Month: June 2023

Ahhhhh good evening.

It’s quiet here. Quiet enough that I can hear a night bird singing in the square. The wind is low though, so I can hear the sea. But I’m aware that there’s nuance here. Occasionally I hear a car here. In London, at mine, a break in the traffic is a rare thing.

I’m sitting on the floor with the cat, in complete darkness. I’ve been away a few days and she’s taking her time to reintegrate me. She’s a very boundaried creature. I arrived armed with new cat grass, and even though she is joyfully consuming my present, she is not certain where and how she can trust me. So I thought I’d sit stark naked and write to you while she works it out. Just so long as she knows I’m available for basic interaction and she doesn’t try and sever various important anatomical gifts. She’s a resourceful beast. If all cats were like her they would evolve civilisation. All her unique aspects are things that, if followed through and bred into, would eventually lead to “Supercats”

I’ve met a lot of dumb cats, and a lot of smart cats. She’s the smartest I’ve known. It wouldn’t surprise me to find this cat stroking some bald old white dude and telling James Bond how she intends to kill him.

We will remember how to be friends, I hope. Just as I hope she won’t come up with her usual 4am jumping on my pillow stuff.

I’m going to sleep. It’s late. It’s back to me and the cat… But she follows me in my dreams. It’s very very helpful to have a cat in your life, when it comes to all the woowoo stuff. Nobody needs to have to do the stuff we have to do alone. If you’re attempting anything spiritual, ask a cat to help you. While we feed them world food and give them world strokes, they help us navigate all the otherworldly madness that we trigger and negotiate almost unknowingly.

Ahhh lovely. What a lovely evening. Marylebone Theatre, this dark and humid Sunday night. Rain in the air, and heat. We all came in and looked at one another. Some of us had never met until an hour before the show. Some of us were old friends, proven colleagues, running mates. All of us had thrown in our lot with The Factory. A mischievous theatre company? An actor’s gym? A clique? An open and expanding friendship group of like minded geeky artists?

One of the places I feel at home and welcome.

Sunday night has usually been the night we play. So we played. Julius Caesar this evening. A new project and one that will likely pop up from time to time and bring that strange mixture of rigour and freedom that form our happy heart. There were people there I haven’t seen for ages and have been deeply important in the past. There were friends old and new, actors and creatives bound together by the will to make something LIVE. With the rise of AI it is getting more and more crucial to look towards the things that are made in the moment with humans. With 26 audience alongside us, we became a little live group and told this ancient tale of ambition and thwarted passion together. “There’s nothing like this,” one lovely old fellow said at the end. I was only covering small parts tonight so I know what he meant. I had enough space in my head to see the moments of immediacy bubble up and pop. I welcomed those simple flashes of play. Sometimes the joy was testament to the deep relationships some of us have built from years running alongside each other in the weird struggle I’ve been documenting the last few years. Other times the joy was in the moment, impossible things to imitate, one time flashes. Madness and inspiration. Truth and fun.

I’m not sure what I brought. I was trying to make big offers. I asked an audience member “What’s wrong with Caius Ligarius” as he has an injury. “He can’t straighten his arms,” she told me. I tried to make him arthritic. My Soothsayer was clearly just on a cocktail of narcotics. Cicero lived in a broom cupboard and wouldn’t leave. Antony’s servant enjoyed lying on his back. I incorporated him into Soldier 1, as it’s a logical throughline, so Soldier 1 also found an excuse to lie back. And Pleb 4 … well he’s a brute. “Tear him for his bad verses!”

I need to properly finish learning Antony. I am not show ready yet but need to be as this is another focused and curious live happening and it certainly feeds to my tastes and maybe that’s enough. I’ve had months to lead up to it but you know how crazy my life has been lately, and I’m aware that it’s in good hands so long as Nell or Leila are free. But for fairness and balance it’s useful to have all the parts well covered.

