Month: July 2023

Once more it was a final rehearsal at Glyndebourne and once more I was fortunate enough to get invited. We met one of the chorus just before their call, out in the gardens. There are many ways in which I’m privileged, and being able to be among the first to see so many of the extraordinary works at this legendary family run opera house will really not work in my favour when they try and establish who should be first against the wall come the revolution. But I was happy today.

A beautiful setting, with expansive gardens. A field full of sheep just a breath away, and Lou and I unloading a bag full of hastily bought Waitrose snacks. I had gone with the spirit of the place. Avocado and prawn cocktail, goats cheese and quails eggs. Enough to satisfy our disgusting joke of a home secretary that I deserve everything bad that comes my way. If anyone there had seen my actual bank balance they would have beaten me to death with rolled up Daily Mails, and then told the press someone poor did it.

My cover was good though. I know the classical stories. It was Semele. MOTHER! She’s the woman who made Jupiter promise to reveal himself in his full power as a lover. He tried to use his most gentle thunder but she was only mortal. She was obliterated but out of the ashes of her womb fell immortal Bacchus, God of wine and parties and occasionally tearing people to pieces while you’re so pissed you can’t remember it. Mostly a gift to the mortal world unless you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Handel wrote it in 1743. You might expect it to be a bit worn out, but Adele Thomas directs it with extraordinary vitality. I think I’ve enjoyed this more than anything else I’ve seen at Glyndebourne. My chief delight was seeing the repetitive moments filled with depth. That never happens at the opera. These songs in Handel – they take ten minutes to say one sentence. Back and forth and back and forth and I’ve seen some pretty good performers try the same tactic again and again and again. The skill is the voice, of course. They might say they aren’t paid to be actors as well. But these guys, mostly, were varying their tactics and expectations, making moments of actual jeopardy out of long repetitions that might otherwise endlessly repeat and add no humanity.

Within that, to my limited knowledge, were some pretty crunchy voices. Stephanie Wake-Edwards was a Mezzo Soprano with real range and grounded me into my listening head when she popped up as the complicated Ino. All the leads were assured voices, of course, within some bold physical choices. I was mostly lost in it. Something that could have been a buttoned up self important classics lesson in the wrong hands became this sexy funny sad human story. And yeah it WAS sexy, because these competent singers were being truthful in a medium that often forgets truth entirely. Opera is usually too mannered to be sexy.

Two long intervals. We went in at 4 and came out at 8.40. The intervals are part of the magic, as you have your expensive picnic in the grounds and, I dunno, convince the person you’re with to invest another 15 million into your cryptochainblock AI thingydingy. Champagne anyone?

Lou and I had nobody to persuade to invest in us. And no champagne. We just ate, lounged, watched, lounged, ate, watched, walked a bit, watched and clapped a lot. Then we went home. Now it’s just me and the cat, as Lou is asleep. The cat is trying to take advantage of Lou being asleep to persuade me to let her into a cupboard she’s not allowed into. From the warring Pantheon of Ovid to the demanding pussycat of Lou. Two different types of all powerful but wilfully flawed entity.

What a huge privilege to have access to that beautiful place, and to occasionally get the chance to witness all these crafty people coming together to tell these odd musical stories. Not counting the orchestra, I reckon they had almost 50 people in that company and it came through in the sound of it all. Lucky happy opera Al and Lou. But the pollen almost killed me. I was crying for most of the show and they must have thought me a soft touch. Now I’m trying to settle it enough to go to sleep without coughing.

“Someone took a bradawl to that I reckon,” says Ishmael. I’ve called Ishmael via Halfords and we are standing next to Bergman. He has reinflated the flat tyre and we are both looking at the big deliberate hole in it.

Here and now in this blog I call down the powers of wind and earth to blow a nasty itchy little persistent fungus into an intimate area of the anatomy of whichever road ragey twit did that. Thankfully Ishmael couldn’t get the locked wheelnut off without the lost unlocking tool, so I’ll get back most of my £167 from Halfords. He put enough air into it that I could drive it ten minutes to the local part worn tyre shop, and Sai. Sai had had a bad day. I got to him 5 minutes before he closed. He got the bolt off in no time. “You make it look easy!” “It is, but it’s also technically illegal.” I am happy to give him my £100 cash. With his help Bergman and I are back on the road despite the malice of the weird man who is going to have a slightly itchy groin for a day or so.

