Month: October 2020

As I write I’m lying under a newly wired up, cleaned and reconstructed chandelier.

I’ve got pretty good at it now, the basics of wiring. Confidence comes through experience and practice. There’s still no way I’m taking apart a junction box or wiring a thermostat like Tristan did, but one thing at a time. The flat will be in this transitional stage for some time yet, but every day a little better even if it doesn’t feel like it. Right now I’m bringing things in as quickly as I can send them out so the sense of progress is stunted. But things are certainly better than they were, and the shape of it is clear in my head. If money were no object I’d lay down the few thousand needed for a full job by experts on the cosmetic things, but I’ve got to be careful so I’m trying to prioritise. Carpets and shower are very high up now on the to do list. It’s tempting to try and find somebody handy to live in the spare room rent free in November and do the work that’s needed, but then I remember that I can be that person and I might as well continue to upskill myself. At the start of lockdown I’d never even changed a wall socket. Today I did another chandelier and didn’t electrocute myself. No matter how confident I feel I’m still gonna pay somebody with a certificate to do the shower. If I’m renting the room I don’t want to cook the guests. But movement is movement.

It’s a maximum one pound listing weekend on eBay so I’ve started queuing up ridiculous large items like granddad’s fucked Tanner Kroll suitcase and a modern boot rack. If I put it on for collection only at a low price somebody will come for it, and if they don’t it’ll go on Freecycle and stop taking up space. I want my space back so I can put more stuff into that space and then get that stuff out as well to make room for even more stuff. This breathing monster of memories is getting easier and easier to partition and sort. One day I’ll be able to see the floor in the living room. One day I might even find out what’s under the carpet. For now just keep on chipping away.

I just took a mouse out the freezer though, as I’m going to drive over to Hampstead tomorrow. The last gasp of the Nissan. It’s being collected on Sunday and off to the big scrap heap in the sky. I lose track of how many short term cars I’ve owned. More than you can imagine. Another one before long I imagine. But the final journey of the Nissan will be to hang out with a friendly snake in Hampstead Heath. Hopefully the weather will be good enough for walking…

This morning my plans got slightly out of whack after being slow. I had a webinar to attend on zoom – a rare occasion for, me using zoom as nature intended it. Normally I either use it with all greenscreen bells and whistles, like a child picking up a stick and flying it as if it’s a plane or I use it reluctantly where I’d sooner be in the room with people so I’ve got the camera pointing any old where. I don’t really like the meeting side of zoom. Zoom meetings about talking immediately wake up the ADHD part of me. Zoom meetings about creative potential wake up the Jackson Pollock bit.

It’s funny to remember : Zoom belongs in the world of corporations and meetings and all that silly stuff where we all have to play the game of pretending it’s important so as not to bruise the delicate egos of the personality vacuums that thrive in that world.

I think of Zoom almost entirely in the frame of a plaything. But then that’s how I think of most things. Half cat?

Last night, I was in the audience for Macbeth on zoom – it’s the latest Big Telly / Creation Theatre entity in this digital playground. Lou had made the dress for Lady Macbeth and a fair bit of extra costume as well.

She had a free ticket and I was with her. We sat in a dark room in Brighton and enjoyed Shakespeare together. Like a theatre date. Just without leaving the house.

We had a lovely time. I knocked a candle over and got wax on the Persian rug during perhaps the greatest verse scene in Shakespeare. (“That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold”). It didn’t take away from our enjoyment. (And thank fuck it comes out with an iron and brown paper – I didn’t do it though. I just got the photos this morning.)

Terrific use of the medium once again, Macbeth, and a very fun telling of the story. I like being allowed to laugh at tragedies, and then have the knife twisted. Once again they were pushing the boundaries of what I thought was possible in this live digital medium. I had a few “how the hell did you do that?” moments and a few “Oooh I see how they did that” moments. I have a feeling Sinead will evolve into an octopus in order to cope with the demands of her job behind the scenes. They cut frequently, fucked with colour, faded in and out, added silly digital touches, put multiple characters on screen at once in the same scene, integrated backgrounds, fiddled perspective. There’s much that’s still to be explored in this rather odd medium of digital live storytelling that I fell into at the start of lockdown, but zoom is at full stretch already due to the size of the PLAY in these makers. There’s something about showing the cracks and bringing the craic. There’s a sweet spot. In these days of HD it is useful to see that it doesn’t have to be highly produced to be successful and fun.

