AlBarclay

The doorbell rang at midnight. I was awake, heating up a late night ramen. It’s someone I haven’t seen for maybe 6 years. He announces himself by first name only but I suspect immediately he won’t be in a good way.

I was living alone last time he saw me, the dynamic is very different now. I have other people and cats to factor in. But he clearly needed a sleep. I let him in. Of course I did.

He’s skinny and very very twitchy. There’s a hospital tag still on him. I almost immediately sit him down and feed him most of my ramen. He’s monologuing but it isn’t making a lot of sense. “Do you need the sofa for a night?” “Oh God please.” “I’ve got flatmates now. They aren’t home but I should run it by them first.” I message them but they’re out. I am kinda partly hoping they’ll play bad cop here but they keep out of the decision making process entirely. So I make a call that he needs it tonight and put him to sleep on the sofa. Otherwise he’s gonna be on the street for a night – another night? He crashes like he hasn’t slept in weeks. He’s asleep before the light is out, like he’s just been switched off.

This place is a safe haven and always has been. I keep it that way and I like to be able to help people out. But… he’s really odd energetically. I don’t have a lot of experience with crystal meth but I have a feeling he’s tangled up with something along those lines. I don’t like the energy of it, whatever it is, at all. And it’s not fair on Brian and Maddy. They don’t know him either, and even though I know he’s harmless I don’t like him like this at all.

This morning was a Buddhist study group in my district. I’ve been avoiding going for weeks but I first met him at Rita’s in maybe 2016, chanting Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo. Getting him there will kill two birds with one stone, in that it’ll get him out of the flat before he settles in and will send him to compassionate people who know him as well as I do. I don’t feel great about the sensation that I’m fobbing him off, but for me it’s about the drugs. One time I had a blazing row with someone who was about to do heroin in my living room, and I kicked them out. Believe it or not, I do actually have boundaries. They’re just … in a different place from many.

Now I’m about to run around the flat with sage. Feels odd to be put out by it all – twenty years ago that was just a normal Friday. But… I’m twenty years older now, I’ve got nice cats, respectful flatmates and slightly better calibrated boundaries.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if I was some vacuous pig with 2 million followers on Instagram”, I sometimes think before I remember what that would also carry. But I wouldn’t have to audition for things! Likely wouldn’t have very many genuinely interesting opportunities but … I wouldn’t have to constantly worry about how the fuck I’m gonna pay for stuff cos people would just offer me jobs.

Even without the following, just being well known enough would be nice. Wouldn’t work with this particular job though. Neither of those states would help with this particular job. Cos this particular job is ART, kids.

Auditioning sucks. All that personal cost for a possibility.

I’m getting a bit long in the tooth these days so my filter is janky. “Is this meeting about chemistry or proof?” I asked immediately. “Both,” she replied. Sure I was fishing, because people are reserved in these situations and sometimes they’ve got another option who is big in one direction. I had two things I needed to bring really as far as I could feel it. My guy  – he is the worst version of me. They might have been needing to see that I could go there. But also my guy – he is the worst version of me. They might have been needing to know I was safe. My hack attempts to get a read on that were expertly derailed. I was told that the part looks like me in their head. That takes away my tasty comfortsnack if I don’t get it.

It’s a small part in some lovely theatre type stuff. But everyone already booked works with a certain technique and it isn’t one I lead with, even if I get it. Sure, we have a suitcase full of tools and we choose the tool based on the job. There’s a shared language here. Can I speak it? Yes.

…

I’ll just drive my car and find out later, that’s the extent of it. In the morning I drove Maddy to Ladywell, packed a load of costumes, took her off to East Croydon. She made her way to Brighton with the costumes. Choir of Man is gonna be on the Brighton fringe. I’ve moved a lot of instruments and costumes for that show over the last year or so. Happy to take Maddy where she needs to be to do that, the fucking tube strike makes it hard for everyone.

The black cab drivers can normally drive with the mix of generosity and attack that keeps a city flowing. Knowing how terrible most of the drivers are on the roads at the moment, they’ve all responded by turning into bullies. So the bus drivers are always bullies, now the cabbies are too, the Ubers mostly shouldn’t be on the road anyway even if it’s 4am in January. Which means all the other confident drivers are having to drive defensively and all the less confident drivers are freaking out and doing random shit. It’s a jungle out there, and bikes everywhere, undertaking, overtaking, they’d just jump over you if they could.

