Month: December 2023

This afternoon, one babyfather passed the baby across the table to another babyfather. As the exchange was made, a large drool plonked in the middle of the table. I noticed it. They noticed it. I wanted to find a cloth to wipe it. They didn’t mind about the table drool. I couldn’t reach it without making it obvious it was big in my mind. After a few minutes it lost significance. I’ve seen the day to day through dear friends. The horrors of missed poo. I’ve cleaned that baby bouncer. I’m shit at babies but I’m trying. Boo and I learnt a lot together while we were plotting world domination.

Jo, at nearly 5 months, is very happy to eject milk orally at an alarming rate. There will usually be a cloth ready for this eventuality. He is happy to sick milk that he was only just shouting about wanting. He takes more than he needs and then vomits the excess. Aren’t we all like that?

This is a human. Before most of the senses are fully developed, taking more than he needs because he can have it and then sicking half of it out – he’s learnt society. Breastmilk isn’t oil though. His mummy has secondnamed him for one of the great giants of Ireland, and he’s huge for his age apparently. But quiet. Calm and quiet. They always say that the second one is the bastard, and I’m sure mum would agree. She loved me so deeply. But I know I was a tricky fucker for her.

I’m happy to have made friends with this baby creature, and with his parents.

“You two have a really lovely relationship on stage,” I’ve been told loads. And we do. Wild haired bearded myth geeks. “Is your Marley John Henry?” This is a frequent question. “No. But they are friends.”

Today I went round Gorey Castle with Will, John Henry, Ciara and multiple childrens. Three bearded myth geeks in one place was almost too much. JH is The Story Beast, and if you look him up he will be wearing what he wore to be with us. A Jersey expert, a myth lover, and he grew up in the same neolithically complex parish as me, a decade later. The energies from the furrows of the silleries, rippling out across the whole island like the equinoctial light of houge bie. This island carries so much light and weight. If you are active you likely can avoid the factions that make everything so tiny. I’m honestly thinking of coming back home. If I had 13.5 million I’d buy my old home. The wonder we could make possible at Les Silleries. Likely I’ll have to make do with something less fancy though.

I’m a little homesick for my London home now. I’m fed up of living in a hotel. They are lovely if a little unwilling here in The Purple Palace. Nobody is here vocationally but different people manifest different priorities in the business of being good at their jobs. I like the guys but you’ll often see a frown flicker over their countenance when you come with a question. I shouldn’t be so fucking sensitive all the time but hi.

I think I’m gonna strike South when I’m done here. St Malo ferry, and then down. I’m gonna head to the riviera for New Year. I might get a shot at seeing family and old friends on the way but I will spend my NYE alone with ritual, where it’s a little bit warmer.

Then it’ll be back up fast so I can get some Lou-time before I’m back into the London mix.

This Jersey Carol has been brilliant. If the houses had been better I would suspect it was the start of an institution. There’s been so many people with their various energies. When I think of the mystic grounding this ancient land gave me growing up, I’m very happy to walk there streets again, to look at the cliffs, to try and imagine what it was for the lost ones that I knew so well. For mum it was home, for dad it was prison. For me it is neither. It’s an old ground. I can see it for the beauty and the warmth just as I can see how the walls would start to close in. If I had property here still I could think about it more practically. I don’t. It is beyond my reach, a memory, nostalgia. Such things are pleasant while you are bathing in them but they quickly get stale if you’re looking to stay present.

I’ll have time to properly cover this island over Christmas. I’ll be able to wash down the gravestones and touch up the writing.

Bed now, and tomorrow I’m meeting a friend of Will’s who grew up very close to me and is just as full of mystic story as I can be. I’m looking forward to meeting him. I’m still playing with the idea of coming home.

Five minutes from the house I grew up in, La Hougue Bie.

6000 years old. One of the oldest man made sites in the world. It responds to the equinox.

Vast stones, hauled from across the far side of the island, arranged as a tomb in cruciate shape. You have to crawl to enter and thus do correct obeisance to whatever was at the heart. The two sides of the cross were tombs. The top of the cross was where the thing of power lay.

