Author: albarclay

Matinee crowd. I’m in my nightie. I’ve just been outrageously flirted with by a drunk audience member. I think that the wild beard thing I have got going on right now is not common in the law firms and accountancies of Jersey.

We are in Yet to Come. Jack is trying to work out where best to stand with the torch for eyeline. I’m doing some emoting. I kind of have to. A: Dickens is the epitome of sentimental text. B: One of that hammered lot from the nursery school has just knocked over a glass of wine. I know we have another show to do. I hear the glass do down on our “we haven’t got spares” tablecloth. The little bit of my head that has always been in production for this show is thinking “evening show drenched tablecloth eeeek I don’t want to have to field that audience member.”

It’s the bit of the show where I watch Bob Cratchit leaving work after the death of his son. In previous years we have had all sorts of tricks with doors and desks. In this version I’m looking at a light and there’s a ton of smoke coming at me.

The ghost of Jacob Marley is guiding me through this experience. My employee is Bob Cratchit. “Oh look,” say I as Ebenezer Scrooge, in this matinee show. And I hear a thump. “Oh no that’s the red wine,” comes the audience whisper. I remain focused, no matter how early it is. ProfessionAL. Unruffled.

I look into the billowing smoke in front of me. I must have done this show a hundred times by now. “Oh look,” I repeat to give them time to come back from worrying about the wine spill I’m worrying about and to focus on the action. I’ve got them again, I think. They are all looking at me as I stare into smoke. “It’s Bob Marley.” And I stop. I’ve said it. I’ve put the two names together. It’s the reggae artist. And I’m looking at a load of smoke as I say it.

FUCK.

Internal monologue: Ok ok how do I save this shall I make a joke? There he is with his guitar? No woman no cry. But this is a moment that I have always always been policed in to be jokeless… Jokes are not allowed in Yet to Come. One joke can fuck the whole thing. I have no way to fix this I conclude. I’ll just continue. They’ll question what they heard.

Jack, meanwhile, is laughing. I hear him. Now I’m doing it too.

They call this corpsing. Because the worst person for it to happen to is the one who is supposed to be dead. Followed closely by me in this moment.

This early Christmas matinee. This very drunk half capacity audience. Dammit.

I had to keep staring into the light with my back to the audience. It’s literally the straightest moment of the whole show. I managed to get my shit together in time to land the last few beats. But … Bob Marley. Ach well.

I remember the small island thing now.

When I was in my early twenties the sheer size of the actual world blew my tiny little mind. I’d traveled pretty extensively but in a protected manner. I had mostly lived on small islands and in exclusive resorts, in rarefied atmospheres. I auditioned for drama school from inside a tiny tiny little bubble of limited life experience dressed up as knowledge. God love Guildhall for seeing and getting behind that very gauche individual. I still carry scraps of him.

Thinking back to my grandparents who had lived in Jersey many years, they were in a small enough bubble that social things magnified quickly. Things felt bigger and more important than they were. A casual unguarded comment in a place like this can lead to a bitter almost Shakespearean level family feud that never abates and takes casualties. There were people my grandmother thought of as dreadful who I saw no harm in whatsoever. There were doubtless people who thought of her as dreadful too. Often it was to do with members of their friendship group. “Merty Plocket said that my cousin’s brother’s best shirt looked like it was from charity. Your friend Bink is friends with Merty Plocket. That means that Bink is a nasty rotten evil BASTARD. How dare he be friends with Plocket. Come on, we’re leaving.”

This island is considerably smaller than the one that contains London. Smaller things feel bigger.

I wrote about my old house and less than 10 hours after it was published it seems the current owners read my blog. As you know I don’t put this out widely at all. I’m not shouting and retweeting and hashtagging and linking. This is almost enough of a fanciful journal and a braindump that I sometimes forget that its public at all until I have a reminder like that. It felt odd that somehow so quickly a reasonably nonspecific day’s write up warranted a phone call. I guess it was trackback on the link after they got a few unexpected hits.

