Month: November 2017

Today has been about numbers. I’ve been taking some long overdue advice on how to do something I should’ve done decades ago. You’ll probably have noticed I think about the death of my parents reasonably frequently – (deliberate understatement.) It’s something that took me a while – arguably far too long – to properly understand and move forward from. I took a fair amount of advice today – from a relative stranger – on money. I wouldn’t have done so much even 2 years ago. At some point I stitched into my identity the fallacy that I’m bad at numbers. It’s not true, of course, it’s just been an excuse for paralysis and avoiding things that are hard to look at. I’ve been at war with myself about deserving, entitlement, agency, independence etc. Time to bury the hatchet.

So this morning I sat with a retired chartered accountant “I wasn’t struck off. I just stopped paying the registry. So there’s no funny business.” he assured me this morning, answering a concern that I hadn’t raised and that hadn’t occurred to me to raise.

He takes great pleasure in his work, in the same way I do. As I sat with him I began to understand a little more. I could see things swimming in his mind and clicking into place – he thought and spoke methodically, crabbing lists and boxes with his black pen as he went, never getting ahead of the present moment. His face sometimes lit up with the thrill of understanding. I know those feelings, even if they’re located in other areas for me. I left his presence feeling galvanised, with a residue of the joy he takes from understanding this stuff and a bloody good list of things to do.

There are people that like eating things I don’t. I often try to find out what it is about those things that pleases them so I can share that pleasure. Taste is just opinion. Today I started to see how the arrangement and rearrangement of numbers can be a pleasant challenge. Particularly if there’s a prospect of genuine concrete reward at the end of the line. It’s something my father understood very well. And it’s time I understood it too and decided that I’m good at it.

I left his house into a shining morning, and met a friend for lunch. She’s a talented musician and actor, and also does accounting for money when she’s not plying her trade. She’s brilliant at both acting and accounting. She’s living proof that it’s possible. We were hanging out, and it occured to me that here’s another person who I’ve gravitated towards recently who can look at a tax return form without a fit of the collywobbles and a bottle of gin.

I start rehearsal tomorrow, so spare time is falling away. But I’ve got a long to do list from this morning, and things I want to action quickly. And I think I’ve found out how unpicking my long-term financial pickle might, viewed in a certain light, be pleasurable – rather than the source of abject horror it has been for most of my adult life.

Contemplating all this, I finished watching Stranger Things, reveling in the eighties nostalgia – back then it was all so uncomplicated and everyone was alive despite the demogorgon, and I didn’t have to finally come to terms with the fact that, at the moment, I’m where the buck stops. And I have work to do.

Call it character work for Scrooge. I always find I notice aspects of my character that ellide with parts I’m playing bubbling to the front of my consciousness. No surprises that I’m trying to sort out my finances whilst gearing up to play Scrooge. Humbug.

It is very rare that Brian and I synchronise on our spare time. Both of us work unpredictably and as constantly as we possibly can. We are both feeding an obsession. If we won the lottery we’d both make theatre and we know it. That’s how far down the rabbit hole we’ve fallen. But it’s nice down here. It’s warm and everyone else is a rabbit.

Today we synchronised. We had a simultaneous spare day. We woke up in the morning and contemplated a day of unstructured time. It’s the last one of those we are likely to have at the same time until next year. It was tidy-time. We both knew it. We both did it. No point in having three hoovers if they don’t get used occasionally. (None of them are Hoover branded. I don’t care. They suck.)

When you live with someone else it’s hard to throw things away unless the person is there. Permissions and ownership are a big thing in a world where possessions equate to power.

I dislike throwing other people’s crap away. I’d sooner tell them their thing is broken and let them do it. I’ve watched as two people I love have fallen out irrevocably over one of them throwing away a few slices of pizza. Their actual reasons for disliking one another were deep seated, and rooted in lifestyle, attitude, belief structure and basic worldview. Of course they wouldn’t get on. They’re brilliant opposites. But the pizza was the thing they fastened on, consciously or unconsciously, to crack those eggs and start fighting.

Brian and I can eat each other’s pizza without incurring rage, because our worldviews collide. But when there’s a lot of pizza to throw away, we’d prefer to have consensus. He knows I eat moldy food if it’s free and I am confident it won’t kill me. I assume he might be similar. So it’s useful we were together at last. 

