Month: April 2021

I just got sent a picture of an ultrasound with a head in it.

There’s been a lot of death recently so I’m thrilled. Tomorrow I’m auditioning for a show that’s going to be about a man in the throes of denial of his own mortality. Friends have been losing parents, parents have been losing friends. For decades now I’ve had a good handle on the finality of death. I haven’t liked it but I’ve known his touch on those dear to me. I’ve looked him in the face a couple of times. I feel his work around me. In this town it’s hard to avoid encounters, on the roads or coming out of the house next door. In the river, over the bridges, in the parks. But so it goes.

A week ago I was shoveling shit into a trough. The stinking moldering wreck of something that was once living, hurled into a trough where it will become the spark that ignites new life. For ever, we go round and round. One spirit moves on, one spirit comes in. The cycle. The endless river.

A new life and not for want of trying. It has a head. But then the question – when is it truly alive? We know that question so well. It’s somehow managed to get tangled up in politics across the pond. It’s tricky and arbitrary to set a date on it. It has been there long enough for it to be officially okay to say it’s there to your friends. It has a head. When are we truly alive? And so too on the other side. When are we dead? Is it when we give up on life? Or is it when we stop moving? I’ve met plenty of dead people over the years, and some of them appear to be quite happy.

This headed thing will be alive and will be happy too, I should imagine. It’s lucky enough to have appeared in the existence of wonderful people this time round. Right now as it grows perhaps it knows more than us of where it has been before but soon it’ll just be part of the daily drive for food and shelter, with the optional extras like “Where’s my shirt,” and “I’m nervous.”

One in, one out, and it makes me happier still that I’m off to Jersey now to finally stop the ghost of my father screaming at me about what a ninny I’ve been for twenty years. I was a late arrival in his life, he was an early departure from mine. There’s a lot of crucial information that didn’t get imparted. I’m still playing catch-up, but only after deciding quite arbitrarily who I was going to be within the freedoms his life gave me, and being it quite loudly and perhaps a bit too selfishly for ages. I haven’t ushered one of these little lives into the world – quite the opposite – I’ve been fucking careful not to. But I’ve been alive along the way, and I fully intend to continue to be alive and more so as we switch back into being able to see each other. I will get to know this tiny human. We will be friends as I tumble to decrepitude.

For now though I’m going to go to a movement workshop tomorrow morning, which might be enough to kill me after months of apple crumble and beef pie. At ten fifteen I’ll probably be running on the spot or pretending I’m spaghetti boiling in the pot while trying to remember a speech about death from Shakespeare that I’ve never used as an audition speech before but which just … feels like it might be right… I expect I’ll be exhausted by noon. Here we go, back into the world.

Bed first. Mao is waiting.

The ferry is finally booked. I’ve been waiting for my SEISS payment but then the sailing I wanted suddenly filled up so I went and put the next one on my credit card instead. There’s all sorts of red tape that I’ll have to go through and work out before I get there but that’ll wait. I have never even had a lateral flow test, least of all a PCR. I’m going to experience both of these wonders in the next week. I’m not even sure which one of them involves having something shoved all the way up your nose. Either way, I have to get to Jersey, so I’ll just have to have some sort of unpleasantness acted upon me in order to tick the boxes.

They don’t let us sit in our cars either, which I’d be fine with despite the smell and the clanking. You have to pay extra depending on the level of “comfort” you wish to subject yourself to. For just a tenner you get to sit in everybody’s feet, shoulder to shoulder with six people who hate you. For the princely sum of £20 you get to travel Club Class, which just means there’s a coded door into your special room full of feet and rage, where the chairs are bigger. I paid for it though. There are plug sockets in those big chairs and you get free coffee. A cabin with a door would’ve been £130 but it’s the colour of sick to make it easier to clean and it’s the size of a shower cubicle. I’d sooner sleep in the bed of Procrustes.

I still haven’t a clue where I’m staying. I’m hoping I’ll be able to cheerfully impose on family but it’s hard to cheerfully impose on anybody at the moment considering other human beings are terrifying disease ridden filthbags who want you dead. Chances are I’ll have to book a hotel for the first two weeks and then cheerfully impose on family once they can be sure I’m not going to give them death-cooties.

For now I’m enjoying my last couple of days of gentle home life, me and the animals, before I have to farm them off to their various carers and hit the land of difficult forms and numbers and stuff just on the other side of the English Channel. A month in Jersey. Land of my birth.

