Author: albarclay

It’s just before midnight. I left the house at 8 and I just got in.

A friend of mine moved to Chelmsford today. She has bought a 16th century grade two listed cottage with three sheds and a greenhouse and a garden. It’s beautiful but I’d bang my head if I lived there. I loved the age and the garden and the potential in the sheds. I loved some of the rooms. I didn’t love the upstairs area. Too crowded. I like a high ceiling.

Jack and I started at noon loading a Luton van from an old council estate in North West London. I was proud of myself, and doubly so when Jack commented on it. I’ve had enough practice to get really good at van loads. Just as well really because we had a fuckton of stuff to take. I tetrissed every inch of that van. We got it all in by a whisker and closed the door.

No blankets or ratchet straps and a client who was a friend of mine, yes, but was incredibly particular about her things. I was terrified to scuff anything. Some previous loads ended up shifting as I drove. Things pile up against the roll-door making it hard to open. You have to force it up if that happens, and then there’s an avalanche. I wanted to avoid that eventuality, knowing I’d be opening it with her present at the other end, and knowing that if there was an avalanche I’d get it in the ear.

Haulage Al wanted to look professional. He didn’t want to break anything, or even make her think that anything was at risk of being broken. And he underquoted again. Sixty knicker an hour. We were at it for seven hours on the clock not counting the two hours back home from unload, and the hour in from van hire which I didn’t charge. Van hire was £100. I need my own van really. Fuel was £50. Jack was my plus one and I had told him £25 an hour. We ended up splitting what was left after expenses and it was not a negative day but I was saved from losing money on it by the fact that the load involved an awkward flight of stairs, and the unload was a long drive away. And we had an extra half an hour out of her realising as we were on our way there that her car keys were packed in a box in the back of the van.

I’m just writing about work. Honestly I’ve had such a practical head on today and I’ve been lifting things so much that I’m not sure I’m capable of insight. I think I’d be better off just going to sleep and waking up in Spring without having to do any haulage.

Heading back up to London in no particular hurry, I stopped at a car wash to give Bergman a good clean-up.

He’s had nothing for months, through all the red dust. Turns out he’s taken a couple of hits, which I hadn’t noticed until he was shiny. That’s London for you. Likely drunk people in Chelsea attempting to parallel park. I’m going to sell him before long as he’s too costly for fuel and regarding capacity I tend to use a van anyway for haulage jobs, so I’ll probably need to find a toucherer-upper. I like him, he’s big and comfy and safe. But he is way too costly to run for me and for the planet, particularly back and forth to Brighton. And you only need and want a half decent car in London really. Just one that is compliant to all the new driving taxes.

I’m not really wanting to get a fully electric car as I think they are short sighted and will create a mess of needs. Everybody will have to upgrade their charging jacks every few years once enough people have them, just as we discovered we had to do with mobile phones once they were adopted. The batteries will get worse and worse as batteries always do. We will end up with chemicals seeping into the mud underneath millions of dead batteries with no infrastructure at all to dispose of them that doesn’t involve cost to the buyer. Millions of people bitter that they wasted so much money on something that has become totally worthless. It’s being implemented too quickly and without thought, the rollout. It’s gonna be a disaster. I’m not fighting against change here. I’ve just had a lifetime of observing short-termism. Ever bricked a phone, or an iPad or iPod etc? I bet most if you have. Electric cars will be a bigger brick that you can’t just put in a drawer and forget about. There’ll be dead ones everywhere and the chemical mess will be much more expensive. And nobody will want to take them for parts if the bulk of them is a fucked battery. Manufacturers and governments need to be thinking now about end of life or renewal for these things. They aren’t. They’ll be more profitable is we have to just dispose of them. We still have functional mechanical cars that are over 100 years old. Electric cars really don’t feel like they’re built to last long. I’m really not sold. Software updates, hardware adjustments, battery degradation… Nah. It’s not well enough thought through despite the shine.

