Month: April 2022

At Kingley Vale in the South Downs North West of Chichester sits one of the oldest gatherings of Yew Trees in Western Europe.

It’s hard to date yews. They hollow in the middle so you lose the rings, and they can pause their growth in bad years. These ones are old. There are many of them, and they have lived long – a gathering of ancient twisted giants. Surely some of the oldest living things in England.

You know me and trees, oh constant reader. Here is a memory of my quest in Northern California. That trip was for redwoods – another ancient spirit. Today I went home, to the yew – the home grown. The temple tree.

Often they can be found in churchyards, single specimens, older than the church. Plaques will occasionally try to persuade you that they pull miasma from the air so they are put there for that reason. Common sense will tell you that they are in places of power – the yew is a canopy. It is a natural temple. There are many beliefs much older than the one we see most frequently. Go quietly under your next yew tree. Listen to it.

Just don’t eat any of it. They kill you nice and fast. Although … I hesitate to say it but the berries are okay. So long as you definitely don’t swallow any of the seed in the middle of the berry, which is mercifully large… Swallow that and you might experience a spot of sudden death. Do you like those odds? Don’t mess with yews.

People liked the wood for bows, although apparently the shape of the branches in Southern Europe were preferred and imported in large numbers in time for us to shoot all the French with longbows at Agincourt. Still I’m sure we lost most of our old growth yews to war, so the ones at Kingley are even more of a welcome survivor. Believe it or not, half of the ones that survived the rise and fall of fletching got taken out by Canadian troops training in the area during World War 2. “Target Practice”. Somebody didn’t like the oojie-boojie druidic slant to these gorgeous trees. The iron child of the bow cut into its ancestor.

They entwine with one another there in the vale, seeming to writhe with ancient life, dappling the light beneath their twisted canopies. I would never want to shoot one. Their trunks are alive and strange and eloquent, torn with mouths and noses and bright shocks of colour. They feel wise, they feel thoughtful and they feel old. A plaque on the trail oversimplifies their genesis. It tells us they were planted in the 860’s to celebrate a victory against the vikings. We may have had that victory, and some trees may have been added, but my instincts and my reading tell me that most of those trees are much older than a mere grand and a bit.

Places like Kingley Vale are powerful and important – plugged into a deeper meaning about how we used the natural world before we complicated it. Once you start to see our yews as our natural temples, it is hard not to confer them with that power. Strange twisted poisonous beauties, squat and stripped and bright and gnarled, green needles and red berries, holding their space in the plant world through light theft and poison, providing outdoor temples to our early faith structures, ingredients for our witches, wood for our bows. A good time of year to go as well. When it’s hot and the sap is flowing they can get into your head. You’re not gonna keel over from breathing them though – otherwise they’d be fenced off. Just be wary of eating, and I’m told mushrooms growing from them should be avoided…

Lou and I spent a few hours in delighted contemplation of our natural and spiritual history through these beauties. Then we drove back to Brighton. And watched Iron Man 3.

Brighton once more. The cat palace. Here, for three weeks now, Lou has been the willing servant to two extremely pampered beasts. They sup from silver platters containing a cornucopia of flavours and textures, turned over on rotation, frequently rejected entirely. Strokes are on tap. They watch a movie at night. At half past four in the morning they desire their goat’s cheese, and they shall be given it.

Lou will be here a few more weeks looking after these beauties. I might get to stay here again before she returns to the catless seaside garret.

I’m very fond of those little pussies despite their ways – either an astronomical degree of friendly incompetence or a vicious reserve with quick sharp spikes. Animals have always been my friends, and these pampered fools have started to make sense of me as I blunder around and occasionally fondle them with my fat hand. Even the spiky one occasionally lets me rub her belly, but frankly only when she wants me to give her something from the fridge.

Not wanting to be eating worse than they were we bought a lovely big salmon fillet at Waitrose and consumed a healthy meal at the long table in the atrium darling, before watching the sunset from the balcony. Oh it’s a hard life. Then we retired to the boudoir to consume the second half of the new Dune movie. We both love it, for slightly different reasons but we come together in a passionate appreciation of the world building that has gone on. It only seemed natural to watch the DVD extras.

