Month: July 2023

We woke up this morning to sunshine and peace at Selsdon, in a bed so vast it has warring provinces. We wandered downstairs to an outdoor breakfast. I had sausage muffin. Lou had eggs. A quick cup of coffee and on went the Panda head as Lou went off exploring the acres.

Shortly thereafter I was pushing a shopping trolley. “Look mother, teddies!” shouted a little girl as Al Barclay with a head on pushed a lady artist in high heels across a stretch of colourful floor. “I think they’re having a photoshoot,” observed the mother, in the tone of voice of someone used to that sort of thing. Instagram has had its effect on us all now. If we saw something weird going on in the nineties we would approach with caution and curiosity. Now we look for the camera, and as soon as we see it we dismiss it as just another shoot.

I’m glad to have been part of it though. If they haven’t got some fun shots and stills from this morning I’ll be very surprised and, at heart, this stuff is about remembering to have fun. My connection to it all started in lockdown when I was dancing behind a pane of glass in Mayfair. We weren’t supposed to do anything so Marie and I announced that we were a “mental health bubble” and served Amy’s bonkers imagination by reminding people not to be scared and sad all the time. Mostly that involved dancing like idiots for hours and hours in a window but we had a selection of subversive messages we could hold up. It was mostly a winter thing. There was huge light in doing it. I’m glad she still thinks of me.

This weekend has been delightful, partly for the art but partly for the venue. Birch is a strong venture, and if I lived in Croydon I would hands down get a membership at Birch even though it’s £150 a month. There’s a gym. The pool is opening soon and will be beautiful. The building is spectacular and needs love to live. And there’s 200 acres of old land that is just gonna get nicer and nicer. The pigs and cows and ponies come next week. No wolves as it’s Croydon. Tamworth instead of boar. I suspect there are too many urban foxes for chickens.

I can’t remember the exact number but there’s over 200 rooms there. Whole wings have not yet come into play. They are still finding their feet, but it’ll turn into something remarkable, and I have no idea what deal they struck with Amy but I love that they have turned a room over to her glorious bright mind, and that she has trusted me to come and be me in it (with a panda head).

Lou and I are back at hers now and her bed feels like a matchbox compared to last night. The wind is hard against the window. As soon as I was out of the Panda the rain came. This weather needs to sort itself out please. Summer? I haven’t got a tan properly yet dammit.

It’s only early and I’m knackered again but it’s okay because I’m living where I work, and there are plenty of people out there who would question interpreting what I’ve done today as “work”.

“I don’t know how you keep it up,” said one grandfather today though, in a parting comment. Mister Panda, who was by then boiling in his head like a pot of moules, had been responsively playing with two very demanding small humans for far too long. At the time he was waving goodbye and very much looking forward to decapitating himself and panting like a hot dog. “I can do it cos there are no children at home,” I said. Little tykes can do their best when I’m being paid. I never have to worry about who is gonna deal with their crap in the morning. It won’t be me cos I never made them.

“This installation isn’t for children,” says the artist. It is huge and pink and full of toys. “PSYCHEDELIC CRÈCHE,” say all the young parents of Croydon who spent their teens going Badger Badger Badger Badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM and are hoping they can leave the little tyke with the panda while they indulge in a remarkably good if pricey wine selection.

I’m at Birch (Selsdon). It’s great. I can’t afford to be a member but I would love to be. It is the latest of many lives that belong to this incredible house, longer than a train, lead windows and with some rooms still smellinh of tobacco smoke, squat against the weather and adapted by literally a thousand years of habitation and use into a creaking breathing mess of impracticality and hospitality. The staff are the most incredible asset they have here. Whoever selected this lot is a genius. Fun and diligent humorous humans, every one of them lively and sparky. It’s The House of St Barnabus again but out in Croydon. I’m very happy to be mister Panda with them. Amy says “We are gonna roll it out internationally!” I’ll take this madness to Korea. Mister Panda is a primal force. He knows things.

I’m knackered though. Lou is here. I had a long day in the head and then some wine. Quicker tomorrow. Then nothing for a few weeks. There are worse ways to earn a crust, believe me. It’s the perfect blend of hard and easy. And for the first time in a while I’m glad that the British summer has taken a temporary back foot. It means I’m only mildly poached, not pressure cooked.

