Hamlet at the Young Vic. A friend of mine bought tickets for this show in June 2019. She has since moved out of London down to St Leonards, and only now are the ticket purchases being honoured. She couldn’t come up to watch it, so I took them off her. Then I couldn’t find a plus one for tonight. I went on my own to the box office. I built my whole day towards it. In the daytime I was swotting up on The National Grid and organising a long presentation for Sunday morning. I booked some packing boxes for Hampstead and two men with a van for two hours on Sunday afternoon. I was a flurry of activity in the morning, and even found time for lunch with a good friend. Then onto the tube, grabbed another old friend for a drink and said hello to Hex who is staying with her, and finally over to the theatre in time to sort out tickets.
Box Office was bemused at first before I found the reference number. I think it’s still in preview at the moment and they were doing a community performance for what felt like it might have been local youth. The theatre was buzzing but I was bringing the average age up considerably.
Turns out the tickets are for next Thursday, not tonight. Bugger.
Still, it gives me time to find a plus one. What a relief… Lou considered coming up from Brighton to watch it and it would’ve sucked if she’d wasted her journey. I’d have felt much more of an idiot if anybody but me had wasted their time this evening.
Returning to the tube station, I ran into a friend on his birthday and we both remembered how it used to be – you couldn’t walk through Waterloo or Soho in the beforetimes without running into another actor. Maybe there are shivers of that coming back at last.
I’m home now, and the show will still be on. It’s three hours long. I was steeled for a marathon this evening but it seems I just get to roll around at home, have a cup of chamomile and read.
So, I’ve got a plus one ticket for Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet at The Young Vic for NEXT THURSDAY. It’s definitely next Thursday this time. I’d like company and I don’t think it’s one that should be wasted.
I’ve got history with Hamlet – as who doesn’t? I’ve been the king a few times over the years. The most recent occasion was in a fort in Dubrovnik, and the woman who passed the ticket to me played The Dane. It’s an amazing play though – quite rightly considered one of his best. The joy with good writing is that it falls out differently when processed through different actors. I’m looking forward to seeing something as involved as a Shakespearean tragedy after so long without theatre. I expect it’ll be well cooked by now with such a huge delay between start of rehearsal and showtime. Next week. For now, good night.
When I was a child I was frequently on airplanes, either as an unaccompanied minor or with the parents, off to wherever dad had found himself. Holidays, half terms, even sometimes just a long weekend off boarding school – an exeat. If we flew with our parents, my brother and I would get a treat from WH Smith at the airport. A translated comic book from one of the revolving racks. Asterix or Tintin. We flew frequently enough that we built up a decent sized collection of these books that were a phenomenon in the seventies that carried through most of the eighties. We still have many of them. Too good to chuck.
In adulthood, the appeal of the Tintin books has waned, frankly. Too earnest, perhaps? Very much only for children – or maybe that’s just my conclusion as they were my childish favourites. If I’m waiting for something and there’s one to hand I might pass my eyes over it for nostalgic purposes. But there’s nothing much to hold onto. Not so the Asterix books. They are much more joyful, dense with puns and allusions and arty jokes. They reward picking up again from time to time.
A famous example of the teamwork between Rene Goscinny the writer and Albert Uderzo the artist is a frame in Asterix the Legionary where the pirates are wrecked and Uderzo, just for the sake of it, has drawn them in a reference to a famous French painting from 1810 – The Raft of the Medusa, by Géricault. Goscinny has the captain exclaim “Je suis meduse” – (I am dumbfounded).
It’s a reference that you’ll never pick up as a kid, and probably not many of us as an adult. The frame works whether or not you know the painting though. If you get the reference you have a moment of smile. If you don’t get the reference you don’t lose much. And the text is full of these little Easter eggs and allusions, just as it is rife with puns. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get them. It’s gently clever, rather than oppressively so.
The thing is though that this witty Goscinny was writing all his puns and allusions in French. How do you bring them over in an English translation.