I’m looking forward to it. If money was no object I honestly think I’d have moved back there by now. The climate is better and even though it’s small I find it less cloying than The Isle of Man. Plus the sea is much better for swimming. I might even get to go in there.

First though I’ve got a theatre workshop audition on Friday morning. Heavens! All spaced out and distanced in Ealing. Two hours of movement while staying away from each other. I’m supposed to wear soft shoes and I literally don’t think I own any. I’ll need to get up into the attic and dig. Surely there’s a plimsoll in a bag there somewhere, unloved and hopeful…

With all this in mind, I’m getting an early bed. So is Mao.

I can see the floor again in the room that used to be my bedroom. This is excellent, and something of a development. I’ve been using it as a storage area for things I didn’t know what to do with and for rarely worn clothes. Now at least the clothes are all in a pile for sorting and I’ve mostly worked out what to do with the things I didn’t know what to do with. That involved a few bin bags.

There’s a trunk of my uncle Peter’s belongings that he must have packed up when he left school. It hasn’t been opened since. Fifty years. Exercise books, work experience detritus, a little plastic wheel that makes it easier to convert shillings into new pence. Letters in the very familiar scrawl of my grandmother, who is still speaking eloquently to me from the back of paintings and notes pushed into old vases. Letters in the tighter and more formal hand of my grandfather the diplomat who never really wrote to me if it wasn’t on business. Stupid joke Valentine’s cards from my mum to her brother just like the ones she would send me. Applications for work by a school leaving Peter with a primped up CV. Bank statements. Not as many tissues and rennies as the older version of Peter was used to hiding for me to find, but still plenty of rubbish. And amongst them, a few old photos. They slowed me down, those photos. I became curious. Mum the teenager…

Here’s my favourite, taken perhaps before a garden party at Buck House, if I recognise those railings.

Four of the departed. Mum distracted. Danda concerned. Da telling Danda what to do. Peter arrogant. An animated little moment, taken long before I was born. When we die, nobody will stumble on our Facebook photographs, or the ones stored in our phone or in that Dropbox you keep meaning to clear space in. We will find paper photos by mistake and look into the faces of our progenitors and wonder what we never knew about them. Anyone that follows us will have to have a device, or a password, and is going to have to knowingly open a folder marked “photos”. Our moments will not be so transferable or so easily discovered by mistake. It’ll make throwing our stuff out a little easier I guess. I’m glad I saved this one from the bin. I found a contemplation within it.

I’m now at the age where normally the mortality of my parents would be brought to mind. My old friend Alexander lost his mummy this morning to cancer. At least four other friends have said their last farewell this pandemic, and only one with Covid. There they are staring at us full of life, and here we are, still in the stream, reading their life with ours. While we have it.

Grab that fucker, my loves. Grab it and ride it joyfully through all the noise we’re hearing and do not go softly and carpe the fuck out of it all and wheeeee. It’s GOOD. It really is and all the things are momentary. This is it, boys and girls. And then somebody is looking at it and wondering. So long as they can find the folder.

Humphrey would be proud of me. I appear to be going to Mornington Crescent almost every day. It’s a part of London I first learnt about in the stupid game of the same name on radio four. Like many places, the reality is not as romantic as the idea. It’s basically an extension of Camden High Street. One fine summer evening I thought I was going to get knifed by a ratboy called Sid as I tried to have a pint in the outside seats of The Lyttleton Arms – named for Humphrey the inventor of the game. Sid wanted to sell us his drugs so badly he got very angry when we honestly weren’t interested. Many a night I’ve been in the Lyttleton without such happenings, but it’s always the weird ones you remember isn’t it?

Living in London I got used to expecting these strange or lovely or upsetting or wonderful encounters with angry or broken or happy or bizarre people. There are just so many in this metropolis and when the barriers go down they go down completely. Even going through my phone, the numbers are saved with little stories… “Lils Random Train Girl” I can’t remember this at all. “Steve Waterloo Suicide Watch” – hell yeah I remember him. He was in a dark place – I caught his eye and reflexively asked if he was ok as the darkness was so visible. I bought him some drinks at Vaulty Towers and we talked for hours. Love and money – the combination, both going wrong at the same time. I think I was flush at the time so I got him dinner and put him on the train home. We texted the next day. I hope he sorted it out for himself somehow. “Dark Hair Drunk Snog Gideon Reeling” … well yeah. That kind of speaks for itself really. I remember her. I remember the night. There was a dog and a pub and a walk and a kiss. I didn’t ring that number because I couldn’t remember her name and I was ashamed. Our phone holds all these records, stored up in the cloud now and passed from device to device so they’re never truly lost unless we delete them. All these little digital memories in a little rectangle in our pocket. They’re all we’ve got of that open crazy world for now. The nightlife and the buzz that swings me round the city at night. In sober years just as much as in drunk ones I was eating up sensation here and probably remembering it even better. The drunk memories often devolve when I follow them too far into flashes of one of a million different late night dives. Bad music and worse wine at stupid prices. Faces in the half light drawling out ideas forgotten as soon the dawn breaks.

