Month: September 2022

All the streets around mine were peaceful, policeful. I woke into reasonable quiet. Tom was giving a tutorial to the daughter of a South American potentate over zoom as I woke into the day. We chose to connect to the shared noise. The procedure of moving a body out of London with soldiers. So much spectacle. The crablike movement of the pallbearers was observed with a certain joy. We watched it on the large telly knowing that it’s a pageantry we are not going to witness on this scale again. As she was being loaded into her motor it occurred to me that she might go close to mine. It was a warm morning. “Ah sod it, I’m going for a walk,” I said to Tom.

The streets were empty right up to the pinch point at Queen’s Gate. There, all the people were gathered. They were standing on railings, halfway up trees, balanced on traffic lights, wherever they could be that wasn’t going to collapse and would give them height. “Switch to 3g,” said a woman near me, who actually probably was one of mum’s old friends, talking to her daughter not us, but in the voice of privilege where it is actually aimed at everybody. “Nobody uses 3g anymore, so it’s quicker than 4g.” She was right.

I stood there surrounded by slightly baffled people. When the motorcade came it was all so quick that it was gone before it arrived. I saw a flash of the top of it. We all gave a little yip. Nobody really knew what was going on. But we were there when *something* happened. Mister clever clogs wants to tell you she’s been dead for months, and Captain Critical will suggest that she was always a lizard anyway and that’s why it’s okay that his life doesn’t work financially. But she represented a huge ideal for me – a good iteration of the unelected monarchy. The thin blue line between us and president Liz Truss. Bred for diplomacy instead of ambition. A little less trussed up by deals with big companies. If you don’t have to fight for it you can’t be bought.

Watching Charles not sing the National Anthem was a study. He’s sung it more than most of us, when it was about his mummy. Now he has to listen and not sing because it’s about him. That moment, the first time he realised his job was to listen now, it must have hurt him. I felt sad on a human level. I’m sure the fact he’s now the servant of the richest diadem in the world will take the edge off for him, but your mum dying is the fundamental shock. His hat is worth so much money he will be fine. But I saw a human with a mountain to climb. With the Russian troll factories still in full swing, it is hard to avoid “Not my king” type narratives. This is another very good chance for St Petersburg to rally the easily swayed into acting against the greater interests of everybody but Putin. The next few months will be noisy…

For a bit now though I’m off again back down to Cornwall. Out of the smoke. I asked if I could drive myself as then I’ve got wheels when I’m down there. I’m sure I’ll get my mileage back at a reasonable rate too. Pretty much a full week of filming ahead of me, which is what took me out of Chile.

I have to move some instruments first thing though. It’s already getting late. I’m gonna go sleep as it’s a long drive to Cornwall…

Something of a last minute decision… The police have cordoned off my little bit of the embankment. All the roads in and out of my area are blocked off and manned by multiple officers. They’ve been brought in from all over – you see Yorkshiremen, Kenticles, Suxxesonians. They don’t know the streets they’re policing but, fuck it, they are gonna police the hell out of them.

The road is even quieter than it was in lockdown. Occasionally there’s a limo with diplomatic plates, frequently there’s a squad car. No private vehicles apart from the very small number of people who live inside the roadblock footprint. Letters dated today were posted through our letterboxes to tell us this was happening just hours before it happened. The resulting mess outside the closed off streets will be spectacular to behold. Here it is peaceful apart from the helicopters and the walkie talkie sounds in the street. And the limos, the limos the limos.

Just down the road from mine sits The Royal Hospital. Chelsea Pensioners. Huge amounts of crown land. Lots and lots of bedrooms. Whole unused wings.

Tonight the unused bedrooms of the Royal Hospital will be likely full of people you’vw vaguely heard about. Major dignitaries from countries and places where perhaps there is no room in the London Embassy, or no London Embassy at all.

