Month: May 2025

I’m knackered. Cables are heavy. I’ve been working through the things that came from a clearance job. I’m having to decommission the bit of me that likes having nice things. Today was just about cataloguing. Photo and description of everything. No time to Google it or go on eBay and filter for sold items. When I walked in to the unit this morning my brain was fried by the quantity. The unit has no working strip light, even though the ones on either side both do. I got mardy with the receptionist, who refused to even consider being helpful. I’ve been fond of that place but frankly it can do one. I’ll keep the unit a couple more weeks but whatever turns up I’ll be moving it to Armadillo where at least there’s lighting.

I even bought a bulb for the strip light. But they’ve isolated it and they won’t make it work. Straw. Camel. “The units aren’t supposed to have lighting.” Repeat ad nauseam.

Still, one of the euro crates had some string light spheres in it which had been adapted to run off power bars. The power bars still had battery. I rigged up my own lighting, swearing all the time. Had to bring most things into the corridor but it was better than darkness, having some working lights. They are making out like running an LED strip light which I purchased in the unit would somehow cost a fortune. Smalltown dumb people.

I got through everything but 18 euro crates. That sounds like a lot but honestly I’m pretty pleased with myself for what I signed off. Next time I go I can do some targeted work to finish those crates. Bergie is full of rubbish with a trip to Wandsworth dump scheduled tomorrow. It was a good day’s work today.

There are some nice things that aren’t sensitive, which is a huge relief. Then there are some nice things that might be sensitive and some nice things that ARE sensitive. And loads and loads of gubbins. I’ll throw away the gubbins by car, find a dealer for the books, likely try and scrap the cables, and simultaneously empty up that expensive dark idiotlocker and recoup some costs. I’ve got time pressure now as I don’t want to give any more money than I absolutely have to to them just on principle, since they won’t flick a switch for me. I’ll have to dispose of some things very carefully.

They need two weeks notice to cancel them, the units. I might give notice on both units tomorrow, I’m only keeping one of them in case of a second job in the vicinity. I need to process the contents of the dark one quickly and then just have done with that silly little place. It’s family run and they’re friendly, but actually they’re douchebags, making me work all day in the dark at the rate I’m paying just to save tuppence. “If they were lit we’d have to charge you more.” Oh get fucked. I could see light spill from the units either side of me. They’ll wait until the tenant changes and take the light out of them too when it does. Eejits. Saving pennies, losing pounds. I’ll be out ASAP now. Might have been lazy otherwise especially as it’s a long drive out there. It’s good to have the catalyst to move quickly. Screw them and their dark unit, it was a nice day today and I’ve been in twilight for all of it.

I’m in Sturry. Even the name is suspicious. I booked the cheapest room on booking.com local to the storage units as it has become time to work out what the fuck is in my storage unit.

There’s a bloodstain on my single duvet cover. I’ve loaded up the cats with food and water in my absence. I’m here.

Today was looking at the big stuff, and there’s some awkward things to move on. There’s also some good things, it’s not all bollocks. But there’s a guy who has been slowly creaming off the good stuff for years whilst charging storage. I don’t like him for it. But this stuff has provided money for many of my friends in the shifting. The only person I haven’t paid is myself. And this is what I’m trying to do now, with the time I’ve got. Time to pay myself if there’s any value left after what Andy has cherrypicked.

For tonight though, this horrible tiny cheap room. The landlady was wandering around in the street when I arrived, looking a bit confused. I’m in now, and I’m in a single bed, and the internet is good now I’ve taken it off the router. I’m pretty chill about the fact it isn’t nice because the mattress is fine and there’s internet. The blood on the duvet has been washed a few times. And it looks like it was from an ingrown toenail. They’ve been thoughtful by putting it on top rather than hiding it, perhaps. It’s above my left toe on the outside, so I reckon it was from a right toe on the inside. And I write this as a man who had horrific toes as a teenager so I know that blood well. I ended up having an operation after teen Al said in earshot of matron: “you know when you step on the floor in the morning and pus flies out of your toe so far it hits the door and you have to clear it up? That’s why I was late.”

I was lucky. It was extremely painful but I just believed it was destined to get better, that it was “growing pains”. My mate Tim was at posh boarding school too where parents don’t give a fuck. He did the same, left it longer, didn’t have Claire Braine-Nicholls as a matron and ended up with one foot and half a leg amputated from gangrene. I reckon they just got it in time with me. When I think back on the level of heat and pain in that injury it gives me perspective on when antibiotics are actually needed.

I’m not gonna bleed on my duvet anymore. My toes still ingrow but I know how to manage myself much better. Eventually. It took me a long time.

Lots of work to do tomorrow but I’m up for it. Bedtime now. It’s fun, in a weird way, making sense of all this stuff. Today and tomorrow are about cataloguing. Thereafter is dealing with it all.

