I needed that! I just got to hang out with people I met through theatre in London who live here in Jersey now. First my actor friend a few days ago, now two more theatre people!
Last time I saw one of them it was towards the end of a Christmas Carol week and it was the night the election results came in and I got so drunk I thought my nose was my toes. He probably last saw me speaking in tongues to a moth. He was doing Carol too, producing it in Brighton – a town I now know so much better than I did then. I tried to loan him some plates. And she was a friend at BarclayHook Towers for those years where Brian and I hosted all the people and fed them fat food and oodles of booze and filled the air with breath and laughing and hugs and fun before it all got wound around a stick. Happy fun times.
In the way that you have to when your major source of income is telling energetic stories for complicated reasons and fun, the three of us started geeking out about all the possibilities of things to be made here on the island. We also just had a really fun talkative and vibrant evening and I remembered for a second how it used to be in the old world. It’s less complicated here in Jersey as they are further along the road to not having to be neurotic about everything. We hugged. There was pie. There was gravy and incredible roast potatoes. It was like the towers, but with a toddler sleeping upstairs.
He’s from Yorkshire. And she’s from Jersey. I mean… It’s a sign. Yorkshire, Brighton, London, Jersey. All of them places that would have rings around them if I was asked to make a map of the UK and mark the places that are significant in my life. And here are two people pulling them together. Maybe it’s more than just a pipe dream that I come back to his place and make beautiful things. Maybe it’s actually what the universe needs me to do for a while, before I go once more to lose myself in the jungles of Argrathoa to teach cockroaches the hokey-pokey.
I am back in my beige room now, and I’m growing to like it here. Perhaps just my mood has been lifted. The old man has done his usual thing. Once I manage to get him to do something, he hides and hopes not to be bothered by me any more. Not this time unfortunately. He’s wasted months like that. Years. Decades. But I’ve got shit to do now and until I can remove him I have to do it through and with him. It’s why I’m here. Likely I’ll have to come and park outside his house. I’ve got a good book.
AlBarclay 