Author: albarclay

Bournemouth. Not that I’ll get to see it. I’m in the Premier Inn in East Cliff, which is one of the Premier Inns that HATE you. “No sir, we can’t seat you for dinner without a booking,” they said to me half an hour before I watched them say “Wait one moment I’ll just check with the chef… yes we can fit you in!” to someone else who was in a suit. I called the staff out on it. They told me they were all new today and apologised like people who have been forced to. I didn’t get dinner. I’m inclined to agree with Aesop’s fox that dinner would have been shite here anyway. Still I would have liked the chance to make that call myself. Now I’m looking on Deliveroo and it all looks atrocious. So I’m gonna just go to sleep and rely on breakfast.

Dayjobberising once more, running a bunch of workshops about sustainable energy, yada yada yada. I’m excellent at it by now but…

This morning found me at The National Theatre Costume Hire. They have a vast trove of wonderful costume to rent, presided over by lots of lovely people and one total arsehole. I wandered around, found some interesting things, remembered what a total douchebag one of their members of staff was, and phoned the client telling them I could maybe help save them some money next time by renting them some of the stuff I now have in my flat. Nobody needs to rent costume from someone like that. The stuff I found was perfectly decent, of course, and has been around and around. I don’t really object to the high prices, they’re the National, they have great stuff that we’ve all paid for once. I’ll pay for it again, as they are not doing Angels rates. They just have one person working there who makes it their business to put your back up. Last time it was my own money, and I just… decided not to because of that person. This time it’s not my money and there are lots of us. We will go there, put up with that twit, and end up with half decent costume. I’ll provide most of my own just out of spite. Here’s what I found:

They want over £130 for it plus VAT though and if only I had access to decent long boots and a red cape I could do the whole shebang out of my dressing up box, slightly different era but not a job that cares:

You see too much of my flat in that photo.. Still, fuck it, I’m not hiding. And I’m still plumbing the depths of my dressing up box. But it is fantastic. I need a walk in dressing room. I crave a walk in dressing room. My day to day life would be so much more glamorous with one, and it would serve my work. Fucking Ponce.

I’ll finish this workshop, drive home, throw some gorgeous clothes into my car dahling and then drive to Bankside loaded up with the bling and go be fabulous at rehearsal. My weird life. Hungry. Goodnight.

Two hours drive from Brighton to Wasing. Two hours back. I’m not specifically a fan of Sigur Ros but Lou had tickets. Bat For Lashes was supporting and I bought a few of her CDs back when I fancied someone who liked her music. We frequently expand our music tastes because of our sex drive. I have loads of odd musical choices from people I fancied or had brief shenanigans with.

Sigur Ros was burnt onto a CD after Twelfth Night by Viola as we drove to London from Yorkshire after Sprite came down for the season. I had a laptop with CD burner and a vast catalogue of torrented music. Passengers would burn CDs. That might have been fifteen years ago? More? We were all doing it back then and we were young and maybe even a bit cool. I didn’t have shenanigans with Viola, just to make note. That was in my monk phase so I didn’t really see her or anyone else in that light. It took years for the lights to come back on. That Twelfth Night was a happy job for me and led to many lovely things.

Viola had just left RADA at the time, and went and got absurdly and deservedly famous a few years later. Back then we were all muddling along and having fun and being immediate. Much as we all still are, but she can do it with more money now, I guess, and more clout, but it’s harder for her to travel by bus. She gave me a good introduction to Sigur Ros through that mix CD. Some other weird stuff. Joanna Newsom… It was memorable. As we came into the 2am city they started a ten minute song. Some Icelandic guy singing in falsetto while everyone plays electric guitar with a cello bow. It was the one where he squeals “Tea-a-woooooooo” about fifty times like a satisfied owl.