A much better day today. Shakespeare workshops again for Alabama and Tennessee kids. Bluetooth speakers and text packs. I packed a load of balls into my bag as I absolutely love to greet them by telling them to catch a ball. It gets them into a play state right away, and anyone who knows The Factory knows how helpful a play state is for telling a … A play.

We made parties, we worked with text, we fought, died and fell in love, we did all sorts of things together. Two of us, which appears to be standard… My first few workshops with these guys I was on my own. It’s nicer in a pair, and they give an hourly rate which is barely over the invigilation rate. For the energy and thought required, ’tis a long way down my list. My time is precious. I had to get in and out of central London. As my dad used to say, it is money positive time. We have to make sure we have enough of that. Better to have two hours than none, although my time is precious right now for sorting through shit.

I got a Lime bike in and out of central London. Forest think my house is central London and send me miles away to a local bike rack, so Lime is much better for pick up and drop off. Lazy software is gonna give it to the big company and I’m sad about that but practicality is important. I was gonna drive to Canterbury tonight, but realised I didn’t want to leave the cats two nights without care. They have everything automated but they need snuggles. I’ll strike out tomorrow morning instead, and stay out tomorrow night.

A better day for weather thankfully. I’m tired out and all I had to do was be enthusiastic for a few hours about something that I’m enthusiastic about. These workshops… I like them, but genuinely what they’re getting is worth lots more than what they are paying. I don’t like giving my time for cheap anymore, I had a good twenty years being exploited and the “experience” it gave me informs that thinking…

Anyway. Bedtime with the cats. Canterbury tomorrow. Joy.

In my optimism I cooked up some fresh ravioli that had been in the fridge for a week, even though it smelt funny. One mouthful was plenty for me to know it wasn’t gonna work. Absolutely vile. Put me in a right old mood.

It doesn’t help that the weather is slipping. June approaches, let’s keep this summer thing going a bit longer shall we? I’m not ready for long nights and jumpers again quite yet. I’m never really ready for long nights and jumpers but I’ll be better at it if I’ve been able to work on my tan going in.

I did manage to have a good lunch, in fact I’ve generally been sure to feed myself excellently today, but I can’t hold my hand up and tell you it was a good day. Mister achieveyface was not coming to play. I need to be hustling, working the angles, reminding partitioners and casting professionals how bloody marvellous I am and how lucky they are that right now I just happen to be free!!

So yeah. Rest rest rest. Me me me. Largely today has been the inside of a flat and the inside of a head. I put shoes on thinking I was gonna go shopping but then found some oat milk. I did some laundry. Had a bath. Paid someone and someone paid me. “Adulting”.

I nearly pulled up a load of carpet but the prospect of the dust put me off. And the work. Was feeling spectacularly demotivated all day long. It’s gonna go soon though that old carpet… It was meant to go in march!

Not today though. Today was slow despite it being a work day and I mustn’t do that too often but from time to time it is permissible. Back to work tomorrow. I’m turning in words without thought tonight. It’s like I’m already asleep.

It was meant to be research, but it was a little bit more like two mates hanging out. Siwan and I, up in Hampstead. We’ve done the Halloween walk on and off for a few years now. It’s about now that we have to start thinking about it.

I was tired today. Didn’t want to do drinks so I drove up to Hampstead. Broke my journey meeting up with a young actress who is trying to work out where the cracks are in the glass ceiling. It doesn’t stop being shite but the joy is joyful. I wasn’t sure how much help I could be. I keep plugging away and nowadays people ask for me or give me nice profiley jobs from time to time and that’s a lovely thing. If I wanted to I could open up my can of worms, but we’ve all got one. They’re just worms. I work. That’s a magical thing. Yes, being recognisable would mean I work more because non-practitioners haven’t got as much imagination as practitioners. But I’m a lucky one. I can largely exist in my industry and tick over, even if I’m having to be resourceful in the gaps, I’m still here. Hooray.

She’s in a place I recognise. My parents were blocking the acting with every inch of life they had left, so I found David Munroe and Michael Mcallion to advise me. Gorgeous humans. They both died suddenly. My parents were busy dying and then the people who held space for me shuffled off suddenly and I got this horrendous hit of “if I love someone they’ll die” which took me about a decade and a half to unpack. Might have been quicker if I’d paid for therapy, I went for eccentricity, overtalking and booze, as I went to a CBT lady for one session and quite correctly realised that CBT is fucking useless if you’re ADHD as you’ll just yammer. It’s slow going the self medication route but fuck me you know who your friends are at the end of it cos they’ve put up with you. I’m alright now. Hopefully I can be helpful for this young actor and not immediately kark it.

In the hopes of that, I’m plotting Halloween with Shoe and its fun. We hit some walks and streets and stories despite the shitty weather. Now I’m home and gonna hit the hay but glad to have got out on the heath even if just briefly.

