Month: July 2024

Summer poking its head out from under the carpet this afternoon in Brighton. By then we had taken the law into our own hands. If the heat will not come to us, we will go to the heat.

Wowo Spa, up in Wapsbourne, and Lou has booked us an outdoor sauna for three hours.  Arguably a normal July is no time to go to the sauna, you just have to sit in the car. “Normal”.

Three saunas. A converted horse box, a converted greenhouse, a room in a hut clad with clay. Heat and wood. Fire and air and water. The horse box is the best sealed and hottest. The greenhouse is a dripping steam room – a piece of genius making wet heat like that. I enjoyed it there, steaming out my voice until I made the mistake of saying to the sauna-bore that it’s good for your voice. He immediately telling me his vocal range and that he hates opera and I know he’s about to ask me what I’ve done or what I’m doing. I’ve already clocked this guy, in his sauna hat, doubling his volume when he expressed an opinion. Why is there always one? Blithering on about their property investments or this or that. I get out and go to the little one before he starts a conversation. Apparently he’s rude about me to Lou later on. I did close a door on him mid sentence but I didn’t come to the sauna in mid July to listen to a phone in on LBC. The little clay one is pleasant enough and you aren’t allowed to talk in there.

For hours we are in there, plunging, pouring buckets on ourselves, crinkling up, warming. At one point we both lie in a hammock and the sun comes and for a moment we pretend that we aren’t in a GCSE project summer.

Now we are in bed. England are still kicking a ball about and I reckon I’ll just listen out for a big cheer as it is gonna go into extra time surely. People are hooting their horns though. It’s over 90 minutes through…

Honking car horns. And little live score widget just updated. Good lord so it looks like England are in the final unless something changes in next minute..90 plus 4…

One more match to watch then and I’ve got a fiver on England are terrible odds, but still it’ll be worth the bet if it comes in.

Game over. bedtime. So early. Don’t care.

Rainy calls about zoomy things in the morning and then Lou and I braved the weather and struck out into the July storms to find and consume brachyura flesh in Worthing.

Lou did the driving most of the way. In a bid for more freedom, and despite the damocletian sword of tax MOT fuel parking permit insurance repair work etc etc she wants to get on the road and I don’t blame her. I thank the lord I was taught to drive by dad. I wouldn’t have the Paris thing without it… so much less would be possible. She’s paying for an instructor as well but if she can get time with me she will do. This is our window, while I’m back training engineers.

Worthing Crab Shack yielded excellent crustaceanmeat and then we figured the cinema was the right place for such a relentless winter day, so we went to “Wilding”. It’s about The Knepp Estate.

Double standards are everywhere so I can shamelessly hold my hand up here. I love nature, I love internal combustion engines. Wilding got me wearing my nature hat. It’s the companion piece to Clarkson’s Farm. There’s more overlap than you’d think.

The Knepp Estate is just up the road from Brighton and it was a farm until they decided to rewild it. Their work, or sometimes lack of it, has brought endangered species back from the brink and taught us all a great deal about the web of invisible connections that hold us all together. It has probably also made numerous traditional thinkers and nature averse ninnies apoplectic with rage. I adored Birch (Selsdon) for that one glorious moment it lived before repairing a horsehair roof in the heart of Soho brought down The House of St Barnabus and both the beautiful Birches with it.

I hope the work they are doing at Knepp keeps yielding fruit. It is astonishing the extent to which we are motivated and encouraged to control and stamp out nature. Dyed meat and bleached veg on supermarket shelves, so little connection left between origin and consumption. A populace so used to being served everything by the infrastructure of capitalism that it just needs a small collapse like loss of power for a week and thousands will die indignantly wondering why their delivery didn’t come.

We caught Wilding at The Dome in Worthing. A rare old cinema now, and being so close to The Crab Shack it seems rude not to. I’ve only got a few days so despite the rain we are trying to go to places I like in the area. Relaxation and luxury before round two.

Bedtime now again, and the rain is piling down on the skylight. This winter seems to be going on a tad longer than usual up here in blighty. Just three days ago I was building air coolers in Paris. Now there’s two blankets.

It is so absurdly cold in this country. Nobody needs this in July.

