Month: November 2021

After another hour and a half long appointment at the dentist I wasn’t certain if Lou was gonna have the energy for any adventures, but the changing seasons provided enough bait to get us out. It’s very easy to get to the Great Wood at Stanmer if you have a car, even though Brighton City Council have finally caught on that they can make money by charging people to park nearby. A year ago all the car parks were free – and most of them didn’t exist. Now people have come with diggers and they all carry a price tag. We used to throw the car up on a verge just by the derelict house, then wander past the church and see if juicy Simon was there for apple juice before striking up the hill. Now we either have to get into an expensive car park just down from the refurbished house, or – much better – to go to a reasonably priced car park a bit further away and then walk through the woodland to the same places.

I’ve been quietly aware of it even in London, but these are the days of spectacular autumn, upon us now fully. The wind and the rain have not yet been foul enough to strip the branches so we are at equilibrium. Half the leaves are still attached, dramatically dying like sopranos – shocking with their colour and beauty even as they take their long last gasp. The other half are down already, dead in the first act, coating the pathways and waiting.

Last time we went to these particular avenues it was the bluebells and the hope of a good summer to come. Today it was the leaves, so many, so bright as they go back to the soil. The cycle. And yes, the promise of a winter very soon now. Maybe snow. The cold. A time of rest, and nurture. Or panto.

I’ll be in Jersey so soon, so soon. God. Before I know it. Not quite panto but a Christmas show. And I’ll be there until after Christmas. I’d better make sure I’ve packed or everything’ll sneak up on me again and I’ll do my usual thing of throwing everything close to me into a case at random and arriving with no socks.

For today though, Stanmer and the woodland.

Not many people about. It was a damp afternoon, and a working day. I’m just done for the week and lucky enough to be self employed and knowing loosely how my next month will pan out. We just slowly walked through shocks of colour we found, enjoying one another’s company. Lou won’t be in Jersey for long so time with her is at a premium. I was supposed to be going to the theatre this evening but I gave away my ticket when I looked at my diary and realised how little we would be able to see each other before I leave. Better to wander around and exist alongside each other. It’s a full moon as well. I love the autumn. If only it wasn’t getting so damn cold.

And the miles are eaten up once more taking me back down to Brighton. I should have probably got a hybrid car instead of Bergman. All this talking about how we can be more aware of the things we destroy in our endless quest for convenience, and then I drive to the coast with a petrol engine. Maybe I should get the train. Even though it costs too much.

As I was driving down I was listening to Radio 4 reporting the train wreck of HS2 being abandoned to Leeds and I was curious. Everything on the news was focussing on the broken promises. Surely the story is rounder?

I remembered a story about the young architect who built the Natural History Museum. It was his first big commission. The planned interior and exterior was packed with beautiful featured ornate stonework and detail. Apparently the architect had an old friend who had been around the block with public works. “They’ll suddenly cut your budget two thirds of the way through the work. Build the beautiful detail first and store them in a warehouse. If the detail is not already made, it’s the thing you’ll end up having to cut.” He did so. They cut the budget. The museum lost a wing, but kept the exquisite ornament.

There’ll be people in Leeds kicking themselves that they didn’t insist that the work started in the North and went down South. There’s no way they wouldn’t link it to London that way. I’m sure the public officials and commuters of Leeds feel hung out to dry, but I’m also interested to know about the objectors and campaigners – the naturalists and the environmentalists. None of the visible news takes them in yet. None of the talking heads on BBC 4 today said “Well, there’s a stretch of extremely valuable ancient woodland that we have been trying to preserve, and we are over the moon about the plans being dropped.” Swampy is in a tunnel somewhere, dancing around with joy. If the news wanted to put a positive spin on things it would likely be easy to find a level headed naturalist to take that standpoint. Despite the destruction of so much nature already, at least a pocket of the north will keep some of its long lived forestry, at the cost of another 20 minutes journey time for those people who get sucked back into the “Live Work Die” model that we are encouraged to campaign for.

At least the negative spin to this news proves that the thing your rabid friend disparages as “the main stream media” is turning on this slippery bunch of salesmen. They’ve been astonishingly forgiving as we’ve watched them take so much, chip by chip by chip. It seems the worm is turning. The papers are never going to start cheering for Starmer, but I think they’ll start baying for Boris’s blood soon.

My work for the power network is done now. It’s done. Hooray. The last session was sadly a pretty disengaged bunch, but I feel like I did as good a job as I could under the circumstances, and with the material I had. Sixteen is a terrible age to be. It’s hard to be interested in anything. I just hope they don’t all end up flipping burgers.

