Author: albarclay

A quiet day.

Next door to my flat, in the huge edifice owned by Opus Dei, there has been a high pitched wine emanating from a faulty door phone for the best part of two days. Last night at about 2 in the morning I was barefoot in my tracksuit bottoms, standing out the front with some sticky pads thinking to myself that maybe if I stuck the bell down it would stop the high pitched wine. No such luck. I just ended up ringing all the bells, but pushing them didn’t stop the whine. It just made noises in the building. So there was no point in jamming the bell down apart from pissing off one of the denizens of the building, which I considered but there was a camera in my face.

I don’t know what goes on in there. Occasionally you see priests coming in and out. Occasionally you see young women with suitcases going in going in.

Sometimes they have open days. I’ve never been. I’m sure they aren’t chopping people up. But suddenly, ringing the bell in the small hours, I started to feel uncomfortable about what sort of thing I might be waking up in there. It’s a huge quiet building most of the time. Occasionally there’s the smell of cooking onions from the big dining room downstairs. And right now there’s this constant maddening whine. I can’t find my earplugs. I hate it. I wish I could stop it. How the heck have they not fixed it yet?

Another night trying to go to sleep with it happening. It’s just on the edge of hearing. It comes into my dreams like fever. Sometimes it is too high for me to fully hear. If I had a dog it would probably be going insane. Tomorrow I’ll probably go over in the daytime and see if there’s somebody there and ask them to fix it. I mostly remember to hate it at night as my bedroom is the closest part of the flat to it. It’ll be worse for the people downstairs I’m sure. But maybe there’s just nobody in that building right now apart from caretakers, security guards and the dark thing in room 15b.

I just pottered and looked at lines. The autumn is setting in and the light is not happy light anymore. The nights are closing in. The rain is falling. Grey skies. And that fucking noise.

My only other activity today was to try to move forward this situation where a big chain of garages has overcharged me for a repair and rather than accepting it they are trying to wheedle out of it. Currently I would very much like to know someone who can access an ICME manual… I need to know clutch replacement time on a 2016 DiG-T X-Trail front wheel drive Acenta – petrol. Any mechanics out there? These fuckers need to be held out against on this. It seems to be a habitual thing for them to do, but I’m not gonna lie down easy with it.

Alarm at 5am. I cancel it. Alarm at 5:16am. I fumble a snooze. Again at 5:26. At 5:36 I blearily set a new alarm for 5:41 as if the five minutes will make all the difference. Then I realise I’m awake so I get up before I change my mind.

There’s a sock on the handle of my bedroom door. I put my hand on it as I stumble to the loo, and leave it there. It’s to remind me that my passport is in my car. If there’s something I absolutely have to remember in the morning, whatever it might be, I put a sock on the handle of my bedroom door.

I’m packed already. I put on a three piece suit and grab my charger. I get my card, my flat keys and my car key, and I leave. I’m still half asleep but the sock reminds me to grab my car key and get the passport before the Uber arrives to take me to Victoria. I’m a bit behind, so I shell out for Gatwick Express. Twenty quid for no distance. It is delayed by about twenty minutes owing to late running engineering on the track. I try to check in online, but Eastern Airlines won’t let you do it within 3 hours of the flight. I’m only flying to Newquay.

Gatwick happens before coffee and I’m not wearing my lenses. There’s a dream of a queue for check-in. The masked woman in front of me is angry enough at the slow queue for the pair of us. I just let the time tick by. I get to the front an hour before my flight and on an impulse I check in my hand luggage. The wheel is broken on my little case. They’ve paid for a checked bag. Saves me carrying it.

I would normally be going to Chile today, but I booked all this filming.

The bag goes in and I find coffee just before security. I end up having to sit on the water drop desk to finish my latte, as the crowds surge past. With no hand luggage I fly through security and before long I’m in hell, waiting for the gate. Noisy angry humans everywhere. Some are so angry I find myself laughing in their faces as they glower at me for existing. There’s no point getting breakfast or coffee right now. Queues are very very long. I find myself hoping it’ll be better at the gate. The busy old ladies clearly hoped the same thing and they are outraged at having had their water confiscated and there being nowhere to get more water at the gate. I sit there.

We board the flight to Newquay. We take off.