Either way it made me feel the walls closing in. I don’t like to think of things as small. It is an experience that has helped me get some sort of closure on one of the early wounds in my life – I was always devastated that we left that property. I was happy there, covered in mud with my mischievous grin and my fragile innocence still perfectly intact. And everybody was still alive. I didn’t know I was born. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

There are things to connect to here in this island but they don’t need to take in that land. There are intact memories. Shreds of nature. The sea, the sea!

Life is big and my perspective has exploded since I left here in my early twenties and the world happened. I don’t like it when things feel small nowadays. I like to view things as an explosion of possibility. I think maybe if I did move back here I would almost immediately eat my own arms and start a cult.

That’s not to say it’s off the table. Carol is delightful and the audiences are a constant pleasure. I just have to examine my actual needs and desires without getting distracted by all the shiny nostalgia. I don’t have property over here, and it’s not cheap even if you’re not looking at mansions.

Solstice full moon is helping shine a slightly more pragmatic light on things that have only existed in the realm of ideas until now. My job is stories but I’m not one. I need to do some practical thinking and a spot of what they like to call “adulting”… We’ll see where that goes. Meantime I’m supposed to be shopping for Christmassy things.

Once again a wonderful night of Carol. I love my work. It’s hard but it’s rewarding. This evening we had one of only two existing Jersey QCs come to the show and he ended up as Tiny Tim. He had his mother in the audience on her birthday. A good Tiny Tim makes everything better for us as he helps put a button on the show. He was a delight during and after. He helped me remember how this island is basically about the people. It’s small enough that you know everybody’s business very quickly. It’s big enough that we have been running at capacity for two weeks and we can still go to St Helier without getting stopped every few minutes.

I had another of those moments today when I questioned the wisdom of this daily blog.

I wear my heart on my sleeve and things pop out of me easily. You mostly get what you see with me and you see what you get. It works to my advantage as a filter and to my detriment when I need to impress people I don’t know. My friendships are usually very deep and take into account my ability to just accidentally speak my everything. I probably shouldn’t write a blog at all, really, as I put it all out there without filter and my heart is sunk into trying to work out how to best tell a story, rather than how to show myself in the best light. This is just a work of creative fiction after all, based on my slightly odd existence. As a fine example of the form I’m going to bring back Cucumbrivalis!!!

I reckon I’ll find my tribe here in Jersey one way or another if/when I return. I’ve already found some of them, and I’ve really become aware that there are good people here through the joyful humans that attend our show. In many ways there couldn’t be a better way for me to reconnect with the people who inhabit my old home than through Carol.

One more week of this and then I’m back to London again and to the winter. We are over the hump. The light is returning. I’m so much happier here. I’d love to stay. I just don’t have a roof over my head if I’m not renting one. Normally I’ve got the pull of my vocation taking me to London, but more and more that holds no weight as all the theatres are shutting down again.

Maybe Lou and I could hit the sunshine. That was always the hope for January… But not if everything is shut down again… Let’s just hope.

For now I’m just gonna read my book and hit the hay. At least I’m well fed.

“Oh yes. Did you have somebody’s ashes in that copper beech? That old woman seemed to think it was important. We chopped it down.” *Long look*

The house I grew up in was purchased by a couple who decided that they would do it up, and had plenty of money to do so. It used to be a little ramshackle farmhouse with a big garden full of good soil and old trees. The copper beech was a windbreak, and we mostly loved it for the colour and the beauty. Nobody was buried in it, despite their speculation. It was just a good tree. The old woman was my grandmother. That’s all.

The couple who bought … I don’t know them personally beyond that cruel quote about the beech tree, harvested at my uncle’s wake no less, after my grandmother was dead. They wanted to stamp their mark.

They built the sort of mansion you dream about … But it’s all slightly too shiny for my eyes. There’s a Romanesque idea to it, and they’ve paid good money to have human beings make questionable statues all over the place.

The soil though: that soil is ancient and fertile. It was good soil back then. You can grow all sorts in it. There were good mycelium.

