Month: March 2025

Mother’s Day. Never an easy day. I woke up in Brecon. We packed up the lovely cottage. We gradually got ourselves together and left in time for checkout. That place was amazing.

We drove up to Pelsall. I’ve spent a while now on that sofa over time, making polite conversation with Lou’s mum and dad. We had thought through a few topics before we arrived. My emergency dad topic was ferrets. I made use of it and indeed it bore fruit. He remembered another application of ferrets from his youth. Find a rabbit hole. Work out where the escape route is. Send ferret down one hole, fix net around the other hole. Wait a few minutes. Rabbit supper, so long as you are up for the messy business of humanely killing them and then skinning. I’m not sure how I would kill a rabbit in a net, now I think of it. I wouldn’t want to club or drown it, too hands on. I’m not dissociated enough to freeze it. I think I would have to be waiting at the other hole with a rifle. Let it run a bit and see if I can roll it. If I can’t that’s my lookout. But then I would also have to skin and prepare it myself. That’ll be unpleasant but if I’m gonna be a carnivore I can’t be squeamish. Tristan taught me how to deal with the gutting and giblet removal, I could do that bit. A lot of work and misery though, for something that’s so lean that if you only eat rabbit you’ll eventually starve to death, it has actually happened. You need fat pretty quickly.

A lovely few hours though hanging with that old couple. Now she’s back in Brighton and I’m here in London with the cats again. Misty is trying to crawl into my armpit and assimilate with me, Boo is observing proceedings with disinterest from her post near my feet. All is well.

I think I need to move to the countryside, but my menagerie is ever growing. I don’t really care to have a dog but Lou will have one. Cats of course. And it seems I just prefer predators. I would love to have a hawk. And a ferret. Maybe next time around. Unless something massive changes financially. Which I’m always ready for. Come on lucky madness. I’m right here for you. It all might work out strangely. You never know.

I’m off to dream with the cats.

One last night in the lovely little cottage in Brecon. Although Lou was unable to get a cancellation test this week, so we might be back here in May if she can find one to suit her needs. It’s a delight here, it really is. I’m sorely tempted. Wouldn’t it be amazing to find a little ruin and have enough money to build it into a little home, like Jamie did in France forever ago, like people could forever ago before everyone started buying places to rent.

This is a rental, obviously. The owner bought it intending to live in it, but as is so often the case the refurb was such a huge expense that she lives somewhere else and we get to stay in it until she’s made some of it back.

Today while Lou was driving I was puddling around in Bergie, taking in the delights of the Welsh hills, up and down, through the green, occasional boy racers but nobody like the angry ginger boy from yesterday. He was a study.

It’s good to be back here with Lou to decompress. The event took it out of me as it got political when we realised they wanted to pay us peanuts and mawkishly hit the negotiating table too late. They would have been happier if we had sat on peanuts. For an extra £200 each we might have fucked the relationship, but sadly that is exactly as it should be. There is a standard to be upheld. Pay peanuts, get monkeys. Hopefully we judged it right as I think it was an honest oversight in both directions…

I’ll need to find more consistent and less exhausting revenue streams if I’m gonna get the ruin in Wales. Series regular? A couple of years of constant fucking work… I’m fine to work hard, but I just can’t be in an office without starting to vibrate imperceptibly. The longer I’m there the more I vibrate. Two weeks and it starts to become noticeable to me. Three weeks and the building starts vibrating. A month and I drill a hole in the floor to the centre of the earth causing the atoms holding it together to disengage from one another and shatter off into the universe forever. The longest I’ve dared risk it so far is two and a half weeks.

But yeah, I’m starting to realise what this money lark is all about and it isn’t just expensive meals and petrol and travel and nice bathrooms, although that’s part of it…

Alarm at 5 and Boo was sleeping right on top of me. I didn’t think too much about still being tired, just rolled into clothes and jumped in Bergie. I was out of London before the traffic, speeding up the M40 perhaps a little too fast. Police car parked at the side and I didn’t see the radar so I’m hoping they were taking notes at the time cos I’m pretty sure I was out of the permissible range.