The captain almost immediately announces that there’s something wrong with a windscreen wiper. It’s not safe, he says, to fly the extra couple of minutes to Newquay, so he dumps the load of us in Southampton.

“Welcome to Southampton, we appreciate this is not Newquay but safety is a priority. As our arrival in Southampton is not expected it may take a bit longer than usual for ground staff to reach this plane.”

I message the production coordinator.

It is very possible that they had already rescheduled the shoot for the Queen’s funeral and just not gotten around to telling me. I’m not gonna be needed tomorrow. This whole trip was pointless. Nobody bothered cancelling me until I made them think about me by having my flight diverted. “I’ll book you back to London on the next train,” she tells me, but we are all being forced to wait at Southampton airport and I checked my bag.

Thankfully, my bag is delivered through the carousel. They start by talking about driving us by coach to Newquay. Then they decide that the plane is actually safe and I manage to extricate myself from the whole fucking thing and go back to London by train. The coordinator books me a train ticket and rather than sending me an e-ticket, she sends me the code you are supposed to use to get a paper ticket out of the machine. I’m already on the train when I get it. It’s useless, but thankfully nobody inspects me. I get through the barrier at Clapham Junction purely through good fortune. And at half eleven I’m back where I started.

Had the flight continued to Newquay I still would have been there unnecessarily. So I guess it worked out ok. I’ve got a few more days to learn my lines…

“Mercury is retrograde,” says my agent. And whatever you believe in, it fucking is. What a pointless shunt of an early morning.

The plus side is, it allowed me to join the team and look at the route for this year’s Peculiar London Hampstead Ghost Walk. You’d be mad not to book tickets for yourself and everybody you’ve ever met. Book now, QUICK before everybody gets nuked by Putin.

https://www.designmynight.com/london/whats-on/bar-crawl/halloween-pub-tour?t=tickets

Today I dragged my energy back from Wales to London. I said goodbye to that old land and hit the road. I’m learning lines again. Tomorrow I’ll fly to Cornwall and have a wardrobe and makeup call first thing, and then it’s more filming. I am such a lucky fucker. Every time this kind of thing lands I feel utterly blessed. I’ve had enough crap go down lifewise that even though I know what I’m supposed to be doing, and know that this sort of thing is part of it, I still hear my parent’s voices telling me I’ll get it out of my system – it’s a phase I’m going through… Hell of a long phase now…

I’m home. I’ve been cramming lines. I’ve been eating sausages and beans.

We woke up in a wonderful huge stone home in Wales. We woke up slowly too. I didn’t appear until at least ten. The silence and the nature made for a good sleep.

Bacon and eggs and a walk to the river, and before long we were all gathered and it was time to leave. Somehow I lost my bag – I think I left it on a chair. I only left pants and socks in that bag – it was the worst packed bag in the history of bags. I felt safe bringing nothing but a change of underwear to The Willow Globe. I’m glad of that call now.

What a wonderful thing to have had the chance to do. What a total joy. I love The Willow Globe. I love the humans behind it. They make beauty and opportunity, and they do it really just out of love. The company that went up, even if some might have had very bright credits, everybody was just a jobber last night – as we always are with The Factory. The best way to be, and we filled that stage with life and truth and mischief.

I’m back in town and I’m seeing how fast I can write this cos I’m gonna have to wake up at 5 tomorrow and haul my ass to the airport. Early early flight. So fucking early. I have packed a rudimentary bag – basically pants and suits. I’m off for only 2 nights this round. Then back next week.

I have to go to bed. Here’s my photo of this time last night, the house and the mist. How quickly things change. London ho!

Phil and Sue grew this theatre out of this fertile ground. Ancient ground, lush and energised. Fertile from the sheets of rain we have encountered during shows in the past. Seeded with energy, with land magic, with all the extraordinary things Shakespeare was channeling. As we played the matinee, the sun hit our faces, lighting the stage before it lit the audience. That would have been thought about when the theatre was planted…

They talk about planting a church. A church works much like a good theatre. The Willow Globe is a powerful and fully energetic place. And it has been planted. It’s a nature church, a breathing performance space made out of living willow. It’s easy to dismiss Shakespeare as old fashioned, considering its well over 400 years old. But the material still lives. We just get exposed to fusty old traditionalists and academics clinging onto their first experience of it – which cannot have any correlation with how it was intended by the writer, outside of massive coincidence. People will tell you, in voices of absolute certainty, how various character names are pronounced, or how various well known lines should be delivered, or what various characters are like. The verse and writing helps with much of that, for sure. But my hope and trust is that the man who wrote all these lovely thoughts for his friends was willing – in his own words – to allow vox. Give the words to the people in the place. Let them run.

