Rochester

I’m still flooded but life is a little tiny bit easier now. I’ve been in Kent today doing physics. My science teachers at school were largely completely uninspirational which is upsetting considering the reputation of the school. Today all I had to do is run a workshop that involved me trying to get a balloon full of water sucked into a glass juice bottle using fire.

My dad used to enjoy that bit of physics. Get a plate full of water and a glass, put a tealight on the plate. Put a penny in the water. “How do you get the penny out without getting your fingers wet?” Light the tealight, put the glass over the tealight. The water will be sucked into the glass by the vacuum caused by the tealight burning all the air and unable to pull new air. The penny on the plate will no longer be underwater. Science.

This is a new workshop about gas. We had three volunteers. It was hard work, with year 7, but a very good school. In many ways I was very very relieved.

So there’s a lot that I’d want done better next time. But it was a good first shift.

I don’t really get the chance to do these workshops much these days. I’m pretty clear without them. They tick me over very nicely though and damn I’m good at them now, do anything enough and you learn it. I can engage young people as a wild card even if it’s about fucking gas.

My best friend from school is an engineer. I still wonder how it was that these people who were supposed to be training a new generation of engineers couldn’t find a way to interest me. I am very easily interested in this sort of thing, but I guess I was always gonna be an actor. Adult life has taught me how incredible and vast science is. My god the things we have learnt over lifetimes of experiment and transfer and experiment and transfer. So much stuff that feels like magic until we understand it and even then still feels like magic.

I was a difficult fucker at school. Happy to hold my hand up to that. If I thought my teacher was stupid I pretty much entirely wrote them off. God forbid they were reading from a book. I still love a few old teachers, the clever ones. I think of them now.

Now… As I occasionally go into schools for science.  Who could’ve predicted that. But as I tell them, there are gaps between acting jobs and if you need to work to feel valid like I do then this sort of thing is perfect. I’m happy to share that. Some of them might have ha de yawn ha similarly to me. Like everyone forever in the whole world twice.

This’ll be my second ever night in Rochester. First one was my motorbike theory test when I thought I was gonna scream up to Oxford every night on a big bike from rehearsals.