Author: albarclay

C’est fini.

Man. I’m sad.

I first went to that flat in Hampstead what… Fifteen years ago? Longer.

I met her through work. Another recent graduate. She was RADA, I was Guildhall. We made sense to each other. Instant friends. There were loads of us on a strange job. I’m friends with many of them to this day. We’ve stayed in the same game, and even back then we were jobbing actors who could be found. Dan. Ellie. Jimmy. Annette. Sylvia. Aja. Tom. Lee. Humans. Lots of them. More than I’ve named and I know it. We were employed by a very enthusiastic man who was creating things to appeal the lowest common denominator. We ended up at The Globe for a Frost Fayre event, but by the time we got there we realised that the taste of our employer was so bad that whatever he was pitching was going to be a carcrash. All we could do was fight for our little corner. We all tried our best. It was an early realisation, for me, that the client often hasn’t got a fucking clue. There were loads of genuinely skilled artists involved in that company. Nothing we made was any more interesting or challenging than a wet fart.

Still, I made friends, and often I’m told “it’s about who you know”. My Hampstead friend, like my Earl’s Court friend, is incredibly private. I seem to have lots of very private friends in performance related jobs. I am drawn to the misfits. Always have been.

We got on. We started to make things. We got buried in immersive crazy “egoless” things. “We are making art,” we told ourselves as we deliberately didn’t put our name to any of the things we made. It’s taken me this long to realise we should have been putting our names to our work. Because it was good, and it was relevant to all the things you call immersive now, and we have no paper trail because we were more interested in the making than in our brand. Arguably we still both suffer from that malaise, and I say that knowing that I write words in public every day. Facebook is trying its best to demoralise me. I’m thinking I should share this. I just don’t and because it feels like an intimacy instead of a sales pitch.

Hi, person. Hi and thanks. That’s another example of how mister slappycheeks zucker makes us insecure about our simplicity.

I’m just making noise here but I’m not aligned to any factions. I sometimes have to remind my friends that they are on the campaign trail but I’m not. If I’ve got an ideology, it’s balance.

Either way it doesn’t really matter. I’ll carry on until I stop. You might read. You might not. I know there are humans who have tuned in and out multiple times. I like making this noise.

And my Hampstead friend hates it. She’s another of the humans in my life who will never read one of these. But I pulled all of their stuff out today. I finally emptied the flat. Oh God it was sad. We have had happy times. She had 20 years.

The card stuck to the ceiling from the durational close up magician who came back for whisky. The first time I had grits. (My Hampstead friend is from Georgia. Grits matter.) Freedom Coffee, with a gun on the package. Astrological calendars from funeral parlours. Silly fridge magnets found too late to pack. Big bags of Mardi gras beads from New Orleans. The heath the heath the heath. Magic. Hex the snake.

My friend. One of my many angry fun different friends. Squeezed out by an oblivious and utterly self serving landlady. I enjoyed a stay there over lockdown summer when my flat was rehab central and I had to be elsewhere.

It’s done. We got everything out. Fuck. I’m exhausted. My eyes are streaming. I’m so tired it makes no sense and I have to run a workshop tomorrow at 11. Fuck you, work.

I’m thinking back to when I first started living in London. Mum had moved to Chelsea after divorcing dad. She was just down the road and I was at boarding school in North London. I lived with her in the holidays and started to make friends in this town. I actually can’t remember how I met my Earl’s Court friend. At the time we were probably about 18. We were both trying to find a start, working as character models and so forth, making sense of the industry, occasionally booking an advert. I think we met through church. This was before I trained, when I still had an uncomplicated faith. She was a couple of years older than me and renting a room off Lottie, a lovely eccentric older lady living in the area. We became close, my Earls Court friend and I. I even briefly dated her best friend.