A lot of the time Sigur Ros aren’t singing words at all. They’re making noises. It’s either high concept or pretentious depending on who you talk to. Emotive phonemes with no semantic meaning. Gobblydegook. They aren’t the first to sing nonsense phonemes of course. Gaelic folk with all the hi-dee-ibbly-gobbly-do, bibbly-abbly-goy. Blues with Rubber Biscuit. Even Leftfield in the nineties with their suspicious Djum Djim “Afro Left” lyrics where they tried to pass off getting stuck in “enga bungo” three times as “an unspecified African language” instead of bad improv. But Sigur Ros have given their gibberish a name. Hopelandic they call it, or von Lenska. Why the hell not? Makes it sound official.

So we drove to Wasing, and for the evening we were among hundreds of people as the guest of Josh, David Cameron’s cute hippy cousin who has thrown his estate open to the masses because the i-ching told him to. I went to a festival there in 2020. Not many people got to do that, but he somehow pulled it off in exchange for too many highly strung security guards causing more problems than they were solving. God we were all so neurotic. It was a wonderful festival though. And I enjoyed the concert offering tonight.

Bat for Lashes (Natasha according to Lou as she’s on the Brighton scene or was) turned out to be grounded and experimental and straightforward. She was playing with movement and meaning. I liked her. A clear set with frank addresses between tracks. Sigur Ros were timed with the sunset and played up a huge bright full moon with their mystic and unearthly crooning. You wouldn’t play their stuff at a game of musical chairs, but they set an atmosphere well enough to have made themselves rich from licensing stuff for telly. I’m happy they still tour, but I guess it’s a good way of being paid to see the world. We had a lovely concert. Better than sitting home watching Netflix, lying in a field while these curious arty musicians displayed their skill.

Sunday evening. Took a while to get back to Brighton though and it’s a schoolnight. Back to the random tomorrow early. For now though, one more night in earshot of the roaring sea. I’m off to sink into the swell.

I got worried and so I took myself off to A&E in Brighton and that’s been the extent of the afternoon. Of course it’s all fine but then one test leads to another test and when she said I’d need a chest X-ray as well just to be sure I tried to object just as I knew it would take ages. “That’s expensive for you, are you sure it’s necessary?” I tried, but she insisted. Need to rule things out. I appreciate that she’s being thorough though. If this was in America l would have to sell my car. As it is I just lose an afternoon, which is shitty as it’s rare to find time to hang with Lou, but with inexplicable chest pain and general heaviness I figure it’s better bored than dead.

Lou stuck it out with me for over two hours before I found myself trying to encourage her to go home. We will go for curry once I’m out. If I’m ever out.

Good talks though. The nurse that triaged me was brilliant and full of words. I assured her that I’m no relation to Steve. For the ECG I had a St John’s Ambulance guy coming in to help make up the shortfall. They are all so understaffed overworked and underpaid. People don’t strike out of nothing. I can loudly appreciate their work but that’s just like clapping in the window, and clapping in the window butters no parsnips.

So I’ll wait and they’ll give me the all clear but now they’ll have ECG and chest x-ray on my record from a healthy time which is possibly going to be useful for possible future unhealthy states. And they took 4 ampoules of blood so they can run all sorts of tests. Busy busy busy. I feel poked and prodded but what price peace of mind, and as Lou said I’d only be worrying if I didn’t get the all clear.

Still, it’s pretty stark in here. Bright lights and squeaky doors and sick people. A prisoner handcuffed to a guard with a broken nose. Rugby players covered in mud and blood. The very old next to the bandaged young.

On the screen in here, the passage of time is marked by Mark Formanek’s excellent 24 hour artwork “Standard Time” in which a large wooden digital clock is adjusted in real time by a group of workmen in hard hats with ladders. Sometimes they barely get out of shot with some of the more awkward changes before they have to get in again. It’s all filmed in Berlin with the TV tower central to the background. It pleases me because it’s ridiculous and difficult and futile and transient. It keys into my love of things ephemeral balancing things eternal. The sun is setting now at 17:19 and these guys are gonna start getting cold and needing light.

