Month: October 2020

Even in the thick of it, in St James’s Park right by the road, I found a moment of peace near an ancient tree. Saturday night and it wasn’t full of drunks. I sat a while and listened to the wind breathing through the trees. The sound of the road seemed trivial compared to the quiet roar of a nature that was there before the road and will be after.

I found myself thinking from the perspective of this tree – my mate.

There it is, plugged into the ground. It’s losing leaves now, but they’ll grow back in a few short months and all it needs to do is wait it out. Meanwhile we are running around swarming like ants, full of our little daily noises. I was walking past it head full of noise until it pulled me in with its big fat trunk.

I’ve let myself get swept up in these concerns. Covid. Money. Politics. Work. Accommodation. I lost half a day yesterday to mixed anger and upset about a job I didn’t really want because it felt a bit like the only job in town. But these little fleeting things, they come and go and yet we can accidentally get ourselves into a perspective on them that’s all consuming.

In the context of history this Covid is just a blip. This isn’t the one where they have to open the plague pits again and start ringing the bell and shouting “Bring out your dead!”. It’ll mean we can’t have absolutely all the nice things immediately. But we need to get a handle on that desire anyway because it’s getting us into a pickle.

The thoughtless way we lived has been shaken off and we are being made to live mindfully. The context of daily life is different. It’s useful to shift context – it broadens your horizons a bit. It’s why travel is good for you. It’s why widely traveled people are usually open minded, if occasionally insufferable. Everybody has had to shift, and now everybody has at least two perspectives on how daily life can be. That will help people notice that many things have an element of choice somewhere. We can have an understanding of the choice, and make our choices actively.

We can choose what we consume, both literally and in terms of imaginative and spiritual fodder. Maybe we’ll start to try to choose more mindfully in time to slow down the rate at which we are making this planet hostile to us. Not that it matters to the tree. It’ll be there, barring a hotel chain getting permission. It’ll be there until a glacier grinds it down, observed by tattered uncomprehending ape things huddled in an old statue worshipping a Jedward poster.

We can wind out our lives on meaningless noise. Don’t allow it. Life is huge and rich and possible. It’s a joy if you let it be.

You could argue that standing in a window with a silly head on just to make people smile is a stupid job. I would agree. I’ve been doing something wonderfully stupid. There’s nothing wrong with stupid so long as it isn’t ruining the place.

We made a lot of people smile today. We shared joy with strangers. We played and were played to. If you’re too wrapped up in the negative buzz of your moment to grin like an idiot at something stupid you might as well just be an ant.

I’m exercising my choice at the moment by denying myself all the things I consumed mindlessly. I’m not saying forever. I’m just going to be as conscious as I can going forward.

Meat. Caffeine. Alcohol. Large quantities of refined sugar. Those are my main ones. I can take things to extremes sometimes though. But maybe take advantage of this shift in context to examine one of the things you have taken for granted. “I can’t wake/drive without coffee?” Yes I can. “I can’t shut my head up without booze?” Yes I can. “It’s not a meal without meat?” Yum. “Yayyy monster munch!” Um…

You might shift a habit. You might not. Either way it’ll be interesting to observe.

It’s late. I’m tired. I would have written this ages ago but I’ve been trying to write the correct response to a difficult eBay person in Sweden who wants everything for nothing. I can’t just tell him to go boil his head, as damage to the rating is a serious handicap on eBay. It’s exhausting striking the balance. I’m tired anyway.

I’ve been wearing big heads again in a window on Brook Street, smile painted on, waving to people. Thankfully nobody was in the room with me apart from my working partner who’s a close friend. I got a call halfway through the day that led to me swearing blind for about 3 solid hours on the other side of my drawn on smile. At one point I even had a little cry. Textbook sad mascot work.

Just an audition not landing. Nothing real or serious. Happens all the time. Never gets easier, though.