Digging tunnels… There’s interesting stuff down there. They found important Roman remains while excavating a graveyard, that would never have been found otherwise. And presumably they also demolished the Norman Church. “Hey everybody, look at these statues!” *Bang*

I can really feel the approach of winter. Hard to believe I’ll be in Jersey again soon, and for the whole of December. I’m kind of looking forward to it. It’ll be a good chance to get the heck out of this town. There’s a lot of weird energy floating around here.

My day off was not as restful as I had dreamt. I’ve been helping a friend in need, but within that I’ve kind of forgotten to take my own needs into account. Right now I’m about an hour away from my flat full of yummy food and I’m starving but too pragmatic to order food here when I have a butcher-cut ribeye in the fridge with a load of asparagus and new potatoes. It’s half six. It’s a relatively tense situation I find myself in, and I have a low level of anxiety because of it. That tightness around the chest. Plus I’m hungry which is probably why I’ve got slight shakes. Nervous energy and the fact I’ve eaten nothing but a croissant all day.

Looking out the window helps though. The colours are momentarily deep and rich on the trees. Leaves are turning through orange and yellow and brown before collapsing into thick heaps in the roads. The skies are clear enough and the days are calm enough that even here in the concrete jungle I can find moments to connect to something a little older. I’d like to have gone out and walked in nature though. It’s been a very urban day. I’m looking forward to getting back down to Brighton tomorrow.

It’s odd though because my whole day has been taken up with something I can’t write about.

—

I went home. I cooked the most incredible steak, with new potatoes and raclette cheese, and asparagus. Then I got an unexpected and fascinating call from my godfather’s son. Then I watched the final two episodes of Squid Game. Then I had my customary hot bath. And now I’m feeling generally just much more relaxed than I was when I started writing today, even though a little spot of my youthful life has invaded. My godfather is a little black spot in my past. I’ve frequently wanted to connect with the fucker over the years. I lost my parents early and his influence in my life was formative. He gave me my strange geeky joy in doing the “manly” things. Hewing wood and gutting fish and carrying the thing and driving the machine. Perhaps we wouldn’t get on now, perhaps we would. I just would have preferred to have been part of the decision and not have just had contact severed by him while I was still a teenager, as soon as my dad was buried.

But that is an old old wound and I know it too well, far too well. I can luxuriate in the lovely things I’ve done this evening, and put my head down. Nice to spend a day helping a friend. It has deepened a friendship, and in the end that is more valuable than 20 lazy days of pampering at home.

Here’s my friend. When you’re sad, play dress-up!! I have some wonderful clothes now. Too many wonderful clothes. But wonderful nonetheless.

Up too early. Way too early for me. Normal for most of the civilised world. I slogged across London. Plumstead. Year 11. First class. I’m in there talking about jobs and electricity. Of course.

These poor young humans. They have been so confined recently. Sixteen to seventeen – surely that’s a time we all need to be unfettered. It’s complicated enough being in that weird changing body, filled with sudden hormones, flooded with malign marketing influences. Add to that the fact they have all been locked up in their homes and unable to even experiment with socialising, for a year and more. We are half back in the room now. I drive an hour to get there, and I’m glad to do it. The technology we have normalised now means that we can speak to a volunteer engineer working on a site miles away from us through Microsoft Teams. That’s a huge thing. I’m talking with teenagers about engineering, but I’m an actor so I’m largely having to follow a script. Today we had a 21 year old engineer talking through a screen to them, answering their questions live. I could really see her words landing on them. I’m a bloke in my forties. I can get myself to the school and I’m glad I can as I wouldn’t be running this on zoom. The engineer wouldn’t have been able to spare the time for the journey. This new mixed culture of working online as well as offline – it made a better opportunity for the students today. I can get behind that.

They are fun, these young people. They get bored or distracted so easily. They do random things to be able to think of themselves as mischievous. They want to see if they can find the edges. I kinda like the attack with which they openly approach pretending to be disinterested, and I enjoy trying to find ways to get over the front and maybe help them find a positive shift. The only huge frustration I have is how, culturally, a pretence of disinterest is considered to be more edgy than a pretence of interest. It feels like a negative cultural choice, wrapped up in “cool” and so forth. How did lack of energy get to be thought of as anything other than dumb?

