Month: August 2023

Finally some good weather, and Lou and I had the best walk. She was curious about a Bronze Age site only a few minutes drive from hers – one she had only just become aware of.

We parked at the bottom of a steep hill with the intention of walking up. That turned out to be an excellent idea. When we got to the top we found ourselves guests on one of those contentious public footpaths through someone’s land. The landowners were looking at us mildly askance as we cheerfully greeted them. Something made them decide to be kind and give us instructions rather than a bollocking. They had a beautifully illustrated map for their guests and they were concerned to be sure that a certain gate at the top was closed so the sheep didn’t go wandering. They had heard reports that it was open. “Report back on the way down,” we were asked.

Up to the mound. It was delightfully overgrown. Huge tall wildflowers, thistles and old man’s beard. If you could find a place to lie down flat without thistles in your arse you had long grasses and flowers to look up at. It reminded me palpably of the old meadow at the bottom of the garden in my first home in Jersey. Deliberately gone to seed. A superabundance of crickets and grasshoppers, tall unruly grass, old land. We lay and let the sun come and cook us. Finally a summer’s day. By this time of year I’m usually so much darker. A summer’s day and a place in the South Downs that is barely frequented. We saw some distant dog walkers and one mountain biker, and we were there for ages. Peace. Air. Warmth.

The landowner was waiting when we came back. She had been steaming carpets outside. They run a woo-woo boutique camping type thing. I report back on the gate, with videos. She takes us into her confidence.

She used to be a Buddhist nun. For twenty years. She saw this land in a dream. She feels she manifested it and I respect her belief. She could evidently sense that we were the right people to show such things to, so she showed us her Buddhist shrine room. Stone walls and cool, and as cluttered functional and personal as the little altars that both Lou and I happen to have at home. I enjoy these personalised devotional spaces that some people make in their homes. I like when people can be open to the unknown. Not dogmatic, that’s boring. But open. She’s following her own unusual route in life, this curious landowner, and we both feel richer to have met her. “I’m not usually so accommodating, just so you know. If you look at the Google reviews loads of people say I’m rude. Don’t say I’m nice as then they’ll expect it.” I don’t tell her I write my days but I do tell her I won’t put the place we went to online. She’s found a peaceful place. Nobody wants to be constantly managing lost strangers. I’m glad she wanted someone to check the fence was closed though as in a different mood I imagine she could be formidable.

A day spent at Knepp today, and it’s mushroom season. I had my mushroom knife with me. I think you know by now that I’m curious about the little buggers. Well, Knepp was the right place to satisfy that curiosity further.

I’ve been shrooming for years now and I rarely eat any of the ones I pick. Coming into it later in life I knew I had to set careful parameters so I didn’t go green and fall over all weird. After all that happened to Babar the Elephant’s dad:

That image in a treasured storybook wrought havoc with my childish trust of mushrooms. I decided to overcome my long held quiet phobia while in my early thirties in the only real way to conquer fear – learning about it properly. Knowledge. If you know something’s true name, you have more power over it.

The illustrator above has used Amanita Muscaria – (Fly Agaric) – one of the more interesting and hard to mistake varieties of psychotropic mushroom. The Christmas mushroom. The ancient Soma mushroom. The reindeer hallucinogen. The Viking berserker. Dry them out first I’m told or you’ll end up feeling like that elephant. You’re better off drinking the urine of someone who has built a tolerance, aye, like they used to back before those pesky Romans took all the fun away. You might go to hospital, you might have Adventures in Wonderland. Either it’ll be the caterpillar or the catheter. I’ve found 1 so far since I made my rules, so I’ve never experimented, and I’m not sure when would be the right time with that one… I’m not in the mycology game for the psychedelics, although I don’t by any means rule them out in the right context. But they’re beautiful and weird. Like us!

I have a 3 strike rule. Even if the thing is unmistakable. I need to find it, check it, be sure of my identification, get a second opinion, then on another day I need to do that all again somewhere else. The third time I’m allowed to carefully eat the one I find if I know it’s edible. The sheer variety of the damn things though – it means that I’ve been doing this for a decade and only a very few things are on the safe list and they are largely both unmistakable and quite common: Chicken of the woods – nom. Hedgehogs. Birch polypore – for weird tea only as the damn things are everywhere. And shaggy inkcaps – (though they deliquesce very fast when picked). Next time I find a cep I can have it. Ditto fairy rings. Ditto Beefsteak. So after over a decade I’m on the brink of better meals.