The upshot was that Earls Court started to be my London playzone. This was in the nineties. It was pretty fun and run down and cheap and lively. The Coleherne on Old Brompton Road was providing colour, but we were too straight. We preferred The Troubador. Good coffee in the daytime and good wine at night, with live music or comedy downstairs. They weren’t particularly fussy, so various friends of ours went through there with their bands. I remember a stand-up derailing his whole act in order to pile into a persistent drunk “performance artist” heckler. I remember lots of nights seeing lots of bands and drinking lots of wine and having lots of fun. I can’t remember going home. The front door is wood and carved with murals. The interior is haphazard. There’s a run down garden. It doesn’t feel curated. The waiting staff are a bit stoned. I used to love it.

Then later, after I trained, it was conveniently walkable from The Finborough Theatre, where lots of new actors take short jobs in the hope of being seen. It was still much the same as my teenage haunt. There was almost always something wrong with the pub below the Finborough back then, so The Troubador became the meeting place pre show for coffee and post show for wine. I’d be there with friends until it closed. I remember one time there was a frog in the show and it briefly escaped and climbed up a mirrored wall.

The Finborough hasn’t really been on my radar the last few years though, and my Earls Court friend moved out of that flat a long time ago, so I haven’t been to The Troubadour for ages. Then one day in lockdown I went for a walk through Brompton Cemetery, and noticed in passing that the builders were in and the front room was gutted. I was upset. I figured that was the end for The Troubador. Somebody was turning it into flats, I figured. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Not so! I went there tonight. I met a new friend. He had merlot and I had pinot noir and it was lovely. There were strangely dressed young people at the table next to us who were so unbelievably drunk that they almost fell over onto us multiple times when they tried to leave. One of them put her face right into my friends face and slurred out a simple Anglo Saxon insult. I remembered being those drunk kids, and was perfectly happy being the older version.

I left this evening still half sober. Unheard of. I suspect it’s the first time I’ve ever remembered my journey home.

I guess this is a pub recommendation. If you’re ever in the Earls Court area, head to Old Brompton Road and look for that carved wooden door. It’s got history. I’m glad it wasn’t turned into flats during lockdown. Coffee in the daytime. Good wine in the evening. Arty things, frequently, and a chance for you to cut your performative teeth. It’s a bit more neurotic than it used to be post covid, but the waiters are still probably stoned, the quality is still definitely good, and it doesn’t feel like it’s just another arm of a faceless chain.

“So you’re the sofa man? What’s your connection to this sofa?”

I’m back up in Birmingham. It’s one of those little studios way outside London. I’ve been to a few over the years. Somebody enterprising has maybe made some greenscreens or some decent sized location spaces somewhere that you have to drive to. Through connections or luck or bloody-mindedness they have picked up business. People who don’t want to pay London prices might accommodate a load of crew in such a place and shoot their low budget feature or somesuch. Often they have basic accommodation on site and sometimes a little improvised bar because they know what film crews are like and they tend to be a long way from anywhere.

It’s about forty minutes in a cab from New Street. I was gonna take two trains but the Aviva up from Euston was too slow for me to make the connection. “It must be new – I’ve never heard of it,” says the cabbie. It’s not new. There’s a dusty plaque on one of the walls celebrating five years in business. “It’s not new, it’s just way out in the middle of nowhere,” I tell him. Because it is.

I dropped off a sofa and left the van parked there yesterday morning before rushing back to Plumstead. Now I’m here to pick it up. It’s a strange thing. The sofa has featured in a photoshoot since I dropped it off. It is just a fucked old sofa. It has character but you wouldn’t think it was desirable. It was used by the same brand for a previous photoshoot, and they wanted the same sofa for consistency of style. This is why they are curious. “I’m just the driver,” I tell them. “Because I mean I could probably find one like this on freecycle,” he continues. He probably couldn’t, as it’s a very specific look, but he’s aware that it has come up from London at a high price, and it’s just a fucked sofa. He’s mildly baffled. “I’m just the driver,” I reiterate. “But … Consistency is priceless.”

