Month: April 2025

Apparently Hitchin is Bitchin’. I didn’t know.

“You should go into the town centre, it’s absolutely gorgeous!”

I diverted there on my way home. There’s a friend there I haven’t seen for too long. Had another old friend turn out to be dead this morning. I was gonna send her a dumb message for Easter and found a memorial page on her Facebook and it blindsided me.

Last night I went to a Thai restaurant and ordered the hottest thing on the menu. I was up half the night with acid reflux, wishing I had someone willing to belch me like an infant. Still alive in the morning so I thought I’d go and visit an old friend while I had the opportunity of a free afternoon and blood pumping in my veins.

She gave me a Gaviscon. My first ever Gaviscon.

“What Gaviscon, welcome: kiss not my hand,
Embrace me Gaviscon as I do thee:
Why shouldst thou kneele, knowest thou not who I am?
Thy friend, thy selfe, another Gaviscon.”

I might not lose my kingdom over it, but I’m pretty pleased to have found it today. That curry did strange things to me. As Lou was quick to point out, I probably damaged my stomach lining getting smashed the other night on an empty tummy. I was after yoghurt and alkaline foods too, but sometimes a chalky chewy pill is just what you need. I’ll sleep better tonight surely. Couldn’t sleep much worse.

It was lovely to see her, to meet her daughter who is recognisably human now. We would often talk for hours on the phone, over a period of about a decade, looking after each other’s mental health, providing deep and joyful friendship. Distance requires concentration, and kids can be all consuming. I gave the family all Easter eggs and headed back to London. I’ll go into Hitchin town centre next time and experience the Bitchin’ nature of the place. I was on the move, didn’t want to lose momentum as it would involve losing the will, I wanted to be home and ready to run a workshop tomorrow morning pretty early at Danceworks. More Shakespeare.

Once you’ve beaten a path somewhere once it is easier to go back, it gets easier every time you go. The first time is the hardest. Hopefully it won’t be quite so long until I go that way again. I guess that’s down to me though isn’t it.

The cats went into cuteness overdrive when I got home. I cooked a pretty neutral pasta, made enough for two and ate the lot without thinking. Now it’s half nine, I’m washed and warm, blog is done and honestly I don’t see much reason to keep my eyes open tonight. Easter Sunday tomorrow, it’s weird to be working but it’s all money.

Well that was lovely. 47 people, in the same space as before, in Stratford. Last time it was kids from Tennessee. So chill they were almost horizontal. Maybe three of them were aware that there’s this writer existed once called Shakespeare. Five of them wanted to be actors. All were wishy washy non specific non targeted. I did what I could.

“Actor” still exists in the free-lunch dynamic of young people’s plans. As you know I’m going into schools pretty often and I’ll frequently ask rooms full of 14 year olds “So hands up any of you that KNOW what you’re gonna do when you enter the world of work?” There’ll only be a few hands. “Footballer”. “Ok great, what position do you play?” “Dunno.” “And you train with a local club?” “…”

Once in a blue moon there’s someone who is literally on the youth team for Arsenal. Normally it’s just a shrug. They wanna be a footballer, just don’t wanna train to be good at football.

“Influencer.” That’s number 2. “Ok so what software do you use to edit your videos?” “Dunno.” “Do you have a specific field?” “…”

Third place is actor. I was that kid though. “Actor.” “So how are you training your memory?” “Dunno.” Someone said that to me aged 14. In the next two years I arbitrarily learnt loads of poetry, and random bullshit stuff like Bohemian Rhapsody and big chunks of Monty Python. (I never regurgitate either because I associate people who do that with being mentally 14, but it was useful to do it. I usually try and avoid it. If someone told me their parrot was dead I would express appropriate concern, and absolutely wouldn’t mention fjords)

It’s good to be challenged and to understand what might actually be a useful skill. Because a lot of the time you just aspire to what you’ve consumed. I had been fascinated and judgemental about the actors coming through my school with TIE. The “Way of Life” workshop where someone made me understand that line learning is a muscle though, I’m glad of that person, that was a really handy learn and helped me develop a great big muscle ooer missus. You’ve gotta fight. Particularly if you are going into a field nobody in your family has gone into. Football, Influencing, Actors – it is possible to get very rich, it is more likely to just tick over, frequently it just goes to nothing. Aptitude, contacts, money, resilience.

