I’m back in Chelsea – I had to come back briefly, to get my tent and my bivouac. I’m off to the woods for a long weekend.
Jack has been driving towards building a show in these woods. It’s quite an ambitious project but he’s an ambitious guy. Had everything not ground to a halt, we might have been doing it right now. The plan was always around solstice weekend. So it makes sense to go out and see what’s what. That was the pitch, because it’s hard to get there without a car. Jack has access to a car and I don’t. Perhaps in a normal summertime I’d have just bought another banger for peanuts on gumtree with MOT until November and doomed to die in late August. But there’s no festival season, I wouldn’t get enough use to justify the punishing cost of the insurance. I’m in a high risk category. Probably shouldn’t have said “actor” back in the day. It’s on all the systems now. And with some of the bangers I’ve had over the years – perhaps they’ve got a point.
But Jack is up for going to the woods, another great friend is coming too, and Jethro’s uncle bought some woodland out in Kent back in the day. This promises to be a good weekend in nature, away from the normal swing of things, able to recalibrate and think clearly. Good for me to escape the city, especially in these days.
I have no idea what the internet situation will be. I’ll work that out when I’m there, but if I go dark for a short while then I’ll be back on Tuesday so don’t assume I’ve fallen in a hole. I’m hoping I’ll be able to post, but I’m not expecting to get much use out of my phone apart from that.
Lots of my friends have been making things. I saw some dear hearts this evening messing with tech to tell stories together alone. They made a greenscreen show in isolation live, and made it look like they were all in the same room. Fascinating silly use of technical wizardry running alongside live theatre skills.
And last night I watched three strangers playing a video game for over an hour. I’ve never done that before! It’s a teaser for a conversion of a board game called “The Captain is Dead” that will be launched on Steam before long and it looks brilliant. I’ve played the demo. It’s fiendishly hard and looks and sounds fab. It was also made by my best friend from school. If you’re a gamer, here’s the steam link. It was odd just watching people play a game and talk about it. That’s a thing that people actually do as a primary source of income now which I just find really weird. But I was proud to see the work he has put into this thing beginning to bear fruit.
Others of my friends have been resting, in the true sense of the word. I used to dislike how people would always ask me “Are you ‘resting’?” when I wasn’t working, and make the inverted commas too. But here we are, a world where there’s a whole lot of “resting” going on. And that feels ok. Who knows what dreams may come when we aren’t constantly throwing our energy against service industry day jobs and office temping and construction and events and driving and all the crazy things. Only time will tell…
AlBarclay 