Notes to Future Self

Book excerpt: Judy's my mom. It's an understatement to say she's a bit of a hippy. I mean who else but a New Ager calls their baby 'Philosophy Rainbow'? I try to go by 'Sophie'. Sophie and Calliope have never been to school. Their mum ran away from home when she was seventeen to join the New Age movement and the girls were raised in a series of ashrams, communes and impromptu raves. When Sophie gets ill, they return to Birmingham - a strange new world where meditation and tree-hugging are replaced with maths homework and TV and the grandmother they have never met. And it's against this bewildering new backdrop - the normality she's always longed for - that Sophie must come to terms with her mortality. Lucy Caldwell's Notes to Future Self opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in February 2011.