I reached the city, looked around for some bits for my friend, and eventually ended up back up at the flat from the other day, cleaning things and sorting things and throwing things away for her. We are getting there, but it’s a terrible rush suddenly. Still so much lifetime paraphernalia to check through. We can make it shinier on the outside but we have to get right into the mix to really make sense of it all. For every twelve old copies of the Sun there’s one irreplaceable photo of her racing dad in an old motor car or somesuch. They remind me so strongly of the photos of my dad from that era – you haven’t got a clue who it is with the googles and helmet unless you have it written down underneath. It’s just a great big car with a number and some dude in it. It’s like the photo I found online of dad racing dragsters in like 1956. I had some tit called Duncan working as location manager on a film shoot I was helping fix once and he decided to shed suspicion on dad – and everything I said generally. It was when I was looking after Hex. He thought that the snake was an invention too. Dad is not easy to find online, but I dug for the dragster photo and of course he came back with “It just says his name in the caption. How do you know it’s him?” I told him because I had always known, and suggested that maybe just because he has always striven to the ordinary doesn’t mean that everybody does the same. I kind of love to see these black and white photos of my father and my friend’s father in their racing cars – even though they are black and white they have more colour than the likes of Duncan will ever have.

The Brighton Marathon was just out of the front window of the cat palace as I woke up this morning. I wandered over and watched them from the balcony. All these people slogging their poor bodies so the CEO of a charity can have a nicer car. The sun was shining, with a cool breeze. Lou and I encouraged the runners over breakfast.

Then we went into the throng down on the beach. There they all were with their families. Wrapped in tinfoil, shoes off, walking gingerly or sitting looking spent or getting massages. Finishers. It’s a big feat. And yes I know not every charity is a miasma of corruption. They had collectively raised a lot of money for so many different good causes. I was surrounded by dedicated, brave and ambitious people. Watching them run was definitely a great deal more relaxing than running myself though. I might continue to find other ways of donating to charities. I like my knees too much.

We ended up on Brighton Pier. It was relatively quiet there.

There’s a man called Ivor who works on the pier, doing something very similar to something I did for a while. Reading fortunes.

Here’s a blog from my tarot. You might have noticed I’m doing linky things suddenly. Why not?! Time to bring my hits up. So, Ivor… He’s in an old Gypsy Caravan on the way into the pier. Well located. And likely with better cushions than the one I sat in on Carnaby Street etc.

“Did you build this?” “Nah. It was here already. They just let me use it.” He has a gentle sense of humour, our Ivor. And he’s got a lovely way with his medium. I’m in my sunglasses (they’re lensed so it was that or blind tarot). He probably thinks I reckon I’m a rockstar. I’m not deliberately making it difficult for poor Ivor. I look at him, let him look at me.

To his left he has all his old retired public decks, worn down by so many shuffles over many years of working with them. He’s been in Brighton for thirteen years. Before then he was in Covent Garden and he thought that was forever until some arsehole council guy moved his pitch out of the thoroughfare and the footfall dried up.

It’s always a concern when you pass the deck to somebody. My heart always sinks when they riffle the damn cards.

He passed his well worn third deck to me. I pile shuffled them. It’s efficient, breaks the patterns, and it doesn’t damage them. I’m not going to hasten the end of a well worked in deck.

He had made me sanitise my hands first. He also had a little wooden screen that he was expertly manipulating the whole time to try and make sure he wasn’t going to get closed down by the old cove.

As ever with a good reader, he has arrived at his own ways through trial and error, and there are things that were unique to me about his style. I’m constantly wittering on about tarot as you know. As often as not there’s a deck in my pocket. But I don’t often go and pay real money to somebody else. Good to do it occasionally though even just to contemplate adaptations and interpretations, and to break my own patterns. He offers a corporate service, which is a familiar angle. Sometimes it’s great to have something a little quiet and honest at your messed up celebrity party. It can get out of hand from time to time – “Uhh do you mind if I do some cocaine here while you’re reading, mate?” And I haven’t got the caravan or the time to do it as anything other than a festival shift these days.

He got me to count out ten cards and he marked my pile with a stone. He chose the stone – maybe a black agate? I had bundled in to his caravan in full gobshite intellectual mode, wearing my sunglasses. He likely wanted to amplify instinct. I’d have been worried if I had seen myself come in like that. Intellectuals are so blocked they forget how many ways there are to be clever.

He got me to count another ten cards. Full double Celtic cross here. I’ve never seen it before, never done it before. I’m immediately sucked in to his words and his quick hands and his soft voice.