Enter Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. I know these names without having to look them up. They helped me understand fully the difference between a good translation and a creative and brilliant translation. Puns do not cross language barriers. Using a medusa sounding word in the example above cannot happen in English. Anthea and Derek translated all the Asterix books, and as they did it they made big creative choices to change the text, sometimes quite radically, in order to keep the spirit of the French. New puns, new phonemes, new rhythms and cultural references. It’s a masterclass, and the pair of them should be awarded for bravery and humour. Goscinny was witty. They match his wit and make it work in translation. That’s extremely hard to do without jarring. For the example above the Captain says “We’ve been framed, by Jericho.” It works in the context. It makes the smile for the person who has recognised the painting , and it even has the artist’s name embedded there – Jericho/Géricault. Elsewhere they change character names that don’t work – the dog Idefix becomes Dogmatix, and sometimes they completely shift the sense of minor frames in order to find an apposite gag. They take what could be thought of as liberties, but make the translated books deep and timeless in so doing.
Goscinny wrote another very large series that was never on the shelves in English. Lucky Luke. In airports in France and Germany and Switzerland we would see these tempting Lucky Luke books, but never in English. Once, in desperation, we got “Le Pied-Tendre” in hardback for a long flight. The Tenderfoot. Max and I painstakingly translated it ourselves, frame by frame. We even started sticking in speech bubbles in English before we realised that we knew what it said anyway. That experience probably contributed to my good grasp of French. But as a child it always perplexed me… “Why have they never translated Lucky Luke?” There were rumours in my friendship group that some existed in translation somewhere, but I never got hold of one until I was maybe 16 and 20 year old Max showed up with two. Glowworm had tried with a limited run. But it never took off. Something to do with the fact that he has a gun and a cigarette in his mouth in every single frame. He was considered, even back then, to be a dangerous role model for British children. There were a few notably untranslated Tintin books back then as well – the ones that were identified as backward even that long ago.
A few days ago, waiting for Lou at the dentist, I found myself thinking about Lucky Luke for reasons I absolutely cannot recall. I searched the internet to see if any were available. Turns out they ALL are now. Cinebook have taken them on. I ordered a big run of the early ones at a fiver each and they arrived today. I was curious, and childhood me was triumphant.
I’m three books in and I miss Anthea and Derek. In these versions, the medusa panel would have just been translated as “I’m dumbfounded”.
It’s interesting reading them as a connection with the child me, but it makes me want to go over the originals in French and think about them and rework the gags to echo the genius that Anthea and Derek brought to Asterix.
Without a translator able to channel Goscinny’s wit they become just slightly dated Wild West comic book stories for children. Sure he was young with these – they started a decade before Asterix in 1947. But I can’t help thinking something is missing. For anyone who has ever loved a book in translation, let’s take a moment to honour the mostly unsung scribe who kept the spirit and meaning well enough to make you love it.
I’ll leave this huge geekfest with a panel from book 3 – Dalton City, illustrating my point. I have no idea what the exchange was in the original French but I bet it was a chaos of puns and wordplay. I suspect its been literally translated by the workaday scribe they pulled in for it. If so, missed opportunity. I’ll probably read one or two more before bed – see if they improve. Maybe I’ll dig up our old copy of The Tenderfoot and compare…
Christmas. That’s suddenly the focus. I haven’t even finished the Halloween madness. And suddenly I’m having to think about Christmas…
I’m yo-yoing between London and Brighton at the moment. Things are getting busier and I’m having to spend a bit more applied time preparing for presentations and the like. I woke up in Brighton knowing I had a zoom interview for BBC Radio Jersey at 11.30. Bergman the XTrail was the best option for an office. I ended up sitting parked up on Marine Parade being enthusiastic into my overheating phone for about half an hour. It felt like we got the salient points across, and hopefully it’ll help sell the remaining tickets so we get to have a busy and crowded Christmas show again. I mentioned my grandpa by name. Good to tease up my connection with the island.
Once the interview was done we had a read through. I hadn’t processed that fully in advance so it rather took me by surprise. My mobile is on its last legs and it was hot in my car. For a short while I sat on a sunny bench with Lou as we read. Then we had a break and for some reason I decided to start to drive back home, even though the journey is 2 hours and the break we had was only about 45 minutes. Oops.
I ended up doing the bulk of the read-through in a lay-by off the A23 with dicky reception and juggernauts pounding past every minute or so. The magic of zoom… I switched my picture off to preserve battery and to stop my phone from overheating. But bandwidth was still terrible. I’d like to say that nobody noticed, but honestly – I’m glad it was a read-through of a familiar project, with friends.