I miss it though. When I was working it was most nights, after the show, pissing it up the wall as I forgot there are other ways of winding out adrenaline. Six foot tall and male I could mostly get about at night with nothing but misplaced confidence and a loud voice. Despite some of the areas I’d be staggering around in I’ve very rarely hit a snag. I’ve only seen one knife pointed at me so far. I’ve been pickpocketed about three times, but two of those times I think I might have just dropped it. Either way I just don’t have a wallet anymore and that solves that one. But I still miss it. The throngs. The noise. The heat. The mess. We have been without for so long that it has started to smell romantic… It isn’t. It’s horrid.

I’m glad I’ve quit booze in the quiet time. It’s going to be harder now if things switch back on. But the worst bit is signed off.

And I went to Mornington Crescent again. So I’ve won.

About a week ago I went online to Amazon Prime. I was looking for something for The Chairman to scratch, after noticing be had his eyes on other items of furniture in the house. I bought him a Piupet 38cm cat scratching board. It sits on the ground in a little circle, and it comes with two little sachets of drugs. Catnip. The good stuff.

It arrived the next day and I really didn’t expect anything of it. It was twenty quid and it was money I was happy to burn for the chance of having my furniture safe from claws. I opened it up, lay it down and filled it with catnip. Immediately Mao was rolling in it, scaring himself with his own fun. Now he sleeps in it all the time.

When Tom came and stayed last week I gave him my room and I went on the sofa. I brought the board through to the living room as I know he loves to be near me, and I’m trying to wean him away from the spare room. We slept happily in the living room with his little circle under my butsudan in the living room.

Last night I forgot to bring the circle back into my room. I also left the living room light on. Mao woke me up so many times in the night that I actually can’t count them. It took me a long time for my muzzy head to work out what he was pissed off about. I just assumed he wanted cuddles, and so would muzzilyb cuddle him until he was purring and then go back to bed optimistically. But no, he wanted his pad in the same room as me, in the dark. He was not going to rest until he made it so. He’s an old man and he is very capable of making it abundantly clear when things are not as he would like them to be. He’s also a big softie, so I solved it for him and he was immediately happy.

I rose late this morning. Sunday lie in. Probably about 11. I have been going about my business all day and Mao has been sleeping like a rock in his little circular board in my room. He barely stirs when I pass him. It’s now half past nine. About ten minutes ago I heard him snore so hard he shocked himself awake. Now he’s looking at me, but he hasn’t got the energy yet to demand cuddles. There’s a whole can of tuna waiting for him in the kitchen and he hasn’t even looked. It can’t be a bad life, being Mao. Just a lack of dietary variation. A cat makes a home. I’ve really started to understand that. First Pickle, so gentle and affectionate and willful. Now Mao, habitual and robust and hairy. They both bring a great deal, especially in these times. They make movement harder. But we learn to compromise over time with these things, and Lou will have him for the Jersey trip and that will work out fine.

And for anybody who needs cat scratchy things, I’ve got to recommend the piupet. It’s getting hard use so I’m not sure how long it’ll survive. But it’s great, and he immediately understood that it was his.

The day started with a zoom meeting in bed. I’m past the stage now where I put a green screen up and make it look like I’m in a jungle or a disco or on a beach. That was 2020 zoom. Now I’m happy to show the cracks. Great big coffee mug, visible duvet, lump of ormolu behind me, talking about Buddhism.

It was a little connection with the local Buddhists, only one of whom I’ve actually seen in person for over a year now. It’s always good to know people in your neighbourhood, especially considering I don’t have many friends in my geographical area. This practice that I’ve adopted when I remember does encourage people to reach out to those around us. There are no temples – we use each others homes. Perhaps if I’d been more diligent in attending meetings like the one I went to this morning, I’d have found somebody to pop over to mine and feed Hex once a week. That has been my worry. Feeding him can be reasonably involved, with all the puppetry. But I found an angel. Flavia is going to take him on, God bless her. The only shit bit is that she lives inside the Congestion Charge area so I’ll have to stump up to get him there. But I’m glad he’s going to a safe home.