The entrance takes the first ray of equinox sun straight in to the heart of the passage. Dawn light hits the thing of power. As the sun rises, the light retreats down the passage back out, pulling whatever power out and into the world, for everyone.

They poured rubble on top in a vast mound and then banked and earthed it well enough that it has stood and stood. The mound would have been carefully judged in terms of height. Likely the top of it would have responded to equinox or perhaps a solstice sunset – perhaps a sacrificial or dedicational place. They plonked a church on it just like they did at Glastonbury Tor, round about the 12th Century. With that there it is hard to fathom the intention from the top, plus there are trees now which have inevitably muddied things even further as keepers who understood the needs would have been pruning them back if they blocked anything. I’d have to stand there on equinox sunset to even start to try and make sense of why it was built to that height, but with the church in the way it’s hard to make sense of the purpose. As Will observed, nothing this considered back then was done at random. The top is as significant as the bottom, but there’s a church that would be thought of as old if it wasn’t basically a child by comparison to the thing it is stealing from. Apparently someone used to “pretend to do miracles in it. I wonder though. That place is full of power. Stuff so old we can barely contain it. Weight and depth. Did he really pretend?

We have this grave leading to the omphalos and *whatever* was housed there for the light to take back into the world as it retreated. The bodies were many and temporary, and were flayed and exposed before going in, and weren’t lain there forever. This was a waypoint. They didn’t want the stink, but the notion of the energy of all the ones who died since the last equinox being pulled out and back into circulation by the equinoctial dawn? I’ll take that as an option. Dry out the dead, bring them to the tomb. At equinox the dawnlight will pull their spirits back leaving nothing but an empty vessel which we can then move on, and grief is dealt with by the hope of that dawn.

It’s so fucking ancient. It is astonishing. And the last two times I was in Jersey it was gated off. I assumed for protecting the monument, but disappointingly it might have been for fucking COVID. Can you imagine? For fuck’s sake… What bollocks.

We got in. We crawled to the centre. Will and Ciara and their little baby.

The air moves in there. Right in the centre there’s a peaceful spider who wouldn’t be there if things weren’t blown in. Maybe we were caught by a similar cosmic spider that needed us to bring it back out into it world. The Gods of this place? We can only speculate what men called them, what they believed them to be. We will never lose the names people gave their gods when writing was better known and preserved. But here we just see how people responded to the sun and the moon. The names we give these powers are always made by men, so in many ways they are irrelevant. Hubris to think we’ve got the right name. The powers are undeniable. The names? I remember doing daimoku with someone and there are prayers at the end. One is for the ancient ones. One is for those more recent who carried the torch. I was hauled out for saying “and now we remember the ones long past”. “No, it says XYZ”. I wasn’t gonna fight mid chant, but the purpose of those prayers is obvious, and it is ancient, modern. If we have to all remember the same list of people every time then we aren’t in a lay Buddhist society, we’re in a cult. The names mean nothing. Just ego stroking. I respect Daisaku Ikeda but he’d be the first to tell me that legacy is not important. It’s about the changes you can make and the energies you can shift, and seeking congratulations just makes you corrupt.

I felt modern in there, taking photos with my phone. But I did.

The museum adjoining the site talks of hoards of gold, deliberately sequestered in Jersey by ancient Celts. The biggest ever one was discovered, and many more. “In the ancient world, Jersey was a place they went to bury their wealth”. That’s psychic geography right there. The function has remained unchanged for millennia.

We drove by the house I grew up in. Maybe they’ve sold it now. On top of a hill, by a dolmen, near that site. They dug a swimming pool. I would like to have just been there to look at the earth they threw away from that dig. How lucky I was to grow up in such a place of power. What were the things that were whispering to me as a child? I still wish I had been able to buy it back for 13.5 million. Next time round.

Some matinees have been cut from the schedule. I’m sad about it as I wanted this show to sell and sell dammit. I want them to make the money they deserve. Production budget is very solid. It looks fantastic. I’m not on production team this year, and there is a tiny bit more separation. Normally I’m building the set and taking out unnecessary tables and counting seats and working things out. I think if Jack and I were still the acting pair we would still be rolling out the empty tables before the show, knowing how much nicer it’d be if we didn’t have empties. But Will is an actor only, and I see and respect that.

