Author: albarclay

Driving through the rainy Ayrshire hills is an unusual pleasure. You drive past wee burns carving through the lush pastures, rushing with rain water. The sheep are fat and happy from good Scottish grass fattened up with rain. The plantlife is fed by rain, bright and healthy. The sky is filled with colourful roiling clouds carrying sweet lifegiving rain. Houses shine, washed bright by constant rain. Healthy lowlanders walk dogs lean and fit from running through rainwet fields. Even the road ahead reflects the light from the rain puddles in the tarmac.

On the local radio I hear the local people giving their contempt for the monarchy free rein. Down back in England people are welcoming the beginning of Charles III’s reign as king. Here, the radio vox pops are raining contempt on who they keep calling “the English king”. I have to restrain myself…

—

He’s not just the English king. This is another example of the small-mindedness and the needless tribal division that is endemic in this age of algorithms.

Let’s go back to 1603 when it was well decided that James Charles Stuart should follow the first Elizabethan age and come be our king too. James VI of Scotland and I of England. Son of Mary Queen of Scots. A practical decision to make absolutely certain the Spanish didn’t come knocking on the crown again. James the VI of Scotland then became also James the I of England.

As observed by Shakespeare, Puritanism was on the rise. Malvolio, who thought that because he was worthy there should be no more cakes and ale, swears to be revenged on the whole pack of courtiers and nobles for their cavalier treatment of him. His son, Charles I of Scotland and England etc was to bear the brunt of that puritanical revenge. A bloody civil war fought between the royalist Cavaliers and Cromwell’s puritan Roundheads, leading to King Charles’ beheading on a cold January morning in 1649. He famously asked for two shirts, as it was cold and he didn’t want shivering to be mistaken for fear. Then came the interregnum. The next year, his son Charles was declared King of Scotland, while Cromwell and the Roundheads were just beginning their time in control of England. Charles exhibited a combination of stamina, ingenuity and good contacts. For someone so recognisable to escape to France with a grand reward on his head was remarkable.

The logical next move for a New Model Army buoyed up by a sense of their own righteousness and everybody else’s wrongfulness was to ban fun. The theatres were pulled down. Until Wanamaker’s Globe came up in the nineties, we lost entirely the form of audience inviting theatre that developed in London from the cart shows via James Burbage in Shoreditch. When the monarchy was eventually restored to a country now understanding (for a short while) that idealists and zealots are frequently not the best leaders, the French form of proscenium theatre came with Charles, bringing new techniques such as the disconnect between actor and audience. The idea of a fourth wall. An “aside”. And WOMEN ON STAGE.

And now we have another King Charles. He has shaken my hand. He loves the theatre. I’m okay with him.

King Charles III. He doesn’t come across as very Scottish, but his lot were Scottish first and his king name was brought into the mix by James VI of Scotland…

I just don’t see why we need to be so little that we spend so much energy hating a system that at least means we aren’t only represented by the likes of Boris on an international stage. The world is big and we are a small nation. We are getting smaller and we seem to want it to happen while Russia is expanding. The troll factories amplify and attack to fit their agenda, and we know that the more we all fit ourselves into tinier and tinier boxes, the easier we will be to eat.

“Go and do something with your youngest son, Norman. He barely knows you.”

I reckon I was eleven. “So Alexander, where do you want to go?” “I dunno.” “There must be somewhere you haven’t been on the island? We can go anywhere you want.” “I dunno.” “Let’s go to the point of Ayr. Have you been there? It’s the northernmost part of the island.” “Yeah I guess… *shrug* “

We get in the car. Up we go. I remember it well. A rare and long memory of time with my dad. Thinking about it now I’m crying suddenly. Dad’s been dead a long time. It never quite goes away.

A grey day as you’d expect from The Isle of Man. There’s a lighthouse. “Look, a lighthouse!” This wasn’t a day of amazing revelations. In many ways, it’s the mundanity of the day that makes it so hard to remember without grief. I’ve made sense of the swashbuckling playboy racer I knew as a kid. It’s memories like this one that bring back home to me that he was my dad as well.

We stood on a stoney beach and looked across the big grey sea. It wasn’t cold, nor was it hot. The wind on the island is a constant. “You see on the horizon? That’s Scotland. That’s where your daddy came from.”