I’m in bed before ten. Been looking after myself. My body’s reaction to coming off the job in France for a few days has been to go into full rebellion. Yesterday I just stopped functioning entirely and slept like a lump of rock to the extent that Lou checked a couple of times because she thought I might be dead. And yesterday and today have involved some serious runs.

The warehouse has virtually unwashed hole in the floor loos. I dared it once when it was pressing. Horrible rusted pipe behind you and many times in my life have I dropped my car key etc on the floor of loo. I’m not risking that stuff. One of the chippies made a khazi but you don’t really want to sit on that either. Best solution if I’m there is to go to Macdonald’s and buy a coffee. But in the state I’ve been in for the last few days, I’d have had ten coffees every day. Add to that the fact that tired Al yesterday groggily ordered dumplings and thought somehow that hot and sour soup was going to be tasty and warming. I even remember thoughtfully chewing up a chili pepper. Hot food to combat cold weather? Fine, yeah but dear god I now know the inside of every seed of that damn thing and all its friends and they all hate me for eating them.

Thank the dear lord I’m not sitting driving around the Route Peripherique, or picking up heavy things in a place without good loos. By the time I’m back in Paree I’ll be fit as a fiddle again and I’m doing things about my booze habit that should easily mean that I can win through to August.

Tonight another early night and long sleep. I’ve had Lou’s Ayurvedic eye on my diet, and her long experience in India accepting the effects of whatever I consumed the night before last. I think it should be over tomorrow. I really hope so. I thought I was gonna drive back to Paris. Not so sure about that now. But maybe.

For tonight though, I’m loaded up with charcoal and chamomile tea and as the July showers drip drop on the frosty summer windows I’ll stay under this blanket and try and sleep like a rock again tonight… February soon.

It’s so cold here. What the fuck?

I’ve been in a T-shirt every day and that’s only Paris. It’s a frisbee throw away. You land ten minutes after you take off.

My body has realised it’s allowed to stop.

This morning I dropped Brian at Heathrow then took some keys to a friend’s key box then loaded twenty seven bags of costume into Bergman and then unloaded it across town. Then I realised I was gonna fall asleep. I got back home and fell flat on my face and woke up groggy three hours later. Mad dreams. Now I’m aching all over and covered in bruises. I slowly shuffled downstairs and into Bergie and we hauled ass to Glyndebourne. Crashes on the 25 and the fact that my tummy is behaving very strangely meant that my journey down south was longer than it should have been. A day or two of taking it easy and I’ll be ready for the second part of the job. But it’s a useful reminder that there was so much backed up behind my endless drive to go go go.

Lou’s is the perfect place to be for me to reassemble myself ready for round two. The sea, the big light, the fluffy cat, the thoughtful routines and healthy food. If only it wasn’t so fecking cold. I might be aching but at least I’ve got a tan.

Now for a chamomile.

Delayed flight back to blighty. I’ve got some online work I couldn’t shift so I’m here for much of the coming week and it’s a chance to see Lou, which I’m looking forward to very much.

Right now though I’m sitting in CDG waiting for a delayed plane and England playing Switzerland is so boring I figured I’d write this instead.

My journey onto the plane this way has been much nicer than the monstrous arseholes who work at the EasyJet gate to Paris from Gatwick on a Monday morning. Nobody has been arbirtary or cruel and I haven’t had to throw away a perfectly good compliant cabin bag because someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

But there we are. I’m flying EasyJet again. But you learn to be alert. I’ve just checked my bag in, paid a bit more. “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.” I’ve learned.

One night at home tonight and then a relaxing time in Brighton. I’m really looking forward to switching off and switching out. This work is good and I enjoy it and respond to the pressure positively, but now I’ve learned consumables I’m trying to make sense of downstairs, and part of me wants to start coming in at 5am, as Stephan is very happy with himself for starting at 5, and wants us all to know about it, but it means that he is sending things that shouldn’t leave, and someone comes at 8 to add a box and he shrugs. He did it to me this morning. I got a text at 8 asking me to add a box to the camion leaving at half nine. I left the boys our whip and went in by uber, knowing full well that he would have sent the camion already just because. He had. The earlier the better with traffic, I suspect is his thinking, but if you think the timings are wrong then talk about it rather than sending things early and incomplete otherwise you are basically just not doing your job while being really visible. Which currently is Stephan.

