Month: January 2021

Just in time, the doorbell rang. I ordered a ring light. My two halogens are useful for balancing shadow, but I needed a central light and a tripod for my phone and this thing kind of does both. That’s the plus side. In close up it can reflect a halo in your eyes which breaks the world so it needs careful handling. It’ll take me a while to make sense of how to get the best out of it, but I pressed it into service on Zoom this afternoon for its first outing.

A quick meeting. An online recall. My first.

A casting director I like, an actress I kind of recognised called Claire and a director I’ve wanted to meet for a while. All of us, gathered on Zoom, simply for a reaction shot. I literally just had to look from one side of the camera to the other. Loads of money is riding on this. How dare you tell me this is a ridiculous way of earning a living. I bloody love it. When it works. Now we’ve done the thing we came there to do. We’ve looked and it’s been recorded. We will now wait and either hear or not hear. The only comfort is that I know I did enough that any decision will come down to the cut of my face rather than the cut of my jib. It’ll stand or fall on which actors look the best together… I would like to be one of them thankyouplease. But the important part of the waiting game is to try to forget about it. It’s like “The Game” where you can only lose if you remember you’re playing it. Sorry.

Sometimes it can take weeks to hear from an audition one way or another. Often you just watch as day one of the shoot ticks closer, and you only know for sure when it clicks past. If they haven’t told you the shoot dates it’s even less exact.

One time it was two months from a very very strange recall that I got a call telling me I’d be flying to Bangkok. I’d already buried the memory of the meeting and chalked it up to experience. It ended up being the audition where I learnt that my monitor on myself in auditions is probably the worst in the room. That’s cool. Means I can rationally try to forget about it just as soon as I’ve dumped it here. Just don’t ask me if I got it. I’ll probably volunteer it if I did. And if I didn’t I’d probably prefer to forget it ever happened. Just as if I was playing that ridiculous thoughtgame that some of you have just lost because of me.

It’s a big old job right now without a dedicated studio space in my flat. About an hour of moving furniture and setting up lights. Another half an hour of sound-check. Twenty minutes of watching the clock and waiting. Ten minutes in an online waiting room fretting that maybe I wasn’t getting in because of a problem with my internet. About 2 minutes of niceties. About a minute of practice. A minute of shot, with a crucial 1.8 seconds of footage. 30 seconds of polite goodbyes. Then hours of adrenaline unwinding.

A pint or six usually does the trick, but that’s not on the menu. Instead I had a cup of tea and played computer games and suddenly it was evening and I was hungry.

Delivery curry, six episodes of South Park, and now I’m in the bath pushing the last of the adrenaline onto the screen of my phone like this. Yaaaarrrk. Bleeeeeuuuuurgggh.

That’s better.

How was your day?

Today I went back to the electric sanding machine. I piled everything into the middle of the room and covered it all in a dust cover, and then I attacked the ceiling woodwork paint with the sander. It’s all cracked with damp and flaking. You can’t paint on top of it until it’s been sanded down as it’ll come off again, but the plastering is so damaged I keep knocking out chunks of it and making the job bigger for myself. This is going to be harder than it looks. It’s why normal grown-ups with normal jobs go on holiday to Crete and hide the valuables while those nice young men come in and work like slaves for three days sanding and painting and sweating oh my! I’m very tempted to get somebody in myself. My knowledge is lacking and it’s miserable doing this on your own. I keep getting paint flakes in my eyes, and the dandruff of it all was in my hair until just now.

Halfway through the job my agent rang to tell me I’m recalling for one of the self tapes I did last week. It’s on Zoom tomorrow afternoon. So now I suddenly have to stop the job again and turn the room back into an office so I can be unruffled in it tomorrow. A good excuse to pause the works again and set back. It’s a weird life, but if this job lands I hereby swear that I’m going to pay people to finish the bloody room. I’ll leave the valuables out and go to wherever I’m allowed for a few days before coming back to a lovely finished room and a bit less dollar, and I’ll feel like it’s a stepping stone in the game of life.