I’m home safe. Met a nice dog. All is well.

The roads are lethal in London today. Everyone who has a Mercedes in the garage has taken it out onto the streets for the first time in months. They’re braking suddenly for no reason, completely incapable of getting through lights into traffic, getting stuck behind loading vans, doing twelve point turns in the road, changing lanes quite suddenly without indicating. Then all the people with bicycles in the shed have wiped off the cobwebs and they are riding as slowly as possible in the middle of the only open roads left in town. The organised and the lucky have found Lime Bikes which they are using to bump all other traffic out the way like Olympic Curlers. Everyone else is walking, deliberately jumping in front of cars like Jonathon Ross but thankfully unarmed. One guy literally made me disengage clutch as it was right at bite moving from lights, out of nowhere, both hands on my bonnet. He might have said “I’m walking here”. He didn’t even realise how easy I could have engaged that and broken his legs. There was less than a second in it. I didn’t bother telling him even though my window was open. Idiot.

I wasn’t in a rush so I just… let it all happen around me. I was mostly laughing as others were honking. These people on the road, its as if all the pigeons suddenly learnt to use vehicles. Even if I had been in a rush I rarely if ever honk. One guy laid into me for not anticipating he would turn and I mildly told him “You didn’t indicate, mate”. “Yeah, but you’re still a wanker”. London innit. And the sun is out.

It’s horrible to work in a tunnel over summer, but fucking hell I’d happily push a button every few minutes and look at rats every day for £80k a year if I didn’t have better shit to do. Bastards just know they can hold the whole city to ransom so they do with astonishing regularity. I bet the guys at the top are absolute pigs of human beings as well. They probably wanted to make sure they could be at home on St George’s Day.

Bunch of tatty flags up all over Kent. I liked them today. Yay patriotism! Let’s all be British together! Engerlund.

The rhetoric is so confused right now. Reform just want to tell us everything is wrong but they’re copying America so much loads of them have started pretending to be Christians. How anyone can look at what’s been going on over there and think “we want that here” is beyond me.

But the weather is wonderful. Bright and warm, not too much wind. I have high hopes for this summer.

Christ though I was absolutely exhausted when I got home. Not the driving, the workshops. And I slept awfully last night. I love throwing energy at strangers, working to raise theirs, reflecting dark to light. But recently I’ve been eating a lot of dark. I need a moment to recharge myself.

This beautiful evening, I’m by the Medway river, near Rochester, Kent. There’s a little hospitality area near the road bridge and it has been absolutely polluted by big businesses. Concrete and thoughtlessness. I can never really understand why homogenisation sells, but I know it does. People feel safe, perhaps, in unchallenging surroundings.

I’ve been running a workshop today about the properties of gas. Tomorrow it’ll be a different one but one I’ve run before. There are volunteers from the company and today my volunteers were so robust it was wonderful. Both engineers, both young women. One of them is likely on the spectrum and absolutely loves her job. She would inspire ME to be an engineer, the way she talks about authenticity to yourself and why she loves her work. I am lucky to be working alongside her. The other is Slovenian and went to an army school. Her English is perfect with a touch of accent, and she also speaks brilliantly and inspiringly about what it is to work for this absolutely vast natural gas processing plant that is paying my bills. She’s baffled by the bad discipline in a very good school. Christ, I could take her into some of the places I’ve been to with the gangs etc

I’ve run workshops I don’t believe in before many times for very big clients. I’ve run bad workshops with enthusiasm for clients I clash with ethically. I have not yet drawn the line, I’m aware of it. I’m working for the man here within all my woolly ethical noises. Nobody has yet asked me to recruit young people to grow up to be journalists for the Daily Mail. “Have you considered propagating fear and division? Have I got a career for you!!” No. That would be a hard no.

I once turned down an audition for Wonga.com. Sometimes my ethics do get involved. But depressingly rarely. Tiny Tim needs his beefy yum yums.

