Month: April 2025

Back to the invigilation. Ah the delights. Lots and lots of strings pulling on my attention at the moment, and somehow my agent has been silent despite me having just finished an absolute blinder of a run. Likely they’re in shock, but it’s ok by me as I’m trying to follow the money for a change.

Some very strong shifts potentially, absolutely in my accumulated skillset, merging events with storage with theatre with driving. I’ve made some good decisions recently but now have to wait and see where the fallout goes.

This week has been the most conspiracy theory-tastic week we’ve ever had, I think. Andrew’s child Epsteined herself, Spain went dark and our government officially revealed legit chemtrail plans.

Right now I’m watching this shit in horror. Yes of course correlation does not imply causation. 100% of people who think correlation implies causation will die. But how the hell can we be so colourblind to announce a cloud seeding project with an environmental agenda when a huge part of the English speaking world is involved in a demagogue who says he thinks climate change is made up so he can keep on burning. His followers have bought the idea that “they” have been somehow flying shitloads of chemicals over us without anyone at ground level ever catching on in order to somehow control behaviours in a populace whose behaviours have evidently not been blanket controlled. Who are “they”? Doesn’t matter. Rich liberals? Some of the oldest crap comes up when you ask these people who “they” are. And now an official similar plan so they can all say “I told you so” and make themselves even more insufferable.

But I am such a questioner, I really find it hard to buy narratives as I know how stories work. Alternative conformist narratives are as pernicious as what is thought of as mainstream narratives. I reckon there are probably more “clever” atheists in this country than there are people with specific “Christian” faith. But the atheists are the ones behaving like their belief structure is the correct one and needs to be propagated. And I use “clever” because so many conformist contrarians think they are somehow clever for having consumed, internalised, and started propagating some absolute gubbins idea about whatever their topic is today.

I find it hard to buy the sun dim. I don’t credit the reasons we have been given for the Spanish blackout and that’s augmented by how cagey and evasive the usually very accurate meta AI has been with me about it:

As for Guiffre, it is hard to credit that she killed herself. We are always being lied to, sure, that’s how government has to work. Manage the truth, release things when it will have the impact you need it to. Because we have made it all up, all this civilization stuff, but we made it up long enough ago that most people have forgotten we made it up and think that there are ways that things have to be, usually based on their preferences.

It’s nice until it isn’t, this made up world, but there are so many countries where it has already gone totally wrong but people are still playing a horrible game.

Sometimes people mess up the board, throw things around, but it always comes back to the same nonsense with different people.

I’m never gonna buy the mainstream narrative, anymore than I’m gonna buy the alternative narrative, knowing we are all kids in the playground making up the rules as we go. Morals shift from person to person and we know it. We are all making up the world together and trying our best in it. Maybe that’s enough. But what a weird news week, and you can be sure the patternmatchers are having a field day.

I’m shattered.

Thankfully I had good plus ones and my prep had been effective. Unfortunately the photos I had been sent to estimate the job were not in any way representative of the extent of it.

Three of us showed up in a Luton to some mardy northerner who was much more interested in moaning about how he expected more vehicles than he was in being helpful. I didn’t let him slow us down and we loaded in a ton of stuff. Old mannequins, bits of duct and cables. It all had to go, no time to properly sort it just hoik it all in. Then the moment of truth as we drove to the tip, but actually barring expense it was totally doable. The tip was lethal. No wonder it’s hi-vis and hard hat, someone almost dropped a ton of doors on my leg. It’s horrible but they are trying to recycle. Pulling out the metal, the wood, the plastics. Chucking it at your head.