Today I kind of added field mushrooms to the second strike list although I’m still not 100% certain and will need to study my photos against the book as I haven’t got a positive on their exact name. I just know what they are not and I suspect they are good. There were tons of them in the field and they looked great. A basket would have yielded a tasty feast if I was allowed the things, but there nothing unusual there – they taste just like the ones we just call mushrooms. Perhaps next time though as things taste nicer if you foraged them yourself.

I’m getting closer to a few other species too. My exact boletus knowledge is sketchy but I’m pretty clear on which to avoid. I’ve never found one that isn’t absolutely swarmed by time I discover it. They’re popular with the insect community. They’re big but get nasty fast.

Also I’m still extremely cautious. The bad ones – the really bad ones – they only need a tiny tiny amount to make you inevitably die of total organ failure. This is why it is a pleasant hobby to acquire. If all mushrooms were edible and it was easy to tell which was which, most of us would never see any mushrooms in the wild ever as there would be armies of people with baskets swarming the hills at this time of year, getting out the house before Good Morning Britain was even finished in order to obliviously eat them walking, fighting one another to shove them into their drooling gaping faces like pacmans gobbling dots. The “you might die” thing helps limit the boundless locust potential for human greed. In this small department. For the rest of nature we are still consuming to destruction as fast as we possibly can, leaving nothing but plastic and death… Although thinking about it, some fish are poisonous and we have still turned the seas to poisonous blood. Who knows? Maybe everyone read Babar the elephant at 6.

Mushies gave a focus to a lovely walk. Like a nice game of golf where you could win a tasty meal or you could get strangled to death. We went to a lovely old ruined castle and lay on the ground. We covered a good few miles walking. There were turtle doves. And there were lots and lots of lovely weird extruding fruiting bodies of huge underground mycelium networks enabling communication between plants and trees in exchange for a share of nutrients.

I was a bit disappointed to find none of my safe list but I’ve bumped a few nice ones up to second strike.

Driving home, Lou and I both remembered this rather odd advert for British Mushrooms. I certainly made room today. I’m pretty sure I found my first Panther Cap, but it was so beautiful I didn’t want to cut it to make a full examination. It was clearly loved by the owners of the woodpile. I let it be. They are even more interestingly toxic than the Fly Agaric. It could’ve been a massive Blusher… I’m honestly not sure. Gorgeous huge big thing though:

I am pretty sure that the first time I saw Minnie working after Guildhall was on stage at The Globe. Tamara Harvey directed the all female Much Ado and she was Hero. I stood beaming in the pit and afterwards got to join the press night shenanigans.

Many years later and again I just stood in that magical space. This time I had three friends on that stage. Min was up there Bottoming away, and two Factory friends were there alongside her and I stood in the wooden O with Lou and felt all the connection to the material and the spirit of that place.

British summertime, and the seasons change their wonted liveries. It was dumping rain on us in the pit and we mostly didn’t care cos of all the warmth radiating from that stage. We stood at the back where we could lean and not get loudly attacked mid show by one of those … helpful and active ushers. We let the rain and the language wash over us. Wonderful use of verse, freedom and mischief, jokes. I’m not gonna write a blog that feels like a review cos that’s not my gig, but I’m gonna write a blog that tells you I was happy there despite the weather. I haven’t seen Michelle Terry since she was appointed Artistic Director. What could have been a very difficult appointment after the tricky departure of Emma Rice has been converted to a joyful reclamation of the actor manager tradition. She played Puck and was the embodiment of naughty mischief. Physically and magically at one with that playing space, she was blending things ancient with things modern, things childish with things very grown up.

