Month: July 2025

5am and the Stratford upon Avon polyester pillow is nagging my face. I wake, snoozy. My brain switches on as I wander through the unfamiliar room for water. I remember I need to be in London by 8. I had totally forgotten. Fuck. So much for coffee with Jenny.

5.30 and I’m behind the wheel, no contact lenses, putting them in as I drive.

6.00 way too fast in the slow lane as I undertake all the reversed drivers hogging middle as they haven’t woken up yet on their way to work. Rush hour motorways are always reversed. A couple of people think I’m racing them personally so I let them win. Mostly I get home in remarkable time.

7.45 I pull into my parking spot and park atrociously. The caretaker’s daughter is there with a pair of marigolds and a bin bag looking worried.

8.00 and I’ve realised that José’s daughter is not a chip off the old block. I’ve known her dad for decades and he gets stuck in. She won’t come into the bin room at all. Spiders. I park the car better and steel myself.

8:15 and I’ve got her to help me rig a hose across the front of the front door. She’s worried it’s not a perfect seal on the tap. It’s summer.

I’m in a tiny little subterranean brick room that hasn’t been cleaned for so long there’s mold growing on the walls from old food items grown half sentient. I’ve carried up all the bags and bins in there and left them on the street. I’m spraying decades of crap out here. It’s empty but it’s no less vile for that. I’m not sure what half of the stuff I’m pressure washing into the drain is. I think some of it might well be rat poo. I need to make fucking sure there’s none of that left before the inspection, as I’m thinking it might be twenty years old. Those little nuggets are unmistakable though, like little shitbeans.

8:45 and I’m drenched in sweat and water vapour and Timon has been woken up by my exclamations. “Can you pick the stuff up that’s too big for the drain?” That was me to the benign but clueless daughter. No. No she won’t. Squeamish. Really not what I need. She won’t touch anything without marigolds. I get it. She’s working. I’m doing this for… Reasons. I explain to Timon what I’m doing and why, as far as I’m able. I don’t expand the complicated issues around entitlement, I just mean practically speaking. “They wouldn’t have seen the rat, those bin men.” Timon tells me. “I know its routine. It’s never there at that time of the morning.” Hmmm. “The rat.” Spoken of like an old friend.

So. There’s a rat. Fuck it. I thought it was just laziness. I’ve been in a wet room with rat crap for half an hour. I go up to my flat and very thoroughly wash my hands.

9am and we’ve taken the hose out and I’m using a broom and a dustpan to get the water and the stubborn bits out of there . I’m being very thorough. I’m wishing I had a mask now but it’s too late either way.

9.15 and I’m soaked to the skin mostly with sweat but also spray. Coffee. It’s as good as I’m gonna get it. Who knows when the inspector is gonna show. I put back the poison traps and send off José’s daughter. Couldn’t have done it without her, helping wind the hose, turning it on and off. She’s not a waste of space at all, just not a caretaker. I wait.

Man from the council comes at 11. “Definitely no rodents,” I tell him. “They just saw damage on the bags from the crows, honest guv.” He is not completely satisfied that the place is rodent proof but he’s good enough to see I’ve been working on it and he knows I’m gonna finish the job, cos I am and he sees the fire in my eyes. I’m gonna get some gauze and metal plating and my wazzer, block the clever fucker out even if I can’t trap him. José will be back by then too. Between the two of us we surely can trap a London river rat. They’re smart but we’ve got thumbs.

Council guy tells me he will give the bin guys the all clear. They’ll go back there until they find another excuse.

Timon lives opposite the bins. He’s renting. “I guess I got money off cos of the rat,” he says. He’s hard to judge, laconic. Writer. Does commercials and stuff. He’s plugged the drainpipe with glass bottles. “I heard it running up the drain pipe last night. Thought I’d try and trap it in there.”

I look up the length of the pipe against the wall. Rat is on the roof now then. From there it can access the whole block, so perhaps we are shot of the fucker… But they are creatures of habit. I’m gonna block that door.

11:30 and I start my day.

I haven’t packed for Wilderness but I’ve been pretty busy all day and now I just came from a lovely evening meeting. Creative ideas and potential involvement in a lovely thing.

I’m pooped. I’m running a bath. Don’t want to do anything else today but sleep so I’ll pack tomorrow. This day was over before it started. Made a lovely club sandwich for lunch and Brian cut me in on his dinner which is for the best as I’m virtually a zombie now.