I won’t envy whoever does it. Even with a gyroscope in it, the sanding machine is very effective but believe me it’s heavy work using it upside down. You have to push this oddly moving vibrating weight into the ceiling above your head while chunks of old paint rain down on you and fill your ears and eyes and collar. I was wearing my grandfather’s Rockall vintage red denim chore jacket – fashionably and effectively dressed darling – and it’s just as well because after twenty minutes it was covered in crap. Twenty minutes is about the limit of my endurance for it right now so I threw the thing off and made tea. My head was spinning from vibration and my arms both hurt from working above my head and I was headrushing from lack of oxygen in a mask that’s actually getting its proper use for a change. I’m not as fit as I thought I was.

The room is a little bit closer to done after a few shifts. A little little bit closer That’s it for now though. I’m going to rebuild the studio tomorrow morning for my zoom meeting. I have a suspicion this is just a sanity check and maybe a chemistry test with the other actors. I’ll get to meet the director and he makes really nice clean stuff so I reckon it’ll be a pleasure. He gets good performances out of people. I’ll just need to look sharp and not be a twit I reckon. Both things I’m capable of, believe it or not – even in auditions.

Right now, bed is calling louder than usual…

It’s very bright in my flat – in direct contrast to how it is in the world. Over the years loads of candles have found their way into here. I always load up whenever I go to Ikea, tons of them tend to just miraculously appear here after Christmas Carol runs are over, and they are generally one of the things that my magpie instinct latches onto. TK Maxx is another repository of waxy columns.

I’ve started to think of my rooms as elementally themed and the living room is certainly fire tonight. I’ve put them everywhere and I’m basking in their glow. I even put them into some antique glass things that look like they’re supposed to hold candles but that explode from heat when the flame gets close to the bottom. Dammit.

They’re terrifically atmospheric as well – like the best budget world-build you can possibly get. Despite what they put on the risk assessment, it’s pretty hard to burn the house down with candles in proper candle holders. I was sad when we weren’t allowed them last time we did Christmas Carol because somebody was frightened of their potential for havok. There’s always a potential for havok in theatre. It just depends which head you put on.

We forget history. They’ve been around for as long as they have because they’re less likely to set fire to the theatre than a birdie with a gel on it is. But you have to have a bucket of sand and all sorts of shenanigans. Usually we do, but last year we had to choose our battles. Even The Globe, when it burnt down it was because of a bit of wadding from a cannon blast getting into the thatch. Using pyrotechnics to wake up the audience during Henry VIII – a pageant. Very much not Shakespeare at his finest.

They get away with candles at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse. (That’s the indoor arm of The Globe). Tickets are like gold dust and so they should be. I’ve only ever managed to get a restricted view seat. Inside the place is swimming in tallow, a true testament to artisanal passion and a faith in old ways. It’s astonishing in there, and they do good work.

God I can’t wait for the theatres to open. Fuck I’d literally chew your arm off for the chance to do a run in that woodysmelling space with all the candles lit.

For now though, I’ll just have to pretend to be other people in my flat, for the fish.

The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Essential trades in an earlier society. Little portable localised flames that don’t poison you and aren’t likely to torch the house. We are clever little monkeys, making such things.

I’ve always been drawn to fire. It’s a human instinct, perhaps. We are the firekeepers. It’s a remarkable thing how we are the only animal that understands it and harnesses it for warmth, for cooking, for light. Sure occasionally we do stupid crap like blow up a load of gunpowder in the dry season for a momentary effect that ends up killing loads of people and wiping out huge portions of ancient woodland. But we are also the only species that thinks we’re clever when we aren’t. It’s fascinating as well as dangerous, this thing that Prometheus stole for us. I can spend hours just staring at it…

As a kid I probably spent more time gazing at sparks as they went up the chimney than I did goggling at the telly. My parents caught on and made it my job to lay and light the fire so the morning room was warm before they woke up. And yes, we had a morning room. I loved that fireplace. I want one in my home. Not a woodburner. An open fire.

It’s joys like that which help make this period bearable, as we work our way through these wintry feardays that I hope will be remembered with a kind of mystified incomprehension a decade from now. “Oh fuck yeah, you remember lockdown…?”