A happy show. Back to Brighton tomorrow and kittycat. But I’m glad I made it possible to come and play as it has helped me remember what a glory The Factory can be…

Up with dawn. 4am and I told the cat to wait despite her bum being in my face. 5am and her persistence mixed with having things to do propelled me up. I gave her mackerel which isn’t her favourite but it needed using up and I figured she was hungry after persistent shouting. She mostly turned her nose up.

I found myself staying with her, stroking and grooming her. She’s got the measure of me now. In return she makes the “giving her medicine” experience much less troublesome – or perhaps I’ve got better at it. I stayed with her and played with her for about two hours longer than I had intended, and then shot up to Croydon to rent the van.

Pace van hire have been my go-to for years for workhorse van rental in London, free of bullshit. I usually go to New Cross where you can park free locally. This time I went to Croydon as it worked geographically. Parking all day was about a fiver. I was late to pick up the van and behind schedule, but they were brilliant and understanding and helpful despite my barely concealed rage at having to wait for them to go and get the thing. As always a good vehicle. Previous clients have chewed up the interior but it was happy to GO. That said, the first time we went at speed it stank a bit. Likely it had sat for a while, but … they have decent mechanics and we are there for the prices. It was a good engine, plenty of space and remarkably fuel efficient.

We were picking up entomological journals from Northamptonshire. My brother was with me. They are all off to the museum for reference. I was just the ferryman, curious and helpful as ever, a little bit lost in conversation sometimes, happy to absorb.

Max was looking at every tree, picking up every rock. ’twas ever thus, and this fellow – the donor – was part of his tribe. I saw them in their element. And oh, I love my brother.

It was an incredible collection of rare scientific periodicals. It’s going to the right place. I was happy to help move it there. I remembered a snippet of conversation between them as a way of filling you in. There’s no competition between these humans – they both just love their medium and this is casual chat:

“I see you have a good crop of Anthrinus on the Oxide Daisies. probably from the swifts. yeah they look like Verbasci… … ? Ooh what type of moth is that?”

These were two specialist big brains and I grew up with one of them. I had been aware of the swifts, wheeling and crying over the house, nesting in the eaves. Wonderful to hear their calls as we sat having strawberries in the garden. The buzzing of happy bees in a very fertile garden, the calls of wonderful birds. Two good smart hearts who care about the natural world. And his brilliant wife and I. Not collectors in the same way, but connectors. We quickly found understanding – she had been a headteacher for years, and shares the joy I take in speaking truth whenever possible.

A lovely day even though it was much later finishing than expected so I’ll be going into a show tomorrow underprepared, but hey, it’s The Factory?!

Fine. I’ll just have another day in Brighton with the cat. Things to do? Yeah like stroking. Stroking that cat. That’s the thing I do. That’s it. And feeding her. And occasionally randomly getting full on bitten when I don’t expect it. Although mostly she’s been a sausage and she hasn’t drawn blood. She took my wrist in my fangs earlier but was merciful.

She tried to wake me up at 4 jumping on the pillow and shouting. I checked my watch and drew the line. I set an alarm for 5.30. She tried a few more times but I made her wait until half five. It’s been creeping earlier and earlier and suddenly it was too early, too early. No. I’ll be off into the dawn tomorrow though God help me. Way too early to be leaving but van hire and all that crap awaits me, so she will actually get all her stuff done with the dawn tomorrow.

I ate out again this evening at Brighton Curry. A mixture of treating myself and not wanting to do the washing up. Tasty food just down the road from a massive bollocks of a place. St James’s Street where all the fucked people hang out shoplifting and selling drugs. Brighton is small enough that all the stuff is walkable and it changes fast. Walking east from here you’re going from Kew to Camden to Covent Garden in about thirty minutes. The cash point on St James is a constant noise of one person withdrawing money while another one fidgets in their peripheral vision. All I needed was £40 for the cat cover. Fuckers were all over me. It’s rarified here and there’s less to do. More fuckheads pushed into smaller areas. Filthy angry people trying to exchange money for poison. I watched someone pull on a COVID mask, walk into a supermarket and walk straight back out with presentation pack of Nivea that was right by the door. It all happened so quickly.

