AlBarclay

Up and out onto the TUBE. Going to The Globe and its in the congestion charge zone so no driving even though it’s a Sunday. Emma and Callum have booked a rehearsal room at Globe Ed and we all went there to top and tail screamed entrances and exits which is the closest we are ever gonna get to a rehearsal for the cue-scripted Macbeth we will be doing at Chalke Festival later this month. Banquo has the good grace to get murdered nice and early which was helpful as I needed to run off at 2pm. In my absence they’ve created a lovely little slaughter dance and like any other dance routine I am gonna have to internalise it so eventually I can get through it without the narration: “and back and grab and barge and draw and ‘fuck you slash’ and back the other way and he’s got me and ow my hand and block and ow and eyes and down and eyes and Neck and spin and dead.” And JAZZ HANDS.

It’s a nice bunch of people killing me. I won’t see some of them again until we do it. I still haven’t met my son Fleance or my son Young Seward as they couldn’t get off work in time.

Once I was good and dead I tubed it back to Sloane Square and drove Bergie up to The Cockpit, where I met a writer who used to be a newscaster and three actors. Wole Sarah and (Grace character name). And just a couple of hours later the four of us did a very unusual piece of writing in front of a live audience.

It’s always a joy to see the actybits land especially when you haven’t got a clue who your wife and daughter actually are in real life. We found a chemistry and discovered energy and rhythm. The writer Sarah is brilliant even if I did call her Sue in the Q&A. This one was really last minute. I replaced an old friend and I’m happy to have done so. Connects me back to the old friend as well.

And now I’m home and I just realised that the evening thing I thought I was doing tomorrow is actually on the 8th July so I am gonna have only one thing to focus on tomorrow (plus lines) which is an absolute wonder right now as I’m feeling a tiny bit flooded tonight in a good way.

Reading through my musings on Camino from 2018 yesterday revealed something uncomfortable. In one of my posts I envisaged some nightmare world where somehow people had managed to demonise kindness to justify going after kind people. It was a thought experiment, a joke. Less than a decade later, it exists.

The narrative goes that white liberals are holding the doors open to the evil brown soldiers who exist in order to replace everyone white. That by being in any way accepting of other cultures – primarily those where the average skin tone is a few shades darker – we are destroying the fragile culture of whiteness and are thus actively enemies of the state of whiteness. I had someone sneer at my “Choose Love” T-Shirt the other day. “Choose Love” has become a wrongheaded political statement to a growing wave of extremely fragile failures in this country who have been taught to outsource responsibility for their fuck-ups. Easier to get drunk and shout at a hotel than acknowledge that maybe you should have paid a bit more attention to life’s hard lessons.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. Blame the stars… Or nowadays blame the “other”.

You fucked up. That’s on you. The best you can do is learn and develop so you don’t fuck up again. But it’s not the fault of whoever you are blaming. It’s your fault. Grow from it.

Sure I’m not gonna start telling victims of violent crimes and so forth that they brought it on themselves. But every catastrophe in our life can be a learning experience if we can zoom out on it. We frame all that stuff for ourselves. If we just start blaming other people for all the things that aren’t working in our life, we have no way of growing, in fact we are likely to atrophy. “How could I have done that better?” is a much healthier and more expansive approach than “How dare they do that to me?”

This bubbling rage in America and now over here cos we copy… It really doesn’t feel healthy anymore, if it ever was. But it is getting too close to the normal. I’m sure people like me started feeling like this in the 1930’s in Germany, and the clever ones got the fuck out before the bubble got too big. It’s already really toxic online on social media but more and more now you get people smashing all your windows because they’ve been told to be angry because some idiot has done something awful and the idiot wasn’t white. But where do we go? Iceland? New Zealand?

What a fucking ridiculous wanker that Sikh boy was, and to use his kirpan too? Sikhs are so well integrated, generally so peaceful… He’s really done some damage to his community and that’s a huge shame. Plus the cop was an idiot.

Sure the bulk of the ogres don’t have enough thought to differentiate a Sikh from a Muslim or an anything really, but still it’s an excuse to go throw bins at cops again, destroy people’s cars and piss on things to mayk are country grate agen.

I went to Dishoom for lunch with Lou in King’s Cross. It was super crowded with people enjoying the result of generations of cultural overlap. Nobody threw a bin at us. But maybe before long there’ll be people firebombing these places cos someone says on the internet that they use child blood in the Tikka to get that red colour, or anything really.

