Author: albarclay

This is what the weekend is for. I’m almost tempted to put the heating on but I’ve got the blanket and it’s still only October. But that was a week. I had no clue how tired I would feel at the end of it all but last night I slept like a rock and I remembered to switch off my 5am alarm. Misty would have been sad as it is her special time when Boo is asleep where she can run around and pretend she runs the place. Most of this week she has been demonstrating all her toys at crack of dawn to me while I’m trying to establish how much coffee it is possible to put into my face in an hour.

But today, nothing. I’m off to see Lou tomorrow but she knew I would be recovering today. Suddenly I’ve discovered all sorts of bruises. My foot. My arm. One of my shoulders. The Julius Caesar back. It is all a little less… young than it was ten years ago. I feel worked out.

So I stayed in bed as long as humanly possible this morning. Got up to make coffee but until about eleven that was the plan and then I didn’t have any milk so I wandered up the sunny road to Heidi and bought a Croque Monsieur and a coffee to have outside in the sunshine. Opportunities to do that are running out and sure enough by three o’clock the early sun was buried in cloud and the ice wind was blowing in the promise of winter. I quickly ran across town in Bergman to help Siwan move a ladder. Didn’t want to but I owe her a favour or three. My whole conversation was about how I didn’t feel very well, just because I’m tired. But the ladder got moved to museum street and I paid the Congestion Charge. Then back back back home, with a brief stop near Monmouth Street. I wandered to Monmouth Coffee. Everyone always mentions that place first. There was a queue six long sticking out the door. I immediately switched out of the whole idea of it.

Nothing is that much better than everything else. There are dozens of places that roast their own beans within two minutes walk of Monmouth without a queue like that. But right now the received idea is that Monmouth is the best which pretty much automatically precludes it from actually being the best, by default. And I suckered in. Like when we all bought into Google being the best browser and it experimented with how shit it could get before we noticed. Popularity + demand + capitalism = shortcuts. It’s why I won’t drink Starbucks. Those poor worldwide beans must have had a foul chemical existence and be as far from nature as anything can be and still taste of something.

So I’m back home without any coffee beans for tomorrow morning cos I didn’t want to risk a queue while I was parked in a loading bay. And I’m gonna get into bed with the blanket on and wait until one of the cats catches on and joins me. And there’s enough coffee for tomorrow, from a little independent roaster in Shepherds Bush. And all is well.

Oh God I’m absolutely wracked with sour adrenaline. This has been a big week and at the end of it I have just recorded a short story, me on film, reading it for a guy in Australia. It was 12 pages long and I knew I needed to get it done in an hour, and Alex in the studio kept faffing. We lost a good fifteen minutes to him changing his mind about the microphone, and then he kept on breaking my flow to give notes that frequently just betrayed that he hadn’t read the fucking story so didn’t have context on what I was doing with it.

I said the final word on the dot of 5pm. He can’t charge overtime for that. My reading could have been better if he hadn’t fucked my flow almost relentlessly at the start. I watched the first one in this series I’m part of and I thought the actor was being way too slow. Then every single note the engineer gave me was about slowing down when we didn’t have time (and the story is a heist – it wants a build in pace.)

So yeah. Sour adrenaline. Not enough time in a studio hour for interpretative shenanigans particularly pushing me to sound all serious and important, particularly when the first quarter is wiped out with tech issues that might have been solved ahead of time.

Still, Alex does know what he’s doing. He’s good at listening. But it isn’t just audio and he is used to that being the only information carrier. He doesn’t know what I’m doing on camera, so his notes only address half the delivery. That’s why I’ve got the sour adrenaline. I want this to be excellent, of course I do, but it doesn’t matter how good it is if it stops before its finished. I promised my client I could do twelve pages in an hour, and I managed it despite everything by the skin of my fucking teeth and I feel wrung out now.

But this has been the week. Deadlines, new information, responsiveness. I’m fucking knackered. This time last year we were finishing a long long rehearsal process for a calm and happy job that I will never forget, the people were so wonderful…

Nice though to do something creative, to care about ideas and storytelling instead of metal and wood and heavy machinery. Nice to get home without oil and filth all up my arms and all over my face. I’m gonna go to the shop and buy a pie, put it in my face and wind myself to bed. This is an excellent night not to drink, as after the week I’ve had that would be my coping strategy hands down. Pie will have to do.