I’m home now, and laying out money and food so it’s easy for Beth to look after the little pussyface. I’ll only be gone two nights but I’m already sad about it as we’ve found a dialogue, the little thing and I, and the closest I’ve got to a routine in many decades even if it is entirely against my instincts and preferences.

Bedtime now, early. Likely I’m gonna take my sleepy drink to be certain I get a few hours in as tomorrow will involve too much driving. Then apparently I’m playing multiple small parts in Julius Caesar somewhere in London on Sunday night…

I’m sitting in Suraya which is a little Thai restaurant just up the road from Lou’s in Kemptown. When I left this evening, Tessy tried to leave with me. She’s been a house cat all her life but she’s a cat so she’s interested in boundaries. I propped the door for her so she knew she could get back in and she thoroughly inspected the corridor where I suspect she thinks I’m going to be spending my evening. Once she decided there was nothing interesting for her, she retreated to the flat and sat on the stairs looking very disappointed at my decision to vacate the premises when she was really rather hoping she could sit and stare at me some more.

Suraya will cook me dinner and do the washing up in exchange for money though. Today I’m very happy with that kind of a deal. I haven’t had much sleep. And here it is. Nom.

Replete and a little bit poorer I’m now back at the flat waiting for a bath to run and I’m aiming to be asleep before 11. There’s no way Tessa is gonna synchronise to me so I’m gonna have to just make peace that she will jump up and shout right in my face no matter how dead asleep I might be. This morning it was ten to five. The days are still getting longer. I’m going to be a morning person until my catsitting is finished, as anything else will just leave me feeling awful.

Last night there was a crane fly in the bedroom, near my bed, just as I was going to sleep. “A bit early in the year,” I thought. “Play food!” thought Tessy. This led to a series of hunts until I was relieved through the thwarted veil of dreams to hear a contented crunching sound.

I’m back there now, bathed and fed, and it’s just gone eleven. At least this time I’ll be asleep by midnight, and hopefully if no crane flies, I’ll get the night without a little creature leaping all over me.

Great. That’s two days of nothing. That’s what I wanted, frankly. There has to be balance and all that running around was doing me in. Now Lou is the one dealing with multiple shitstorms and I’m just chilling out with a poorly cat.

She woke me up this time by jumping onto the bed and shouting in my ear at 5.20am. It’s just as well she’s unbelievably cute because that would otherwise be a hanging matter. I can hold onto the dream and do her soup, but just barely and then no matter how hard I try I only go back down for a few hours because I know I need to do her medicine while it’s still morning. She finds it all a game. I still find it stressful pretending not to find it stressful. And this has been the minutiae of the day.

Pleasant enough to have nothing but a cat and a flat to look after. Nothing really pending either. A friend of mine just missed another lovely acting job and rang me to express about it. There’s only one person getting each job, I guess. We are both looking forward to being that person. Too many actors. I’m just learning a couple of small parts for Julius Caesar and reading my book and chilling out in my new role as cat-slave, here in this happy soft top floor flat.

It’s 1am though. I don’t know what happened to time. One second I was running a bath and the next it was past midnight. Tessy is being cute but I know damn well that she’ll be hungry as soon as it’s dawn so I’m gonna try and get a good four hours before I’m put back to work. On which subject, it’s probably time for me to be more productive now. That’s been a lovely non-weekend weekend…

Now it’s just me and the cat. A restful day as planned, up here by the sea. I didn’t even pay for Bergies parking until half eleven but thankfully no inspection early on a Tuesday up this way.

She had me up at half five to make her soup, but then I was right back down and asleep until eleven. Then she came in again demanding treats, and she got her medicine. It’s a learning experience, squeezing two syringes of goop into an attack cat. I tend to sleep naked when it’s hot and almost came a cropper as a result. When she wants to she can FLY. Lou almost always has a few scratches or bite marks, but today I found it easier than usual, mostly because I was more confident. Animal trainers usually say that the bulk of the work is in training the owner. I see that. When I’m not confident she can sense it and she worries. No foam at the mouth this time, and it all went in her mouth which is a turn up for the books. She got her treats.