We threw stones at the waves. He taught me to throw better. “They taught us with hand grenades,” he said. “That way you make sure it goes as far as possible.” “If I’m strong enough can I throw all the way to Scotland?” “You can try.”

In my memory we were on that grey beach for hours. In some ways we’ll be on that grey beach forever. Old father and young son. Not the only day we had just us, but one of only a few. I soaked them up like a sponge, those days. “Every seventh waves a big one,” he said, and without really thinking I said the same thing to Lou on the beach in Brighton last week. There’s something in it, although it’s not an exact science. We threw and skimmed and talked.

“It doesn’t point to Ayr, the point of Ayr. But that part of Scotland you can see – it’s part of Dumfries.”

And here I am, in Dumfries. In Ayr. I’m on the other side of the stonethrow. I can look out to a sea as grey as the one I knew back then, and if I look from the right place maybe I’ll be able to see the island. If I look very very closely perhaps there’ll be two little shadows on an empty beach. A boy looking at his future, a father looking at his past. Throwing stones into water.

For all his foibles he was my dad. He’d be glad I’m working on Extreme-E again. He’d probably know the grandfathers and fathers of some of the people I’m working with through his racing days in the fifties and sixties.

My first day and just orienting today. Tomorrow I’ll be off to Edinburgh and I’ll find out more about the shape of things to come. I’m happy to be part of this team again. It’s a good group, working hard to make something new and ethical – to sustain a beautiful idea and have fun at the same time. Season three. Race 2. Dumfries and Galloway. And the ghost of my dad is sitting with me tonight.

I only named two of my fish.

Chippie the weather loach was my favourite. Busy nibbly little sod. When he popped his clogs, the last of my interest waned. This evening, Max and I approached the tank to begin syphoning the water and bagging up the remaining fishies, and the other named fishie must have understood on some level that they were moving. He had chosen to stay forever. Brian the clown loach was floating on his side, stone dead. Someone had eaten his eyes.

I picked him up with a spatula and flushed him. “What ceremony else?” He would perhaps have have had a little more thought attached to his send-off had I had a spot more time to think. But with one evening left in London, not packed yet at 7pm and a huge tank to move first, I had other fish to fry.

We rounded them up and bagged them. We sucked out the water and put it in buckets. We carried the tank down to the lift. We loaded it into the car. We then carried it up three flights of stairs and triumphantly deposited it all. I was already sweating like a pig. Success though. I won’t be able to revel in the space we made as I had to get the cabinet in a second trip, hoik that up the stairs too and then get the fuck on with packing.

I’ve got my passport. Mobile chargers. Clothes. I’ve even got a toothbrush.

It’s only like two weeks or something.

iPad. Kindle. Bluetooth speaker. Satnav holder. I even remembered my driving licence. It’s not like I’m off to Bogota this time though. Just to Ayrshire.

The moon was huge as I was pelting around London dispensing with fishes and loading up my cases. One day off the flower moon. A bright omen as I remove more tricky stuff and streamline.

The fish were lovely for a while. When I was home predictably and before the algal bloom. I couldn’t fight the algae. It moved in stealthily and suddenly it clogged everything and made the water brackish. I persisted as Chippy seemed to like eating the stuff, but then two expensive Fluval U4 filters packed up within a week of each other and I threw my hands up.

“A fish is for life, not just for lockdown.”

Well, at least it wasn’t a puppy. And Max is brilliant to take them on, and it makes some sense as his life is more predictable than mine.

—

And now I’m on the Gatwick train, after about three hours sleep, and an uber to Victoria. This is only an hour late. Breakfast at the airport?! And I might allow my first coffee for a month. Although I don’t need them anymore so it might be good to keep it that way…

Another Premier Inn. “Have you been here before?” the receptionist asks and yes, I think perhaps I have been but it’s honestly hard to tell. It’s in a concrete layby near some roundabouts. There are lots of drunk people in reception. It is somehow devoid of character. Familiar and functional.