These guys cut down so many of the old trees. They pulled up all the old bushes. Then they seeded endless empty lawns probably full of chemicals. Likely it killed the puffball mycelia and many more. The grounds they made have to be maintained by expensive humans sitting on devices. I suspect that the house will be hard to keep running cheaply. There’s an empty orchard of sad new trees where once there was life. There’s an avenue where once there was a bramble path. To my taste it’s a bad bad bad bad bad use of good land. It feels controlled to the point that it has lost its identity completely.

My brother learnt to be an entomologist in the old grounds of that house, and I learnt to be an person surrounded by space.

My mother had irresponsibly seeded the meadow with matchbox crickets taken from Europe on the ferry. It was a huge strange breeding ground for nature when we were children there. It was rich rich rich. The trees were deep. Everything had age. Now, the grounds are stripped back mostly to just lawns and they’ve almost certainly been poisoned with chemicals. I still love the house for where it is and the interior looks good. But I’m really not behind the thinking that designed the exterior.

“The house you grew up in is gone,” says the guy in Curiosity Coffee Shop, where I spilt my guts after seeing it in the window of the estate agent. He’s right. But… The land!

So.

11 acres.

Three floors with office space and an indoor pool.

Seven bedrooms.

I have always dreamt of being able to buy back my childhood home. I always wanted the chance.

They want 13 million for it. Aaaaaaa

I’m so sad.

Euromillions on Tuesday. I’m gonna buy 13 tickets. 13 has been my lucky number all my life. That would make a good story. But I can’t even buy a ticket for it here unless I use a VPN.

Thirteen million. If I had it… Oh hell I wish I could buy back that house, those grounds. That powerful powerful part of the world. I would help nature return after all the cameras and chemicals. And we could start with a theatre in the folly and offices for makers on the top floor, and maybe even a headquarters for a good organic food store. Oh God. I am so swept up in this. How the hell is it worth 13 million? What even is that amount of money? It seems impossible. And I’ve dreamt of getting that place back for most of my adult life. Damn. Damn. Damn.

My PayPal is alhimself@hotmail.com

Secret millionaires and investors, you are welcome to donate or talk to me about your terms. Oh God I want to be able to return here, to this place that sprung me. I’ll come back to Jersey, rewild that land, and be at the heart of a huge and powerful push forward to The Arts over here. My old home, new rendered. A veritable hub. A nexus. I just need to give a little over 12 million to those idiots. It’s been on the market a while at 13 I’m told so I’m sure there’s a bit of room for haggling. I haven’t seen inside yet.

Meanwhile, GORILLA. This is me, looking at what they’ve done with the place.

EDIT: The owner found this blog. Out of courtesy I’ve adjusted it. My emotion about the loss of my family and the passing of the past – it pushed some cruelty on my part as well. By all accounts they’re a nice old pair. I’m not seeking conflict here. Although I’ve blown any chance I might have had to buy it, even if I was rolling in money.

Oh God it’s 3am.

We finished another week of Carol this evening. Tomorrow is our day off. I think that all Jack and I were intending to do was to have pie and then go to sleep. Last night I slept fitfully, somehow constantly gravitating to the gap between my two pushed together single beds and waking up – perhaps I was sleepily seeking Lou.

Jack you know. We have lived together for a good long time over the years. Throstle Nest, The Bishops, America and multiple Carols. We have lived in the same building as one another for about a year of our lives, working. There’s love there, between us. It’s a partnership that works. And once again we have a bubbling and fun group.

Estelle is new to Carol, and local to Jersey even if she trained in theatre and dance. She knows the island deeply but has that elusive skillset where she can program a lighting board and dance a complicated tap routine in the same breath. She voices Scrooge’s lost love and crawls on all fours to fix the smoke machine mid show. Hopefully tomorrow she’ll come to the zoo with Jack and I. We are gonna give our day off to Durrell.