Funny to be screwing on my Christmas head on such a hot November day. The sun in the morning was stunning by the seaside. But walking around Hampstead and also in Stanmer last week it is noticeable how abundant the berries are on the holly and the yew. A heavy yield of berries speaks of a cold winter to come. Nature clearly knows something we don’t. Or its just been thrown completely out of whack. We shall see.
I’m back in London with all the things that need doing next to all the distracting things. Which will win??
Once I arrived here this afternoon, post read-through, I rationalised to myself that the days work was done so did remarkably little. I mostly read my book. Then I had the traditional bath and now it’s my bedtime ritual but somehow time slipped away and I just looked at a clock and it’s 2am. My body clock is all over the place. I’m gonna put my head down.
It’s only nine in the evening but somehow it feels much later. Partly it’s the hour change I’m sure, but mostly it’s the fact that I’ve done very little today. A soupçon of admin. A spot of wandering around. A long queue. Posted a letter. An email or two. Some coffee…
Is that what I think it is?
Monday is always the official actor’s weekend – with the advantage that the post office is open – queue or no queue.
Frankly most of my focus today has been on Lou, who got bashed around by the dentist at lunchtime. She was in there so long I ended up waiting just outside the dentist for a bit too long considering it’s finally getting colder. I walked around the outside of a church a couple of times, surprised by the fact it seemed so firmly closed. Then I just stood on the pavement and ordered a few books online, and rang some friends.
Up in Glasgow meanwhile lots of people are trying to find ways to help stop us making the atmosphere of our planet hostile to us. If I’d been able to get into the church I might have sent some positive energy their way. Let’s see what comes. It’s these possible huge scale operational changes that will make a difference. Sure we can all be asked to only boil as much water as we need. We can get the vegan option or not have that hot bath. But if anything is going to seriously improve it’ll be on an industrial level – not just putting the price of consumer gas up. And petrol?! Watch those fuckers not drop it even though they’ve got the supply chain fixed.
All my social media channels have devolved to the point that I’m getting fed up of logging on at all. It’s mostly because very little is familiar right now. The platforms all seem to be serving up fundamentalism to try to get hits. Your mate who says you shouldn’t recycle because a climate activist went on an airplane. That guy who says that some vegans wear leather shoes so let’s all bite the heads off chickens. Someone who finds a Caduceus and doesn’t get the evolution of symbols so concludes that doctors are Satanists. I’m sure my friends aren’t all frothing at the mouth, but it feels like they are. The algorithm. “Promoting engagement”. I might get them because I sometimes draft a long considered reply in the comments and then delete it knowing from bitter past experience that there’s no arguing with stupid. But the platform still knows I wrote the draft.
The advertising model has taken all the joy from these social platforms. They were fun when they were for users instead of for profit. But that was just the phase when they suckered us in. I suspect that Zuckerberg announcing his saccharine and terrifying “meta” thing is going to be a step that historians mark on the crumbling and eventual total decline of our interest in and our newly formed addiction to this “social media” thing. I hope so. If that’s the future of it, it has to die. It has had its time. We’ve seen it get totally coreupted. Now it’s just a mess of hate and sales. Let it go.
It rose. Zuck with his slapped cheeks sits on his pile of money now still perhaps thinking he has started something wonderful because it made HIM LOOK AT HIM HIM WE HAVE MADE HIM MEGA RICH. We will all start suddenly clearing our heads, seeing this for what it is, and wandering down to the beach leaving our phone at home, wondering what all the fuss was about. I almost used the phrase “wake up” but there’s another phrase that has changed its meaning in the information wars. What does it even mean anymore? “Woke”.
The beach isn’t particularly appealing right now despite my sudden anti social meedja stance. I’m in bed writing this digital blog thing into my phone. Earlier today I was browsing Amazon. I’ve been on Facebook and Twitter in the last hour. I’m just so so bored of them. But … I’m still servicing the addiction. “The first step: we admitted we were powerless.” The drugs don’t work anymore. Good to spot it. It’ll take more than individuals noticing quite how manipulative social platforms are for there to be a shift away from this form of interaction, particularly in the hangover of the pandemic panic phase. But we aren’t as dumb as Zucchini seems to think we are. I hope. When it’s not quite so cold we can go to the beach. In great numbers. And throw litter everywhere like a bunch of bastards.