This company and this workshop? I’m happy to punch my card. We need all sorts of solutions, we need big companies like this who know what it is they are working with and are trying to offset their carbon. I can’t speak for the motives at the very very top, but the people they employ care very deeply about the environmental impact of our hunger for electricity. They work with a contentious fuel, importing it. They know natural gas is a tricky optic. They are doing everything they can to offset. They are using their massive brains to try and do everything better. And they’re employing me for outreach.

“We could use our equipment to freeze CO² but there’s no market or use for liquid carbon dioxide. If there was to be someone who could find a beneficial use that somehow converted it to something harmless in the process…” Naiveté? Or progressive thinking? I like it though. You never know what might become possible.

Everything is driven by the market. Here we are in late stage capitalism.

Tidal snakes. They are too expensive to build. We don’t do things that would be good for us because nobody will foot the bill.

We’ve seen it time and again. Elon Musk could singlehandedly end world hunger. He has no intention of trying.

So the likes of me hang out by rivers and maybe one kid one time somewhere will turn out to be the next Elon and maybe my brush with her will help gently settle her on a different path where she gives a fuck about more than herself. Let’s hope. The future is yet to be written.

Or maybe I’ll just take the money and run eh eh? Eh?

I can’t. Sometimes I wish it was that simple for me.

Another lovely day in R&D. The thing with comedy is you have to go deep into your own tragic shit and take it seriously, which can actually be quite costly. If you manage, it can be fucking hilarious for everyone but you. Because the funniest thing is the absurdity of the human condition, and the best laughs are the ones of recognition. We are all spinning around on this thing surrounded by other people and we’ve made up so much stuff like Lego and Christianity and Air Fryers and Society and Currency and Comics and Narcotics and Languages. Most of us understand some of the things. Nobody can do the lot. People can be shit at Lego but great with Narcotics. People can be polyglots that can’t operate an air fryer. Together we make it all work as best we can and occasionally we kill thousands to distract from the horrible things we did and still want to do.

I’m sitting in a hotel room by the Medway near Rochester. There’s a cinema next door so tomorrow I’ll probably go and watch something but tonight I wanted to make sure I’ve downloaded all the PowerPoints I’m gonna need. R&D is over so its back to teaching workshops about power. Natural Gas right now. Contentious and beleaguered at the moment I’m sure. These guys aren’t fracking, they’re importing it. But we don’t talk about the fact it is running out or that it about to get really tricky with the latest war of distraction. Are the boats even still coming in? We will know soon enough.

It’s 9pm. I had spaghetti and immediately regretted it. Regretty spaghetti. My acid reflux has been bubbling all day. I should have noticed it when I was coughing in rehearsal. I ignored it. Now it is bad. I noticed it after the spaghetti, but on the weekend Stuart went and blew my mind by informing me that Omeprazole, which I’ve only ever had on prescription, is available over the counter. I’ve just had a little brown pill. I have a feeling it will mean I don’t wake up in the night. Which is good considering I have to get up at stupid o’clock tomorrow morning and go be mister hyperenergetic until I drop.

I’ve also had some liquid gaviscon. Right now my body is growling at me. If there was a bath I’d be lying in it, but I’m in a purple palace. Showers only. And the sheets are made of acid sandpaper.

Still I’m gonna wind down. Might go through the PowerPoint again. It’s another one I haven’t run yet, but I’m an old hand at this shit now so I know it’ll be golden.

Still, it’s 9pm. What else am I gonna do here in this industrial estate. I went for dinner at some American Diner knock off where they gave me that active spaghetti mix. There’s not much here but bingo and cinema.

I’ll be reet. I’ve got my kindle.

I’m back in R&D in daytime, just for a couple of days, examining a good script with a lovely bunch. Happy times, doing the thing with the people. It’s what I set out to do after all. Practicality has been known to interfere but the intention and drive have been consistent and unwavering. And I’m happy in that room, and adding value and occasionally sad that positioning and sheer dumb luck haven’t allowed so many more of these rooms over the decades. But here we are.

“Who the fuck is Madeline?” This was spoken in reference to one of the lines in the play we are examining. It caused Rachel who plays my wife to tell us all: “You have to listen to Lily Allen’s new album. It’s only about 45 minutes. You can listen on the way home.”