I’m glad I’m not greatly involved in the IP as we have had to be ruthless. We tipped another fuckelton, but time was not on our side with the tip closing at 4. Still, we pulled as much as we could out, got things cleared but not all of them. There’s still loads there. I’m looking into getting a truck for a day – ideally a box loader 18 tonner. That and some lads and I can come up in a Luton and we can do shuttle runs and get the rest of it out. Eurocrates full of cables that’ll weigh so much I’m tempted to get someone else to drive the van and come up in my car, take them and put them into the household recycling cable section where they don’t weigh you in and out. Flight cases with god knows what. Sure we can put it back round and we will. We have to. But yeah, once I get greenlit on part two of this plan you’re gonna get a call if you’re a big lad I know. Jack and Jake and I pulled hard today and achieved, softened the mardy northerner. But there’s much to do here still and I’ve started so I’ll finish. Some huge sheets of glass that just… weigh. Big glass is the absolute fucker for weight.

I’m gonna get in the bath now. I almost certainly stink. A few more days like that and all the pies will be a distant memory. They’ll have come through my pores. I’ll get this signed off and I have now learned not to pitch too low if I’ve got no information. But … I needed the work, it has been pretty dry lately and the coffers are looking empty.  This work won’t make me rich but it won’t fuck me over either. Glad to be active.

I’ve run a bath. Brian has geranium and CBD bath salts. I thought it best to write this before I get in as I’m not sure how eloquent I’ll be when I get out the other side. This is already the fucked version of me. Sleep is calling. I’ll have to work hard to stay awake in the bath.

Well that was a lovely evening.

It feels like just yesterday that Claire and Ffion and co went round America with the fortieth anniversary of AFTLS, but here we all were suddenly at the FIFTIETH. There’s no way ten years have passed. Ten years have passed. Christ.

I last went out with Twelfth Night. Before that it was Much Ado. 5 actors and a suitcase, working deeply with Shakespeare. It’s magic. It calls for an easy knowing of the text, as you are teaching and workshopping as much as you are performing, sometimes more. Nice people, long distances, great text.

There was good cake, and a bar tab. I’m busy all day tomorrow, so I couldn’t nail the booze. I very much enjoyed the cake and the company though, and honestly I’m a cheap date these days so a glass or two of wine and I was anybody’s. I pulled out and went home before 8 and ordered pizza from deliveroo. Pizza express doing large pizza for 12 quid and I get 7 quid off four times a month and then a 5 quid rebate on my amex so basically it’s free. Gotta work the angles. I just let the guy in and now I’m munching as I write to you.

Lovely family of people, all pushing in the same direction. Actors gotta look after each other and this is an actor led company. It makes me very happy to call them friends. But I’m glad I managed to leave before the end of the night.

Greasy fingers on the phone now. Messy yum yums. The cats are both watching me with admiration and disgust as I push cheesy bread into my face and write. I’ll be asleep and in cheesy dreamland soon, that’s the plan. That was a good show. Hamlet. Three men, two women. Really strong and clever. Trust Jim Jack to make everything active, he made Claudius a thug and it worked. It’s always fun seeing lovely actors playing monsters. The whole company was fun and sparky and gelled. I’ve had a lovely night, the pizza has soaked up the wine, now it’s bedtime.

I thought I might be driving all day today, slinging heavy bits all over London and Kent, emptying emptying emptying. But the lady who runs the place this particular set is stored charges £650 for weekend access. Absolute madness. I’m going on Monday and I’m steeled to the expectation I’m going to be obstructed by her. She’s onto a winner – a company paying a monthly storage. She probably quoted them an eye watering sum for removals which is why my pitch landed. Now I’ve got to do a good job of it. That’s fine, I’m good at these things. I don’t think she will want to make it easy as she wants it still there next month… But let’s see.

I’ve booked two guys who know each other so it’ll be three lads in a Luton. White van men. Waheyyyyy etc. By the look of it there is lots of weight here. I suspect it came in an artic. She thinks we need two artics to clear it. Nah. I didn’t see any pallets. This is gonna be manual, hence the three lads. Who runs a storage place that isn’t accessible on the weekend? Madness. I honestly think she’s a chancer. Someone’s mum who thinks theatre people are rich. The post code takes me to a load of land with two businesses marked: A pet groomer and a clearance company. Clearance companies. They charge you to take the stuff. They charge you to keep it. Then if it’s good they go quiet and hope you stop paying and then they flog it. Triple profit. Land for profit.