And he was good. No bullshit. No ego. I’m not gonna meet a tall dark stranger. He’s not trying to force meaning. He’s connecting cards, working fast and eloquently, letting me make my own connections too. Twenty cards makes for a lot of information and it also allows him to downplay the arsehole cards. I love a few fuckercards in a reading. Life is messy. I had 3 of swords in unconscious. He didn’t want to focus on that one – you never want to focus on the negative. I knew exactly why it was there though and even though I welcomed it I was glad to see it crossed with The Chariot which sneaks into every single reading I ever get and I know why that was in unconscious too. It was a very very clear spread and clear message, with an excellent kind man at the fount of it. He drew extra cards to clarify a vague outcome and they kept on aligning with each other. Vague opportunity, vague opportunity vague opportunity. All subject to the old spinning wheel. Around we go. I’m an actor for crying out loud. Life is chance and grabbing hold of the sticks of vague opportunity.

I love it. Symbols. There’s so much you can do with symbols. We assign meaning to everything if we can. We choose in the moment of assignation whether to make that meaning bad or good. Black cat crosses your path? Loads of people think it’s good luck, loads of people think it’s bad. You make the choice.

Ivor is seeking the good and he reminded me to do the same. He pulls Wheel of Fortune and even before it’s on the table he’s saying ‘luck, you’re gonna have good luck.” You could just as easily say “Oh God and it’s all up to random chance!”

At the end he left me remembering that we make the world we are about to step into. We create or destroy the opportunities. It’s easy for a brain to go to an overthought or cynical pathway. Witness my comment about where the charity money for the marathon goes. Ivor told me a story about myself by interpreting symbols, and the story reminded me not to overthink things. He then shared a bit of his wisdom and a bit of his insight, based on his pretty good assessment of me through my treble camouflage of beard, sunglasses and words. I left with an angle, positive things to think about, insights into my patterns and warnings I’d given myself. Not bad for £25, really.

I’m sure if you were to say the magic words “Al Barclay Sent Me,” he would still charge you £25 and say “Who’s Al Barclay?” Nevertheless you’d then get a really insightful tarot reading in the liminal space between sea and shore. If there’s magic didn’t much of it sink with Atlantis? I dunno. Nor do you. He’s not selling magic but if he was and if magic worked he’d be in a good place for it. My thought not his. He’s not pretending to be mister mysterious magic man by any means. He’s extremely adept at interweaving symbols and observing people. I’m a keen amateur and I complicate my hooey by all sorts of random unquantifiable beliefs. Maybe he does too. Doesn’t matter. Ivor’s a pro. Thirteen years in Brighton, probably a good decade or more in London before that.

Better than me coming at you at a festival in a ringmaster coat and a bowler hat with eyes like dinner plates.

At Kingley Vale in the South Downs North West of Chichester sits one of the oldest gatherings of Yew Trees in Western Europe.

It’s hard to date yews. They hollow in the middle so you lose the rings, and they can pause their growth in bad years. These ones are old. There are many of them, and they have lived long – a gathering of ancient twisted giants. Surely some of the oldest living things in England.

You know me and trees, oh constant reader. Here is a memory of my quest in Northern California. That trip was for redwoods – another ancient spirit. Today I went home, to the yew – the home grown. The temple tree.

Often they can be found in churchyards, single specimens, older than the church. Plaques will occasionally try to persuade you that they pull miasma from the air so they are put there for that reason. Common sense will tell you that they are in places of power – the yew is a canopy. It is a natural temple. There are many beliefs much older than the one we see most frequently. Go quietly under your next yew tree. Listen to it.

Just don’t eat any of it. They kill you nice and fast. Although … I hesitate to say it but the berries are okay. So long as you definitely don’t swallow any of the seed in the middle of the berry, which is mercifully large… Swallow that and you might experience a spot of sudden death. Do you like those odds? Don’t mess with yews.

People liked the wood for bows, although apparently the shape of the branches in Southern Europe were preferred and imported in large numbers in time for us to shoot all the French with longbows at Agincourt. Still I’m sure we lost most of our old growth yews to war, so the ones at Kingley are even more of a welcome survivor. Believe it or not, half of the ones that survived the rise and fall of fletching got taken out by Canadian troops training in the area during World War 2. “Target Practice”. Somebody didn’t like the oojie-boojie druidic slant to these gorgeous trees. The iron child of the bow cut into its ancestor.