We filled a lot of bin bags. I fished out an unopened bottle of coconut water that was past its sell by date, and drank it as we worked. We jettisoned a lot. Half eaten jars of olives, instant decaf coffee, 75 toothbrushes, 6 year old couscous, Babylonian dental floss, green potato trees, hyperevolved talking garlic, hotel shampoo, conditioner that never gets used, anchovies that have sentient mold civilisations where humans are gods, open jars of curry paste and pesto. Dear regular reader, I even threw out a bottle of PALMER’S COCOA BUTTER BUY IT NOW NOW NOW. Yep. We were being draconian. Which reminds me. A month of blog adverts is complete. For what they call 16,923 “attempted impressions” I get the princely sum of $1.62. That’s in exchange for my readers and I getting spammed with mostly irrelevant adverts. Not worth it. Sorry I subjected you all to that experiment. It was worth a month to find out. I switched them off.

This evening I contemplated fire, steam and light. I went with friends old and new to a free thing involving some glorious creative fiery displays in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, right by where the bike is being fixed up. All about fire and steam, heat and light, energy. It was a delightful reclamation for me of that patch of grass. We got some ridiculous photos.

When our desires don’t match we can hurt ourselves and each other. I got hurt ages ago in these same Pleasure Gardens for the simple reason that I had assumed that someone wanted what I wanted. Nice to go back to fire. The heart of much human hurt is misalignment. Bad timing. If only we could synchronise when it serves us.

Brian and I synchronised today and it was ace. Now the flat is tidy in time for us both to lose our spare time and – figuratively -for me to vanish up Scrooge’s asshole. Tonight was a joy. I need to catch as many glorious light-shows as I can now, because December is going to take my evenings for humbug. Hurrah! It’s important for us to throw things away both figuratively and literally…

I held my best friend’s baby again. She’s only been in the open air a few weeks but her head must be twice the size of the little head I marveled at so recently. She is still mostly a syphon at the moment, overflowing with mother’s milk as she expands like a mushroom. Milk in until it bubbles over, noxious poo out, grow, repeat. Shouting. Sleep. More milk. Grow. Puking. Sleeping. Shouting. Milk. Growing.

For a moment she was quiet and fascinated, grey eyes questioning my glasses as I cradled her and she communicated in an ancient lost alien language that she probably still remembers from the other place. Who knows what she was trying to tell me. Secrets that are lost to humanity.

Whilst I held her, Minnie and Rhys both displayed a new behaviour. Knowing I had her safely they both started doing arbitrary things compulsively. Arranging things in drawers. Connecting with each other. Moving things around on shelves. Sighing long breaths out. Wiping surfaces. If I hadn’t done the washing up they’d have done it. For a brief moment they remembered that they were self-governing entities with their own desires and needs.

Meanwhile I happily burbled utter nonsense to the package in my arms, and she gurgled scientific formulae and the solution to interstellar travel back to me. “Little baby, you’re so small.” “No you idiot listen to me I’m going to forget this; you have to prepare a knife to cut into the inter-dimensional abyss by freezing it while coated in the following chemicals – are you writing this down?” “Aww she’s trying to talk like us.” “ No you idiot just … oh sod it I’ve shat myself again.”

How is it that, confronted by a helpless being that has no communication skills we so often communicate by singing nonsense? I do it to the cat. I’d probably do it to Trump if I met him. We do it to babies. Maybe we all secretly want to write a popular song and we instinctively test our material on captive audiences that don’t have the nuance to tell us we’re not Beyonce or even Edith Sitwell. But that was my night last night. Singing to a baby. Couldn’t have been better.

Being a mum must be terrifying. It’s a relief to me that one of the only people who expressed concern about this burgeoning motorbike situation is Minnie, and she’s too busy with the baby to worry too much. My mother would be doing her head in if she knew. My dad rolled his bike while I was pillion aged 10 and he was fucking around in the garden. Nothing was damaged but his free rein and the last shreds of her tolerance of motorbikes. She would not be pleased at the prospect of me riding.

I’ll have to be careful in her memory. I’d sooner remain attached to myself. I don’t want any of you having to come round and sing gobbledegook songs to me after I ride head first into a pole.

I bought a kick-ass helmet today though, which is a statement of intent. Now I just need to know how much it’ll cost to fix the bike up. I’ll likely scrap the car on the weekend if I can’t get it running…

Here’s my helmet, for want of any other photo. The cops use it. You can tell by the stupid visor. But it fits beautifully around my glasses.

Over 20 years ago I sat in a lecture theatre downstairs in the catchily named “Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences” at Reading University – (FoLSS) I was presiding over auditions for Cyrano de Bergerac. With the arrogance of youth I had already cast myself in the lead. I met a young man called James in that room and cast him as Christian. He later trained at The Drama Centre, and now lives in Sussex as a teacher. I’m Godfather to his son.