Today has just been booking the van and my two hands to get this stuff out. Siwan will be at Old Street to take the clothes so I’m gonna cut her in as well. There’ll be loads of unexpected costs and I know for certain that the tip is gonna be pricey. But I’m in a happy place that I’ll be able to pay my friends, pay myself and solve a problem without being greedy. You’ll know on Monday night how it falls. It’ll either be triumph or disaster. I’m registered now though as an official government certificated waste disposal thingummy.

Maddy is in Albania so it off just Brian and I at home, plus cats. He’s downloaded The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered, which is the game I was playing when I completely quit games and trained as an actor, but not it’s remastered. I missed at least ten years of games starting with most of that  – a true flawed masterpiece, preserved in all its wonky glory. I didn’t have the headspace to do it anymore, I needed to put in the bedrock of an acting career, not gather 30 Nirnroot. The horse of absolute justice, the NPC voice actor who says “hang on wait I can do that better” and repeats himself, people having banal conversations while oblivious to the fact they’re on fire. It is a brilliant mess. There’s so much to love in the ambition of trying to make a whole world that long ago. They pushed the boundaries. And they pushed me out by making it so big I couldn’t comprehend it anymore.

I’ll never catch up on games now, my attention span isn’t there for them. As a teenager I could do whole weekends being a completionist, but the undimmed sun is much more interesting. Now I play for the story. I’m not trying to get every damn chocobo. Still … today I picked up the old Steam Deck and pushed further into Baldurs Gate 3, got as far as my mate John Hopkins who voices the dad of one of the playable characters. He’s been tortured for twenty years non stop when you meet him. It’s always funny meeting friends in these games. I killed Katie in Witcher 2. John isn’t alive anymore either in my play through, but he very eloquently begged for death and I didn’t have to actively stab him like Katie. I tried to take a video so he can see himself in context. My playthrough will be very different from others, I’m sure there are many options for his character, but I’m at war with Shar the dark moon goddess of loss, and aligned with Selune her light moon rival. John was collateral.

It’ll take forever for me to finish this game, but when I get a day like this it is valuable. We ate well, had occasional conversations, and consumed media. It’s just another way of telling stories. I’ve always been a fan.

So in the latest round of “things that sound like they were made up by that friend of yours who is as thick as a barge” we have the UK literally planning to pilot some experiments to “dim the sun”. This is a thing that has been mooted. Funds have been earmarked. To dim the sun. Dim. The sun. To dim it. To dim the sun. The sun. Dim sun.

Contrails happen because of temperature. You might see some moron crowing that they weren’t about in X decade where we had planes. They were. The Ickeys started to do their certainty thing where we were brainwashed cos actually “they” are controlling us with chemicals in the sky. It was whack. But the dumber people are, the more certain they can be. And patterns are attractive. It is much more comforting to think that there’s intelligent design in all the chaos. The only other option is to properly look at the unflinching uncaring mad eye of absolute random neutral chance. It’s nicer to think there’s a pattern, that we are important, that we somehow matter cosmically. That we aren’t just a load of cellbags who are trying to eat each other without being caught.

Now I’m told people are wanting to dim the sun and … look this shit up, it’s not me getting sucked in. It’s a thing. It’s not even April fools. Good god.

Why do they want to do this? Because we are too fucking greedy to stop burning anything there is to burn because we all know that if we stop then someone else will take our place. We are playing out the Fermi Paradox. Perhaps like all the other advanced civilisations before us, we are going to burn everything that might make us interstellar on short term profit. For the comfort of a few awful humans, we too will go into the bin of clever creatures. We will die clinging to this burnt rock. I think it’s a problem with our species lifespan. A few hundred years is forgotten so fast. People are already driving wedges into things that happened recently. “Oh but did the holocaust REALLY happen?” That’s coming from the same idiot that thinks the earth is flat, that evolution isn’t. That space doesn’t exist. Sure, half of it can be tracked to fundamentalist faith structures. But mostly it is ignorance grounded in greed and laziness. “Why should I change my habits?”

