AlBarclay

These hot nights it is hard to motivate, but having been in a rehearsal room all day playing an oppressive man it felt like the right thing to do to tell my agent I could grab her an Edinburgh Festival programme from The Cockpit. As a fringe venue they get a bucket of them.

She’s in Chiswick so I got on a Lime and only realised halfway there that I was in a war with my new phone’s battery. I needed the map to get to the house. I needed battery to end my ride. I had to switch off my phone and guess most of the way and then when it came to end it, my phone died while sending the instruction. Thankfully it must have hit the system as the bike locked. A second later would have cost me a lot of money. Damn we rely too much on our phones.

Esta and I went for a walk and a pair of non alcoholic beverages in her local, and a long needed chew of the fat while a friendly lady behind the bar charged me up. She’s a bloody marvellous agent to me, Esta. I’m so happy to be an actor with no complaints. Loads of people I know bitch about their representation. The industry can be a total fucker but we keep coming back and the longer we can avoid trying to blame people the better. She’s fun and fab and knows what she’s selling.

Now she has an Edinburgh programme and I got to spend time with her – a double win.

And Mighty Spacebeard that programme is HUGE. Face after face. Logo after logo. How the fuck does it work for ANYONE? But yeah… I remember people it DID work for. I mention two of them to Esta, a boy and a girl. “They’re the only reason people still take things there,” she tells me.

It’s kinda tempting even at my age to build something mad and take it there, to be another face in that book, to create something out of hope and chutzpah and sticky back plastic and then watch as maybe you hit something, maybe you just get by, maybe you are desperately flyering in the last week hoping you might just get some of it back with a rush at the end. It’s one of my many stupid ideas bubbling away down there. There are so many. But it’s such an unbelievably roll of the dice. To do it well I would have to pull every fucking favour I have, and to pull those favours I would have to deeply believe in the thing I was making. Anything shy of that would be a crash.

Bedtime soon in this heat though. Tomorrow I’m part of a company where someone else is doing all that horrid production work. I just need to be sure what I’m saying and to able to listen and respond. Bread and butter.

I’ve put nice new sheets on. Gonna see what sleep looks like in this heat. Early alarm. I want to hit tomorrow running.

We tell stories to work out who we are. And we don’t fundamentally change. A good tale can help us understand ourselves and others, ourselves in the context of others, ourselves in the context of the world.

Early tales are full of Gods and Monsters, before we all knew that we’re both.

I love the old tales, the ones that have somehow survived, the ones where civilisations are making sense of their scars.

The Odyssey. The second great preserved epic of the Homeric bards, and perhaps it was blind Homer with his stick that first caused this immense story to be written down. It was probably told over many nights, varying in the telling with the needs of the audience and the news of the day. It got big enough and copied enough to survive the great library burn where we lost who knows what.

A few hundred years after the greatest known human cataclysm of the ancient world, this story of a homecoming began to bubble up into general familiarity. A great coastal city to the east, likely in Turkey. Ilium. Troy. A Greece dominated by these huge dangerous Atrides brothers, the sons of Atreus, their name taken by Frank Herbert into another epic. Agamemnon the king among many small states in a scattered Greece, later murdered in bed by his wife. Menelaus, married to Helen, charming and deadly. Two brothers willing to destroy a whole civilisation over a lost love. A war about a woman? A competition between jealous goddesses played out among men? An almighty mess of an ancient siege told and retold and romanticised.

Ten years on a beach, a trick, one night of atrocity. The fields sewn with salt, the women and men of Troy enslaved or killed. Troy utterly deleted. Marlowe’s topless towers of Ilium lost forever.

The scar of “what did we do to Troy?” That’s what the Homeric bards were examining in The Odyssey through this tale of a difficult homecoming. It’s a whole society knowing their prosperity was built on a huge act of violence far away and long ago.

The story covers a great deal. Hospitality is a huge theme in it. How we treat strangers comes up again and again and Nolan’s film leans into this, and spells out the ancient code – strangers might be Gods, treat them well. From Lastrygonian giants eating two out of three crews with no hesitation, to unwelcome suitors emptying Penelope’s cellars of wine. Playing the cyclops in our Factory Odyssey I could always find a clear justification for my violence. They ate my cheese without permission, these nasty little spiky men. And they’re after my sheep. They came to my island on their little boat and now they want my things. It’s an ancient reminder that sometimes we are the native and sometimes we are the visitor. This is sewn into the fabric of the tale.