So many people come together to make something like that. Watching it a second time knowing that the sequels weren’t funded and might not have been greenlit at all if it had tanked, I’m appreciative of the team’s skill in leaving us wanting more but giving us enough, and I like the fact that pretty much the last thing you hear is “this is just the beginning”. The DVD extras carry the feeling you get from watching all the lovely actors talking about the lovely thing they were beautifully paid to be do. Universe, I want to be in the sequels. Make it so. Lou was loving all the stuff about the costumes as well, and listening to the director talking about how he wanted he worms to feel really connected me to his artistry.

Film sets are remarkable places to be and that looks like it was a good set. Good people coming together to make these sometimes hugely ambitious fables. I want to travel for work wherever possible and I stay streamlined so it’s easy for me to do that. Saudi was incredible, but just over the track from our huge site was a little nest of tents where I knew they were making a movie. Sometimes I’d find myself looking over at those tents wondering if it was a Dune 2 unit. “You should just show up there and tell them you’re an actor,” says your auntie who read an interview in The Radio Times once. But that doesn’t work these days. Probably never did. And anyway I had a race to help with over there.

Things come when you make the space and do the work. I’ve been a bit better at doing the work than making the space. The experience with my friend’s dad’s stuff yesterday is a good reminder to make it. If it’s not Dune 2 it can be something else. But time to pull that shit in.

First though I’ll be sleeping in the cat palace for a day or so, eating much more healthily than I’m used to and farting like Ivor the Engine. Toot toot, all.

That was a hard day. Helping out a friend.

Mid pandemic, just when things were feeling really awkward, my friend’s father died quite suddenly in the room I slept in last night. Since then I know she’s tried but it’s not been easy for her to look in there and make some change. It doesn’t help that the dad was a hoarder, and without an eye on cleanliness. His room has been unthought of since he died. All his hoarded things, all left there with the cat enjoying the peace and quiet. She needs that room to pay those bills which have suddenly jumped so much. I know from experience how things like that are virtually impossible to sort without two willing participants.

Wardrobes full of disintegrated ancient vintage woollen suits so completely decimated by moths that they didn’t even really have use for theatre, but with a Mont Blanc pen in one of the pockets. Drawers still fluffed with the dry carcasses of thousands of exterminated bedbugs, but with potentially interesting cigarette cards stuck with the organic detritus. Junk, junk and junk. Once again the ephemera of this varied life, neglected into dust and carelessness at the end. I’ve seen photos today, read cards. I found his racy mags and his wardrobe liquor stash. I liked him alive – he was a racing driver back in the day, beating out early Lotus cars. The same rough era as my dad – maybe twenty years younger – but Scottish too. Much of the ephemera is connected to that obsession and is so familiar to me with my dad’s effects. Racing trophies. Pictures of old cars. Articles about him and old cars that weren’t old back then. Flashy shiny memories of a life that suddenly stopped not so long ago.

We made some change in there but there’s so much to do. I’ll have to be back next week. I hit a wall and went home. All the organic matter stuck to me. All the dust I’ve inhaled. Even the cat got weirded out.

Tomorrow I’m back to the flat of another friend’s dead mother to look for a crucial document I still can’t find. ’tis the season. First all my friends got married. Then kids. Now dying parents. Next up there’s second marriage. Then I guess we all start to kark it.

I’m gonna get the hell out of all this trapped energy I’ve been moving now though. There’s more to move but we made a solid start. It’s a lesson about what I might be able to achieve in my own flat with application. We put about 20 bags in the rubbish and took six to the charity shop. We took a horrible sofa out, despite having to fight the cat.

Shortly I’ll be off to Brighton to see Lou and just be for a while.

It occurs to me that we all have to try to make it easier for whichever poor fool will have to go through our stuff when we drop. I’m feeling closer to the old chap than we ever were when he was alive. I had to ditch some pretty personal things. We went through everything to be sure we weren’t throwing away precious things… More to do. We accumulate so much. Maybe there’s something in the fascism of kondo. I do love being surrounded by ridiculous random stuff. But I don’t need all the tissues and old newspapers… I guess with stuff we have to choose our battles always.

Finally through all the malaise, a chance for a day that reminds me why I love my adopted city.