I’m not on production. I remember once, at The Arts, two audience members arrived late and ended up sitting in the corner. “We’ve paid the same as them,” they said. “Why have we got a worse view.” Those two people left early. Because of those two out of however many thousands, there’s a stratified pricing plan along the lines of what Punchdrunk did when I finally abandoned hope that Felix would learn integrity. I really don’t like tiered pricing… It does give a level to the show. I can bring it into my audience stuff, and I do. But the practical upshot is that most nights I’m playing to a row of empty tables with shadowy people behind. It doesn’t help that my contact lenses seem to have been siezed in customs.

I’ll play to and with whoever. Tonight we had the owner of The Pembroke Pub in Grouville, having dragged the landlord with him. The owner was dressed as Santa and the landlord an elf. He was pretending to be incognito Santa. It was delightful. He was wonderful craic and has apparently been evangelising the show to his regulars in Grouville, my home parish, on the strength of the Beowulf that Jack and I gave birth to a few years ago and Will did.

There’s definitely a strong audience in Jersey. There’s also a lot of money, so the Amdram scene is developed. I went to see a Durrell show some years ago at The Arts Centre and it was delightful. Tickets were cheap because they have the building and all the artists are doing it for free. You can do that if daddy lives in magical moneyland. Dicky Dodgem has never been voted off the board this year. He buried his money so he wouldn’t have to pay tax, but then forgot where it was so was borrowing from Scrooge to mount search expeditions. As far as the good people of Jersey are concerned, he’s an out and out goodie. In London or York he’s gone by the end of week one. But yeah, people are clearly happy to slog their guts out in exchange for being told how very very good they are at acting as well as divorce law. That doesn’t cut it with me sadly. Show me the money.

The few shows I did at the start of my career in pub theatres where the economics weren’t working: they did me more harm than good. Because people like me now don’t want to see talented actors giving their shit away. It drops the price across the industry. So young actors end up wasting their time doing something for “exposure” where the majority of people who watch them think of them as blacklegs.

This is the issue here. Jersey people are used to Amdram prices. That could not sustain a show like ours, which is actually very reasonably priced for an excellent meal and show. But you have to come to know how professional and together it all is, as it is an unfamiliar offering for the island. And the main paper didn’t run an article for way too long and then finally just rehashed an opinion piece from a smaller paper.

I would have preferred a day off today, as is traditional, and actually, genuinely, this evening’s show after 3 days of 2 show days… that was the reason I kicked off with my agent and insisted on cranking the fee up. I knew how tired I would be. Now some matinees have been cancelled as undersold and I feel bad for production. Jack and Adam have been slogging their guts off for months to get this on. I just get to show up and play. Man, I really wish we could sell out the rest of the run.

This afternoon we had Holly and her family in, as part of a well sold kids matinee. We cut all the swearing and our inprov is made clean. Jeff the Pervert Strangler becomes a ballet dancer and pirouettes for us. Sue is so happy that all she can do is shout “Woohoo!” It is nothing to do with her alcohol consumption.

There’s a game. Holly very actively wanted to play it. It involves getting up onto stage and sitting in all the lights, in Scrooge’s chair.

Holly is 7. “She saw a video of you guys online and insisted that she really wanted to go,” her mum told me after the show. She’s definitely the youngest person we’ve ever had up playing the game. I have a suspicion she’ll be an actor though, and do it well. She was pretty grounded. But watching her calibrate the experience of being in the light like that was remarkable. There’s quite a hefty rig. If the cumulus and haze has been rolling you really can’t see the audience without stepping out of it. I forget how I automatically try and stand where I’m blinded, knowing it’s the best place. She was momentarily dumbfounded seeing things from our side, but we watched her comprehend how we can mostly only pretend to see the audience when the lights are up. Her brilliant mum came up to help keep her safe. “I’m invisible,” mum announced, and hid behind the chair. Holly just made sense of it, in her own time, and won the game better than plenty of drunk people have over the years, with such a supportive audience and her ace Spanish mum hiding behind the chair, realising in the moment that she’s probably reared an actor.