It’s funny that we’ve come to this. Generations of human art and ingenuity. Incredible thinkers and makers for hundreds and hundreds of years pushing the boundaries of man-made beauty in architecture and landscaping and interior design and art. All this and yet there’s been this consensus that “they just want it plain and modern.” This is another example of the small people being vocal while the larger ones keep schtumm. If there were antique taps in my room that squeaked a little and needed buffing up, I would enjoy that but I wouldn’t write about it in a review. But someone small would complain. Ditto cracked paint on ancient walls, interesting frayed carpets etc etc… Better to have it all functional and neutral, not being anything so it can substitute for everything. No great beauty as art is subjective and for everyone that loves interesting challenging art, there’s someone else who hates being challenged by something on the wall. This human need for the familiar is not helping culture advance as we become more global. Starbucks, Macdonald’s and all the global food chains pull travellers in when they feel a little lost. It denies them any touch of the unfamiliar. The first time I went to Chicago I had a day. I ran around all over the place, caught a matinee, saw some stuff. Some of the others just saw the inside of an Irish pub.

I would argue that we need the unfamiliar to live a full life. The more we have patterns, the faster time goes, the less we notice and the older and smaller we become. I guess this is why I can’t work in an office.

Here I am in my neutral pared back room with the hum of air conditioning that is going to ruin my throat in the night, and clean starchy pillows, with road noise through the window. I brought half a bottle of wine with me as I’m gonna need to do something to get me to sleep. Brain is still shouting. I had a vacuum sealed half bottle of Ferreret 2020 from the mountainside vineyard in Majorca. I’m drinking it out of a cup hoping it’ll knock me for six before midnight. I’ll be in a school first thing tomorrow and I’ve already been told they haven’t got any equipment for the orange battery which is the heart of the workshop. If that’s the state of it, I’m gonna need to be firing on all cylinders from first thing in the morning to win the room, or I’ll have a horrible day trying to run a workshop where everybody is shouting. I don’t want them to be obedient but I do want them to be engaged and that takes energy.

And I’ve just realised that I think I brought no contact lenses. Which means I’ll be working tomorrow either blind and confused or, more likely, sporting my prescription shades. Let’s see how that goes down…

On the plus side there’s a bath in here that fills in less than 45 minutes.

Exams again today. They’ve changed, particularly since Covid. Everybody still comes to the same place, but often they bring their laptop and have an online exam. Tip-tippity-tap-tap. Hours of fun. Often if it’s not too busy I learn something or think through something but I’m all out of projects at the moment so I just did my job instead. I was vigilant. The vigilation was successful put in.

They’re a nice lot, but often they are nervous and it gets a bit pongy in there. Up all night revising on pro-plus, two hours sleep, no time for a shower, run for the train. The exams are usually really arcane. It’s rare that I even understand a question. I get asked to clarify things that are unclear from time to time, but even if we think we know the answer we have to feed it back to the academic. If we guessed and guessed wrong it would be foolish. Still I read the papers and think about it. There’s a lot of maths, but occasionally it’s food for thought. Marketing etc. Business. Things I might do well to be better at.

I might find something to think about for tomorrow as its another double shift and if they are doing the online exams it is pretty simple to run so long as they are technically competent, and they aren’t usually undergraduates. I’m just moonlighting as an invigilator. “This is my old man job,” I find myself saying to a colleague. “I can make a bit of extra money when my knees are gone.”

Then home and I thought I was going to get shot of the fishies, but that’ll be on Friday now instead. They are off to a new home as I’m having to get things out of this flat. Farewell fishies soon.

Not the most thrusting day today. Two exams, a sandwich in the sun, and a chat with my brother. Now it’s late and I’m not sleeping too well. Noisy brain full of nothing. Bits of unchangeable past dancing with bits of notional future. Perhaps I’ll treat myself to a spoonful of sleepy medicine. Earlier than I like to start for the next few days / weeks.

A spot of rest. That was delightful.

Beltane is all about fire and flowers. Burning away the old. Dancing around poles. Putting the virgin in the wicker man. Making daisy chains.

We wandered down to Beach Box Sauna. Lou has been volunteering and had made enough credit for both of us to book forty five minutes in the great big new horse box sauna there. It has a huge window looking over the stones of the beach. There must have been twelve of us in there and it was HOT.

There’s always one person talking loudly about their business. This one sells “high end” clothing. We got the blow by blow on supply and demand, before the topic inevitably shifted to the menopause. “This is coffee house talk,” Lou observes. There are only three men in this horse box. I’m pretty used to the subject having had mostly female friends for a long time until recently.