We will wake to Samhain. The beginning of the dark half of the year. We will start to huddle together in little groups and burn fires in the dark to ward off whatever might be out there on the edge of the forest. How better to have seen it in than with my peculiar new colleagues, with a large group of oddly dressed strangers, and with friends old and new.
Like a psychotic behatted Pied Piper, I swept a motley group of witches and weirdos up into the darkness of the heath for Halloween night. It’s the edge of something as close to ancient woodland as you get in London. Screech owls and foxes. Tree roots and doggers. Actors dressed in fabulous costumes they made themselves, hiding in the bushes, about to haunt you with a sad tale, or try to rob you blind, or assault you or spook you. At the head you’ve got me in my wild mood hurling energy and noise at your face. Lou was up from Brighton with two mutual friends and then I had two of my North London local friends surprise me. Really lovely to have some familiar faces.
The Heath was settled in Neolithic times – a good view down to the plains below, plenty of springs. Drinking and hunting. Bad soil though – it’s too sandy. Agriculture not so good. You’re never going to have decent crops. It’s probably why nobody ever bought it. 2% of London’s green space. Enough of it that you can get reasonably quickly to places far enough from the roads that you might forget the fact you are in a metropolis.
As I walked through the dark paths with my strange crowd walking behind me I found myself thinking what an appropriate way it was to see this night in. Trailing through the urban woodland with alcoholic ghouls in tow. Hellboy and skeleton woman. Alice, Mad Hatter and Edward the very excitable dog, a witch and a wizard, John and Emma, Victorian gentlemen, women in hats, lots of people just in their Sunday whatever, and the inevitable joyless bespectacled literal minded prat in a waistcoat with no sense of playfulness, coming right up close to me to mutter his barbed little comments. Maybe it was a Halloween act – pretending to be somebody with no soul. More likely he was just a joyless prick but apart from them remembering him as I write and memorialising his heavy joylessness, he didn’t affect me at the time other than to briefly wonder what was wrong with him. I even complimented him on his silk waistcoat but all he managed was a monosyllabic noise. Didn’t like attention going back on him. Just wanted to undercut others. I hope he finds love.
Now I’m in Brighton. The car was ready at the final pub and we all bundled in and struck off more or less as soon as the walk was over. It’s a long drive and late already, especially with the hour changing. Sunday roads though. We more or less teleported to Brighton.
I’m gonna sleep well though as after leading the group it was my right foot orchestrating the teleportation.
Only one more tour, but I’m glad of it as I wouldn’t have wanted to have had to rush off on the last show. I like the guys who I’m doing this with. Good that I get to see it off with one more night with them. And a meal beforehand.
Hello again. I’m writing to you from my comfortable little outdoor seat outside The Old Bull and Bush. There’s a stone column just opposite me, which might be the last remnant of the original farm building from which an enterprising fellow started selling home-brew to travelers in 1721. It’s colder than I’m used to. This unseasonably warm October has worked to our advantage for certain, and now with just two nights to go I can safely say that even if it pelts it down tomorrow and next Saturday, we’ve still been lucky with the weather.
For a theatre job at this time I’d likely be rolling around on the floor or warming up my voice. For this job I find it more helpful to sit quietly and breathe and focus. Saturday night is usually the weirdest audience as they’ve been boozing all day so the chances of a noisy bloke who wants to show off rise considerably. Last Saturday there was a gobshite who was on a first date. You wonder in what world he believed that she’d be impressed by him drunkenly shouting random stuff. Maybe she was though. It takes all sorts to make a world, and I can deal with hecklers all night long. But yeah – Saturday and it’s time to gird my loins and see what gets thrown at me.
This evening I’ve been spotted in my hiding place. Three children are discussing me loudly through a window above me. They’ve seen my hat and staff. “A wizard” one of them theorises. And to some extent, I am. Right now though, I need water. Gonna put this down and sort myself out.