We ran. Sometimes we ran straight into a wall. The sun was shining at the end of the matinee and the jig was carnage.

My part of the revels today was Malvolio. A tempting one to divorce yourself from. He’s a creep. You never really want to be channeling your inner creep, but he’s a creep who gets to share his thought process with the audience. I got to do it with a safe company and in a magical place. Matinee show I kept myself safe, I think I did a bit of a heightened accent. It’s actually the accent I grew up in, so it’s a true voice of my past, but it’s not my true voice now. I’ve flattened it. I was challenged to cut the crap for the evening show. Fair. We wouldn’t be The Factory if we weren’t allowed to “bust” each other.

How dare you suggest that actors frequently use the matinee to warm up!

After the incredible bright and direct sunlight in the first show, the failing light brought electric lighting – “we are going to have to unplug though. Standing charge is absurd” The moon rose too late to light us, but it did rise behind the stage, so bright and strong. I got to see it from the new tiring house, built this year from a fallen cedar, meaning we no longer have to change in a gazebo. As I improvised cross garters for my stockings, I watched it appear. As I tried to teenage-seduce Olivia it was shining on my back, encouraging lunacy.

These guys, these friends, these hearts. Some of them are consciously channeling, others are doing it without knowing. All of them are various types of energy conduit. With the full moon behind us, there in that living theatre, we found a couple of crystalsharp moments of truth out of the usual hilarious boiling sea of chaos.

I’m almost asleep now in the big house. I hope next year we can come again. Always this is a true delight, coming to this powerful beautiful place. I will sleep now under this moon, in this energy, next to Lou. Good dreams. Good night.

A whole hell of a lot of actors. Most people went in a minibus to Wales, but I came in Bergman. I need to be self-determined. We are all sitting downstairs in a beautiful vast stone home into which we have been welcomed. Last year, in Covid crazytime, we camped. This year we are welcome here in the house once more and it truly is a wonderful thing. The lush wet pasture around here. The river flowing by. The hills. This old old ground. Deep and unchanged for generations. For ever. This land has never been owned by the Ikea-fools. No new lamps for old here. Old lamps. And old friends.

My old friends. My new friends too, and newer friends who are now long standing…

Scott. It was a different millennium when we both met one another. Back then we had at least a full head of hair between us. We have held friends for so long. I adore the depth and time of it. We still challenge each other and piss each other off. The work is getting better the more time that passes. Then more recent friends, with equal complicated depth. So many different odd humans whose lives have touched each others, and we are all gathered here together under these eaves and bound in this stone but deep deep deep in the heart of the Welsh hills. And Lou is here. She’s far too smart to miss a chance like this. I’m glad to share it with her. I wanted for so long to be able to share my adventures.

Right now we are in a circle just … talking lines to each other, sitting in a beautifully well appointed room. The moon is just off full, bright through the leaded windows, forceful and clear. We will sleep upstairs in a huge room in the eaves, where the wallpaper matches one my grandparents had in their bedroom when I was a tiny tiny child. Tomorrow morning we will wake, earlier than I’m happy to, and go by minivan to The Willow Globe, and there we will do two versions of that beautiful strange sad romantic comedy Twelfth Night. I know it better than many. Post zombie apocalypse, you’d get a better quarto from my memory of Twelfth Night than most of the rest of the canon. You’d get a decent maccers, a heavily cut Hamlet, a decent shift through some of the histories and the Romans, the best bits of measure for measure, most of Dream, and the crown of my post apocalyptic memory would be a detailed Twelfth Night including academic variations and notes and a very bad recall of only the Orsino and Feste lines. Many of the rest of the plays would come in patches. And then at the end of my attempted preservation volume you’d have Cardenio Prince of Athens which I guess I could make up out of the ones I really don’t know anything about. I would perform them for the zombies and it would feel exactly the same at touring through Eastbourne on a Saturday matinee. The zombies wouldn’t mind my atrocious paraphrasing.