Andy might not approve of our zoo trip. He’s our Scroggins and even if it’s the best zoo in the world he still has his reservations about any animal being in captivity for any amount of time. I love him for it. He is filtering the audience, and absorbing all their mardy pre-show bits and bobs, so it helps that he’s an empath. He used to work for Disney in China, for years. Mum prevented me from taking a theatre job in Beijing in the year she died. I understood it in retrospect but resented her at the time. She was adamant. She knew something was wrong with her… It would’ve been awful if I’d been the other side of the world when she went so suddenly. It was bad enough it happening with me by her side. But … I can vicariously understand extended time in China through Andy’s eyes. I would have loved it. But who knows what’s to come? The world is wide. There are many more opportunities to come.

I’m so tired now. I always love doing this show, in all its different colours. And I should’ve written this blog hours ago! Zzzzz xxxx no pics.. Sleeeeeeeeppp

The good folk of Jersey have been so rich in their audience behaviours. We have had some crazy rowdy crowds and we have had extremely polite groups. Tonight was the latter, which was welcome as we were both tired. I can’t wait for a day tomorrow where I don’t even have to speak…

Between shows today, we had a moment where we could go and celebrate together. It’s one of my favourite spots on the island. El Tico.

Back in the sixties, a Costa Rican fellow realised how the west coast of Jersey looks to the Atlantic, and is just shelves of sand. It’s the best surfing beach you could hope for in the English Channel. The “tico” set up a surf shop. By the time I was a child it carried a little coffee shack with myna birds who could swear like troopers. The original tico is gone now. The business remains. And it is so much more than it was. A big restaurant trying to serve food that looks interesting and has local ingredients. Sure, my entomologist brother identified swimming crab claws once in the “local crab linguini” that could never be local to Jersey, but based on the description it could easily and happily be the linguini that’s local, not the crab. And either way I don’t give a fuck. El Tico is a joyful mess of a chaos service restaurant cafe, giving patrons tasty food that doesn’t always make sense with an atlantic coastal view. I will always defend them, even when you tell me it’s been microwaved. El Tico is better than most of the other bollocks on this island. It gets my vote. And in the spirit of the Costa Rican founder, if there are supply problems, improvise!!

We have struggled with food supply. We have struggled with Covid too. Tonight, with virtually no notice whatsoever, the whole of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust cancelled their booking. We were there ready. They didn’t show. For Covid.

They all work together. Jack and I aren’t mingling with anybody outside of the show. The whole audience is Jersey.

I’m pissed off.

I wanted to meet the Durrell staff. There’s a spot of Gerald and Lawrence going on with my brother and I. And that piece of ground – so far from a zoo that you would have to be a wilful bastard to hate it – it’s a powerful legacy. Max had his first job in the reptile house. I sometimes went behind the scenes with him. The place they call a zoo – it is so far from a zoo. It’s only changed its name to “zoo” since I left the island. It’s a dedicated captive breeding program, where they let humans pay money for the limited possibility of witnessing some of the animals. It’s an animal home where you might see nothing but vegetation. And it covers a huge portion of this tiny island. They are internationally extremely important. They have been focused on breeding and reintroducing endangered species for generations now.

I really wish I had had the chance to connect with them. These naturalists. These kind humans. Fear is a terrible thing.

Jack and I are hoping to go to Durrell’s on Monday. I’m so sad not to have had the chance to get the know the keepers as Ebenezer…

Here we all are at El Tico. This is the showteam. With the dusk surf just casually being epic in the background. I love that lot. Lucky me.

No Lou. She timed her exit very well. It’s getting busy. Busy busy busy.

Jack and I rose in the morning. Jack had made coffee and breakfast. Frankly, he saved my life. I hauled myself from bed and contemplated a beautifully poached egg, and some crushed avocado with marmite on toast which you should never ever knock until you’ve tried it.

We drove to the venue.

The Auberge du Nord is, as you’d expect, on the northern side of the island. It’s mostly cliffs up there. The bulk of the people live in the south. The north is largely cliffs and you can’t build permanent structures, thank God. “Stop the Urban Sprawl,” shouts a petition that is already too late near our digs. They are going to build on more of the cow fields. It’ll mean more traffic on overcrowded roads. Bad new change bad. I can understand it though. This place has managed to stay unfucked. Litter gets picked up. The beaches would be unrecognisable to anybody from Brighton. They aren’t covered in packaging.