I’m done with waiting. But I’ve got to keep waiting. Hopefully not much longer. Hopefully.

A quiet day of learning and relaxing but I feel atrocious suddenly. Tinnitus amped up and a heaviness in my chest. Very little appetite and very little energy. A headache too. If I worked in an office and had a set number of sick days a year, I’d have taken one and done much the same as I’ve done. I read my book, chilled out, had a hot bath and now I’m trying for an early bed but it’s getting later and later.

It’s hard to write a blog after a day like this. Barely any contact but for a few phone calls. I didn’t even listen to the cricket. Tomorrow I’ll get to drive to Brighton and chill with Lou for just a couple of days, and it’s exactly what I need right now. I’m getting better and better at running those workshops, but still they take it out of me in energy and early mornings. I’ve got a lot of things to learn or keep in my head. It all feels a bit busy and crowded so perhaps that’s why I’ve been laid low today. My body knows that this weekend is a little oasis of nothing before a very full and varied and unpredictable tenday taking me into the middle of July.

Hard to believe that July has crept up on us. Caesar’s month. The heart of summer. I don’t think this is a summer cold but I’m hoping that a good sleep will shake this heaviness. I’ve got a flask of water, it’s not too warm. I might have a spot of sleepy medicine and read my book until I’ve got no choice but to sink into dream. My hope is that I’ll wake up feeling better. At least the next few days hold only lovely calming things.

My dad always insisted that one hour before midnight is as good as two hours after. He was a great advocate of early to bed early to rise. If I can get to sleep quickly I’ll get one clear hour of pre-midnight slumber. I expect I’ll still lie in later than I should but I’m hoping to sleep deep and restorative. Wishing you all a relaxing and calming weekend. Zzzz

After a lovely operatic interlude, a heavy sleep once more interrupted too soon by the deliberately annoying jaunt of my phone alarm. We used to have alarm clock radios, or a CD player with a timer. Or just a dedicated alarm clock. There were ones shaped like baseballs that you could throw at the wall to put them in snooze. How many of us still use them, now we have these phones?

Smartphones do so much, but they take space by doing it. These incredible digital cameras and now you can’t take a disposable clicky camera to any branch of Boots and quickly get some badly framed prints and negatives. I bet there are far fewer darkrooms in Soho now. Our photos just take up digital memory. When we die most of the vast record of snaps we’ve accumulated won’t sit in a box for decades while our heirs work out when they’re going to have the headspace to pick through it all for memories. Mostly it’ll just get reformatted or chucked out with an old laptop. These hard copy photos by other people are tough to chuck out. I still want to go through my mother’s slides, play her cine films, give time with Max for the huge boxes of old photos from other lifetimes. But when is ever the right time? It’ll be a nostalgia tinged with an ancient grief. Doing it will perhaps allow us to get rid of another box, but I can’t think it’ll be a swift process or an easy one emotionally.

I write this blog on my phone daily. Swipe typing makes it so much faster than any other method. So this phone is my word processor. Also my calculator, my notebook, my calendar my weather forecast. I’m reading one of my big fantasy trilogies right now – The Soldier Son Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Haven’t read a big one like that for a while but I don’t have to carry it around any more so it’s more attractive to have it on the go. I’m fond of Hobb – she has a strange challenging voice. Start with the Farseer Trilogy. Ive got these big books on my little Kindle when I’m home, but I forgot it when I went to Scotland. I could still keep the bedtime reading habit by using this phone on dark mode… So it’s my spare book too… The distances I drive in cities and on motorways – I have been driving long enough to remember that open A to Z on top of the steering wheel, that list of road numbers tacked to the dashboard. Now it’s just the phone again. Last night a road was closed on the way home. I pulled up, inputted the closure to Waze and followed a new route. In the process I learnt nothing new about the geography of South London. I was just slavishly following my phone – (I was knackered).