I can filter out the garbage, and it was HOT so I was in heaven. She was very adamant that you should LIFT. I think she meant weights. My mind went wandering.

Honestly I’m better at thinking when I’m hot. I had two good ideas in that sauna and wrote them both down when I left. It’s why pretty much all the revolution happen in Spring. It’s easier to think and easier to leave the house.

After about twenty minutes in there I was a lobster and Lou and I pulled out and made the long stoney walk down to the tide. Big swells, so the easiest way to ensure a quick plunge was to wait until the big wave pulled back and then lie in front of the next one. I’m less inclined to fearlessly dive since I shaved off the front of my face in Uruguay. That did the trick and soon I was swearing loudly and aiming to get myself back into the hot place. We did so.

It’s a good discipline, the hot cold hot thing. I feel calmer and warmer for it. The good feeling carried me all the way back to London and now here I am in a hot bath and getting ready for three weeks of mayhem with no more days off. I’ll snatch my moments when I can, and remember these calm beachy days. Much like this 25 year old seal who is mostly basking at the moment before stocking up on local fish and busting it back to the big cold sea.

The low light of this flat in Brighton. The sound of the sea and the gulls…

I grew up with the sound of gulls, and then London happened when I was thirteen. Going back to places where they wheel and cry helps plug me into ancient memories of warmth and comfort and safety. The years up to thirteen were spent either by the sea or in the mountains, and they were bright safe protected years. I was perhaps in a bubble waiting for a spectacular shattering. But it gave everything thereafter this foundation of warm comfortable safety.

Coming here now is a tonic. We won’t have long together in the coming months so snatching time with Lou is important. Everybody in the world is descending on Brighton for Beltane, but up here it’s a long way from the lagered up crowds on the beaches.

We went to Stanmer and took the high road. We found the motherlode – a huge fairy court of bluebells dancing in the beginning of May. Just in time as well – their moment is so fleeting. Their dance was almost over, the rot already setting in. A great shock of them though after all the rains. Big and small and albino and bright. You can almost hear the music of the fairy court just a sliver of time away weaving and rushing past our heavy logical stone world. We stood and breathed them in. The yapping dogs and groups of youth faded into the wind and we were there with jackdaws and wind, the simple ancient sounds of an English woodland. Mushrooms coming up now. Nothing tasty I’ve seen yet. Turkey Tails and Witches Butter.

We had another roast at our local haunt. Chicken and everything beige with gravy. A ginger ale. And now I’m bathed and warm and very soon to get into a warm toasty bed and sleep my way into may and fire and Beltane and the inevitable summer.

A very lovely woman was having her sixtieth birthday party this evening and she had booked out The Balcony Room at The Swan, the restaurant arm of The Globe. I often come into play in such situations. There is an ancient ruling that the corporate actors can’t perform in Elizabethan costume. It is to do with certain people in certain departments who don’t want the “corporate” actors to be associated with the ones on the main stage. I showed up with Ffion. We were both in sexy smart clothes.

Minnie and Maz were on the mainstage tonight as Bottom and Titania. Apart from having agents with a little bit more reach I would argue that there isn’t much to choose between them and Ffion with whom I was working. But yeah, that’s been the deal for years. I usually just show up in a suit and I have to make it clear I’m not one of the “proper” actors because heaven forbid.

My job isn’t to be made of magic fairy dust. It is to entertain the VIP diners. It is, of course, a slightly different aspect of the acting skillset to that which is being displayed on the mainstage. But the wedge is driven. Minnie once introduced me to an artistic director at the space, and then said that I do the corporate stuff. I watched the man’s smile curdle. I know one human being who has worked all three departments. Rigid fucker and one of my closest friends. He keeps it quiet though. Here I am writing about it.

“It’s not work if you aren’t drenched in sweat,” I had been told a few hours earlier when I made up part of a three man team taking the heaviest printer you can imagine down a long flight of stairs. The three of us found ourselves living in each others puddles. It was my last day helping this endless office move.

Building and deconstructing furniture, lugging heavy boxes. Organising things, connecting things and disconnecting them. I’ve been so involved in the office break I’ve barely remembered anything else. Two days of stoppage coming up. Then back to the grind for too long. In many ways, this evening was a break into happy work.