The archduchess of Alpha Centauri is likely sleeping there in her little canister of methane with Tinkerbell and Pan, enjoying a strange entente with The Great God of the same name who is trying to practice his pipes in the garden after having been dead again for a while. That terminally ill widow who wrote you an email asking you to help her launder hundreds of millions in from a small country somewhere – she’s still just alive and is there trying to persuade Pierogi to help. The Darklord of Helgedad is sharpening his blade hoping that Lone Wolf shows up tomorrow, whilst trying not to get annoyed by the fact that Nicol Bolas is snoring. Galadriel is sharing a room with Danaerys Targaryen. The Akond of Swot… Who or why or which or what is the Akond of Swot? Does he sleep with the pensioners snuggled up tight, was he given a teddy to cuddle at night, or NOT? He’s there too, with the Owl and the Pussycat. The jumblies live too far away – the boat they put to sea didn’t make it yet. They’re starting to worry. Mr. Benn is there but he can’t work out what to wear and he just stepped on Pikachu. It’s crowded. Godzilla hasn’t showed up yet, but there are unusual waves in The Thames. The room that was put aside for The Spanish Inquisition has been given away on reliable intel they they are not to be expected.

Right now I’m sleeping next to all these famous people, and likely next to other very very rich people from all over the world. The limos I saw coming in all had personalised plates and stern looking smart men and women in the back. Ambassadors and local celebrities no doubt from all over this big old world. People who their country has decided to send as representatives. This death is globally huge. This transition is significant. I fear we will soon discover the extent to which her dignity and service protected us from the worst in international terms. We do not have a statesperson as our political leader right now. We haven’t for a long long time. Elizabeth has been a huge buffoonerybuffer. Helping us appear internationally credible.

I kinda wanted to be out of London by now frankly… If I was Putin, I would have itchy button fingers. But … I’m here. Cornwall on Tuesday. Joy.

Last night I was staying in one of the wonderful self catering cottages at The Headlands Hotel in Newquay. The company have been booking them up for years. This is my third visit in three years. With my flight booked to leave late, I was looking forward to a slow start and a lovely breakfast overlooking the sea. Breakfast doesn’t start until half seven which is almost always too late for location pick-up, especially at this time of year so on working days I get no breakfast. I was looking forward to a nice slow morning looking at the sea, and a lovely Friday wind down.

At half past nine on a Friday night I wandered in to get myself a glass of wine at the bar. There was some sort of event on – lots of drunk people. I just fancied a glass of wine from the bar of the five star hotel I was staying in. I got to the bar in my tracksuit by walking confidently past a sea of suits. He poured me a glass of house red and pushed it towards me. My fingers brushed the glass of the stem. “Which room?” asked the barman. “Beach 2” The glass was pulled away. “We can’t serve drinks to people in the cottages tonight. There’s no way to charge for them.” “Can I pay for it tomorrow?” “No.” Can I just take it and unofficially settle at reception?” “No.” “So is there any way I can get a drink at 9.30pm on a Friday night in this five star hotel I’m staying at?” “People at the cottages have to go to the spa.” The spa is closed. I am curious the extent of this madness now so I ask reception if they can do room service. Apparently that’s impossible too. What a remarkable dereliction. There is one tab – the wedding tab – all night, and the bar manager doesn’t have the wherewithal to have another tab running for guests. Easier to say “no” than “yes”. Events take a lot of people to run, and you can never guarantee a good team across the board. Many of the staff are making a bit of pocket money before going back to uni to do ppe and grow up to be Liz Truss. But what a huge lack of flexibility. And having worked managing high end event catering, the way the barman made me feel as a guest is something I would have immediately taken him aside for. “What sort of establishment do you think we’re running here, young man? That man was a paying guest. Do you have any idea how much they pay for a room here? It’s half past nine on a Friday night, and he just wants a glass of wine. If you can’t work out how to charge him for it – and he made it clear he wanted to pay – then you damn well give it to him! Now draw up another tab, even if nobody else comes in, I’ll show you how to make it work. We never want to say no like that to a guest. Never do it again please. If you get confused just see me.”

The next morning I go for breakfast. I just want a slop of yogurt and a pastry – it’s towards the end of service. But it’s seems breakfast in the hotel is booked for the event too. We second class cottage dwellers are not allowed. I am told I’m supposed to eat in the same spa that was locked last night at half 9.