I do my banking through my phone. I wind down with games on it. I use the torch when I’m getting things out of the attic. I tune instruments with it. When I stop to think about it, it’s crazy how much it can and does do. I’ll still need a swiss army knife to open cans and bottles and cut boxes and put holes in conkers, tweeze hairs etc but I wonder how many companies have gone bust because of phones taking their market. Watches have managed to remain a desirable accessory even though we all know the time now, but you really don’t see alarm clocks much these days outside of hotel rooms.

A slightly longer day today but satisfying and now I’ve got more lines to cram into my head. Happy to be busy. Happy to be warm. Lucky to have this incredible device. Silly to take it for granted.

Got up in the morning, barely. Greggs for a bacon butty and a coffee before I was really fully awake. Most of the way to Greenwich before the colour started seeping into the world. Random workshop time!

Lots of shouting. Lots of troubleshooting. Some inspiration. Did it land? Perhaps it did.

By noon I’m knackered. But by noon I’m finished. I wander out into the hazy sunshine and try to remember which industrial estate I hid Bergman in.

The phone goes just as I’m about to go back under the river. Lou has two tickets to the final rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne.

I’ve been really curious about this one, and it’s not an easy ticket. U turn and I’ve got to be there by ten to three. Satnav has me arriving at 2.55pm and I’ve only got about ten miles of petrol. My foot goes DOWN.

I think Peter Hall directed this originally in 1981 and they mothballed it so they could roll it out every few years. It’s archaeology and opera all rolled into one now. Lovingly restored prop trees are held by painted actors for hours. “Yes I work at Glyndebourne as an actor.” “Oh really, who are you playing?” “DON’T COME AND SEE IT.” Apparently one time one of them listened to an audiobook every show.

It is as camp as Christmas. Shiny shiny big moustaches wigs LOOK HOW MUCH WE SPENT oooh Magic LOOK fairies. The youngest cast member gets the most dangerous fly. There’s a huge burning brazier on stage. Most of the staging of this was a new show? There’d be some humourless booklicker killing all the fun for ‘elf and safety. It wouldn’t be the artifact it is, and right now I’m in an artifact head. Antiquities on the radio, old fashioned remounts of shows that were esoteric when they were written? Sure. I’ll take some Benjamin Britten and some Peter Hall and that incongruous but brilliant countertenor reading of Oberon. I know little about opera but like many many actors I know Dream inside out and back to front. I was finding joy in things that pinged when sung. It’s an rearranged, but the good stuff is all still there and it’s a fun show.

Sometimes I found myself remembering important early drama school lessons. “Why did you walk over there in the scene?” “The director told me to.” “But why did you do it?” “So I wouldn’t upstage the other actor?” “No, why did your character walk over there?” “I dunno.” “You need to know. Otherwise it’s just an actor doing interesting walking and we can all see it has no truthful purpose.”

There’s always a bit of interesting walking in opera, and remounted shows will often be blocked from the book of the previous cast. It felt like there was a bit of that tonight, but it’s a final dress rehearsal. This is gonna be another extraordinary show for Glyndebourne and I’m only sad that it’s so hard for almost everyone to be able to engage with the place and the work that goes on here. I’ve been really fortunate to have Lou help me educate myself in a form that would likely otherwise have stayed totally opaque to me.

Dream always works. That’s the wonder. Doesn’t matter if it’s performed by the England cricket team. It still works. I’m back in London now. Glad I had the time. Now I’ve got to go to sleep…

Driving back from Scotland today was made a little quicker by Neil MacGregor. Former director of the British Museum, he’s an artifact of sorts himself, brought down from Scotland and forged in the academic mill of Oxford University many decades past. He collaborated with Radio 4 to create a History of the World in 100 Objects. I’ve now listened to a good fifty of them back to back.