I knew grandpa’s dress uniform would come in handy before long. This was today’s self-tape look – but with the hair in a ponytail to keep it out of view. I was reading for an army major, so it’s all wrong if you’re a purist. I’m in a higher ranking naval uniform… But it made me look right, and more importantly it made me feel right which is all that matters for these things. It’s a scratch at the door.

It’s technically work, auditioning, and I couldn’t do it alone so I drove to Tristan’s. He wore a mask bless him and kept his distance. We got it nailed down and sent off in short order. There’s a lovely fellowship to the self-tape. We’ve both given lots of time for each other over the years. Investing in the knowledge the investment will pay off. We both get generous when we feel flush, and we both try to give the energy we received when we’re helping each other on these home-auditions, so it goes round and round in a lovely karmic circle.

Meanwhile, on the interwebnet, I’m performing in a dramatic monologue – audio only. There’s a digital / online theatre festival. Very much grassroots stuff and some interesting and weird things will be there I have no doubt. The Festival is called The Living Record Festival and it’s live up until the 22nd February, with an opportunity for people to browse and drop in to anything they fancy. My corner of the festival is called Covert Firmament, and my specific piece is called “Read to Me” – here’s the direct link if you have fifteen quid to spare and a little over 12 minutes in the bag. It’s a strange piece and I like it. It was done in my little portable studio through the iPad, microphone on a suitcase covered in towels while sitting facing into a wardrobe in Hampstead on a hot summer’s day. I’ve got pretty good at organising my sound environment so it sounds good even if it looks weird. It was a comfortable recording session, all in one sitting for consistency, and I’m happy with how it all came out. They’ve scored it beautifully, and of course … well I’m marvelous, darling, I always am aren’t I oh dear me yes.

I haven’t really worked out how the festival all works. I’m going to go in tomorrow and virtually stroll around and see what I can find. I reckon it’ll be like Vault Festival but online. Lots of good stuff, lots of weird stuff, lots of stuff stuff. But they got people like The Guardian and The Financial Times to review it, which is testament to how different everything is under Covid. Usually it would have been passed down the list until it dropped off the bottom. But it’s a little ray of light. A little chance for me and mine to put something out into the world again and do that storytelling thing that we’ve decided is the thing we do for money life and joy.

So yeah, an auspicious Sunday. The beginnings of things again. The niggling feeling that perhaps … just perhaps … things are starting to happen again in the world.

Considering the soundtrack for the last few hours has been Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and Leonard Cohen I guess I’ve only got myself to blame if I feel sad. I’m kicking around my lovely flat full of piles of things listening to melancholy music, frequently with a snake on my head. Me and Hex. Solving crimes.

In today’s episode, Hex and Al try to work out who stole the warmth from the world. Hex’s special power is sleeping. Mine is getting distracted. Hardly a dynamic duo. Nothing happens in the episode. The end.

I’m supposed to be recording a self tape so I can go on set and do some lovely filming next month – possibly in North Africa – but today I didn’t have the get up and go to even shave down to a moustache for it. I’ve gone over the lines a few times out of reflex. That’s it. I’ll get it on tape somehow tomorrow because I have to, with beautifully shaved tache and everything. I might even try to persuade a brave friend to help, as it involves a fecking action sequence. Despite this, motivation in the dark has proven elusive. I’m glad of this beautiful flat, I’m surrounded by all sorts of wonderful things, I have lots of devices that provide different forms of distraction in exchange for money. I miss some of the people I’ve lived with over the years who provide me with distraction for free. Company would be nice, even though I’m also relieved that it’s just me in here. I can be antisocial. I can listen to my sad music, burn my stinky incense, and spread my weird cornucopia of junk hither and yon without consequences. I can walk around naked with a snake.

But yeah I’m sad. We all are.