These New Jersey kids, they understand how to make a fucking noise. In an audition every single one of them would ride over the Tennessee kids on first round. You’d need to open up and really work with the Tennessee to get them to the standard. It makes me notice though how much better at pushing forward you get when there’s not so much space. I enjoyed working with that room full of people so much more because there was SPARK.

I’m in a little room in Stratford to sleep now. Decided not to go home until tomorrow. No need to rush and means I can take it easy. I’m happy to have had such a good workshop with this new company – first one was disillusioning perhaps just because it wasn’t what I expected. I’ve got a good frame now though too, as Jo has run hundreds of these and we shared it, which basically meant I let her run it and actively told her I was gonna nick the workshop. Which I will.

Sometimes I get drunk and ranty and surprise myself in the morning by things I’ve needlessly held onto over time. It’s not a good look, raking over old pain. Never serves a purpose.

Last night I went to Caroline and James’ space on the King’s Road, where they’re running a show all weekend with a friend of theirs. It’s called “Emergency Chill Clinic,” and it feels like the sort of thing that was dreamt up after a rave in someone’s flat in Dagenham. I went today. Last night though I was too late for the show, didn’t finish until just before 9pm. I just went up and said hello, haven’t seen them for a while, drank lots of beer on an empty stomach. It wasn’t late when I got to bed but I was not a well boy this morning. I am definitely getting too old for that stuff.

Thankfully all I had to do was walk a little dog, which was a mercy. I got up, drank electrolytes, had a banana and a painkiller and got myself over to Olympia.

He’s an old dog now. Not so good on his legs. We were quite a pair, sprawled out on the sofa together. Dogs age so fast compared to us, I still remember him as a spritely young pup. He’s still got the spirit, still stubborn as a mule when he wants to be, still likes his belly stroked. He’s just slower. I doubt I would have been happy walking a greyhound this morning so it was a good combination, he and I, pottering around in the spring sun.

Then I went back to Emergency Chill Clinic and got to lie in a hospital bed and have a relaxing time looking at some visuals whilst busy actors played doctor. Last time I was in that space above Marks and Spencers it was for a kiddies birthday party and I was dressed as Hello Kitty. Much better this way round, but I didn’t get paid and I ended up buying merch because fuck it why not, I go through T-shirts at an astonishing rate. Thankfully I’m earning tomorrow. Will have to get myself to Stratford early.

I’m winding to bed, still feeling pretty fragile but the chill clinic helped. Bed bed bed and oh the joys of it, I can’t wait.

I’m gonna get on my soapbox here cos this is pissing me off.

My mum had the same colouration as me. She was Spanish. If she lived in America she would be described as latina. She lived here so she got things like “sultry” instead.

She loved the original Disney Snow White cartoon. The women looked like her. Rare enough back then. It’s important to see yourself represented, even if it’s just a cartoon.

I work in an objectified profession, and occasionally I’m told things like “you’re too dark to be posh” or “learn Arabic and you’ll never stop working”. I’m not very brown, folks, seriously. But even I have been asked multiple times “no but where are you REALLY from” etc. There’s a certain type of human that thinks that “yep, those Vikings? Peak of evolution, so long as they’ve shaved. And bleached their buttholes.” No point telling them we all came north from Africa and some of us lightened over time. White is right to them and even if they don’t understand it they are angling to Teutonic and scandi origins – northerners generationally bleached by the cold.

So… Snow White is dark haired and dark eyed, and Rachel Zegler fits that casting, but because she’s in America they call her “latina”. She said a few unguarded things, perhaps designed to stir the pot a bit. They were pretty damn innocuous but certain people were looking for a pretext. And the online hate for her has gone off the scale. So many articles desperate to paint the movie as a disaster and to implicate her casting as the main reason it went wrong, even though it won’t be quite as much of a disaster as they want it to be.

Half of them (guys she’s 23?!) are crying about her being “woke” – (which as previously discussed means “threatening as they expose and call out deeply held and carefully nurtured prejudices”) But it all feels amplified. It’s like with Meghan, there’s more to this than just… this. It’s more than just distaste for her not liking Trump and having slightly left wing opinions, not necessarily fully thought through yet, a bit mawkish opinion-as-fact stuff like many of her generation. Like me! But … this is a huge online effort to eradicate any influence and standing that this talented young actress has built for herself. And buried deep beneath it is something really uncomfortable, nothing to do with her politics. “She’s not like us.”