And so in desperation because the tipping point is basically already here, they are trying to dim the sun.

We are all going to burn. It’s too late for the crap we’ve made up. Something will continue, but before long this frantic model will collapse.

Seriously this is the reaction now? To send those oversimplifying JSO juves to prison for a decade cos they saw it coming and threw soup on a glass frame. And then to try and dim the actual sun. Because of course we can’t “just” stop oil, but still the idea of changing habits, properly breaking all the corporate abuses, deeply tackling carbon from the actual biggest emitters, not just Roger who drives a diesel engine… That’s too much to ask, is it? It shouldn’t be if now you are so desperate to fucking try and stop what you know you’ve created by seeding the clouds and making it all shit and what’s even the point of being alive if there’s no light? I’m gobsmacked. Solar panels not looking so good now.

Can we just sort out nuclear fusion? And soon. Without making a black hole please.

Christ.

Dim the sun? Get in the bin.

Back on the invigilation train tomorrow, my career in invigilation is progressing apace. They’ve bumped up the hourly rate now so it doesn’t feel like a pisstake anymore, and largely I don’t come across so many potatoes so they are clearly thinking about things which is good. It’s still the fallback but I have come to value the money. Some came in today and couldn’t have been more timely. I’m down to brass tacks in terms of cashflow.

Bergie had an advisory on his brake pads and discs last MOT and we are at the stage now where I can hear them scraping pretty much all the time. I wince every time I have to stop. I brought him in to Shak. He’s that rare thing, an honest mechanic in South West London. As often as not I buy the parts on eBay and if I can’t fit them, he does it. This time he reckons he can get better quality parts quicker, and I’m happy to let him lead cos he’s always been brilliant. I’ve never come away from him with a sour taste in my mouth. I’ll take it in after work tomorrow. It’ll still be money but I’ll pay cash for it. I’ve got some sitting in a box at home.

Slow day start today but then I gradually found myself pulling up momentum as I sourced some actors and juggled dayjobs into the next month. Some potentially very positive driving work might have just come in. But nothing is set in stone yet.

It was St George’s Day. A time to care about slaying vast beasties and to celebrate people of Middle Eastern heritage. A few days after hot cross buns, but it is the time of year for crosses. I’ve spent it mostly with the cats. Misty was sick from eating too much hair. Boo is as hyperactive as ever. All is well and I’m shattered. Even doing nothing is tiring. Probably the fact I had wine yesterday made it worse today. Bed now, and up at sparrows’ fart to make money by being organised at future business leaders.

Back to the place in Old Street where we are making sense of costume. We have a huge amount of stuff. Thankfully Siwan and I have a collaboration that goes way back. I’m very aware of the fact that it is currently eating our time, I wish I could pay her an hourly rate. She dreamt last night that I ignored instructions and walked through a plate glass window shattering it. She was worried about me, but I was totally fine, and then she realised she was the one who had some glass fragments stuck into her.

I’m gonna try and pay her what she’s worth. We are partners in this so if we start to make money then it’ll start to work out and we will go 50/50. But… right now we are both struggling for cash for the nitty gritty. That dream was a clear warning to me that I can’t just be confident without cause. We’ve got some wonderful costume, but … it’ll take time and work to even start to connect it to people that need it. We are nothing until we have been used and reviewed, in this landscape. And neither of us can work for nothing.

Like with any new business, even if we have the materials, we need so much more. If I had money to invest right now, I would do it. I’d buy into Siwan every day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

Right now it’s just about sorting. Until we know what we have, having it is meaningless. We are getting better.

Second hand shoes… I can’t even begin to tell you how many espadrilles we have, and I think it must be because they are thought of as being very close to Elizabethan footwear. I’m likely going to donate much of my tie collection to this as well. This is just the stuff from Parabolic, but there is more to sort. There’s so much.