—
The parents brought the kids round to talk to me right before I had to start. It was cute. The older one was a bit more worldly, and was looking forward to watching strictly. The younger one still fully believed in magic. Even though I explained to them how I was an actor and how I was about to lead a Halloween tour and tell people creepy stories, he lingered a few steps behind his departing family and fired a hasty parting question: “Are you actually a real magician?” Faced with the two options, I chose the magical one. “Of course. But I have to pretend not to be. Shh.” After all, magic is belief. Perhaps a little of what I do is magic. Wouldn’t that be nice. Time to begin.
—
Halfway through now. I’m sitting in the lovely beer garden of The Duke of Hamilton with the worst of it behind me. Now they all have a few drinks and I can relax for a moment before the last push to the King William IV. A friendly lot and not as leery as I feared by any stretch. I’ve been experimenting with making my guy insane today which has kept me occupied and having fun in a Peter Sellars in Doctor StrangeLove type manner. It’s quite pleasant to document these little jobs I end up doing. This one feels like a goodbye to Hampstead, coming as it does at the same time as my friend losing her flat. I’ll be staying there tonight and hopefully I’ll manage to put a lot of things in boxes again tomorrow.
I’m going to go and circulate with the audience and be sociable.
—
Done. So the StrangeLove experiment had mixed results. I think it read reasonably well to the audience as they had the consistency. But because I was cracking my voice and essentially joyfully behaving weirdly, my colleagues found themselves worrying about me. I finished the tour to a “medicinal whisky”. I accepted it, of course. But then had to explain to them how it had been a deliberate experiment and yes I’m perfectly fine and no my voice only cracks when I crack it. I get bored of myself easily. It’s a blessing and a curse. I probably won’t make him batshit crazy again but it filled the time. It took away from my authority. There’s a delight in being an unreliable guide through the darkness of the heath. But I’m already a murderous ghost guide. No need to be insane too.
Halloween tomorrow. Hopefully the weather will hold…
I’m in my bath after successfully remaining sober whilst leading an enthusiastic Friday night pub crawl – with spooky stories. Groups like tonight’s are joyful. There were quite a lot of them. We oversold. But they did reasonably well at sticking together, and they were all pleasantly trolleyed and playful without being leery. We all made it across the heath and then I made my excuses and got out of dodge. I want a good night’s sleep tonight.
It’s strange doing entertainment right now. We only have a small group at cap, but they still automatically spread out from one another. I still feel like some weird pied Piper, leading this long tail of giggling pissed people through the darkness of the night-time Heath. It’s black as pitch now at 7. Considering the first time I walked the route it was September, I can really see how the world has gotten darker here. Thankfully the rain has continued to hold off…
We only go to pubs with outside seating, and frequently lots of the audience remain masked in the pub garden. I’m wondering how it’ll feel with Christmas Carol this year. I’m glad it’s on again but I suspect it’ll be much harder to connect with the individuals who are watching it.
These weekends I’ve been glad of the focus this walking tour has brought me. It feels a bit like having a job again, although really it’s just three nights a week and some of the other guys have a nine to five in the week while I’m going to the opera and looking at mushrooms. With the Hampstead flat I don’t feel like I have all that much free time coming up now though – I’ve been much slower than I might have been at the process of boxing up and removing my friend’s stuff. I still kinda keep expecting her to tell me she’s back in London. Still, I’ve ferried a few car loads out, and with one more good load I reckon I’ll have most of the things she’ll miss. If push comes to shove I’ll just have to pay a removals company, knowing they’ll do it in a matter of hours. But I’ve been trying to avoid it, even though it’s getting less and less comfortable in there. I’ll sleep there tomorrow night so I can wake up and start doing things. Tonight I wanted to be in my space with my things.
I’m gonna get out of this bath, make and consume a huge cup of chamomile tea, and sleep like a baby.
Two nights to Halloween. The veil between the worlds is thin. I’m pretending to be the ghost of the pub we start in, which is a genuine reported haunting. This evening, just before we started the tour, there was a brief power cut that dropped the lights for a second or two and stopped the tills from working. Hopefully it wasn’t the strange Victorian man showing his disapproval…
Shaggy Ink Caps. My third allowed species of mushroom for munching now.