The decision to keep the Christmas decorations up until Candlemas at least means it’s trying to be cheerful here, but I’m still sad. Part of it is circumstance. Lots of my grandparent’s furniture sold at auction this morning for fuckedynothing this morning and I’m as little put out. Better we aren’t paying to store it, sure. But some lovely things sold for absolutely bobbins and it’s sad to think that after charges, grandpa’s bed will yield about £6.50 which I’ll have to split with my brother. It deserved better. I miss him as well. I miss them all in this dark. The buck stops here now… I still don’t like it.

So I’m running a bath, and I cooked up a storm. Teriyaki Salmon with crispy kale quinoa and savoy cabbage. Easily enough for two people, and before you applaud me for my culinary expertise it’s cooking by numbers courtesy of Mindful Chef, the lazy recipe in a bag people. Simple enough to cook even in this funk. Healthy enough that, no matter how demotivated I am, I still get my five a day.

I really want the world back now. And the summer. The summery world. I would like to travel immediately to a hot place and do fuck all there instead. Closest I’m gonna get is this filming. Best work out how I’m going to record the scene I guess. That’s the way out.

This is the fifth anniversary of my blog. Five years ago yesterday I was on the wrong side of the tracks and decided to start sharing the madness of my existence. I didn’t really think it would develop into this, but it has. The unusual and the pedestrian, all mulched together. A record. I like to think it helps make me accountable to myself. I also find it useful for my tax return. And the world needs to know what has happened in the life of everybody’s favourite haphazard antique moving dancing driving falling over spiritual geeky friendly actor. Doesn’t it? Well here goes.

I did a self tape and then I scalded myself on the bum. There you go.

Self tape involved rolling up the bed in the spare room and making a little office boardroom out of a blank wall and a swivel chair.



Then I had to attach my iPad to a tripod and mic it up, and wait for a gap in the drilling opposite. They just wanted a reaction shot, but I bulked it up with words because in an empty room it would’ve felt totally cavernous to just react to somebody who isn’t there. Also as it’s the first tape I’ve sent for some time I didn’t want to turn it in too cheaply. I didn’t cut my hair for it though. It’s long enough to make a greasy little rat tail but last time I tried to trim my own hair I shaved a strip up the middle by mistake. I was on tour. It worked fine for the part to be bald so I got Chris to shave my head on the fire escape. He did a good job despite the laughing.

I sent it off, it went to the client, and immediately another one came in. Are things finally waking up? I really hope so.

Celebrating a good day with a nice boiling pot of chamomile tea, I got Hex out for some exercise / company. I sat down with him twined around my left arm, accidentally dropped the teacup on my lap, shot up in shock trying to take my hot trousers off with a snake on my arm, lost my balance, couldn’t use my arm to stop myself falling over because it had a snake on it, knocked the teapot over with my bum and got more hot tea all over my arse which I was unable to escape from quickly owing to the curious and completely useless cold blooded animal that I had to keep safe from the boiling water. Shortly afterwards I had my scalded bum stuck in a cold stream of water with oblivious Hex happily drooling on my neck. He’s company. Useless company, but company nonetheless. Him and the fish. Some people don’t have any company at all in this. But he’s not great in a crisis, our Hex. And neither are the fish. Better than nothing I guess.

Now I’ve got to learn some actual lines for the other tape. Something to do that isn’t antiques. Oh what a delight. And I’ve got a whole load of furniture that’ll be (hopefully) selling in the morning at Tennants – (and the illuminated manuscript I wrote about). It’s the van load I took up, and at the time I didn’t expect that nobody would be able to go in and actually look at it… Still, it had to go out of the storage, and hopefully it’ll get a price. I often experience seller’s regret the day before a sale, and I’m worrying it’ll all go for nothing. It won’t. All will be well… Even my bum. But it hurts right now.

Two tills in my local Tesco Metro have been replaced with automated robot tills. Fewer staff in there now to be paid, and they can say it’s for our safety. And so it continues.

Hardly anybody is flying anywhere from the UK but when we try you can bet it’ll be hard work. Right now you pay for a test, then you pay for another on the other end. You usually pay for a hotel too where you have to isolate for weeks. But even take Corona out of the equation, it’s gonna be harder to do things now. Visas and documents galore, and you can bet there’ll be a fee. There’s no short term EU touring visa so it’ll be easier for me to take my work to America than to go on an EU tour. There’ll be fees for all of that as well though – you can bet. Fees fees fees. Tests and certificates and forms, oh my. All the infrastructure, all coming in to bleed us dry if we want a sense of freedom.