I hauled out of bed to go to Hamlet at The National. The Dorfman ex Cottesloe. Claire was Gertrude. Any constant reader will know who I mean by Claire as she’s one of the unfortunate friends who just get named now in this blog without permission. Twelfth Night. Willows. Life. Claire was a wonderful Gertie in a fun quick Hamlet. I did The Factory long enough to know Hamlet backwards. This was a wonderful audience to be part of, and it’s a wonderful show to witness.

“It’s all a bit green,” says Guildencrantz. The actors are constantly freely ad-libbing in their own language, and then sliding into bits of text from the “enshrined” version. The name confusion of those two unctious courtiers Rosenguildencrantzstern – it is played more clearly than I’ve ever seen it. We see the royals not really giving a fuck so long as the job is done. And we see Hamlet changing the letter to the English King. And we watch them die. They are fun. And they die. “Why did they die?” asks a small child behind me. “Hamlet changed the letter so it wasn’t him,” the mother attempts. But yes, small child. You’re right. Hamlet didn’t need to do that. Arguably Hamlet is an absolute fucker for doing it. Good to hear him called out by a child. He didn’t need to. Stoppard cashed in on that. But yeah. These stories by Shakespeare – they have edges. Hard edges. This is part of why his work has persisted. We believe that he knows we will notice these things and care and interpret. “It’s yours not mine,” is what Pinter would say. We hope that Shakespeare was equally free. He was an actor after all.

“Are they all going to die?” asks the small voice behind me even as Ophelia drowns herself with words from To be or not to be. “No, I think the Queen lives,” says the mum. Horatio is cut from this version. Normally somebody lives to tell the story. Not here. Everybody is for it in this version. It’s bleak. The incredible awful unnecessary poison death of Gertrude meets with a slightly steely commentary from our young commentator “no mum. She’s dead too. They’re just all going to die in now. All of them.”

Good old Hamlet. It’s a play about how, when we have everything in place, we still don’t see things through until we are forced to. We can let our whole life go by ignoring our own needs in favour of what we think are the needs of others. And while we do it, the likes of Claudius take all the territory that would be more beautiful and rich if it was just ours and freely ours. There isn’t much room in the world now, and the kind people might be the best for whatever the job is, but kindness is a recessive gene. Every time I see Hamlet it reminds me to kick forward. Every time I play Claudius I think about what he represents – the ruthlessness and entitlement. I loved this version. I was proud of Claire. And I felt galvanised.

Post Hamlet, drinks too early in the day. Joy and fun with the friends and associates connected to the show. A drop too much wine and I found myself in Waterloo so I went to see my old dear companion Hex, who is now beautifully homed.

It’s been a long time for the pair of us.

And now I’m at The Green Note in Camden. Jazz and spannacoppita and a spot of hummus. Very much the guest of a wonderful friend. Another aspect of this town. And fuck it – I love it here. I love the yes. The variance. And real people are about to play me music.. And I’m gonna listen.

Good lord. It seems I’m constantly knackered when I finally get down to writing these at the moment. I have this complicated relationship with my work ethic where I think of it as a wasted day if I let it go by negatively. Dad was only with me at the start of my adulthood. He imposed the idea of negative and positive days. Days where the income doesn’t beat the expenditure – they’re negative and to be avoided. I spend my life avoiding them. But it’s getting harder. We have to earn more to stand still.

We are governed by talking grapes. We are governed by little scraps of horseshit stuck on the side of your boot. We are governed by rocks. We are governed by venal self serving narrow minded fuckwits.

Our home secretary hates everybody. Our culture secretary probably thought she was dealing with bacteria when she accepted, and would certainly be better placed if she was. Our chancellor has no ethics and is so rich it would be impossible for him to even pretend to have perspective. Our prime minister is tightly evasive little bully. But… I can write this, and there isn’t even the possibility that I’ll go to prison for it. This freedom of speech is anathema to the likes of Tsar Vladimir. He has been autocratic for so long now, and he has been firing resources to try and use our freedom of speech against us – to try to undermine our confidence in our own freedom. Yeah he’s helped mislead people in elections, I’m sure there’s Russian money behind some of the absolute poppycock that is now emerging from the well meaning hearts of some of my “wellness” friends who have been YouTube radicalised. We have been sleepwalking through an information war for years that has, at its centre, Vlad the little rat-faced bully. This little Tsar, carrying his huge ego and his world beating nuclear arsenal – and don’t forget that missiles have an expiry date. Warheads made in the seventies – they’re going to have to be remade at vast expense or … Maybe just used. And we want to call him a war criminal because he’s committed so many war crimes. But he doesn’t recognise our structures and never will. For him to admit he’s a criminal would be for him to accept our morality. Even though it is his orders that have led to this well documented rape and large scale murder, I can’t see any way to end it because as far as he is concerned he will take advantage of the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. He thinks that the freedom we have to say that Boris is a feckless liar makes us weak. He wants us to look bad, because nobody in Russia can say that Putin is a nasty little homicidal rat who is killing the children of his own people to serve some lost ideal of a soviet past that nobody wants back again but him anyway.