We drove to Lewes, Bergman and I, on very off balance tyres. I’ll need to do some pressure tweaking, but no time for that as I had a ticket to a talk at the town hall. This is why I was anxious to get back on the road. I didn’t know there was also a train strike, so I’m double pleased that it is all fixed.

David R Abram. That’s who I was anxious to see talking in Lewes. Lou is an enthusiast as he aligns with many of her things. He wrote The Rough Guide to India back in the day when she was living out there, and now he is obsessed with ancient sites in Britain. He has written The Aerial Atlas of Ancient Britain and filled it with incredible composite drone photos often taken guerrilla style despite asshat farmers or zealous security guards. It’s my jam too, as you know. I love ancient things. I find it perplexing how many people take their British identity from the Normans, or maybe the Romans. How few people consider the ancient peoples who came from the south with their handaxes and started to leave their marks through over thousands of years with barrows and monoliths. This Somerset Welsh Dad Geek has done lots of thinking for us, about how things are aligned. Ley and river, liminal borders, height and depth, different layers of rock. I reckon he spends more time on Photoshop than in the field, but his results are remarkably beautiful and approachably cosmic – just the right sort of balance in the Instagram age.

I bought his book. He will actually get money if I buy it direct, I hope. Surely nobody but the publishers can make money from books these days. Like musicians. Like actors. It’s a miracle anyone still makes nice things, but fuck it, we are obsessive and surely something will give. The actors and writers strike about AI regulation is absolutely crucial to lots and lots of people in lots and lots of creative industries not starving. I really really hope it gains some traction.

Meanwhile I’m off to sleep to dream of ancient things that have carried through despite all our fear of nature and our atrocious hubris. Good on David, getting up in the morning and pissing off his children to bring us these reminders of how we can be oblivious to the wonder we walk on every day of our cotton wool lives.

Things are afoot. This morning I went for a meeting with a friend and collaborator. She’s an artist and has a very clear but strange eye on things. She’s used me a few times before and I’ve got some remarkable images out of it, but I’m unrecognisable in them. I’ll be back working with her again soon, bringing joyful madness. Mister Panda will be running a shop. He might be a bit pompous this time. It’s about providing a place for people to play in and then giving them rein to be silly. Nothing outside my remit there. I was enjoying thinking about the possibilities when I got a call to ask where I was because of course I was supposed to be in Aylsford today doing a workshop and I had kicked it down the road. I think I had invented an extra day in the week, and was living in it. Dayjobby people were pretty cool about it, but how could they be otherwise? How cool they actually are will become apparent via how many bookings I get in the coming seasons having just cost them a day. It’s been a useful lifeline that job but in the end it is just a dayjob. I don’t love it like I did the boats, but I love the income so I’ll be glad to keep it ticking over until Spielberg finally picks up the phone. Let’s see. For now there’s Panda and pay is comparable.

Now I’m home and I’m in bed before nine. Someone from Halfords is coming to fix the tyre because I can’t find my wheel nut unlocker. I still think it might just need to be reinflated. I wish I had a portable inflater. Can’t drive it to the pump as it is – it’ll hurt the car and I could get pulled over which would be bad as my insurance is up for renewal.

I say I’m in bed. That’s just my office. I’ve been here the last few hours sending emails and doing admin and I’ve just ordered a curry to eat here. Lou was in her office on the beach today. Mine is my bed and that’s fine. It’s the joy of being self employed.

One of my friends sent my a whole load of apps today that are supposed to help people with ADHD and I immediately thought how useful they all would be if I ever got round to actually using them which I won’t.

I’ve sent the invoices. I’ve updated the diary. I haven’t made the plans properly but … for short term I’ve put things in motion that will allow me to make the more long term plans… There’s been some sort of progress albeit slow as ever. Soon there’ll be another flurry but bed was calling today and who am I to ignore the siren song of the fluffy pillow?