Meanwhile the internet is falling. Given to us for free by Tim Berners-Lee, other people have made it into a horrible place where we mostly go to get radicalised or to buy stuff. AI algorithms are pushing us into little intolerant clumps where we pat each other on the back in tiny circles, and defend ourselves against outsiders – we are basically splitting into tribes with no view to geography. The language and rhetoric of war is slipping in where ideas are concerned: “Whose side are you on?” “It’s treason!” “It’s a revolution!” Also the language and methods of religion are getting applied to random world-views. Zealots with no theoretical basis and no hard first hand evidence attack anything they think of as faithlessness or complacency or heresy against their prophets either behind a lectern on national TV, or in front of a flag on YouTube.

It’s all fine for all the megarich colonists of the internet. So long as people keep watching the YouTube clips and clicking the adverts it doesn’t matter what they are getting excited about – just that they are getting excited. So they let the algorithms keep on polarising.

It’s an easy formula. “You have an unexamined belief. That unexamined belief is provably incorrect. Therefore everything you believe is wrong and should be replaced with what I want you to believe.” My first crack was dad’s death. I drove my own wedge. “You thought your dad will last forever. He’s dead. What about your other assumptions? That your mum is immortal too? That you’re immortal? That you’re even important? That you can make change in the world? What about the people that you believed on TV? Nothing can be trusted! Examine everything! Question everything!” I hit depression for a long time and then came out of the long rabbit hole wide angled as a kind of chaos-positive radiator. But I was lucky. Lots of us were. Nobody took advantage of our cracks when they happened. We took ourselves through our long processes and came back stronger and stranger with slightly harder eyes. Others weren’t so lucky.

Catch ’em at the right time. Find the crack. Drive the wedge. Welcome to the fold, soldier.

And yet there’s something in all this frothing at the mouth we’re seeing, even if some of the mouthpieces are idiots, extremists or zealots. The erosion of personal freedoms, once a gradual chipping process, has turned into a landslide. Nobody could miss it.

It’s nine years since ID cards were scrapped in the UK after public outcry. Not even a decade. Since then, the vast majority of people including myself have clicked agreements for the sake of convenience which make your phone into much more of an ID card than anything we fought against in 2011. And now the machines are moving in properly. This disease has caused a lot of us to get used to just living on handouts, to constantly obeying and enforcing tiny rules, to walking in smaller and smaller circles, to switching off personal ambition. Rushed laws are put through that have unpleasant consequences long after this disease is understood and controlled. The people shouting about it the loudest also posted something last week saying that Donkeys Are Actually Aliens, or The Pyramids Were Built By A Giant Octopus Cat. But even a stopped clock tells the time twice a day.

Tim Berners-Lee is making a new internet it seems. That’s the advantage of having him still alive. Get stuck in! Fascinating. Internet mark 2. And why not start again? Early days but interesting stuff. I’m regretting giving so much of my information away, and you’re hearing that from the dude who has written about his life daily for over four years now. I’m in.

One of my old friends is driving for Amazon now – when he isn’t making movies. He’s the one I know about. I bet loads of people are doing it these days. It’s one of the only jobs in town. We are still allowed to deliver things.

With that in mind I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground for little driving gigs, and I found one today. Specialist delivery service, undercutting the big name couriers while paying myself better than they pay their drivers and charging the client less. It amounted to me buzzing west in an Audi full of cushions. We got the job done. The job was a laundry bag full of dead butterflies, going from London to Leominster. I resisted the temptation to peek into the bag and check they were ok on arrival. I expect they were though. I certainly hope so. The only bumps I encountered were on the driveway to the stately home for the drop off. A beautiful building, far from the road and surrounded by empty land – gargoyles, great big pipes and a huge studded wooden door. All I need is a Euromillions win. Unfortunately I couldn’t go in. I left the delivery in the porch, despite desperately needing the loo. These are cruel times. There’s no stopping for butties or to sit in a warm pub for a hot chocolate, or for a coffee by the river, or even for a wee. Half the public loos are closed and the other half have barbed wire.