So I’m just immersing myself in work. Got a spot of theatre, a spot of filming, this and that keeping myself ticking over. I can’t think too much about leaders because everywhere I turn I see nasty little creeps. How have we come to this? Where are the statesmen? Even the strong and eloquent leaders with ethics are being deconstructed by radicalised morons on YouTube – and those voices, even less clever than the leaders themselves – they have way too much traction. We are slipping. Slipping. We are just getting stupider and stupider, and losing the ability to judge for ourselves. I AM TELLING YOU TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF! DO AS I SAY.

Ugh.

Maybe if I was wearing fashionable clothes and doing this by video.

It probably doesn’t help that I watched dumb old Travis Bickle stumble his way through life in Taxi Driver. It’s still a wonderfully made movie but he’s a depressing little prat.

I stopped halfway to Nuneaton to get a bite to eat. Appropriately enough for the destination I hadn’t eaten. #HereAllNight

I was a good hour out of London, just me and Bergman, my USB stick and clicker for tomorrow and a few clothes in a bag. It was spitting with rain, miserable, dark. Bergman needs a wash, but this rain is mostly filthy.

I get out of the car and pat my pockets down. Fuck. How did I get that far without noticing I had no debit cards with me? No cash. No means to get cash. The thing I thought was a card in my pocket was an old hotel keycard I had forgotten to return. Oops.

I had enough fuel to return home, but at the rate it’s selling for I didn’t want to burn it and drive an unnecessary few extra hours. So I turned to my phone.

It’s new and I’m funny about security. I haven’t set up Samsung pay as it keeps asking for my fingerprints and facial scan and things like that and I’m generally pretty uncomfortable about the extent to which we donate our entire existence to tech companies so they can sell it to advertisers. I’ve got nothing to hide but I want to hide it anyway and I will fight for the right to hide it. Still, today I found a use for the Samsung pay, and I gave my pound of flesh in exchange for convenience, as we all eventually do. Half an hour of swearing in my car, and I’ve avoided the fingerprint thing but there’s an app on my phone now that doubles as one of the cards I left at home. It works. And it probably knows everything about me. Did I read the terms and conditions? Does anybody ever?

I won’t need to buy much before I’m home but I wanted the option. Perhaps some fuel. Maybe a spot of food. Lunch? I’m in another Premier Inn now, so breakfast and coffee is laid on. I’ve cranked up the heating, washed thoroughly and I’m now regretting forgetting all my books. Likely an early bed will be the least depressing option. Then home again and back into the bewildering mix of things to do and think about. My agent rang with good news today so at least there’s a spot of filming on the horizon. It won’t stop me doing all the random dayjobs as always. Tomorrow I think it’s batteries again, or it might be electric cars. Either way I’ll be pretending to be an engineer. Because engineering is FUN! I don’t start until half ten so I’m gonna just wake up tomorrow and think about it then.

Nuneaton. There’s not much here I don’t think. It’s easier to London than I thought though. I probably could have driven up tomorrow morning but I just didn’t like the idea of fighting through rush hour. Better another faceless night in a Premier Inn, another inedible breakfast. I’m sleepy though and these suburban rural places have the advantage of being quiet. Time for another crazy-dream night.

Sometimes it can be fun doing a self tape. Tristan had two sides that were mostly incomprehensible. There’s a helicopter, there’s shooting, there’s swearing. The scene we had to tape comes in right in the middle, and there is no context whatsoever. None. Somebody shouts “fuck” off screen. Nothing hangs together. Actiontastic.