Tomorrow though, they’ll be a lively audience and there’ll be the Shakespeare experts there, as they always are. Still, this audience – they know we care, they know we work and drill and they know we then go from rigour to mischief. We’ve been coming here annually for eleven years doing such last minute half cocked joy. They will be looking for our mischief, and despite all the hard work we are trying to do to connect up the words and our energy and bind together, in the end we are doing all this work so we can jump into the show holding hands with each other, keep it live alive oh and have a lovely time with the people who are watching. Let’s make something fun!

First though, it might be time to clamber up to my room in the eaves with Lou and sleep in peace and darkness and silence, warm in stone and humanity and material and good air. The willows are waiting.

Earlier today I didn’t clamber back up into the tree that broke my rib. I went a little way up, to put my hand on the new growth where three years ago in high summer that big branch shed with my weight and sent me plummeting. I thanked it for teaching me a lesson. Then I probably would have pulled myself up into it anyway had Lou not been there to help me remember the lesson. We are not immortal. But we can have a lot of fun while we have this big life chance. And then eternity.

The rain really has settled in, and on Saturday we are gonna try to do Twelfth Night at The Willow Globe slap bang in the middle of Wales. We are gonna get soaked.

In a strong example of pathetic fallacy, the skies have been weeping. The water has been pummeling down. The roads are flooded. The gutters are backed up. Driving through London I was feeling awful for the poor cyclists, bobbing on their little frames through massive floody puddles.

You can’t get any music on the radio but for the National Anthem. Indignant journalists complain about those young people taking selfies outside Buckingham Palace. Others speak as slowly as they can, perhaps knowing how much of the schedule they are going to have to fill with words. Chelsea Physic Garden will be closed tomorrow, in mourning. Who knows what the roads will be like to Wales, or the audience when we are out there. “London Bridge is down”. That is, apparently, the code phrase to tell us that the Queen is dead. And so indeed she is. She just held on long enough that someone other than Boris Johnson got to talk about it for posterity outside number ten. Subsequent generations, watching the footage, will say “who is that outside number ten?” Liz Truss just met her majesty before she died. I have a feeling a lot of old people will die this winter.

But the Queen will be remembered. A stateswoman. A remarkable figurehead. An international symbol. She helped our frightened little island look a lot less chaotic and foolish than it really is. She brought gravitas and a sense of tradition into international relationships – the sort of thing that gives us our USP to other nations. The thing that sold Downton, The Crown, Bridgerton…

Jugears is coming in now, older than many. Who knows what will become of him – he hasn’t the weight of his mother. Do the fates of the Charlies alternate? Do I hear the grinding of an axe? We now have an android for Prime Minister and a twit as king. I’ve met the king though. How unusual. He was personable. Maybe he will fund the arts. He seems to like theatre. We shall see. I guess they’ll have to put his face on the next minting of coins.

A day of trying to remember lines in company, and tomorrow we all drive up to Wales. I’m looking forward to it. Lou can come and we all get to stay in a huge country house. Perhaps Malvolio will wear a black armband in mourning. After all, Olivia’s household is a mourning household. But plans plans plans. Plans are not allowed.

I’m sleeping in Richmond tonight, surrounded by packing boxes. I wanted to see Tristan and Tanya before they move to Ham and lose the spare room. I’ve got a friend on the sofa and another in my bed. Makes sense to do it now, and we can talk about all the immediate responses to this news of the day, that will eclipse all other news for literally weeks. The pageantry. The funeral. The coronation… This will be big business. People will fly in from all over the world. It’ll actually help our economy in the short term before the actuality of the new regime becomes apparent.

I liked her. Loads of my friends just detest the whole institution. I just preferred her as head of state than the unelectable fools we keep having to choose between. A monarch is a lottery. It’s totally unfair. But for the ones who do it, it is their job and they learn from an early age. Still, some are mad, some are bad, some are great. We’ve had a great one. Expensive thing to have but it brings in more money and interest and love for our nation than many people are willing to accept. I hope that son of hers has learnt well.

Farewell Queenie.

Suddenly autumn.