Man I love it when they offer me the part without having to audition. I hate loathe and detest the things. They bring all my insecurities to the front – as if my life choices are being judged and found wanting. I forget all the things that are front and centre when I work. I usually hit the bottle as soon as I’m out of an audition to forget, so it’s good that I’m sober these days as I could break it down for myself and use the knowledge to improve. After this one I drove to Brighton. I knew I’d been off colour, and had time on the drive to get to the bottom of why I didn’t serve myself well.

Next time, nervous or not, I’ll eat first. It was at 7pm. I didn’t eat all day for nerves. I almost passed out halfway through a sentence after getting up too quickly in order to get it out of the way. I froze for a good five seconds while my head filled with blood. I lost track of myself completely. Then I just talked shit for about twenty seconds. Doing stuff out of context with an assessing audience rather than a real audience? It’s like throwing a dead chicken and telling yourself it’s flying.

Nonetheless, both the choosing people in the room were known to me. But not in an uncomplicated manner. Lessons to carry to the recall? A chance to rebuild a bridge?

No.

Yeah, I was upset. It’s a kick in the teeth. But maybe it’s for the best. Fox and the grapes? Well, it would’ve been fun. It looked like the only gig in town. It would’ve been a year out of life. It would’ve been exhausting, all consuming, a small community, new friends, hard work, passion. I would have loved it and thrived and played and brought loads. But I always do that. So I’ll do it somewhere else. There’ll be other gigs, despite those monumental fuckwits at Westminster deliberately trying to bin us because they don’t see value in our sector because nobody’s run the numbers and they all just follow Cummings who is a literal actual sociopath and thus of course is unable comprehend art.

Things will wake up. I don’t have to be loved by everybody. And I suspect I’ll need to be available for the incredible things that are coming my way. I look forward to the day when I can say with a dancing heart “Thank fuck I didn’t get that gig – I wouldn’t be here.”

But just for a bit I’ll feel sad. Because I got swept up in a dream that popped.

It was one of those days. I’m glad I’m in bed now. I’ll probably spill this hot mug of camomile over my crotch just as I hit the schedule button.

Driving back from Brighton was a breeze. I was happy, full of green tea on clear roads listening to interesting stuff about Deism on Radio 4 and passing the miles by instinct. The road just unraveled.

Then back into London but carrying Brighton energy, so I got a parking ticket for a five minute stop because I momentarily had my head in the clouds while it all started to get urban again. I was a minute too late.

We got some work done in the bedroom though, and then at noon we went for a quick run to B&Q that turned into a mission. They’ve closed all the local B&Qs. We didn’t get back to the flat until quarter past four after ending up in Croydon and then I had to stop the noisy work in order to do some filming in the green screen.

Now I’ve got a hole in my spare bedroom and rubble all over the floor, we didn’t quite nail the filming so the green screen is still set up, I paid a full day for a few hours of work in the room and a long drive around town, plus 55 quid for a parking ticket, and my roof has been leaking so badly that it’s probably a fool’s errand to plaster it up again anyway until something has been done about the water coming in, which my leasehold management company have ignored for years despite scaffold coming up the block and my making as much noise about it as possible when that happened.

Ahhh it feels better writing all that shit down. I should be able to sleep now. It’s only money and time. I’ll be in a window with a silly head on for two days again starting tomorrow and there’s gold in tham thar heads, believe it or not. Money for time. Round and round we go.

A hole in the wall instead of a damp patch somehow feels like progress. It really needs to be fixed at source. It could all happen again in heavy rain. I’m gonna need to talk seriously to the guys who take my expensive service charge and see if they can work out why the fecking roof is leaking. The longer it goes the worse it gets and it has been more than a year now.

Right now I’m going to go to sleep and let all the stress roll off me. Then tomorrow I won’t achieve much but at least I’ll get to make people smile for money.

Arriving in Brighton late last night I stood up from the car into the darkness, tired from a post audition mission. Immediately I felt the wind slam into me from my right, buffeting in from the channel – in from the huge ancient sea. To my left the windblown buildings and the window behind which I’d sleep. To my right, darkness. Behind me the empty road.

I stood and looked for a while. Just wind and wavesound. Crash and rush, the cooling engine ticks, late night birds, my breath.