Rather than go straight home, I broke my journey for a walk – and maybe to inspect a tree. It’s not the shortest drive, London to Hereford, and it was dark and I was tired. With the enforced inhospitality, I hadn’t had a chance to shake off the journey there before I started on the journey back. I needed a hit of cold air and a bit of a walk to make sure I didn’t drive into an oak. So I went to Ledbury and hiked in the dark to the top of Raggedstone Hill.

Raggedstone Hill has a curse, so it’s probably best avoided in the light anyway. A horny monk called John got busted and refused to divest the name of his lover. He was made to crawl up and down the hill every day until he repented and dobbed her in. He refused to tell, and eventually died of infected wounds one November. As he was dying he called up a cursed mist that brings untimely death to those caught in its shadow. In the dark there are no shadows, and it’s the wrong time of year anyway. Plus it’s bollocks.

Even in the dark it’s a heck of a view up there, that’s for sure. Gloucester, Exeter, Cheltenham all splayed out twinkling in the night.

Behind me as I took this photo lay the pitch black of rural Hereford melting into Wales. No light that way. It’s a powerful old part of the country though. I like it out there, towards The Willow Globe, which even the vicar said was “a thin place”.

I’ll be out to Hereford again I’m sure, in kinder times – for walks and maybe even for company. I have friends in Ledbury, but we can’t sit round the fire and talk crap until we know we aren’t going to kill each other or get arrested or both.

Long walkies.

By the beach at Lancing, The Perch is still selling breakfast butties to people in the outside world. Very welcome they were too in this godawful freezing cold. We had to sit in the car to eat them because of the wind. But the fact they existed at all in this environment is a blessing. The sunshine hasn’t stuck around and the wind is up. We walked around and looked at things as I got progressively colder and colder.

Arundel Cathedral was open and empty. I lit a candle for the world, and another for my mother – likely still in purgatory somewhere if I judge things by her belief structure. Every candle helps if she is. I lit another candle for the world. Mother earth. And all the creeping things like us. We need all the help we can get. A candle, technically, is not helping. But it’s the thought that counts.

Oh it’s very nice in Arundel isn’t it darling, just so awfully pleasant. Empty streets and terribly expensive houses, and isn’t that an attractive priory and gracious me such a big castle and well of course we’ll have to have a cathedral to make it a proper city darling. It seems as if every shop is a shop that sells antiques. “I’ve got something like that,” I was saying, or “How the hell can they justify a price tag of £420 for that Edward VII silver gravy boat!”

They’re all shut, of course. Everything is shut. We peered in through the windows like dusty Victorian children. Maybe we shouldn’t have been in Arundel at all, but we were. And It helped. I’ve been going slowly insane on my own in the cold and dark. We all have. I chose to break out and to prioritise my mental health. Going for walks helps stop the crazy spiral.

We found a quiet beach at Climping. A sandy beach covered in ruined breakwaters and abandoned works and rocks with strange graffiti. By now the sun was falling, and the wind – constant all day – was cutting to our bones. Determined to remain outside for as long as possible we picked our way through the boulders and abandoned structures, banking a kind of joyful hypothermia for later. But for it wind it would’ve been glorious.

Now back at Lou’s, here I lie on sheepskin directly in front of a radiator refusing to go more than three foot away from the heat, the heat, the heat. I’m going to have a hot bath, a hot curry and a warm bed. A holiday in the sun would really hit the spot right now, but it’s just not possible. I wish it were. The world is so much less wonderful when it’s less possible. And all these short sighted blocks on travel from the UK that are triggering nothing because nothing is happening right now – they’re going to make everything much much worse when this is all over.

We are climbing back towards the warmth and the light though. There’s a way to go.

Our boots were covered in mud, and I was frozen right to my marrow despite activity, cashmere and walking. I’d much sooner have been walking in Greece…