Aware that the rules are changing about movement every three and a half minutes, I’ve taken a risk anyway and packed up another car load to go to Yorkshire. Then, in a great illustration of my disordered brain and my atrocious geography, I’ve driven it all to Brighton so I can hang out with Lou. I’ve just arrived. She’s sewing a costume for an actor friend of mine to be gainfully employed whilst wearing it. It’s a bit more fiddly than she expected so I thought I’d write while she works.
The flat is empty of tenants at last – a situation that can’t last long, but one that’s considerably preferable to having a tenant with a flexible approach to payment. I’m trying to work out what I can usefully do with the room while it’s empty. There’s some work that has to be done by others, some work I can do myself and some work that can just be ignored for now. I need to be quick about deciding what’s what and about getting it all done so I can start to tick over again. Service charge has just been put up because everybody else in my block is a millionaire and thinks that a few hundred quid more per month is peanuts, plus they love scaffolding even though every fucking time they put it up I tell them my flat leaks and they tell me they’ll solve it and don’t.
Glad of a little bit of weird work from the artist, but I’m determined to try and get ahead of myself at last and stop this decades long flirtation with the sharp end of my overdraft limit.
So I’ll be up to Yorkshire again tomorrow so long as Dominic Cummings doesn’t decide that he’s the only person allowed to drive to Yorkshire these days. This time it’s larger items. Bits of furniture and so forth. And it’ll be slightly rushed as Lou has to be back in Brighton on Tuesday evening, and I’ve got to be doing random stuff in my greenscreen next week anyway.
This really hasn’t felt like a weekend. My days of the week are cancelled. I haven’t even got the habitual drunken Friday and Saturday leading to sleepy Sunday. Every day is … just another day trying to work out how the hell I’m going to keep butter on the parsnips. Decades of hard work, sacrifice and refining our skillsets has been designated “unskilled” by the chancellor because when he does acting he does it without skill. It’s like thinking a doctor has no skill because you can lance your partner’s boils, and you quite enjoy it when you do.
It’s very chilled out here though in this lovely familiar cluttery home by the sea. The sea always takes the weight off and brings me back to myself. This place makes me miss The Isle of Man. It might be time to go back there for a while soon. For now, though, it’s making sense of my uncharacteristically empty flat.
AlBarclay 