Today I was working in The Edith Morley building on the same campus, in room G27, facilitating a workshop for quantitative surveyors and construction managers. I’m not even going to bother explaining how the hell that happened. It just did.

I had been told “The Edith Morley was formerly the HumSS building.” Evidently someone realised that it was stupid calling it FoLSS when HumSS is just so much catchier. And then years later someone a little more imaginative said “Shall we name it after an early esteemed female academic?” All this rebranding was particularly confounding for me. I arrived on campus looking for a building I’d never heard of, and ended up finding out it’s a building I’d been to every day for years, and a room I knew. Good they named it for Edith Morley though – I had to Google her.

Upstairs in this newly rebranded humanities building is the theatre where I cut my teeth. Over almost three years as President of the drama society, we put on all the usual student fare. I was sometimes directing, sometimes acting, kicking things around. Learning the basics before training. It was a basic theatre – minimal lighting rig, tabs, a little apron, a trapdoor. There was potential though. We blocked everything to within an inch of its life because we thought that was the only way. Thrashing out zombie-classics. Ambitious sets – we did Noises Off with two levels, and doors, rotating. Challenging parts – I played Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons. Possibilities. So many of them, limited only by our depressingly limited knowledge of world drama.

One of our most avid audience members was Professor Wolfgang van Emden. A delightful man who would persuade all his undergraduates to come to the shows. He’d always moan that the theatre wasn’t as well equipped as it should be.

Arriving today I noticed that the theatre is now named after him. Another rebrand! In a field as embalmed as academia I suppose superficial changes help add to the sense of progress. I expect he’d given it a bequest in his will. Lucky students! Glorious Wolfgang, making possible the theatre we’d always dreamed of! Maybe a better rig, more room to store costumes. I vowed to have a little look after work before the cab home. I wanted to reconnect with that mawkish entitled kid that thought Stoppard was experimental theatre.

Having finished with the engineers, I bounced up the stairs, camera-phone in hand for nostalgia snaps only to find … a lecture theatre. They’ve ripped the whole thing out and made a modern lecture theatre! I can’t help but think that’s totally counter to Wolfgang’s wishes. But they’ve named it after him. It’s just another flavourless room for idiots like me to stumble into and blither our way through a PowerPoint in exchange for cold hard cash.

I sincerely hope it’s because they’ve built a proper dedicated theatre for kids to make overly worthy learning theatre-things happen in. If not I hope that the ghost of Wolfgang van Emden, scarved and wild haired, will make all the PowerPoints go crazy until they do.

Under a tarpaulin in a garden in Littleborough is an old Suzuki “Marauder” GZ 125. It’s a lowrider. Her name is Ramona. She is the first of her kind, chassis number 0000001. She’s not the happiest little bike, having been in a garden a long time. She needs some love. I need a starter bike. And I’ve been driving around the North of England in a fat great big Luton with a tail-lift.

It’s almost mandatory for men of my age to start thinking about motorbikes. If I’m not going to conform generally, I’ll choose my areas in which to do so. I reckon I can scream around town dressed like a tank and legitimately be able to refuse beer after work. “Not if I’m on the bike, mate. I value my life.” It’s a great excuse. I grew up in the Isle of Man. You see some horrendous bike crashes over there in season.

Robin – of the whisky collection – broke his spine in three places three years ago coming off his motorbike. He was told he’d never walk again. Miraculously recovered, he’s a motorbike instructor now, and he has a whole hell of a lot of perspective on the fragility of life, on human resilience, and on being safe on one of these big machines. Yesterday he talked to me about equipment. Today we drove around in circles at his workplace. He used to be just an instructor there, but now he runs the joint. In the late afternoon we went out on the roads. I managed not to fuck it up, so I got a certificate that means that I can break my spine in three places legally for two years, (so long as I have a helmet and L-Plates.) Hooray!

Earlier this morning, I’ve been in Littleborough trying to persuade Ramona to get in my van. She’s been reluctant, but she’ll be a good bike to learn on. Her back brake is totally seized. No movement in the wheel at all and it’s a barrel brake so I can’t even get oil on it without taking the thing off and apart, which is outside my limited knowledge. She’s heavy. This is a two man job, and one requiring knowledge. Thank God for Robin.

I go back to his work, and drive round with him for a while on a brand new Honda, getting used to not dying. I turn a lot of corners and do some maneuvers. At the end of it I still have the traditional number of limbs, there’s no blood on the front wheel, and I’m feeling marginally less incompetent, although still a little bit like a glass meteor.

Then I get back in the Luton. After a motorbike it’s strange to drive a massive truck. Glass meteor to Steel Asteroid. They say your consciousness expands or contracts to the size of the vehicle you’re driving. My consciousness today has been like an accordion – expanding and contracting regularly, (and constantly screaming.)