This is what the webinar was to be about. This new digital live medium.

My alarm went off somewhere near Kingston, flashing up as I was driving : “Webinar in ten minutes”. Glad I set the alarm.

It was pouring with rain. I pulled into Sainsbury’s car park. With the London driver’s instinctive fear of fines for technicalities I rushed into Sainsbury’s with only a minute or two to go and *purchased something* so I wouldn’t get a letter saying I had been seen on camera using their customer carpark without being a customer. Then I sat in the rainy car and listened to Lucy and Crissy talking about their wonderful crazy plans. By some miracle, The Arts Council has given them a decent grant to develop an online platform actually designed to make things like the beautiful crazy happysad fun Tempest thing we did. It’s a fine idea and could be really interesting. They’ll be looking for a small number of consistent collaborators next year. I’ll throw my hat into the ring. I’ll be up against the whole world but you gotta be in it to win it and this is interesting and edgy.

Now I’m back in London, happy and warm in my flat with the heating cranked higher than I should, and a comfy bed waiting.

Lashing rain blowing in from the sea reminds me what people really mean when they say “wet weather”. Going from the house to the car drenched me. Then it seemed the right idea to offload a whole pile of grandpa’s damp-spotted paperback thrillers into the recycling bin. I had already scanned all their ISBN numbers. Nothing. So recycle time. The process of binning them probably took less than a minute but I was wet through by the time I was done. Not to be deterred I got back in the car and we drove to Rottingdean.

All that area used to be deer parks. The dean where they were rutting with Roedean next door, full of roe. Now the roe and the bucks have been replaced with frustrated young women at boarding school. The rutting bucks are no longer there – just angry looking middle aged men in masks sitting in big shops full of wildly overpriced tut. They’d be no use for the intentions of the pupils of that blasted seaside private school.

One of the shops is trying to sell a small empty cardboard Gucci box for £3. It was an inspiration and a warning, seeing the bric-a-brac of Rottingdean, feeling how little of it they must move at that price, sensing the low energy of the proprietors. One shopfront by the beach in a lovely location was closed and completely unworkable. Every inside inch of the place was utterly crowded with absolute bollocks that had been salvaged over the years and not adequately moved on. Stuck on the inside of a window was a piece of paper : “not your ordinary white van man” and a number. He’s hauled in a load of stuff from clearances but he hasn’t sorted it and so he’s got no shopfront left to sell artisan coffee or monetise it somehow. There but for the grace of God. I’ve been looking into buying myself a van for when I scrap the Nissan, you see. Having wheels has been incredibly useful for me. If I do get a van I’d be well advised to move to somewhere with ground floor and get super efficient with my process of sorting and shifting, or I’ll end up with a fucked back from boxes and I’ll make the block so top-heavy with junk that it’ll fall in the Thames.

Today I’ve been learning fabric with the help of Lou. We hoiked a box of old linen into her place and piled it. Some of it will end up on my bed as it’s much nicer than the cheap polycotton I’ve bought. Some will end up in a skip. The rest I’m going to try on eBay. Fifties to seventies bed linen. Some table tops and lacy bits. Just another random bag of God knows what but where there’s muck there’s brass. More to come. If I don’t up my pace I’ll be rotting like the Rottingdean van man. But at least it keeps me occupied.

Speaking of which, Lou and I are about to go to the theatre! We’ll be zooming into Macbeth by Big Telly at Creation Theatre. I can’t wait. If it’s anything like The Tempest – (wonderful. I was in it) and Operation Elsewhere and Alice it’s going to be a real treat! I’ll likely gush about it tomorrow. It starts in ten minutes. I should get my hat.

I found another dusty mucky chandelier. Many years ago, drinking with friends up here, somebody said “why’ve you got chandelier hooks on all your light fittings?” At the time I hadn’t been aware of it. That’s when I was taught what a chandelier hook is. He took me round. He even did that thing people do here: “I can take them out for you if you don’t need them.” It’s like the army of plumbers who offer to change out my gorgeous antique brass taps for “some nice mixers”.

Now I’ve cleaned up three chandeliers and put them up on the nice old brass fittings that weren’t taken down. I have three fittings waiting and now there’s three more chandeliers. The one I just found is already in the dishwasher. (It’s the best way to clean those crystals – honest!) Soon it’ll be chandelier central round here. It’s only a matter of time before I can invite Erroll Flynn for six bottles of vodka and then provoke a fight between him and some chimps. I could video it.

