Month: June 2023

After a lovely operatic interlude, a heavy sleep once more interrupted too soon by the deliberately annoying jaunt of my phone alarm. We used to have alarm clock radios, or a CD player with a timer. Or just a dedicated alarm clock. There were ones shaped like baseballs that you could throw at the wall to put them in snooze. How many of us still use them, now we have these phones?

Smartphones do so much, but they take space by doing it. These incredible digital cameras and now you can’t take a disposable clicky camera to any branch of Boots and quickly get some badly framed prints and negatives. I bet there are far fewer darkrooms in Soho now. Our photos just take up digital memory. When we die most of the vast record of snaps we’ve accumulated won’t sit in a box for decades while our heirs work out when they’re going to have the headspace to pick through it all for memories. Mostly it’ll just get reformatted or chucked out with an old laptop. These hard copy photos by other people are tough to chuck out. I still want to go through my mother’s slides, play her cine films, give time with Max for the huge boxes of old photos from other lifetimes. But when is ever the right time? It’ll be a nostalgia tinged with an ancient grief. Doing it will perhaps allow us to get rid of another box, but I can’t think it’ll be a swift process or an easy one emotionally.

I write this blog on my phone daily. Swipe typing makes it so much faster than any other method. So this phone is my word processor. Also my calculator, my notebook, my calendar my weather forecast. I’m reading one of my big fantasy trilogies right now – The Soldier Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Haven’t read a big one like that for a while but I don’t have to carry it around any more so it’s more attractive to have it on the go. I’m fond of Hobb – she has a strange challenging voice. Start with the Farseer Trilogy. Ive got these big books on my little Kindle when I’m home, but I forgot it when I went to Scotland. I could still keep the bedtime reading habit by using this phone on dark mode… So it’s my spare book too… The distances I drive in cities and on motorways – I have been driving long enough to remember that open A to Z on top of the steering wheel, that list of road numbers tacked to the dashboard. Now it’s just the phone again. Last night a road was closed on the way home. I pulled up, inputted the closure to Waze and followed a new route. In the process I learnt nothing new about the geography of South London. I was just slavishly following my phone – (I was knackered).

I do my banking through my phone. I wind down with games on it. I use the torch when I’m getting things out of the attic. I tune instruments with it. When I stop to think about it, it’s crazy how much it can and does do. I’ll still need a swiss army knife to open cans and bottles and cut boxes and put holes in conkers, tweeze hairs etc but I wonder how many companies have gone bust because of phones taking their market. Watches have managed to remain a desirable accessory even though we all know the time now, but you really don’t see alarm clocks much these days outside of hotel rooms.

A slightly longer day today but satisfying and now I’ve got more lines to cram into my head. Happy to be busy. Happy to be warm. Lucky to have this incredible device. Silly to take it for granted.

Got up in the morning, barely. Greggs for a bacon butty and a coffee before I was really fully awake. Most of the way to Greenwich before the colour started seeping into the world. Random workshop time!

Lots of shouting. Lots of troubleshooting. Some inspiration. Did it land? Perhaps it did.

By noon I’m knackered. But by noon I’m finished. I wander out into the hazy sunshine and try to remember which industrial estate I hid Bergman in.

The phone goes just as I’m about to go back under the river. Lou has two tickets to the final rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne.

I’ve been really curious about this one, and it’s not an easy ticket. U turn and I’ve got to be there by ten to three. Satnav has me arriving at 2.55pm and I’ve only got about ten miles of petrol. My foot goes DOWN.

I think Peter Hall directed this originally in 1981 and they mothballed it so they could roll it out every few years. It’s archaeology and opera all rolled into one now. Lovingly restored prop trees are held by painted actors for hours. “Yes I work at Glyndebourne as an actor.” “Oh really, who are you playing?” “DON’T COME AND SEE IT.” Apparently one time one of them listened to an audiobook every show.

It is as camp as Christmas. Shiny shiny big moustaches wigs LOOK HOW MUCH WE SPENT oooh Magic LOOK fairies. The youngest cast member gets the most dangerous fly. There’s a huge burning brazier on stage. Most of the staging of this was a new show? There’d be some humourless booklicker killing all the fun for ‘elf and safety. It wouldn’t be the artifact it is, and right now I’m in an artifact head. Antiquities on the radio, old fashioned remounts of shows that were esoteric when they were written? Sure. I’ll take some Benjamin Britten and some Peter Hall and that incongruous but brilliant countertenor reading of Oberon. I know little about opera but like many many actors I know Dream inside out and back to front. I was finding joy in things that pinged when sung. It’s an rearranged, but the good stuff is all still there and it’s a fun show.

