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.
AlBarclay 