I could never teach full time, no way. I tell these guys I’m more used to dealing with adults in the context of delivery than I am with people their age. This hopefully gives me a free pass when teacher hears me accidentally swear. But, working with these young people, from time to time, in a context where I’m not bound by the fuckery of bureaucracy, Yeah – sure – I’ll moonlight as a teacher. I see the other teachers giving so much, knowing so much, caring so much for other people’s angry offspring. And yeah, they’re angry coming up. They want to know about money first. They want to impact fast and hard while keeping hold of who they are. I really hope they manage it.

I was done by early afternoon, in both senses of the word The diary is empty tomorrow. I went shopping on the way home. To Waitrose. I ended up filling my basket with ridiculous items. I took half of them out again, but my lunch was the most ridiculous of them all.

I now have a well stocked kitchen, if you’re a Bavarian aristocrat. Cold meats and delicacies and unusual vegetables, and cheese and potatoes. I’ll feed myself healthily. Just as well really, as a friend came over for a surprise while my fat dinner was in the oven, and I had made so much food that I could easily give them half of it and still get happily replete on the leftovers. Now I’m settling in to another bit of Squid Game – God it’s dark, but it has me hooked. Night night.

The Surprise at Chelsea. It’s my local.

The surprise is the price. It tells you it’s at Chelsea. You should be expecting high prices. But it’s six quid for a pint. Bastards. And they chased us down the road.

I met Fabian there. He lives in my block, renting one of the flats below me. We’ve been trying to connect for a while. He’s a Lancashire lad, 26 now, down from Manchester and trying to hit the acting game as best he can. He has a similar skin tone and eyes to me. He speaks with a Lancashire burr. I see common ground. This industry is darkly objective enough that I can see him hitting some of the same obstacles I hit. 2002: “You’re tanned to be posh”. I was told that by a gatekeeper. But … the industry has changed since then. The arbitrary barriers have moved, perhaps.

I try to advise him as best I can, but it’s hard because he’s set himself up against the idea of a training and I honestly think that my practical training at Guildhall is the only reason I’m still working. I was noisy, opinionated, clever, privileged and not beautiful. I needed skill and to learn kindness, because I was never going to inspire charity, and there weren’t any Spaceys hoping to help me into their show for perks.

Guildhall gave me contacts and perspective, even while it changed my confidence. But my confidence was Boris. Guildhall leveled me out. I can thank them for my humanity. They taught me to be a company member and to understand things out of my frame.

I still don’t work enough for my own happiness. But I would probably have pissed off a lot of people and pushed myself further to the weird edges if I hadn’t been taught kindness. I just have to try to remember to be compassionate – that just because MY journey was from intellectualism to instinct, it doesn’t mean that proudly left brain intensive humans are in some way under-evolved.

So yeah. I had a few expensive pints with a neighbour after a day of running workshops. Then I decided to switch on the telly. None of it worked. I honestly don’t think I’ve switched it in for three months. The PlayStation needed to be unplugged to communicate with the controllers. The remote was out of battery. Eventually I got it all plugged in and functioning. How many hours of swearing do the people who manufacture devices cause by purposefully selling them with the shortest possible cables? Still, I got it working, and I fell into Squid Game just because it annoys me when there’s something cultural that I am lost on.

I’ll probably go a bit deeper, before a reasonably early bed. More workshops tomorrow. Glad to be busy. I’m not as good at being busy as I was. But I’m clocking back on.

C’est fini.

Man. I’m sad.

I first went to that flat in Hampstead what… Fifteen years ago? Longer.

I met her through work. Another recent graduate. She was RADA, I was Guildhall. We made sense to each other. Instant friends. There were loads of us on a strange job. I’m friends with many of them to this day. We’ve stayed in the same game, and even back then we were jobbing actors who could be found. Dan. Ellie. Jimmy. Annette. Sylvia. Aja. Tom. Lee. Humans. Lots of them. More than I’ve named and I know it. We were employed by a very enthusiastic man who was creating things to appeal the lowest common denominator. We ended up at The Globe for a Frost Fayre event, but by the time we got there we realised that the taste of our employer was so bad that whatever he was pitching was going to be a carcrash. All we could do was fight for our little corner. We all tried our best. It was an early realisation, for me, that the client often hasn’t got a fucking clue. There were loads of genuinely skilled artists involved in that company. Nothing we made was any more interesting or challenging than a wet fart.

Still, I made friends, and often I’m told “it’s about who you know”. My Hampstead friend, like my Earl’s Court friend, is incredibly private. I seem to have lots of very private friends in performance related jobs. I am drawn to the misfits. Always have been.