Being open to the sky is a huge part of the joy of The Globe. It’s another possibility of chaos – a chance for the gods to get involved. Actors can’t control the thunder, the sun coming out from clouds, the sudden showers… but if they can respond in the moment, that’s when the whole house comes together into one true moment of LIVE. This afternoon it was a pigeon that brought a joyful shout from the house. It flapped onto the stage and was incorporated by all on stage just as Bottom was singing about birds. We watchers all knew this was impossible to recreate and enjoyed the perfection of the actors and the animals playing together honestly. “Never work with children or animals,” say those actors who are incapable of being alive on stage. “Children and animals are joyful gifts if you can respond to them honestly without losing your thread,” say I, and if I was writing that in a manifesto I’d phrase it much more neatly. “Be alive to the chaos and the chaos will be alive to you”? “The things you can’t control usually prove to you how bad your clever plans are”? Who knows but there’s much in it. I love the ephemeral, the moment, the edge. And I love seeing people respond without losing it. Once I did a show when a huge weight fell to the floor just off stage. The two actors on stage at the time were pretending to be in a shitty old hotel. It could have been a gift. Neither of them stopped to acknowledge it, so the whole audience got lost in it instead. If they had stopped, looked, incorporated, continued the house would have come with them, wondered if it was some sort of effect, and stayed with the story. As was the audience were in the bar afterwards saying “what was that bang, it totally threw me off the scene.” Conversely a small child picking a fight with Hamlet during his rogue and peasant slave speech was a joyful thing when Hamlet let the child win for a moment – “Who calls me villain?” “I DO! VILLAIN!” “Breaks my pate across?” … *waits, encourages, gets punched* He brought it back and people were asking him after “did you know that kid? That was great.” It’s what you do with the unexpected. Thinking over the years – and yeah weirdly I did a lot more acting before I started this blog (?) some joyful live incorporated moments that come to mind involve: a bat in a theatre, a screaming toddler in a marquee, a little frog, a string of baby partridges and their mother, a lamb called Tutu… If I really thought about it I’d remember hundreds more but what held them all together was an incorporation and a mystical sense of timing. Animals KNOW. “It was the spirit of Michael Boyd, that pigeon” said one… It was certainly something magical. That building is built with magic in its bones. If you don’t believe that, seek out the correspondence between Sam Wanamaker and Theo Crosby the architect. It’s on a fucking leyline nexus.

Dream is only on for two more days and it’s sold out. Doesn’t matter. Maccers just started and I bet it’s fab. AGAIN I have multiple friends involved. I was there on press night but I was at work. I had to go and be charming and do sonnets to a huge group of women bankruptcy lawyers instead of watching it…

When Grenfell Tower burnt, I had just been working with the landlords in a little workshop space off Ladbroke Grove. We had been training them in “Customer Facing”. Essentially staff empathy training via role play and workshop, but called “theatre”.

It was literally excruciating. The level of awkwardness was off the scale. But I took the money and did the best I could. Can you teach a stone to sing? The management were perfectly convivial and perfectly clueless. The ground staff were just there as part of their job. A lot of money had been spent to create and propagate some sort of staff training acronym that was evidently no more than lip service to the idea of caring about stuff. I hated it at the time, and wrote as much. I wish I could remember the acronym but it was so insipid I almost immediately squared that portion of memory out of my head where it would have remained had it not been three days before the fire.

I woke up three days later to hear about that awful tower fire run by the TMO and just down the road from me. Volunteering was the only sensible thing to do and I was struck not least by the absence of the TMO but also the evasiveness when I tried to suggest we could use the big empty gym we had used for the training of 250 people for something that could benefit all those who had been displaced. I spent a few days trying to help coordinate the effects of people’s goodwill but that space sat empty and locked. The whole area became a nexus for donated clothes. Every hand was a good hand that hot summer and every inch of space was useful.

When my friend offered me tickets to the Grenfell verbatim show at The National, I knew what I was getting myself into, and steeled myself accordingly. So many years have passed now and so little has changed. The lazy flammable cladding is still on many blocks. The culture that residents raising concerns are somehow just willful and stupid – that’s still there it seems. The word land”lord” needs to be adjusted. Landbeneficiary, perhaps is more appropriate. Lord gives both the benefit and the notion of power, but these people deserve no power as they haven’t the scope to wield it with strength or compassion. It’s the language of serfdom and it silently allows an imbalance. “I’m their LORD.” Self constructed monoliths, and when you climb to the peak you usually find a frightened fool clinging on to an idea they’ve always held. And my borough, RBKC, much as I love it, does not have compassionately and well run estates. Up at World’s End, overlooking the river, posh end of Chelsea up against discontent. I did a weekend of street theatre five years ago and got stuck in and it’s lively, but not a liveliness borne of contentment. Knife amnesty bins, dogshit, drugs, carelessness. The sense of having been forgotten. Just across the road there are shops selling a bedframe for six grand, and you might well watch someone step back from you in wobblechinned fear as they walk out of thay expensive shop putting their gold card back in their wallet. All you were doing was taking the dog for a walk… Two worlds colliding, and the landlords are people who “just LOVE that bed shop, darling, despite where it is.”