I’ve googled the early symptoms of Weils Disease and I’ll bring one of my spare courses of antibiotics to Wilderness as I’m not planning on doing my liver any more harm than absolutely necessary what with all the acid reflux.

Wishy washy. Yuk. It’s funny the things I do without being paid. “Mother, Father, I am going to be an ACTOR.” And I got my wish, with all the trimmings.

I did The Winter’s Tale at university, when I honestly didn’t know I was born. I just saw the first half up in Stratford and it was so human and upsetting and brilliant that I had to take a time out. I know it’s about to go to Bohemia, the play is 50% Othello 50% As You Like It. I left before it all got pastoral. But I needed to process it. Madeline Appiah absolutely destroyed me in the court scene as Hermione. I learnt and delivered Leontes aged twenty fuck-all to a summertime crowd at Whiteknights Open Air Theatre – (some scaff and masking we threw together on campus). In retrospect it was an intellectual exercise. I needed my training at Guildhall, I could speak with the confidence of an Harrovian but there was no real understanding or meaning there. I don’t know how anyone could forgive my Leontes. I don’t know how we are going to be able to forgive the one we have just seen, but I know this production is all heart. I will almost certainly come back when I’m more emotionally robust and watch the second half. It’s an extraordinary production. I had to take a time out. “Time” is seeded in throughout, a human narration presence. They use water in a shinto way – my sadness at Kumano Kodo is that the path you had to wade to through rice paddies has been health and safetied into a long bridge across water. The symbolism still works, but stronger by far if you have to wade there and back. There was wading aplenty in this production and it really works. It just broke me unexpectedly.

I’ve been up here teaching Shakespeare to Americans. It buttereth the parsnips. It was a good workshop, in the little Methodist church here. I was going to drive home but my evening meeting was cancelled so now I’m here in this little knocking shop hotel outside the city. I’ve time travelled to the nineteen seventies. Nobody is having sex next door though so it should be reasonably peaceful and then tomorrow I can go back home and pack, ahead of a few more nights in a field. Summer summer summer. I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend.

Back into town tomorrow briefly. I’m happy to be mobile at the mo. Beginning to feel human again and integrating with the world. Good to have the workshop as a focus. Dropped my phone though and it means I’m cheesegrating my finger when I swipe type. It never rains but it pours.

The bins in my block go into a downstairs room. To bring the bags up, you have to use some stairs. They are secure there.

If the bags go on the street, they get attacked by clever crows.

Nobody has taken the bin bags out for the last few weeks because one of the bin men filled in a form saying we had vermin. They were using the crow chewed bags to pretend they thought it was rats. If you say “vermin” you can avoid doing a job you don’t want to do. It’s a common strategy in this city.

We got all the bags on the street this morning and then I spent hours on the phone to the council and ended up paying £30 to have someone come and inspect our bin room on Wednesday. I’ll have to be there early in the morning and I’ll have to make sure the place is totally empty. The caretaker is on holiday and this sort of thing either gets done by him or me or nobody. It’s Chelsea. ’twas ever thus. Most people don’t actually know what “work” means, even if they’re earning plenty.

I waited until ten past twelve when they finally showed up with their van. I stood there making sure they took the lot. It was breeding flies like crazy.

I’m glad I got it all done as it kept me occupied. Things I’m not very happy thinking about.

Then a guy came from our internet service provider and actually fixed the WiFi rather than moaning about the cats. I had to chase them down as well. Nothing gets done in this city if you don’t prod.

Then I went to Tesco and cooked and ate an entire chicken. Bite me.

Now I’m going to a Factory zoom session.

—

Here we all are on zoom. Zoomyzoomyzoom. Meeting meeting meeting. I still hate these but they are functional.

—

That was rather pleasant to be honest. Old friends and new, geeky lovely inspired people collaborating. Fun when I’m sad.

The only option is to step into the light.

After a lovely weekend I got back home to news that I could never have predicted. This beautiful little movie I was high billed in, this movie with a major director… He’s decided it works better as a two hander and he’s reshot some scenes to make it work that way. It means that people a lot better known than I am would have received the same letter. We aren’t in it anymore. I can still have it on my CV, and maybe I’ll be in the credits when they roll, but in terms of the cry towards external validation, once again I’m back to the drawing board. I made the mistake of getting excited about this one and I told too many people. This shit is dark. I have been fuelled by optimism and blind wide happy hope for decades now and sometimes I think I’ve weathered everything this industry can throw at me. I half believe that this one is a very involved bad dream. I didn’t think it was possible the whole storyline would get the heave ho. But…

So I have to step into the light again again again.