We got on. We started to make things. We got buried in immersive crazy “egoless” things. “We are making art,” we told ourselves as we deliberately didn’t put our name to any of the things we made. It’s taken me this long to realise we should have been putting our names to our work. Because it was good, and it was relevant to all the things you call immersive now, and we have no paper trail because we were more interested in the making than in our brand. Arguably we still both suffer from that malaise, and I say that knowing that I write words in public every day. Facebook is trying its best to demoralise me. I’m thinking I should share this. I just don’t and because it feels like an intimacy instead of a sales pitch.

Hi, person. Hi and thanks. That’s another example of how mister slappycheeks zucker makes us insecure about our simplicity.

I’m just making noise here but I’m not aligned to any factions. I sometimes have to remind my friends that they are on the campaign trail but I’m not. If I’ve got an ideology, it’s balance.

Either way it doesn’t really matter. I’ll carry on until I stop. You might read. You might not. I know there are humans who have tuned in and out multiple times. I like making this noise.

And my Hampstead friend hates it. She’s another of the humans in my life who will never read one of these. But I pulled all of their stuff out today. I finally emptied the flat. Oh God it was sad. We have had happy times. She had 20 years.

The card stuck to the ceiling from the durational close up magician who came back for whisky. The first time I had grits. (My Hampstead friend is from Georgia. Grits matter.) Freedom Coffee, with a gun on the package. Astrological calendars from funeral parlours. Silly fridge magnets found too late to pack. Big bags of Mardi gras beads from New Orleans. The heath the heath the heath. Magic. Hex the snake.

My friend. One of my many angry fun different friends. Squeezed out by an oblivious and utterly self serving landlady. I enjoyed a stay there over lockdown summer when my flat was rehab central and I had to be elsewhere.

It’s done. We got everything out. Fuck. I’m exhausted. My eyes are streaming. I’m so tired it makes no sense and I have to run a workshop tomorrow at 11. Fuck you, work.

I’m thinking back to when I first started living in London. Mum had moved to Chelsea after divorcing dad. She was just down the road and I was at boarding school in North London. I lived with her in the holidays and started to make friends in this town. I actually can’t remember how I met my Earl’s Court friend. At the time we were probably about 18. We were both trying to find a start, working as character models and so forth, making sense of the industry, occasionally booking an advert. I think we met through church. This was before I trained, when I still had an uncomplicated faith. She was a couple of years older than me and renting a room off Lottie, a lovely eccentric older lady living in the area. We became close, my Earls Court friend and I. I even briefly dated her best friend.

The upshot was that Earls Court started to be my London playzone. This was in the nineties. It was pretty fun and run down and cheap and lively. The Coleherne on Old Brompton Road was providing colour, but we were too straight. We preferred The Troubador. Good coffee in the daytime and good wine at night, with live music or comedy downstairs. They weren’t particularly fussy, so various friends of ours went through there with their bands. I remember a stand-up derailing his whole act in order to pile into a persistent drunk “performance artist” heckler. I remember lots of nights seeing lots of bands and drinking lots of wine and having lots of fun. I can’t remember going home. The front door is wood and carved with murals. The interior is haphazard. There’s a run down garden. It doesn’t feel curated. The waiting staff are a bit stoned. I used to love it.

Then later, after I trained, it was conveniently walkable from The Finborough Theatre, where lots of new actors take short jobs in the hope of being seen. It was still much the same as my teenage haunt. There was almost always something wrong with the pub below the Finborough back then, so The Troubador became the meeting place pre show for coffee and post show for wine. I’d be there with friends until it closed. I remember one time there was a frog in the show and it briefly escaped and climbed up a mirrored wall.

The Finborough hasn’t really been on my radar the last few years though, and my Earls Court friend moved out of that flat a long time ago, so I haven’t been to The Troubadour for ages. Then one day in lockdown I went for a walk through Brompton Cemetery, and noticed in passing that the builders were in and the front room was gutted. I was upset. I figured that was the end for The Troubador. Somebody was turning it into flats, I figured. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Not so! I went there tonight. I met a new friend. He had merlot and I had pinot noir and it was lovely. There were strangely dressed young people at the table next to us who were so unbelievably drunk that they almost fell over onto us multiple times when they tried to leave. One of them put her face right into my friends face and slurred out a simple Anglo Saxon insult. I remembered being those drunk kids, and was perfectly happy being the older version.

I left this evening still half sober. Unheard of. I suspect it’s the first time I’ve ever remembered my journey home.