I was at Rochdale Crem easily by ten, and changed into my suit in the disabled loo. They took Peter in a land rover hearse and brought him in to Hawkwind To Love a Machine. Apt. This was a sad funeral and I’m glad I made the effort. He was a great dad, made four boys, one of them Brian. I remember him giving Jack and I the free tour of Hare Hill House. He told us lively tales that stuck with me – a natural storyteller, a performer, an artist. If I’d known then how he was to decline I would have stayed up longer, as his last years were hard with dementia. This is why the funeral felt so loaded, heavy with the bittersweet memory of another gorgeous soul gone back to aether, not be arranged like that again, gone. It’s a necessary ritual, a funeral, and if we miss it the grief can be harder. We all go… some go hard, some go relieved, some drift, some cling. We leave a unique hole in the shape of things that resonates through time. It’s a power to say goodbye properly.

Brian carries a lot of his dad forward. I’m happy to see that connection, to know how proud his dad will be of the sonly that currently lives with us in our catflat in London.

I then drove briefly to St Helens but the idea of an all night Irish wake weighed too heavy on my tired bones. I needed to get some sleep. I’d even had a proper road rage incident on my way from the funeral to Robin’s. I’m in a suit, some great big hairy ginger lad starts trying to cut me up, laying on his horn and shouting so I let him pass but he pulls up alongside. My window is open and he’s shouting “it’s MY lane” and I gesticulate open handed, ‘go for it’ “Are you calling me a wanker?” and the obvious answer would be “I don’t need to call attention to it,” but I just ask him to back down. And there’s a queue ahead of us and I know he’s a problem. I realise in plenty of time that I’m gonna be alongside him in the queue so I stop, leaving about 6 car lengths before I’d have stop beside him. And immediately the car behind me starts honking and gesticulating, not understanding why I’ve left the space. I creep forward, watching the queue in front, waiting for the best moment, guessing what might be about to happen. This isn’t my first rodeo with an irrational driver, and I don’t think the suit helped. Sure enough, I time it just right. I get alongside him as I see that the two cars in front of me are about to get on the roundabout. And he’s out. I knew it. “oh here we fucking go,” I find myself saying. About six foot with meaty hands and all the ginger hair and beard and “You jumped up prick, get out of your fucking car,” and like that’s gonna happen. I wait until he’s come round (he’s on my right). He’s almost in my grill, but the cars in front are pulling onto the roundabout so I floor it and glide into their wake and I’m the out the other side and round a load of corners before he’s back in his seat. Shaky legs but still got all my teeth. I’m not worried about him taking my numberplate. He’s not the type. He was just having a moment, and his girlfriend was in the car with him laughing. Perhaps I’m lucky I could get clean out, I was worried he might have got across the roundabout in time to see where I went and that’s when it might have got dangerous, but I had let him come round his car to get to me. Peter was with me – nobody needs to get beaten up after your funeral.

Good lord.

This was the only photo I took tonight. It was to send to a friend who wanted to know if they could use me for a thing. “I’m on a thing!”

This thing has been a long thing coming. And it has been a learning thing, as I’m trying to balance the creative side with the fact I’m having to be hard and hold my ground about money. We almost fell flat where a miscommunication had left the client expecting they could get two experienced event actors for the price of one. Actors at events get a bad rap and rightly so, so it’s important to hold value if you aren’t gonna be a nightmare. Often the client hasn’t got a clue. “We want vampires” the booker hasn’t got a clue “Can you all be vampires, you’re actors.” You get there and there’s nothing but some shit fangs and a pound shop costume. “What do we do?” “I dunno, just be a vampire.” So you do whatever. I remember dancing in a shower of blood in a singlet vest and a guest came in stupid vampire costume and started talking in Dracula accent. The booker lost their shit about “that fucking actor doing Dracula shit”. He still treated me like a wanker even though they realised the mistake when someone was sent up to fire me, realised I was stuck in a shower doing my Blade shit, and then got told by the guest that “I VANT TO DRINK YOUR BLOOD!”

