFL draft or Will and Kate's wedding highlights or something? I mean, it pinged back in two minutes, having been forwarded internally to some, err, interns.) And the address they give is:

Keith Middleton

Stomp New York

c/o Frankel Green Theatrical Management

729 7th Avenue 12th Fl

New York, NY 10019

USA

At first glance, looking pretty similar. But, check out the third digit of the building number, Sherlock. So it should have been 729 instead of 720. (Clutch head with palm.)

I hold the correspondence in my hand, kind of half hitch as if to launch them like some paper aeroplane. And in my mind I'm picturing how this drawing and letter, the curious atoms that compose them, have flown across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Twice. They've crossed the Atlantic more times than I have. And they're still no closer to Keith Middleton's percussive, stompy hands.

But, in a moment of pure personification, I recognise they're a relentless bunch of stationery. They refuse to give up the pursuit. They simply must fulfil their mission, by any means necessary. (And as their author, I guess I'm being pretty relentless too. But hey, this is for my kids!) For the first couple of return to senders we kept it quiet, but now Miriam and Theo know that it's not proving quite so straightforward, so we're modelling some perseverance and hope being the stuff we've not seen happen yet.

But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.[Romans 8:24-5]

Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. [James 1:4]

Only 3378 miles to go. Hopefully.



[p.s. I first posted this in the morning. And in the afternoon Theo and I wandered off for an explore while Miriam had some friends round, and we discovered the playing fields at Ashlawn High School were open, so we had a good old run around and Theo was so honest when we played a game he calls Monsters and Acrobetics Persons (sort of Hide and Seek) i.e. no peeking, that he headed off to the school car park and freaked himself out when he felt so alone, even though I was doing my signature distress call from behind a tree. And as we headed back, I noticed a bench with a perspex chart screwed to it. It had Ashlawn School as the centre, and directions and bearings zooming off to different cities. And whattayaknow, it turns out New York is 3378 miles away on a bearing of 286 degrees, a bearing that, when I followed it back towards the road, towards New York itself, seemed to pass straight through our house. God sets these things up, he truly does.]