Much

Brixton is nice. It’s lively. You really get Londonned there. Lou and I arrived an hour earlier than we needed to be there. We went and found coffee.

In the back of Bergie I had some body armour bits. Lou is wardrobe on Maccers and she’s been looking for black military stuff and I found a few bits so brought them in. Lovely to shift that energy forward. It’s for a van tour company that is getting ready for a long and varied summer.

There are a few of these van tour companies around, and they always look so tempting. I’m not sure I could do it these days just as it is so many weeks committed and away and it feels like I wanna be rolling the dice in London. But the nostalgic call weighed heavy on my memory. Balmy summer evenings in the grounds of stately homes, with friends. You get to see the country. Their schedule is so hugely varied. They’ve got their own HGV with sponsors names down the side. Everything fits in that and then the actors either go in a minibus or multiple cars. I’d almost want to push for multiple cars and just employ people with their own wheels, as the schedule goes to so many interesting places, but actually a minivan would be fine as largely the performance venue is the place you’d want to visit. The stately home gardens. The minnac. I wonder where they’ll sleep – that’s a big factor too. But my heart is pulled to that road life – the romance. Knowing you’ll be doing lovely text every night, knowing you’ll be in a beautiful place with friends, the late summer breeze.

In reality, it’s shitting it with rain and half the audience were drunk as skunks, your fingers are bleeding from a bad lift in the load last night and you’re carrying that bloody steel deck again and it’s a Travelodge this evening forty five minutes drive from here and your agent has had to turn down a movie for you to have half your speech accidentally cut by that guy who is shouting at your left eyebrow and your boyfriend is upset and lonely because you’ve been on the road so long with these people and your agent hasn’t sent anyone to see it and you’ve pissed all your wages up the wall but your family all came when you were in that stately home near London and your aunty asked why you weren’t playing the lead and your cousin said he knew someone who was looking for an office worker when the job’s finished but still every evening you warm up in the evening sun and look at the grounds of this incredible home and think “could I be happier?”

I’ve left some armour with them. Then I went home to the two cats and the friends and it was lovely and fulfilling. And then tomorrow I’ll audition for a shorter tour, not in vans but in America, no set to load, just a suitcase, no steel deck and only five weeks. I could enjoy that.