This is media. There are people who rent you old 1980’s Benson and Hedges cigarette butts for like over a fiver a day and you pay a hefty deposit if you lose just one. Junk in the right hands is treasure. The film industry needs specific things quickly. If you can be the person who has that rare thing, for the right company you can name your price. There are warehouses just waiting for somebody to need a Flymo or a stack of Whizzer and Chips comics. Things that have little value are extremely desirable occasionally to that group of people making a movie with a scene where a British woman mows up her son’s comic collection in the eighties. I remember being on a set where they suddenly wanted an electric turntable to display some rotating shoes. They paid hundreds for it. I ended up picking it up for them. They could probably have just rigged a kitchen turntable from IKEA with some string and got the shot, but they had an American budget and they weren’t afraid to spend it.

So I got this fucked sofa that suddenly found new value, and I brought it back to London, and now I’m home and I feel like it’s the beginning of the weekend. I prefer it if I’ve got time to stop and see the new places in in on these long driving jobs. But this week has been packed. Tomorrow I’m just stopping. Hopefully there’s nothing I’ve forgotten…

Up in the morning and I’m immediately into a van and driving around Stourbridge looking for a Studio. I’ve booked a taxi to pick me up immediately after drop off, and it is the first step in a long chain of connections that I cannot miss if I’m going to get to Plumstead on time.

Drop off is smooth and the cabby is early. He’s lively, and he’s excited about the cricket today. Pakistan is playing Australia. Unfortunately, looking at the result as I write, it didn’t go his way. But we have a good natter as he floors it through the A roads outside Birmingham and into the city centre. He’s angry about the Low Emission Zone in central Birmingham, and well he should be – it’s atrociously signposted. I suspect everybody gets fined the first time.

I get my train to Euston. The guy across from me has a fake ticket and ends up in long conversation with a very measured guard. He ends up paying top whack for a single and I find myself feeling sorry for him but helpless. Rail fares are too high. He tried to save and it cost him.

From Euston I bundle into the Northern Line and only realise after one stop that I’m on the wrong branch. I’m heading to London Bridge via Charing Cross. Thankfully it’s all running smoothly and I just go all the way to Waterloo and then Jubilee two stops. Whether or not I hate being on the tube right now, I still know the network. I get my train to Plumstead in plenty of time. I’m even early enough to walk from the station and I arrive at work with no food but with ten minutes to spare.

Straight in and on duty for a clear hour and then back on all the trains until I’m almost all the way home, dreaming of the food I’m going to eat and the rest I’m going to have. And then I remember that I’ve got two tickets to Kush Jumbo’s Hamlet at The Young Vic. No time for food. Great. Damn.

Uber to the theatre and to the box office to collect my tickets. Ready for three hours of tragedy when my phone goes bing. “Where are you?” Fuck. I’ve got a read-through for Christmas Carol. On Zoom. Now. I give my plus one ticket to my plus one. “I’ll see you in the interval”. A friend of mine lives local to Waterloo. “Help! Can I use your front room. I’ve got a read-through and I forgot about it.” Thankfully I can.

No charger though. I’m reading the play with my screen off where possible, watching the last of my battery dwindle, trying to come across well under tricky circumstances. I hate zoom read-throughs. We finish. It’s lovely, somehow. I put my empty phone in my pocket and hightail it back to the Vic. I am let into the back just in time to hear Ophelia saying “what a noble mind is here oerthrown”. And all my busy busy rushy day vanishes. After the interval I get to watch the second half in amazing seats that my friend bought over two years ago. The duel at the end makes more sense than I’ve ever seen it. Hamlet is considered great for a reason. There’s so much to find in it. I allow a committed and skillful company to tell me their version of that knotty play. It’s great and surpisingly underattended. We don’t have to fight to get served in the interval. We easily find a table and quickly catch up afterwards. But I’m tired and I can’t hide it. My friend puts me in an uber. I get home.

I’m too tired to eat now. I had pret porridge on the train this morning. I’m gonna go to sleep hungry and probably wake up famished.

A full day today. Tomorrow less so. Phew.

