“I’ll be bringing my entourage,” I told Amy today, half in jest, half in earnest.
Golfo is staying. She looks fabulous and is entirely practical and together. She’s only in town two nights. I am so rarely in Liverpool that I’m making sure I see as much of her as possible while she’s in London. She’s here, my guest, and Mel of the Hampstead flat is around too. None of us have seen very many people over the last few years. We decided to spend the day together no matter what, the three of us. All three of us have our own particular style.
We went to meet Amy. She’s an artist I’m collaborating with. “You know the way our gut biome has lots of different needs in it and lots of different forces and actions on it to make it healthy? Our social biome needs a whole selection of different influences and interactions as well to stay healthy, and many of us have had it really badly damaged by the pandemic.”
She’s so right. I can think of friends who have retreated into themselves, and others who have vanished into somebody else’s idea. Neither is healthy. We need conflicting voices. We need to be stuck in conversations we don’t want to be in. Everything like that helps us widen. We can always learn from each other if we let ourselves.
My entourage and I agreed that the project she has in mind is going up be excellent and delightfully challenging on the basis she’s talking about. We can do something weird and helpful and beautiful with strangers. It’ll keep me very very busy in October and oh fuck I’m just gonna have no spare time. Mel was lined up as my cover – the filming is landing right now. Long may it continue.
Post artist, we zipped up to Camden where Mel and I helped out as emergency cover with a Scene and Heard dramaturgy class with very young men and women from Somerstown. Lovely work and a great young man to work with. We generated things.
Then Mel and I bundled back into the car, drove to Chelsea for a pint and then all bundled into my autumn flat where Tristan showed up and four old friends who have been separated for years just got to talk about things and laugh and remember and be stupid.
Everybody has gone now but for Golfo and I who are keyed into David Attenborough on the big screen and will shortly be snoring companionably from our opposite sides of the sofa.
AlBarclay 