They entwine with one another there in the vale, seeming to writhe with ancient life, dappling the light beneath their twisted canopies. I would never want to shoot one. Their trunks are alive and strange and eloquent, torn with mouths and noses and bright shocks of colour. They feel wise, they feel thoughtful and they feel old. A plaque on the trail oversimplifies their genesis. It tells us they were planted in the 860’s to celebrate a victory against the vikings. We may have had that victory, and some trees may have been added, but my instincts and my reading tell me that most of those trees are much older than a mere grand and a bit.

Places like Kingley Vale are powerful and important – plugged into a deeper meaning about how we used the natural world before we complicated it. Once you start to see our yews as our natural temples, it is hard not to confer them with that power. Strange twisted poisonous beauties, squat and stripped and bright and gnarled, green needles and red berries, holding their space in the plant world through light theft and poison, providing outdoor temples to our early faith structures, ingredients for our witches, wood for our bows. A good time of year to go as well. When it’s hot and the sap is flowing they can get into your head. You’re not gonna keel over from breathing them though – otherwise they’d be fenced off. Just be wary of eating, and I’m told mushrooms growing from them should be avoided…

Lou and I spent a few hours in delighted contemplation of our natural and spiritual history through these beauties. Then we drove back to Brighton. And watched Iron Man 3.

Brighton once more. The cat palace. Here, for three weeks now, Lou has been the willing servant to two extremely pampered beasts. They sup from silver platters containing a cornucopia of flavours and textures, turned over on rotation, frequently rejected entirely. Strokes are on tap. They watch a movie at night. At half past four in the morning they desire their goat’s cheese, and they shall be given it.

Lou will be here a few more weeks looking after these beauties. I might get to stay here again before she returns to the catless seaside garret.

I’m very fond of those little pussies despite their ways – either an astronomical degree of friendly incompetence or a vicious reserve with quick sharp spikes. Animals have always been my friends, and these pampered fools have started to make sense of me as I blunder around and occasionally fondle them with my fat hand. Even the spiky one occasionally lets me rub her belly, but frankly only when she wants me to give her something from the fridge.

Not wanting to be eating worse than they were we bought a lovely big salmon fillet at Waitrose and consumed a healthy meal at the long table in the atrium darling, before watching the sunset from the balcony. Oh it’s a hard life. Then we retired to the boudoir to consume the second half of the new Dune movie. We both love it, for slightly different reasons but we come together in a passionate appreciation of the world building that has gone on. It only seemed natural to watch the DVD extras.

So many people come together to make something like that. Watching it a second time knowing that the sequels weren’t funded and might not have been greenlit at all if it had tanked, I’m appreciative of the team’s skill in leaving us wanting more but giving us enough, and I like the fact that pretty much the last thing you hear is “this is just the beginning”. The DVD extras carry the feeling you get from watching all the lovely actors talking about the lovely thing they were beautifully paid to be do. Universe, I want to be in the sequels. Make it so. Lou was loving all the stuff about the costumes as well, and listening to the director talking about how he wanted he worms to feel really connected me to his artistry.

Film sets are remarkable places to be and that looks like it was a good set. Good people coming together to make these sometimes hugely ambitious fables. I want to travel for work wherever possible and I stay streamlined so it’s easy for me to do that. Saudi was incredible, but just over the track from our huge site was a little nest of tents where I knew they were making a movie. Sometimes I’d find myself looking over at those tents wondering if it was a Dune 2 unit. “You should just show up there and tell them you’re an actor,” says your auntie who read an interview in The Radio Times once. But that doesn’t work these days. Probably never did. And anyway I had a race to help with over there.

Things come when you make the space and do the work. I’ve been a bit better at doing the work than making the space. The experience with my friend’s dad’s stuff yesterday is a good reminder to make it. If it’s not Dune 2 it can be something else. But time to pull that shit in.

First though I’ll be sleeping in the cat palace for a day or so, eating much more healthily than I’m used to and farting like Ivor the Engine. Toot toot, all.

That was a hard day. Helping out a friend.