Meanwhile there’s the sound of a circular saw in the room next door as the next stage of patching up the huge hole in the wall takes place. The more work I do the more work there is to be done at the moment it seems, but in the fullness of time it’ll all be worth it. I just have to keep revising my estimates both financially and in terms of time. The sensible thing would be to continue to treat the flat and nothing but the flat as my nine to five job and take the endorphins of finishing a section when they come. Life has other plans as ever. I’ve got the usual multitude of spinning plates. Looking for acting work, plenty of writing, sorting antiques – I have to sell the car in the next week, and be ready to cut a new showreel in a fortnight. I’m still going to go to Brighton tonight and stay over because I want to see Lou and the sea. I like having too much to do. I much prefer my brain to be flooded. If it’s not flooded it floods itself anyway, and I sleep much better when the flood is generated by spinning jobs and not by strange memories of other times. It’s a constant battle to remain in the present when the past is so active and the future so weird.

I think that’s why I’ve been a bit angsty lately. My bias towards the future is a defence against the puddle of the past. But I’m pretty well located in the now at the moment and still allowing the future bias to tilt me into the unknown. What will be will be in terms of the world. Sure I was considering (genuinely) finding a retrain grant and doing a course in politics in order to try to change from the inside on the basis that if you’re not involved there’s no point moaning about it. But then I’d be just another fucking middle aged public school boy who thinks he’s clever doing politics. And I might kid myself I’ve got perspective but that fallacy is why they’re such a problem.

Besides, I could get an acting job on set in Prague in a bubble tomorrow for a year making a series, and you know I’d drop everything immediately and bite off the hand with the plane tickets.

So I’ll just keep on waking up and doing and looking for the thing that makes me happy and pays the bills at the same time. And eventually this flat will be the palace it could be.

No idea why I kept the fish. It was in one of the random boxes of my uncle’s things. Cracked and old but there’s personality there somewhere. I like it. It doesn’t have to be valuable to have personality.

Like the UK. We are cracked and old. But there’s personality. I have a friend from Georgia who flew to London for something like 12 days and watched 7 shows. Our glittering West End, making worldspanning stories for decades. A taxi driver in Utah told me he’d seen The Mousetrap. “I’m not allowed to tell you who did it though,” he said with joy. That’s the old bit. Longest running show. Then there’s stuff like Jerusalem, made in the tiny Royal Court and off it went. Art galleries full to bursting with amazing pieces. One of our galleries is selling a major piece to stay afloat. Smaller ones are looking at the empty wall approaching. The Opera House is selling a Hockney. All of us in the arts are wondering how the government can be so open about deprioritising us. The much mocked “cyber” campaign saw ballerinas being sorted into the same category as unskilled workers who might be looking to change career. Ballerinas! One of the hardest careers to train for that there is. One that destroys your body before you’re in your forties in the name of seemingly effortless beauty. The swan gliding above the water, little invisible legs paddling hard. Sure maybe they can shift to cyber. They’ll have the work ethic. But better by far to support their industry – one that brings beauty and skill and practice around the globe. Considering we are a tiny ancient nation, we have a powerful tradition of the arts. I know that my work has given me skill. My skill has given me confidence. I’m in a powerful place. But the industry isn’t. And travel is looking harder and harder even despite the cove. It’s why I’m looking towards my Spanish ancestry.

There’s a change coming and it’s not feeling good yet. Boris and his sovereignty are waiting to hear if Trump gets re-elected before laying any cards down on a severance from Europe that will only benefit the rich how he wants it. Trump probably will get re-elected and if by some miracle he doesn’t then there’ll be people setting fire to the place and saying it was rigged. Boris is hoping for the chlorinated chicken to start crossing the Atlantic instead of cheese over the channel. At least it’ll wake up Liverpool. He’s hoping for the final golden nail in the NHS to be presented on a cushion before being driven in with American steel trucked Liverpool to Sheffield. If it’s Biden we are once again back to square one with no time.