Lots of work for myself in the next month. I’ll need to be motivated and not distracted. This month will make sense of my next few months of life. I’m gonna need to be organised and resourceful. Plus I’ve got fucktons of line learning to do. Ugh.

Effortless welcome day of nothing. Think you did fuck all? I’ll raise ya.

The wedding last night ate all my thinking. The first one where I had collated the material. Was it gonna work? Was it gonna land? Would we remember it? Venue fuckery made me want to turn in a blinder. Client was lovely. We nailed it. Then I walked home through late night London and stopped briefly under millennium bridge to dance with the guy outside the salvation army shelter who likes to make his vicinity into a little portable rave courtesy of a gargantuan backpack speaker and a bicycle. It puts me in mind of the “ghetto blaster” thing in the eighties. Largely, portable music is stigmatised. I sometimes like it when people break the social contract on purpose. I made an Instagram reel as it felt old school and somehow redolent of youthful freedom. I associate dance music with simpler younger times.

Today I lay on a bed with cats. I only really got up to make coffee. Ordered curry for dinner. Had eggs on toast for breakfast. Pretty much any effort was off the list, I really couldn’t be bothered to do thinking things, practical things, anything things. Didn’t even watch anything on telly. Played a bit of magic the gathering, stroked the cats. I’m a teenager again! Bedtime now and I don’t deserve it, but it is almost eleven and by rights I should have been asleep hours ago. I’ll drink a bottle of water and switch myself off, curl up with the fluffpots and see about being a little less of a nothing tomorrow. I did have a little walk in the evening. Wandered up the road, cut through the Chelsea streets, saw an old friend. And I’m knackered. Honestly, the idler we get the more tired we feel. This is a strong argument in favour of exercise.

What a lovely evening. I’ve been quietly nervous about it for a while. It’s another first. Client wanted a Midsummer Night’s Dream themed wedding entertainment. Couldn’t afford to pay for writing fee or costume. So Ffion and I worked for our basic. But we still had to write it.

Thankfully Ffi and I have been around the block by now. Between us we know a lot of material and we both have confidence with it as well. I collated things I knew we knew, she objected and rewrote, we both disagreed and then agreed, and we ended up with what the client wanted. “Themes of love, and Cupid’s meddling”. We had specific out of context bits that we needed to shoehorn in for him. So… we did. And it was good. It landed. And we made a new thing. From many plays.

Good people, getting married at The Globe (the swan) because they fucking love Shakespeare. Really lovely, and anyone who knows us knows how lucky they were that it was Ffi and I organising their Shakespearean wedding entertainment. The right combination of love and experience. It’s why I’m trying to hold firm with price for future work – sure they could save some money, but why not offer the client a good experience? I’m not desperate enough to engage in this race to the bottom they are catalysing. Let us be the expensive option for the client, they’ll get it back in feedback.

There’s a disconnect between the corporate, the education and the stage departments in that building. I would never mention in an audition for main stage there that I did this work for The Swan – there’s unnecessary division between the branches. But… despite that I know that I’m turning in respectable work with integrity that meets the client’s needs. I’m really fucking proud of the level of skill Ffi and I have got to with this event Shakespeare stuff. It’s perhaps largely venue specific, but we’ve got enough now that we could do it anywhere and it would land well. And it’s nice being good at stuff.

I haven’t been able to see past today for at least a week. The client is in events, so actually there’s loads of alignment in our lives, and the best man is also in the same game as me. We probably walked past each other at VSM in Paris, the client and I, or BCY. I would’ve been carrying a load of screws, he’d have been worrying about condensation on projectors. That crazy summer. But yeah.. different strands and yet we both know events and we welcome the madness that they entail.

A happy small event. Onwards now.

Powerful day today with a Shakespeare workshop. Amy was leading, this is a new company for me. She showed up in a branded tracksuit with a Frantic Assembly workshop and it was brilliant to see what she brings. I’m still building my workshop for this company. It’s not a high paid gig, it’s something for the gaps. Being part of her workshop today was very revealing.

I first met Amy when she was still at Guildhall and she thought I was German. She’s Irish. I had been drafted in to replace an actor in her year that had a breakdown and didn’t show up for the third year. I played the German juror in 12 Angry Men. She’s brilliantly reactive and her mind was blown when she discovered I wasn’t German. I wasn’t being method, she just wasn’t in the same play as me and assumed. My years in the German part of Switzerland likely helped my accent. I’ve occasionally had amdrammers query my German accent on stage because it is correct and not demonstrative. I’ve spent a long time with people who are German speakers but are using English to the best of their abilities. The key is about exploring the bits they’re good at and the bits they aren’t thinking of. Observation is better than generalisation. Ja ich bin Cherman is only gonna be spoken by people who aren’t trying, and the majority of Germans speak English better than the idea of them do. Bad emphasis, unusual sentence structure and lack of nuance is much more honest than any of that WW2 crap, but ignorance is pervasive in audiences as well as performers.