MacGregor is very much a product of his privilege, very casually bringing in household names to talk about esoteric things. “Here’s Lara Croft on Hieroglyphics”… “Here’s SpongeBob to talk about Augustus Caesar”. All of the vowels have made friends with him. You can hear the “h” when he says “wheel”. Listening to this is like taking tea with a benign and ancient retired headmaster in the garden of his ancestral home. The ideas rove all over the world. He is full of scattered insight into the ancient world, political mechanisms, the power of trade, humanity, sex, food, shifting morals… Antiquities are a minefield of outrage and meaning these days. He occasionally nods to what could be endless arguments about almost everything he talks about, but he doesn’t let these modern sensibilities derail what is always fifteen minutes of timeless knowledgeable and pleasurable whimsy. It helped me eat the hours up on that seven hour slog back from Ellie’s.

I didn’t want to leave hers which is why I’ve only just got home now at half ten. I was loving the tranquility and creative potential in that little slice of land, that stone house full of history and possibility and dreams up there in the marches, the borders, the edges. I took the morning to really fill out my diary and look at the shape of my coming month.

Tonight, directly outside my flat, men with flashing lights, big machines and drills are whistling to each other and appear to be very seriously gearing up to spend the whole fucking night making big noises with machines. I’ve got to deliver something unfamiliar tomorrow morning way too early in a place that’s hard to drive to. My alarm is currently set to half five. I’ve said “yes” to too much again it seems, and the next fortnight is going to be a test of stamina. I have a feeling I’m gonna wish I’d snapped my phone up there like Gus Fring and gone and lived in a tent with the hares until winter where nobody can make me do random things.

That said, it was cold up there. It’s noticeably warmer down here, although in such a way that I want my window open and that means these huge machines might as well be on my bed as they crank up to do whatever nonsense they have to do. Why the hell does anyone live in London?

I shall attempt to sleep while dreaming of antiquities, interpretations, ancient civilisations, worlds without petrol.

Wisteria is growing in through my window. I can hear it existing as I write. Behind me I just trashed about a decades worth of webwork by a very much still alive harvestman spider, just by plugging in my mobile phone. “I thought you’d love the wisteria,” says Ellie, who could have trimmed it back before I came but knows how I love nature. I do. And I feel sorry for the spider but she’ll rebuild.

I love it here. I’m in this comfy bedroom now where the windowplant is talking to me and there’s space. High ceilings and room between the bed and the door. I sleep well in rooms like this cos I grew up in them. I haven’t closed any of the curtains. Tomorrow I want the sun to wake me, not an alarm. I’m here in the Scottish borders and I’ve never slept here before but the silence is vast compared to what I’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t have to be anywhere until 8.15 on Wednesday morning in Greenwich.

Look back two decades… Ellie and I buggered around at The Globe in the corporate leg of it just after we finished training. A load of us … we got cherry picked by some guy who wanted to make very very broad strokes populist stuff and call it a Frost Fayre. Much of it wasn’t to many of our tastes. The joy of it is how so many of us are still in touch decades later. It was a crucible of sorts. I’m glad I got stuck in. It has nothing to do with the work I still do in that place, but it has informed my friendship group – my running mates. Ellie is still making fresh work and asking questions. We’ve been trying to hang out for a long time now and finally managed it.

We walked around the gardens. There are hares here, openly loping about for evening silflay. There are badgers. On the horizon there’s even a tree with mating osprey, well enough served by the river teviot that they return year after year.

Every inch of this soil is laced with power. There’s a dormant volcano just in sight, a buried dragon. Life overlaps life in an endless drive. Yew trees and rivers, dryads and hamadryads, mud and sun and haze and moon. Ellie and I talk into the night about the lights that have always drawn us, about how we can focus those lights, about where and how we shine in their glare.

A joyful calming night. Too much wine? Never. And here now in my annex I will fall asleep and my spirit will talk to the quietly bumping wisteria and the busy harvestman. I’ll go journeying over the pastures and woods in dreams. After a full on social wedding, it becomes a quiet and reserved night here – once more the borders. The edges. The liminal space.

