Résumé
Alistair Fruish began working at ten years old and during gainful employment he has accidentally made bertholite gas (used as a weapon in the first world war). He has delivered lectures to nurses and healthcare professionals about psychoactive substances, predicting the problems with new substances in prisons, a decade before they occurred. He hyped records for bands, got creative with hundreds of prisoners (in well over thirty prisons) as a writer-in-residence. He as also worked as a writer-in-residence based on a street in an SRB area. He has worked in parks taking money for bowling greens, assisted children with reading difficulties, taught beginners to use computers, promoted gigs, and walked early morning hospital wards discreetly purveying the twin demons of tobacco and tabloids. He has created comic-books with soldiers and children, helped hundreds of people to make films – and he has kept many gentlemen-of-the-road in tea.
His first job, before he was even a teenager, involved regularly delivering beer to a crippled veteran journalist at her tiny flat on a council estate. Inside it smelt of naphthalene and fried bacon. She had once been involved in accepting the surrender of a dozen U-boats in the North Atlantic and she was the first female crime reporter in Fleet Street. She brought him his very first thesaurus. Roget’s of course.
While at work he has also played tennis with an escapologist, edited several different publications and spent sometime with a man who had been forced to live on raw potatoes. He has analysed the semiotics of a newspaper’s coverage, researched the details surrounding an international murder, produced audio plays and he did the graphic design for several books of poetry.
He has been the founding member of three arts organisations.
He also attempted (and failed) to raise half a million pounds to create a modern Olympic Torch — this would have involved firing a giant laser beam encoded therapeutically with humanity’s pain (inspired by the work of Professor J Pennybaker) towards a super-massive black hole.
He has broken boxes, bottles and bones.
He has moved a lot of furniture about.
He has appeared in a few dramas.
He has had short fictions published in a number of issues of philosophy magazine.
There is a limited edition of a book of his early short stories, Songs of Insolence and Expedience, with a cover made entirely out of sandpaper.
As part of The Anderson Project he made a soundtrack for a film that has been screened around the world, and an album, Ringsome on the Aquaface.
He has helped to make art his Government won’t let you see.
Some people climb big lumps of rock to high altitudes to see if they can, as he is dyslexic his bonkers high-wire challenge was to be a writer – and even at one point he managed to be an English teacher.
He has written reviews. He as written funding bids. He has written a series of books for Operation Black Vote. He has written about art. Many of the socially-engaged arts projects he has organised and collaborated on have won awards for the participants.
He has recently had discussions with a feature film producer about the possibility of making of his novel – Kiss My ASBO – into a flick.
Just for pure cash he has ridden unicycles and cooked huge amounts of food for film crews. Though not simultaneously.
He is open to interesting offers of further employment.