There’s true darkness out there, at sea. I always think of my grandmother: “The sea is in your blood!” That’s what she’d say. Her father drowned somewhere in that expanse out there, to the east, dragged down by his new boots. Her husband, grandpa, was on the Atlantic convoys and the South China Sea, and went down with The Repulse. Dad was fucking with the sea, on lethal cigarette boats going as fast as possible and somehow not dying. He was world champion powerboat racer a few years running – including the year I was born. Lucky. For the stories, he almost copped it a few times. That was the knife edge he was happiest on.

It’s unforgiving, the sea. You fuck with it at your peril. That’s what drew dad to it. I get it.

We humans haven’t turned our colonial eye to it despite the projections of underwater biobubbles from the 1950’s onwards. Too lethal. Nature’s domain. We are still just visitors on those terrible wonderful waters we left so many centuries ago. Sometimes we’re playing, sometimes we’re playthings. We don’t get to choose which. Very few people have slept a night under there and come back up. Just that quiet ordered compact breed who make submariners.

Cold out there. Looking out into the black, there’s the lonely blinking red lights of a wind farm. Unmanned. Unmannable. But recently sanctioned by our glorious leader as part of the isolated nasty future he dreams of. We’ve got wind and wave. We can have power in our island and screw everybody else. It’s a nasty reason for a good thing to get promoted.

I’ve spent the morning with the sea ever present. It somehow helps me think. A sabbatical in The Isle of Man is looking more likely the more I think about practicalities, especially when I remember how much clearer I feel when that wind blows over me.

For now I’m going to get stuck into the lanes, dig around in charity shops, and wait until Lou has finished work so we can go for yummy yakitori.

This morning I got a survey from my NHS practice, asking what I thought about triage only over the internet going forward. I said I worried that having that as the only option would mean that many serious things slip through the cracks because somebody’s following a checklist. It took me months of shouting to fix something that Vodafone had done by mistake because I could only get through to the call centre in Alexandria and it wasn’t on their checklist. A checklist rarely works in practice but frequently works in theory. This is life and death, not a phone contract.

On the radio this morning I listened to lots of people who haven’t been able to have medical things looked at in time, to their cost in terms of peace of mind or even months to live. Home visits are off the table. There’s barely enough funding to keep Nye’s dream alive as it is. It’s the death of a thousand cuts.

Then I heard Dominic’s blonde sockpuppet still taking to the nation as if he’s Captain of cricket jollying up the team before the big match with Brambletye. But buried in that familiar bumble is the sting. It’s only going to get worse. This frame is so much more convenient than terrorism was for curtailing liberties. We haven’t heard a peep about ISIS. When the dust settles – and I’m beginning to think it’s measurable in years – we will all look down and realise our legs have been chained together while we weren’t watching.

I’m starting to realise that this pandemic and the fallout is a big part of how this era will be remembered by posterity. They’ll talk about the economy and social damage and isolation and shrinking humanity from whatever dystopic viewpoint wins – it looks like America is preparing for civil war, and the UK is just crumbling and sinking under its weight of self importance. They’ll talk about the things that started, the things that grew and the things that dwindled and died.

They won’t talk about how Al had to stick his nose and mouth into the crotch of a dirty pair of longjohns and tie the legs behind his head because he forgot his mask again and needed to buy stamps. It’ll be the end of institutions that will be remembered. Big companies, ways of thinking. Things are tumbling. They might not all tumble bad. But it’s gonna take a while to settle. I want to take a year off and crew a tall ship. Seriously. I’ve had enough of this.

I’m going to an audition soon. They’ll take my temperature and I’ll fill in all sorts of forms. The result will be that I get to participate in a small workshop that might lead to some acting work down the line, and a year in London. It’s Brian again, with his Superman T-shirt on, trying to singlehandedly restart an industry that’s on its knees. More power to him. We need positive news. I’m almost in despair for the future of the world so I’ll see if I can bury myself in community and weird story for 365 days or so. It’ll almost be like a tall ship. Still lots of wind, rigging and sailors. Fewer sharks.