Before the release of the film I saw articles by incels highlighting some downy hair on her back, saying “she’s not feminine”, like they’ve ever actually met a woman face to face. Where are they getting their idea of femininity from? Men like the president. That’s not a very logical route. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

She is being “othered” though, on many levels simultaneously, being clusterbombed with hate, and honestly I think that beneath it all, at the bottom of the filthy well, sporing plague into the discourse, the words: “Snow White.” Listen closely, you hear it whispered on the wind “SHE’S NOT WHITE LIKE I’M WHITE SHE’S DARK SHE’S OTHER HOW DARE SHE BE CALLED SNOW WHITE”. People who can’t see beyond themselves and actually can’t see themselves either.

On forms, I tick Caucasian if it’s the only option that fits me, over here there’s no “latina” option or I would tick that instead. It often lets me put in “Mediterranean” and I will put that if I can. But… Skin colour is just an accident of evolution over time and we literally all started black. Many celts stayed darkish by these people’s standards, all up the west coast from Africa through Spain through Wales to Scotland. Catherine Zeta-Jones never got othered in the industry, but Zegler wears “latina” proudly as she should. This stuff should be meaningless surely by now? But Трамп’s America, the same people who literally don’t give a fuck about art anyway, who are collectively about as intelligent as a bucket of eels – they’re using every story trick possible to demonise her. Most of what she has said is being taken out of context. She’s become a household name and if her mental health can weather this and the industry is smart she will come out punching and will be right at the top and properly platformed in twenty years. But… it’s precarious – this is designed to sink her and I’m not yet sure how robust she is. “Get back in your box, actor, woman, darkie”. The witch-hunt has sunk some remarkable people. It is not about her opinions, not about her acting, not about anything other than the fact that there is a word: “white” and it is in the name of a character, and it keys with deeply held largely idiotic views around loss of territory and master races. The same voices are raging about Doctor Who, Snape, anyone where someone of colour is playing a part, but the edges are blurry when it comes to a “latina” and it looks like people feel they can go into full hate mode and not get found out for being racist because “I just don’t like her, it’s not like she’s black, I’m not a racist. She said things so it’s her fault.”

“I’m Anglo-Saxon,” said a nazi bouncer I met in a country and western bar in The Valley. He tolerated me cos I’m English, but asked me a series of questions that concluded with him determining that I was “latina”. “Calling yourself Anglo-Saxon, that’s going a long way back,” I said. “Hell yeah,” he replied proudly. “You could go back even further, I reckon,” I suggested to him. “You could put your identity back where human civilization began, in Africa.” He didn’t like that, argued it had been debunked, with all the rigour of someone who has read the comments section. Randomly he brought up the Piltdown Man. Dunno where he had picked that up from. It was a hoax. I didn’t push it. He had “- – – – CUT HERE – – – -” tattooed on his neck.

God though I’m getting fed up of the vocal idiocy in America. I finally made sense of why so much of this “flat earth” and “space doesn’t exist” is about and that’s to do with these fundamentalist Christians – the same lot lobbying to get “gay books” out of our libraries.White straight Adam and Eve kinda features here too. I couldn’t work out why people could so wilfully overlook generations of science in favour of a misinterpretation of physics. But God and Jesus, of course, ask us to “be faithful” instead of analytical”. And suddenly you can just believe all sorts of shit cos you’re involved in a community. And a love based religion becomes about preserving your bastion against “other”.

How random. Who could have guessed that it would be a Jewish book of folklore and genealogy plus the half remembered exploits of a Nazarene insurrectionist that snuck through time as the “how to life” manual for so many entitled morons. Could’ve been Gilgamesh, the Iliad… but no, it’s that bible, used as an excuse to not only ignore science but to take a high handed superior tone to anyone that understands geological time and how to test things for yourself and how to read history and science clearly and not just through a prism of confirmation bias. God help us all, cos where America leads we follow. The libraries are already under siege. Urgh.

An office building near Old Street, mercifully just outside the congestion charge zone. Siwan and I are getting stuck into sorting out all the clothes that have been in my lockup. It’s a mixed bag. Plenty of stuff from Parabolic, with whom I did the Bletchley Park show a few years ago. Parabolic are busy with Bridge Commander now, and they lost their crypt so this stuff has been costing them money to keep. I’ve got it now and the first thing to do is air it out so I’ve hung it. Lots of camouflage. Chris was in the army. It seems I’ve got his stuff now, some of it lovingly nametaped with his surname.