New actors might want to justify their pay by DOING. That’s a trap. Nobody wants to be acted at. Particularly when they’re getting drunk with friends. I remember rehearsing “audience moves” for an event for the Princes Trust and having to pretend to be an  audience member so the young actors could practice moving us. I chose to be like people genuinely are at these events, being rude, breaking world, being patronising. The director asked me after the first move not to “be so obstructive in rehearsal”. Oh summer child. I said “I’m being realistic,” I tried as these extremely skilful musical theatre performers were going to get eaten alive and I could smell it. 

Come the audience moves at the event, all these young actors went up to all these drunk rich people and started “acting” at them and of course got totally resisted and couldn’t move them. They had no technique to genuinely engage or undercut or play, to read the person and quickly serve what they might respond to. Sure it’s a skill that’s learnt. Sure it has taken me decades. Sure it involves abandoning your crap and shifting up your charm. But a teaching moment was shut down by being told I was being problematic. I still walked away with my head held high, and the performance part of the event went well, but the expectations of the cast were vastly shorted. You won’t get what they thought they were gonna get. Ever.

This evening we balanced it fine for a small audience as part of a pitch. I was white rabbit so timekeeping and madness conversations, but also can touch on things like rabbit hole – he can be a bit mad himself and maybe has bought into one of the crazier pattern matches.

Playing it back I maybe went in energetically harder than I needed to at the start as I had to have a discussion just beforehand about what we were worth, and I knew with that discussion just done that we would be under scrutiny. “They asked for £200 more than we budgeted for each.” Yes we fucking did. Cos you wanted to pay us in tapeworm. I’ve done events, twenty years ago, at that rate all in and everyone on it was bitching about it back then: “This is much more work than that accounts for”.

I held my ground, I’m glad I held my ground. If they want to employ the thirty years ago version of me for peanuts next time time they can, but there’ll be a learning curve before they can do it like we do it. Ffion and I know what to ask the booker now, what to ask the client when I’m given a direct line to them, what I can sort with the venue first, what it needs to build what the client wants, how to deliver it in a way that the guests are happy but so is the client and the booker. etc etc. We play, we learn, we play more, we earn. More.

A good night. I’m fucked. No specifics, just a brain dump. That’s all you’re getting. Off up north at dawn tomorrow. Fuck. Good lord. Night night. Mel is in my room after reading tarot all night with a snake round her neck. I’m in Brian’s with cats. I thought I would drive halfway up tonight but I can barely think. Sleep. Early early start tomorrow. But seeing off a friend.

What a lovely day.

The cherry blossom is all up in the trees, and the magnolias are a good month early. Everything is in bloom.

I’ve just exited a conversation online with a friend who has no particular timeline but is very prone to pattern matching, and has found a reason to think that aliens made the pyramids or whatever. It’s a necro of an old post about something deeper underground, it’s very heavily trodden ground. My friend believes in wonder. It’s why I love them. But they are why we all had to learn not to follow the weird guy who said he had puppies. They would have been eaten.

There’s this guff around the arbitrary system that brought about one way of expressing the numbers of the speed of light, well they correspond with the system of numbers that were normalised when we made longitude and latitude. As Burroughs taught us, if we look for the number 23 we find it comes up again and again. And maybe we feel more powerful if we are certain that the guy who says he has puppies actually does have puppies even if he then murders us in his van before we’ve seen the puppies.

The internet has made us all stupid. People I love have bought into absolute idiocracy. I choose to be disobedient and playful and sideways. That’s important – we have to examine. But examining requires our own discernment. If we start to isolate ourselves because we are convinced things work a certain way? Fucked.

I’m not being patient with it today. I might even be tipping into impatient, just as I’ve had persistent noise from someone I respect. I hold space for a lot of people who are absolutely full of shit, but it’s weird when you realise someone clever has drunk the Kool Ade. These things are so fucking pervasive. You can’t stop it by being annoyed.