Bed. That’s tempting. I think I’ll crash now but I’m filled with the images and thoughts of the families who made it and the ones who didn’t… It hit hard at the end and it was unhurried and structured and thoughtful and moving throughout. I often don’t see things that I know will be an emotional grind. But it’s important to really know that we have to activate across the board, and it HAS to be the people. If we wait for our representatives in parliament speak for us, we wait until we are dead, and I say that with absolute sincerity on a day when the only credible opposition to the emotional toddlers we have in power right now has just described the actions of one of the only protest groups to have really managed to get heard and known in his hostile environment as “contemptible”. Because he wants votes more than he cares about anything. Fuck.

Across London to Stokey. Jack and I have so much history now. We met in Yorkshire maybe fifteen years ago on a lawn outside a semi derelict farmhouse that had a drained swimming pool full of frogspawn out front. I brought the bed bugs from my huge and comfortable bed all the way back to London when the job was over. I had been oblivious to them but that’s surely the source of the infestation that convinced me I had eczema and finally made me have everything fumigated and throw away my bed when I woke suddenly from deep sleep to find them at their horrible work.

Richard put a plank in the pool so the frogs could escape. The aga was still working and was on. There was a faucet in the room next door to my head that I eventually learnt to silence but which interrupted my post show dreams more often than the bugs. We launched Twelfth Night from that house, down at Ripley Castle. He was Feste, I was Malvolio. Brilliant campaigner Lucy directed us.We had a right fleabag as Viola. Jo was Olivia and … a big and lovely cast… We were all dear friends together making something we cared about and living in Bohemian Arcadia. A truly joyful summer. My first of many with Jack at Sprite.

“What are you most proud of,” I was asked at my school reunion the other month, and I referenced those happy years of Yorkshire Shakespeare. I made deep long friendships and we tried to make things well. Every time I went I occasionally experienced that strange vast endorphin release of fulfillment and true joy that you only get when you are in the right place doing the right thing. It was summer, we loved each other, we were all doing what we love doing. We all came back with about what we started with in terms of money. Jack and I found a friendship that followed us though. That year I was trying hard not to go to the pub after every show for financial reasons. I had just given up smoking as it was too expensive a vice. I was happier to buy a case of beer and go to our eccentric digs. Jack was the same. We hung out in the living room many nights guitar noodling while everyone else was blowing their wages at The Boar’s Head, before they all rolled in and the night got longer.

Post Sprite we ended up doing a spot of filming, things here and there by coincidence until eventually he auditioned to replace John as Marley one year and got the part. That became our Christmas Carol, where we deepened a well formed creative partnership over many more years. We are very different, but we fly well together. There’s a shared mischief. He eventually signed with my wonderful agent, and this weekend he had a self tape and then a mutual friend’s birthday party near his gaff. So that was my day.

He’s done plenty of telly so the tape came easy. It’ll be great if he gets it, but it did feel that he was too young for it. These tapes cast a wider net, but they cost in hope what they make up in opportunity. Hope can hurt, but maybe it’s better to have the chance at nice work than to feel like the world has passed you by. I love it when my friends are working, as the weird little gap in them fills up and suddenly they are just imperceptibly more confident and robust – ironically the skills that help in the auditions…

We then were in a bar full of actors. Some I’ve known for 20 years and more. Others I met today. Nice lot. Enough partners there that the conversation wasn’t entirely about the trade, but there was plenty of reminiscing even so. We all trained roughly the same time. We’ve been running mates. Everything we do is so unpredictable and sporadic, but all of us have learnt to know joy when we have it available, and clutch tight hold of it. The collective memories of the people in that room will have been filled with strange colour given to us by this vocation we all pursue, often in gorgeous places doing strange things. “What are you up to right now?” “I’m collaborating with an artist in a 200 acre rewilding project down in Croydon. Here’s a video. I’m in a panda head.”

Fun. Joy. And thick skins on vulnerable people.