It’s gonna take a few days to even get all the stuff into the office and out of bags, and this is always just gonna be a temporary room. This is a room for sorting, we might have to pack up and run at any time. Worst case I’ll rent a Luton and one shot the removal. Right now, it’s coming piecemeal with Bergmanloads. It’s already clear we will have enough stuff to happily kit ourselves for our forthcoming projects – The Swan and Halloween walk among them. But we haven’t even cracked the back of it yet, there are so many loads still to come. Costume bits, bloody bits, a couple of corsets, accessories, hats, ties… So many shoes. We are keeping it all until we have sorted through, and then we might start jettisoning the crap. Need to know where the level is first.

It’s something to do while I wait for whatever is next. I’m no good at doing nothing, never have been.

Still I’ve been picking through some of the little things that bother me recently. I had a realisation. Things like the boats, and  getting outplayed on one of my old event contacts by an ambitious snake – I have carried bruises for a while. But today suddenly the perspective shot in as I was driving. I hate the game playing and point scoring that comes in with office work. I never really understand it when I get caught up in it outside of that context. There’s a lot of bottled poison in workplaces, and I dip in and out of many workplaces, usually as a wild card. I’ve tried to flush lots of the negativity. Met up with the snake. I’m getting perspective. Because it’s only the dayjobs where there’s this weirdness. I think to the Othello Company, it was bliss. My recent film sets – happy sets. When I’m doing what I’m here to do it’s all lovely, it’s only when there’s a money job and there are emotionally stunted people that my instinctive visibility means I can cop it for no reason and I start to pick up negativity that, even now, pops up in my memory like it is new and has to be deprocessed again.

I wish I didn’t need them, the money jobs, but … I wrote the other day about how they make it possible, if you aren’t independently wealthy to a high level. They help with perspective too, you can’t be an actor effectively if you only hang out with other actors, who are you gonna scavenge? I have just noticed that it’s only in these money jobs that I’ve experienced the pain, so I’m gonna pull my pain out of them. I’ll keep working as hard as ever, it’s who I am. But I’m gonna try and take a leaf out of Darren’s book and not let myself get so tangled up and involved emotionally. What will be will be, what people think of me is their business outside of within my profession where it is fucking important. “You’ll run yourself into the ground if you keep giving that much of a fuck,” said Darren. “I’ve done this for over twenty years,” I told him. And I still will, in my way, but I’m not gonna let myself get hurt when people see it hate it and take a swipe. Like N who used to try and make me fall over on the boats, and eventually poisoned the well merely cos he didn’t like me, like he did with Dave before me. But … you see how I’m carrying it still? Old poison. Time to let it go.

BLEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAARRRRGH

So I’m sorting lots of disguises out after having worn many disguises over many years and I think I’m done with putting myself on the line even if I’ll still work like a train. I’ll have another workshop soon teaching people Shakespeare, and I think I’ll be better at it if I don’t give so much of a fuck. I’ll still work hard but if they don’t wanna learn it’s not on me.

It’s good to be back home. It’s strange, but it’s good. This town is busy, it’s vibrant, it’s full of shit. I drove in with the morning.

Cats cats everywhere and after an initial shyness they were mobbing me for strokes. What am I right now but an accessory for the felines? I have been trying to establish what I am by catching up with admin. It seems I now lead workshops for children about Shakespeare, but the stuff I used to do about lisping Tarquin and Cameron lost in the woods – that has gone the way of all flesh. Honestly that’s a mercy. I had to play one of the worst videos ever known to a bunch of year 10 and then afterwards had to teach a workshop clearly designed by a committee of fifty year old men who work in offices. They all went to private school and so they think nothing of asking for vast amounts of colour printouts, and all sorts of unnecessary materials, and it was all done without an eye to what real schools are like. It would have played very well at Harrow, but they were after Ark Walworth. So yeah, one thing goes bye bye – (I think they lost the client, no fault of mine) – and something new comes in and now I get to corral American students who don’t give much of a fuck about Shakespeare. “So, who knows a line of Shakespeare!” *Tumbleweed*.