Not even pie, with the storm outside. That might explain my mood, a storm rolling in. I’m having pasta pesto with the cats.

I didn’t really need a second van and driver for today but just instinctively booked it, as I wanted to be absolutely certain we were finished at the end of it. “I’m convinced someone up there is looking after you,” says Canice when the first van gets a massive puncture and I’m fine as I weirdly decided to spend on a second one. He says it before Lee from the unit next door undercuts the RAC for cash and changes the tyre for us right there. He runs a Mercedes garage and has the tyre and the tools. We’ve been pissing him off blocking him all week so I’m glad to bring him some business, and I think Canice might be right that someone has got my back.

We got it all signed off. Final load was a pile of cut up steel. Canice and I drove it to the local scrap metal dealer and they have no time today. Shit. There’s a great big artic unloading in there. So we drive out to the marshes.

It’s another world out there. The streets are lined with shit. I know it’s expensive to tip things, I’ve spent thousands in the last few days. Pure wood is cheaper than “mixed”. We drive past sofas, old mattresses, all sorts of detritus, just thrown off the back of vans in the dark. It’s like an apocalypse movie. Who knows how long it has all been there. I get it, you’re broke, you rent a van to get a room clear or something, you don’t know that you can’t get vans into the tip without paying. It happened to me with a mattress aged 24 or something. So we parked the car and walked to the tip carrying it. They wouldn’t let us in carrying it either. So I waited until it was dark and then drove around until I found a quiet place where someone else had done the same and … well who knows if I leaned it up against a wall and fucked off or not? I know. Hopefully I thought better of it, but perhaps I was just clueless and broke and antisocial and don’t want to admit to it publicly in case someone says it’s a crime.

Still it’s horrible all that junk, and of course it is nobody’s job to go get it. It could be put back round if it was, but no good Samaritan is gonna pick it up as it’ll cost them. If the government started paying individuals to clear old flytip sites it would have to be worth their while and it would be wide open to abuse. Dump it, then pitch to clean it up.

I’m done anyway. I have two good tools I didn’t have before. One of them would be amazing if I was a bike thief but I can’t seem to find my multitool or my DeWalt charger. I’m sure they are buried in my living room somewhere. Nobody would have taken them thinking I wasn’t paying attention to them.

The last load was ready to go. Some weird pump like tubing, all dressed in plastic. Various bits of wood with scaff braces bolted on with a wrench I didn’t have with me. Chicken wire and rusted corrugated iron glued to board. Some fucked old pallets. “Mixed load” (Turns out pallets have to be very good to sell them. I got £6 for a van full of pallets, and they took 3 for that. We had to chuck the rest).

So yeah, I was about to fork the load into the tipper when a man swarmed in with escorts. He went straight up to the pile I had been told to leave.

“That’s supposed to go. That’s supposed to go,” he starts, talking to the guy next to me as if I’m not there, itemising things. “They should have taken this all. This isn’t the deal we had. I was told it would all go. I’m calling him up.”

I finally got the guy to look at me and hear me. Thankfully I have a video of his staff member telling me it wasn’t for me. I have magical recordyface glasses – it wasn’t a stealth film though, I told him I was recording it so I could plan it. But I’m very very glad I did.

“No need to call him,” I say, and I think I sound calm. I don’t want my very very busy client to get a stressed message from the warehouse owner. I can get it out for you tomorrow no trouble and I’ll sort it out with him myself. He acquiesces but he can’t resist: “This is what you get when you employ people from outside.” With me standing right next to him. Rude.

I find myself thinking of all the England flags that went up yesterday around the industrial estate, and on the road in and the roundabout. A profusion of them. I know that’s not what he means by “from outside”, but it’s the same attitude when you condense it and I still haven’t been allowed to see this man’s eyes. I’m not one of “his” people, is his judgement, made in haste and without thought. And it’s true because I don’t fucking know which bit of green flat is for which fucking show, and he made them so he does. “I recognise that bit cos it almost killed me when I made it.” He’s more interested in the pallets than me. So I go full charm offensive and I think I’ve made some headway and he gangles back out defused and goes to his next thing. He’s running an astonishingly large business. My adrenaline is in full flow but it’s all good.

Canice gets back. There’s time in the day for one more load. Yaah Fuck it. We start cutting into the stuff he’s pointed out and get two more loads sent. And I’m back in tomorrow again. Had to explain to the client and hope he’d cover the extra. Thankfully he agreed to my proposal by WhatsApp at half seven at night so I’m not gonna be paying to work tomorrow.