We get back to Littleborough, we manage to bounce Ramona onto the tail lift.

Nowshe’s back in London, locked up outside Metropolis Motorbikes. I’ll go in tomorrow for opening and see what it’ll be to get her up and running.

Now I’m washing the oil off myself and passing out. It’s late…

I saw the dawn this morning from my bedroom window. I’m not sure how I was awake and alert but I was, despite last night. The flat was flooded with merry people at about 8pm yesterday. I’d had advance warning, so had made sure there were clean plates and had cooked a lamb tagine. I totally failed to take into account that one of the party people was a vegan. Thankfully there was couscous with pomegranate and mint and I hadn’t put the chicken stock into it by the time I found out.

Brian and I blitzed up some garlic balsamic mushrooms and a load of other veg. I like cooking for people. I like hosting people, generally. That’s another thing I’ve picked up from my dad. He had a bar built into the downstairs hallway and stocked it. He used to have Christmas in August and friends would come from everywhere and party. Even as a kid I thought it was brilliant. He was using what he had, back then, before it all went south, to make people happy. He taught me how to be a host.

At his wake, I manned the bar while his friends got through what was left. I still dream back to that house all the time. Sometimes I’m outside, stuck looking up at my bedroom window. Sometimes I’m inside, and it’s vibrant. Sometimes I’m inside and it’s dead. I was there last night. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” I don’t like dreaming back to it.

I was never given closure. My brother Rupert told me it was being sold when I was in production week for Richard III at university, playing Richard. I told him it was impossible for me to get there, and all my stuff was there. He said it was the only window I had. I couldn’t believe him. It seemed too arbitrary. And it was an impossibility for me. The show was booked, I was the lead, no understudy. I told him the date I finished production. “They have to wait until then,” I said. He scoffed. “If it’s important to you, you’ll get there.” NO I FUCKING CAN’T!!!!

I had to rely on my brother Max to rescue what he knew I loved – all my hidden secret things that had meaning only for me, they all got thrown in a skip. 

Max and I are close, but not deep. Much of what he knew I loved went as well, as there just wasn’t room in the van and his stuff had to be prioritised – he was there. Basically, my childhood got binned before I binned it myself. It kicked off tricky hoarding tendencies which I’m now trying to curtail. I’m still angry about it, upset about it. I’d like to have had some more control over the wholesale destruction of my childhood sanctuary.

And yet the past is another country. If we are borne back ceaselessly into it, we end up atrophying. I can’t get stuff out of that skip. So I might as well just forget I ever had it and keep filling my flat with merry people and my life with warmth.

I’m off to have food with dear friends and it’s going to be great. So often I encounter people who are holding onto something from their past as an excuse not to venture forward. That shit with the house was something I carried for some time, now finally processed and understood. Just another thing I sacrificed for my acting. One of the first though. But we all do it, all the time. I hear it from my friends, encounter it in my behaviour as well as that of relative strangers. We make choices and we must stand by them. The past is … information that informs us. We have been forged by it, but it no longer burns us.

Every day is a dawn. All we are is who we are now. All we have is what we have now. If we had less or more before, if we were happier or sadder before – what can it matter? It’s information. We either move forward or we indulge. Keep moving folks. I’ll be running alongside you, and when you trip I’ll try to pick you up and hope you do the same for me.

I’m off to dinner. Have a great day NOW. He says, having monologued about the past for ages. But where would this blog be without contradicting myself?

Tristan and I have grown used to helping each other with self-taped auditions. Quid Pro Quo. We’ve done some strange things to camera over the years with each other, and today was no exception.

Knowing that I was going to be dancing in my pants in front of him in the afternoon, we thought it best to have a morning stroll first. We hit up Bishop’s Park in Putney. It’s a strip of land running up the side of the Thames from Putney Bridge. The winter sun hits it well. 

It’s a good place to soak up vitamin E while watching better men than I am sculling down the rotting Thames, biceps glinting as they thrust that little bit harder. I’ve been going there for years – I had a day job selling fine leather sofas just opposite, and this time of year was when they were likely to need me. I’d go there before work and snatch a moment of morning before sitting in a dark room full of leather for hours.

There’s a little market in the middle where fools like me can be duped into buying sausages and steaks and pots of expensive honey made out of sunlight by artisan hipster bees with beards. I’m a sucker for good honey. But there was work to be done.

We tore ourselves out of the park and headed back inside, rearranged the sofas and made a reasonable temporary home-studio lit by the sun.