It’s important – nay vital – to find ways to tick over between the jobs. Drop the dayjob ball too long and the career ball drops with it in this game. I’m still riding high, but I’m starting to think about the passage of time, and I need to have my basic needs met. And God help me I’m still as ambitious and hopeful as I was in my twenties. Gotta stay flexible and positive for those good opportunities when they come. I didn’t have babies when it was the age, I wanted to, but my momentum never allowed it, I never got close to a time where I felt I could take my focus off the ball. I’m sad about it, but the plus side is I can still be immediate and responsive, yah? What’s gained, what’s lost? I dunno. Gotta have something to be responsive TO. I’m sad about it sometimes.

This job is a hiding. All will be well. This… this has been an excellent year. Almost impossibly good. I can only keep the faith, keep space, keep working. And keep the dayjobs ticking over.

Urgh.

A week and a day until Easter believe it or not. The shops have been screaming about it for so long I’ll be glad to see the end of it, and maybe a month of barbeque crap before they start pushing Christmas.

I’m out of the woods. It was all I could do to pull myself away. I woke up, scrutinised the now tainted bird feeder. Less busy, but some larger birds came. Some crows and the woodpecker. The noisy jackdaw. I’m nervous now as if it was a peregrine, the tit was just a snack. Might have been a sparrowhawk though, cognitive bias is a thing and I’ve had falcons on the brain. Hell of a thing to have witnessed. I still love predators.

Semi feral cats are great. Rajah only wanted food once a day and never bothered me for it. Carlos is a bit more needy but warm at night. Both of them go outside for all their poo and wee, and they have such a range that there’s no issues about shit all over the place. I just got to bask in the spring sun and do absolutely fuckedytuesday for a whole week. I cooked a bit, but also fell a little bit in love with Lime Wharf Café, with better coffee than I can make in the woods and a reasonably priced and always absolutely brilliant breakfast if you get there in time. Some of my mornings I was too slow and I got presented with the lunch menu which is alright, but for just a 7 minute drive it was my treat every other day. Pretending I’m in civilisation, then back to the cats. Also my phone works there, it doesn’t work in the woods. So I would eat my breakfast mumbling into my raybans, looking like some sort of maniac, catching up with Lou or a friend.

Reasonably speaking I did go a bit feral in the woods. But Lou observed I had been getting a bit crowded out in London, as evidenced by the day I went to try and wind down at Chelsea Physic Garden, but it was full of tour groups so I went home and Maria was shouting about laundry so I went and sat in my car outside for about an hour and a half just because it was the most solitary place I could find and I was getting flooded. I do get flooded eventually, much as “I love the people,” as Lou puts it. I needed a break.

I’m with her now and another cat, this one fluffier and much higher maintenance. Tomorrow I’ll be back to crazy and lazy and London town. There’s always a cat these days, it’s the rules. Usually there are multiples, even if I’m not counting myself.

Yesterday I wrote about the peregrine falcons at St Alban’s Cathedral. About how the webcam showed someone gathering their courage to “innocently walk” across the well watched falcon nesting area “just coincidentally” putting their boot exactly over all three eggs. (That’s what they’ll argue)

Raptors have always had a hard time on this small island. Red Kites, which are carrion birds, were wiped out because farmers thought they were taking the lambs and started shooting them. They would certainly take lambs, but they aren’t going to kill them first. “Your lamb … was already dead.” They’ve been reintroduced, red kites. There’ll be idiots swearing about it I’m sure. The internet has made it clear that the vast majority of people are morons.

Peregrines, they feed off live prey, not carrion. Some predators are wired like that – even Hex the crap snake won’t take a mouse unless you heat it to body temperature and puppet it to convince him it’s alive.

I was upset that someone felt they needed to “accidentally” deliberately kill three unborn falcons. “Maybe he was a twitcher,” I quietly thought, knowing in an academic way that peregrines murder small birds, knowing how some people can’t get their head around nature red in tooth and claw.

I’ve been interfering. I put fat balls out, and seeds for the birds. I’ve been quietly worrying the cats might kill something but Carlos is slow and Rajah is groundbound. I stopped being concerned. “Look at all the nice easy food I have for you,” was my human intervention into the natural world. Satisfying my own obscure desire to be able to observe nature and feel like somehow I am contributing, here in the woods. “Look at all the pretty little birdies” I said to myself.