I’ll try and track it back. It’s usually an identity crisis at the heart. “I’m this, they are that.” As I say I’m being impatient. I’ve had occasional rubbish for decades. It could just be a flash in the pan. But…

Maybe there are vast alien created super machines buried under the pyramids. Coils of metal, only written about by certain internet outlets and only recently because THEY don’t want us to know and haven’t been able to *complete sentence here please*. This is the life changing news ya, even though it so isn’t. Good for north African tourism perhaps? Good god it is such bollocks based on bollocks based on bollocks and I’m actually bored of having friends who are such dupes they buy into it. *insert prose congratulating all comers on their clever different thinking* Fluff them into believing they have discovered something new. Tell them they are clever and special, not just more fucking idiot thoughtzombies. Idiots. I’ll let it slip if I don’t have them shouting about it to me. “Mummy mummy I did a poo poo in my trousers!”

Yayy secret knowledge. There’s more where that came from. I’m going to share it with you now. Here it is: MOST PEOPLE ARE INCOMPETENT AS FUCK AND CAN’T ORGANISE SHIT, BUT SOME PEOPLE CAN CORRAL PEOPLE INTO ACTUALLY GETTING SHIT DONE, TRUST ME I’M ONE OF THEM WHEN THE MOOD TAKES ME. BUT YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW THAT SO YOU THINK COMMUNITY IS WITCHCRAFT SO YOU CAN’T MAKE SENSE OF THE GREAT EARTHWORKS OF THE PAST. Also they did a poopoo in their trousers.

It’s one of the most egregious of all the fucking bullshit stories to me. Stonehenge saksaywaman pyramids etc CAN’T HAVE BEEN MADE BY HUMANS WITHOUT TECH! Why? “Because PERSON SAYING IT is completely incompetent and shit at working with other people and has no understanding of tools or society or time. Must have been lasers? You fucking child. LASERS!? Engineering. God it makes me hate stupid people, that one more than all the rest.

If you are an entitled lazy incompetent frog of a human you will think that these huge endeavours were made up cuz you could never do it. But it has been done for you again and again. And someone has to teach you to use the remote control you take for granted.

“I’m shit at life so the pyramids were made by aliens.” Join a big group, do a hard thing as part of it, see how some push away and some push towards, marvel at whichever of the two you happen to be, learn from that when it gets done whether or not you helped it cos you aren’t the main character cos that only exists in stories, you are just a narcissist, if you think I’m talking to you, adjust.

I’m so bored of it. I shouldn’t even write this blog, I’m sure I’ll annoy some friends. I’m just done and done. I can still hold space for you, just… have some self respect. Hold space for yourself. This shit is tempting but ultimately it’s a great big pile of poo and you might feel clever but you look dumb as shit. Do better.

So yeah, I’m going to be short, even with old friends, when they start thinking this flat earth idiocy is new or clever. It’s dire. And it just exposes them as a consumer. And oh god the bollocks I’ve been fishing through, where’s it coming from? Meh

I’ve got nothing against consumers, but it makes me sad for the makers and shifters that the idiots who eat their stuff always seem to have the reins of conversation. What are we making for? Not some idiot that thinks they’ve beaten society by shrugging.

I’m home again home again jiggidy jig. Long old drive but podcasts make it go away. Million Dollar Lover, still on Intrigue with BBC SOUNDS. Back to catland and it’s warm here on my bed with the blanket on. Lou is still in Brecon. I miss it and her.

Pretty much every time I left the little house I was in someone engaged me in conversation. There’s interest in the place and I can feel why, it is a beautifully done holiday cottage now. But it is on a flight of steps that gives a useful shortcut. It’s busy. When I was recording my tape, people often lingered, seeing me in the window, curious.