Sometimes I found myself remembering important early drama school lessons. “Why did you walk over there in the scene?” “The director told me to.” “But why did you do it?” “So I wouldn’t upstage the other actor?” “No, why did your character walk over there?” “I dunno.” “You need to know. Otherwise it’s just an actor doing interesting walking and we can all see it has no truthful purpose.”

There’s always a bit of interesting walking in opera, and remounted shows will often be blocked from the book of the previous cast. It felt like there was a bit of that tonight, but it’s a final dress rehearsal. This is gonna be another extraordinary show for Glyndebourne and I’m only sad that it’s so hard for almost everyone to be able to engage with the place and the work that goes on here. I’ve been really fortunate to have Lou help me educate myself in a form that would likely otherwise have stayed totally opaque to me.

Dream always works. That’s the wonder. Doesn’t matter if it’s performed by the England cricket team. It still works. I’m back in London now. Glad I had the time. Now I’ve got to go to sleep…

Driving back from Scotland today was made a little quicker by Neil MacGregor. Former director of the British Museum, he’s an artifact of sorts himself, brought down from Scotland and forged in the academic mill of Oxford University many decades past. He collaborated with Radio 4 to create a History of the World in 100 Objects. I’ve now listened to a good fifty of them back to back.

MacGregor is very much a product of his privilege, very casually bringing in household names to talk about esoteric things. “Here’s Lara Croft on Hieroglyphics”… “Here’s SpongeBob to talk about Augustus Caesar”. All of the vowels have made friends with him. You can hear the “h” when he says “wheel”. Listening to this is like taking tea with a benign and ancient retired headmaster in the garden of his ancestral home. The ideas rove all over the world. He is full of scattered insight into the ancient world, political mechanisms, the power of trade, humanity, sex, food, shifting morals… Antiquities are a minefield of outrage and meaning these days. He occasionally nods to what could be endless arguments about almost everything he talks about, but he doesn’t let these modern sensibilities derail what is always fifteen minutes of timeless knowledgeable and pleasurable whimsy. It helped me eat the hours up on that seven hour slog back from Ellie’s.

I didn’t want to leave hers which is why I’ve only just got home now at half ten. I was loving the tranquility and creative potential in that little slice of land, that stone house full of history and possibility and dreams up there in the marches, the borders, the edges. I took the morning to really fill out my diary and look at the shape of my coming month.

Tonight, directly outside my flat, men with flashing lights, big machines and drills are whistling to each other and appear to be very seriously gearing up to spend the whole fucking night making big noises with machines. I’ve got to deliver something unfamiliar tomorrow morning way too early in a place that’s hard to drive to. My alarm is currently set to half five. I’ve said “yes” to too much again it seems, and the next fortnight is going to be a test of stamina. I have a feeling I’m gonna wish I’d snapped my phone up there like Gus Fring and gone and lived in a tent with the hares until winter where nobody can make me do random things.

That said, it was cold up there. It’s noticeably warmer down here, although in such a way that I want my window open and that means these huge machines might as well be on my bed as they crank up to do whatever nonsense they have to do. Why the hell does anyone live in London?

I shall attempt to sleep while dreaming of antiquities, interpretations, ancient civilisations, worlds without petrol.

Wisteria is growing in through my window. I can hear it existing as I write. Behind me I just trashed about a decades worth of webwork by a very much still alive harvestman spider, just by plugging in my mobile phone. “I thought you’d love the wisteria,” says Ellie, who could have trimmed it back before I came but knows how I love nature. I do. And I feel sorry for the spider but she’ll rebuild.

I love it here. I’m in this comfy bedroom now where the windowplant is talking to me and there’s space. High ceilings and room between the bed and the door. I sleep well in rooms like this cos I grew up in them. I haven’t closed any of the curtains. Tomorrow I want the sun to wake me, not an alarm. I’m here in the Scottish borders and I’ve never slept here before but the silence is vast compared to what I’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t have to be anywhere until 8.15 on Wednesday morning in Greenwich.