I didn’t want to go anywhere, so we sat and looked at each other. Eventually I went and lay down for a siesta and that’s when she woke me up with the most unbelievable hairball. It was the length of her aesophagus, just solid hair. Poor thing was quivering with the strain of it. I cleaned it up and sat with her a while. Hairy cat in summer – I’m gonna need to get stuck in with a brush.

Evening bath and then we sat and read together. Neither of us feeling adventurous today, and the weather wasn’t good enough to make me feel I’d missed something.

Now I’m in bed. She’s next door. She’ll wait until I’m sleeping and then walk over my feet. It’ll just be she and I for a few days now. Maybe I’ll learn to speak cat. She’s trying to teach me. She ain’t a lap cat, but within her boundaries she’s a poppet.

This morning I woke up only reluctantly in my little Premier Inn bed. The alarm felt too soon. I felt far from rested. My sleep had been active and dream laden, likely as my brain was dumping all the Shakespeare to try to remember the facilitation.

At 8.25 I was already trying to make sense of unfamiliar technology. By 9 I was in full active mode, throwing out all the energy, seeing what came back. Three two hour workshops back to back. Thankfully real coffee at elevenses and pasta bake for lunch. Nonetheless when I was done I didn’t take into account how tired I was until half way to London.

I’ll tell you that my stamina for driving is exceptional, because it usually is. Today though, suddenly, I was borderline narcoleptic in my car. Radio 4 wasn’t helping with Today in Parliament. The heat likely wasn’t helping either, and neither was the sugar crash from having shoved most of a packet of Oreo cookies into my face as I exited Leicester. Droopy head and I was on a motorway. Eyes defocusing. Not fit to drive. I knew it immediately and knew it was going to be dangerous even getting to an exit and finding a layby. The hard shoulder was very big with a storm runoff extending it. I took a hard call that I had to use it, and pulled in.

With my passenger wheels in the storm drain, I put down the passenger window, rolled back my seat, put the hazards and the handbrake on and vanished instantly into dream.

The traffic police are pretty quick it seems. I reckon I got half an hour, forty five minutes tops. I was deep in dream when “Alright mate” came loud and clear and I woke from a cricket dream with an audible scream. A little ginger guy was leaning his head through my window and for a moment my head put Ben Stokes’ face on the neck. “You’d better be broken down and not just sleeping,” he said. I was still half asleep and in no mood to be anything but honest. “I had to stop, I was too tired to be safe.” “There’s an exit just ahead and another one behind,” he informs me. He’s reasonably cheerful and I get the feeling he’s not gonna issue some sort of fine. “If you sleep here and there’s a crash you’ll wake up dead.”

However long I got it was enough to get me to London. Then I repacked my bag for another week in Brighton, slept for maybe another hour and got back on the roads for the last push.

I’m here now safely with the little pussycat in the soft and peaceful flat of Lou. With the heatwave I’m pretty glad to be in Brighton, and with the – currently – empty diary, I’m happy to be looking at a bit of stop time. We will see how that pans out though… But I already turned down a short job tomorrow in Leeds so I can hang with the pussycat. My intention now is peace.

A hot hot day today and a little bit of rainfall pushed the first half of the show into the emergency weather marquee. On a day like today, tents turn into ovens. We were all drenched in sweat immediately in that marquee. I was never happier than when I got to remove my cotton shirt and put on my silk one. Hot hot hot. They’re gonna put out severe weather warnings for the rest of the week, and Lou is in Saudi where it’s ten degrees hotter in the shade and you wonder what all the fuss is really about over here. It’s just a bit of temperature. I’m certainly happier sweltering occasionally than not wanting to get out of bed and live in the land of freezing hell. Second half thankfully brought us outside, back to the beautiful tree that frames the little stage.