Can we celebrate idleness?

I think we ought to.

Certainly when, like me, our stuff is public.

Yes I’m not writing it all here by any means. I’m only writing flashes. Thank God for that because even everyday life is richer and more nuanced than anything I can try to capture here with words.

Still. This blog is a shadow of a life now. Many years now I’ve settled and at some point put these words down before sleeping. I am trying to look back over them but I haven’t the discipline. What a mess of life I’ve already made. What could be made of it? Edinburgh is starting. “Do you have any fringe recommendations?”. *DON’T GO THERE!!* But maybe there’s a comedy show that would eat this stuff. I’ve thought about going toe to toe with AI.

I rarely go to Edinburgh. Maybe again one day. The only show I’ve ever been in up there got 5 stars in Three Weeks yay hooray etc. But… being in London for August has usually been bank for me because Cunty McAgentsign is doing his show up there so the casting director he knew at school has to work down the list and get new humans. Nowadays Cunty can send a tape of course so it’s not as good as it was for me when he had to show up in Soho. But… I’m allowing myself to believe that I might get a meeting this month. It has happened before many times over. Maybe even a job at the end of it. Meanwhile I’m mister Panda for a few days at the end of the month, and your friendly punching bag elsewise.

Maybe if I hadn’t been celebrating idleness this lovely weekend. But I know how working too hard can damage things too. I tried to do letters at the start of my career and they honestly did more harm than good. I tried to be different and I think I ended up being weird. I tried to deliver into people’s hands and probably have myself written into lists as a stalker. Fuck. I really want to work. I’m so fed up of nothing. Aaaaargh

Bring it August.

The internet. The internet.

Back in the day it was much harder to spread disinformation but we still did it. A lot of it is about pattern matching. There are patterns in everything and just as we can look at a cloud or a flame to find faces and pixies so we can look at popular culture and politics and draw connecting lines.

Back in 1966, fans of The Beatles went mad for a theory that Paul was dead and replaced by a lookalike. Once the theory was voiced people started looking for corroboration and found it everywhere. “goo goo ga joob” is what Humpty says before falling off the wall in Finnegan’s Wake. The walrus is Paul and it’s Scandinavian for a corpse. He’s barefoot on the Abbey Road cover and his fag is in the wrong hand. If you played some tracks backwards then you could hear potential hints – “Turn me on dead man”… Who had blown their mind up in the car? This was a collective pattern matching game, played out pre internet and made possible by the astronomical fame of The Beatles. It was a fun version of the madness that eventually caused Mark David Chapman to shoot Lennon in the back because he didn’t appear to believe in God and because The Catcher in the Rye had told him to do it. Patterns. He had found what he was looking for.

Now that sort of stuff is everywhere. We can all go looking. Most of us have got a friend who quietly or loudly believes in aliens. The internet lets us all prove anything we want to prove. If you look hard enough you’ll find patterns in anything.

I’m sad today though, as another thing the internet does is keep us right up to date on who has died, and Sinead O’Connor is another one of those voices I admired. I first noticed her when my parents were scandalised by her. We often get drawn to the ones our parents don’t like. What a voice she had. And what clear incisive rage. I had all her albums including one where she belted out a load of Jazz standards. It’s great. Am I Not Your Girl. I’ve been listening again today. A quiet day and time to think and listen to music. I just sent invoices and read and chilled. Now I’m in bed and the party boats are up and down the Thames. It’s Friday night. I’m listening to jazz and should be in bed by midnight.

Sometimes I’m too amenable.

Today I drove to Tadworth with a great big telly I had flogged on eBay. The guy gave me cash. Then I put most of it into a friend’s bank account as the thing wasn’t mine. Got a good price for it considering it is missing lots of the things that most people keep. I had a remote and I’d bought a power cable. Thinking about it, I forgot to deduct the cost of the cable from the money I transferred to my friend but it’ll all come out in the wash as I’ve still got lots of random things that I can tick over. My eBay mojo is pretty decent. I’ve sold over 400 things and still got 100% positive feedback. That’s enough of a history that I look like a safe bet to potential buyers, so it’s easier to flog things. But then I go and drive to Tadworth just to make sure he says nice things about me. Bah.