I guess this is a pub recommendation. If you’re ever in the Earls Court area, head to Old Brompton Road and look for that carved wooden door. It’s got history. I’m glad it wasn’t turned into flats during lockdown. Coffee in the daytime. Good wine in the evening. Arty things, frequently, and a chance for you to cut your performative teeth. It’s a bit more neurotic than it used to be post covid, but the waiters are still probably stoned, the quality is still definitely good, and it doesn’t feel like it’s just another arm of a faceless chain.

“So you’re the sofa man? What’s your connection to this sofa?”

I’m back up in Birmingham. It’s one of those little studios way outside London. I’ve been to a few over the years. Somebody enterprising has maybe made some greenscreens or some decent sized location spaces somewhere that you have to drive to. Through connections or luck or bloody-mindedness they have picked up business. People who don’t want to pay London prices might accommodate a load of crew in such a place and shoot their low budget feature or somesuch. Often they have basic accommodation on site and sometimes a little improvised bar because they know what film crews are like and they tend to be a long way from anywhere.

It’s about forty minutes in a cab from New Street. I was gonna take two trains but the Aviva up from Euston was too slow for me to make the connection. “It must be new – I’ve never heard of it,” says the cabbie. It’s not new. There’s a dusty plaque on one of the walls celebrating five years in business. “It’s not new, it’s just way out in the middle of nowhere,” I tell him. Because it is.

I dropped off a sofa and left the van parked there yesterday morning before rushing back to Plumstead. Now I’m here to pick it up. It’s a strange thing. The sofa has featured in a photoshoot since I dropped it off. It is just a fucked old sofa. It has character but you wouldn’t think it was desirable. It was used by the same brand for a previous photoshoot, and they wanted the same sofa for consistency of style. This is why they are curious. “I’m just the driver,” I tell them. “Because I mean I could probably find one like this on freecycle,” he continues. He probably couldn’t, as it’s a very specific look, but he’s aware that it has come up from London at a high price, and it’s just a fucked sofa. He’s mildly baffled. “I’m just the driver,” I reiterate. “But … Consistency is priceless.”

This is media. There are people who rent you old 1980’s Benson and Hedges cigarette butts for like over a fiver a day and you pay a hefty deposit if you lose just one. Junk in the right hands is treasure. The film industry needs specific things quickly. If you can be the person who has that rare thing, for the right company you can name your price. There are warehouses just waiting for somebody to need a Flymo or a stack of Whizzer and Chips comics. Things that have little value are extremely desirable occasionally to that group of people making a movie with a scene where a British woman mows up her son’s comic collection in the eighties. I remember being on a set where they suddenly wanted an electric turntable to display some rotating shoes. They paid hundreds for it. I ended up picking it up for them. They could probably have just rigged a kitchen turntable from IKEA with some string and got the shot, but they had an American budget and they weren’t afraid to spend it.

So I got this fucked sofa that suddenly found new value, and I brought it back to London, and now I’m home and I feel like it’s the beginning of the weekend. I prefer it if I’ve got time to stop and see the new places in in on these long driving jobs. But this week has been packed. Tomorrow I’m just stopping. Hopefully there’s nothing I’ve forgotten…

Up in the morning and I’m immediately into a van and driving around Stourbridge looking for a Studio. I’ve booked a taxi to pick me up immediately after drop off, and it is the first step in a long chain of connections that I cannot miss if I’m going to get to Plumstead on time.

Drop off is smooth and the cabby is early. He’s lively, and he’s excited about the cricket today. Pakistan is playing Australia. Unfortunately, looking at the result as I write, it didn’t go his way. But we have a good natter as he floors it through the A roads outside Birmingham and into the city centre. He’s angry about the Low Emission Zone in central Birmingham, and well he should be – it’s atrociously signposted. I suspect everybody gets fined the first time.

I get my train to Euston. The guy across from me has a fake ticket and ends up in long conversation with a very measured guard. He ends up paying top whack for a single and I find myself feeling sorry for him but helpless. Rail fares are too high. He tried to save and it cost him.

From Euston I bundle into the Northern Line and only realise after one stop that I’m on the wrong branch. I’m heading to London Bridge via Charing Cross. Thankfully it’s all running smoothly and I just go all the way to Waterloo and then Jubilee two stops. Whether or not I hate being on the tube right now, I still know the network. I get my train to Plumstead in plenty of time. I’m even early enough to walk from the station and I arrive at work with no food but with ten minutes to spare.

Straight in and on duty for a clear hour and then back on all the trains until I’m almost all the way home, dreaming of the food I’m going to eat and the rest I’m going to have. And then I remember that I’ve got two tickets to Kush Jumbo’s Hamlet at The Young Vic. No time for food. Great. Damn.