There’s a lot about taking responsibility for our actions. War. Leadership. Coming of age. The monster action is largely in books 9 to 12 of 24, starting with the blinding of the one eyed monster Polyphemus. Remember that the storyteller is thought to have been blind, maybe even that he WAS blinded for poetry. The blinding of the cyclops and the bragging about it, that’s a hard hard lesson Odysseus learns in the poem that the film still teaches him but elsewhere. “Nobody has blinded me!” “Ha ha you idiot, my name isn’t really Nobody, it’s Odysseus!” *cue angry Poseidon*

Nolan treats this story with his usual incredible mind. He invents sequences to connect characters – a temple raid for a father and son, an expanded role for Argus the dog, an expansion (and topical blinding) for the swineherd Eumaeus and contraction for Laertes, Odysseus father, mentioned but omitted. He shoots it on film, for IMAX, because he is a champion for our industry. His movie is a telling for our times and it’ll age well. Good god I’d love to work with that man. My first movie was on film. I approach them all like that. Come ready, don’t fuck with the take, there are too many other people involved.

As with all big stories properly told, there are moral quandaries. Nolan cuts the hanging of the maids. It’s a difficult thing to forgive which is why I always made sure we looked at it when we improvised it. This story isn’t happy dancing ponies, and Odysseus is written as a deeply flawed man – a man of many turns. It is unsettling that in the calm after the slaughter he immediately oversees a second slaughter of servants. I thought Nolan was building to it making Melantho so unpleasant, but he has Penelope shut her in the slaughter room instead. Kinder. I didn’t miss the hanging.

No good story tells us how we are supposed to behave, it just tells us how someone else behaved. It’s noticeable how noisy the modern equivalent of the monsters are being about things that make no effect on anything. The casting of two minor characters has raised so much online howling from the usual silly nasty scared people.

But these stories teach us who we are just as they teach us who other people are. I’ve watched people I know magnifying themselves about these small things and I’ve sadly understood a little better why I haven’t been seeking their company. Skewed perspective. The cyclops has one eye. No perspective.

—

This is my writing about the story, and the film which has reminded me of the story. Both are important, the ancient and the modern retelling. Tales must be told anew as things in society shift.

As I said at the start these stories can teach us more about ourselves. How we react to them, what we take away, what we hate, what we love… There’s enough in this one that we can find a million things to love or hate depending on our inner life, our twists and turns, our polutropos. I loved how Nolan showed us the wine dark sea, the cost of sacrifice… I loved the way we learnt with Odysseus. I didn’t miss Nausicãa and the Phaecians. I didn’t miss much of what he cut, and kinda see why he cut it and made the changes he did. It all felt complete in execution. My bum was tired.

I miss improvising it with The Factory. This was a great way to go to the cinema. Do it.

I woke up this morning when I realised that the satnav had taken me to Rotherhithe. Luton van had to be returned by 8am, no overnight key drop and its in Upminster. It hadn’t occurred to me that the satnav was gonna try and route me through that fucking tunnel. You can’t tell Google maps or Waze that you’re in a van yet, which is an oversight.

I was having a lovely dream about traffic and momentum when I was startled into very wakeful problem solving. Thankfully I know my town now, so I found my way to Tower Bridge. In the end I only lost a few minutes.

Early Saturday morning bus to Upminster station after returning that van. Times like this I really wish I had my own Luton.

I left my Makita in the van so I’ll be carrying that back. Got my kindle with me. About to sit on the District Line for a week or two until I get to Sloane Square. Upminster. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. I’m in a Café Nero on the high street getting my caffeine fix before the incredible journey.

—

Made it all the way back, mostly courtesy of my Kindle. I so rarely get on the tube these days, now there’s Lime and Just Park. But today I jostled elbows all the way to Sloane Square. A territorial neighbour also with bare arms. There’s a strange intimacy in that war for armspace.

—

Siesta with the cats and then up to the lockup to grab the car boot equipment and once more a mission to the seaside. Lou and I are catching a day of car boot and Odyssey before I go into performance week for Luton Hoo and Awaken, this wonderful and intense Meisner related theatre that found me.

Lou is cooking a risotto as I write. It’s windy here so she wants to ground us with stodge. I’m looking forward to a snatched weekend here. It’s gonna be two very different busy weeks.

Still a lot to process. I’m building a team for a big job. There’s gonna be a lot more than just the basic stuff that goes on in my head. I’m freelance and employing a lot of freelance people.

Today John and I went down and made sense of all the shit left in Canterbury. It was a lot. There’s the costume stuff which I think of in a different part of my head. I hoped that I might have a place for that today even temporarily but my friend is on holiday. I’m scared I can’t afford what they might want on an ongoing basis, but maybe for a month… Maybe. I’ll need a few months to make sense of any business I want to establish with the stuff I’ve got. I still think there’s something in it, but my focus is everywhere.