God I need a proper holiday though. I want an adventure. A helpful friend says “Why not find an adventure in England,” but I do that every week if I can so it’s not an adventure anymore.

I want to be surrounded by people I can’t understand, eating something unrecognisable in relentless sunshine with a back aching from loadbearing. I want to look out over unfamiliar peaks covered in dust with a bandanna tied around my head, worn out boots, and a donkey carrying my bed. I want to have so many mosquitos on every inch of exposed flesh that I’m past caring while the guy with the machete realises he’s lost with only an hour to sundown and we’ve pretty much drunk all the water.

I don’t want to go for soggy egg and chips and a rainy walk to see all the Macdonald’s wrappers and hate.

Mel just sent me a photo. She’s at the start of a 3000km walk in New Zealand. “Fancy it?” she sends me. YES! That’s a leisurely 120 days of walking. That’ll do. Dammit.

Lou fixed my jeans for my birthday.

Six years ago, in Austin Texas, I got giddy. I bought myself some bootcut jeans, some bright red cowboy boots and a stetson. Jack thought I was a real cowboy for a moment. They really do dress like that in Austin.

I still have the boots. I’ve worn them twice in Texas and once in London – (I looked a tit, it rained into them, and I got a blister). I loved the stetson though, but left it at some actor’s house over the course of a very busy New Year’s Eve. I have no clue which actor, but the house was almost certainly in Stokey. As for the jeans? I wore them out. I ran the pockets through with keys and phones and pens and bits. When I took them in to the local seamster to fix I got quoted £50 a pocket, so they’ve been on my shelf for years, unwearable without pockets as I’ll lose my keys and break my phone.

Lou got wind of this. She fixed them for my birthday. Then she tells me she doesn’t like them. That’s a labour of birthday love. I have the jeans back but I am going to be leery of wearing them around her. My instinct might have been to wear them every time I see her specially in honour of her fixing them, so it’s smart of her to break the news that they aren’t her favourite. A more ruthless person would have told me they were impossible to mend and have thrown them out.

“What sort of clothes do you like?” she goes on to ask me, and it makes me feel momentarily self conscious as it’s one of those things I know I’m supposed to have an answer to. I’ve occasionally been marched down the shops by people. I was a talking Ken doll for a few years, and about as much use in that particular relationship – but I looked great. My own taste in clothes is haphazard. They keep me warm. Usually.

I think back to my first girlfriend. The first time I saw her she was in a white summer dress in a garden and I fell for her. Textbook. But I was a teenager at an all boys school. “I like dresses,” I find my mouth saying. Then I add “people can wear what the fuck they like, though.”

I find myself thinking that usually I notice breath use, gesture, eye contact quality, and gait before I notice clothing. I’m more interested in the things that are less likely to be curated as they can lead to a quicker truth than the bits we throw over our skin. Not just for research although that’s part of it. Also just plain humanity.

I’m wearing my newly cancelled jeans as I write. I’ve been wearing them every day since my birthday, but not because I love them. Because they’re there and the pockets work. But it’s got me thinking about my wardrobe. I’ve got too much stuff now and I’ll be moving out of here before long. Maybe I should be ruthless and Marie Kondo it. Problem for Lou is that these jeans will spark joy, perhaps more so now because she fixed them. And that’s my only measure really – joy.

Nonetheless I won’t be wearing them to the audition tomorrow.

It’s cold in Hampstead and since I’m just snakesitting for Mel, I’m not about to put the heating on. So I’m wrapped up in jumpers having herbal tea and, for the first time in a while, wishing that I was having a good long glass of fine dry red wine. A Chateauneuf perhaps. Which I shall drink python-scarved as I watch the city darken from the hill. Tea will have to do.

I’ve been happy bear and murdery panda and sexy cat all day again. There’s nothing like being cheerful to lighten the mood. And my mood needed lightening. I woke up under the weather.

You know that yearning feeling? I had that. I kept on saying “oh I just wish …” before realising that there was nothing specific that I wished for. I was experiencing a feeling of huge absence. I wasn’t really yearning for anything specific. But I was yearning for it desperately as the rain battered down. Yearning as the wind over the river crashed into the windows and forced flurries through the gaps and into my garret. Yearning as the absence of Proserpine started to make its impact felt in this world.