I was involved with a very beautiful thing, which will continue to be very beautiful even without my face and voice. It will be moving and powerful and funny, and it is in the hands of two wonderful actors, one of them a Guildhall graduate, one of them a knight of the realm. The movie will stand tall I’m sure. But “I was in that, they cut the whole storyline” doesn’t hold the same punch as “I saw you in that thing by that person, it was great.”

For me, forever, it’s about access to the jobs. I couldn’t give a fuck about being recognised, but if it helps me get the chance to do the thing I’m here to do then great. I’m running blind into closed doors repeatedly. I’ll keep doing it. Some of them might have been ajar if that movie had gone how I wanted it to. But it didn’t. So it’s back to the drawing board. It mustn’t go for nothing this time. When my whole storyline was cut from the Luc Besson movie my mental health took a plunge. I’m much healthier now and my perspective is better on how it all works. Most actors have at least one story like this. It’s Hollywood, baby. Another bit of footage I wish I could have on my showreel. Another disappointment.

So I’m really gonna try and punch forward now, smash those doors, get that work, stay bright, stay healthy. It tastes like sawdust but it was done well, the let down. The director handwrote me a letter, and put in a photo of himself dedicated with “feel free to rip this to shreds”. I knew from him before I knew from my agent. We worked well together so … who knows, there might be another role down the line. Meantime I’m gonna find the light just as soon as I’ve stopped randomly crying every few minutes.

Arse. Fuck. Fuckedy fuck. Bugger. Fuckytitbags. Arseshit bum bum poo.

It’s summer. August has always been a lucky month for me. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. I think I’ll be okay but Jesus fucking Christ not again. We are done with this now.

We are playing Time Stories. It’s an old game, French in origin, very cleverly designed, but kinda not really very replayable so I expect it goes round on eBay reasonably quickly. It’s very well designed and needs four people to play it. We are puzzling.

John is teetotal and I’ve been off the sauce today and it is fascinating to be with people as they gradually get more and more blotto and not go with them. They slow down and thought links get simpler and simpler as volume rises. We are at the stage now where we called a break to eat kebabs. I bought a load of lovely skewers from a Surrey butcher on the way out of London. I’m hoping we can get some food into them so they start making more sense, and I’m hungry too so it’s great. Prawny things and chicken things. We have a huge great big impressive gas barbeque. And it is all cooked. I’m getting stuck in, then it’s back up John and I and the two growlers. It’s great fun.

The weekend started with Deep Regrets, the unfortunate fishing game. Then Boss Monster. I was on a roll, which might be to do with the state of my brain at the mo. Both excellent games and you start to realise how a board game round a table with three or four people is really a frame for conversation and catching up. We’ve covered a lot of ground.

This morning we started with Era Medieval age. Then Mind Management and I had to take time out and just put my head down for a bit. Now it’s half ten and we might be very close to finishing this epic strange time travel pirate themed game. Back to it I think.

—

And done.

This board game thing is an excellent Macguffin for getting together with old friends. It’s been a biannual thing for a few years now and feels like it is becoming an institution which can only be a good thing. As we get older it is harder to stay in close social touch with loved friends. I’ve enjoyed this catch up. But it’s late. Time for bed, just as soon as I’ve tracked down this persistent mosquito, and been a terrible Buddhist for a moment.

All that morning stuff nicely signed off. At noon I suddenly realised there was a day in front of me. But the day needed to end in Southampton. Rather than getting stuck at the back of all the people trying to get out of town for the weekend, I jumped into Bergie and stole a march on them. I’ve got to be careful about food right now but still I stopped at the butchers in Surrey and picked up some scran to add to the pile – I suspect Dan will want to use his barbeque, and I’m down with supporting that plan at the expense of a bit of self care.

So now I’m in Southsea, but I’m early. So I’m writing this, as last time I came down here I realised that my old friend is a bit phone averse. I really knew it when I had it in my hand. It was boozy last time too and I sometimes write peacemeal over the course of an evening when it’s like that, but there were no opportunities so I found myself in bed at 3am totally blotto trying to make sentences. It’s definitely one of those blogs where I’d have been better off using the infinite number of monkeys.

This feels like a boys weekend coming up, perhaps with a bit less booze. I’ve been listening to the England India test and it’s really good to have a team where it is just mildly possible that we won’t lose every single test against Australia at Christmas. That’s gonna be still playing tomorrow while the boys and I do barbeque and board games.  I’m looking forward to this weekend. The boys don’t give a fuck about cricket or people checking phones so I’m gonna have to find ways to stealthily feed all of my different nerd things while trying to do okay at these board game things.