As many of you might have inferred, I’m fascinated by the mycological. I try to learn all I can about these strange little helpers. They are so alien, so unlike other organisms, and sometimes their fruiting bodies can be really rather tasty. I won’t eat anything that I haven’t picked, inspected, dissected, identified and then had a reliable second opinion about 3 times. That’s a bare minimum and it stops me from dying or from hurting my friends.
Last year at around this time Lou and I saw some large old Shaggy Ink Caps near one of our favourite parks outside Brighton. They were already turned but unmistakable. Huge beautiful mushrooms. Their gills go to black as they mature, and then they turn into black slime. They can’t really be sold as a result. You can only eat the young ones and even then they deliquesce extremely quickly once uprooted. If you keep an uprooted one overnight, it’ll just be muck in the morning. As a result, a rare delicacy. But we found a load last year, past it, and I remembered them for this year.
If they were past it last year it’s because nobody was picking them, I thought. And I was right.
We drove past the little layby, and I said “keep an eye out and tell me if you see any mushrooms”. “Ooh! A huge one!” We stopped. The layby was full of them. I improvised a basket. I took half of the fruiting bodies that were small enough.
An unusual mushroom. A very mushroomy looking black and strange spotted creature by the side of the road. They look incredible, and they change massively as they age. I took lots, thanking them as I took them, careful not to damage the actual mycology below those tempting strange fruits. I put them in an improvised basket in the back of my car. We went for a walk, then I dropped Lou off for work and I drove back to London.
I stopped about an hour ago and went in to see Tanya in Richmond. I brought in the basket. Probably 4 hours since picking them. Half of them were already ink.
They used to MAKE ink with these things. Put them in a bucket with some cloves and not much else… I can really see why. We were much more ingenious forever ago. Now we rarely even USE ink. We just read on screens.
I found the ones that were still good. I cut the bad bits and I rubbed them clean with kitchen towel. No need to rinse with water unless they’re going in soup. They’ll only be slimy if you do. They ended up ready on the kitchen surface.
Fried in butter and fed to three with a bit of parsley. My first allowed forage of that species. Tasty, and I can tell why they call them “asparagus mushrooms”. The thing that really struck me was how quickly they go wrong. A true delicacy and a rarity. I’ll be keeping an eye out in that spot next year.
There’s a joy in foraged foods. I just fed two friends and they had been drinking, but I’m pretty much certain that the coprine from common ink caps is not present in the shaggy variety in anything like enough quantity to interact badly with alcohol. I was 100% certain on every fragment that went into the pan though. That’s the only way with mushrooms.
I’m glad to have a third allowed species. I guess I’ve been doing this long enough now that I can start allowing the eating, which is part of the reason I learnt. Still, I get nervous at it, and I guess that’s the honourable thing to do. I’m erring on the side of caution always. But don’t fuck with mushrooms kids.
This one kicked off sometime before the 1730’s when the London artist and observer William Hogarth did the thinking that led to a series of paintings showing the progress – or perhaps lack of progress – of Tom Rakewell.
These paintings doubtless have their roots in older art. John Bunyan’s influential and moral Christian life journey story The Pilgrim’s Progress, which in turn come out of Dante and Everyman etc etc until we don’t have it written down anymore. The heroes journey. Let me just start grinding my Joseph Campbell again…
Hogarth painted his progress in living memory of Bunyan’s very different progress. Shortly afterwards, in France, Voltaire wrote his Candide. A new rash of these ancient allegorical journeys for the modern age of the mid to late 18th Century. Fables. Cautionary tales, perhaps. Hogarth was a very eloquent satirist for his time. The paintings survive, unlike his earlier “Harlot’s Progress” which was destroyed and exists only in etchings.
Cut to the 1950’s and Igor Stravinsky the Russian composer has ended up collaborating with WH “stop all the clocks” Auden – the extremely prolific Anglo American poet who is recently largely associated with one (excellent) work, for such is the power of cinema. Stravinsky has decided to make an opera of the Hogarth paintings, and pulls Auden and Chester Kallman in for the libretto. An opera in English, of these English cautionary paintings, and told with a twinkle in the eye. “For idle hearts and hands and minds the Devil finds work to do,” the piece concludes. It premieres in Venice in 1951.
Cut to 1974. I get born. More or less around this time John Cox is the creative producer at Glyndebourne Opera House and he persuades the artist David Hockney to design a unique production of the Stravinsky. With all the sets painted by Hockney, all the props and busts and costumes, painted by Hockney, this show enjoys a good opening in 1975.
