Nomadic

I suppose it's fair to say that I was never particularly drawn to the idea of a British foreign resident amateur dramatics society - Nomads, the North of Mallorca Amateur Dramatics Society. Until, that is, I ended up almost by accident with a small part in 2015. It had been an awfully long time since I had been on stage - school as Thomas Mendip in The Lady's Not For Burning and either of Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in the Tom Stoppard play (not being too sure who was who was part of the deal with the play).

For the following production, I rewrote The Sound of Music, then it was Oliver and this year Mary Poppins. The idea was to make them like pantos, although it was more a case of making them farces. And over these years they have acquired - and one can say this with all due modesty - something of a cult status, typically because of what can go wrong: the prompt, Lorraine, falling backwards through the curtains during The Sound of Nomads has been the high point of the cock-ups.

With this status have come the audiences. The Casa de Cultura in Alcudia was so full for the third and final performance of A Spoonful of Nomads last night that there were kids sitting on the floor in front of the seats. Even the Saturday matinee was two-thirds full; that has never happened before. And remarkably enough, there were quite a number of Spanish in the audience.

So, a success and one for a small part of British resident life. I guess it says something about this foreign community, although I'm not entirely sure what. For one previously reluctant participant, I'm not overly minded to contemplate a so-called expat existence. Like Brexit, I let others worry themselves about that.