Problem is, when we attract lots of little tasty birdies, something might be watching. I could never have imagined I would learn this lesson in such a timely fashion.

10:30am. Lou and I in the garden. “Oh look there’s a pair of tits.” (Stop it. Cute birds. A couple, perhaps.)

10:35am. “One of them is brave enough to go to the feeder. The other one is coy. They’re plucking up the courage.” I say. My nice tits that I’ve encouraged to eat at the table cos me me human me doing.

Twenty minutes of sunny conversation in the garden forgetting about these creatures. Then suddenly I’m bolt upright, there are no birds visible, but there are loads of them shouting unfamiliar alarm calls. Too late, too late… Since this incident I haven’t seen a single bird on the feeder. It’s dark now.

What incident? Yeah it was that quick.

Out of the corner of my eye, previously unremarked, I catch the movement of a big bird. Lou has her back to the feeder, but sees me sit up in interest. I say “ooh”. I’m expecting a woodpecker as all my brain has really processed is bird movement towards feeder. It is greyish almost blue and how many of you have ever seen a predator strike close up? I saw a dragonfly take prey once right in front of me, and it was astonishing.

From my right to my left, the thing came in so fast I hadn’t fully computed it, and had I not seen it fly away slower into the trees with the tit in its claws, I could not have believed that I had just witnessed a fucking peregrine falcon taking a little bird off the lawn. It struck behind Lou’s head, but I caught most of it and it was SO CLEAN. I had caught it coming in and was curious enough to see it leave but it all happened so quickly.

“Wow, I’ve never seen that,” I say in awe and horror. Lou, with her back to the feeder, has been oblivious. I’m shocked though and she senses it. I describe what I saw. I got a good look at it as it left. She can hear the birds shouting weirdly. A life snuffed out like THAT.

I honestly think it was a peregrine. It was small though so it could be that I’ve got them on my mind and it was a sparrowhawk. Whatever it was, I saw a small grey raptor take a finch off the lawn so quickly it almost felt like it was impossible. Now the feeder is barren.

Predators are incredible, the speed with which they take something from busy life to dead dead dead. We all might end in an instant, but I’m glad we wiped out Smilodon even if sometimes I think it might be the solution to the superabundance of oblivious entitled eejits. It’s such a cruel end to witness. The circle of life but… …

Was it my fault for putting the feeder out? The falcon would have found prey anyway. It’s just worth remembering that if we put a feeder out for things that eat seeds, we put a feeder out for things that eat things that eat seeds.

If that’s why the guy walked on the eggs, he needs to examine his cause and effect. If he deliberately cut off three small lives because he saw something else cut off a life, how should a being that considers itself more powerful than him react? He didn’t even want to eat the eggs. At least the tit made a good meal. Maybe there’s some impossible to comprehend alien being that loves falcons plucking up the courage to step on the guy that stepped on the eggs.

I feel humbled and fortunate to have seen such a thing. I feel slightly to blame byb feeder intervention. I created a situation the birds hadn’t evolved survival strategies for yet. But it’s not like I threw an ant into a spiders web. It’s nature. insha’Allah. Raptors are beautiful but brutal. I eat meat. I am a member of the most destructive species that ever existed, and like with the eggs it often isn’t even for survival. Plus nature is cruel.

“So this is what you’ve been doing all day? Sitting here in the sunlight talking to the birds?” “… And one particular squirrel. They join in too. But largely yes it’s me and the birds – mostly that jackdaw.”

Lou came to the woods.

I drove to Birling Gap in the morning and met her off a bus. We went walking up the Seven Sisters. There’s more waiting to fall off, they’ve fenced the edges, at some point before real summer we are due that seasonal dump of rain where all the cracked chalk peels off into the sea and our great nation gets just a tiny little bit smaller by erosion.

It’s odd round there but beautiful. Chaplains in marked vehicles drive to try and find potential jumpers. Flowers are strewn on patches of grass from relatives of the ones that slipped past. I’ve known a couple took this way out – Beachy Head. Desperately sad. Suicide is such a cruelty. I’ve always considered it too uncertain jumping here, not that I’ve put that much thought to it mind you. If I were to feel like I was buried in shit with no way out, I wouldn’t want the risk of ending up paralysed as well. But my deep embedded science thinking is both my blessing and my curse. Max was a powerful brother to grow up with.