It seems we are doing seasons this year. Not the most optimistic for energy bills in winter. Right now it’s all bucketing down again (have they lifted the hosepipe ban yet? No? Nothing to do with fracking though good heavens). Our new Prime Minister is an idiot. Tout ça change. Apparently Plato nailed it, back all those thousands of years ago – “the one fucker that shouldn’t be in charge is the fucker that wants to be in charge. But that’s the only bunch of fuckers positioned to be in charge.” That’s a direct translation from the Ancient Greek. It’s fair. Nobody wants the porkrobot to be calling any kind of shot. But we’ve got her. She’s as bad as the one before, likely as bad as the one to come. Another vacillating untrustworthy morally bankrupt wisdom-cavity flapping their jaw in the face of growing poverty, and spoon-feeding the richest people whatever the poorest people need.

I’ve been in the basement of a Catholic Church, running Shakespeare scenes and trying to think about getting the words out in the right order. We are all off to Wales on the weekend and who knows, it’ll come out in some sort of order. Hopefully it’ll be the order we need. We will never be together as a full company until we are in Wales. That’s always the way. We rarely get this much rehearsalising so it’s better than often. I’m looking forward to throwing shit at the wall. We shall see how it all goes.

Bedtime now just as soon as I’ve taken my pants out of the washing machine. I suddenly realised I’ll be away a few days and I’m running low on clean undies. No tumble drier and it’s wet so I need time for them to dry. Ah life admin. I can just about stay ahead of it, even if some days like today I have to put my pants on inside out. And yeah, maybe we expect too much of these morons who want to lead our country. I can learn huge tracts of Elizabethan language, but I can’t wash my pants on time. Maybe Liz Truss is extremely efficient with her gardening or something, in a way that excuses the fact she’s utterly dogshit at public speaking. Policy remains to be seen, but she can’t be any worse than the parade of fuckwittery we have witnessed this last age.

I’m fed up with it. Go be a politician, reader. What though you don’t want to? Great. That’s your recommendation. Really the best leader is always going up be unwilling. But the ones who want it are always going to push past and fuck everything up. As with school games, so with politics and everything else. Ugh.

Car rage, but it can’t be directed at the garage… They got me back on the road quickly, they moved some things around to accommodate it. They charged me so much money. So much. But they fixed my car and I have a 2 year guarantee (or 20,000 miles).

Driving back from Stratford on Saturday and the revs suddenly started to go crazy with very little purchase. That familiar smell of burning rubber. I put the hazards on in the slow lane. It got worse and worse. No purchase on the gears, revs going crazy. I rolled into the hard shoulder. Tried to get him started again but the clutch refused to rebound. Something badly wrong. Lou and I had to sit on the hard shoulder for over an hour. Anyone who knows Lou will know that that’s not her natural environment.

Mr Clutch is a big business, and they are preferred by the RAC. I had no choice but to go there. Like with other big garages they can kind of name their price, and they did. I could have literally bought my previous 3 cars before Bergman and had change for the money they took from me to get him back on the road. A big bold hard figure. Having been debt free for some time now, I’m now maxed out on both of my overdrafts and scared about it. No flex from Mr Clutch. Even though he pulled the numbers out of his arse, my customer service complaint has gained no traction. They are paid now. Somewhere on a beach in Turks and Caicos some fat bastard has ordered another mojito. And Bergman is back on the road.

Driving is a luxury. I do a lot of it. Even though I work with electric cars in multiple different ways, I still prefer a combustion engine full of petrol. I like Bergman because he’s a big fatty and he can carry lots. But maybe I need to move on. It’s only a matter of time before he’s no longer ULEZ compliant and then he’s a brick.

Driving back I stopped to hand-feed broken up chicken bits to a sick cat. Turns out he’d emptied his bowl before I showed up, but he was still happy to have a bit of chicken from my hand. It’s a strange experience, hand feeding a cat. That little raspy tongue. Those sharp fangs. We get on, he and I. But he’s unwell. By the time you read this he might well be under the knife, having the canker excised. I hope it’s enough. Send some positive energy, cos it has been an expensive process thus far for my friend…

Unexpected expenses. We who are self employed live in fear of them. And so often they come on the back of lovely work. The money for the car more or less exactly matches what I’ll get from that wonderful day on set yesterday. God save us all from unexpected expenses.

I’m having a glass of ouzo and then I’m gonna crash out and dream of how to make back the money I’ve spent today just to stand still.

“How did the clutch fail so catastrophically? Is there something I’m doing that I need to stop doing?” “Likely you were towing something too heavy?” Ach. Bergie has a

—

And we all feel asleep with our phones in our hand at that point. Or at least I did. I think I was about to blame the damage on the previous owner for trying to tow something too heavy.