I’m in bed at half ten, in Birch Selsdon. It’s an old golf course that has been rewilded, and an old manor house attached. I’m in a room overlooking the car park. I met the staff today with a panda head on – me not them – and now I have a good sense of many of them in terms of how playful they are. I’m back to doing one of the things I’m best at – encouraging people to drop their barriers. I can’t do it without a mask, but with as mask I’m a ninja at it. How dare you suggest I don’t like my real self enough to do it without a mask! Why would you ever consider such a thing? Nonsense. You shouldn’t have brought it up as now people might think it’s true…

I’m in a brightly coloured room with a panda head on. “What are you going to say to them?” asks the artist’s PA and I’m honestly not sure. “Depends on them,” I say, knowing that you can’t rehearse a conversation with a stranger. Still there’s a lot of uncertainty…

It’s called JoyMart, and the space is dressed up like a store. People are encouraged to fill a basket and then bring it to the counter. I then extract a playful price from them. But the buzzkill is that there’s nothing replaceable here. “Which items are there enough of that I can send people away with?” “None.” “Oh.” Nobody can take anything away that isn’t made up.

Enter Panda’s mother. I couldn’t think of any other way. Mister Panda has a shop full of lovely things that he wants to give away in exchange for play. He doesn’t want money. Pandas have no use for cash. So he refuses every transaction offered for a genuine thing because the installation cannot sustain it. If it gets hard to explain this in character, his mother rings him up on the phone in order to remind him not to let people roll over him and take his things.

People are getting exactly what they desire in mime form. It seems to be working ok. I’m no Marcel Marceau, and this is just my emergency adaptation of an improv warm up game called “I’ve got you a present!” It works well, as I can create the thing they’ve asked for, give it a quality, and then pass it to them and see how it affects them and how they play with it. “As it happens, I’ve got a World Peace in a sealed test tube just here. It’s very very volatile and it could explode and burn up entirely at any moment but since you’ve asked for it you’re clearly the one to be trusted with it. Careful now. As soon as you have custody of it, my hands are clean if it blows up everywhere! And if it doesn’t blow up, perhaps you’ll know where to put it so it starts to be effective.”

So yeah, I get to be silly with people and try and get them to be silly back. This is a special skill of mine, but it is hard for me in such contexts not to create a silliness vortex. I can only see out of a gauzy window the size of a postage stamp, and the more I encourage people, the crazier it gets. Plus the lazy grown up assumption that bright fluffy things are only for children. We tried two hours this evening and, even though this is aimed at adults it was The Lord of the Flies crèche after about an hour.

I’m curious about tomorrow. I’m dreading tomorrow. I’m off to bed.

A quiet day today. I took the time to tidy up around the house, and then read lots. I’ve been burning Palo Santo and candles and incense in vast quantities. I do like smelly burny things. I always have a quantity of them. Frankincense, Tibetan stuff, sage, ylang-ylang. I pick it up almost reflexively when I travel, going into little shops where they hand make it, sometimes charging way too much. In Saudi I ended up with some oud that smells like wet camel. Thick cloying smoke. I still burn it on purpose occasionally because sometimes I feel I need that musky pungent reek. Not this evening though. Today I’ve been quite pointedly grounding. I’ve been eating homely food home made, bubbling up black coffee. This evening I opened one of the French wine bottles and had half of it before pumping it sealed. It’ll keep for weeks like that. My vacuum pump – it’s a revelation! Now I can open wine and not finish it without it going to waste. Yeah sometimes I finish it anyway, but the option of only having half a bottle is … pretty appealing. I’m off tomorrow to be Store Manager Panda somewhere near Croydon!

Not today though. I’m still a bit sick with a summer cold. Leaky and coughy, but not escalating into full horrorshow. Just my body checking into itself and recalibrating. I’ll probably have some Actifed in a bit to ensure a deep and still sleep.

Outside my window the road rattles on but my little slice of London is quiet for Thursday night. My cleaning lady came for a few hours today and put on lovely clean sheets. That’s a luxury that I’m happy with myself for making room for. She’s finding it harder and harder to get work these days, and has been helping make sense of this flat for years. I like her, so I budget for her even when I’m away for months. Mostly when I’m away she stops my plants from dying and I help her pay her rent. She’s pushing seventy now, not that you’d know it to look at her. I first met her when she put an issue of Watchtower into my letterbox and I invited her and her friend up to talk to me about being a Jehovah’s Witness. I was curious. Now I’m not so curious, and she leaves that alone. She doesn’t rearrange my multifaith altar, she cleans up the ash from all my incense crap while vocally disapproving, she listens to endless seminars in tagalog while bagging up my sometimes rather excessive collection of empty bottles. She is a positive reset force here. A luxury, sure. We all deserve nice things from time to time. Now I’ve got clean sheets. I might not have taken the time.