Off to bed.

Business is hard, folks. I’m learning on so many levels.

A slow start in the morning caused me to get a teensy little bit (a lot) stressed. Two tippers in the yard and discussions about neatness of load for something that is going two minutes down the road and then falling off the back on purpose and into a shredder. Thankfully stress doesn’t make me mean, it just makes me stressed. It’s rare for me for it to happen but this felt like there was a lot riding on it today. I want to keep the client positive.

The wood all gets shredded and sold to a company that burns wood for power. I tried to get them to buy my wood direct but they weren’t having any of it. So I pay the tip and they sell it. Wizard wheeze there they’ve got.

The metal can be sold if I cut it down enough but that’s time and staff. We were running the grinder when we could to cut it down. Jethro must have his ears ringing this evening. God only knows how many metal cutting discs he burnt through but it was A LOT. But – it had the effect of giving me one load that was positive at the end of the day.

Two vans were running on relay all day. Apparently the guys at the tip were astonished at how quick we were loaded up. We left the guy at the weigh bridge my company card, as we knew it would run and run and we were often sending one van before the previous one was back. The slow start turned into a repeating pattern, and as the space in the warehouse grew, the forks started to really make sense. Thank God we had them. Some loads would have been impossible.

If we hadn’t hit queues at the weigh bridge from artics coming in full, I reckon we would have managed to clear the whole job. As it is, we got an ungodly amount processed. 38 trips in two days at an average of £71.99. There you go, maths fans. Fuck me I’m knackered. But I’ll be back there first thing tomorrow for the last push.

First thing tomorrow morning I’m sending Canice with a load of pallets to the pallet reclaimer. We might get another positive load out of that. Meanwhile John and I will strip the wood we can strip and maybe cut down more metal. Time pressure is off so long as we can empty it tomorrow. Business owner won’t charge the client for a day of spill back into October. I asked him. A lot of the extra work is sorting. If there’s any plastic in the wood it’s a mixed load which costs double. It’s knowing when you have time to strip it and when it’s worth paying the extra. Time is money too.

Phew. Now a bath. I’m in it. Need to clean my nails and put myself down for the night. Self tape tomorrow at 5am. Got a bit of filming to prep for too. I’m missing a day of Panda tomorrow and I’m sad about that.

“So the thing you were most worried about turned it to be the easiest!” That’s Lou. She means the forklift. And yes, I got back on site from buying a battery powered angle grinder and there was a guy with a forklift toodling along to the door. I signed it in sharpie and now I have a forklift. I’m not the most confident, I’m not like Jason or the Portuguese lads. But there’s only one way to get like that.

Today though was about getting access to the pallets. Whoever unloaded it started with the pallets and got tired later. The deeper layers look like they are on nicely sorted pallets but we have been wading through horribly chucked in guff to get to them. One of the piles was leaning so precariously I was nervous of picking off the top with the lift. Then John just clambered to the top like a mountain goat and chucked all the stuff on the top down.

If we sort the wood properly and get all the dressing and plastic and metal handles etc off it, we only pay £75 plus VAT per tonne. If we don’t we pay £150 plus VAT. This is why I spent money on a good angle grinder. If we cut the trellises and make the metal more manageable we can theoretically send it to the big scrap dealer down the road. Even if they give us pennies it’s a saving. For the same reason I’ve isolated the pallets. There’s a pallet reclaimer just down the road. Money in instead of paying to dump, by all means possible. If only all the second hand wood people I’d contacted hadn’t been so oddly disinterested and unhelpful. I’ve sent multiple good sheets of plywood to the scrapyard today. I spent a whole day phoning people and the best I got was : “We will take any length of timber over 2m, but send us pictures of what you want to bring to us first.” Ain’t nobody got time for that, and the guy had already pissed me off by the time we got to that. So… I’ve booked more hands so we can sort and sling on shuttle runs but also try and reclaim pallets and scrap metal. This means it’ll cost me the same but more people will get paid and less stuff will go to landfill. That’s a win as far as I’m concerned.

I really wish I had had more notice on this job. I had scouted the area so was able to accept it on short notice knowing how close it was to the recycling facility. But with a couple of weeks warning I could have probably moved lots of the good wood to where it was wanted.