Rain in the city.

Vast hard sheets of water. Flooding into the edges of the roadways. Catching the lights and flooding the pavements. Hard rain. Sudden rain. You wouldn’t have brought an umbrella this morning. You would have wished you had done. Out in it? Soaked. In moments. Wet to the bones. Wet wet wet.

I was in a bus. Problem is, buses don’t take you home. They take you nearer than tubes for less, but… After twenty minutes of waiting at the drop off I finally caved in and flagged a passing black cab. I didn’t want to get soaked and that was the only other option. It’s still pouring now. I’ve been home over half an hour and I’ve had some food, plus I’m not gonna get pneumonia. Eleven quid though, for a black cab from Victoria to my flat, which is less than a mile. This is why you have to be rich or stupid. How do they operate when it’s not raining? That was a necessity hail, pure and simple.

We’ve been plotting the Hampstead Walk this year. That mostly involves following our leader who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. We were going to start in The Flask in Hampstead, in a Diagon Alley substitute street that I think did feature in some of the potter movies. The management never got back to us though and ultimately it was too much faff trying to get contact. Added to which there’s a brilliant Flask pub in Highgate, just the other side of The Heath. With two flasks, there’s way too much risk of audience members showing up at the wrong pub. I did it. Chris did it. This evening the photographer did it too, so we had to try and rethink the route on the fly. The Hampstead Flask is right by the station, which is in its favour. But added to the potential confusion from competing flask pubs, we can’t raise the management. It really helps to be able to warn them we are coming. We cap at 30, and it’s probable we will hit good numbers. We are probably going to shift the base. Then we can have comms.

But yeah that’s been the day, plus a really unpleasant interaction with the garage that has taken in Bergman, who are honestly going to try and take me for every fucking penny they can…

Car at 6:35. And I’m lucky. The Winnebagos are on The Mall. Darren picks me up. He’s an unusual human. Very tall. Maybe a bit touched. Is he ex services? When I come down, he’s staring up into the trees. “You’re after the crows,” I tell him. He agrees. “They’re eloquent, these ones.”

I have some local crows that know me. They trust me so they come to me. Darren didn’t know them, but he could sense they were biddable. He was checking them out. Communing. You can’t park outside my flat without being checked out by those local crows.

Darren is a bit sideways as a location driver which immediately makes me love him. It’s a balance. You have to have personality but you mustn’t fuck up the route. Darren had his secret right ear satnav earpiece – (PRO-TIP) – but he was still a bit lost in London. He mostly got me where I needed to be but he was always late in the process. I didn’t mind. I don’t need to spend time over my breakfast. It reminded me of the Extreme-E stuff, where I’m basically him.

I got onto set promptly after changing superquick. I then said my 38 words. I knew them inside out and back to front and I had actioned them all and was just willing to roll them around. That’s easy when the sides only have 38 words. Those motivations and transitive verbs were well explored. I was sub though. The other actors had far more to say than I did. But … I had my bit. And they covered it from so many angles. The camera was only on me twice, but I must have said that tiny piece over 20 times before all the shots were covered.

It helped that I was talking to people I admire, who turn out to be good people too. I met another human I respect very much. I’m looking forward to using today’s shoot as a point of contact with them when I’m playing an equal part. Today I was a service part. Today I tried to push myself back into the old game. Today was lovely. We are only as good as our last job, and today I was taken seriously and worked with humans I have liked in theory. Lovely to see that, in the case of all the well known names today, they were all balanced and professional actors.

Obviously I tried to jokingly persuade the writer “You should have more scenes in this restaurant and get me involved.” I wouldn’t have made the crack if he hadn’t been the most lovely fellow. I trusted that he would know I was making an obvious joke about actors. “Have you played a waiter before?” asked the director. “I’ve been a fucking waiter,” I told him because I have. “That’s not the same,” he responds. And he’s the director. So “yes, of course I have” trips off my tongue. But I haven’t. I’ve been in the abyss until recently. I’m looking forward to playing lots more waiters and fuck knows what else going forward.

In real life I went straight in at Maitre d’hotel for major event restaurants and that’s the me I was channeling. I know the bullshit. I know my high end service personality. Unctious little shit. That’s what I served up. They seemed to like it.