It was derelict for some years, it transpires. The previous owner lived alone there until he was old, and kept ferrets. You sometimes still hear people on the way up say things like: “careful, the old man lives there, mustn’t let him see you”. I remember there were “haunted” houses and such when I was a kid and you had to hold your breath as you passed or pinch your nose or mutter something to protect you. This old guy with his ferrets clearly made an impression both positive and negative on the locals. He’s gone now and the likes of us have moved in, to buy our packs of artisan coffee on the high street and noisily record things in front of a tripod in the living room for a couple of hours on a Tuesday.

I wonder if he was the dynastic cathedral family ferreter, pre rentokil, keeping his working ferrets against the time they got called in for a rat infestation: “they’ll realise what they done wrong and call for us again darlings, just you wait, all these folk they don’t know that all that nasty poison, that ain’t the best way to get those rats anyway, they’re clever and that’s expensive and nasty that is, but us darlings? We’re cleverer then they aren’t we darlings? We’ll be like the pied piper won’t we? Begging us they’ll be, as the rats eat their lemon drizzle cake. And you’ll go in those holes and it’ll be like old days again and oh just think of darlings, just you wait…”

“They like to hide up trouser legs,” Lou remarked from apocryphal memory, and yes, I too have that memory. I wonder if anyone who wasn’t there a bit in the seventies has any memory of that. I wonder if anyone who was doesn’t. Ferretlegging in the country pub… how long can you keep the ferret in your trousers? Ferret racing. The guy with a beret on and a ferret in his pocket… A strange old world of familiar furry predators. And for thousands of years, maybe until they just got too hard to find, the ferret man was your solution for rats. Maybe until poison was everywhere and you can’t trust the client to be honest when you ask them “are they poisoned?” and you lose a ferret for eating bad rat. It’s not really a vocation you see these days. Anyone who has had rats, did you look for a ferret man? It’s smart, you know. A good ferret will even bring up all the bodies and then you don’t have weeks of horrible stink. I’m sure they still exist and I’ve just forgotten them being in London.

This old brecon ferret house is glorious now, with the most enviable bathroom I have ever sluiced myself in. A huge freestanding bath, an excellent shower, plenty of light but nobody looking in. Lou is like a ferret at finding good deals on accomodation. I’ve long ago realised she’s better and more persistent than I am. I had to come back to London to troubleshoot ahead of a live tester for an ongoing event tomorrow. But I wish I was going to sleep in the ferret house.

London is flexing its muscles, trying to get teeth into me, pulling on my attention. But I’m glad I’m here with Lou. It worked out very well.

24 hour turnaround on a commercial tape, and not an uninvolved one either. Three scenarios that I had to absorb with mood and product info. I only had the clothes I had, but with a tripod in the car and Lou taking driving lessons it was perfect. My flat is busy these days and there is often the TV and always random cats. It has never been an easy selftape zone, with sirens and traffic, helicopters and clutter. The process of clearing a wall can be time consuming.

This morning I rolled aside a glass table, stacked up some books and moved some lights. Then I read a load of mood boards and, took a test shot and realised I looked too spivvy. Went to Boots and got razors and hairspray. I have long hair at the mo, and there’s a tape out with long hair so I can’t cut it or “WE LIKE THE GUY WITH THE LONG HAIR!” I won’t cut it until all extant tapes are timed out or I book a job.

I spent a good hour amusing myself with various improvised scenarios around a particular brand. Kept myself pretty happy making things up. Just me and a tripod and the contents of my own head and the mood boards. I was picking takes and editing when Lou finished her day’s driving and we struck out to find some waterfalls in the evening light.

The more I get days like these the more I like the freedom of self tapes, the fact I can be here, go see those waterfalls but not miss a last minute commercial casting. I’ve had to run from them in the past in Soho, when they are an hour behind and I’m supposed to be across town. It’s shit for all the studios in Soho I have no doubt, and all the sardonic actors who worked as receptionists and kinda hated you for getting the meeting – where are they working now? Loads of those old places must be gone, turned into Airbnb or Pret. But hey ho and the Brecon Beacons are amazing.