Perhaps partly it was indeed a yearning for the spring. Partly too for a world less cruel, less smug, less fearful, less righteous, less aggrieved. A kinder world. Also in there, a yearning for those who have gone. A yearning to be free of money worries. All these huge yearnings, all wrapped up in the cold, all packed into my busy head.

So I put another head on. Three other heads. And I danced and sprawled and played with strangers and it was lovely and I can remember the yearning now as the dark closes in, but it no longer lives in my gut.

But I’m feeling spent. Worked out. Tired out. Ready for bed. So I’ll play with this friendly snake for a little while and then just put the light out and hope for better weather on the morrow.

Addendum: I was so knackered I forgot to schedule.

The costume and dressing does a lot of the work for us. We just get to have little cute interactions. It’s better in the daytime, as we can actually see who is on the other side of the glass, through the gauze hole in the nostrils or in the neck.

Perhaps it’s the strip lights and the fact that you have to contort your body to make the head sit right. Perhaps it’s the constant movement and back and forth with strangers and moving around in s confined space. I feel tall and ungainly next to my partner in this who is smaller and younger and fitter than me. And now I’m home I’m knackered.

I’ve got three heads. First is Brown Bear. If he’s on straight I’m blind unless I stuff two pencil cases in the top and then I can see with peripheral vision, but I’ll overheat quickly. Brown bear appears to make an annoying enthusiastic squeaking noise and dances. He’s exhausting. Second is Sad Panda. He’s a bit scary. He’s slower than the bear and seems to growl rather like some idiot actor trying to imitate a Panda. He gets things wrong, holds signs upside down, and is addicted to caramel milk. He’ll likely wave or be fascinated by you. You can cheer him up for a moment but then he’s sad again. Then there’s Sexy Cat. You’re lucky to have sexy cat. Worship sexy cat. Maybe you’ll get a wave. Most likely a scratch. Often you’ll have to wait, particularly if there’s ice cream. “He’s practiced that cat noise,” someone says. I guess I have too… This is my JOB. Or part of it anyway.

I have no idea what the Business Secretary meant when he said that people like me need to get qualifications and get a better job. What a grey world they want to carve. The thing you might be surprised about is that I’m loving this work AND it is cheering lots of people up.

Not only do I have the qualifications, but this ridiculous random piece of work is a sheer delight and is bringing much needed smileage into a world in dark times. I am grinning underneath my unwieldy headpiece for most of the time I’m there, and it’s very rare that someone notices us and doesn’t grin back or wave.

Our window is very small though. Throughout the day we would see people rushing past, full of the thinkings of the moment – perhaps scowling into a phone or maybe lost in distant thoughtplaces. They pass by inches from us without ever knowing we are in the window with the sole mission of doling out unexpected momentary joy. My partner in crime observed it this morning: “It’s a reminder that we need to look for the joy or we don’t find the joy.” She’s so right.

My pride could get involved and scupper my joy here. It isn’t and it won’t. I’m happy to blog about it. It’s actually hard work in those masks despite the fun, and there’s a skill in maintaining things and interacting which I know well over years of street happenings and audience responsive work. I’m glad I can make a fleeting moment of simple stupid joy right now.

But right now I’m getting in the bath to wash the fluff off.

Remember when everybody on the internet started throwing buckets of ice on themselves and then nominating you? That was for ALS. Motor Neuron Disease. It’s a bugger. And it can kill quickly. Another of these desperate side effects of knowing next to sod all about the brain. One thing that has been observed in the treatment of this condition is that the state of mind of the patient can have an effect on the speed of degeneration. So it becomes about finding ways to stay happy.

The artist I’ve been working with today lost her husband to it. While he was suffering, she was making ridiculous and beautiful installations in their home using great big mascot heads and balloons and anything that struck her as fun – just to cheer him up, and thus to prolong his life. Now, at this moment while the world is in the clutch of fears both nameless and well known, she has found a way to brighten up a tiny patch of London for anyone who happens to be passing a particular window, in the same way she brightened up a hard time for both of them as he was slowly taken.