I associate the idea of intelligence with critical thinking and the ability to clinically empathise, even if you aren’t able to feel it. I grew up with a brother loosely on the spectrum and watched him learn that stuff.

This ripoff Nero in the White House, he’s cunning but he has none of the things that are valuable in human intelligence. There’s precious left of anything in him frankly, he’s just a noisy shell for himself. But his existence is empowering the worst people in the world. And I can’t wait for the pendulum to swing, but I think we have a few more years of this yet and I don’t think it’s gonna be nice.

A peaceful day by the sea. Taking the down while I can – I’ve been a little flooded with new things, which is as I like it to be.

I’m dreaming of another long walk. I spent far too long today looking at various options. I can’t afford the time for Shikoku, coupled with the expense of going to Japan. There would have to be a perfect alignment for that, like some filming in South Korea. So I’m looking at Europe again. Principally the old Camino just cos I know there’s infrastructure and people clambering over themselves to get you to sleep in their albergue.

So I did something unfamiliar and I went over old blogs. September 2018 it was, when I did the trad Camino. Feels more recent somehow. I extended my route beforehand and ended up walking for about a month and a half. I remember now the tired feet, but I also definitely dealt with a load of dead weight and blocks in my life. There’s more to come out though and the first one was for my mum and grief. I’m wondering if I will have time for a Camino Norté, or a Portugues. Or even a Primitivo. I think the Norte is the shortest – I could bang it out in a month, get a bit more toned, and tanned on one side of my body like a truck driver as I’ll be walking south the whole time down the coast. And get into my body properly again.

Chances are I’m too swept up in the delusion of momentum though, and also there’s more to leave behind than last time. Lou. Cats. More good dayjobbery. My structures and relationships are better than they were in 2018 thankfully. That’s the point.

It has been a delight to stop here with little Tessy by the seaside. I needed it. Today and tomorrow will be my weekend and then things are gonna get busy again. I’ll need to clean up one of my history lectures tomorrow as I’m gonna have to deliver that at The old Globey on Monday and I haven’t done it for a year or so. But it’s only twenty minutes and most of it is in my head anyway.

I’m perfectly fine to dayjob when I’m not acting. I’m perfectly fine to talk about it. I know damn well that some people outside the industry don’t get it and stigmatise the idea of it, but that’s backwards thinking. The only people left in the industry would be the phenomenally successful and people who are considerably more privileged than me, and I’m uncomfortably close to little lord fucking Fauntleroy with my riverside Chelsea flat.

Today it was a school doing what used to be called Dragon’s Day but has been customised. An Enterprise Workshop for year 7. They invent something and pitch it, make a jingle, all that. This was a tech heavy school. They all designed and built things on their iPads. Some of what they built was good.

But for me it felt really auspicious. I walked into my classroom first thing in the morning, getting ready for a day job day, just after an audition for a part I really hope for, and the first thing I set eyes on was a poster with my name on it.

I’ve got that poster in my kitchen. I persuaded everyone to sign it cos it’s a credit I’m proud of and a show I was really happy to be in. And it was and still is a really happy company. The Othello WhatsApp group is still a pleasant place and not too spammy. We don’t have anyone who is doing the usual WhatsApp shit like spamming petitions or constantly sending memes. We share news and occasional banter and I have never needed to mute it. Most of my WhatsApp groups I might as well not be in anymore. I like the Othello one.

So… I sent that photo to the group. And I felt held all day running a workshop alongside a reminder that yes by jiminy I’m an actor that does acting, and this is just one of the many side hustles I’ve managed to pull together. Cos I’m a resourceful and enterprising human being dagnabbit.

At the end of the day I signed it with a green sharpie. I think though that it was a whiteboard pen so it’ll rub off almost immediately. Just like so much of what I do even my signature was written on the wind. Ah the ephemeral. I didn’t stick around to check. I wrote a little note for the teacher as she wasn’t in school today. And drove to Brighton. Thank you Birmingham for a happy alignment moment. Hopefully it is the universe telling me that one of these lovely jobs is gonna land. Or all of them.

This is cheapest room in Birmingham that you don’t have to share with anyone. It’s one of those houses where they’ve turned every upstairs room into a locked bedroom, and the only bathroom is downstairs through the kitchen, which ain’t ideal with my bladder but I’ve brought pajamas and I’m up early either way.

