Author: albarclay

“You’re not gonna get much change from a grand.”

I had suspected as much. Not what I wanted to hear. But… what I expected to hear. The universe has a way of working out when you’re feeling flush and stealing that feeling.

I was driving back from Stratford. “Something is going weird with Bergman,” I remarked as the rev count occasionally went nuts and that old familiar engine rubber smell came in. “I might have hit one of the buttons?” There’s this stupid cruise control thing on the steering wheel that’s easy to hit. It caps the speed at like sixty. I might have hit it while accelerating at 80 and caused the clutch to burn out. Either way, something went bang as I was going into the hard shoulder, with enough force to knock a plastic panel out onto my knees. We ground to a halt. No resistance from the clutch. Poor Bergman, all of a sudden a hunk of useless metal.

The guy who made the prognosis at the top – he’s the RAC rescue guy. His name is “Cider”. He has it written above his cab. Lou spots it. “Is that because you go out with your mates and they all have beer but you have cider?” “Yep,” he replies. This gets Lou into singing The Wurzels. Her dad is a cider drinker. There’s a song about being one. She knows it from her dad. He knows it too. “That’s the Wurzels,” he acknowledges. I’ll be off to see them next week in Tewkesbury. Saw them last week too.” Lou and I have hit on something here. As poor Bergman is towed to Cowley, we discover that The Wurzels became famous in 1976 with “I’ve got a brand new combine harvester”. They are still going, but only two from the original lineup are still alive after the drummer – formerly the oldest drummer in popular music at 86 – died of Covid.

Cider spins us into the garage and I drop Bergie off. He then drops us near the Banbury road and we get a bus into Oxford. Thankfully I’ve got history with expedient travel from Oxford to London so we end up in the Oxford Tube. I’ll have up wait and hear about Bergman. I’ll be on set in costume and made up at 8am tomorrow, talking. I won’t want to think about mechanics.

The car to pick me up and take me in will show at half six. It’s half ten right now, I’m wound down and happy. I’m gonna crash imminently. I can’t worry about poor Bergman. But considering he’s the most expensive car I’ve ever bought he might be about to teach me an important lesson about how you might as well just keep getting old donkeys… I’ve been ragging him, the poor sod. But … this is a surprise… Something bad has happened to the big bugger. I’ll find out soon if I can afford to solve it. For now though I’m gonna think about the shoot.

I just went upstairs. It was when Lou and Minnie started talking about the Upanishads and yeah, I’ve got a blog to write here dammit. I’m sure I could benefit greatly as I do every day from the combined yogic wisdom of these two humans. But… Bedtime. I also figure it’s gotta be bedtime for mummyminnie too. She’s got two remarkable tiny humans growing under her wing. I thought by going upstairs the two of them could have the yogic conversation they seem to be craving before morning comes.

She was marvelous tonight. The McGuffin that brought us up to Stratford tonight was Richard III. Min is finishing her journey as Margaret, the only character who consistently plays through four plays in the canon. Margaret in Richard III is a shuffling remembrance of all that failed and bloody ambition that pushed the action of the Henry VI plays. She’s a reminder that all that kingly ambition is death. Physically echoing Japanese horror, and with the specificity and confidence she has always carried, she was again – as always – a master of her art. I’m so fucking proud of her. And of Rhys, who has been holding space for her across the way, looking after those two small girls and keeping his own practices alive within it.

Watching the play with Lou was a joy for me. It’s complicated. All those lords. I toured it with Love and Madness back forever ago as a last minute replacement for a lost Buckingham. Buckingham is a bugger of a part – all the lines and none of the glory. He’s the kingmaker and he makes a bad king. I was channeling Mandelson but that’s how long ago it was. But my working experience of how it runs helped me sketch out the basics for her to follow it. She has taught me opera. These histories are like opera but without the opportunity to look at the orchestra when you clock out of the action.

She really seemed to get it. It was a solid company, as you might perhaps expect up here. It was easy to get lost in the politics, and the direction was so smart towards keeping the momentum going through the bits that sometimes drag. Arthur was a great Richard. I liked revisiting it as a spectator, and thinking about the nuance and the audience experience. It’s a mischief, that play. So dark, but so full of jokes. We all have a different moment where we can’t be charmed any longer by that poisonous bunch-backed toad.