We are making progress. We are solving. There’s so much stuff if we factor in all the things I’ve had in my attic for ages. Still, in the great big room we temporarily have for sorting, it looks like we have nothing at all. Scale is everything.

Ah the morning in London. Someone drilling and it’s not even half eight. Boo has the zoomies. I’m still in bed cos it’s warm here, but up and at it before long. Largely yesterday was an extension of the extra long weekend for me.

I woke in Brighton, well rested. Lou managed to fit some costumes and a sewing machine into Bergie and we stopped at the crack house – damn I like their coffee. Red Roaster provides it. I’m obsessed.

Then it was up to Kingston with the commuter conveyor belt of vehicles coming back from the seaside to plug back into the working world.

I didn’t plug though. I ate and nattered. In Kingston I sat at Coin de Paris, which does an excellent job of being a Parisian bistro in London. I had a croque. Uninspiring cheese but it filled me up and the coffee was good.

Ham Nature Reserve is huge. I wandered for ages and saw virtually nobody. I had no idea it was that big, it filled the morning and the sun was shining. More food at lunch via Tanya who made an omelette and then time to go home to the cats.

Evening took me out again to a low in booze and high in walking Chelsea pub crawl. The Antelope, then The Fox and Hounds, then The Royal Oak. All three can hold their heads up as having kept a degree of personality in our homogenising culture. India was in town, neither of us wanted to get drunk so walking between pubs felt like the evening hang out we wanted, with momentary stops along the way. I ended up reading her tarot in the Fox. The only other punter was a charming silver fox so was playing fast chess with the bar staff. I like Chelsea when it’s like that.

Still was tired when I got home. It was only about half nine but I’m wired for bed at that time the days so I went down like a sack of potatoes and, for the first time in ages, my internal blog alarms didn’t fire. Hence the morning pages. It’s time to get up and see the world. Sirens. Traffic. Brian is doing something with a plate. Maybe there will be coffee in the world…

Brighton again, rushing through but there are bluebells to be walked in and I’m the man to do it. Lou’s workshop is in Ditchling. We found woodland near her workshop and hit the nature trail.

Right now I would sooner be walking in pastures on the edge of the woods, as the St George’s mushroom will be up and I really want to get some strikes of that one into my strikebook. No such luck though, I’m not gonna find it in forests. But there is pleasure in the pathless woods. Plenty of pleasure. No great big white mushrooms. (Footnote, don’t fuck with these ones, there are some that look similar that can be deadly). But we are in that precious colourful fortnight now. Nature returning.

A few people walking around but it was peaceful enough. Lou picked some flowers. Then we drove into Lewes and went to Waitrose, darling. I bought some Black Bomber because you know what it’s just the most remarkably flavoursome cheddar you MUST try it darling. And Lou bought some houmous.

We grow old.

We took the spoils to a friend’s house and had DINNER. Mussels and cheese and conversation. I gave them some child’s Easter eggs because it’s traditional. Neither of them wanted them but both of them will guiltily eat one when they’re hungover I reckon. Or they’ll give them to someone who will. It’s what they’re for.

I haven’t had DINNER at a HOUSE for ages. It used to happen all the time. You remember when Ginby and Slog had just got married and invited you and some inconceivable bore they also knew because you were different genders and hadn’t got laid for a while? You’re sitting in a room eating moussaka and someone is talking about the traffic on the A27 and they’re holding hands at the head of the table and occasionally making an announcement about one of you. “BOGO is an AUDITOR!” Meanwhile someone repeats their latest story and everyone reacts like they haven’t heard it. These people are all fictional, obviously. The situation though is burnt so deep into my hippocampus it’ll be passed on to my ancestors. I usually got away without saving any numbers in my phone. Sometimes I rigged a flatmate to call me with an emergency. Thinking about it perhaps this is why I don’t find myself at them so often these days. But there were some lovely ones. I even used to host them. Maybe I’ll do some of that. It got harder suddenly. “Oh I eat green vegetables but not alliums and I can’t have fish after 6pm unless it’s a Wednesday. And Mograt only eats red meat raw and needs to be sluiced with water at 46° twice hourly or his feet swell up.” It’s easier to go to a restaurant and let them deal with that shit.

