Hannah Regel

 

Do Nothing, Do Absolutely Nothing

 

We used to open bowling alleys and kiss usherettes and I had that kind of surly image, you know? I had some advice once, I got a lot of advice. Actually, the only reason I started acting in the fashion that I do is because I was in car crash with my ex wife, simply rolled the thing over and squashed it under a lamp post. I appeared the next day with my arm covered in blood and somebody grabbed it and said Are You Alright Captain Clegg and I said Yes I’m Hurt, or something like that, probably over the top, and Peter came over to me and said Oliver what you must remember is that when you’re hurt you must always make an understatement of it, don’t say Yes I’m Hurt say Yes I’m Alright and so I’ve kept like that ever since. He taught me a great deal like Do Nothing, Do Absolutely Nothing and he did nothing, my dear boy. He went to Browns Hotel because he’d been kicked out of all the others, and got some sandwiches and what have you, and then he realised he’d forgotten where he was working so he got a police car, he said to police car Will You Please Take Me To Where I am Working? They said Mr. Welles we don’t know where you’re working and he said You Must Find Out so they had all the traffic wardens at it, anyway, in the end he got out of the police car and he walked round the corner and he found the place and he got in the lift and he got stuck six floors up, its twelve stories, and he got stuck and we were waiting and he came out eventually and he said, three hours late, he said Sorry Michael. And that’s what its about, understatement.

 

 


 

Eviction Notice

 

A woman is for querying, pursuit and servitude, cosmetic scorn.
Remorselessly it is imagined.
We come to some conclusions here where the manacled heart breaks,
above small beers and stray curls (battered little flies) like money begets money
and inexpressivity: allowances for card carrying blondes: a house!
Worthy sources distinguished through insecure environments
which is no new news against depth; those who in the race for acclaim occasionally
dent the peace-loving sense of how I loathe to lose myself in the fullness of creation.

 

 


Hannah Regel is an artist and writer based in London. She has performed and/or exhibited at the Tate St. Ives, the ICA London, Nottingham Contemporary, Spike Island and the David Roberts Art Foundation. Hannah was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2013 and shortlisted for the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Award in 2018. Her first chapbook of poems, When I Was Alive (Montez Press) was published in 2017. She is also co-editor of the feminist journal SALT


Continue to Helena Fornells on Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland >>

<< Go back to Kyle Dargan’s ‘King for a Day’ & ‘I Know You from the Screen’

Return to Issue 6