Well, I’ve been listening to great albums as often as possible. Van Morrison at the moment as I got stuck there a bit repeating Astral Weeks. So after work I drove to The Globe for work and listened to West End Girl.

Rachel gave us some context that drew me in. It’s a breakup album. She is pulling no punches. And it is a remarkable piece of art where she shares her truth and bleeds it with beauty, but absolutely says what she needs to say.

She’s from an acting family. Her mum produces films, her dad works across the industry. Her brother has played some very unfortunate men – the man who killed John Wick’s dog, and Theon Grayjoy for starters. She’s always had a clear voice and it seems clearer than ever right now. She takes us through the collapse of her latest marriage and its fallout, in a manner that is exposed and exposing, tender and abrasive. And she finds catharsis at the end. I see why Rachel encouraged us to go to it. Sure, it’s a cultural touchpoint right now, but it has enough to be a step into a deeper musical reputation for a woman who has always been a strong wordsmith and a force to be reckoned with. She pushed herself into the conversation with MySpace, which caused people to underestimate her – perhaps as she was essentially an early influencer and we all know how empty most people with that label are. She’s not fucking around though and clearly you shouldn’t fuck with her. (Or you should if you’re married to her.) And she’s smart and musical. Good actress too I’m told. Didn’t see her West End debut but I had friends involved in Ghost Stories and word gets around.

It’s catchy as well. I’ve got to be careful not to sing the words “pussy palace” in falsetto right now. She’s made a really good album.

She was at Glastonbury forever ago and she absolutely carried a set on a big stage with sheer fucking energy. Woke us all up from our comedown bouncing around in a dress with all her early hits.

I went and did a load of Shakespeare and then it came on in my car as I drove home and I listened to the first half again. They often say that pain helps with art. Wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t. But hey, it does so let’s all show our bits as best we can.

God love Lily Allen for sharing that stuff so raw. Fictionalised a little bit, sure. I suspect Madeline isn’t called Madeline and her voice notes are acted. I wonder what her ex makes of it. He doesn’t come over as a monster, just… lost in it all. I don’t like him any less, I don’t think that’s the intention here. This is art and truth through music, and catharsis and we are all desperately human and fighting through our own crap about sex and love and pain and life, every fucking day.

She’s been bold to do it. I wonder if there’s collateral for her legally as it is remarkably intimate. I hope not, as art like this is good for the world. And it doesn’t feel like she’s lying or exaggerating. More power to her, I say.

The way we value information has changed so much in my lifetime that it is very hard to parse it out. The internet seemed like it was gonna be a helpful tool for sharing things. It might become that in time but there are generations who grew up believing that if they’ve read something, it has weight. Back then people had to go to a lot of work and do a lot of thinking to come up with a book, and then it had to be decent to get it placed in such a way that you could find it. So we got conditioned to put value in the things we could find that were written down.

Now you’ve got people who have … read some articles online and they are honestly thinking they can go toe to toe with people who have been actual qualified scientists for decades. Delusions like flat earth and the Icke stuff have fed themselves and grown fat. Right now the fundamentalist Christians are going hard on the moon landing stuff because it looks like there’s gonna be another landing and they need to line up their bullshit early because they’ve decided that science disproves religion. I personally disagree with that anyway, but these people are way too obedient to start thinking cosmically. They just want to cling onto something.

And then this latest scourge of rational thinking is bubbling up all over the place and oh lord I detest it.

It is a misnomer to call it AI. Because it oversells what it can do. It is merely a vast aggregation tool, it can only regurgitate what it has eaten. But it can eat a lot, it has eaten a lot, and idiots like me are putting stuff up every day that it can eat as well.

It’s a restaurant where they serve leftovers and call them the Daily Specials.

There can be nothing new. No new thought. No creativity. It has a hard cap on innovation that can never be broken. It will atrophy us and make us smaller and smaller and smaller.

It is in the interests of the people who sell it for the capacity of this tool to be misrepresented up. To sell the idea it will break ground.

You can use it to labour save. Like a computer. Thoughtless donkey work might be speeded up, but forever beware of inaccuracy or hallucination.

The narrative being pushed is that if you don’t get behind it you will be left behind. And jobs are going because of that trust. But every human you cut and replace is going to make your output more and more bland.