On the way back I picked up a mate and we caught up as I drove him into town, so the trip wasn’t entirely wasted. And I got to listen to a few episodes of Yeti on BBC Sounds which is perhaps a tiny bit more intellectual than I like things to be, but packed with enough curiosity and wonder to be good company while driving. Apparently even Attenborough is willing to give credence to the existence of something Yeti-ish, and the podcast is two very left brain enthusiasts going out to the Himalayas looking for evidence. The history of yeti hunting is fascinating to learn about, the Himalayan people are very attuned to the possibility of magic, but I’m sad every time they talk of people running DNA scans on yeti relics and finding them to be goat or human or polar bear… I kind of hope they find something. There’s plenty of photos of footprints. This one is from the Indian army and they were mostly just laughed at for posting it. Footprints in snow can melt to be larger, but maybe … just maybe…

Things like that though, I’m always happier to give credence to them. We all think we are terribly clever, and often that manifests in us closing ourselves off to the possibility of wondrous things. It’s why I like tarot, and think about the phase of the moon and all the oojie boojie stuff. It’s why I go on pilgrimages with Catholics, and chant nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo and think about Greek gods and earth magic in Shakespeare. Believing in things beyond our ken is generally going to bring nicer things into our lives than feeling all smart because we think we can prove the wondrous thing isn’t wondrous.

So I guess I’ve been moving energy around again. Now I’m home and it’s hot and getting late. I’m enjoying my long drives at the moment – even without the cricket they’re a great opportunity to plug into random lovely things on audio.

Once I had sobered up, I drove home. It was lovely to get absolutely hammered with an old friend, but I have to remember to try and write to you before I am incapable.

I was on a quick turnaround. Had to be at The Globe for half three, suited and booted. Another corporate gig.

This time it was an international conference of women lawyers. “We are looking forward to the tour,” they tell me right away. Tour?

After the matinee, muggins here suddenly found himself leading groups of hammered lawyers into The Globe. It was press night for Maccers and my friend Aaron is Macduff. By the end of it people were warming up on stage. Nevertheless I thought it was Dream and told my groups so. Totally misinformed them, likely in front of the cast. But … fuck it, I literally didn’t know I was doing tours until I was doing tours. I mostly talked about what Elizabethan theatre was and why it varied from post restoration, and what that means in performance. Factory stuff. Purist stuff. They seemed happy, but I’m eloquent and charismatic. Bite me.

Then we did the usual festival of scenes. That’s a thing I really know now – After Dinner Entertainment. Damn if only I could get into something that gave my name traction then my old age would be sorted. You can ask for a lot of money to do what I do easily, so long as you are Blokey off of Tellything. I just need the Tellything to be Blokey off.

Now I’m home. It’s cold. I’m gonna crash and it feels like it has been a positive day. I’ve been helping ease people in. Youth. Three young’uns and me. When I finally explode they’ll be able to carry the after dinner torch. Today was a way for them to cut their teeth and gain confidence while I took the brunt of the last minute random stuff like unexpected tours.

I’m happy. And probably a bit tipsy too. The client gave us wine. I’m usually too “professional” to accept it as I never want a client to think I’m drinking their budget, but the young’uns had already helped themselves and I wasn’t gonna be a buzzkill so I let myself have yummy hair of the dog.

Now I’m home. Bed is happening. Hooray. zzzz

Tristan and I are sitting watching Test Match Special. All these cricketers. How did I start to care about this sport?

I’m catching up. Yes I know we drew the series, and yes had the rain not stopped over a day of play we would have won. But… we didn’t. So be it.

I’m watching Anderson and Broad batting for a few more points. These guys are bowlers. They can’t hit it well or safely. Broad just announced his retirement.

TONK.

There it goes. 6 runs. And the night hawk, this massive weirdo, Stuart Broad – he’s hit his last ball as a batsman and it’s a six.

Anderson is out shortly after.

I’m happy to have cared about this series. This ancient game, that is bigger in many other countries than it is here… I love how it responds to the wind, the earth, the ground. I was a bowler, so I hold out towards the likes of Broad, who will always be better at their job if they listen to the wind and the earth.

Tristan and I both know we drew the series. The aussies retain the ashes. I’ve very much enjoyed the hard work and play that took us to that.

I’m gonna watch it. You won’t get any remarkable insights from me right now so it’s silly to try. Be kind. Night night. A