Three years at drama school. Fifteen years honing my craft. It’s all been leading to this. Lip-syncing to a terrible love song in nothing but a pair of bright red pants. It’s being sent to Germany. I’m reliably informed that that sort of thing is funny in Germany.

The brief was acting 101. “Don’t play comedy – the situation is funny enough.” I’m surprised that these are still pretty much the only castings I get – commercials that are throwing a wide net. It’s a funny thing – I’m still as determined as I was when I left Guildhall, despite all these years of not having the opportunity to fuck up the audition. But that’s me and so many other practitioners. There’s something delightful about getting a friend to film you dancing in your pants and calling it work. And on that basis I’m working pretty often, which could be enough.

We got it all done for the 4pm deadline, and then I noticed the dates. Fuck. I’m already committed. Tristan and I spent bloody ages, I was prancing around in my pants, and I can’t even do the shoot dates. That footage can never be deleted. When I’m 64 and I’m playing the deadly serious part that somehow captures the public imagination, Tristan can just casually put a video of me dancing in my pants up on YouTube if I don’t invite him to the premier. I knew I shouldn’t have let him shoot it on his phone. I just, foolishly, trusted that the dates would work.

Driving home, my car died. Karma. It was only a matter of time. I managed to push it into a parking bay in my borough. It can sit there until I scrap it. Damn. Still, that’s a monthly expense that I no longer have to meet. My insurance is huge because I NEVER have a car for a whole year, so my no claims remains at 3 years despite 20 years driving. Pants!

At least I’ve got some honey.

Most actors have day jobs. Without them it can be hard to weather the gaps. I have found some great ones over time. My major criterion is that they should have nothing to do with my primary job. I don’t want to be surrounded by actors.

This week I’ve been invigilating exams for Imperial College.

I’ve been working with Brenda, Chris and Jacqui. It’s delightful to hit a break and not have to listen to some actor moaning about how they can’t get seen for whatever job they’re fixated on being seen for, and “why not this and why not that and why not the other and this person and that person and aaaaa”!? I know my job is hard, and arbitrary. That’s the rules. I don’t need to vanish down the arsehole of that unpleasantness while I’m not directly tackling it.

Brenda was a holiday rep, and then a trolley dolly. Now she’s retired. She’s entirely disciplined, as you’d have to be if you’re working for BA. She’s also liberal to her very core. She was doing this before any of us, and her positive energy helps make the gaps between exams pleasant. She’s an expert at passing the time, although prefers to be able to speak. She’s done this for years, and I’m sure that it’s her consistent instinctive kindness that means we aren’t expected to burn students at the stake if they have their mobile phone on their desk at the start of the exam. Allegedly things are much more fundamentalist elsewhere.

Jacqui programmed COBOL for years. She kept doing it in different countries before finally realising that it wasn’t where she was that she didn’t like, it was what she was doing. That’s an important and difficult realisation. Many people sit on it their whole lives. She’s lived on her own terms since then.

Then there’s Chris. He’s a thoughtful and creative man – a painter. He has a huge body of work, but he has never let go of a single original painting, despite struggling for money. He has all the originals and just sells prints on his website.  He hasn’t sold many though – “actually I’m about two grand down.” – but he makes no effort to market these prints. He’s spent more on building the site than he’s made selling prints from it. He doesn’t even know the IP address – he insists it’s .com where I’ve already ascertained it’s .co.uk.

He only told me about his Parkinson’s today. As soon as he told me, I noticed, but not before. He deals with it by being very physically contained. He told me today that every lunchtime, his father counted how many baked beans were on the plate. He also told me about his dad taking him outside, and pointing at the sky. “You see that? It looks like it goes on forever, doesn’t it, son? Well it doesn’t. If you go far enough – *bang* – you’ll hit something.” He’s not let himself hit anything.

“As soon as my hand is holding a paintbrush, my brain knows what to do,” he told me. I mentioned that my brother had had Parkinson’s, and then immediately regretted it. Chris is older now than Jamie was at the end. “How’s he getting on?” he asked. Fuck it, I wish we knew more about the brain. I wasn’t going to lie, although I made much of the fact he had MRSA. Which is irresponsible of me because we’ll all die from MRSA or its more aggressive followers, no matter what we’re admitted to hospital for, and it won’t be on any of our death certificates, so as to keep the stats down.

Bleh. I’ve been thinking too much today. I hung out with Brian in the evening which helped decompress. But it’s taken me until 2.40 to get today’s blog down. If I had another half an hour I’d try to wind into some sort of conclusion. As it is, death is shit. Life is great. Live life, avoid death, don’t sabotage yourself. Be like Brenda.