Lou and I walked up some hills, heading to waterfalls in the evening light, but it was all a bit too far to get there and back before dark so we made do with a yomp up halfway and a yomp back down. It’s quiet here and the air is good, the promise of rest and a hot bath outweighs the endorphins from a beautiful waterfall despite them having a purported “wow factor” of 3 out of 5, which sounds like pretty decent “wow” – depending on where they start and where they’re going. Middling-wow falls are better than low-wow falls. We made do with evening light, the golden hour, a bit of hillside. The wow will wait.

Then we went back to the cottage and had a curry. Gotta love curries. 💕

I feel like good things were achieved, set in motion, continued. An old friendly casting director contact, haven’t heard from them for a few years. Happy to set things moving via them. Happy to be able to take the time at short notice. Sometimes it works out.

Around the streets of Brecon today, no fixed agenda. I’ve told my agent I’m not gonna run off to any deserts in the near future just because it’s always good to be available. But the industry has changed. We all hated self tapes when they first started but with all the tech that’s sprung up around vapid people wibbling on about themselves on social meedja, it actually makes it possible to do things like be in Brecon and still respond positively when you get a commercial casting due the next day. I would have driven back to London first thing tomorrow in the old world, swearing all the way. As it is I think I have a little phone tripod in the car, so I can just set up and throw things around in the morning until I’m happy. Brave New World. I’m happy to have the casting – it’s a CD that I haven’t seen for a while, perhaps since I switched to my lovely agent, but some years ago they were a genuine lifeline and I’m always happy to turn up for them as I feel a kind of loyalty to the people who helped keep me going through the hardest years.

Today was calm. I didn’t know about the casting until just after 5pm so I could just enjoy the stoney streets of Wales. I pottered about, found good coffee, and stopped at the confluence of the river Usk and the Honddu. The sun was out, but not so many people. A man in a little booth at the top of the promenade sold me a generous portion of ‘Japanese style fried chicken” which I ate outside with a can of Lilt – Hot damn! Fanta bought it and call it Fanta Pineapple and Grapefruit, but it still exists. I was a happy sunny boy.

When Lou finished her driving we went to church, up at the cathedral, just to catch prayers. It was just Stephen the vicar, the two of us and an Irish lady with a bag of fish and chips. We did the collect for the day, we all read the magnificat cos she gets annunciaterised tomorrow, that Mary. Then Steveyboy read a bit of Galatians off of his phone cos we live in the modern world now. It was about working in mines. Getting in touch with the earth, working hard under a yoke, remembering to trust in the lord. I haven’t been to church since Christmas. I’m always happy to clock in for a bit though and do the thinkings. Can’t promise I go along with all of, can’t state I support how it often gets used, but monolithic and corrupt or not it is better to have some sort of spirituality in this mess of a world than to just worship money or yourself or some demagogue. None of them are right, all of them are right. Go pick a belief, pick three, pick ’em all, but don’t use them as the excuse you’ve been looking for to be a dick about things. Apart from the ones that required mass sacrifice, most of them came from a good place, and certainly now around the world some of the best places for calm peaceful contemplation in a world that is getting noisier and noisier – they come under the frame of these belief systems.

A lovely chilled day. Nice to have the structure of a tape tomorrow, but I’m happy it was tomorrow and not today. I was feeling pretty ropey yesterday, thrashing around all night, now the weight has fallen off a bit. Another quiet night or two here. Back to the fray on Wednesday.

Lou and I are in a little cottage halfway up the Charles I steps in Brecon. I’ve not been here before for any length of time. I think we came through here one time with Fitzrovia Radio Hour back in the day. But that was a whistle stop. I’m here for a few nights this time and I have no reason to be here other than as a chauffeur to Lou. She’s here on a crash driving course. I picked her up from Victoria at half ten and, dear reader, I got absolutely bollixed last night with Siwan. Lou found me mainlining coffee and pastry, still bilious, having woken up just an hour earlier and spent the whole morning looking for my spare keys before giving up, leaving and finding them in my car.