It’s so late. They are still talking about yoga downstairs. I’m off to sleep. But yeah… Dick the bad, right now, up at the RSC – It’s a great show… Watchywatchy. Nighty night. In a satisfying way, this is the first time in my life I’ve been asleep before Lou. That’s my good friend. Yay. Yoga. Zzzzzzzz

A flying visit to Stratford is pending, and I’ve been trying to juggle all the odd requirements of the TV company. They own me for a week from Saturday, although it’ll only be one day of filming within the week. This to me is a reasonably new way of booking actors in small parts and it’s kinda nice as it means we get the weekly rate for one day of work. I’ll have to jump when they say jump. But unless something goes tits up, the location will have been booked for just one evening and we will have to show up and do it. Barring Covid, I can’t see it being cancelled. And with all the testing going on, nobody is gonna have Covid. I have to go to a test AGAIN tomorrow morning though, and I’m not under contract yet. I had to do two before I was even in wardrobe, but they showed up on my doorstep. Because I’m off to Stratford tomorrow morning Lou and I have both had to juggle, and rather than me going to Brighton this evening, she’s up on the train tomorrow morning to meet me in London post test. I’m up super early in order to go and let someone shove things up my nose again. I’ll have to drive to Bishopgate in the Congestion Charge area for the privilege. It’s a total ballache.

Worth it though for a week of work in a day. Worth it for the lovely team, for the lovely work, and for the feeling I got coming off set yesterday. Film sets were my first experience of professional acting. It’s lovely and familiar every time.

Gotta love the bootstrap theatre as well though. This afternoon a load of us went to Nadia’s flat and talked to each other in heightened language for a few hours. This is The Factory again. Some old faces, some newer. Twelfth Night at The Willow Globe and a brief opportunity to remember that geeky joy and fellowship. It’s forever delightful to revisit that company, and the rigour. There’s a shared language still where we can challenge and bust one another, even if the initial monastic doctrine has faded over time with changes: the absence of our patron saint, the robust career of one of our founders, the incomprehensible sacking of the other and the recent death of the New York heart, dear Louis.

Still, we muddle on. Today we couldn’t remember it all but we tried. Who knows how it’s all going to fall out in Wales but we’ve done obscure canon plays with cuescript before having never been in the room. Having the chance to be in the room together beforehand – that’s something of a luxury and lovely to see the team.

The joy with The Willow Globe is that we are known by their audience. They come for the anarchy. It’s our annual opportunity to hang out and be sexy and make Shakespeare. I love it there. I’m so happy to be going back.

After rehearsal, I went and lit a candle for my friend’s sick cat. As my mum would say, “beam on positive thinking”. He’s having an operation tomorrow…

Back into the groove.

Early morning car. Down I go with my buttfungus. I’ve showered and clean shaven. I’ve squirted myself all over with musk. This is just a costume fitting, but it’s not theatre where I can eat a pork pie during the fitting. It’s telly. I need to be sleek, unruffled, magically professional and not volunteer that I have cooties on my bumbum.

Unit base is in Bishopsgate, just down the road from my old drama school. Location today is Hyde Park, just up the road from my flat. Typically though, I have to go to unit base for my costume fitting and location for hair and make-up.

My costume is horrifyingly white and clean. There’s only one of them. I have to look immaculate. The whole purpose of my character is to disapprove of how the important character is turned out. It’s a living, darling, and I’m very happy with it. But Christ. I don’t want to touch my clothes. I can’t drink coffee in costume. I’ll have to be super careful. Plus it’s basically made out of plastic.

Even though it was just a test, I had a trailer with my character name lined up for me in the park. It smelt brand new. Sitting in it I could look out at the trees of Hyde Park, and the runners. “What are you filming?” I would hear them ask to other people in earshot of me. I would hear people vaguely avoid response. Even if we haven’t signed an explicit NDA we still know that we have to be very very careful. These huge moving sets… So many of them all over the world. I have to say, I thought they’d be more prevalent in my life over the last twenty years. My first job was all about it. I never expected the drought that only really broke about three years ago.

“Hair and make-up are ready for you now.”

The make-up wagon is always a fun community with a specific voice. This one aligns with my preferences very closely. Ocean makes me look fabulous and they tell me about how everybody in the wagon loves cats and coffee. Both easy things to love, sure. But… I am given one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had on a set, and I find strangers who are as concerned about my sick cat friend as I am. This is a lovely group. Shame my character is only in one scene. I feel at home.

More soon with these guys and then off to Cornwall. Man, I fucking love my life when I get to do this kind of thing. Thank you universe. This is what I have been working towards.

Am I really gonna write about this?