On balance, is social media a good thing, or a bad thing? I’m asking those of you who were here before it was here. I think I know what I think about it. We were better without it. This will be the same. We aren’t evolving quickly enough to evolve with these fast communication things we have made. But they aren’t good enough for us to rely on like we do, like we learnt to do with books. Social media is totally manipulated now, it’s just a swamp. AI is just blowing smoke up your arse while regurgitating stuff that was crap when it was eaten.

This Walking Dead Game I’m playing has a spin-off series that revolves around a well known character in the TV series. It is written by humans but clearly the B team. The main series is brilliant and I care about all my decisions. That’s good writing. The spin-off I don’t give a fuck. It is generic, doing all the things that are supposed to make me care, but I don’t give two hoots about it and as a result my decisions have been pretty arbitrary and likely many more made up people are dead than need to be. And that’s just bad writing by humans. If an LLM had done it – and that is all these things are, all they can be – I would likely have not worked my way through it at all.

I can’t be bothered with all those slop articles every day everywhere that people are fobbing off as theirs. “It understands my voice!” No it doesn’t. You’re just lazy. And why so much of this ordinary stuff? “Here’s a rude sign someone put on my car,” “We put a gopro on a rabbit,” and it’s AI. It’s ridiculous.

Someone I respect sent me a load of dross to learn one time. I didn’t learn it cos it was basically just atrocious and lots of it. I went into the shoot saying: “Did you get hammered and write that script over the course of a long night?”. In my imagination they had been caning it, probably on substances. That was how much sense it made.

“No. It was chat GPT.”

“I’m glad I didn’t learn it. Let’s improv on the themes.”

Southsea again, at Dan’s. This is a semi regular board game weekend. At the core, Dan (our host), Fluffy John, Stuart and I. I’ve known Dan and John consistently since 1987. I do have friends that go back further but I rarely if ever see them. So it makes this precious.

Dan was an incredibly important part of my growing up. I still know and love his family, his bonkers mum who is so like mine, his dad who immediately understood my dad and made friends with him. His brilliant straightforward brother. His delightful quick witted sister. Dan was my best friend at school and after the family haemorrhage, he is one of the only people in my life that knew both dad and mum well enough to have opinions and stories about them. That counts.

John also went to school with me, and his mum looked after our budgerigar one time. We were consistent friends from day one to the end. He’s a very very solid man, with nothing dishonest about him. His wife Mayumi gave me some invaluable recommendations for my Kumano Kodo, including sending me to the best fish meal I will ever eat in a minshuku in Kii-Katsuura.

Stuart fits. He’s Brian’s age, and an engineer. I like spending time with practical geeky people like this. Can’t vanish up the arsehole of theatre every day. Life is big.

Next week is gonna be confusing in terms of focus. I can partition it, and I will. But I’m aware that this weekend is my time to zone out so that’s what I’m doing. I’m in excellent company for such a practice.

Jules is here too this time, his wife. This helps. We are all capable of getting overexcited and either getting too drunk or staying up too late over the course of enjoying each others company.

I’d best get back to it. So far we have played: Mountaineers (very tactile, game not so well thought through). Then Chronicles of Crime where we solved a noir Hollywood murder. You need an app. It played well. Then Tiger and Dragon, which John brought from Japan and it didn’t have English instructions but it played extremely well, we were in the garden in the sun. Then Brink. Extremely involved. Somehow I won massively. Largely because none of us knew how it was scored and I specialised. Then Pairs as a quick one and Deep Sea Adventure where you just sabotage each other.

We are setting up “That’s a question”…

A few times over the last few years I’ve driven through France. Both times, I thought to myself that I would take advantage of where I was and stop at a vineyard or two.

Last time, I stopped at Chateau Corbiac and at Chateau Coutet. At Corbiac she was like “would you like the tour” and I told her, no no I’m just here to buy some wine. I thought I was gonna come away with a couple of cases at least. I ended up with just one as it was really really pricey. I bought one case of six bottles of their 2015 Pecharmant. “I’ll have to stop at another cheaper place, seems I got one of the good ones,” I thought. Oh sweet sweet summer child.