So… as you can see I need to take myself out of it a bit. I became consumables guy in the supply warehouse and Darren became off site guy this week as no Ali with his shameless OCD. At least now I’m good at both off and on. Darren and I are both half jaguar though, with all the edges that brings. We will choose our battles and fight them even if they are stupid battles to fight. We will do three jobs simultaneously and all will be well unless someone comes halfway through and asks what we are doing.

I want to go lie on my back and look at the sky. England weather better behave itself…

It’s stretching things really, to call this place Paris. I’m staying in Noisy-le-sec. It’s a little busy urban satellite of Paris. A commune if you will. And very very crowded. The name suits it. It really is very very fucking noisy. Right now I’m sitting in the evening sun on a little stone bench. Behind me three men angrily and loudly gamble. In front and to my left, children play by the busy road. Men and women stroll around in pajamas and cultural outfits. Others parade the latest fashions.

This is my bedroom window – on the first floor.

HGV at all hours. The binmen early twice a week. Car radios with the lights off. Biker gangs. Arguments in the night. This town is alive with people but dead to nature. A pigeon got stuck in our oven chimney for over 24 hours before a builder let it out. Now it sits above the door, scraggled and reproachful.

Somehow it feels like community, but with all the shouting that community brings. If you look up, the sky is blue. But the streets are filthy and busy and fraught. People know us now though, the rosbifs who roll home late and leave early, often in hi-vis. We are in the build phase. It has been a steep learning curve but I’ve climbed it and man it is never too late for a dog to learn new tricks.

There’s a bit of wannabe gangster going on in noisy as well. I’m not dressing smartly as I am mostly in a warehouse and a jacket would stick out like a sore thumb. The burger joint opposite us is called O’Snoop, as the guy looks like Snoop Dogg. When he’s not flipping burgers he’s screaming around town on his big bike. Like many areas that feel rough, it’s actually friendly. Sure there’s need and addiction. But as goes the travellers mantra: Trust is almost always better than mistrust.

There are burnt out cars by the road and others overgrown in lots. Parking is tricky. Everyone has a vehicle. Try and get this place switched over to electric it’ll never take on. You’d have improvised cables stretching across the road. It’s easy to forget how obedient the majority of people are in England and America. You can lose touch and start thinking “Yay, no cash is great and everyone in electric cars,” without realising that the world will be on fire in a week.

The other day I picked up a box of screws on the mezzanine and the bottom fell out. About fifty screws fell through the crosshatching to the area below. I went and cleared them up. Nobody was below me, so nobody got a screw on the head, but the French clocked it. As I was sweeping I said “Il pleut!” to them. “Oui, il pleut des vis.” It’s one of those things that we all knew might happen. I even thought about putting a cardboard floor down. Better to shift it entirely.

So …  I’m making a new station for vis, with a concrete floor. Much better. Des vis – the screws – are a constant problem. The office guys can make orders at the hardware store but they have to choose the brand and then the French hardware store inevitably says “we only have 999 of the 1000 screws you ordered so you are getting none”. It is actually better by far for me to show up and buy screws by weight. I’ve done that twice today and so long as I keep changing branches I’ll keep us in cheap screws until the fabled unicorn brings the delivery of screws that was promised in the faraway time. These weight boxes are just as good, they just require a bit more work to count.

You measure screws by weight, which I wish I’d known when I first counted out 300. I’ve bought a kitchen scales now. Amazon lost my first one, but it is a crucial tool. Nobody counts screws, but … anyone with a modicum of sense can work out how much ten screws weighs and then multiply it to get their amount. I’m making a chart. I’m checking it twice. I’m becoming the screw master.

Then it was boxes. Everything always comes at last minute. 150 80x40x40… No office store is gonna stock that many. Another big hard call, but there’s two of us and we are both good at this. I’m gonna be on stock tomorrow, and Darren will roam. This means I’d better turn in. Wednesday morning can be pretty full on. And there have been a load of trucks. It’s getting really busy here now. I think I might need to crack in early. Just had to tell Dean the driver where the Luton key was so someone could drop the back of their artic.