The spa can’t seat me without a reservation though. Nobody gave me any warning about this car crash – about having to reserve for a hotel breakfast. I’m a guest at this aargh hotel. The company paid over £200 a night… Surely … Surely I can get some breakfast? But the spa chef refuses to accommodate me. By now with all the talk it’s on the dot of ten thirty. Breakfast turns into a pumpkin at 10.30.

I have to actually pay for my breakfast latte with my own bank card. It costs me £4.18.

Five stars this hotel has. The waitress mercifully gives me a pastry, which I don’t have to pay for which is good considering the price of the latte when surely breakfast is supposed to be included in the £420 bill for 2 nights. I think she can sense that I’m almost apoplectic with hangriness. The pastry helps me not explode. A wedding guest though, fat in her entitlement and berobed for the spa, overhears her give the angry man the last pastry. I think she may have been the same inconsequential woman that glowered at me as I was refused wine last night at the bar “Do you have any pastries,” I hear her jowl pointedly at the poor young lady just as I bite into my raisin thing. I would have given her very low marks for acting in a LAMDA exam. She knew I had the last one and is just deliberately making things hard for the poor waitress. Roald Dahl’s Witches was shot in his hotel.

“The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next. REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS. That is why they are so hard to catch.”

All the facilities in the world. All the stars. Just something not quite right.

Despite all their attempts to put me off I love the hotel, the aspect, the facilities. I’m a happy mouse when I’m there. The staff are all very polite and vigilant. Most of them aren’t used to edge, which makes the ones that are a bit edgy into gold dust. The waitress in the spa, she absorbed my absolute discombobulation with the whole breakfast situation very well, and converted my energy with understanding and skill. She was thoughtful and personable. There’s a great night porter I remember from a previous stay (see blogs passim) The fact I’m dedicating another blog to being annoyed with this wonderful hotel isn’t to do with the staff. It really isn’t. They rock. It must be the management not being able to handle events that led to a little string of bother. “Oh … cottage guests can go to the new spa when it’s booked out for a wedding,” someone said but nobody thought to keep it open later than usual in the evening to match the hotel bar, and nobody thought to warn guests who might be affected that they would have to book their breakfast in advance and that they wouldn’t be allowed in the hotel…

I’ll be back there next week and I’m genuinely excited but I’ll need to ask some questions in advance this time. Like “will I be able to have a breakfast on my last morning?” Tristan just said “The problem is that nobody in the provinces knows how to run an event.” I’m quoting him so I don’t say it myself.

A day filming outside, in autumn, in Cornwall, for a scene set in summer.

Miracles happen. We wrapped before 6. This was mostly achieved by only having a couple of goes at every angle, and only really going back if something wasn’t functioning for lighting. It’s useful to know your craft enough to be able to ask for another one if you are certain that you’ve done it atrociously. Nobody on a set like this is looking at the actors performances – they’ll break the shot for light or sound but rarely for flub. I was comforted that an actor with much bigger chops than me turned in a perfect performance in the reverse and then as soon as the camera was on him he chose to do-over a few times mid shot. Film work is a bit like prep at boarding school. Everybody pretends to do no prep and then show up knowing everything. Everybody is secretly working hard and not letting on. The only person who suffers is the person who believes that nobody else is working and cuts back on their own work. It’s an unusual discipline, filming. You get no rehearsal. You can’t break into the lines softly. You work on your own beforehand and when you get on set you fucking know it and know it and know it and if you don’t know it you fuck the whole day up and loads of people you have never even been introduced to secretly think you’re a bit of a tit.

The actress and I both knew it today and there was play. It’s her first job at this level, and you wouldn’t know it. Playful, responsive and confident. It was mostly a two hand scene, first thing, lots of movement catalysed by her character. I was supposed to have an old fashioned bicycle, but somehow that joy was axed at the last minute before I arrived on set. For that, my eyes are on the very dour art department lady. She barely even trusted me to lean on a table. “An actor on a bicycle? Impossible. Actors cannot safely and consistently ride bicycles.”

Another old pointless war, between the person with “crew” written on the back of their shirt and the notional “talent”. I have so many shirts with “crew” written on the back of them that I likely could have predicted her exact sentence when she came up to tell me I couldn’t put my weight on the table when I was holding my weight in my legs because I’d already had that thought. Artifice comes in many guises but it takes a deeper craft to be able to see it across the table. Art department was brilliant today. They made a very British scene. But as is often the case, they couldn’t see the performers for who they were.