The wonderful client wanted us to mingle with the guests beforehand so it was more of a surprise when we showed up and did some acting. That meant we kinda had to have champagne just to fit in. So we did, and we mingled. Then we did our thing, customised for the client, charming assured work with Shakespearean text. Like the guy that hits the thing with a hammer and then says “yes it looked easy, I’ve taken twenty years to learn where to hit it,” Ffion and I are deft at this work now and we aren’t bothered by the confidence issues you get at the start of your career.

Seaside now. Yeah I guess if the machine won’t give me the work that will be seen by many, I have to be the machine. I know enough now to make large scale. I’ve got the contacts. Maybe it’s time to McBurney it. Something to think about.

That turned out to be an entertaining and fun morning in the Docklands. I ended up in involved conversations about how feasible it might be to create a Dyson Sphere. Not in our lifetime, I concluded. But who knows, the speed at which things move. We also talked about plasma and this wonderful impossible dream where they think they might have got marginally more power than they put in from an artificial sun in America. They suspend plasma with magnets and pump power into it to superheat it while trying to pull off the energy it creates. It’s the sort of thing that will scare the fuck out of you if you aren’t confident in all the things that have led us to believe it is controllable. The large hadron collider was supposed to cause a singularity somewhere in the Indian Ocean that would quickly suck all matter in the solar system into it. It didn’t. It just got a few boffins excited about Higgs Boson activity and so on.

Eventually our hubris will destroy us, yes sure. But it’ll be slow. The exponentially rising carbon and all the lazy ignoramuses farting about ice ages being part of the natural cycle because they literally just don’t understand science. We will burn and freeze because we want it all now. Likely we will all be dead by the time we make things uninhabitable, so it’s just a lovely present for our great grandchildren while we still do whatever the fuck we please.

Still, a fun morning and very sparky youth. I was happy to have the chance to meet them.

And then I immediately became part of the problem. I had to go to IKEA for my friends and load up with plastic boxes. £300 worth of crap for their office, all made in Vietnam, and I had myself a plate of smoked salmon and the inevitable meatballs. Then I drove to Chelsea and deconstructed/reconstructed a desk, carried a load of stuff and generally did the things.

Home now and too tired to really remember the details. Another day without stopping – but for the meatballs. If i wasn’t exhausted I would get stuck into something distracting on telly, but I’ve got no head left. A hot bath and a warm bed.

I remember when I used to be able to think of things. There’ll be none of that for weeks yet. I’m about to plug back into the races and the run-up to it all looks far from relaxing. Ugh.

If they crack the Dyson Sphere, hopefully they can make things a bit warmer round here thankyouplease.

I’m up way too early tomorrow morning. Something like an hour and a half to get across town to this technical college in East London where they keep moving the goalposts about what they want tomorrow. I’ll need to be awake and prepared, and from experience it is a very tricky area in terms of the behavioural demographic. Frequently there’s a very low English comprehension mixed with a lot of very angry young men and women. I’ll have to be alert and ready, and then switched on.

Trying to wind down tonight and running a bath, and struggling to relax. Thinking about my finances when I just want to eat chips. Plus it’s still cold and raining and I’m… I’m just done with today thanks. Can I get off?

I dunno if I’ll be able to sleep even. I am not feeling it. Maybe if I get reading…

First though I’ve got to boot up my laptop and download the correct workshop to my flashdrive as the one I brought with me last time won’t do for the time slot I’ve been allocated tomorrow. It’ll need to be something else and I’ll have to be learning and editing on the fly and I’m honestly just fed up of saying “yes” to everything all the time forever. I want to book a month or two in my diary where I attend to the things in my life that I’m kicking down the road. Problem is I’ll need to be able to afford it.

What the fuck happened to the acting? I was helping Tristan with a self-tape. “Do you think they just give us the tapes as a placebo so we don’t kill ourselves?” “We promise to view every submission,” the bumpf said. Which clarifies what I’ve suspected for a long time, that 90% of the stuff I do on self tape doesn’t even get watched. Eew.

I’m not going down that road tonight. Got to wind down, not up.

It’s already quarter past eight. I’m starving. Bed. I’ve got a bit of relaxation booked with Lou soon thank God. A chance to drop it all and not have to think about difficult things for two days. A joy to come. But for now, two more days of constant.