On the 12th December 1969 a bomb went off in a bank in Milan killing 17 people. It was followed by more bombs across the city. The Ordine Nuovo were the culprits – a paramilitary organisation looking back to Mussolini and the fascists of days gone by. Make Italy Great Again. With bombs.

The Italian police were like headless chickens and followed their natural propensities. “It must have been anarchists,” they decided, and rounded up the perfectly innocent members of The Anarchist Black Cross. They didn’t fit in. And they had signed up to an anarchist society. Must be wronguns.

On the 15th December, close to midnight, Guiseppe Pinelli, who worked on the railroad, was being interrogated by the Polizia del Stato in Milan. He was wholly innocent but they were convinced of his guilt. Shortly before midnight he was defenestrated. He went through a fourth floor window. He fell to his death. Despite very fishy circumstances, his death was ruled “accidental”. Not murder. Not suicide. He “accidentally” fell out of a raised fourth floor window that was wide open at midnight on a night where it was -3° outside.

The great post war Italian playwright Dario Fo chose this as the catalyst for his famous work “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”. Since then it has been performed widely and frequently. It is on many syllabuses. Usually when it is performed the dead anarchist is Pinelli and his photo is used. The poor man has been mischievously immortalised. It is set in a police station where they are expecting an inquest into this death and they are visited by a maniac insisting he is a master of disguise and is on their side and is trying to help them get their story straight. Things gradually descend into unbridled chaos. The maniac is in dialogue with the audience, while all other characters are behind the fourth wall. Things get very weird very quickly but it all follows a strange logic. The police are lampooned, the audience is hauled out for complacency, everything is under fire. Anarchy is used to point out the flaws in our assumptions about how everything should work.

I first read it at university. Don’t read plays like books. You have to do it out loud and ideally with others. It is so tedious reading the things cold. I was deluged with references to things I didn’t understand at the time. Took me a few sittings.

It is remarkable though, seen live. It’s a brilliant clown show. One clown and the rest are all stooges. The Maniac, as he is called, does most of the talking. It’s a really high octane, full on, constant role. I saw Danny Rigby in a matinee a long way into the run and he is still firing on all cylinders, listening, playing, sweating, working. I first saw Danny at Edinburgh in “Moth Wok Fantastic” which he just booked with an anything name as he didn’t know what he was gonna make. I remember him just flowing with energy in a tiny hot room. He’s great for the maniac. Last time I saw it was at The Donmar with Rhys Ifans. Totally different productions, but both of them absolutely hilarious and completely different, carried by the undeniable charisma of their central performer. Fo is angry. The play is angry. This modern reworking, so well received that it transferred from The Lyric Hammersmith to The West End – it is angry. But the treatment of the anger is bright. By the name and the subject matter you would expect a difficult didactic play. You might go in expecting Brecht. You get a clown show with a beating heart and a sucker punch. All the cultural references and gags have been updated and there’s space for ad-lib to keep it completely now. Most of the British cultural touch points are touched, from establishment politics to social media absurdities. They even mentioned Barbenheimer, which I only heard about yesterday – this crazy cinema marathon where people watch Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back (do it that way round if you are gonna try) and put it on the socials. “I must have liberty, withal as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom I please, for so fools have.” This is admirable fooling. And all in the majestic confines of Theatre Royal Haymarket, “the queen mother’s favourite theatre” and we are told that since it is a royal theatre, “it is against the law to boo”. And even our matinee audience boos in response, even if the plausible law the maniac cites is probably apocryphal or invented by him for the gag. Danny excels at including the house, at giving audience permission to play but keeping us playing for him, for his character, for his story.

It’s running until 9th September and it’s a big theatre to fill so if you’re diligent you might well find cheap tickets. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a good one. And if you have, it’s been brought right up to date.

An unexpected morning Lou started my day. She was on a train to Victoria. I picked her up and we slung up to Bounds Green and a huge theatrical dry cleaners. All the West End shows were getting cleaned there, in the big old warehouse. Lou had a sheep to collect – it had gone in with copper stains. I took note of the place, just as it was clearly clever with costumes. Sometimes dry cleaners make a right mess of the lovely things I’ve accumulated, and I’m capable of quite a sweat when I’m jumping up and down, so vodka spray doesn’t always cut it. I’ll likely use them some time.