I started to worry that this old cracked country is looking to model itself on the likes of Dubai, a shiny new place designed to make money. The UK trying to follow that model? It’s like Rembrandt trying to stencil a tag onto a railway bridge. Sure there’s lots of money in Dubai but google Dubai theatre and there’s an extravaganza show and the cinema and not much else. Touring musicals. Telly stars singing. There’s no meat in that art. With our generations of history and weirdness we have no end of cracks and stuff is always going to leak through the gold paint.

I keep remembering it’s global and it has never made the world feel so small. We’ve all but built walls. Nobody is happy about it which is why we’ve all devolved into petty squabbling. We need other people, conflicting opinions, different cultures, society, understanding. Otherwise we atrophy. It’s written in the gene pool. We are made to spread and mutate. Like a virus.

It’s getting harder to genuinely connect. I’m going to try to send more messages to old friends and new, to just build a little string of love from one bubble to another across the country and the world. I can bury my head for England. Whatever England is these days. Green and pleasant land. Pleasant or not I’m not sticking my head into the earth.

At least we’ve had the sunshine today.

There are no bins at Vanguard Self Storage. There were none at big yellow either. It’s cunning. You throw the boxes in there, usually at a time of grief when you’re brain is too full to adequately sort. Then you discover that the bulk of it is magazines about yachts. You still have to take a car load of magazines about yachts off site to get rid of them. And it is slower and harder for you to sort the stuff you’ve stored. So the storage people get more money. There must be some storage millionaires somewhere. Not least among them the guys who own Vanguard, where our grandparent’s furniture has ended up. They have enough wodge kicking around to commission a replica of a WW1 Mark 4 tank and get it craned 54 foot up onto the roof of their building in the outskirts of London. There it sits as we speed past it going about our lives. A big tank distracting us from the building below us – a brick and mortar metaphor for our inability to let go of the past.

We were storing a box of letters to my uncle at Vanguard. Mostly bank statements. He literally never threw a thing away in his life including tissues. Loads of money a month to keep the unit and there’s stuff like that in there. We were storing boxes of paperback Jackie Collins books. All with a monthly cost. We still are. For everything in there that has value, we’ve already paid for it twice by now to keep it. It’s the chances of finding the things that don’t have value but we like – that’s why we are taking the time to sort it now. Plus trying to make back some of what has been blown over the years. A fraction of it.

If I ran one of these storage units I’d have a courtesy skip for customers. I would also quietly employ a skip picker, with the certainty that people would eventually give up on paying to keep things they’ll never sort, take the things with true meaning to them, and put the rest in the courtesy skip. I reckon it would pay for itself in good timber, old sewing machines, wardrobes, ornaments, God knows what. They could have TWO WW1 tanks on top of the building. And we would have been able to offload a load of magazines that MIGHT have value to a collector…

It’s a mixed clientele at the self store. You see men in their fifties carrying antique oak furniture. You see women with massive piles of fabric. We all look a bit tattily dressed as if we’ve spent all our spare money on a storage unit.

Some people run bookshops out of them. God knows how that pays for itself. They are a very expensive oubliette. A sort of liminal space between throwing things out and keeping them, where you can say to the ghosts that you haven’t chucked it even though you have.

I took home some shells today because I like them. Among them was a Nautilus.

Some gauche idiot had stripped all the natural colour off it so it’s just a big shiny chunk of mother of pearl. It’s still lovely. It’ll end up on the shelf in the bathroom. Illegal to sell so I couldn’t buy one if I wanted it. But a lovely odd thing to own and a reminder of our grandparents. While we work out how to get rid of large amounts of their beloved stuff.

“That’s life though, isn’t it,” says Max at one point. “You’re born, you get a load of stuff, you have lots of opinions, then you die and all the stuff goes in a box for twenty years before it’s thrown out.”

The wind is roaring across the river into my windows, rattling and battering them and reminding me how cold it is in the world. I’ve been toasty warm in my sanctuary up here, a home which is slowly getting cleared although right now the living room is absolutely full of pictures most of which are worthless and I don’t much like them and they’re taking up space. They’re the sort of pictures you might find on the wall of a pub, the majority of them. There’s not even the chance that one of them is a lost whojamaflip, because I’ve already run them all through a basic check and I’ve got a handle on the painters. Probably one of the best ones is of me by an old schoolfriend. Not that he’s doing as well as he ought to, just that the other artists are doing or did worse. I love some of them despite their notional value being low. I’m having to come to terms with how it works even if I don’t like it.