So I brought everything but the costume up to London. Buckets and buckets full of pewter tankards and gas lamps and stationery and hand grenades and guns and puppets and alembics.

I’ve left two huge great big thrones and a Cyberman desk with the costume. Hoping the local auction house will have it. The only Doctor Who auction I’ve ever seen was in Newcastle. Maybe that’s the best place for the desk… I don’t want to pay to store it anymore, like with Christine’s crap.

I’ll likely have to pay the lads next week to move the costumes and stuff and make room down that way. I’ll be switching my head back next week into Meisner and performance. Actually I’ll have to give you all a link for tickets. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing for a week – gainful acting. Playing a broken man who breaks things and doing it the Meisner way.

I’m close to flood on this so I’m gonna just go to sleep and see how it looks in the morning…

X

All this stuff belongs to Christine. She used to live below me. We got on, we were good neighbours. Sometimes when she was sick I would bring her food. We shared plates, company, wine. It was very Chelsea. One night I brought Siwan over and they bonded.

Christine decided to stop paying her rent at some point and there were all sorts of noises. The flat has been empty ever since she was evicted so I can’t help but think that the new deal is worse than the old deal. But she was evicted. Bailiffs got involved. And all this stuff ended up on the street. I had just got home. I moved it in multiple shifts in my car to Camden. Then I drove it to Canterbury.

I thought she would have got it back by now. I’ve asked her about it a few times and heard nothing. So I called her. I need space in Canterbury for *things unknown*

“I can’t store your stuff in Canterbury anymore. My only two options are to throw it away or pay to store your things with my own money. What do you reckon? Can you add an option?” *Talking talking talking* “ok but that doesn’t change my options. I have been trying to warn you about this. I can’t afford to store it anymore. But I don’t want to throw it away. Can you help me, considering it’s your stuff?” “Drive it to France?” “That’ll need a van or two trips and my time isn’t cheap and nor is fuel. I’m happy to do it for mates rates but I’m not doing it if I’m paying to do it so I’ll need money in advance.” *Talking talking talking*

Ugh

So now I’m storing it in London again. Brought it up tonight. i don’t want it but it seems wrong to chuck it. But I don’t think she’s ever gonna come up with a solution so that leaves me and if I do another van trip to Europe. I’ve done a few. If anyone needs anything brought over from France, particularly the vicinity of Biarritz, you’ll get a cheaper deal from me than anyone else for a van load as I can double bubble it.

There’s been a great deal of moving things around today. Not much disposal, although a bit went to the scrap guys in Whitstable. It’s an ongoing thing.

More tomorrow and I’m knackered. Still, a good day today.

I wrote here a few days ago that I used to do commercials all the time but haven’t had a whiff of one for ages.

Esta just rang. “It’s a good thing I’m in the office, darling.” It’s half six. Kharmel has called me in for a first round commercial casting.

I wrote her a card a while ago when I was up in Stratford and feeling employable. I thanked her honestly and expressed my happiness that she was credited in a well known movie she’d cast. Casting Directors don’t get as much recognition as they deserve. They populate the industry, and bring the variation and the colour.

There was a period where the only meetings I was getting were hers, and then – though it often went south – she helped me at least feel like I was pointing myself in the right direction. I know damn well I’m an asset now, I know my job, but there are many more rapids we have to negotiate to survive in this business. She helped. And right now, when the biggest problem I’ve got is cashflow, as if by magic a shot at a commercial again. Yes please. Thank you. Yum.

—

Today was van all day with a brief meeting in the middle about a Shakespeare entertainment thing.

Tomorrow and the next day more van. I’ll be in Canterbury mostly moving my own stuff around to make room for more. Somehow before lunch I’ll have to record a self tape. And I’m happy to do so as I’ve wanted one with money attached. This year I’ve been reasonably discreet about the details but something delightful blew up in my face and left me in a very weird headspace. I really want to get down to nuts and bolts and put myself back together properly. This will help. And I’m thrilled that K is calling me in again. These are the people who can help, the casting directors. Without them at your shoulder it is very easy to fall away completely. You have to get in the room to stand a chance.

And so we push on. Today was about emptying one space to make room for more. I reckon I’ll take Christine’s stuff up up Camden. She is being totally helpless. “I can’t store it anymore. Either you tell me where to put it, or I have to either throw it away or pay my own money to store your things.” I offered to take it in for a few months when she was evicted and it was on the street. A few months is now years and she can’t pay me. I don’t like the version of me that throws it. She’s relying on me being nice. But there’s nice and there’s stupid… I know she will never make a call on it. So can I store it without it costing me? For now, perhaps, but in space I might otherwise use.