Hmm

Yeah so. We are humans. We are bags of infected meat banging up against each other. We can’t pretend to be perfect and anyone who has a friend who does pretend to be perfect can refer to this blog where I try to remind you that we are deeply flawed.

I’m usually very careful in public loos. I put paper on the seat. But I’m sometimes in a hurry. Sometimes in the past I have let time pressure cause me to be less careful. I can tell you now, don’t do that. I can think of two times in the last fortnight that I’ve been in such a hurry I’ve barely looked, outside of the very basic wipe. Turns out you can never be rushed where motorway service stations are concerned.

“Hi, is this the phone clinic?”

“Yes. How can I help?”

“So I’ve got something that I think is fungal, right on the bit of my arse that touches the loo seat. It looks like a verruca. But it’s on my bum. I got someone to take a photo. I can send it if you want? It’s about the size of a two pee piece.”

I send it. He calls me back. “You are bang on. I think it’s fungus too. Get something like Daktacort. If it’s still there in like ten days then get back to us, but unless you’ve been bitten by a tick lately then it’s probably what you think it is.”

Yay… But boo. I am disease ridden. Last possible tic bite is July so it’s somebody’s horribly bumfungus. I’ll have to be really mindful using public loos, in the way that whichever asshole had this before me wasn’t. It looks like a verruca. It itches. I am not at all happy about this turn of events. I’m very conscious about where my fingers go now. Applying cream, into my eyes for contact lenses, through my hair…

It’s interesting to think about disease spread nowadays. I’ve been back in London and considering what we’ve been through and the step into flu season now, I’m honestly not sure if I find it refreshing or weird that nobody gives a fuck about personal space again. Maybe we will always be a bit more aware – I remember getting flu after being too polite to move when someone streaming sat down beside me on the Victoria Line. Now I might move. We all think a bit more about disease, and just like they always have in some countries, we have people masking up if they are experiencing symptoms.

Still though, most people don’t give a fuck. I’m hearing reasonable people parrot incomprehensible science-negative rubbish about what they think is going on. Buried in it is always loads of excuses why we needn’t take personal responsibility. Loads of stuff shifting the battleground from what’s actually happening to something that’s made up by one of the dumb stoned hacker guys from 8-chan.

I’m an actor. I work in a cosmetic industry. My brand is important as it determines my job prospects. The things and the ways I consider to be important in terms of communication they aren’t universal. I am perfectly happy to tell you I am currently mister arsefungus. But who knows, there might be someone in silicon valley looking for the new face of their brand. Maybe this will be the thing that takes me out of the running. Hey ho.

I pride myself on being … this. On going to the place we aren’t supposed to. But… I’m worried because I NEED to be working more in my industry now, to justify the years. I write this shit nightly. I’ll never be the shiny liar… But can I get the work I need when Epsom Garbage from The Daily Fear can do a basic Google search and find me telling you all that I gave a strange large round itchy fungusring in my ass? “Employed actor Al Barclay once had cooties. Eeew”

I’ve got cooties. Hug me anyway.

And so back to Hampstead. The difference a year makes!

This time, a year ago, I met some new people and I was indoctrinated into a slightly odd walk for Halloween. We were going around being creepy in Hampstead. We did it and it was glorious. At the time I was just transitioning out of Mel’s Flat up there. I was still trying to use it and keep it in good nick, but somebody oblivious to the practicalities had filled the landlords ear with spurious figures. “On Parliament Hill? You could be getting a squillion squids! And she’s paying you how much?”

The boiler was fucked, but we worked around it. We could make it work and we knew what made it stop. It was liveable. The washing machine was fine so long as you know how to replace the fan-belt. The carpet in the bathroom was horrible with damp. My friend had dealt with a total lack of engagement and improvement from her landlord for twenty years. She spent her own money when she had to, but only when she absolutely had to, knowing that it was going to take years through the landlord and she’d never get anything back. I learnt from her by phone how to fix the washing machine and the boiler. She had made many DIY spot-fixes over decades of prompt rent, but the bulk of it the place was just bust – it needs gutting to justify the landlords behaviour. Insecure windows, crumbling grout, bad carpets and plumbing and lights… I lived there in the summer of lockdown though and it was beautiful, partly for the geography. Sadly the landlord decided she could get much more… I don’t think she will. I would lay money that she now has an empty flat. She was being baselessly greedy, and she made my friend homeless. A baseless and damaging gesture by someone who has never really thought about what they have for free.