Back up to London in the morning. Most of the things I’ve sold on eBay are mine this time – magic cards and the like. But I’ve been trying to sell things for a friend as well and I can tell you, it’s never a good idea. There’s loads of admin if you’re serious about eBay, just because feedback is king. You have to be constantly in touch and amenable. Some guy wanted combined postage and I couldn’t do it on my phone – it had to be my laptop. I had to go out of my way just in order to cost myself about £3.00 and get some good feedback. Loads of questions. Loads of people wanting deals. So far nobody has ever dumped me a negative, and I’m hoping to keep it that way so people feel they can trust me enough to bid on the expensive things when I put them up.

So I went back to my flat and packed loads of junk up and took it to The Royal Hospital post office. It’s staffed by Chelsea Pensioners and I always like bringing my things in there to post. Like a village post office in London.

Bergie was fine when I got home… I parked him opposite my flat and went upstairs. A little later I came down to grab some things and a guy shouted down to me from his balcony “You’ve got a flat tyre!” Sure enough, my front right wheel is as flat as a pancake. How the hell did that happen?

After I parked I sat in my car for a wee while marking all the items as dispatched on my phone etc. While I sat there, the guy in the car next to me came down and scowled at me. He inexplicably moved his car a tiny bit further away from me and then sat in it and and occasionally glared at me. I didn’t really engage as I just figured he was uptight. But now I’m considering the possibility – (surely not) – that he let it down… People are very odd in Chelsea. That tyre is so flat that I’m thinking I would have noticed it going down as I sat there. Tristan had his car keyed outside my flat, he thinks for parking too close to someone. Someone once wrote off one of my cars by shoving things up the exhaust that I didn’t consider looking for until it was too late. There are people here with too much time on their hands, a very bad grasp of consequence and no personal responsibility.

Tomorrow I’ve got to drive to Kent, but I should have time in the day to sort it out. I’ve got a jack and a space holder in the boot. I’m tempted to try and pump it up and see if it holds the air. I really hope he didn’t let it down but if he does I can salvage it. Likely I just hit some glass or something just as I was parking and it’s ruined. I’ll find out tomorrow…

Wind still, making it harder to remember that it’s summer. Still I regretted forgetting my hat as we walked west briefly and once again encountered something burning in Brighton. It was hot enough for me to want to cover my bald bits.

The West Pier burnt down twenty years ago because of arson and its skeleton still stands stark. This time the fire was closer to the east pier, at The Royal Albion Hotel. No casualties, but lots of people evacuated and a big chunk of town cordoned off as the fire service pumped water into it.

Last time The Royal Albion burnt down was in 1998. Was it arson for insurance? Who knows. They needed a refurb and got one with the payout. 160 people were evacuated that time. I have a feeling that there wouldn’t have been so many people turfed out this time. Hotels are struggling versus all the apartments etc that are taking up space in Airbnb and stopping us from being able to buy property.

They had to extend the exclusion zone and demolish a section of the building today. Just too much weight of water and too much fire damage. Sad to lose a wing of a lovely regency hotel like that. I wonder what will come up in its place. Apartments? Hmm.

Lou and I turned round and headed back east. Lazy Sunday was very much the vibe, not rubbernecking. Enjoying being here and having nothing much to do. I finally managed to recycle all those papers. Lou cooked a tasty stew and I filled mine with sriracha. Thoughts and responsibilities mostly switched off despite way too many questions on eBay. I’ll sort all that out tomorrow from London. All the madness of dayjobbery is finally gonna ease. It’ll be happy trails and flat sorting out from now on. Oh joy.

Well done the fire crews for somehow managing to battle a huge blaze pretty near us without us hearing sirens all night. The wind was blowing the smoke away from us too. It still is. Lucky all round.

One more night with the relative peace here. Wind and gulls, an early morning cat… The worst noise is the one I make myself when I’m sleeping and I’m the only one who doesn’t have to put up with that. I might roll over and see how quickly I can start it off…

The rain was bad enough. I’m glad I’m not in a tent tonight, I would be in danger of taking off. I’m at Lou’s, and we can hear the gusts from the windows and the skylight. When we arrived home the front door had blown open and it was whistling up the stairs. The cat is mildly traumatised and couldn’t be quite certain if she was more pleased to see us than pissed off that we had been away for the day. We went to Camber Sands.