Ach.

Early bed tomorrow so I can be shiny on tape. Logistics.

Back in London and I wish I was still in Brighton with Lou. I think that was a Staycation. We barely moved but we did a lot of lovely things.

Yesterday after breakfast we went to Chanctonbury.

It’s strong up there in that grove of trees and footfall is attractively low because you have to go up a steep path to get there. Also this week some of the schools are in so there weren’t the desperate parents carting up their howling progeny in the desperate hope they will exhaust themselves screaming.

I’ve caught the sun. I’m a vessel for the sun. I have two very different skin palates and I prefer this one even though it’s the one where the eejits start saying things like “You’re not from round here are you?” I’ve had that all my life because … Well because idiots abound. The petri dish is full of them right now, encouraging each other with their utter nonsense.

Back in London now, and trying to think about logistics. I’m employing some friends again to do a difficult thing but I’m looking forward to it.

This morning though was about avoiding thinking about it for as long as possible.

I still hit the adrenaline. Lou has got decorators in her block. This morning they painted the block door shut. I found it when I went for coffee. Didn’t have the strength to open it from the inside.

I went back up to Lou’s and climbed down many flights of precarious fire escape ladder. At the bottom there is a four foot pile of new rubbish from the builders that nobody knew about. I walked across it and then hopped the wall. Sent some photos to Lou, as that’ll be an absolute bitch to clear down the line. I’d do it for £700 right now but that’ll double or more if it rains. Horrid lazy contractors. And I’m not getting involved, just looking at the job.

Bedtime.

Lou’s birthday! We wandered up to Starfish and Coffee on the far side of Queen’s Park. She made the cushion she sat on. “It’s in good nick that cushion, ” she told me. “Mind you the fabric was top quality. It probably had a 500000 on the Martindale rub count.”

Ok. Great. A new thing to me. To many of us. Today’s blog is coming to you courtesy of mister Martindale.

To test the durability of fabrics you rub in a continuous figure of eight with a certain amount of abrasion and a certain amount of force. How much? Who knows? The internet is not forthcoming on this at all.

Probably around the same time as Mister Kirkaldy was bending girders to breaking point in Southwark, someone in England was diligently circling fabrics with a custom made sandpaper thing and counting. And his name appears to have been Martindale. But even Wikipedia isn’t telling me much about him. AI provides his initials as JG, but AI is often drunk. Also there’s some dilution because there’s a modern electrics company called Martindale founded in Cleveland Ohio 1913.

—

Right I’ve dug deeper. Seems he wasn’t industrial revolution. 1952 it appears, at the Wool Industries Research Association up in Leeds, a machine was made named after him. Very possibly BY him. He was doing it in the war though it seems. By 1952 he was a doctor. Still not clear what his names were. James George? Testing the cloth at the edges of gas masks (?) was his route into making sure your bum doesn’t go through the seat on the tube. Or soldier wool elsewhere? Socks so they don’t get such wet feet? What was he testing that now he has a test named after him?

“The testing process requires a Martindale machine. The tester pulls the test fabric taut across a series of plates on the lower side of the machine and places discs of worsted wool or wire mesh on the upper plates. The machine rubs the upper plates against the lower plates in a Lissajous curve. The tester inspects the fabric constantly for signs of wear. If there is a visible change in appearance or two yarns break, the test is complete.”

He made it across the pond like The Beatles, but the Americans have their own rival test too. This is just as obscure in genesis and named Wyzenbeek – like they absolutely had to give it the most American sounding name they could muster. He was more direct, mister W. Just a back and forth rub for Wyzenbeek. American directness. None of these goldarned corners.

Friction eventually wears things out. That’s the thing we know. It can be direct and repetitive like Wyzenbeek or it can be curly like Martindale. It’s amazing what people measure. But there we go.

We had a glorious day in the sun today. Up hill and down dale. I’m exhausted.

Out of the flat and down to the beach, but Brighton is crowded this weekend. Fatboy Slim is playing just down the road from here tonight and the Londoners are down in force. Lou was backstage when he played hundreds and hundreds of thousands in the nineties so she’s professionally over it. “It costs more money to go stand on a beach and watch Fatboy Slim than it does to go to Glyndebourne,” she comments as I’m writing. Because that’s what we did today after a spot of beachy languishing. We went to the opera again darling.