I was on foley. I had a solid whup whup gunship sound on my phone, routed through a speaker. I had an AK47 on short burst fire through an iPad. I was reading all the other humans who were unfortunately meant to be women but there was just me. We had actual fun, and I know for certain that it would have been easier to play that scene that was mostly Tristan saying “what’s happening!” WITH all the foley than without it. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Self tapes are part of the job now. I used to detest them. It’s such a big ask, to find somebody willing to do it with you when they have no skin in the game.

Tristan’s agent was in my year at Guildhall. We did a show together in Camden after leaving, to try and get the potential employers to watch us act. None of them came. Do they ever? He’s successfully agenting now. I’m still acting, still still still along with what like less than a fifth of my year group and that’s a good school. Today I tried to help my friend into an incomprehensible action movie job and remembered again how I might have a little bit of a boost if I just had somebody on the casting side who was rooting for me. We suspended a fan in an A frame. He bought the fab specially from Argos. I had to switch it on at the right moment so the helicopter would move his hair. Cheap but funny and it kind of worked. He was channeling Alan Rickman in Die Hard. I’d give him the job. Sadly it’ll probably go to somebody’s nephew or whatever but ’twas ever thus and all we can do is keep plugging.

I drove here, and afterwards it seemed logical to open a bottle of wine. I’m feeling great for it, despite it being the start of Ramadan. Time for a spot of good behaviour, joining the Lenten Christians and the Muslim world in a springtime fast. I’m wrapped up warmly in the Tristan snoring bed. A month of good behaviour? I can do that. I think… Ramadan Mubarak..X

This little house in Belgravia is the first London building I ever slept in. The windows I’ve ringed – that’s where Max and I slept. We were there for maybe a week, with my parents, guests of my extreme Godfather. I had been very cosseted. This is 1980’s Belgravia so it’s not the jungle. But I very clearly remember, long after bedtime, Max and I watching the drunk people at the pub opposite.

The house is opposite The Antelope. Back then it wasn’t fucking around, that pub. It was welcoming big personalities and it was getting them drunk. The area adds to it, perhaps, because these drunk people have enough privilege to be fearless. Max and I watched grown men clambering onto the roof of parked cars and taking their shirts off. We witnessed eccentric fights and eloquent squabbles and people getting weird about TROLLEYS. It was summer, and people were getting really really very drunk, and expressive. I stayed up late and watched it as if it was a favourite drama.

It didn’t necessarily glamorise alcoholism for me, but that whole generation was swamped in that mistake. O’Toole and Reid and Harris were standing tall on top of a boozepyramid, flashing their handsome eyes and luring thousands to a nasty wet death. I certainly enjoyed watching the spectacle of the fun drunks from my little safe rich Belgravia window.

I had a meeting this evening about a show I’m about to start. We met at The Royal Court bar, but it’s underground and they want six quid for an Estrella. We decanted round the corner to a place with windows and without theatre prices, and I found myself opposite those windows in the picture. There I was, one of the grown ups at the first pub I ever watched. The Antelope.

It didn’t disappoint. I didn’t jump on top of a car or start shouting about TROLLEYS. But… There was a little quartet of people attempting four part harmonies with Prince songs with evident skill, and we got swept in to the start of something that might have developed. I trained at Guildhall. Music is often part of my lash. We’ve done the sweeping with that sort of thing before and it doesn’t always end well. We got roofied in Brick Lane one time after instigating a knees up, and one of us woke up in a gutter with a black eye from a (taxi driver?) I felt the edge approaching. The moment where I either have another drink and everything goes sideways, or I leave. I very nearly got that drink and put that mask on and vanished into Saturday London aargh. “I can still bend reality through boozeysubstance abuse and carry rooms with me,” I found myself thinking. But… The morning is bright. There are things to see and do. And my liver is not as fast as it used to be.

I left.

I left quite abruptly. Just as the party was about to start. And now I’m home eating bread and I’ll be in bed by 1am and I’m not circular thinking yet or inexplicably angry or sad. I had a moderate quantity of booze and then left before things got out of hand. WHO EVEN AM I? I’ll be up in the morning when it is actually still morning. And I have a lovely show to look forward to being in, all about the curious personalities that made up the codebreaking team at Bletchley Park. More about that anon I’m sure. For now, bed…

Ah so, now comes the time when I write about all the things I have done. When I catalogue my remarkable litany of achievements this day. When I share with you some of the high and lofty thought journeys I’ve travelled.