The council put the charge up to £30 for the main car park at Camber Sands which is frankly absurd. I found a place to put Bergman for free nearby, and we wandered into a wind tunnel of sharp sand. We clung for a while to the bottom of a sand dune like gorse. Beside us a large group of boisterous Indian men played and sang along to their favourite tunes while joyfully bonding and playing keepie-uppie in the wind as we shared our quiet and reasonably woo-woo conversations. It wasn’t long before we all decided it would be nicer in the spa, and Bella had a membership so off we went.

I was the only man in this large group of women. Beaches, clothes shops, art galleries, spa… After I was pickled by the sauna I went and got myself a pint of lager and sat in the sun and for a moment there was no extreme weather. Then off to Bella’s place briefly.

She’s got an incredible woodland home, with two cats and so much light and quiet. It’s a woodland retreat. What a wonderful place to have moved to. She’s renting it, but still I envy her. For a while I lay in a deckchair facing the sunset falling perfectly between the trees to light my face. Peace.

Then out for dinner and a drive back to Lou’s. We saw a BADGER, running across the road, likely spooked by the wind. I hope it got back safely. Branches down all over the place, debris blown in the road. A couple of times the wind slammed Bergie and I had to hold him hard. This gale has come in all across the coast and it isn’t fucking around. I think if I were in a tent tonight, I’d wake up in the same tent 100 miles north.

Ow. My head hurt this morning. Serves me right. Was a fun night of catching up and backgammon. Maybe a touch overindulgent on the beverages. That’s got to be close to the worst drunk blog so far. I woke up in the morning suddenly and completely from a deathlike sleep into my clothes and out the door.

Working in Enfield today I was relieved it was a lovely crowd – the polar opposite of the one I had a few days ago. Now I’m in a tent and it’s raining.

I arrived at this campsite at about 7pm and was quite surprised to see loads of other people carrying their stuff in wheelbarrows. The great British summertime. Everyone just trying to pretend it isn’t miserable. Stiff upper lip. Tea?

I think if it hadn’t been for Lou I’d be in a foul mood now, but as it is I’m in a tent that belongs to a friend of hers and I’m warm and pretty dry and there’s snacks and a little camp stove. I didn’t pack clothes this morning because I just had to leg it out the door, so I had to stop and buy pants on the way. Now I’m listening to the wind on the canvas and in the trees. I can hear the patches of rain approach and pass. I’m looking forward to a cosy little snooze here and then up bright and early and hopefully into a rain free morning. My head has been too full to anticipate this so I came with no expectations. One thing that is noticeable is that there are far fewer mosquitoes in this tent than there are in my bedroom in London. No idea what’s going on with that.

It’s earlier than I would usually turn in, but I need the sleep and I rather like just being here and listening to the sounds on the wind. Lots of people noise too of course, even in a campsite it’s still a Friday night. I have no desire to do anything other than curl up and snooze.

If I was to die suddenly, nobody would have the means to give a fuck. I’m ok with that. I’m home, and I’m here trying to make things make sense. “How goes the blog,” asks Tristan. Maybe I shouldn’t have invited him over. “Look at this,” he says. “Shit pellets”. “Word word word word word word word” He says.

It’s odd. I now have to write something, irrespective of blah!!

I’m thinking about the beginnings. I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I am happy to make myself part of something but I’m not totally swept up. I’ve enjoyed being slow.

This evening it has been remarkable to be ready for a year of practicality.

I’m so happy to have been pushed. I’m done. Thanks All for being excellent xx A night night

Empty diary tomorrow. Oh joy. I’ve been leading towards that.

I tell you what, oh constant reader, it’s exhausting doing literally all the things. I made the mistake of not really budgeting very much energy for the dayjob today and good Christ they took it out of me. Absolutely atrocious room not even that full but just disengaged as you like. The workshop I was running today is very familiar to me and it is very much not the worst one I’ve had to do over the years. I’ve done it in so many places and contexts I thought I wouldn’t be surprised by it anymore. Maybe I’ve become complacent… Maybe I was budgeting energy for this evening and didn’t use enough to win them back.