Ali has gone to work on other events for a while, so I’ve shifted onto stock and Darren is into response. There’s A LOT to do. Like tons. We are trying our best to do as much as we can. But each person is only a person.

Today I’ve been making boxes up with all sorts of things. Not screws, somehow. Never any screws. Where are all the screws? Will I have to purchase more screws? When will this screw shortage ever end? Darren went to the hardware store today to get an order and once again they came up short. It’s endless.

Darren was running around in the transit while I calmly made loads of piles of consumables. Lots of it is running out so that’s the conversation I can have tomorrow morning. I wish I knew how much was needed. I’m in the dark about the bigger picture because the other option would likely involve having to go to meetings loads and filling in forms. This way I can just be a blunt tool and get things done when they need donegetting. And while the big orders downstairs seem to keep getting mixed up and not by Greg, there’s some seriously overspeed French work going on while we are upstairs ordering things. I sometimes see them getting things ready for loading and it really doesn’t feel thought through. Upstairs it’s a system now, and it’s hard to fuck up even if it took Ali and I a while to arrive at it by combining our opposite brains. We conjured up a way of things that isn’t too particular but is meticulous and can be transferable if, as will happen next week, we both need to be off elsewhere leaving Darren holding the baby on his own.

I’m waiting by the tumble drier right now. It has said six minutes for it last twenty. I want to go to bed. But I put all my clothes in it but what I’m wearing. Tomorrow isn’t such a really early start which is comforting. But I’ll need to be in clean clothes.

It still says 6 minutes. I reckon there’s a moisture gauge or something.

I wanna go to bed

Into the warehouse and into the orders again. There are so many venues and they all get a standard order of cleaning supplies, tools, fixings and other consumables. They get them when they request them, and the gamble tends to be that they never ask for more than about six on the same day. The ideal is that we have nine set up at all times, unwrapped but ready to accommodate special requests.

The supplier has fucked up royally. We should have had a load of screws at wholesale prices ages ago. It’s ridiculous that I’ve had to buy tens of thousands of screws to make up the shortfall. I had to tell my captains how much they’ve made me spend. I have a company card with deep pockets, but that doesn’t mean I should spend it badly. I wanted it to be clear it was all on the line. Nobody will fuel their vehicle if they know it only comes back when they invoice, and ditto nobody will do a hardware run. That’s why I’ve got the card, but then I end up being the one that runs up the money and nobody wants to be thought of as the one who spends more than anyone. I know it will all end up back in the same place though. Still I’m trying to choose my battles.

Tomorrow I’ll be in the warehouse on consumables, shifting and sorting things and making everything shipshape. Inevitably someone will want something. That’ll fall to me as Darren has to go be glamorous at an airport tomorrow because he’s a racing driver when he’s not response team, and the racing driver that was supposed to be there can’t be.

Darren is 47 and ripped, but with him I hear the voice of my wonderful Guildhall movement teacher Wendy Alnutt telling us not to go to the gym. His well wrought muscles have pulled his body out of whack with itself and he’s having the same sort of issues you might get if you have a big belly or, God help you, if you have massive knockers. He tried to get me to lean my whole body weight on his chest to pull it wider and ease his back pain. We will keep trying to find a solution – he’s got elastic cables and maybe we can pull against each other. It’s not a bromance. How dare you.

I’m in early tomorrow. Bunch of orders going out first thing. I need to be there to add whatever the fuck they need last minute and make sure nothing catches fire. We are coming together as a team now. Two weeks. I sent my first invoice today… I’m at the bottom of all my overdrafts. Thank fuck for this work. Still, it’s low blow. Darren gets a third again on my rate for the same work with the same experience level. Interesting how it all fits together and I’m thinking about systems going forward and what I hold to be my value. But … I’m an actor primarily. I love this event work but it will always be secondary to my vocation, irrespective of the money. I’ll get a fraction of this wage at the RSC, and that’s considered to be top of my beloved theatre industry. I hear my dad’s advice: “Go into another line of work.” He was pragmatic I guess. The event work has made the acting possible. All hail the event work. That’s why I’ve been here, not Wales. Wales would have been charitable, fun, all about friendship, but ultimately it would have been hard work for no remuneration. I’m getting to the stage where I can’t allow that anymore.