Cut to this evening.
This Hockney Opera has only been performed 146 times including tonight despite the age. We managed to get into the slips, right at the edge of the stage in the upper circle. Lou and I brought the average age of the audience down by a fair few years. The house was packed, and I reckon if we had pooled the collective wealth of everybody in that room we could’ve bought much of the Southern Hemisphere. The singers were running around with props that might have six figures next to their prices if they ever found their way to auction. I cricked my neck with the terrible view but, surprisingly, I loved it. “I don’t watch opera,” I’d have told you a year or so ago. My reason? “Too expensive. Not accessible. Nothing to recommend it.”
I like it now. I’ve loved these reasonably regular chances to witness opera done well without having to mortgage anything. I’m not immune to the fact I’m a lucky sod to have somebody able to get me these tickets. It would be good to see the shows somehow appealing and being accessible to people who are not so fabulously wealthy as most of the presentation and conversation I witnessed in those gardens today. But I guess with all the musicians and staff, and more silence about The Arts in today’s budget, the easy way for the model there to survive is to keep doing it like it has been. Rake’s is proof at least that it works. This show was conceived before I was born and I didn’t find it egregious. It was colorful fun. The singers were enjoying it. The house was enjoying it too. I would say go see it but you can’t. It’s about to go on tour. I think there’s one night where it’s affordable for under thirties. I imagine the rest of it is sold out already. And if it’s not it’s gonna be PRICEY.
Maybe also I loved it as I wasn’t paying, despite the restricted view. Free opera. Free hard to get opera.
My phone accidentally snapped the apron as I switched it to silent.
When we went to the cinema last night I ate tons of popcorn and I drank most of a huge glass of cola and then I woke up this morning feeling like I should do something about the fact that somebody has stapled cold blancmange around my bellybutton. Brian looks fitter than a butcher’s dog. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for boxing. But…
I drove through exploding roads out of London this evening. Three hours from mine to Lou’s, and sirens and trails of smashed up bumpers and broken glass and people standing in lay-bys blankly looking at fucked up cars just sitting where they stopped, waiting for the ambulance or the fire truck or whatever happens to you after you total yourself. Is it the heat? Who knows? It’s hotter at night than it usually is in the daytime at this time of year. It all felt a bit Mad Max as I drove to Brighton. Maybe that’s why I want to get myself fighting fit. I’ll have to defend myself with nothing but a claw hammer and a bit of perspex once the Brexit Water War commences.
Horse riding? I’ll need access to a horse that can carry me. And it’s not very cardiovascular. And it’s expensive. I could go do a ski season somewhere but… acting and money… Too much time. Plus I could tear my leg off. Fencing? There are no adult fencing classes in Chelsea and anyway it’s mostly detailed wrist movement and lunging. Besides I always found fencing classes catastrophically boring at school as everybody wanted so desperately to divorce it from violence that it just became about talking and safety equipment and you never learnt technique. Judo? Hmm. Ow.
I’m not running. I hate running and my ankles are pronated. Maybe climbing, but my beautiful hands will be ruined. Gyms need you to have a 9 to 5 job and charge as if everybody is on 60k a year. Then you come out of the pool smelling of sick and immediately get a cold. I’ve often thought of trying to crew a tall ship round the world. I’d come back ripped, grounded, zen and better at the accordion. But time…
Or I need to get a job where they make me dance every day. Even just a decent hard hit of the Shakespeare. Outdoor summer Shakespeare is the ultimate accidental fitness job. I suppose I’ll lose a bit of weight Scrooging it but that’s just December and I’ll put it back in with post show audience wine : “Oh really there’s no need, but if you must then a glass of red wine. What? Well, large I suppose. The bottle? Oh go on. So long as we share it. I’ll pour.”
Maybe I should just start doing press-ups. Go to my friends online barre class. Hang upside down from a bar above the door by my boots like dad used to. I could join the Territorial Army. The Foreign Legion.
I’m writing this in bed. Today I walked up some stairs and changed the sheets on this bed. Apart from that it was just driving and pottering. I’ll sleep on it. Anyone for tennis?
AlBarclay 