My next attempt was at Coutet. “You can’t buy wine until you’ve had the tour”. Fuck it, I’ve got time, I’ll listen to someone blither on about wine for a while so I can get the vineyard pricing, I thought.

We got through the tour. I bought a case of the organic 2019 Grand Cru St Emilion. It was more expensive than the previous. I felt a bit disillusioned, I didn’t have the bulk I wanted, but I clearly had the value. “I will sit on these a few years and then flog them for a healthy profit,” I thought.

I dug into one of the cases, and left the other expensive one intact to resell. When I got back from America it had been opened and put neatly away on shelves. My initial reaction was a resigned frustration that a potential investment had been scuppered. Then I went online to see what sort of prices I could get for these bottles now, a few years after purchase.

Turns out, about the same for one, and less for the other.

I was driving through France, these places happened to be close to my route, I went in wanting to buy from source as an investment. Turns out that’s not how it works.

The assumption seems to be that if you are there at the vineyard then you are there because you are already gasping for that particular vineyard. They want to give you the tour and blither on about temperature and so forth so they can justify skinning you on the cost per bottle. Buying from the vineyard is the worst way for punters like me to get wine, it transpires. I stopped off in a supermarket as well on my travels, and found three bottles of Margaux on the top shelf that were priced at €24. I’ve still got them, and could get £150 each for them easy. Still got stuff to learn, it seems.

In a perverse way I’m quite grateful that the cases got opened and broken up. I might have ended up going to a few more vineyards before I finally decided to sell my first batch of “investment bottles” only to discover that they were no better than they were when I started in terms of value. I suppose it makes sense. That’s my optimism interfering with reality again. It happens all the time. But it usually keeps me pretty happy.

So I’ve brought one of each of the two down to Southsea for the weekend and my friends and I will get through them. I’m reframing it like this: a couple of years ago I treated my future self and my friends to twelve very lovely bottles of wine and paid for them in advance.

Some young fellow from Stoke on Trent helped me get forty quid a month off my mobile phone bill. I couldn’t quite believe it. I’d tried the Vodafone store on the King’s Road, knowing I have been overpaying for months, and they just did all they could to lock me in for ages at a punishing rate. Inevitably it was the “I’m thinking of leaving Vodafone” option that got me the best shot. It’ll make a lot of difference to me that forty quid. Good on that lad. He trained as an actor.

It takes a good person sometimes to break the customer out of overpayment once they are there. Loyal customers who haven’t switched provider for years are probably on charts in the boardroom with tags like “Blood Bank”. It used to be that loyalty was rewarded, but usually nowadays it’s tested to destruction in the name of profit. We all have to play the market now. I just don’t particularly want to switch provider as I know some friends of mine struggle with signal in my flat.

A reasonably quiet day today, winding back the spring. I saw an old friend for dinner. We went to Durbar in Notting Hill which is an old unlicensed Indian Restaurant, affordable and friendly. We ate very well for not much. I shouldn’t eat out really while my finances feel so unstable, but life is life and friends are friends. I’d sooner spend it on curry than give it to Vodafone for literally nothing different.

One thing I noticed is that “Device Care” was on my old contract. Did I have some sort of PPE phone insurance package that some unscrupulous pigfucker bundled on? Very likely. We all know that nobody can read all the terms and conditions we agree to. Some of them change every week or so and all of them are acres long. You’d have to be obsessive and bored to have read even a quarter of what you’ve agreed to. So unscrupulous businesses (aka businesses) can sneak in what they want to.

Some Cyclops in America tried to troll me on the old book of idiots for pointing out that an AI post was AI. It made me realise how lucky I am to have so much going on. I thought we were having a conversation and suddenly he came in with loads of very odd unpleasantly reactive stuff. It made me look him up and looking him up made me sad. I guess these lonely souls are the people the demagogues are appealing to – an illusion of strength, a hearkening back to some lost halcyon time that never actually existed.

Life is big and weird, and it’s great now too just as it was great then and will continue to be great without anyone making it great for you. You just have to look for the light and remember that you’re the only one that can truly frame your stuff.

Let’s all keep being big and weird and goofy when we can, and try not to be rude to strangers across the world just because we’re sad.