I’m on standby.

I don’t know where I’m gonna be sleeping tonight.

For the last hour I’ve been sitting on my sofa expecting the phone to ring at any second. It hasn’t.

This is gonna be worth it when it lands. But part of the job is patience.

There’s a photoshoot happening in East London. There’s a van at the shoot. There’s bed in the van. The bed needs to be in Birmingham at 10 tomorrow morning. Then it needs to be picked up on Friday evening and returned to London with the van. Enter muggins.

The good news is I’m gonna get a lift to the van this evening when the photoshoot winds up. The bad news is, these shoots can drag and drag and drag. Meanwhile I haven’t been given a postcode for dropping it off tomorrow morning which means I can’t plan my accommodation tonight and I can’t book my train back to London because I don’t know how far it is from the station.

There are advantages and disadvantages to working for your friends.

On balance though, I’m happy for the work. It’s just lovely to be in a position where there’s a bit too much to do.

And there goes the call. 45 minutes to pick-up. Then another 45 to the van I reckon. It’s gonna be at least two and a half hours up to Birmingham. Chances are I’ll be in bed in some terrible Travelodge by midnight. Better bring a good book. I could’ve driven up tomorrow morning, but I didn’t want to be late for drop off as I’ve got another of these workshops to run in Plumstead at lunchtime so I’m rushing straight back to London. It’s only fair on the students I’m working with that I have plenty of energy when I go into their class. Then I can focus on them and their needs. They are about to leave school and fire out into this difficult and protective world. I’m just some guy but maybe I’ll bring one or two of them an opportunity that changes their trajectory and helps them into a bit more security and comfort. They’re an interesting age group, year 11. Almost adult, but still very much institutionalised and strung to their home life. It’s hard to get them to think creatively without making them self conscious. Still I’ve been impressed the last few days with their teacher. “Are you brothers?” they all ask, as he is bespectacled and follically challenged as well, and we’re a similar age.

Walking through the corridors I see him address the students and engage with them. He’s impressively available to them. Firm when he needs to be, but somehow even after many years teaching he seems to have room in his head for every single one of them individually. He knows their names. He speaks to them on the line, without that edge of wary distance that I hear with some teachers in schools like this. I would have liked him and listened in his classes. I can see that he is loved and respected, and I can see why. Good teachers like him are gold dust. Today he spoke about his wife and how she gets paid so much more than him because of early career choices. He uses it to illustrate a point, but I can see he’s a vocational teacher. He’d be doing it anyway. Whatever he’s being paid though, it should be more. It’s people like him that will lead to a stronger economy from these confident young people entering the workforce having been HEARD when they needed it. I’ve watched him for a couple of hours only but his positivity and care seems boundless, in a tricky school.

I’m going to pack some clothes for my mystery stay.

—

Travelodge Stourbridge, and I’ve been in the room long enough that I can’t smell the bleach anymore. It’s just gone midnight. I’ll be fine here. And weirdly, I kinda like the random nature of all this. That’s the key. Go after what makes you happy…

Waking up in Brighton today, I knew that I would need to be back in the centre of things this evening in order to catch “Choir of Man” at press night. It’s the show that’s reopening The Art’s Theatre West End after all the horrible fuckeration. “Six, The Musical” was there before everything went to shit. I caught that and adored it. Now, after all the mess we’ve had, I wanted to show up for the big night and be there while humans sang songs to us from that very special small stage.

First of all though, the important things. Lou hasn’t got a car, which means there’s a way in which I can make myself useful. We drove out to Chanctonbury Fell – the place where I communed with the pheasant spirit some time ago. We walked up slippery clay pathways, almost unrecognisable after heavy rainfall. The ancient ground was hardyielding many less familiar mushrooms. It’s the right time of year for mycology. I had plenty to consider.

Lou and I found time to spend in nature, even if I was on high alert much of the time, eyes scanning the pathways, curious and hopeful to pick up first and second clear sightings of excellent mushrooms. The time not spent doing that was spent joyfully being in nature with my sputnik. I felt calm, wild and flat when it was time to drive back up into town.