A year ago though, I was still there. I was part of a team making a spooky walk around the heath. The walk is happening again. The locations are different. I’ll have to find / make up different stories. And I won’t have the wonderful common blood of working in Hampstead and needing to be there the next the morning as well to pack boxes, with a bed to sleep in over the gap. So yeah, October: anybody you can think of in Hampstead who might need a catsitter, send them me. I won’t be going to Uruguay until November and not at all if my current run of filming carries on …

Right now I’m home after a scout, and thinking of the difference between rolling home to Hampstead last year and going all the way to Chelsea now…

I took no photos but of this thing, one of many plugged into a wall. I’m just trying to work out what the heck it is… Our best guess is that it helps stop the ancient wall from bowing…

On her way to teach her morning yoga, Lou stuck a day parking permit into Bergman. You gotta pay on Sundays normally down here owing to the fact that everybody from London comes down to the coast on the weekend. By giving me that little piece of paper she gave me a day free of worrying about him. We didn’t use him. We still went on an adventure.

Down to the Marina, and up to the top of the multistorey carpark near ASDA where all the guys that do house clearances try and flog their tut. Ann eclectic mix of random crap and I wanted none of it apart from perhaps a little bit of fromage from the rude cheese-man who overcharges and literally doesn’t want to sell you his cheese.

Then as we wandered down the coast we ran into Ryan. He’s part of how I met Lou. He designs the costumes for Creation many of which are made by Lou. I wore some bits in The Tempest. Ryan and I stood and spoke about that show down by the marina. It was timely, that mischievous one we did right at the start of lockdown on zoom. It catalysed some really interesting ongoing conversations.

Then we just kept wandering. A lack of decent coffee and a mild day at high tide took us all the way to Rottingdean, so we sat in the gardens of Rudyard Kipling’s old house and shut our eyes in the late summer heat.

Then we stuffed our little faces with a huge Sunday lunch at The Plough Inn, got the bus home and watched the first three episodes of Sandman – THEY MADE IT!!!! INCREDIBLE.

I had no need of dinner. One course was plenty from The Plough. It was GOOD.

I am now replete, calm, entertained and barely injured from a good long playing session with Tessie.

Having had a little bit of a tickly cough for the last few days I was somewhat dreading this morning. I’ve a costume fitting on Monday and someone from the production company had to come round to my flat in the morning and stick a cotton bud into my tonsils. “What happens if I get that bonus red line?” I worried.

Email just came through and I’m off the hook. No nasties. Just too much snoring. It was an unusual experience though to stand on my doorstep on a sunny day and have a young woman ask me “which nostril do you prefer?”

That nastiness having been completed, I bundled myself down to Brighton, picked up Lou and we spun out to St. Leonards. Compared to Brighton and Eastbourne it’s pretty calm over there down Hastings way, although I guess it was only about two days ago that they dumped an unprecedented amount of silage into the sea there so that might have discouraged the London tourist crowd. I like the feel of it there. My friend has got a posse of outspoken and positive humans there, and we briefly joined that coterie for her birthday. Then we hived off. I have barely had any time to see Lou recently, and it’s not going to get any less busy in either of our existences in the run up to Christmas. My social anxiety was on full power, so smalltalk was not really in my capacity, but we had some good if snatched conversations before Lou and I went and grabbed pizza at Rustico.

I’m tired today though. It was just volunteering with Scene and Heard last week, but the responsibility is wearing. By half six I was already running out of fuel, so we found evening coffee in an old swimming baths down by the seafront. They’ve converted it into a huge underground skate park. Still some of the mosaics are in place. A huge cavernous space, and I’m glad they’ve found a way to make it accessible for people. That area of St Leonard’s is populated widely by alternative minded people living their best life.

Hot sun all day there, but it fades fast at this time of year. Suddenly despite recent coffee I was cold and shifting to sleepy again standing above the grey tide and the shingle. We bundled back into the car and hit the mission back to Brighton.

Now I’m back in Lou’s cosy home, the sea to my left, the cat to my right. The Saturday night drunkies are out on the streets shouting and I’m very glad not to be amongst them. I am going to sleep well, sleep firmly and every time I snore I’ll get punched which will be good for my throat.

Things went well. I think.