There’s no paddling pool full of ice and beers at Glyndebourne. But it isn’t chaos there either. I’ve been so many times in the last few years. “Are you a fan of the opera then?” asked her friend Simon, this morning, when we met briefly in Café Rust. That was my coffee solution as everywhere else decent had a weekend queue. “No, not particularly to be honest,” I replied. “But I’m learning”.

Ariadne auf Naxos is fucking weird.

“How are they gonna make a whole opera about that?”

I had a Theseus ladybird book as a kid. I loved it. Great illustrations. Clear telling. And I always thought it was a bit weird. There’s Theseus, and he’s stuck in the labyrinth and the daughter of the king basically saves his life cos she fancies him.  She gives him string. And a sword. He can track routes in the labyrinth using the string, and he can use the sword for poking into the bad bad maneating bull person thing that lives at the centre. So she runs away with victorious Theseus. Then next page they stop at an island and she goes to wash and Theseus fucks off with his boat and leaves her there on Naxos mostly undressed and sad. “How could Theseus leave that poor mostly undressed attractive young lady? If I were Theseus I’d be making sure that one stays happy.” But he forgets her. Heads off home, forgets to change the sails so his dad chucks himself off a cliff. “Is Theseus a bit of a space case?” “Yes, Lou. I think he is a bit of a space case”. It works out fine for Ariadne. Bacchus finds her and likes it. She ends up with her crown as the Corona Borealis.

For Richard Straus I reckon he wrote a bit of good opera about a sad lady on a desert island falling in love with Bacchus. Then realised he didn’t have enough for a full opera so bulked it up with a frame about two competing entertainments in one night and then hammered in a bit about Circe cos everyone likes Circe. Although I expected pigs when she came up. I was disappointed.

It was fun. It was opening night. They relaxed the rules a few years ago saying that all the men have to go in penguin costume so I wore a natty yellow waistcoat that belonged to a friend’s papa and one of Lou’s blockprints. Lou was in a lovely dress. We looked glam. We ate picnic, got sun, and had culture. All round a great day. If you asked me to sing a tune from it I wouldn’t be able to. But it’s not a musical. And the singers were brilliant, giving their all on a really awkward set.

A terrific day. Culture! I think I must be up to double figures with Glyndebourne…

Up in the morning and out before coffee. Only enough milk for one day I figured I’d get mine on the ashphalt. Misty forced me to stroke her a little bit by standing on the socks I was packing and yelling at me. But that was momentary before I hit the road. No lenses. Stopped at a Shell garage for an expensive vanilla latte. Sunglasses on and Radio 4 blithering on about pirates while I’m slowly waking up at 70 mph. Another coffee at a garage close to Brighton and I decide to put my lenses in at last. I wear them too long. My eyes are still fighting them. I should get some lensed glasses. But it’s usually better to be able to read the signs when you’re driving.

Late morning and I’m by the seaside. There’s a tarot day on in a church just down the road. We drive over and stump up a few quid each and wander around looking at nice art. Lots of very open wide eyed people who have opinions about star-seeds. I bought a witchy calendar by an oily lady. Took a fair number of business cards. Pleasant interactions with good people. I’m always at home to that lot, I can be one of them when I can be bothered to dig into all that stuff. You have to be very open which they all were. Sometimes you unexpectedly get things stuck in you when you do that. Brighton isn’t exempt from that, there are silly little boys playing with nasty things as well in that world. Most of the ones who weren’t shining were on their phones looking a bit hungover by their “Dark Magic tarot deck” – (I turned that one upside down when they weren’t looking).

Sated with the woowoo, we grabbed pub lunch in a really old manor house in Hove – Hangleton Manor. Pretty basic fayre but a beautiful garden staffed by enthusiastic and clueless Saturday staff at the start of their summer holidays.

A burger. Chips. Heavy on a summer’s day so we drove to Pyecombe and walked up the hill to a hill fort that’s usually pretty quiet. It didn’t disappoint although they’ve started quarrying one of the hills in the view since we were there before. Just one lady and three men with things that they probably call bikes but which have a battery on them and tyres like a tractor.

We lay in the sun awhile. Then walked down the hill again. A good day of no real pressure to do but just a chance to be, but in a variety of different contexts. Evening brought the third of the Nolan Batman movies that are on Netflix at the moment along with an amazing amount of unwelcome adverts for Oral B Toothpaste that make me wonder why the hell I haven’t had an advert recently, I used to be on timer for them all the time, I need the money. Would prefer to work with Nolan though to be honest. I’ll have to go catch The Odyssey. It was such a seminal piece of theatre for me, improvising that story every night with The Factory and Creation back in 2013. Nice to have connected with both those companies in the week the film launched.