Look back two decades… Ellie and I buggered around at The Globe in the corporate leg of it just after we finished training. A load of us … we got cherry picked by some guy who wanted to make very very broad strokes populist stuff and call it a Frost Fayre. Much of it wasn’t to many of our tastes. The joy of it is how so many of us are still in touch decades later. It was a crucible of sorts. I’m glad I got stuck in. It has nothing to do with the work I still do in that place, but it has informed my friendship group – my running mates. Ellie is still making fresh work and asking questions. We’ve been trying to hang out for a long time now and finally managed it.

We walked around the gardens. There are hares here, openly loping about for evening silflay. There are badgers. On the horizon there’s even a tree with mating osprey, well enough served by the river teviot that they return year after year.

Every inch of this soil is laced with power. There’s a dormant volcano just in sight, a buried dragon. Life overlaps life in an endless drive. Yew trees and rivers, dryads and hamadryads, mud and sun and haze and moon. Ellie and I talk into the night about the lights that have always drawn us, about how we can focus those lights, about where and how we shine in their glare.

A joyful calming night. Too much wine? Never. And here now in my annex I will fall asleep and my spirit will talk to the quietly bumping wisteria and the busy harvestman. I’ll go journeying over the pastures and woods in dreams. After a full on social wedding, it becomes a quiet and reserved night here – once more the borders. The edges. The liminal space.

There’s history here, and character. Much has come before, much is to come. And this stone house is talkative and living, as all the best ones are, as Eyreton was. I’m gonna stop writing and start listening now, to the wisteria, to the air, to the stones, to the silence and to my creative soul here where I can hear my heartbeat.

… and I’m horizonal.

My feet hurt.

For most of the final four or five hours of the wedding I was either dancing or sitting outside letting myself cool down before more dancing. Glad I can still do it, even though the drop in stamina is noticeable from the last time I was at a Scottish wedding. I’m not as fit as I used to be. That can be solved.

Happily I had great dancing partners in the ceilidh. I was in the same Barclay Hunting Tartan as the groom. It’s a mark of this branch of the family that we all use the hunting as dress because the dress tartan looks like a wasp drowned in your piccalilli. I met some fun people and we did some energetic dances and overheated and it was a glorious thing. The last few family reunions have been sad ones. Happy to have a happy occasion.

“I’m the oldest man in this branch of the family now,” my brother Rupert mournfully confided in me. Oof. They’re all gone. Jamie too, my eldest brother, as much an elf as a human, working wood and making music. They were well remembered though. And as I walked into the wedding a bit late in my sunglasses with a wonky bow tie one very old man exclaimed “Norman!” at me, my father’s name. He quickly remembered the passage of time… I felt a mixture of pride and sadness to be mistaken for my dear old dad. After all I was wearing his kilt that he rather sadly and formally gave to me right at the end of his life when I had a wedding to attend. He had taken it out to it the very end of the leather strap and made a new hole there. It used to sit a little large on me if let out to that hole. Now I needed every inch of room. “Normally I’d take you and fit you with a kilt, but this one has seen some good times and it wants to keep on having them.” It has seen some parties with me. Maybe one day I’ll pass it on to someone. I’ve still got some dancing to go though.

There’s a vein of incisive awkward kind stubborn mischief running through the family. Friends of one of us will often know how to quickly be friends with others. I found easy conversation with Hugo’s friends, and easy dancing too.

One unfamiliar thing I did was to stop drinking once I was no longer eating. Someone had opened a bar tab so I could have gotten hammered, but I danced and drank water and occasional sugary things and when it felt like time to go I felt pretty clear headed. I’m surprised at myself.

Off to bed now in my wee apartment. Gotta send a self tape tomorrow somehow. Eek.

There’s me always banging on about how I love the heat and so on. Then last night I write about how my car is air-conditioned so driving to Scotland in summer will be reasonably clement.

To bring me down a peg or two, the universe conspired to make the Aircon pack up in Bergman. Nothing like eight hours in a hot car to make you question preferring the summer. Window down meant deafened, window up meant cooked. I stopped at Halfords to see if there was a hot fix but they didn’t want to make it worse. That’ll be money in the garage for a future version of me, and meanwhile … I’m in Scotland again YAY.