Buddhism completed and a long day of nothing was looming large when the phone rang.

Tristan has a garden. He got one of those sexy American gas barbeques for his fortieth. I’ve had sausages in my fridge from a trip to the butcher. An impulse led to the perfect Spring day as four of us sat at opposite ends of a little back garden in Richmond shoving down meat as the cherry blossom blew in the breeze. It made me realise how thoroughly I’ve decoupled myself from what little social ability I once had. I felt weird, sometimes a bit panicky, even. I’m sure all sorts of rubbish came out of my mouth unguarded. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert by preference, this pandemic has pushed us all to a kind of introversion. I seem to spend large portions of my days stroking a cat and mumbling to myself. Jersey will do me good, once I’ve worked through the quarantine period which might be horrible. Great to see some old friends though and do something traditionally sociable for a change. A barbeque. Who knew it would be so unusual.

It’ll take us years to get good at big groups again, I fear. I’m home, recharging and running myself a bath. I’ll book the ferry tomorrow…

The part was a very familiar person to me – much like most of my mother’s hilarious and bold friends when I lived with her as a teenager just down the river from here. She wouldn’t like to be described as a lady who lunched, but she would definitely pull an excellent Carrie Bradshaw impression in the more interesting Boho joints that still hadn’t quite been driven out of Chelsea by the Cadogan Estate’s war on Indie. White wine at 2pm and hold the food. I was, I think, able to give compassionate and helpful thoughts to hone the best tape I could this time. It felt like it would be awesome casting for my friend. I really hope it lands. I think it might.

Driving home I got a call from my agent telling me I’m auditioning for The Tempest – an R&D but paid and a bit of theatre in his horror. It’s a year to the day since Lou watched me online with Hex jamming it as Alonso on Zoom, and was motivated to open a conversation in the comments section here. I certainly wasn’t writing this in order to have that effect but it seems this blog has brought nice things into my life. I’m glad of it. There’s been a few ructions, mostly in the drunken ranty days. Remember those? Pissing people off on purpose. Man maybe I should just bang myself in the head a few times before I write just so we can all remember what it was like. But I’m not really feeling angry with anybody at the moment. I guess I haven’t seen anyone.

But yeah, so a workshop audition on the last day of this month and then off on the ferry to the land of my birth in early March. I’ve been making calls and getting information and trying so hard to get to the bottom of the difficult thing I have to understand out there today. The more I do it the easier it becomes. It will be untangled now, and soon. It must be.

The theatres are starting to open a bit, bringing small clumps of bruised and suspicious humans through their impressive hallways and into their pokey rehearsal rooms once again, with buzzers if they get too close to one another. The smell of tea and feet. Table work for weeks and then missing the table work for weeks. A stage manager whose whole job is to shout “Covid” at all your ideas. Possibilities bandied and crystallised and guided towards and amplified and cut. It’s likely going to be a decent summer as the chances of work start to improve at long last. Not the best time to consider upping sticks and fucking off to Jersey. But it’s time. Past time. And the border opens on the 26th. I’m going to blow every penny of my next SEISS payment trying to finally slice through the Gordian knot I’ve inherited. I’m inches away from booking it now but travel – even on a car ferry – is hard. I’m just going to the Channel Islands and it’s like I’m visiting a prison from a leper colony. I have to pay for travel insurance. Money in the pocket of the insurance company. I have to pay for 3 PCR tests at whatever price they decide to set for them in Jersey. That’ll probably be a couple of hundred quid to whichever of Boris’s cronies got the contract. Day 0 test. Apparently they’ll accept one done over here. Day 3 test. Presumably it’ll have to be sent to me wherever I manage to quarantine myself. Ditto day 10 then wait for result. I won’t get out of jail for ten days after a £300 ferry ticket. I’m hoping I’ll be able to go to jail somewhere nice but money… All the stuff I’ve been able to find online involves indoor space and if I don’t have access to something outdoors for 10 days it’ll kill me. I’m hoping family over there can help. It’s all so up in the air right now. But I have to go, while things are still slow, or I’ll lose out on work down the line when it really starts to move again – and it will. The ice caps are melting.

Lou is gonna take Mao which works brilliantly as she frequently catsits two pedigree ragdolls one of which demands goat’s cheese at 3am every night. Mao just wants evening cuddles and to be asleep where he can hear you. And something to mangle.