And what a show. It’s a tricky fucker to sell to those of us who care about theatre. 9 men in principal roles and another 4 on music. Self consciously celebrating the positive side of pub culture and the positive side of what one might call “the divine masculine”. It’s a very very male show, and they pull up women from the audience to serenade, which could be a horrible mess. It’s a knife edge. It’s huge fun. It’s tenderly done, and with terrific skill. It asks us to drop quite a lot.

Right now, we are so used to culturally exploring the fucked side of men. We are also trying hard as an industry to balance jobs. Not to mention the awareness that we all have that a deeply toxic and entirely man driven culture somehow got sewn into our industry over generations – and every other industry in the world. The arts is flushing it. Other industries are slower, but they will.

Knowing that, and watching thirteen men celebrate masculinity…? I found myself relieved, somehow. Happy that there’s a new and young artistic dialog that lets the pub male be more than just the sweating and inarticulate woman-fearing racist that we all know so well.

Also this is a show that helps us remember the value of our public houses. With a government that wants us all to stop congregating and just get us medicating at home so we are ever ever closer to just being batteries, we need alternative noise in the mainstream.

Is there room in the cultural space for something that celebrates men like this and only employs them? Hmm. I’ve got my 50:50 badge on my altar and to my own detriment I’ve campaigned for years for a better balance of gender in my industry. I know that there’s still work to be done. But this show isn’t undoing any work – to my mind as I write. To me it feels a moment to celebrate the good things about men. Sure, then we can all get back to being angry about the men who have finally been rumbled for being disgraceful in positions of power. We can get back – and we must – to being regretful and forward thinking about the generations of utter fuckwombles who never got held up at all for treating humans like shit – to making sure that stuff NEVER happens again. But meanwhile, let’s watch some dudes singing.

I loved it. I cannot be in conflict with myself about that. I just loved it. Stet. Musically beautiful humans. An unexpected show with an unexpected perspective, and they aren’t doing politics so it seems wrong for me to do politics in response. Noise. Light. Joy.. Go see it if you like fun. Go see it double if you like men. There’s no axe to grind in this piece outside of the very obvious one about employment numbers. I know the administration at The Arts well enough to be able to tell you right now that they are already taking every step to balance that gender gap, and they are very conscious about having made such a programming choice.

Go see it. That’s my recommendation. I had a wonderful evening. I just wish I didn’t have to get up at fuck o’clock to go talk about The National Grid again.

Plumstead. That’s where I had to work today. “A hilly suburb known for its sprawling green spaces.” I didn’t see any green spaces. I saw a screen and a load of faces.

I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to be in Plumstead before. I’ll be there pretty much every day this week. A room full of young people heard me telling them about The National Grid. Maybe one or two of them will go on to have careers as a result of the huge project they are undertaking across London in the next few years. They are going to be a massive employer with hundreds of thousands of jobs attached to building a network of vast cable tunnels stretching under 20 miles of London. Distributing power underground. Better than pylons. It’s an important part of the future. The better the infrastructure allowing us to move the power around is, the better use and yield we will be able to get from our solar farms and our wind farms etc. Efficiency cuts costs so it can get funding. It also cuts waste. The market is always going to drive these things unfortunately, but at least the side effect is positive. Cheaper and easier fuel distribution, and loads of jobs. The money won’t manifest in cheaper energy bills unless the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come goes into overdrive this year. The money WILL manifest in lots of well paid and respectable safe jobs for lots of young people who honestly don’t know what they want to do. And as I try to point out, it’s not just engineers they need. I’m an actor and for this week I’m gainfully employed because of these tunnels. If they look for opportunity they have the possibility of it coming easier to them than it might have. It’s about targeted seeking, as often as not. I was lucky. This little spot of work just filtered down to me because of availability issues with others, and because of things I put in place before the pandemic and had more or less forgotten about. It’s extremely welcome, filling a gap perfectly between the end of ghost tours and the start of Carol.