Mid pandemic, just when things were feeling really awkward, my friend’s father died quite suddenly in the room I slept in last night. Since then I know she’s tried but it’s not been easy for her to look in there and make some change. It doesn’t help that the dad was a hoarder, and without an eye on cleanliness. His room has been unthought of since he died. All his hoarded things, all left there with the cat enjoying the peace and quiet. She needs that room to pay those bills which have suddenly jumped so much. I know from experience how things like that are virtually impossible to sort without two willing participants.

Wardrobes full of disintegrated ancient vintage woollen suits so completely decimated by moths that they didn’t even really have use for theatre, but with a Mont Blanc pen in one of the pockets. Drawers still fluffed with the dry carcasses of thousands of exterminated bedbugs, but with potentially interesting cigarette cards stuck with the organic detritus. Junk, junk and junk. Once again the ephemera of this varied life, neglected into dust and carelessness at the end. I’ve seen photos today, read cards. I found his racy mags and his wardrobe liquor stash. I liked him alive – he was a racing driver back in the day, beating out early Lotus cars. The same rough era as my dad – maybe twenty years younger – but Scottish too. Much of the ephemera is connected to that obsession and is so familiar to me with my dad’s effects. Racing trophies. Pictures of old cars. Articles about him and old cars that weren’t old back then. Flashy shiny memories of a life that suddenly stopped not so long ago.

We made some change in there but there’s so much to do. I’ll have to be back next week. I hit a wall and went home. All the organic matter stuck to me. All the dust I’ve inhaled. Even the cat got weirded out.

Tomorrow I’m back to the flat of another friend’s dead mother to look for a crucial document I still can’t find. ’tis the season. First all my friends got married. Then kids. Now dying parents. Next up there’s second marriage. Then I guess we all start to kark it.

I’m gonna get the hell out of all this trapped energy I’ve been moving now though. There’s more to move but we made a solid start. It’s a lesson about what I might be able to achieve in my own flat with application. We put about 20 bags in the rubbish and took six to the charity shop. We took a horrible sofa out, despite having to fight the cat.

Shortly I’ll be off to Brighton to see Lou and just be for a while.

It occurs to me that we all have to try to make it easier for whichever poor fool will have to go through our stuff when we drop. I’m feeling closer to the old chap than we ever were when he was alive. I had to ditch some pretty personal things. We went through everything to be sure we weren’t throwing away precious things… More to do. We accumulate so much. Maybe there’s something in the fascism of kondo. I do love being surrounded by ridiculous random stuff. But I don’t need all the tissues and old newspapers… I guess with stuff we have to choose our battles always.

Finally through all the malaise, a chance for a day that reminds me why I love my adopted city.

I hauled out of bed to go to Hamlet at The National. The Dorfman ex Cottesloe. Claire was Gertrude. Any constant reader will know who I mean by Claire as she’s one of the unfortunate friends who just get named now in this blog without permission. Twelfth Night. Willows. Life. Claire was a wonderful Gertie in a fun quick Hamlet. I did The Factory long enough to know Hamlet backwards. This was a wonderful audience to be part of, and it’s a wonderful show to witness.

“It’s all a bit green,” says Guildencrantz. The actors are constantly freely ad-libbing in their own language, and then sliding into bits of text from the “enshrined” version. The name confusion of those two unctious courtiers Rosenguildencrantzstern – it is played more clearly than I’ve ever seen it. We see the royals not really giving a fuck so long as the job is done. And we see Hamlet changing the letter to the English King. And we watch them die. They are fun. And they die. “Why did they die?” asks a small child behind me. “Hamlet changed the letter so it wasn’t him,” the mother attempts. But yes, small child. You’re right. Hamlet didn’t need to do that. Arguably Hamlet is an absolute fucker for doing it. Good to hear him called out by a child. He didn’t need to. Stoppard cashed in on that. But yeah. These stories by Shakespeare – they have edges. Hard edges. This is part of why his work has persisted. We believe that he knows we will notice these things and care and interpret. “It’s yours not mine,” is what Pinter would say. We hope that Shakespeare was equally free. He was an actor after all.

“Are they all going to die?” asks the small voice behind me even as Ophelia drowns herself with words from To be or not to be. “No, I think the Queen lives,” says the mum. Horatio is cut from this version. Normally somebody lives to tell the story. Not here. Everybody is for it in this version. It’s bleak. The incredible awful unnecessary poison death of Gertrude meets with a slightly steely commentary from our young commentator “no mum. She’s dead too. They’re just all going to die in now. All of them.”