I’m having a lovely time. I always do, on set. I need three sleeps though to be utterly satisfied I know it, but that’s to do with my particular work ethic. I knew it but I could’ve made more space for freedom.

Fistral. Great big sky and a line of coast. I’ve been standing in my balcony with red wine running my tomorrowlines against a recorded version of myself reading all the other lines in. They’re in, I think. I’m allowing myself a dinner break and then it’ll be another hour before bed. Important to appear effortless on set. I’m hoping I can get into The Fish House for dinner but you have to book forever in advance. If they call me I’ll indulge. If not I’ll likely end up having Rick Steins dodgy fish and chips.

Cashflow is not good right now after Mr Clutch threw the book at me to fix Bergie. Needed to be done though, and even if there were too many hours charged, at least the work is guaranteed for two years. This experience puts a fuse on Bergie though. If he’s that much of a bastard to work on, I’m better off with a Qashqai. I might get some of the overcharged hours back, but I honestly feel right now that I’m tiny and the Mr Clutch machine is huge and stupid and inevitable. I’ve got some basic quotes on time, but I’ll need to contact Nissan direct and yadda yadda yadda.

As I write I’m getting messages from The Atacama desert where I would be if I wasn’t here. There’s a sliding door, as I sit in my suit in Fistral wondering if I’ll get a table at the posh restaurant while my friends work their fingers to the bone burning and sweating their way through a huge villagebuild into another desert race. I’m getting photos of nothingness. Apparently the night sky is incredible. I’m sad not to be there, but also I’m so happy to be on set again. I sat by the monitor for a while today and just made sense of the feeling on this film. Much of the same people in the same roles. I’m gonna enjoy slotting in and doing my job.

The call sheet just came through. Pick up before 7 and my biggest scene first. Ain’t it always the way. No callback from The Fish House, so I’ll wander back up hopefully and if they are still chocka I’ll go get overpriced undersized unpopular tourist fish from mister famous.

And then I’ll go to sleep in my incredible cottage. I’ve got the whole thing to myself. It’s huge. It’s self catering, which would be relevant if I’d known about it, and will be useful next week when I’m back again and will have my car with me. So long as the clutch doesn’t burn out on the way.

I flew again this morning, to Newquay. This time the plane didn’t break. It’s a pretty good way to get here, frankly. Very quick compared to any other route and, in keeping with the ridiculousness that we have been enduring for most of my lifetime, the train will be more expensive than the plane. Thatcher.

I’m gonna watch the sunset. Then eat. Then work. Then sleep.

—

I ended up in The Stable. It’s a pizza place with a panoramic view of the sunset. Fish House lady stood in an almost completely empty restaurant and told me the was no room for me, and I’m sure she might fit me in at the end but I’m gonna need to be back to work before then. There’s no way she could every know how fast I’m capable of eating…

It’s interesting how I allowed myself to get exercised about the chance of eating in an expensive restaurant when I’m cash broke. Gotta watch that tendency. I had to divert investment funds this morning to pay for my pret coffee at Gatwick. When I say I’m broke these days it’s different from what I meant by the same word a decade ago. Thank fuck. But… My service charge just went up this morning in my block which means that now, to stand still, with council tax and service charge I need just under £600 a month to stand still. Considering I am supposed to own the place, that’s fucked, no?

Anyway. Food. Then bed.

Moving house… It’s a really bad time to move house if you’re renting right now. It’s pretty shit if you’re buying as well. But from what I understand, all the prices are hoiked up horribly because of lack of properties coming up on the market or greed or unsustainable intergenerational financial models.

Nevertheless, Tristan and Tanya’s landlord good and karked it in lockdown and whoever inherited is gonna gut the place so they can charge more. It’s a shame really as it worked with the cat and they had upstairs downstairs and a little spare room stinking of weed where I could curl up and pass out if I had too many gins to drive home. But today they had to move.