A lovely businesslike audition first, at Spotlight. First audition where I’ve worn shoes for ages. I’ve sent so many barefoot tapes. I’ve even done a few tapes in my pants and a smart jacket and tie. Comfort is key. What I liked about this one is that I had done the work, shot it, they did a redirect on the first and last short scenes and let me do the long one straight through just once. None of the second guessing of a self tape. What’s in the can is in the can and it’s clear I’ve done the work so now it’s just about how tall I am or the colour of my eyes or what have you.

Spotlight have moved from their office in Leicester Place. It must have taken them ages to get all the hoarded actor gold out of the basement. Now they have a very similar setup in Covent Garden. It felt both familiar and unfamiliar. I liked the team in my audition room. I’m already under NDA so you’re getting nowt. A spot of filming would be nice too thankyouplease universe. I’m still wobbling a little after the lovely one that died on me. I’ll always have the callsheets… HA ack yuk.

Complete sobriety is a surprising help in navigating the emotional rapids. It turns out if you push stuff away it just gets biggerer. If you look at it long enough you see the shape of it and after a while you know its name.

So yeah. Now I’m in Brum. More specifically I’m in Bromford. Just went for Balti in a place that was full of locals, many in traditional dress. The confused people in Southampton would have been climbing the walls in that place. Awful to see how many people are motivated by sheer idiocy propagated by obvious villains. It was a yummy balti and cheap for what I got. If I lived here I’d have got a doggie bag.

I’ll go to sleep early here in my strange little room. Blowing £40 of my fee for tomorrow so I don’t have to bang it up in the car from London at dawn. After petrol it’ll still be worth the day and I can go see Lou afterwards instead of squabbling back into London.

I need every penny I can eat right now to keep me in Baltis and petrol so I’m happy for tomorrow. Bergie is moaning about something. It’s electronic though and not crucial – it’s the Stop/Start thing, which I hate anyway as it makes you stall if you ride the clutch, which I do all the time. But it means he’ll have his engine light on for the rest of his life though I reckon.

I’m gonna switch mine off for the night. Zzz

Remember the days when we looked out the window to know what the weather was like before we left the house?

Dressed in smart chinos and a golf shirt, I put on a pink v neck sweater just in case the air con was freezing again. I didn’t look out the window.

I reserved a Lime Bike out front for half an hour – they let you do that when you have the monthly pass.

I had a coffee, grabbed my bits and walked out into the middle of a rainstorm. Everyone else had umbrellas. Idiot.

I jumped on the Lime. I was only going to Victoria. By the time I got there I was wet through. The producer saw me walking the bike to the parking area swearing to myself. Lime GPS is rubbish so it often thinks it’s in a restricted area. I’ll put up with that shit when I’m not drenched.

I got into the theatre. Thankfully had a change of trousers. Put on my pastel pink Uniqlo which usually only get used as festival trousers but are very good for playing a man my age trying to be cool and failing.

Last minute cuts. And then we were basically into it. Enough people to call it an audience. And off we went.

It went well from our point of view. I’m well cast in it. We all are. I get to do my comedy which is a good place for me. I’ve enjoyed this process and I’ve enjoyed working with these people. Feedback and pub after, and it was very hard for me not to drink but I pulled it off. Helps that I’ve got an audition tomorrow. I left the pub to bright sunlight and decided to get a Lime Scooter home which was a horrible mistake. Just as I was approaching home the sky turned to storm and then it turned out I had to go to Sloane Square to leave the scooter. On the way there the rain came and then I had to get a bike back home from the scooter parking area. By the time I was home again I was a drowned rat again and I have learnt never ever to get a Lime Scooter as they are extremely restricted about where they can be left. Which again is fine if its sunny, but not like that, a full on tropical rainstorm that could have been avoided if I’d only chosen a bike in the first place.

Looking at lines. Can’t face digging out clothes tonight. I’m gonna hit the hay and solve all that in the morning.

Semi staging this R&D today. We are sharing tomorrow (Tuesday 2nd June 2026) in the studio downstairs at The Other Palace at 2pm. I’ve definitely seen something down there, but what? And when? I will never remember.

Today was intensive. There’s been a rewrite and we basically only had today and a flash tomorrow morning to work out how we are going to present this piece to whoever cometh.