This morning we went through the play together. “Do you want to say more here?” “No.” We went through every line. “Here?” “No.” My playwright was happy. The other day at the end of writing she got tired and just said “and now he says goodbye and leaves.” We eventually expanded things into a brief exchange that made sense of the exit. Today we were asked to put a button on the play. There were so many wonderful possibilities, but I wanted it to be hers not mine so I sat on my ideas completely. I’m glad I did. She only put in one more line and even that was reluctant but it works. She really didn’t want more text. But … the line was a good one. And her whole attitude is helpful for writing and, frankly, it aligns with what I’ve been doing here for so long. I often put out my first draft. No revision. There isn’t enough time in the day to make it sexy. It’s why this crap will never get me a job in my spare time as columnist.

Sometimes I emergency edit the next day, just because I am sometimes writing … augmented. I might get terribly obsessed with a detail and go circular and then wake up in the morning and disagree with myself. That happened recently.

Today was lovely. We went back to The Wellcome Collection. Our team’s writer showed Jill the painting that inspired the whole thing, and they talked about it. The dance of death.

She’s something of a linguist, already interested and learning French on the curriculum and Latin extra. This is the first German she’s hit on and it clearly struck her. I can imagine her ending up in Berlin.

The art on this C18th oil painting is mischievous and rich, and death is made to look like kinda fun. Death varies the dance depending on what the person does, and they all hang out in the middle before going off to wherever it is souls go to. Death holds the builder by both of those hard hands. The soldier is held just by the sword arm and with a threatening gesture. We see actions and consequences. Eden leading to hell. Crucifixion leading to heaven. My writer has a faith and her mother isn’t there. This is a considered piece in the way that we don’t really consider such things anymore. As I’ve just been saying – this blog is just extruded nightly without edit or thought. You can see that the painting you can see above has been thought through and lovingly crafted.

Death is coming for all of us, and for everything and everybody we love. All of us will join that dance. If the dance goes anywhere, that’ll be for us to discovet. But the inevitability of it… That’s something they are all just properly precessing now. My playwright isn’t the only one. Death. 14 is a good age to start to properly look at it. Making peace with it can only come much later really, or through terrible hardship. But we all have a timer. It is running out. This is the one life we have this time. And still we procrastinate or fail to represent ourselves. It’s crazy when you think about it…

I’m done with it now. The play goes to the actors, and a director. It’ll be put on in late September with costume and props and even some tech, at Theatro Technis. I’m not acting in this one so I’ll just get to enjoy the finished product. We had a first reading upstairs in The Wellcome. I sat with the other dramaturgs and we just had a lovely time watching. I’ll be something random again before long I’m sure. But this time, the writing was a powerful part of the mentoring and helped me get a deeper handle on the whole game of making something out of nothing.

Little baby sheep, and we eat them. I often think of my dad when I eat lamb. Of all the meats, the most complicated one for my vegetarian father was lamb. I think his parents might have had some sheep. It doesn’t quite fit my inherited picture – his dad Jamie Barclay was running whiskey into America from Scotland. JB lived the second half of his life with a policeman’s bullet in his gut. Apparently it was visible through the skin, gradually being pushed out. Perhaps he used what he had made to look after sheep. I don’t know much about my unknown mobster grandpa.

So, a lamb is lamb for a year. Just a year. No more. After that the second year they call it hoggart. Then after that it’s mutton – the stuff they call ‘meat” in Indian restaurants. They aren’t offering lamb, nor should they l. You are gonna be fine with a “meat” vindaloo. You’re not the princess and the pea.

Dad was a vegetarian in the eighties, by choice and yes, with a degree of flexibility. He was extremely well traveled. In some circumstances you starve if you can’t compromise. He hit on The Gerson Technique when his cancer manifested though.. Extreme abstinence. He mostly had juice and supplements and enemas for years at the end of his life. But at the very end, perhaps when he knew that the pathogens were finally winning no matter what, he would eat mutton pies, and he’d pretend that it was my brother and I eating them. So yeah, he missed eating mutton. That was the meat that he returned to at the end. Grown up sheepmeat. Baah

I did some research about sheep. This all happened because my friend told me they would be with me in “two shakes of a lamb’s tail. I got to thinking: what is the longest possible time between the first and second shake.

If a lamb were to shake its tail once, immediately, upon being born and then if it were to lose the ability to make such a tail shake action until just before its first birthday… Well, it means that the distance between the first and second lambtail shake can be up to buy no more than a single calendar year. If it shakes that booty any later, it’s too late, it’s hoggart.

I’m in Richmond. Falling asleep. Done for the night, hanging out with friends. Thinking about ridiculous pointless phrases. Life is good. But I’ve gotta connect with my playwright tomorrow. I’m glad. A touch more space to make sure she feels it’s hers…