It’s Mayfair Art Weekend. Almost directly opposite Claridges, on Brook Street – that’s where the window is. It’s brightly lit by striplights, and this evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday evening you’ll find me standing with a friend in the window. Or sitting. Or crouching. Or lying. Or attempting to ride an inflatable horse.

I’ll be wearing fashionable clothes, brand new Nike trainers, and one of a selection of great big animal heads. I’ll be rolling on inflatables, or holding up messages, or bothering inflatable animals, or preening myself, or dancing. I’ll be trying to see anyone who stops and looks in the window, and to respond to them, although observers have the advantage of me. My visibility is awful through the mask and dwindles with the light until I just have to guess what the owner of the moving white thing might be doing.

By the end of my first shift on Friday night I was knackered from squinting but happy to be back doing what I do best – something completely random and high energy. This whole business of saying “Yes” first and then asking the details – it occasionally gets me into trouble, but it also brings great joy. This is one of the joyous ones, particularly coming at this time, when the whole world is reeling and employment is as hard to find as joy. I get both. Lucky me.

I knew I was in the right place for me when I arrived at a very big formal looking building in the heart of Mayfair and saw some people throwing an inflatable blue tyrannosaurus out of the window…

It’s 10am and the sun is glorious. I’m in Cardiff, sitting outside Bill’s.

Apart from getting back to London, my work here is done. I had to drop bits of tardis off at the Dream Factory. This involves multiple levels of security, general open suspicion, muted hostility and a bit of carrying. Wearing my gas mask and my chauffeur’s hat I felt as if I was radioactive. Wales is pretty much in lockdown with more to come into force this evening. I wasn’t even sure I was going to get over the Severn successfully based on all you hear in the news. But then the news is mostly utter catshit.

As I drove here through the dawn I was listening to Radio 4 and observing how the daily news is generated. Get somebody on the early show, repeatedly ask them a leading question that fits an agenda, ignore everything but their polite attempt to engage with the stupid question, then roll out that response as news and get people to angrily react to it. Listener reaction is a quantifiable guage of popularity. Outrage is easy to stimulate. Boom, the day ticks over.

Problem is, even though we all know that news isn’t, we still have to get our information from somewhere. Some of our current crop of demagogues are waging war with “mainstream news” because it still occasionally tries to show us how most of the familiar world leaders are walking around with their pants down. The little sites that have set themselves up as legitimate alternative “news” outlets often try to do it in the frame of whistle blowers – “don’t trust the mainstream media!” they encourage you to crow smugly. “We know what’s really going on!” But they can’t be trusted either because the model is the same. Focus on one shaky premise, explode it from every angle, get clicks. And behind a screen in silicon valley is yesterday’s teenager, grinning to himself over his high end skunk as he notices the number of shares go into the millions for the latest iteration of the scary story he made up in his granny’s basement while he was mining bitcoin.

At the heart of it is always the sense that it’s just about to happen. We’ve had decades of things just about to happen that won’t. Today it’s putting asylum seekers into old ferries and creating some sort of floating shanty town. It’s a shift from the gold standard as the basis of currency. It’s fishing rights and zoos. It’s revolution just coming.

Yesterday we all had to stay home for fear of terrorism. Now we stay home for fear of Covid. Presumably the terrorists are staying home too.

As long as there’s something we are made to sacrifice liberty for, then there’s something we can be told has been generated from within to keep us down. Bush vs Osama. Chinese Bats vs American scientists.

Meanwhile the autumn sun is glorious. I’ve got it on my face. I’ve just had a beautiful drive and I have no answers – no more than anyone else really does no matter how convincing (or convinced) they sound. I’m gonna turn around and smash back to London posthaste, and next time I come to this part of the world hopefully it’ll be in kinder times and I’ll be off to do a spot of filming.

Be kind out there. Treat each other well. This too shall pass. I hope.