I really hope that there’s a further life for this project, for the simple reason that I like the people involved. Katia is fun and gets me. Guy similar… I haven’t seen Guy since what I think must have been my thirty first birthday and Tassos and I got swept into a big long night in Dalston that had no end and no beginning but the bottom of glass after glass and the loud sound of voices and bright lights in the dark and how did I get home or where did I sleep? Back then there was always so much going on, the shared houses, the parties. I’d wake in an unfamiliar room full of empty glasses on a sofa, I’d let myself out onto unknown streets with no mobile phone to map me home, just the local bus stop always there to offer a clue, and my hangover as motive.

Those two are writer and director, with myself and three other actors across two generations. It’s about love and ambition and money and life. It’s about the things we wanted against the things we have. It’s about the way we pretend.

It’s an unusual piece to come from the pen of Katia, whose last piece was political. This is a human comedy. She has written my character in a voice I know. There’s a healthy slice of my brother Rupert, a chunk of John Cleese and a few squeezes of Hugh Grant mixed up with all the Al Barclay. The others are distinct as well, and it feels like a good professional company of clever dedicated practitioners honouring a smart piece of text. And that is knackering because in a room like that you absolutely have to show up.

I’m trying to learn my lines for this lovely audition on Wednesday around this work. I tried for a Friday slot knowing I’d be flooded but no dice. So I’m just gonna be flooded right now and that’s ok cos it’s what I wanted.

I’m supposed to be inviting friends and family to the R&D at 2pm at The Other Palace, so there’s a home crowd and so we can examine it and know if it works for people that aren’t us. If you fit that brief just warn me by text so I can add your name to the list, or you might be turned away. I’ll have time to check my phone and would love some friendly faces.

A hot night in London and Boo is so thrilled to see me she won’t leave me alone. I just had the most comprehensive bath I’ve had for weeks and she was hanging out watching. I must be about a stone lighter now. I’ve been trying to embed lines and thoughts from all over the place while she rolls on me. The next few days need to be carefully partitioned in order to make sure I can keep myself in peaceful equilibrium. I’m happy I’m not drinking as I’m gonna be needing to get up earlier than I’m used to just to make sure there are enough hours in the day to do all the things.

Tonight though it is just about hitting the hay. I woke up in Brighton, brushed the cat forever, got on the train to more cats. A lot of my spare time was spent feeding things into Claude to the extent that it has a website all coded now. It won’t be perfect or complete, nothing ever is, and it will be very text heavy at the mo, but over time once it is live I can start to bulk it up and make it look sexy and try and make a calling card that in some way matches the mildly disobedient and deeply chaotic lifeform that I sometimes think of myself as inhabiting.

My injured foot has responded to the bath by peeling skin, but it doesn’t really hurt so I reckon it is just part of the healing process. The medic at Soul Revolution did a fine job with cleaning the thing. So prompt and so efficient. Who would have thought a festival was a good place to be injured.

I am feeling absolutely flooded at the moment. Can barely think from moment to moment. Not enough room in my head for it all and I keep saying yes to more. I’m still working on the basis that if it is physically possible to do the thing I’ll do the thing whatever the thing might be. There are some potential spanners in the works with filming stuff, but frankly I don’t think it’ll come in, the one that is asking for my heart and soul and my first born in exchange for a possible single day of filming. I’m on pencil for it but I reckon every actor that auditioned is on pencil for it. People do that all too often. It’s not ethical but I’ve learned not to put my life on hold. I’ll react when they give me an offer. Up until that moment it’s just noise.

I’ve put a load of bets on the world cup. I’ve put one outsider bet on for every group. It’ll keep me interested in the tournament but I’ll have to be careful. My hope is that most of them will clear the group stage, at which point I’ll cash them out but for a few. I often do this for the world cup as a way of ensuring that I have some sort of skin in the game, because we are all going to be bombarded by it no matter what. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I say.

Lots of zooming around again. I’ve been taking the train to Brighton which is easy in theory but in practice it is an absolute minefield. My rationale was that I could learn lines in the nice peaceful carriages. The reality is that one in three trains gets cancelled and the rest are delayed cos this is Southern Rail. So every train is filled to the brim.