Will and I have secured our tigers and how we coexist. He’s a fire tiger, I’m a wood tiger. We both like to play, and we both talk too much. We have learned how to start editing each other. Great new friends, we are. He’s a joy. He plays the fire, I try and plug the roots in, and we both get lost in our own ideas.

In any sensible world we would have a day off tomorrow. It is the thing that I balked at most when I saw the dates, just as I know what happens to our voices. No Monday off after 3 back to back 2 show days. It’s tough. We are both vocally tired but full functioning… we are aware of upper register bits that are a struggle. A full day with steam etc would guarantee a clean week. Not to be.

So I’m gonna get in the bath now and then collapse, relatively sober.

Moments like watching Holly calibrate what it meant to be in the light, and then guess that hard question for a 7 year old… Joy

A full house tonight. Drunk as skunks. It pleases me to be the permission for their chaos while pretending to hate chaos.

Problem is, at the end of the day, I’m spent. I’ve only got one thought in my head and that’s how I’ve got two shows tomorrow and I did two tonight. I’m happily tipsy after Tiny Tim’s table left with untouched prosecco in abundance and alerted us to it. I suspect an extra hour on the licensing would have been too much money but a shame we couldn’t get it for weekends. We went up really late tonight because of all the bar orders being honoured. We ALWAYS open late to accommodate the bar. It rankles with my professionalism. I’ve never been in a show that expects to open late. Normally that’s one of the stage management pridefails.

That said I am happier to open the show late than to have that stage manager that literally hates the show and keeps going on about their idea of what “immersive” means and why we aren’t living up to that very limited idea. Bullshit pride and sectarianism. I get it. Some idiots would bill their show as “immersive” because audience were invisible watchers in a kitchen and some people had an *actual sink* behind them that was randomly used at one point or whatever. But yeah, we had a stage manager one year only with an extremely narrow frame, a very big NO, and the aegis to tell us all why they didn’t like the show they had agreed to work on all season. Thanks. Hmm.

In 9 years of doing this show though we’ve only had that one negative team member.

This year is too much of a sausage party for sure. But my dad would always say that Jersey is 20 years behind the mainland. The sausage is the way it has fallen. The known people with the known skillsets were available without seeking. There was no need for auditions. Untried people can bring negativity, such as the SM I’m referencing above. They were lovely, and my friend, but it was very important that we all knew how they didn’t like or respect the show we were busting our nuts on.

This evening I was paid to bring my cards and read for Aylar, the violinist. She needed some advice and Alice’s Tarot helped. Sara observed how I transform when I’m speaking through those cards. Aylar commented on exactly that as well.

Transforming energy, reflecting it, and doing it from chaos. Thanks Tom, Al, Caroline, Alice… all the humans at the root of shifting me into these overlapping practices of teaching people to be more Christmassy and helping them sort their blocks out. And you of course, my fellow cats and cat lovers. I’m turning in. Two big days ahead. Nice to think about woowoo but in the end I’ve got a job to do.

Lovely show tonight. Getting fuller. We had a brilliantly conflicted review in The Bailwick Express where she went expecting to hate it and remembered to have fun. She was one of the only people I’ve known to give a straight “no” to Scrooge when he looks for a dance partner in Fezziwig’s Ball. She thawed considerably by the end. I had no idea she was a reviewer. But she was. Not for the Jersey Evening Post, which is the holy grail. But in their absence I’ll take The Bailwick Express and her strangely reluctant enjoyment and understanding of what it is to do immersive theatre. Aylar the violinist had a similar reaction to the writer’s wonderment at her playing violin “with no sheet music”…

Adam the producer often says that, with the opera house having been closed for so long, the people of Jersey are used to only having amateur offerings. To have something that is produced, that is clean when it needs to be clean, that, essentially, is professional… They aren’t expecting it. Yes this show invites some flowing. It is the result of my and Jack’s work with TC and The Factory where we try and mix fixed with flowing so it is simultaneously alive and coherent.