Still slow summer. I’ve got into Southsea too early so I’m writing this from Pie Caramba over a portion of chips. Summer! Barbeques and friends and attempting to eat healthily and largely failing.

It’s an early start tomorrow to piece together a tape for a nice job. They’re slightly putting me through my paces and I’m slightly fullheaded for a meeting so it’s a relief that I can send it rather than walk into a room in Soho prepared tomorrow. It means I can let it all back up, as I have done, and tomorrow morning early I’ll set up a camera and learn it live in front of the camera until it’s clean. Then I’ll do it all again different. Then I’ll try and forget about it.

Tapes tapes tapes. Man I’ve made some works of art over the years. There was a commercial tape where I was the devil and Tristan and I deliberately put in the Wilhelm scream, and loads of other little film-maker Easter eggs. No recall for that one. It is genuinely tempting to believe that half the tapes we make never get watched by the client. But still we make the tapes. I had a commercial tape the other day. The instructions asked for plain background. I did one scene in my car. It’s possible that the assistant to the casting director watched it with a checklist in front of them and just swiped left because “no plain background”. If I knew for certain how these things were parsed I would conform to it, but it’s impossible to tell. I’ve watched friends of mine casting things go all gooey eyed over a mediocre actor because of how they are positioned in the marketplace. We are all to a lesser or greater extent suckers when it comes to people selling us stuff. Actors are a commodity.

My agent has some position in the market. She’s not just a producer trying to make a second string tick over. She gets me and knows how to sell me, and as a result there are some casting directors who have started to know who I am and what I do easily and how I can improve the story. So I’ll take the time tomorrow morning and I’ll be grateful that I CAN take the time. Sometimes I just learn it and bust it out, sometimes I haven’t time to learn it so it’s about time and short term memory. I’ll send the first take I do where I remember it right. I might… might take a leaf out of a dear friend of mine’s book and use an autocue on iPad. Probably won’t though. Learning tech takes almost as long as learning lines. And the fear with autocue is that you get a recall and you haven’t learnt it. Might as well do the work, even if it’s condensed into a few hours starting at 6am on a Friday.

I was up way too early this morning. Just as I was going to bed Carlos and Rajah had a squabble and Carlos ran out. I think Rajah had decided that Lou was his territory. I didn’t want Carlos to feel he couldn’t come back in so I went and scooped him up, and deposited him inside in his favourite bit. In response Rajah stormed out of the French window in a huff and went into the woods. I figured he’d be gone for ages but he’s a big lad and he knows the woods so I just went to bed.

Half past four and I’m woken up by an almighty deluge. Half asleep I go and check on the cats and Rajah still isn’t home. This isn’t like him, he doesn’t like getting wet any more than the rest of us, so I open up and go stand on the lawn for a second in the rain. I can’t spot him, he’s got a cat flap, so I turn back and head inside and as I turn to close it behind me, he’s standing there looking at me with mild rebuke. He’s freezing and soaked so I dry him up and make a fuss of him. I know I’m off in the morning and want them to be harmonious when I go.

Problem is I didn’t really get back to sleep after restoring harmony. I’ve disbalanced myself.

I just noticed that it’s nine at night here. I’m exhausted. Not just the cats, but I’ve been fighting severe acid reflux for a while now. And last night was all about belching forever because I’ve run out of hot fix Gaviscon. So Ayurvedic Lou kicked into gear with her entire area of expertise. I’m not to drink, gotta eat cucumbers and melon, no meat, nothing fun but fish. I can have chicken too apparently with all the tasty bits chopped off. My ideal meal of a meatcheesewhiskyfatcrunchster – that’s not allowed until I’m less likely to regurgitate acid instead of snoring. My throat is a precious resource. With the beard on off on off my voice is definitely my calling card, and bathing my vocal folds in stomach acid is unlikely to leave them in the best fettle.

I’d do well to live with her. It would be much easier to eat brown rice and veg and make it taste nice. I’m largely unskilled in such matters. But that’s the way of it. I took Lou home, we went for a spin on her car, and now I’m back in London town, about to try and remember how to sleep with this fucking great big road at my back, and no owls.

Thankfully I lived on a motorway sliproad in Reading for two years, ears against the glass. I’ll remember this easily enough.