Amy ran a strong workshop and I’m very happy to have been included. Maybe a few minutes beforehand to work out what we were gonna do would have been good as maybe I could have run a voice workshop as part of it. But frankly, they got a cracking time of it from Amy. She’s very much about physical theatre, and brought in Frantic Assembly stuff. She hasn’t made the connection between Shakespeare and modern theatre, so is looking at the themes in isolation without yet noticing how these dusty iambs are extremely redolent as soon as you’ve cracked the initial language barrier. But for a devising workshop, she ran it super strong. I guess I would have liked to have got a tiny bit of the actual language in. But she quite rightly calls out to have more accessible new writing available in this industry. It’s true. We need a big melting pot for that. Maybe it’s time to drive one.

Up and out to Kentish Town. Clutch went with one of my P/Ace Van Hire vans recently and it could’ve fucked a very important day completely, but they’re treating it like it’s my fault! Kept the deposit. I’m “waiting to hear”. I was expecting an apology or a partial refund for the dicked clutch – Rhys messaged me immediately about it but it took most of the day to die completely. Perhaps they are reserving their refund for now because another of the vans had a fucked shutter. Either way, not good business practice. So I went to H&H which aren’t so well located but, having recommended Pace countless times, I’m very much unimpressed by their entire handling of this so far. I’m going back to my old standard. I’m tempted to go to one of the bigger companies as I kinda really want a flip top door for the extra two inches of room to pull in a tall flight case wardrobe, and the fact that all the shutters are fucked. Here’s the van when I took it.

The job was largely favours. Christine’s stuff needed to go from me down somewhere safer so now it’s all in Canterbury. The whole contents of her flat. She was evicted. My downstairs neighbour. I’m trying to help. Hopefully I won’t have it all for too long.

Then to Kingswood house to pull a huge great big oven out of a greenhouse. We wrestled it onto the tail lift and it came down with us, now it’s in Canterbury too for Brian. I’ve got big storage units while I look for a warehouse. I can do this stuff for people.

Then off. To Kent where an alien sarcophagus needed moving with a bunch of heavy boxes from Faversham to Canterbury where now it sits and will start to cost me until I find a damn ground floor warehouse space, 1-1.5k sq foot, maybe an office mezzanine, maybe plumbed, in my budget. I’ll find it, I’ll have to, but it ain’t gonna be easy with all the other shit I have to do and the fuckery of estate agents.

I’m back in town now, van went home no trouble, maybe Pace will pull their socks up here but so far the only communication we’ve had has been driven by me and I’m not happy about it.

Up and out to Brixton. Grabbing back a bag of body armour that isn’t going to be used by a Scottish play that I’ve helped to costume using my large haul of sexy free clothes.

I left Lou to it after slinging the sack into Bergman but suddenly found myself sleepy. I think my body is used to meat. I had a power nap and then back out and over to Ffion in order to work towards a wedding we are Shakespearing up at The Swan. It’s weird, they know we do a good service, but they kinda don’t want to pay us to provide it so this might be one of the last ones I do there and that’s just the way of it. I’m determined to do a good job of it, so Ffi and I hammered out some cuts and changes in order to make it all a bit more palatable to a wedding crowd. The client doesn’t want things to be crass so we are folding in much more lyricism than either of us are used to, and Ffion even less than me. If she had her way it would only be about a minute long.

We won’t be in costume for this one, it seems like it would be too showy and actually it’ll be nicer to look and feel like wedding guests but to deliver lots of lovely poetry. This is why he’s chosen The Globe for his wedding. I’ve done loads of lovely things up in that room and to a large extent Ffion is right, less is more, but I’m not gonna turn in fuck all, it’s not in my nature. Gotta get better at invoicing though. And tech in general.

I was at The Globe last night for a workshop that has resulted in me getting asked to be in a cue script Henry V at a festival in Wiltshire later this summer. I’m actually quite excited at the prospect – it’s people I’ve run alongside for so long it is almost impossible that we haven’t done things with each other, but we haven’t, so now is the opportunity. Festival Shakespeare, back to the bones of The Factory but older and wiser and marginally less likely to get my kit off. We shall see. I’m supposed to be playing a Welshman. “Never stop challenging yourself,” said Al Barclay. And frankly, I can’t do Welsh for shit. It slides alarmingly towards a nineteen eighties attempt at Bangla. I’m gonna have to be very careful, but thankfully Rhys has offered to help with the phonetics. A new skill by the end of it, look you. Or I fall flat on my face. And that, my darlings, is my favourite performance binary. Take the big risks. Try and succeed. Behave like you have. Win.