The Willow Globe is deep in nature, and there’s much to feel around here. A horsefly landed on my finger during a scene in the second half causing me to momentary pop out as I shook the bastard off. Round the back you constantly hear a call that was lost to these valleys for a while after hundreds of years – the call of the red kites. They were almost totally extinguished in this country by silly people. Now they are back, and their very distinctive agile whistle sounds around the theatre as we wait for our entrances. Moles and rabbits have left evidence of good activity all around. The entirely docile chickens that shamelessly interrupt scenes are proof that, for now, the foxes are looking elsewhere. I’ve had a very peaceful few days, slipping into that slightly irresponsible show routine where I stay up too late processing and then miss too much of the morning.

The show wound up and I stayed for a while to enjoy the celebrations, but I was always gonna have to cut and run – I’m back to the dayjobby grind, about to run a workshop about batteries again. I’ve just driven to Leicester. I’m far from the kites and the chickens, the William and the willow. I’m in another Premier Inn, cocooned in my plastic sheets, listening to the roar of some sort of air thing I can’t switch off. A little wasp woke up in my light when I switched it on, so there is still nature but it’s not as deep here. In Wales I had to clean the front of Bergman because the collision sensor got a dead bug on it.

I’m tired. I start too early tomorrow. Midnight just happened and I’m going to take it as my cue to spark out.

I’ve been very comfortable here.

I’m staying in an old farmhouse deep in the Welsh countryside. If I’m not being thoughtful, I brain myself on the door to the loo. There’s a big lump on my head already, compounded by the time I’ve been here. I could not live in this place for that simple reason. It would eventually kill me.

We had a show tonight again. We started at the beginning and finished at the end. The middle was up for grabs largely, but the whole thing was largely sustained by the company.

My character veers from being an insufferable and bloodthirsty piece of shit to being a fun happy festival voice. He’s the bacchanal. No surprise it’s me playing him. Party party party party KILL party. This is a voice I know deeply deeply deeply from work and karma. It’s a big part of the mess of human chaos that oor wullie was interested in. He was on the edge of the oral tradition when he was making plays. His stuff has survived as he wrote it, when just a generation before him there was little chance of that happening.

Oral trad stories are much more likely to be morally difficult. As soon as a left brainer writes it down – and the early clerks will have mostly been the equivalent of our intellectuals now – their preference affects the stories because they aren’t very good at staring into the void. “Let’s make Grandmother still be alive when the woodcutter cuts!”

Merchant of Venice is horrible. It’s incredible. It’s vile. Oral tradition lite though. Most oral stories have no resolution and either kill everyone or destroy hope because they have been built to respond to this arbitrary and hopeless world where the only certainly is the eventual heat death of the universe.

Willy told stories for money, so be avoided such didactic nihilism. He isn’t dumb enough to peddle happy ever after though. He lets everyone speak their fullest and hopes we can think around things and come up with our own conclusions.

Gratiano is the pro capital punishment voice, in the end, in this play. And he starts as the FUN voice. Like so many genuinely dangerous and charismatic humans. “Hey wow, let’s notice things and be opinionated and noisy and let’s believe in God and be in love and angry and actually if I had my way people who don’t think like us should be killed, yeah?” The people with the strongest faiths are universally the most dangerous, as they reckon they’ve got the moral high ground and have outsourced their responsibility. They can do whatever “the thing” is cos *insert higher power* wants it based on their interpretation of *text*. I got pissed off with some American eejit on Twitter recently who said that the rainbow belonged to The Bible. I tried to tell him by how many thousands of years Gilgamesh predated the transcription of myth that he wanted to sell as history. Thankfully it didn’t make me the focus of ignorant rage. You see it so often with these Christian Americans. If it wasn’t Christianity it would be another myth, so I’ve nothing against it in particular. But the scattergun is absurd. I’ve even seen them try and say that Caduceus is to do with Satan as a way of slamming the NHS.

But my father taught me “You can’t argue with stupid”.

My character is that guy. He’s immediate and opinionated and dumb. And lovable. There’s the point though. We can all frame the world however we want. It’s only when we start dismissing those who don’t share our frame that we start to do harm…