Maddy is playing plinkyplonky whale noise stuff next door. Boo is fighting toys on my bedroom floor. The road is busy. I am gonna zen out and see what dreams come just as soon as I’ve belched myself like a toddler.

Last evening here. We went for a long walk and didn’t see a soul. Turned about in the end as we weren’t certain where we were exactly but knew that the path was still heading in the wrong direction. These tame woods aren’t going to be trouble to get lost in. Maybe you’ll meet a frightened Mailreader with a shotgun but there are no lions or tigers or bears, oh my. Or snakes. Or bad insects. How lucky we are that the primary threat to our well being is each other.

We had salmon, fresh and baked, with tatties and broccoli. Good healthy scran. Trying to make sure I recharge here as being solitary in the woods can be a recipe for disaster if you have my propensities. Look what happened to Kerouac. Gotta have liver function. If I was on my own out here I would try to make sure I didn’t just stack up with wine and hallucinogens and get found ten years later with incomprehensible pencil scrawled all over the walls as I babble about the ancient ones and try and sell you my new religion. On which subject, Ozzie Osbourne died. Lou is with me and she’s reading about it. 76, which isn’t bad when you’ve cooked yourself to that extent, but still sad.

A peaceful evening once again here for me. No biting the heads off hamsters. Some lines to learn for a tape but other than that not much new really. We are in a lovely place. We are slowing down in it. That is a good thing.

Pushing back into the world from tomorrow. I could absolutely live here, and be happy, but how the hell would I make enough money to pay for what would end up being daily trips to the butchers and the fishmongers for increasingly fine ingredients? Better to get back into the fray. Money doesn’t happen by mistake.

I priced up a job for a friend and sent a quote. I paid myself back all my expenses from Germany. It wasn’t an entirely null day, but largely it was. We went and met some goats. Goats like Lou. Three years ago today a goat tried to climb in the window of our hire car in Kefalonia and very nearly managed it. If it had, perhaps it would still be with us today. I could use a few goat friends if I lived out here with the new religion, the ancient ones and the hallucinogens.

Sun is falling. Tomorrow it’ll likely come back up. But I’m gonna unplug and say goodbye to it, just in case. We take these things for granted.

As the light fades Lou and I are listening to the woods through the open french window in our bungalow here in the depths of Flatroper’s Wood. Wood pigeons and stillness. We had two cars come down here all day, in convoy, a guilty looking lady and a guilty looking man. Lou and I were going for a walk and they turned around and came back out again thankfully, rather than hoping we would press our faces against their window while it all got steamy.

We went for a walk. Nobody else, little pathways, easy enough to start to feel lost the deeper you go. Last time I was here I didn’t notice so many anthills. Wood Ants. There’s a hill establishing in the garden here, which is currently only small but they can get very very big. I remember them from Switzerland growing up, but never seen them over here before. They are a native species though.

The domes they create are busy and distinctive. They’ve made a smaller one than the photo near Bella’s rose garden which will be a good hunting ground for them for aphids, which they harvest for honeydew. It’ll keep the aphids off the roses. Wood Ants are bizarre and wonderful creatures. They domesticate their aphids, keep them alive and milk them like cows.

As a kid in summer in Switzerland I must have spent days of my life with Max observing these big ant piles. Sometimes a grasshopper would land on one. Or a wasp would fight some of them. Sometimes thousands of ants would drag a dead bird across a road towards one, and it was like some weird zombie. We would watch them go to war with another dome for territory, watch the battle lines drawn and the convoys bringing back the dead and wounded and replacing them with fresh troops in extended futile stalemates that might extend into a road and get broken by the tyre of a car. They clean things up though. But they are also hungry for small insects.

I tend to think of ant-hills as a single organism. An anthill is really just the queen. If you kill the queen you’ll end up with a dead nest. Every ant is an extrusion of that one life force and will, birthing what the colony needs when it needs it, extending territory, hunting resources.

Wood ants are a very benign example of formicidae so I’m not worried about them being in the garden. Sure the drones were flying into my ear in bed two nights ago but that’s only one night a year. Most of the time they just mind their own business, and I doubt they’ll come into the house. They aren’t biters like those little red fuckers. And they won’t hurt you if they get trapped – it’s a little prick of a bite and I should know, I basically played with the damn things every summer for a year. “What happens if I stick this lolly stick in the nest OW you pushed me, now they’re all up my ARM OW.”

The day birds are passing shift over to the night birds. Somewhere far away there’s a cow shouting. The last of the light is fading and a little breeze is bringing in the night time rain.