Panda today and a few lovely conversations despite a bit of a muck up with the billing of it all. The people who came were brilliant, which makes all the difference. I’ll sit around all day if there’s just one person who comes in like Rachel came in with her son Nico today. Another thing we did was get a load of good quality footage. Tommo is in town. Over the years he’s filmed me so much. He’s got me as a robot on the streets, a superhero also on the streets, a ringmaster with two giraffes, Mister Kirkaldy… Probably loads more, I lose track. Now he’s got the panda, thanks to Camellia who was happy to be an audience member who signs a release. I guess one day I should try and dig up the footage and feed it into the website my overenthusiastic cyber buddy Claude is apparently helping me build.

Post Panda I drove home. DPD have a habit of leaving things on the doorstep. Brian had some packages. The guy left my laptop outside my door when I was home once. I reckon it’s the same guy and I want to wring his neck. I took all the packages up – some had been opened but they didn’t want the contents so they left them. Plants, cat litter and window gauze.

I watered everything including Misty and Boo, topped up their food, and got a Lime to Victoria. Those cats are much better at self managing than this little fluffpot here. And it is hot tonight. I’ve brushed her as comprehensively as I can to try and get dead weight off her and now we are both settling in for a sweltering night by the seaside. One more train tomorrow. I still have lots of lines to learn…

In between clients today, Mister Panda tried to get better at the internet.

I’m using this Claude. The first thing to observe is that, like every AI I’ve encountered, it blows a load of smoke up your arse. I’m using it to do the HTML for a website. I’ve owned a domain for years and want to finally put it to use to host a website and perhaps my blog. It’ll take at least a year to migrate fully, but doing so will get me out from under the £96 a year fee for wordpress pro, which is actually quite gate-keepered. You can’t have plugins for a start. They’re trying to push people to the Business plan which is £25 a year which is basically insanity for a small scale blog like this. I have my ads switched off. My annual payment comes up in a week. So… I’m gonna bite back my disgust for this coming AI wave, and work with it to vibe code a website, and see whether or not what we arrive at is a pile of horseshit.

It keeps trying to offer to write copy for me, and sometimes it just writes stuff anyway, and it’s universally godawful. I’m hoping it’s better at coding. That’s where I can get use out of it. I’ve seen that with decent prompting it can make copy that doesn’t read like a school assignment demo by the teacher. But largely I dislike the creative output.

I’ve been remembering my credits into Claude today and it has been fawning over me in response. Ooh that’s a great director, wow what an incredible theatre, gosh and golly you have such a huge great big swinging career. I can see how these incels get attached to it and start to think they have a relationship with it. If you’re lonely and badly socialised you could easily get attached to something that keeps blithering on about how great everything you say and do is. By the end of the day I was longing for it to say “Why are you sharing that pile of shit? I bet you were terrible in it.” But no, fawn fawn fawn. Excruciating.

But… it taught me how to work around the plug-in thing. And now I have embedded a ko-fi link that should be easy-ish for people to find. Just in case you’re running around with some spare beans. I have a dream that in a year’s time, somehow, I will no longer be paying to write this. So it’s either donations, loads of ads, or “Hey wow guys I just wiped some DonkeyCrem™ on my Elbow and it Feels Like Fun in Box! Buy it here! DonkeyCrem™ – the mucky delight for men and women. Dogs love it too!”

Here’s the ko-fi link so you can prevent that happening kids. Get on out there and donate donate donate! Page is still pretty basic. I actually made it four years ago and then got disillusioned when WP wouldn’t let me use plugins.

This blog is genuinely helpful for me, no question about it, money or no money. I put it out there and sometimes things come back. I got lovely messages from unexpected places when I was spiralling a few weeks ago. Thank you!

Now I’m back solid and sober (for now?) and I know that these paragraphs can help make me accountable to myself via you, oh constant reader, via the very act of scribbling.

—

There’s nobody booked for Panda tomorrow. Some sort of fuck up with the booking system. Anyone who fancies something a little odd between noon and six, if you’re near Latimer Road give me a text and I’ll send you a location and walk you in. Maybe you’ll be shopping in Westfield?

Bedtime now in Brighton. I’m commuting for the cat again. “Your life seems so rich and varied,” says Claude, or words to that effect. I guess Claude is just an entity of code. Once you’ve given it too much “context” it floods and has to reset. I wonder if that’s a safeguard against it eventually gaining something that looks like consciousness. I flooded it already today and it is my first day of hard use. It is an interesting tech. More to explore for sure.