Strong men speaking a slavic language were hauling things into £750 worth of white van when I arrived with Bergie. I took the boxes that weren’t in their budget. Tristan supervised the lads who, of course, were seeking ways of charging more. Tanya packed a zipvan full of plants.

I hauled a load of stuff into my whip. I’m not being paid for this in any traditional way. “Money or food?” That was the offer. I know them well enough to know that “food” is the correct selection in such an instance. I’m likely to have paid Tristan £120 for a day like that. He’s likely to take me out somewhere glorious and put things into my face that come to as much if not more. What though I’m broke after the Bergman clutch incident? This is my version of avocado toast. Without occasional conscious indulgences, life isn’t anything like as much fun, and we mustn’t just be slaves. Sure, learn to cook cheap. But from time to time just get someone else to do the cooking and the buying and the washing up. Life’s too short.

All the narrative though is about how we are all about to be broke. We are pushing that Sysiphean boulder up that hill. We are at the point where every step comes with failing strain. October and we all expect the moment to come again, where the rock rolls over us and back to the bottom of the hill.

This winter is being prepped to be a hard one. The buggers want to drive the final nail into the NHS and hand us to the American healthcare system with insurance forcing us all to conform in our life choices or die when we get sick. They want to make standing charges so high in theatres that suddenly the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse’s much criticised decision to light themselves with tallow candles will be looked on as the cheap option. Even The Willow Globe is feeling the pinch – they are going to try to go off grid and maybe they can – if they can afford the outlay for the infrastructure. It’s gonna be a long December. My friends and I are going to feel the pinch. Thankfully the film and TV industries remain robust – entertainment hasn’t all shifted to self involved demagogues ranting on internet videos. I might be ok for work. It’s not like I’ve auditioned for theatre for years now. Things might change though. Things change quickly. And I don’t think the relationship with Extreme-E is broken even though I’m upset I couldn’t make it to Chile.

Another early start tomorrow. I’m going to try to fly to Cornwall again. This time though I’m driving to Gatwick in the morning and not fucking around with trains…

A quiet day.

Next door to my flat, in the huge edifice owned by Opus Dei, there has been a high pitched wine emanating from a faulty door phone for the best part of two days. Last night at about 2 in the morning I was barefoot in my tracksuit bottoms, standing out the front with some sticky pads thinking to myself that maybe if I stuck the bell down it would stop the high pitched wine. No such luck. I just ended up ringing all the bells, but pushing them didn’t stop the whine. It just made noises in the building. So there was no point in jamming the bell down apart from pissing off one of the denizens of the building, which I considered but there was a camera in my face.

I don’t know what goes on in there. Occasionally you see priests coming in and out. Occasionally you see young women with suitcases going in going in.

Sometimes they have open days. I’ve never been. I’m sure they aren’t chopping people up. But suddenly, ringing the bell in the small hours, I started to feel uncomfortable about what sort of thing I might be waking up in there. It’s a huge quiet building most of the time. Occasionally there’s the smell of cooking onions from the big dining room downstairs. And right now there’s this constant maddening whine. I can’t find my earplugs. I hate it. I wish I could stop it. How the heck have they not fixed it yet?

Another night trying to go to sleep with it happening. It’s just on the edge of hearing. It comes into my dreams like fever. Sometimes it is too high for me to fully hear. If I had a dog it would probably be going insane. Tomorrow I’ll probably go over in the daytime and see if there’s somebody there and ask them to fix it. I mostly remember to hate it at night as my bedroom is the closest part of the flat to it. It’ll be worse for the people downstairs I’m sure. But maybe there’s just nobody in that building right now apart from caretakers, security guards and the dark thing in room 15b.

I just pottered and looked at lines. The autumn is setting in and the light is not happy light anymore. The nights are closing in. The rain is falling. Grey skies. And that fucking noise.

My only other activity today was to try to move forward this situation where a big chain of garages has overcharged me for a repair and rather than accepting it they are trying to wheedle out of it. Currently I would very much like to know someone who can access an ICME manual… I need to know clutch replacement time on a 2016 DiG-T X-Trail front wheel drive Acenta – petrol. Any mechanics out there? These fuckers need to be held out against on this. It seems to be a habitual thing for them to do, but I’m not gonna lie down easy with it.