Last night the sound guy queued a child shouting “fuck off” as I raised a bittersweet glass to absent friends at the end. There are still strange and gorgeous moments of chaos. The audience interaction tonight was so deeply satisfying, and we’ve really nailed down the tech. Will and I have started to learn basic telepathy although we can only do easily missed monosyllables, unlike Jack and I who can have full and instant conversations and frequently did.

I’m enjoying not having to think about chairs and candles etc. Stage management is doing most of my pre-show checks. I then do them again but I don’t have to be there hours before the show to help launder tablecloths and sweep up detritus and work out how the hell everyone is going to sit down and eat.

My only great sadness is that the little Portuguese place over the road will be closed from tomorrow. They are all off home for Christmas. No more lava hot coffee for a pound and cheap cake. No more steak and cheese baps for two quid. They’ve stopped me from blowing half my fee by being cheap.

Company drinks. Two shows tomorrow so I won’t have loads. But I’ll certainly have a few…

Two years ago, during a show at the Auberge du Nord, in the dinner section where Scrooge is learning about Christmas, this odd lumpish guy asked to kiss Ebenezer. I resisted, of course, but eventually under the aegis that it would help me learn something, and with the vigorous encouragement of his friends, I allowed it. He surprised me and went for one plum on the lips. It stuck in my mind because the guy seemed really off. Negative energy coming off him in waves. Something very odd about him. Definitely straight. I assumed it was some stupid Christmas dare between him and his colleagues. Scrooge disliked the whole interaction but built it into the show. “And that man kissed me!” etc etc

On Friday night he was in again. “My mate gave you COVID,” says some douchey guy to Scrooge in the dinner section. “He hates amdram.” “I do too.” “Oh yeah this isn’t amdram. Well he hates it anyway. He kissed you on the lips so he gave you COVID cos he had COVID.” (May I just point out that this sort of interaction is extremely unusual in the show.) “I didn’t get COVID,” I said. “He gave it to you. You kissed him.” And then he points at the guy. “Go talk to him.” And there he is, this same lumpish guy, sitting there not making eye contact, radiating negative energy in his Christmas jumper. “Go talk to him. Go on. He hates this. We’ve brought him for a joke.” “I’m not here to police people’s enjoyment,” I say, and leave the whole interaction. “What a twat,” I think to myself. I don’t bring him into you show this time.

Today I went for a coffee in the pizza place. There are two women having lunch. “We saw you on Friday,” they say. “And two years ago you kissed our friend at The Auberge. He’s upstairs. Do you want to talk to him?” “No, I thought he was very odd energy.” “You grabbed his face and gave him a big kiss on the lips. I think that’s a weird thing to do, right at the height of COVID.” “I have no recollection of this interaction.” I exit the conversation. But I’m weirded out now.

So now this morality vacuum of a human being is trying to score social points by embellishing the story and making out like I kissed him on my own impulse. It’s ridiculous. What a total berk. It makes me really fucking angry.

Meanwhile on various Jersey Facebook groups, admins are taking down positive reviews of our show and fronting reviews for the local amdram musical. We aren’t in competition, or we certainly shouldn’t be. The two things are chalk and cheese. We can exist very happily next to each other. But… I no longer live in this small island, and I’m remembering the behaviours that propelled me away from it.

It made me really uncomfortable, the kiss business. “He hates amdram” they said. Yeah because he has no charisma and wants to be the centre of attention anyway, which is how most amdram can be described.

I didn’t want that fucking kiss at the the time, he was out of line going for my lips, it creeped me out in show, and doubly so now I understand the whole purpose of it was to infect me with COVID. My decision in show two years ago to humour him has now led to him turning the story round to make it about him. When you look at the shape of it, it’s really a miracle he’s not in prison if that’s how he goes about his life. Grrrr

Schools matinee this morning. We had to cut all the filth. No dinner section either. I had to tell one of the teachers off who kept on going “shhh” when I was encouraging chaos. “I’m perfectly capable of doing that for myself when I need it thank you.” There was plenty of chaos thereafter and I was perfectly happy about that. We always got silence when we needed it. Will and I both love this kind of work and we both know how it works. This evening we were talking about the arbitrary nature of literally everything and how important it is to make peace with the fact that things are random as fuck. We both really bonded on that. We’ve both seen people go kablooie by hoping desperately that things are all connected and make some kind of sense.