Good old Hamlet. It’s a play about how, when we have everything in place, we still don’t see things through until we are forced to. We can let our whole life go by ignoring our own needs in favour of what we think are the needs of others. And while we do it, the likes of Claudius take all the territory that would be more beautiful and rich if it was just ours and freely ours. There isn’t much room in the world now, and the kind people might be the best for whatever the job is, but kindness is a recessive gene. Every time I see Hamlet it reminds me to kick forward. Every time I play Claudius I think about what he represents – the ruthlessness and entitlement. I loved this version. I was proud of Claire. And I felt galvanised.

Post Hamlet, drinks too early in the day. Joy and fun with the friends and associates connected to the show. A drop too much wine and I found myself in Waterloo so I went to see my old dear companion Hex, who is now beautifully homed.

It’s been a long time for the pair of us.

And now I’m at The Green Note in Camden. Jazz and spannacoppita and a spot of hummus. Very much the guest of a wonderful friend. Another aspect of this town. And fuck it – I love it here. I love the yes. The variance. And real people are about to play me music.. And I’m gonna listen.

Good lord. It seems I’m constantly knackered when I finally get down to writing these at the moment. I have this complicated relationship with my work ethic where I think of it as a wasted day if I let it go by negatively. Dad was only with me at the start of my adulthood. He imposed the idea of negative and positive days. Days where the income doesn’t beat the expenditure – they’re negative and to be avoided. I spend my life avoiding them. But it’s getting harder. We have to earn more to stand still.

We are governed by talking grapes. We are governed by little scraps of horseshit stuck on the side of your boot. We are governed by rocks. We are governed by venal self serving narrow minded fuckwits.

Our home secretary hates everybody. Our culture secretary probably thought she was dealing with bacteria when she accepted, and would certainly be better placed if she was. Our chancellor has no ethics and is so rich it would be impossible for him to even pretend to have perspective. Our prime minister is tightly evasive little bully. But… I can write this, and there isn’t even the possibility that I’ll go to prison for it. This freedom of speech is anathema to the likes of Tsar Vladimir. He has been autocratic for so long now, and he has been firing resources to try and use our freedom of speech against us – to try to undermine our confidence in our own freedom. Yeah he’s helped mislead people in elections, I’m sure there’s Russian money behind some of the absolute poppycock that is now emerging from the well meaning hearts of some of my “wellness” friends who have been YouTube radicalised. We have been sleepwalking through an information war for years that has, at its centre, Vlad the little rat-faced bully. This little Tsar, carrying his huge ego and his world beating nuclear arsenal – and don’t forget that missiles have an expiry date. Warheads made in the seventies – they’re going to have to be remade at vast expense or … Maybe just used. And we want to call him a war criminal because he’s committed so many war crimes. But he doesn’t recognise our structures and never will. For him to admit he’s a criminal would be for him to accept our morality. Even though it is his orders that have led to this well documented rape and large scale murder, I can’t see any way to end it because as far as he is concerned he will take advantage of the idea of “innocent until proven guilty”. He thinks that the freedom we have to say that Boris is a feckless liar makes us weak. He wants us to look bad, because nobody in Russia can say that Putin is a nasty little homicidal rat who is killing the children of his own people to serve some lost ideal of a soviet past that nobody wants back again but him anyway.

So I’m just immersing myself in work. Got a spot of theatre, a spot of filming, this and that keeping myself ticking over. I can’t think too much about leaders because everywhere I turn I see nasty little creeps. How have we come to this? Where are the statesmen? Even the strong and eloquent leaders with ethics are being deconstructed by radicalised morons on YouTube – and those voices, even less clever than the leaders themselves – they have way too much traction. We are slipping. Slipping. We are just getting stupider and stupider, and losing the ability to judge for ourselves. I AM TELLING YOU TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF! DO AS I SAY.

Ugh.

Maybe if I was wearing fashionable clothes and doing this by video.

It probably doesn’t help that I watched dumb old Travis Bickle stumble his way through life in Taxi Driver. It’s still a wonderfully made movie but he’s a depressing little prat.