I’ll put the ones I like on the wall, like I did with this “ancient map of fairy land” by Bernard Sleigh, which cost twice the value of the picture to have it reframed, but I don’t care cos I love it. Picture Framing is a MASSIVE SCAM, right? Sure you need some expensive equipment and some specialist knowledge, but it’s not like you have to train for years, and the hourly rate has got to be worth it. If we lock down again, maybe that’s the next skill I’ll teach myself. Then I can chuck a bit of glass with some wood and by a new car from it.

The pictures I don’t like I’ll just have to find a way to eject from the premises, unless the guy from the auction house who I’ll eventually manage to get round here knows more than I do – (which he will, I expect – I hope…)

It’s been another day mostly deleting paragraphs just after writing them, making another cup of tea, looking out the window, making more words, looking out the window again, swearing, deleting them. A desk would help. I’ve officially drawn a line under it now for the day and I’m having a cup of chamomile tea. Then I’ll likely play a computer game that sounds like porn for a while – Divinity Original Sin 2, anyone? It feels like things are slowing down again like they were in February. Maybe we’ll all be asked to stay in our houses again. Maybe we already have been – I’m not hurrying to switch the news on in the morning. It’s never nice. I want the world back please.

I’m inevitably losing the Nissan in the next week. MOT falls due and parking permit expires. It’s going to the scrapheap but I’m going to immediately try and replace it. In my dreams I’m going to get a lovely shiny big car that I can drive as an uber and fill with boxes too. Reality may have other plans. But it means one guaranteed week of transport. If it’s not closed I might spin to Yorkshire one more time…

A year ago today I was in smalltown Indiana, watching old folk do scenes from Macbeth and Henry V in a home. Then we did our five person Twelfth Night, and I doubtless got tipsy on Pabst Blue Ribbon and fell asleep in a hotel room with an alarm set for the first class of the day. We had a pretty disappointing Halloween a few days later. We were in the Christian heartland of Indiana, and there’s nothing in the Bible about Halloween. Denton Texas provided a much livelier example of American Halloween some six years previously where we went to a frat party, so my high hopes were dashed by Winona Lake, where it was just a stinky bar and a man in a stetson howling into a microphone.

I occasionally look back on my blogs from last year to remind myself how quickly everything can change. I found myself thinking about the fallout of Brexit and worrying from afar about how things would be when I got back – would my movement be restricted? Ha. And then some.

Less than a year ago, five of us were flying to a different state every week. We were going into rooms full of strangers and getting them to throw balls around, visiting old folk, standing on stages facing rooms full of people sitting next to one another. We’d play foursquare and then hug each other properly. It all seems like visions of another lifetime. I adore traveling for work – it’s pretty much my number one thing to do full stop. Seeing new places and acting? My two big ticks. Can’t easily do either of them right now, although I’m giving it my best shot.

On set yesterday we had to limit numbers, be very careful about masks, sanitise our hands frequently, be two meters apart… To the five actors in Indiana we would have looked like absolute neurotics. But if I was to say I’d gone into an old folk’s home to talk about Shakespeare today you can be sure I’d get a barrage of messages asking what the heck I thought I was doing. People wouldn’t be pulling punches. People very quickly get very nasty about this disease on social media, I’ve noticed. Nothing directed at me yet, but the tone shifts FAST. It’s a nasty insidious little disease. And it’s not helping anything if we forget to be kind to one another. The less we are able to connect the more we have to try to connect. It serves nothing to sit in the endorphins of our own sense of doing it right, and to throw stuff at the people we think are not.

Anyway, I haven’t left the house. I did some writing and some cleaning today. That’s it. That’s all she wrote. I made the corridor neater. So now I have a nice kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and corridor. This is called progress.

I’ll be ready to take Airbnb guests right about the time that nobody in the world is coming to London. But I’m gonna keep plugging at it. Tomorrow is another worky day. So much to do…

It’s warm again. I’ve been filming all day. I asked the director if I could blog it and he told me I could blog it once it’s made, by which time I’d have forgotten about it and I’ll be doing something completely different. So with no clear line on what I can or can’t say I’m not going to say much. Always err on the side of caution.

We’ve been going around London landmarks with a bunch of great big polystyrene things. Set them up, get a quick shot, into the van, next stop. We buzzed by Parliament, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and Covent Garden Market. We met a few nice cops, and a slightly more insistent private security bloke. The less power the more bluster.