Uber to the theatre and to the box office to collect my tickets. Ready for three hours of tragedy when my phone goes bing. “Where are you?” Fuck. I’ve got a read-through for Christmas Carol. On Zoom. Now. I give my plus one ticket to my plus one. “I’ll see you in the interval”. A friend of mine lives local to Waterloo. “Help! Can I use your front room. I’ve got a read-through and I forgot about it.” Thankfully I can.

No charger though. I’m reading the play with my screen off where possible, watching the last of my battery dwindle, trying to come across well under tricky circumstances. I hate zoom read-throughs. We finish. It’s lovely, somehow. I put my empty phone in my pocket and hightail it back to the Vic. I am let into the back just in time to hear Ophelia saying “what a noble mind is here oerthrown”. And all my busy busy rushy day vanishes. After the interval I get to watch the second half in amazing seats that my friend bought over two years ago. The duel at the end makes more sense than I’ve ever seen it. Hamlet is considered great for a reason. There’s so much to find in it. I allow a committed and skillful company to tell me their version of that knotty play. It’s great and surpisingly underattended. We don’t have to fight to get served in the interval. We easily find a table and quickly catch up afterwards. But I’m tired and I can’t hide it. My friend puts me in an uber. I get home.

I’m too tired to eat now. I had pret porridge on the train this morning. I’m gonna go to sleep hungry and probably wake up famished.

A full day today. Tomorrow less so. Phew.

I’m on standby.

I don’t know where I’m gonna be sleeping tonight.

For the last hour I’ve been sitting on my sofa expecting the phone to ring at any second. It hasn’t.

This is gonna be worth it when it lands. But part of the job is patience.

There’s a photoshoot happening in East London. There’s a van at the shoot. There’s bed in the van. The bed needs to be in Birmingham at 10 tomorrow morning. Then it needs to be picked up on Friday evening and returned to London with the van. Enter muggins.

The good news is I’m gonna get a lift to the van this evening when the photoshoot winds up. The bad news is, these shoots can drag and drag and drag. Meanwhile I haven’t been given a postcode for dropping it off tomorrow morning which means I can’t plan my accommodation tonight and I can’t book my train back to London because I don’t know how far it is from the station.

There are advantages and disadvantages to working for your friends.

On balance though, I’m happy for the work. It’s just lovely to be in a position where there’s a bit too much to do.

And there goes the call. 45 minutes to pick-up. Then another 45 to the van I reckon. It’s gonna be at least two and a half hours up to Birmingham. Chances are I’ll be in bed in some terrible Travelodge by midnight. Better bring a good book. I could’ve driven up tomorrow morning, but I didn’t want to be late for drop off as I’ve got another of these workshops to run in Plumstead at lunchtime so I’m rushing straight back to London. It’s only fair on the students I’m working with that I have plenty of energy when I go into their class. Then I can focus on them and their needs. They are about to leave school and fire out into this difficult and protective world. I’m just some guy but maybe I’ll bring one or two of them an opportunity that changes their trajectory and helps them into a bit more security and comfort. They’re an interesting age group, year 11. Almost adult, but still very much institutionalised and strung to their home life. It’s hard to get them to think creatively without making them self conscious. Still I’ve been impressed the last few days with their teacher. “Are you brothers?” they all ask, as he is bespectacled and follically challenged as well, and we’re a similar age.

Walking through the corridors I see him address the students and engage with them. He’s impressively available to them. Firm when he needs to be, but somehow even after many years teaching he seems to have room in his head for every single one of them individually. He knows their names. He speaks to them on the line, without that edge of wary distance that I hear with some teachers in schools like this. I would have liked him and listened in his classes. I can see that he is loved and respected, and I can see why. Good teachers like him are gold dust. Today he spoke about his wife and how she gets paid so much more than him because of early career choices. He uses it to illustrate a point, but I can see he’s a vocational teacher. He’d be doing it anyway. Whatever he’s being paid though, it should be more. It’s people like him that will lead to a stronger economy from these confident young people entering the workforce having been HEARD when they needed it. I’ve watched him for a couple of hours only but his positivity and care seems boundless, in a tricky school.

I’m going to pack some clothes for my mystery stay.

—

Travelodge Stourbridge, and I’ve been in the room long enough that I can’t smell the bleach anymore. It’s just gone midnight. I’ll be fine here. And weirdly, I kinda like the random nature of all this. That’s the key. Go after what makes you happy…