Alarm at 5am. I cancel it. Alarm at 5:16am. I fumble a snooze. Again at 5:26. At 5:36 I blearily set a new alarm for 5:41 as if the five minutes will make all the difference. Then I realise I’m awake so I get up before I change my mind.

There’s a sock on the handle of my bedroom door. I put my hand on it as I stumble to the loo, and leave it there. It’s to remind me that my passport is in my car. If there’s something I absolutely have to remember in the morning, whatever it might be, I put a sock on the handle of my bedroom door.

I’m packed already. I put on a three piece suit and grab my charger. I get my card, my flat keys and my car key, and I leave. I’m still half asleep but the sock reminds me to grab my car key and get the passport before the Uber arrives to take me to Victoria. I’m a bit behind, so I shell out for Gatwick Express. Twenty quid for no distance. It is delayed by about twenty minutes owing to late running engineering on the track. I try to check in online, but Eastern Airlines won’t let you do it within 3 hours of the flight. I’m only flying to Newquay.

Gatwick happens before coffee and I’m not wearing my lenses. There’s a dream of a queue for check-in. The masked woman in front of me is angry enough at the slow queue for the pair of us. I just let the time tick by. I get to the front an hour before my flight and on an impulse I check in my hand luggage. The wheel is broken on my little case. They’ve paid for a checked bag. Saves me carrying it.

I would normally be going to Chile today, but I booked all this filming.

The bag goes in and I find coffee just before security. I end up having to sit on the water drop desk to finish my latte, as the crowds surge past. With no hand luggage I fly through security and before long I’m in hell, waiting for the gate. Noisy angry humans everywhere. Some are so angry I find myself laughing in their faces as they glower at me for existing. There’s no point getting breakfast or coffee right now. Queues are very very long. I find myself hoping it’ll be better at the gate. The busy old ladies clearly hoped the same thing and they are outraged at having had their water confiscated and there being nowhere to get more water at the gate. I sit there.

We board the flight to Newquay. We take off.

The captain almost immediately announces that there’s something wrong with a windscreen wiper. It’s not safe, he says, to fly the extra couple of minutes to Newquay, so he dumps the load of us in Southampton.

“Welcome to Southampton, we appreciate this is not Newquay but safety is a priority. As our arrival in Southampton is not expected it may take a bit longer than usual for ground staff to reach this plane.”

I message the production coordinator.

It is very possible that they had already rescheduled the shoot for the Queen’s funeral and just not gotten around to telling me. I’m not gonna be needed tomorrow. This whole trip was pointless. Nobody bothered cancelling me until I made them think about me by having my flight diverted. “I’ll book you back to London on the next train,” she tells me, but we are all being forced to wait at Southampton airport and I checked my bag.

Thankfully, my bag is delivered through the carousel. They start by talking about driving us by coach to Newquay. Then they decide that the plane is actually safe and I manage to extricate myself from the whole fucking thing and go back to London by train. The coordinator books me a train ticket and rather than sending me an e-ticket, she sends me the code you are supposed to use to get a paper ticket out of the machine. I’m already on the train when I get it. It’s useless, but thankfully nobody inspects me. I get through the barrier at Clapham Junction purely through good fortune. And at half eleven I’m back where I started.

Had the flight continued to Newquay I still would have been there unnecessarily. So I guess it worked out ok. I’ve got a few more days to learn my lines…

“Mercury is retrograde,” says my agent. And whatever you believe in, it fucking is. What a pointless shunt of an early morning.

The plus side is, it allowed me to join the team and look at the route for this year’s Peculiar London Hampstead Ghost Walk. You’d be mad not to book tickets for yourself and everybody you’ve ever met. Book now, QUICK before everybody gets nuked by Putin.

https://www.designmynight.com/london/whats-on/bar-crawl/halloween-pub-tour?t=tickets

Today I dragged my energy back from Wales to London. I said goodbye to that old land and hit the road. I’m learning lines again. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Cornwall and have a wardrobe and makeup call first thing, and then it’s more filming. I am such a lucky fucker. Every time this kind of thing lands I feel utterly blessed. I’ve had enough crap go down lifewise that even though I know what I’m supposed to be doing, and know that this sort of thing is part of it, I still hear my parent’s voices telling me I’ll get it out of my system – it’s a phase I’m going through… Hell of a long phase now…

I’m home. I’ve been cramming lines. I’ve been eating sausages and beans.