We looked at the lighthouse, met some horses. They’ve put white horses up there. Serene, kept from the cliffs by low electric fences, but happy to come stand near people. Maybe it’s a government scheme, mental health horses. They would blow my mind if I was staggering around here off my nut on hallucinogens. I’d get no further than them. Last line of defence for local kids who think they can fly.

We blew into their noses, chewed the fat a bit. Makes a change from birds, cats and that darn squirrel. “A horse is a horse of course of course and no-one can talk to a horse, of course…?” Not strictly true. You can talk to a horse just as efficiently as I can talk to that squirrel. It just hasn’t got a fucking clue what you’re on about.

My communication with the animals here is probably mostly about territory. I’ve been feeding them seeds and fat balls but it’s just made them think I’m after their seeds and fat balls. Bastards. I try and reassure them but all I can do is imitate them, which is probably rude but I do it anyway. And so the day goes by. It’s mostly convivial.

“You’ve gone feral.” She says. “There are bats in the garden at night.” I reply.

This is deep woods, for Sussex. The owner bought land with a footprint, an old gamekeeper’s cottage and a barn. He built on the footprint, he’s an architect. He made two amazing properties. The other one is usually empty, a bit deeper in, you can rent it on Airbnb. It’s like an old American A-frame.

Somehow the binmen get here. And there’s plumbing. But… it’s a comfort, reminds me of childhood, to know that there are so many bees, that woodpeckers are still at it. To see the variety of plant life, the primroses all up and blossoms blooming. The two heavy hearted things, I haven’t heard a cuckoo. They used to mean this time of year across the country. Where are they all? And I’ve seen all sorts of tits, but nary a sparrow and they were as common as pigeons when I was a kid. Both losses. Maybe just natural shifts, but some absolute bastard deliberately stepped on three peregrine falcon eggs at St Alban’s Cathedral a couple of days ago. I hope they throw the book at him after they’ve finished throwing it at the two idiots who finally go on trial on the 28th for hacking the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore. In this digital age of misinformation, more and more people are magnifying their little ignorances or grudges about things of nature. I’m sure we will see more of this sort of thing, often mistaken by the perpetrator as some kind of expression of personal power in a largely misunderstood world.

But I’m not gonna give them the energy of thought. Here in the dark and the quiet I can just enjoy being with Lou and know that things are pretty good right here right now no matter what’s going on out there.

I parked up near Warrior Square in St Leonard’s. Immediately on the street there were people playing shit awful music at mega volume through their car stereo, or shifting around in dodgy groups where you think you might have your phone snatched or someone is gonna spit at you. It’s still a bit lively and pissed off in St Leonard’s. I wandered down the seafront.

Two young women were feeding chips to seagulls on their second floor windowsill. Drunk men pissed on the beach with no care. The cold wind was blowing in off the sea. I put my hoodie up, fitted right in. Last time I was here Lou and I watched a small time drug deal go down in a car park. Didn’t even bother to do it in the car, just out in the open. There’s a crime museum where they have all sorts of artifacts. “This is Charlie Manson’s toilet brush,” type stuff. Standing outside it was a large group of Macdonald’s-bodied people in identical ghost hunter sweatshirts. You could have run a butter knife down any of their cheeks and spread the result on bread for a nutritional meal. They looked like they were about to go hunting ghosts in the crime museum, and they might well find all sorts of stuff in there if they don’t need to sit down almost immediately. It looks like it’s a load of damp catacombs where you can commune with Rose West’s pajama bottoms. Maybe too many stairs, but I’m sure they have some Red Bull.

I haven’t seen people for a few days, that’s the problem. My tolerance has gone down. It’s just been me and the cats and the birds and the trees. Now I’ve remembered there are millions of people out there who do stuff like think they are clever cos they’ve watched a thing on YouTube saying space doesn’t exist or whatever the latest guff is, I don’t even want to write that shit down.

I went to see my mate in her new flat. It’s a sanctuary, and I’m proud she’s made it for herself. It’s taken work.

We caught up, laughed about the struggle, and I packed myself back out and off pretty quickly. Cats don’t feed themselves, and being here means looking after the furry little blighters.

Now I’m in bed early again, gonna get my head down, it’s dark. It’ll be warmer tomorrow I think, which is a blessing. I’ve started to relax a little and dress lighter. Maybe a mistake since it is only April. But maybe there’ll be a summer this year.