We went to the venue and we did a show. I can’t remember it. I think it went well. We went home and straight to bed after. Two hours later we were back in the venue.

I tried to snooze. I honestly thought it would work. It didn’t.

We did another show. Yeah, details… So there were humans… Oh! Yeah we had a load of fucked paramedics. This was their night away from being on call. They were dressed up in Dickensian costume. One of them was an utterly terrifying human. He’s probably going to turn out to be a serial killer in about ten years. I hope not, but Christ he made my skin crawl. We also had lots of teachers. I love all the teachers. They aren’t killing, and I didn’t feel they were groping either, which feels like progress. It’s the end of term! They are very very happy about this. Their happiness seems to mostly involve alcohol.

But. It’s done for the day. And I’m knackered. And I did nothing but show things all day. Lou was great. She helped me not disappear up the arsehole of this thing…

Right by the house I grew up in. Just at the bottom of the meadow. A short way beyond the edge of the grounds… No more than 6 minutes walk from where I used to play in the summer evenings, there lies a powerful and mostly completely overlooked Neolithic dolmen.

This island has been inhabited since the stone age, and as a result it has some extremely important sites if you are interested in ancient civilisation. The dolmen of mont Ubé was used as a pigsty and before that it was hacked up by quarrymen. Now it sits right next to a nasty modern house with atrocious plastic Athena statues and climbing frames for the kids. The house does nothing to complement the site. The owners must be oblivious or contemptuous. But it’s just down the road from the soil that sprang me. I really hope some of that ancient shit rubbed off on me as I was running around digging in the soil. Turns out I grew up right next to a Neolithic place of power.

Not the biggest one in this island though. Not by any stretch. La Hougue Bie lies here. One of the ten oldest man made buildings in the world. A mound, from about 6000 years ago. Cruciform on the inside, because yeah that was a thing a long time before you know what. To get in there you have to prostrate yourself. A small tunnel. “People were shorter” my arse. Bow your head before the power of *insert here*. The Christians have shat a chapel on top of the mound, as was their way. “Place of power? It’s OUR made up story, not yours. Ours.” Unlike the ridiculous arrogance on top of Glastonbury Tor, this little “worthy” Christian folly still stands and leeches energy from the omphalos below it. The true power is clearly in the mound. But there’s a pimple on top with a cross.

It’s closed. Whatever function this served visibly peaked at equinox, not solstice. There’s probably something that can be found at solstice there but it hasn’t been worked out so they’ve basically closed it completely. I’ll have to come back on an equinox. I’ll likely show up at solstice anyway, although it’s all locked up for the off season with iron gates so there’s no way in. Whatever power is there will be surely magnified at the solstice. If there’s nobody else trying to connect with it maybe it’s even better to try.

For this morning, I crouched at the entrance. I could feel power radiating out of that tunnel. There’s something. There really is. “It fell out of use some 4000 years ago.” Out of use, but not out of power. Right there, surrounded by roads, with little room for more than a very worthy bunch of reenactors making a longhouse, this feels like one of the biggest missed tricks in the world. Hougue as in Sutton hoo. Hoooo. Bie means a home. So both a place to honour the dead and a place you live. Six thousand years ago. Mostly ignored, overlooked and passed over by all these accountants. There’s power here. And fuck it, I grew up in sacred ground for whatever the fuck that ancient faith structure was. Maybe this is my ministry. I just have to work it out. Meanwhile, Hooooo!

Up at a reasonable time. There’s still plenty of Jersey we haven’t gone to in the limited window I have here with Lou. We went to Plémont up at the Northwestern corner of the island. It’s usually pretty peaceful there and the views are strong, from clifftop scrubland down to a roiling sea. There are the ruins of an old Napoleonic barracks overlooking a little cove. Not too much wind today, and the sun was peeking out as best it could. We got our fix of rugged gorse, and then inevitably found our way to my beloved El Tico for a bowl of chowder. The evening sun setting over the high tide helped make it a beautiful last evening on the island for Lou. Sun sets too early right now. Not long until the solstice, but we are still on the wrong end of winter.