There’s history here, and character. Much has come before, much is to come. And this stone house is talkative and living, as all the best ones are, as Eyreton was. I’m gonna stop writing and start listening now, to the wisteria, to the air, to the stones, to the silence and to my creative soul here where I can hear my heartbeat.

… and I’m horizonal.

My feet hurt.

For most of the final four or five hours of the wedding I was either dancing or sitting outside letting myself cool down before more dancing. Glad I can still do it, even though the drop in stamina is noticeable from the last time I was at a Scottish wedding. I’m not as fit as I used to be. That can be solved.

Happily I had great dancing partners in the ceilidh. I was in the same Barclay Hunting Tartan as the groom. It’s a mark of this branch of the family that we all use the hunting as dress because the dress tartan looks like a wasp drowned in your piccalilli. I met some fun people and we did some energetic dances and overheated and it was a glorious thing. The last few family reunions have been sad ones. Happy to have a happy occasion.

“I’m the oldest man in this branch of the family now,” my brother Rupert mournfully confided in me. Oof. They’re all gone. Jamie too, my eldest brother, as much an elf as a human, working wood and making music. They were well remembered though. And as I walked into the wedding a bit late in my sunglasses with a wonky bow tie one very old man exclaimed “Norman!” at me, my father’s name. He quickly remembered the passage of time… I felt a mixture of pride and sadness to be mistaken for my dear old dad. After all I was wearing his kilt that he rather sadly and formally gave to me right at the end of his life when I had a wedding to attend. He had taken it out to it the very end of the leather strap and made a new hole there. It used to sit a little large on me if let out to that hole. Now I needed every inch of room. “Normally I’d take you and fit you with a kilt, but this one has seen some good times and it wants to keep on having them.” It has seen some parties with me. Maybe one day I’ll pass it on to someone. I’ve still got some dancing to go though.

There’s a vein of incisive awkward kind stubborn mischief running through the family. Friends of one of us will often know how to quickly be friends with others. I found easy conversation with Hugo’s friends, and easy dancing too.

One unfamiliar thing I did was to stop drinking once I was no longer eating. Someone had opened a bar tab so I could have gotten hammered, but I danced and drank water and occasional sugary things and when it felt like time to go I felt pretty clear headed. I’m surprised at myself.

Off to bed now in my wee apartment. Gotta send a self tape tomorrow somehow. Eek.

There’s me always banging on about how I love the heat and so on. Then last night I write about how my car is air-conditioned so driving to Scotland in summer will be reasonably clement.

To bring me down a peg or two, the universe conspired to make the Aircon pack up in Bergman. Nothing like eight hours in a hot car to make you question preferring the summer. Window down meant deafened, window up meant cooked. I stopped at Halfords to see if there was a hot fix but they didn’t want to make it worse. That’ll be money in the garage for a future version of me, and meanwhile … I’m in Scotland again YAY.

My cousin invited me to dinner this evening, which was very thoughtful of him. I was in no state to be a guest though. Family dinners, formal dinners… never an easy time for me, and doubly so when I’m absolutely exhausted. He’s not going to be at the wedding, so I totally see how he’s extending the invitation now, but the last thing I wanted was to socialise. He even offered me a bed in the pantry, but I’ve booked this little apartment near Loch Lomond. I want to be able to walk around all morning in my pants trying on kiltybits. I tried to make my excuses: “I’d like to get to where I’m staying before it gets dark!” “oh but it gets dark so late right now!” Eventually I just pulled out. Nothing left in the tank.

It’s a nice little apartment. Very IKEA but self contained. Plastic sheets. I’m in them and I’ll still sleep like a baby. I’m feeling a little curmudgeonly for leaving before pudding but honestly I was no good to anyone in terms of conversation. I just wanted to be horizontal in a vessel that isn’t made for transport. This bed will suffice.

Sometimes we really want to be talkative and engaged and engaging. Sometimes the opposite. That’s where I’m at this evening. Hopefully I didn’t upset my cousin.