We got as far as Leigh Delamere before I had to stop for coffee. We got as far as Aberystwyth Waitrose before I knew that the only viable hotfix was to go into the disabled loo and perform the Ayahuasca detox shuffle.

We arrived in Brecon and immediately ate a glorious burger from Hills. Grease replacement. Now I’m just out of the bath. I feel nearly human. I’ll be in bed again soon though and then a few peaceful days in the Welsh spring.

Lou will be driving all day tomorrow so I’ll explore this little city, find the points of interest, switch into a different pace for a wee while. Unless something comes up I’m not going back to London until Wednesday. Four hours to get here but it feels peaceful and calm and different.

We are right opposite the cathedral. The doors were wide open when we tracked in from the graveyard and we were both taken with literal awe at that vast breathing building. It’s a good one, feels really alive but old, like some of the churches on Camino. I lit a candle for mum as is my way – she believed in purgatory so I’m doing what I can to speed things up for her. We both just looked at things. History and piety there. Sadly we had missed evensong but we might go to compline one day and hear that huge space lit up by the Welsh voices.

Now I’m gonna take an early bed, recover from my foolishness, and get ready to face a few calm days in a relaxed place. Another little Al and Lou cottage adventure…

I got sent an article again this morning about some cretin that has been making lots of noise about decolonising Shakespeare in relation to the birthplace trust etc. It’s all a load of amplified nonsense now of course, and my passenger observes “These people don’t realise it but they are responsible for Trump”. The remarks will have been taken out of context, amplified and drummed up into “THEY’RE TAKING OUR SHAKESPEARE! DURKA DURKSPEARE! DABURKSPEER! DAGRABAROOOO! COCKADOODLEDOOOO!” Which to be honest is most debate these days. These revisionist niche anti-how-it-was type thought-holes will always feel progressive when espoused but in the end will push the more instinctively conservative people closer and closer to populism – and so so many people are instinctively conservative. “MUMMY, HE TOOK MY LEGO!”. Look at Trump for crying out loud. Cunning like a fox, dumb as a blanket. Great at survival, crap at logic, null at nuance. Simplifying things so he can fit them into his frame, hacking all detail away, visually duped, utterly useless, loved by anyone who really just wants things to be as simple as he needs them to be.

“So come on, what does Woke actually mean?” I’m asked at dinner this evening. “It has no meaning,” I responded. “All meaning has been sucked out and now it just means ‘people we don’t like’ to a certain type of commentator. It used very briefly to mean to be aware of the different life experiences shared by people of colour in America, but as soon as people who didn’t give a fuck felt excluded by it they went hard to reduce it to a simple meaningless insult, which is reductive and ultimately empty of any true meaning but distaste.” You call somebody “woke” if they make you uncomfortable now. Or like me you avoid the word. It’s a weapon now, nothing more.

I’ve been driving lots, thinking too much, existing. Good to have a head day, recovery from yesterday, all that.

Went to Ipswich. I finally took some old reels I want digitised. Fuck knows what they are. One of them is called “Tragedy of a Nation”. I’m dreading that it’s someone’s video of something they think is wrong with the world now. “People don’t wear hats like they used to,” or “Why aren’t there trams?” “We should be allowed to have asbestos,” or “What’s wrong with a bit of good old fashioned hate?” Still, they were gonna rot in my attic, they might have something good on them, they might be of interest, who knows. I’ll find out in ten days with a download link. One of them might be something genuinely interesting.

I’ll get the films in ten days. Left that place, then we loaded the car with boxes and took them all back up to London. No breakfast. No lunch. I had a pint of beer before dinner and it came back up so quickly it was still fizzy. “I can’t think of any physiological problem that would cause that,” my brother says. “A pint of fizzy cold poison liquid on an empty stomach,” I reply. I’m really going towards Lou in this now. Why did I spend seven quid to hiccup into a drain? Who knows. I feel fine now, post dinner, in bed, off back around another sun and night cycle, ever onwards, somewhere at the end of it, stuff on the way, joy and sadness, life and death. Onwards.