“We are social animals, it’s odd how easily we get annoyed with one another,” I said to Lou after we both reacted to someone voicing utter banalities in the woods. Just a harmlessly banal person in nature, we’ve all done it. Life is about the nitty gritty, and we like to share it. I’m doing that every day, but at least you can just stop reading and surely people frequently do. We didn’t have earplugs in the woods, we were just there to enjoy those blue flowers. And enjoy them we did.

Danceworks is up near Bond Street. I didn’t have to be there until half one, so I drove Bergie up to the edge of my borough near Hyde Park, and struck on foot into the park.

Colder than it looks out there, isn’t it? Didn’t stop half of London coming out to the park for Easter. It was crowded around Rotten Row. Skateboards and rollers and families and strollers. I was on a mission.

Back in the eighties my grandma wrote a short poem for a competition in The Daily Express. It won. The poem had to be about Rotten Row and the prize was the author’s name on a bollard on Rotten Row.

Peggy died in the early nineties. Mum and I used to go there to her bollard on her birthday (28th September) and pop a cork, pour a small libation, neck the rest. I haven’t been in years, maybe just once since mum died. It’s Easter. Family time. We do what we can.

Took me a while to find it. Many of the bollards have been stripped of names now. They were all added with a strip of metal around the top, and perhaps they were something of an afterthought as they haven’t weathered well. Many have lost their name entirely. I was ready not to find it, but I remembered vaguely where it was.

Sadly her surname has gone now. But I’ve made myself a video to help me find it. I’ll check back occasionally and perhaps one day I’ll measure it up and bang out a new one for her in a workshop and attach it as fearsomely as I understand how to. They won’t be replacing the bollards for a few hundred years yet, and her spirit would be glad to know she’s still got that tiny bit of London. I’ve made a video that ensures I can find the bollard even if the rest of the attribution goes as well, and it might. Scrap metal weight has tanked so I doubt it’ll get chipped off any further on purpose, but weather happens every day. There are plenty that have been ripped off entirely by bored people, people wanting material for things, students, whatever. London, innit.

Happy to have found it, I forged through the bluebells and up to Oxford Street and to Danceworks. A negotiation with a nasty little dancer who wanted to give me a fifteen minute monologue about how he wanted to use the room we had booked for fifteen minutes. I just kept saying “Stop talking and get on with it then, I won’t need to ask you to leave until ten minutes before I start.” I ended up walking away from him mid sentence after feeling too harangued and going down all the stairs and asking the receptionist to chuck him out. I just got tired of his tone and his constant domineering attitude. He got less time than he would have as he didn’t know how to shut up, but really I think he just wanted to dominate me for whatever tiny tiny little … reason he had.

Glad we flushed him though as my Americans came earlier than expected. San Diego today, about twenty of them with a wide age range, and they got a cracking two hour workshop. I’ve got the format down now so this is gonna stop being anything other than joyful for me. Yay a new dayjob, now bring on more acting. Meeting people, being enthusiastic, sharing passion, connecting, geeking out, doing fun things, telling stories, last minute work… Lots of things I like. I’ll take this one over science in schools every day of the week and twice on Easter Sunday.

A bit of Shakespeare and the chance to commune with the spirit of my grandmother. Max knows the whole poem that won the bollard. I don’t. It was about Rotten Row though, a place where Earls would go… I just remember the last couplet: “Only problem is, of course, / I can’t afford a bloody horse.” She knew what she was doing. “It was a newspaper competition, it had to be relatable.” God rest her soul. She had another one published about Churchill’s death. She had the creative stuff in spades – even got accepted to a London drama school (RADA in those days perhaps?) but her sisters opened the letter and her mother burnt it. She only learnt it decades and decades later. Fire. I’m sure I’m partly her fault, but mostly I did this to myself.