I didn’t really get to stop in Plumstead today. I figured since I’m not back working there until Wednesday I’d shoot down to Brighton and see Lou as soon as I was done. We can hang out tomorrow. She’s been mass producing pretty little prom dresses all day while I was wittering on about Net-zero. I’m tempted to try one on but I suspect I’ll rip it.

I have to take my opportunities to see her when I can these days – it’s getting rarer that I’m not brainflooded with something unfamiliar, and she’s constantly got tons of stuff to do. Now I’ve jumped the hurdles of the last few days I’ve remembered how schizophrenic my existence was before somebody hit the off switch. I loved it back then. I’m enjoying it now, but I’m thinking perhaps I could’ve found ways to allow myself a bit more downtime within all the “yes” somewhere. My back is hurting, not in the damage way. It’s just tired. It’s not used to the variance. To the heavy lifting, the long standing, the running around. I had a proper moment of sprint yesterday stopping a van at some lights (don’t ask). I’m still feeling it now, but I told you all I was unfit a few weeks ago. It’s slowly changing. I just have to keep up the random activities.

For now though warm bed, soft sheets, and another human. Mmmmm

A full day. It seems the world really is waking up.

Off to do the Globe talk in the morning. Such a beautiful morning to be in that powerful building, and I gave my little talk in the river room looking out over the expanse of the Thames shining in the morning sun. I’ve had some wonderful memories from that building and this morning was fun. My head was disorganised and I was rusty, but I could feel the old mechanisms clicking back into place after so long shut in a box.

Still, finishing carried a sense of relief as if a burden had been lifted. 45 minutes is a long time to be talking. The client seemed happy and I accepted a short morning prosecco before rushing across town to Hampstead. Manual labour. The flat is a lot closer to empty now. It’s still not empty. But it’s getting there. And this afternoon, with the help of Jan, Emma and two helpful young men with a Luton Van from Gumtree, we took a great deal of stuff down all the stairs and out. There might be another day of work in this, but I can safely say that the things that matter to my friend have probably been extracted by now and stored in a garage in Camden. It’s not the best solution, but under the circumstances I think I can be happy with my day of work today. Sunday. Day of rest? Ha. I’m pooped.

I’m in bed now having very much enjoyed my personal fireworks display – the one that they lay on for me every year in Battersea Park directly across from my flat. It’s right across the river, framed beautifully in my bedroom window. I get the best view in London, for free. I stood there, body and mind drained from an unfamiliar full throttle Sunday. I let all the clever explosions work their simple magic and I let myself feel tired at last. I hate how they affect pets, but there’s something wonderful about a firework display. Those huge sprays of artifice and colour across the night sky. Just what I needed to wind down. I let the fire do the work.

Now I’m in bed with plenty of time before midnight. Alarm is set bright and early so I can swot up before I drive to fecking Plumstead and do a PowerPoint presentation that somebody sent me last week. It’s switching back on. It really is. If it carries on like this I’ll be fit again in no time.

Zzzzz

It’s quarter to one. I finished my last ghost tour some time ago, and drove home sober. There’s the end of a lovely little thing, and the beginning of some interesting creative partnerships..

I got home because I wanted an early bed, but I’m my own worst enemy in that regard. I decided I was hungry and then I needed to digest and probably it could have all waited until breakfast time. Then I got into bed, put the light out and just as I was about to abandon myself to sweet sweet temporary oblivion I woke up with the word “blog” on my lips. I do this to myself. Who knows why, but I do. Mostly it’s helpful, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be more helpful to have the extra time asleep.

Still. I actually don’t start work all that early tomorrow. 11am at The Globe and I’m gonna drive in so it’ll only be half an hour getting there. I’ll need to be up before that as I’m gonna want to talk to myself one more time to make sure that the things I’m saying are reasonably coherent and that I can find my way through the journey of it. “Actor and historian.” That’s how I’ll be characterising myself. My old history teachers would have their jowls wobbling at the very idea, but I’m transferring knowledge of the past that I’ve internalised and looked at from multiple angles, so I guess that’s it really. Corporate entertainer? Jobbing actor that hasn’t learnt to say no? All these things.