My cousin invited me to dinner this evening, which was very thoughtful of him. I was in no state to be a guest though. Family dinners, formal dinners… never an easy time for me, and doubly so when I’m absolutely exhausted. He’s not going to be at the wedding, so I totally see how he’s extending the invitation now, but the last thing I wanted was to socialise. He even offered me a bed in the pantry, but I’ve booked this little apartment near Loch Lomond. I want to be able to walk around all morning in my pants trying on kiltybits. I tried to make my excuses: “I’d like to get to where I’m staying before it gets dark!” “oh but it gets dark so late right now!” Eventually I just pulled out. Nothing left in the tank.

It’s a nice little apartment. Very IKEA but self contained. Plastic sheets. I’m in them and I’ll still sleep like a baby. I’m feeling a little curmudgeonly for leaving before pudding but honestly I was no good to anyone in terms of conversation. I just wanted to be horizontal in a vessel that isn’t made for transport. This bed will suffice.

Sometimes we really want to be talkative and engaged and engaging. Sometimes the opposite. That’s where I’m at this evening. Hopefully I didn’t upset my cousin.

London is sticky. I got here and realised I was going to stay here overnight. Just too tired and it’s too much my home in this flat for me to pass through it without sleeping. I loaded up my kilt and related paraphernalia. It’s all a little haphazard but it’s a family wedding and so it makes sense to wear the family tartan.

Now I’m just lying on my back in my hot room, and when I glance movement out of the corner of my eye I keep thinking it’s the little cat. She’s sending me projections. She wants treats and cuddles. I’ve let her down striking out to London. But here I am.

From here non stop it’s about eight hours to Glasgow. I’ve done it a few times in one go. Once it was in a van with no air con when it was like this. Bergman is going to be a luxury, and I’ve managed to pass the work on Tuesday so I can have a relatively slow return after the wedding.

Hugo is one of my nephews fathered by Jeremy, the youngest artist son of my father’s (first?) brood – (apparently there might have been some in Japan in the late 1940’s…) I’ve always called them brothers, and I get on with their kids. This one has stayed in art but is a producer. I went to the Affordable Art Fair last time as he was the Fair Director. I couldn’t afford any of the art. Buying modern art as an investment seems odd to me as someone who has tried to sell on a few pieces that my parents bought. Largely it seems to be a buyer’s market unless you are selling through a gallery. I suppose that’s what the Affordable Art Fair makes possible, but then the artists will need to have a gallery. I guess it’s like actors and agents. Gallery helps guarantee quality in a subjective market. Value is sustained by hype, hype is mostly purchased. Investment stokes investment. As an artist, you get back what you put in minus a cut from the gallery, and sometimes you get lucky. As a punter “Just buy what you like,” he advised me, and I think that’s the extent of it really. Buy art you like and hope that your taste matches that of the kingmakers. But this thing I’ve heard : “art holds its value” – that hasn’t borne out with the second hand paintings I’ve tried to sell. Maybe I was going about it the wrong way.

Hugo is getting married. I’m very happy to be invited and able to go. He was very understanding about the nature of my work and let me be a maybe for a long long time. Weddings are extremely tricky for actors, and I’ve had more than one occasion where I’ve ended up missing an important one, sometimes at horribly short notice and in very stressful circumstances. This one I’m gonna make it. I’ll do the whole drive tomorrow. It’s nothing in the scheme of what I’m used to. I’ll get there and be kilted up and all will be well and I’ll be the weird uncle.

I can’t quite believe that this is my final night alone in Brighton this time around. It’s been joyful having little Tessy as my master. It’s been lovely being here in this unfamiliar and busy town. My friend reminded me yesterday that there’s plenty going on here, plenty to find. I’ve mostly just been relaxing while I’m here though. There’s scope for that, particularly within this soft and happy little flat above the noise overlooking the sea.

Today I tried to hoover and set back so I wouldn’t leave the place mucky. I’m crap at cleaning but I did my best, while Tess hid under the bed. I’ll have a bath now and then tomorrow I’ll make my way up towards Scotland. Long way to go, Brighton to Glasgow. I’ll have to break my journey somewhere. I haven’t even really thought about where, but it’ll find its way. Maybe I’ll just overnight in London and then mission it on Saturday. I just know how punishing it is to do it all in one day. Ideally I’ll be there Saturday night. I’ve booked a room with that expectation.