Oh God.

I didn’t put any clothes on until about 4pm.

I was awake, yes. I was reading in bed. Occasionally I made coffee and took it back to bed with me. At about 4pm I got hungry and here was no good food in the house. Still prostrate on my back in my warm sheets I ordered a hamburger on deliveroo. The only reason I put my clothes on is so I could grab it from the delivery guy. Now I’m back where I started, burning a frankincense stick, drinking a little glass of port from the bottle I brought back from São Miguel. It’s good. Sweet. Fruity.

I might read some more comics in a bit. I’ve played Magic the Gathering on my phone. Everybody has boggly eyes today because it’s April Fools Day. I MISSED A TRICK. Yesterday I could’ve written something ridiculous and whimsical. I could do that now instead of cataloguing this totally null day that I’ve achieved. But it would publish on April 2nd and then I’d be the fool.

I feel pretty good for my nonexistent day. Considering the extent to which I’ve been utterly demotivated and uninterested in achieving anything whatsoever, I’m doing quite well at not hating myself. “I’ll probably go through some boxes this evening or something,” I said to Lou on the phone. “Are you just saying that so I don’t give you a hard time for doing nothing?” “Yes.”

Sometimes it’s totally fine to do nothing. I have no children so there’s nothing that needs to eat me to survive. I can just roll from torpor to torpor, watch things move in front of me, occasionally push meat into the hole in my face, answer the phone when it rings…

It’s past midnight now. I honestly have no idea how that happened so quickly. Time flies when you’re doing absolutely nothing. “It’s snowing, it’s snowing,” cried one of my friends this morning. I shuffled to the window, saw no snow, and reassumed the position. Brand new sheets on yesterday. My bed is high and hard and comfy. I have lain therein.

I’ll have to do something tomorrow. But after the week I’ve had, a day like today is tonic. I must have traveled hundreds of miles, and I ran myself hoarse teaching stuff that I care about a bit but that isn’t my primary function.

There’s a WhatsApp group bubbling though for a fun project that I’ve been asked to be in about Bletchley Park. The creative theatre-machine is rattling up out of the swamp and the huge gears are starting to creakily turn again. This will be a short fun thing and then something will follow and something else and something else and I’ll look back on this peaceful day with envy.

For now, it’s back to the port and a good book. Cheers.

WHITE RABBITS.

My own bed. I am in it.

I know some of you have attempted to communicate with me over the last few days. Thank you for trying. Sorry if I haven’t been in the slightest bit available for any of you. Tomorrow, in theory, I’ll be able to think about things other than crowd management and not driving into a tree.

I dropped off some lights about eight minutes from my Airbnb this morning. Then I crashed back into town. The people who book me for workshops are mostly literally fucking clueless about what I actually do in the room. Based on the email chain I had been forced to follow I was going to have to bring my laptop into the school and they were going to provide me with an HDMI cable. No parking at the school and it was in the congestion charge zone so I got an uber with my laptop. I never normally bring it. As I wrote earlier this week, my personal laptop is atrociously slow. I was sent a laptop by the company many years ago and it was old then. I brought that one even though it barely functions. It was, of course, unnecessary to bring it.

There was a smart screen in the room. Most of the inner city London schools have been given one of them to replace the whiteboard. They aren’t very good compared to a whiteboard but you don’t need to drop a screen anymore and I just had to stick my USB into it, and my PowerPoint clicker.

The PowerPoint presentation is not particularly good. The one today is better than the one I’ve been working with for the rest of this week. But it’s pretty uninspiring. If I can change the slide without going back to the computer it means I can keep the audience attention on me instead of the weak content, and then all I have to do is be interesting. Oh darling, I’m perfectly capable of that.

The clicker is the single most useful bit of kit I ever got for myself in the context of this dayjob. Twelve quid on the internet for a little magic wand that means I can walk around all over the place and magically shift through the presentation. Plus it has a little laser pointer for showing things to students or freaking out cats.

PowerPoint is not the most inspiring way of teaching, and the pps I’m working with are not the most revelatory. But I think I’m making the best use of the tools I’ve been given. You must know by now how I don’t like doing things halfheartedly, oh constant reader. I don’t. I won’t. Still… I’d like to get into the mix for some theatre now. Or a solid slice of filming. Ugh. Tap tap tap tap tap