By five we were back in the venue gearing up for our single show today. With all the news over the channel, people are perhaps unsurprisingly becoming more cautious about coming to our intimate show. They’ve already paid for the tickets so we lose nothing but their energy, but we had close to twenty people from the same office party just deciding not to show up this evening. I don’t think we’ve had a great deal of this new brand of Covid here in Jersey yet. The new restrictions and guidelines don’t count over here. Jersey moves at its own pace and I have a feeling we will manage to finish our run, even if its by the skin of our teeth. Jack and I bounced pretty swiftly after the show tonight though just as we have a big week still to come, and it’s Lou’s last night. I’m glad she came again though. It was a fun and gentle audience. She ended up going backstage and reading everybody’s i-ching in the interval. I forgot my cards when I was packing so I’m glad I had her to represent for the oojie-boojie stuff.

When the weather isn’t disgusting, this island can be so beautiful. I’m glad we’ve been able to rush and catch some of it in the time we’ve had. Lou’s leaving just before I kick off into two show days until Monday.

I’m gonna get off this and have tea with her and work out what to do tomorrow.

We slept over twelve hours last night and when I woke up I was still sleepy. My voice was recovered but I just wanted down. Nevertheless there’s plenty of island left to share with Lou, and only a limited amount of time. We tried to catch the light.

We went to Grève de Lecq barracks. I wanted to show Lou where we had been with the residency. It’s a powerful part of the island and strong to share. The sounds of the waves in the bay. The power of the wind up the headlands. There’s nature there. It was a strong headquarters for the residency.

Lou and I walked on the beach where I swam every day. I was very struck by how much it resonated with her.

It feels like she understands the beauty of this island, and can see the wild beauty that has always been here through all the crowds of oblivious moneyhumans. It’s a relief. I see potential here, and beauty. If only I had property here. Mum and my uncle sold my grandparents house, and I was always told that it would pass on to me through my uncle’s flat. Turns out that wasn’t the case. Poor Peter died, and who knows what happened to the flat.

Anyway. Right now we have a lovely rental for the duration of the show. I just wish I still had a foothold here as I’m seriously thinking of returning and there’s nothing and property is very expensive…

Lou and I went to Bouley Bay. I have had my eye on the derelict hotel there ever since I reconnected with the island. I love it there. As we walked past Mad Mary’s – (the eccentric tea shack)- we found a half stunned buzzard with what seemed to be a broken wing. Something had happened to it, clearly. It was gallumphing around, and not avoiding us even though we were unpleasantly close and it was bushed in with loads of brambles. Something was clearly wrong.

I didn’t want to get too close to it as picking it up would involve having a chunk taken out of my fingers without gloves. I love and slightly understand birds of prey but I’m not going to pick one up like a pigeon. I called the JSPCA. I got hold of Steve. He’s new on the job. But his job is animal rescue. The JSPCA is underfunded.

Steve showed up. He had big fat gloves and a bird carrier. He went in from the front, and I came round the back so the easy walking escape route wasn’t on the cards for our buzzard friend.

When we all got too close, the buzzard just suddenly thought “fuck this” and flew away.

I had been convinced it had a bad wing. Clearly it had just been stunned by a near miss from a car or something. Steve was like “The majority of bird calls we get, once we get close they fly off. Often they just like to sit there in weird places and look at you until they get too close.”

Steve was brilliant. I’m thrilled we were wrong about the bird. Most people in Jersey don’t give a fuck about animals so come on you non-Jersey legends: help pay Steve for the extent to which he massively cared for that bird when he thought it was injured, and the extent to which he will massively care for genuinely hurt animals he is called to as time goes by.

There goes my little fantasy of saving a buzzard. But I’m so glad it was basically just a bit stunned and hoping it could chill out without somebody trying to bundle it into a basket and fix it.

Donation link to the JSPCA here. I’m gonna help pay Steve’s wage with a donation of my own. But Steve is a great big healthy lad and he loves animals, and he was with me on my pointless call less than half an hour after I first contacted him.