I think it’ll be fun. It’d be more fun if it wasn’t in the morning after a final night.

As soon as I’m done I’m off to do things in the Hampstead flat. Then next week I start a whole load more unfamiliar things. It’s just looming at the moment. Piles of things. My headspace budget is tight tight tight. I guess if I use this as a dump it’ll help the process. Because otherwise, like now, I’ll just find myself getting angry with myself for being too stubborn to miss a day no matter how tired I might be.

The wonderful thing is that I have this bedroom with comfy sheets and good paint and not much junk. Even if the rest of the flat is carnage at least I have this oasis. I can rest and dream here. And both of those options are high on my list right now, frankly. Next week I’ll find time somehow to get to Brighton, but for now it’s good to be under this roof in the good ship. The road is rushing by below me as ever, but the heating is on and the money from the ghost tours came in today so generally I’m in a pretty decent headspace. I just need to remember to write this earlier in the day more often, instead of leaving it until just as I’m drifting off to sleep. Brian once, years ago, said I could always get away with just writing the word “blog” repeatedly one day. This is about as close as I can happily let myself get. Bed.

The fifth of November. A Friday. Guy Fawkes Night. I’m getting an early bed.

They were papists, you know. Fawkes and his lot. Catholics. This festival used to carry huge anti-catholic sentiment. People would often burn the Pope in effigy. “We see no reason that gunpowder treason should ever be forgot!” “Damn those Catholics.” It’s only a few years later that we were pulling down theatres. It’s hard to imagine such a rift between Catholic and Protestant in modern England. But that conflict shaped a lot of geopolitics.

Guy was arrested underneath parliament, as he guarded barrels of gunpowder set there to blow up the state opening of parliament at the House of Lords and kill the protestant king James the first thus paving the way to a return to Catholic monarchy. They had 36 barrels in there. It would’ve blown the Lords to smithereens and changed the course of history had there not been an anonymous tip off. Busted.

Hundreds of years later Fawkes has become something of a symbol of conscious rebellion now. Originating perhaps with Alan Moore’s dense graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” it’s rare to go to a protest these days without seeing one of those guy masks. His face has become part of the language of postmodern anarchy. Of the plotters, he was lucky in death. He broke his neck immediately in the scaffold and was not drawn by horses and shown his own severed genitals. Perhaps he was as given a quick death as a mercy for dobbing his friends in.

We still burn him in effigy on this night, mostly thoughtlessly – just as an excuse to drink mulled wine and come together in the darkness. It’s the closest we get to those heady days of public executions. A man on a fire. Cheers and warmth and toffee apples.

With the weekend starting tomorrow, the bulk of the official fireworks displays start on the sixth. But this is the day we are exhorted to remember so I’m remembering it.

Remember remember,
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot;
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

It’s a good time for fires. We are trying to get used to the dark but we still remember the light. On Sunday there’ll be a fireworks display in Battersea Park and I’ll have a ringside seat in my bedroom. Tonight the blinds are already closed although I can hear the banging of a few fireworks as I write. All the little temporary shops are likely doing a roaring trade in expensive things for people to burn.

Maybe there’s something of a protest in bonfire night now. Growing up I saw my fair share of Thatcher guys. I remember a cheer when her mask melted. I’m sure there’ll be some Boris guys scattered around the country with very flammable hair. At least the bonfire is a way of getting nameless frustrations out. Actual protest is starting to be more firmly legislated against, which is worrying. It’s a response to people pushing the edges, of course. But the edges need to be pushed for society to stay healthy. We aren’t at the stage yet where we can be hanged for burning a Boris. I might try and go to the bonfire in the park on Sunday… Although honestly the view is much better from my room.