We woke up in a wonderful huge stone home in Wales. We woke up slowly too. I didn’t appear until at least ten. The silence and the nature made for a good sleep.

Bacon and eggs and a walk to the river, and before long we were all gathered and it was time to leave. Somehow I lost my bag – I think I left it on a chair. I only left pants and socks in that bag – it was the worst packed bag in the history of bags. I felt safe bringing nothing but a change of underwear to The Willow Globe. I’m glad of that call now.

What a wonderful thing to have had the chance to do. What a total joy. I love The Willow Globe. I love the humans behind it. They make beauty and opportunity, and they do it really just out of love. The company that went up, even if some might have had very bright credits, everybody was just a jobber last night – as we always are with The Factory. The best way to be, and we filled that stage with life and truth and mischief.

I’m back in town and I’m seeing how fast I can write this cos I’m gonna have to wake up at 5 tomorrow and haul my ass to the airport. Early early flight. So fucking early. I have packed a rudimentary bag – basically pants and suits. I’m off for only 2 nights this round. Then back next week.

I have to go to bed. Here’s my photo of this time last night, the house and the mist. How quickly things change. London ho!

Phil and Sue grew this theatre out of this fertile ground. Ancient ground, lush and energised. Fertile from the sheets of rain we have encountered during shows in the past. Seeded with energy, with land magic, with all the extraordinary things Shakespeare was channeling. As we played the matinee, the sun hit our faces, lighting the stage before it lit the audience. That would have been thought about when the theatre was planted…

They talk about planting a church. A church works much like a good theatre. The Willow Globe is a powerful and fully energetic place. And it has been planted. It’s a nature church, a breathing performance space made out of living willow. It’s easy to dismiss Shakespeare as old fashioned, considering its well over 400 years old. But the material still lives. We just get exposed to fusty old traditionalists and academics clinging onto their first experience of it – which cannot have any correlation with how it was intended by the writer, outside of massive coincidence. People will tell you, in voices of absolute certainty, how various character names are pronounced, or how various well known lines should be delivered, or what various characters are like. The verse and writing helps with much of that, for sure. But my hope and trust is that the man who wrote all these lovely thoughts for his friends was willing – in his own words – to allow vox. Give the words to the people in the place. Let them run.

We ran. Sometimes we ran straight into a wall. The sun was shining at the end of the matinee and the jig was carnage.

My part of the revels today was Malvolio. A tempting one to divorce yourself from. He’s a creep. You never really want to be channeling your inner creep, but he’s a creep who gets to share his thought process with the audience. I got to do it with a safe company and in a magical place. Matinee show I kept myself safe, I think I did a bit of a heightened accent. It’s actually the accent I grew up in, so it’s a true voice of my past, but it’s not my true voice now. I’ve flattened it. I was challenged to cut the crap for the evening show. Fair. We wouldn’t be The Factory if we weren’t allowed to “bust” each other.

How dare you suggest that actors frequently use the matinee to warm up!

After the incredible bright and direct sunlight in the first show, the failing light brought electric lighting – “we are going to have to unplug though. Standing charge is absurd” The moon rose too late to light us, but it did rise behind the stage, so bright and strong. I got to see it from the new tiring house, built this year from a fallen cedar, meaning we no longer have to change in a gazebo. As I improvised cross garters for my stockings, I watched it appear. As I tried to teenage-seduce Olivia it was shining on my back, encouraging lunacy.

These guys, these friends, these hearts. Some of them are consciously channeling, others are doing it without knowing. All of them are various types of energy conduit. With the full moon behind us, there in that living theatre, we found a couple of crystalsharp moments of truth out of the usual hilarious boiling sea of chaos.

I’m almost asleep now in the big house. I hope next year we can come again. Always this is a true delight, coming to this powerful beautiful place. I will sleep now under this moon, in this energy, next to Lou. Good dreams. Good night.