My employer always asks way too much of the people I’m meeting though, and it sometimes makes them behave oddly towards me. No matter how often I feed it back, I always end up smuggling loads of stacks of unnecessary colour photocopies away in my bag so I can be the one to dispose of them and not the people who blew the budget on producing them. But if the person who stood by the copier is in the room, they see that I’m not using lots of the stuff they spent time copying or gathering. Apart from the papers they’ve been asked to get sand, mud, rocks, sticks, glitter, copper, zinc, leaves, empty plastic bottles, oranges, foil, a magnet, a knife, volt meters, wires, bulldog clips, an LED… If I’ve got enough oranges and the zinc and copper, the wires and clips and the meter then the rest can be largely improvised and it would be much less time consuming for the poor people preparing for me to be there.

The handouts don’t even need to be in colour to be honest. But feedback on this one takes a long time to convert to action. There are some simple errors on the sheets they send. And perhaps most noticeably, the whole thing starts off with an extremely cheaply made video where some poor young woman who clearly isn’t an actor speaks in an idiom that is anachronistic and unfamiliar to her and to the young people it’s targeted at. I always have to win back the room. “She’s got bits and bobs?!”

So yeah, I was wrung out when I got home. Looked at the clock and realised I only had about half an hour to turn around and go back out in a suit to entertain a room full of lawyers. I sat in my car and had a little cry of exhaustion before putting a different suit of armour on and getting an Uber to The Globe and what was thankfully a delightful if long evening of being charming with Ffion. The two of us click well together. We were both worried about the crap poem so we stood next to each other and techniqued it and it went down well, and the surge of adrenaline we got from getting through it carried us the rest of the way in style. A good end to a hard day and now I’m getting in the bath. Don’t call me before noon.

I’m pretty good at learning stuff quickly these days. At school I kept on learning poetry as I had been told by a good teacher that it was a useful muscle to develop early, and mostly it has served be in good stead. Some last minute corporate gigs where I’ve had to say absolute drivel but got it in. Training videos or conferences with in-jokes and nitty gritty about obscure financial chicanery. I’ve crammed for movies large and small with scripts running the quality gamut. I’ve had something pushed under the hotel door two hours before I was in the make-up chair. I’ve not had the discipline of a long session on set filming every day for months, but I’m keeping myself ready. Eternal optimist and all that…

Learning all the Shakespeare over the last few weeks, that was fine. I found time around all the dayjobbery and made happy clients. This poem though…

Artificial Intelligence is changing everything, they say, and I’ve seen plenty of stuff about how it might encroach on all your favourite creative industries. “A chat GPT sonnet,” I was told, and somehow in theory it’s an interesting concept. “They want you to learn it.”

From this experience, I don’t think poets are under threat yet by any means. This language model can rearrange but it has no discernment. It’s an interesting enough technological knife edge that I am sure there will be multiple shows at Edinburgh next month incorporating aspects of the tech, and some will be good. But this “sonnet”? For a start, it’s doggerel. Iambic couplets, and 8 of them. Not a sonnet. No complexity. No twist or payoff. Just rhyme such as I might expect from an American High School kid who still thinks Shakespeare is about fairies.

Out of all the things I’ve had to learn it’s the hardest, as there’s no pattern to it, no real journey through it. Even a terrible writer might have been thinking about assonance or alliteration or something to make it trip a bit, but not even that. Not even the joy of purple prose. This is a diligent uninspired and uninspiring arrangement of words in a form that suggests poetry. And I hate it.

Tomorrow I will perform it with a smile and a flourish, and maybe even wring a laugh or two. That’s our job. Sometimes I watch telly and see someone brilliantly solve a turd of a piece of writing and I want to clap the screen. Other times – maybe more often – I see people wading through a soup of exposition or staccato emotion with no real thought other than memory.

I went to chat gpt myself and asked it for a sonnet. Arbitrary themes. Tried to get it to embed a bit of nuance. They say it’s all in how you prompt it, but I’m not convinced it could come up with anything even with really elaborate prompting… We shall see. Here’s mine, as I can’t share the one I’m learning. This one is … better… but it would still be a bugger to learn.

I’m curious what you guys might have found while tinkering with AI…