Once the sheep was collected we drove to Regent’s Park. She was making some costume for an upcoming show there. The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. I’ve had a few friends do seasons there over the years. I love it. So central, and yet it almost feels like a country theatre. It’s outdoors, under the elements. Often the shows are fun and well put together. Back when I was youthful and optimistic I wrote a few letters to the artistic director hoping to be considered for company members. Never got a meeting. Insha’Allah. I’ll be going to see La Cage aux Folles there soon just to see the design, as the guy she was collaborating with is part of the whole set of circumstances that brought Lou and I into orbit with one another back in lockdown.

Then to Camden for a snatch of lunch with a friend and home home home as the evening warms up and I start winding down. Bed and rise is later when I’m not working, and I’m voraciously consuming literature through my Kindle. I almost dropped it in the bath just now, but I invested in a waterproof one for that very reason. It goes everywhere with me now. I have to be careful not to read when I’m driving.

Lou finished and returned to Brighton and the pussycat so it’s just me and the traffic up here. A few more things packed in boxes, a thorough clean, and now to settle on this balmy summer London night. The mosquito problem seems to have moved on, thankfully. Likely some water in the gutter above my window that’s washed away now…

Off to BAFTA this evening. Very glam.

Maybe five years ago there was a screening at BAFTA where I was in the movie. It was an American project where young “street” youth got to make a movie – they were part of a Ghetto Film School over in LA, coming here to make a thesis film. The script was unusual, about a writer faking Shakespeare and being haunted. Interesting as the writer Gillian was 17 and Nico Baur the director, who I worked with most closely, was 18. They were both on their first journey outside of the USA. They likely both have big careers ahead of them. They still can’t be older than 23.

I was Shakespeare’s ghost. They had some serious contacts attached to what was essentially a mentoring project – it was about giving the young artists some confidence. All I had to do was be me and let them work with me. One day they had 150 extras on set, just so the young film makers could experience managing a crowd like that. It was an experience thing for them, and it turned into something like that for me as well to be honest. They managed to persuade Barbara Broccoli to come to the BAFTA screening. Champagne and canapes, the whole nine yards. A full cinema and a big screen. I invited a woman I liked on a first date. I felt a million dollars. I’m okay with my work. It is what it is. Here’s a link.

I haven’t been back to BAFTA since then, until tonight. Alice is a film maker and sportswoman and friend. We haven’t seen each other for ages so we arbitrarily decided that tonight was the night to catch up. Problem is, now I’ve got some peace ahead of me, I’ve got all the symptoms of a cold. My body is repairing after a few weeks of not being allowed to be anything other than full forward.

I sat with her, refused to hug, caught up, felt like shit. We had a bottle of white between us, and the fat chips – which I can recommend. We talked of ideas and hopes and dreams, the usual. I didn’t mention my last visit to that building, but it was in my mind. I wonder when I’ll next get a screening there? Then I got a black cab home.

Now I’m looking at a diary that is empty apart from a spot of mister Panda. I have no doubt it’ll fill, and perhaps for a day or two I can recover and let this cold thing play itself out. There’s always work to do in the flat.

It wasn’t so long ago that the phone would ring at midnight and I’d find myself in a cab to Brick Lane and a late night bar and wine and talking. It wasn’t so long ago that we would end up dancing until four and then walking the east end streets clutching a bottle of wine and still talking talking laughing and putting the world to rights. Never a booty call despite the gender differential. A strange and deep friendship. It wasn’t so long ago that we would end up in a tiny flat in Whitechapel and I would pull out the mattress on a sofa bed so familiar that I gave it a name and wrote poetry about it. One or the other of us would rise to an unwelcome alarm next morning and go to work first. Sometimes I would wake to an empty flat and a note, bottles and glasses strewn everywhere, a memory of five other people sitting around in there, a throbbing head. Sometimes I would go to work myself and leave the note myself, amused and heady, half functional. Sometimes I would decant to her vacated bed and sleep the fitful sleep of the non-contributor, long into a grey day, not wanting to face my own idleness, calling it “recovery”.

It wasn’t so long ago that we would go for long restorative walks in parks and attempt geomancy with sticks. It wasn’t so long ago that we would sit opposite each other and just go “aargh”. It wasn’t so long ago that we would talk for hours on the phone because we needed to, because we didn’t have anyone else we could do it with, because we wanted to make sense of things.