Polystyrene is light, in theory, but oh God my fingers and my triceps are aching after some long hauls. We got some nice shots though so it was worth it. I think it’ll look good and serve the purpose for which it was commissioned, and I’m happy with my part in it, which was lots of carrying and a little bit of improvising around a script.

I finished work at 4pm in Old Street. It’s just a couple of hours walk home from Old Street. Despite being tired, I’m not a fan of public transport when I’m not in a hurry these days. Too expensive anyway, and now there’s way too much neurosis. So I’m halfway home by shanks’ pony and I’ve stopped in an old City of London boozer for a non-alcoholic beer. Cheers.

I love walking this city, and it’s interesting to see what’s functioning and what’s shut. I think we are only now beginning to contemplate the extent to which this pandemic will reshape the city centres. We still think it’ll all ping back at some point. Maybe it just … won’t.

The food outlets that cater to city workers are mostly closed with signs telling us they’ll be back. The hairdresser’s academy is going great guns though – packed with young men and women in protective gear snipping away.

My friend wrote on Facebook that she had to get her stuff back from the office. Everybody talks as if it’s temporary, but it wouldn’t surprise me if working from home becomes the new ant farm. I fucking detest offices for all the little powerplays and the one-upmanship and the false friendships. But actually it’s got to be good for people to not be able to choose who they spend their time with. Plus you end up getting much better at being a person if you have to work around the shape of other humans. You can even make actual friends.

Social Media is pushing us hard enough into isolated bubbles, and in the UK we are still favouring the politics of sitting in a locked box scratching at the sides. A lot of people don’t like anybody that isn’t exactly them.

If the office buildings sit empty though, what’s going to happen to them? They won’t turn into hotels because “Sven is just going to Zoom us from Germany – we don’t have to fly him over”.

Maybe they’ll end up full of hairdressers and artists. Maybe they’ll mostly sit empty. Maybe all the cities will start to look like Detroit in the wake of this fucker. Who knows. But I’m happy to set up a charitable company and take custody of an empty building to make good theatre that I believe in. If anybody has the building going. I have a few good ideas bouncing around right now.

Meantime I’m glad to be back on set. More of that please… More. Of. That.

Time is moving so quickly. It’s crazy. In April it was like wading through soup but now the days are just galloping by. I’m trying to do some writing in the daytime as well as for this evening blog but it’s so easy to distract myself. I’m making progress but I am learning that the only way to do it properly is to have a dedicated space where I go and treat writing like a job – and currently there isn’t room in my flat for an office so my bed is the only option.

I could probably blog while taking off in a rocket because the habit is so ingrained, but despite my little screenplay blog a few days ago when the car got broken into I’m finding it very slow going working out who says what and when they say it in a script for stage. It’s a different discipline, all this writing from inside the practical constraints of a play. Multiple voices but not as many as I need. A new set of limitations. Trying not to ask for the impossible whilst asking for what would be fun. Trying not to just sound expositiony or empty or trite or explainy. This is going to take some serious selfshaking.

Playwrights, I take my hat off to you. I’ll try not to mangle your words next time I’m acting them out. Prose has always fallen out of my head in some form of vague order. Verse assembles itself effectively but I’m too shy to share it most of the time. Dialogue tumbles disordered into my iPad where I’m constantly reassembling and doubting it.

As an actor I’ve sworn too many times at scripts where writers make me speak their needs or perform their transparent fantasies. I’ve grumbled as I’ve had to learn huge tracts of exposition that could be reduced to a gesture and word, or when I’ve had to walk into a room, speak my needs, and then change the subject to the next needed conversation with “but anyway”. “Hi Bella. I’m here to get the gun so I can go out hunting for pheasants. But anyway, have you heard back from the police about your lost puppy?” You’d be amazed how often it gets sent out to the actors like that. (Example made up for illustrative purposes).

Now I’m finding out how easy it is to fall into those lazy playwriting traps myself. I’ve had to go with the overused adage : “Don’t get it right, get it written.” I’m gonna get it written and then rewrite most of it while swearing at myself for being a clumsy fool the first time round. There’s the beginning of something I think I’ll enjoy. But time’s a ticking. I should have had a first draft by Monday. I’m way behind schedule. And I’m filming tomorrow. Still, I’ll get something out there I reckon. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from doing this daily blog it’s to just put it out there. If you build it…