Weekend. Hurrah!
Man it’s great to be back at work. This has been a delightful week, but I’m glad I can shut down now for a moment. A remarkably snug quilted dressing gown has been posted to Jersey from The National Theatre costume hire, and I wore it for the first time this morning for the run. Considering that for six years I’ve worn polyester, I’m thrilled to have something nicer. I grew attached to the polyester gown, but it frequently led to worldbreaks – “Tell us about your dressing gown, Ebenezer!” I was very comfortable in it today, but put 80 people full of alcohol into that little room and I might be boiling gently by the middle of Christmas Past. We will see. We ran it earlier than I think we have ever run it. We started at half nine. It’s feeling complete now, and most of the questions are to do with things that will only become apparent with an audience. We had sponge cake and were broken by noon.
I went to the optician for contact lenses. Alain Duchemin, affectionately pronounced “doucheman” by the locals. His practice is directly over the road from where I was born. I figured he was the best option for things I’ll be shoving into my eye. I lost my trust in contact lenses after I had a terrible eye infection for over a year. I’m looking back that way again, as my career is waking up. I’ll need to be able to see without glasses again. Doucheman did plenty of tests, and it seems like my ocular health is holding out reasonably well. Hopefully I’ll get some toric lenses by the middle of the first week of shows. Blind Scrooge is comforting but loses specificity.
Post optician, Jack and I went home to the IKEA flat and we lit the woodburner for the first time. Now we are cocooned together, assisted by crispy duck pancakes and way too many logs, enjoying another Liverpool game which I think will become a fixture of our time living together.
I’m so looking forward to a quiet sleepy day of very little tomorrow. I want to get out a little bit with Jack and show him parts of the island. But the wind is buffeting the windows, the rain is in hard hard squall. Not going anywhere is the order of the evening…
AlBarclay 