They aren’t and they don’t.

Will and I have both understood that. Patterns are comforting but rubbish. That knowledge informs our attack on both world and work. It’s joyful when you stop having to worry, like one old actor friend of mine worried a decade ago: “I think I’m on some sort of blacklist.” No. We wish there was something concrete like that to make sense of our hurdles. But the sad desperate truth is that we are not important enough, none of us are. There is no pattern because the world is arbitrary random insane cruelty. For everyone.

As soon as you embrace that, then you find the vast wierd joy and the delightful power of Eris. That’s where I’ve been for over two decades, and Will right alongside me. He’s been doing Shitfaced Shakespeare, which is a bridge too far even for my degree of chaoslove. I dislike glamorising the thing that killed my mum. And yes it was more The Daily Mail than the booze, but she wouldn’t have looked to the “glamorous” killer refuge if the world hadn’t been painted so dark. And that shitty organ is just another example of painting bad cause and effect diagrams, the thinking that destroys our peace.

We had two shows today. The first was that schools matinee and I had a small cousin in the audience. My first ever school was there with the pink edges to the grey uniform. I can barely remember my friends from the brief time I was there. Mostly girls even then. Boys annoyed me, but Jocelyn… Lavinia and Marina. Oh and Antony! Those are the only 4 names I remember. I know all 4 surnames too, although likely the women’s have changed. I wonder if any of them are still on the island?

Thinking it through it is very very odd to be back here staying in a Premier Inn. Before mum died she told me “Peter and I have made sure you will always have a home in Jersey.” That wasn’t the case. I’ve got to know the hotels here in the town where I was born. It’s on their budget though. And I hope they get some profile in the local papers, cos this is a wonderful show and it is a shame it isn’t sold out, frankly. Even if sales don’t affect my pay at all. I prefer to play to a full house, obviously…

Up in the morning after a decent lie in and off to the Atlantic coast to have breakfast with family. Then a walk down the huge empty sand, and coffee at either end. There are parts of this island that can look like the end of the world, particularly here at the west side.

By lunchtime I was back in St Helier, and off we went to Mont Orgueil Castle at Gorey. It is a looming yet squat monster, redundantly hanging over the east side of the island, unused now and when will it be used again? A castle. Don’t try and invade us. We are Norman. We will conquer the large land to the north with our arrows and horses, and populate it with more castles to make it ours forever.

Knowing Will and Kiera, I figured that the best place for the last of the light was La Hougue Bie. This is one of the greatest assets of Jersey and nobody in the island gives a fuck. It’s a Neolithic tomb, over 7000 years old, designed to catch the light at equinox. the stones and the path to the omphalos still have weight and power. Christians have put a chapel on top much as they tried with Glastonbury. Nothing wrong with syncretism – Westminster Abbey is entirely on the footprint of Thorney Island, the most important druid school in the ancient world, teaching a great deal more than obedient subservience to a higher power.

It’s built around. Space is at a premium in Jersey. A road passes right by the entrance.

Nevertheless the power is undeniable. We were only there a moment. It once more led me to realise how, growing up in Grouville, I was exposed to seriously ancient things without even knowing. The hill I lived on is right by an ancient dolmen. The guys who turned my first home into a multimillion pound romanesque … thing… they likely secretly dug through inestimably ancient tombs to make their swimming pool.

We didn’t take the baby inside.

Evening took us to St Brelade and a church built to respond to the sea, with an old fisherman’s chapel where once there was something pre-poseidonic. Again with the syncretism. These places are still so strong that if you are listening you can feel the weight of the ages. That place punches you in the sea gut. I’m gonna aim for midnight mass there at Christmas, to sing new songs in an old place.

Then dinner with an old friend, and remembering the faith that opened it all for me back here back then. The trust in a higher power. A wonderful thing when detached from arrogance and control.

All said, a very curious and largely delightful day off.