I stopped halfway to Nuneaton to get a bite to eat. Appropriately enough for the destination I hadn’t eaten. #HereAllNight

I was a good hour out of London, just me and Bergman, my USB stick and clicker for tomorrow and a few clothes in a bag. It was spitting with rain, miserable, dark. Bergman needs a wash, but this rain is mostly filthy.

I get out of the car and pat my pockets down. Fuck. How did I get that far without noticing I had no debit cards with me? No cash. No means to get cash. The thing I thought was a card in my pocket was an old hotel keycard I had forgotten to return. Oops.

I had enough fuel to return home, but at the rate it’s selling for I didn’t want to burn it and drive an unnecessary few extra hours. So I turned to my phone.

It’s new and I’m funny about security. I haven’t set up Samsung pay as it keeps asking for my fingerprints and facial scan and things like that and I’m generally pretty uncomfortable about the extent to which we donate our entire existence to tech companies so they can sell it to advertisers. I’ve got nothing to hide but I want to hide it anyway and I will fight for the right to hide it. Still, today I found a use for the Samsung pay, and I gave my pound of flesh in exchange for convenience, as we all eventually do. Half an hour of swearing in my car, and I’ve avoided the fingerprint thing but there’s an app on my phone now that doubles as one of the cards I left at home. It works. And it probably knows everything about me. Did I read the terms and conditions? Does anybody ever?

I won’t need to buy much before I’m home but I wanted the option. Perhaps some fuel. Maybe a spot of food. Lunch? I’m in another Premier Inn now, so breakfast and coffee is laid on. I’ve cranked up the heating, washed thoroughly and I’m now regretting forgetting all my books. Likely an early bed will be the least depressing option. Then home again and back into the bewildering mix of things to do and think about. My agent rang with good news today so at least there’s a spot of filming on the horizon. It won’t stop me doing all the random dayjobs as always. Tomorrow I think it’s batteries again, or it might be electric cars. Either way I’ll be pretending to be an engineer. Because engineering is FUN! I don’t start until half ten so I’m gonna just wake up tomorrow and think about it then.

Nuneaton. There’s not much here I don’t think. It’s easier to London than I thought though. I probably could have driven up tomorrow morning but I just didn’t like the idea of fighting through rush hour. Better another faceless night in a Premier Inn, another inedible breakfast. I’m sleepy though and these suburban rural places have the advantage of being quiet. Time for another crazy-dream night.

Sometimes it can be fun doing a self tape. Tristan had two sides that were mostly incomprehensible. There’s a helicopter, there’s shooting, there’s swearing. The scene we had to tape comes in right in the middle, and there is no context whatsoever. None. Somebody shouts “fuck” off screen. Nothing hangs together. Actiontastic.

I was on foley. I had a solid whup whup gunship sound on my phone, routed through a speaker. I had an AK47 on short burst fire through an iPad. I was reading all the other humans who were unfortunately meant to be women but there was just me. We had actual fun, and I know for certain that it would have been easier to play that scene that was mostly Tristan saying “what’s happening!” WITH all the foley than without it. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Self tapes are part of the job now. I used to detest them. It’s such a big ask, to find somebody willing to do it with you when they have no skin in the game.

Tristan’s agent was in my year at Guildhall. We did a show together in Camden after leaving, to try and get the potential employers to watch us act. None of them came. Do they ever? He’s successfully agenting now. I’m still acting, still still still along with what like less than a fifth of my year group and that’s a good school. Today I tried to help my friend into an incomprehensible action movie job and remembered again how I might have a little bit of a boost if I just had somebody on the casting side who was rooting for me. We suspended a fan in an A frame. He bought the fab specially from Argos. I had to switch it on at the right moment so the helicopter would move his hair. Cheap but funny and it kind of worked. He was channeling Alan Rickman in Die Hard. I’d give him the job. Sadly it’ll probably go to somebody’s nephew or whatever but ’twas ever thus and all we can do is keep plugging.

I drove here, and afterwards it seemed logical to open a bottle of wine. I’m feeling great for it, despite it being the start of Ramadan. Time for a spot of good behaviour, joining the Lenten Christians and the Muslim world in a springtime fast. I’m wrapped up warmly in the Tristan snoring bed. A month of good behaviour? I can do that. I think… Ramadan Mubarak..X