Tonight I’ll relax. Early bed, early rise. Sort things out tomorrow. Tonight is just for playing with Tessy and reading my book. I’ve packed, sent a load of invoices, worked out what I’m supposed to be doing after the wedding. I’ve even tried to find cover for next Tuesday in Greenwich as it might be a lovely opportunity if I can drive slowly south from Scotland and say hello to old friends on the way. At the expense of a few days low paid workshop, I’m happy to just take my time. That particular project doesn’t pay enough to justify taking the life hit. But they might not be able to find cover for precisely the same reason I’m not very sold on doing it. Gotta pay what the job is worth. I’ll take a hit for things like Extreme-E, but that brings adventure and its a consistent daily rate over time which makes up for the rate being smaller. There’s an important message in the work, so I do it when I can. It’s about personal responsibility and understanding how easy it is to pretend that our actions have no consequences. I’m happy to do it for cheap when it doesn’t negatively impact my life to do so.

Bath is running. Seagulls are calling. Cat is hoping for more laser pen. It is warm and clear. I’m planning on sleeping very well. I’ve got cash for the catsitter and she is gonna be spoiling Tessy going forward. Night night all.

Not a working day for me, or for my old mate. I’ve been in Brighton a while now, but I haven’t been into town. Today was tourist day.

It’s a good day to do the tourist stuff, a Wednesday. Since I’m usually working weekends I like to try and take space when everyone is working. And it’s the solstice. The longest day. Still a lot of summer left but they start to get shorter now.

There was plenty of alcohol today. Morning margarita on the beach. Then Craft Beer in flights. Small glasses of many varieties. We had a table booked for half two and I was already concerned I would sleep through lunch when we arrived at The Ivy Asia. It’s a ridiculous place. Ill fitted trippy uplit green floor tiles and absurd finery. “Stolen from The Ivy Asia” say the napkin rings and chopstick holders in what I assume must be encouragement even though we don’t succumb up temptation. A monkey holds up our lettuce. We stuff our faces.

Downstairs in the loo, someone has placed a very lifelike rubber samurai in front of one of the urinals. Upstairs, everything is spicy and over-presented. This place is both fabulous and awful. I had a great time. Lobster and duck rice. Black miso cod. Ribs. Decadence! Sheer unmitigated decadence.

Sake and Singha and we go stand in the sea awhile. We walk down the shitty pier. Then up into town to have ice cream and then to Plateau for natural wine and clean cocktails.

By the time my friend got back on his train I was surprised I could still function. I wandered homeward, fed the cat, had a hot bath and now I’m going to sleep the wonderful happy sleep of someone who has done something, even though I’m truth all I’ve done is eaten good food and had a little bit too much booze on a Wednesday. Still I’m tired and replete and very very happy to have spent time with my old schoolfriend and felt a connection and a truth.

Just past midnight and I’m lying with the cat thinking about confined spaces. I have been swept up in this awful story about billionaires going to the Titanic in a submarine. That ship is over 2 miles deep, with such a weight of water over it. It was famously marketed as unsinkable, providing a helpful frame of reference for you if anyone tells you anything is anything. Like the guy three years before Grenfell who told me to take my ladder to the roof off the fire escape because “nobody will ever need to escape to the roof from here because the fire doors will stop any fire.” “What if they don’t?” “They are guaranteed to.” Everybody who sells things to us will be speculating about our safety, and most of them will fudge the figures or outright lie because profit is king.

These poor people though. They paid an astronomical sum in order to go in a tiny private submarine to that place of death on the ocean floor. Why? They have lost communication and there’s only so much air. Perhaps they just decided to cut off comms and save power. It seems likely that something big went wrong, in which case suddenly it is an impossible situation for everyone on board… if the motor is somehow bust, if they can’t get up on their own steam, then it is just more souls to the underwater horror of that famous and unprecedented hubris. Even if someone works out where they are, if they’re at depth then that’s where they’ll stay.

Right now, somewhere awful, a human drama could be playing out beyond description. An explorer, three extremely rich men over fifty and a teenage boy who has never had to think about value. A limited supply of oxygen. Pressure outside that would crush you in moments. Inside, personalities that are used to being top dog. Under pressure. Perhaps, just perhaps they’ll all be ok. But it puts this whole space / ocean tourism thing into relief. This is an expensive journey, and the CEO is there with everyone to reassure them it’s safe. It clearly isn’t. What a horror.

I went to the dodgy Kemptown pub to watch the last few overs of what has been an incredible first Ashes test match, even if the pendulum swung to the Aussies. My day largely involved playing with the cat, hoping for the England team and then worrying about the people in the sub. God what a horrible way to go. I hope they come out of it…