She’s a mum of two now. I was in Uruguay for her wedding. She’s still my best friend but those strange lost times are a memory. We are maybe both in a better place, we have moved towards other ways of helping ourselves forget the painful things. I don’t get the late night calls anymore and I only occasionally miss them. Time relentlessly marches on, and tonight we celebrated her birthday. Another year.

We are older now and going out is harder for our friends. Out of a possible 27 people just 5 appeared. Babies, work, distance. It was a familiar group. Old friends outside as the sun set on the south bank. Even amongst the five of us there is a history of opinion and experience. We grow and change and things attach to us as we go. It was glorious.

Much too much wine. Rosé. Light and quaffable and the time passed and we kept topping up. They have a grandmother babysitting. I’m still here in this flat dreaming of the break. She’s doing great. We got drunk again, but my tolerance has changed. It wasn’t so long ago that I could drink that much wine and keep on dancing. As I walked up the stairs to the bridge in the early summer night, I stopped for what I think might have been a tactical chunder and might have been just an inevitability. Momentarily unobserved in the city, I conversationally erupted about two large glasses of wine, self conscious, in a guilty corner. The adrenaline from that and the endorphins walked me all the way home. Here I am, happy and nostalgic for those nights when I wasn’t even thinking about how much I had consumed. When I might stay up until two even though I was working at eight. No work tomorrow thankfully – but for the flat. Still post bridgespew I’m likely to wake up okay and capable. It was good wine, but I just didn’t want my liver to have to work that hard, and the opportunity presented itself. Even though I had filled up with bready pizza.

Back home and contemplating a relatively peaceful run of it. On this mizzly pizzly day, I had a friend round to help box up all the crap I’ve accumulated over the years. There’s definitely less bubble wrap and more full boxes now than there was this morning. It feels like progress even though it is still the foothills of a mountain. Still it is certainly easier, that sort of thing, when you have company. I’m paying her by the hour, but it’s companionship too, so it works well.

Tonight I’m gonna sleep. My dreams were all over the place yesterday and I was restless. My own bed and nothing to wake up for is greatly appealing. A lazy Sunday. No more rushing around.

Had it been like this yesterday I don’t think we would have rushed off to Bournemouth like that. It was all a bit half cocked but made so much more palatable by the gorgeous clear sunlight letting us stop and frolic in the New Forest.

I’ve promised myself I’m gonna make some progress here now, treat it like a job when I’m not working, push to a flat that isn’t full of delightful ridiculous junk and esoterica and geek stuff. Today with my friend to help I have felt a little shift. I’m not sure where I’ll put the boxes yet, but filling them up is movement of sorts and definitely to be encouraged.

Now I’m in bed again, listening to the rain and hoping we don’t lose too much of July to this, not to mention the cricket… We need a full day of play tomorrow dammit.

Bedtime. Past bedtime. It’s late. Gonna put my head down and seek oblivion a while…

I left my hoodie in Bournemouth a few weeks ago. Realised when I was only twenty minutes away from the place, but couldn’t turn around as I had to rush to The Globe in time to rehearse. So I rang them up, and they put it aside for me.

Yesterday when we were at the opera they left me a really hunpy message. There’s nowhere to store it. It’s the end of term. We’re gonna throw it away.

The woman was being a right plonker. I tried to persuade her to see if anyone would post it. “I’ll bung someone £15 if they can post it second class in no particular hurry?” She was having none of it. Even when I raised the bribe. I knew she was gonna say “no” to any figure that I named so deliberately raised it absurdly high. “Fifty quid just to walk to the post office for a minute or two, and you can offer any member of staff that, and I can pay it by any means they choose.” “No.” Because, like, apparently it would look like they were taking bribes or something. Lou was with me and I didn’t want them to burn my hoodie, so I didn’t spell out for them precisely what kind of a human I thought they were and what I would be pleased occurring in their lives as a result of the interaction.

So we woke up this morning, got in the car and drove to Bournemouth from Brighton. Two and a half hours. That’s more than the cost of a new hoodie in petrol, but that one has sentimental value.

On the way home we made sense of the trip by stopping in The New Forest. The woods near Bolderwood Deer Sanctuary, and they were bright green and fertile and ramjammed with interesting mycology.

We were both pretty glad of the chance to connect with nature. I spent a long time dancing with mushrooms but mostly failed to identify the ones I found with any certainty. Some were huge, old and probably not edible:

Others were great, but too small to take:

After enough time with horses and mushrooms and trees and light we schlepped back to Brighton and healthy food and bed. Back tomorrow to London town, and now I’ve got my hoodie back, hooray.