The fish have an automatic feeder and light. The snake? Within a week I need to find somebody that likes reptiles and doesn’t mind puppeting a dead mouse every once in a while. I’ll drop him round with food and show you how it’s done. Any takers?

I’m likely to book it tomorrow or the next day at the latest for price, and leave before the end of the month for a full calendar month out there. Boom.

The theatres are starting to open a bit, bringing small clumps of bruised and suspicious humans through their impressive hallways and into their pokey rehearsal rooms once again, with buzzers if they get too close to one another. The smell of tea and feet. Table work for weeks and then missing the table work for weeks. A stage manager whose whole job is to shout “Covid” at all your ideas. Possibilities bandied and crystallised and guided towards and amplified and cut. It’s likely going to be a decent summer as the chances of work start to improve at long last. Not the best time to consider upping sticks and fucking off to Jersey. But it’s time. Past time. And the border opens on the 26th. I’m going to blow every penny of my next SEISS payment trying to finally slice through the Gordian knot I’ve inherited. I’m inches away from booking it now but travel – even on a car ferry – is hard. I’m just going to the Channel Islands and it’s like I’m visiting a prison from a leper colony. I have to pay for travel insurance. Money in the pocket of the insurance company. I have to pay for 3 PCR tests at whatever price they decide to set for them in Jersey. That’ll probably be a couple of hundred quid to whichever of Boris’s cronies got the contract. Day 0 test. Apparently they’ll accept one done over here. Day 3 test. Presumably it’ll have to be sent to me wherever I manage to quarantine myself. Ditto day 10 then wait for result. I won’t get out of jail for ten days after a £300 ferry ticket. I’m hoping I’ll be able to go to jail somewhere nice but money… All the stuff I’ve been able to find online involves indoor space and if I don’t have access to something outdoors for 10 days it’ll kill me. I’m hoping family over there can help. It’s all so up in the air right now. But I have to go, while things are still slow, or I’ll lose out on work down the line when it really starts to move again – and it will. The ice caps are melting.

Lou is gonna take Mao which works brilliantly as she frequently catsits two pedigree ragdolls one of which demands goat’s cheese at 3am every night. Mao just wants evening cuddles and to be asleep where he can hear you. And something to mangle.

The fish have an automatic feeder and light. The snake? Within a week I need to find somebody that likes reptiles and doesn’t mind puppeting a dead mouse every once in a while. I’ll drop him round with food and show you how it’s done. Any takers?

I’m likely to book it tomorrow or the next day at the latest for price, and leave before the end of the month for a full calendar month out there. Boom.

This’ll be once I’ve got the Oscar. I’ll be there on the couch talking about my history. They’d have done their research. They’ll tell me where I went to school. “It’s not like you were shoveling shit for money before this role though, is it?” I’ll uncross my legs. This has all been agreed with the producers and rehearsed but we are pretending it hasn’t. “Well, it’s funny you should say that, because actually…”

One and a half tons of organic compost. Horse shit, cow shit, anything you like shit. There it sat on a pallet in a driveway. They must have taken it there by forklift. One huge canvas bag, brimming with the stuff.

It was out the front. It needed to go through the house into the back. This involved shovels and plastic buckets. At least it was a nice day.

Loam. That deep rotten solid ancient smell. You smell it with your cheeks. The rot that brings the life. Part slick and part crumble. We got stuck in. It gets everywhere. It was in my nails and over my clothes. In my hair. On my face. I’ve just got out of a hot bath and a good scrub. Hard work, it was, schlepping it all – hard work but worth it. They’ll get tomatoes out of that slimy muck. It’s a great big planter they’ve got.

And I was glad of the work. Good to get my hands dirty again. I’ve always been a great fan of the random thing to do for cash, and I wondered when I’d get to add “shoveling shit” to the ever growing strange list. And I love a bit of graft. Reminds me I’m alive. There hasn’t been enough of it this year.

Before I shoveled the shit I sent off the least aspirational selftape of my long career to date. Needs must when the devil drives, and I did just tell my agent I’ll do anything but porn so I’ve got to stand by my word. It might actually turn out to be a lovely thing, and either way it’ll get me out of it house and into doing something creative again, and it’ll pay almost twice what I just earned hauling compost. Maybe it’ll land. It’s getting wearing now, this business of sending tapes that don’t land. Sure, they’re mostly for commercials which are always a crapshoot. But it’s time for a good roll of those dice. Maybe not the job I’ve just sent for though. I’m after the one that’s coming that makes sense of all the gaps, that leads me to that couch where I can talk about the shit I shoveled today.