We learn by doing, and running this has been a steep learning curve for me. I need to do the teams better tomorrow. Frequently everyone was doing the same job at the same time today which is never a good thing, but the average experience level at this work was low. I had good hands but raw. Still better than most of the lads who showed up in Paris in the mornings. But yeah, I rarely had the experience of taking my focus off something and coming back to find it done.

Over too quickly. A snatch of a day with Lou and now I’m back in London. We had a rehearsal this afternoon and I’m amazed I had headspace for it but these Halloween stories don’t tell themselves, eh? There’s still a few tickets left. I’m hoping it sells out.

Much as I would have loved to have stayed in Brighton, the heath is a special place. We met at half four and it was pouring with rain. We walked out at ten to five and the rain stopped completely. For the last few hours of the day, sun broke through the clouds and made a mockery of my multiple layers. I think I’ve done three years of this haunted walk now and it has only really badly rained once, and that was the last night of the last time round. October was when I did Camino… It can be dry. I’m hoping for another dry one. We shall see.

I’m home now, running a bath, and I’m gonna try and get my head down early. Brian and Maddy roasted ham which was a happy surprise, and doubly so as rehearsal went well and I got home in time to eat it at a reasonable hour.

Misty is trying to burrow into me as I write. Tomorrow is a big old day of the unknown, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got everything in place to do things well. It will slightly depend on how badly things were put in there. We might get things done tidily by the end of Tuesday. I think we will so long as things don’t go tits up with the forklift.

Brighton again, being scrutinised by Tessy as I attempt to get this blog started before the end of the day. It’s only a snatch of time with Lou so it’s an opportunity to write a bit while she switches into her evening wear. We are off to see the Scottish play – she was on wardrobe and some of my costumes will be on stage.

“Are you ready to go?” So much for that plan.

—

We had dinner at Botanica on Lou. Food this week, good God. I’ve been spoilt but it’s my birthday week so its allowed. It’s in a great big old stately grounds that is now all full of restaurants and Botanica is the affordable one and it is still posh, dairy free and healthy, £26 for pork but it was excellent and it was on Lou this time so tasted even sweeter.

Then to Macbeth. I got to watch some of my costumes on stage. We were in a tiny little theatre in Horsham so the last person I expected to sit next to me was Ffion. “Get the fuck out,” I said almost by mistake as I saw her. We got to sit next to each other and watch Shakespeare. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen the play live with both the big Macs played by Scottish actors. It was nice to see it done well on a low budget, and considering it was so deep into a van tour and they’ve only just come inside, it was in great nick.

They must be knackered. They’ve got the get out down to 28 minutes. I remember that being such a driver, the way we would hit a timer every night and celebrate when we beat the record but get it all loaded in tidyily. You come off stage, take off your costume, and go grab a wazzer, or start banging out the truss, or derig the lights. There’s a terrific connection to the whole business of show in a van tour. Exit stage right, wipe the tears from your eyes, grab a bit of tech, do tech things for the other actors, quick swig of water, chuck a cape on, listen at a door, come on as someone else, repeat and then it all goes in a van every night and you put it there and you don’t know what your bed is gonna look like until you collapse into it. And at the end of the week your agent puts in about enough money for a week’s worth of food and … that’s your summer. “I think I’ve been to Horsham. I can’t remember for sure…”

Lou and I said goodbye to the cast and producer. What a delightful gig – similar vibe to AFTLS but you’re really on top of each other. If it’s harmonious it is really harmonious. One squeaky wheel starts to magnify and magnify. These guys had a cast change early in the run, perhaps for that reason. It felt harmonious. They all still had the light in their eyes. And that little theatre was packed in the first half and no less packed in the second half, and this is Shakespeare. Excellent stuff. That’s what I like to see.

Up at 6:30. Coffee. A moment to relax.

By eight o’clock I’m back looking for forklifts. You’d think it’d be easy. One company wasn’t responding so I hounded them and eventually I got a link where I could sign up my company to their website. No quote without the sign up. They wanted to run credit checks too. I filled in all the forms. I think my credit is ok. I get sent letters offering the company credit cards.

Meanwhile tipper vans. A place in Loughton had conjured huge numbers for one. A place in Upminster showed up slightly better and a really friendly saffer on the phone who thinks Siwan and I are siblings. I left her on that while I chased forks. Ended up on the phone while driving across town. I even dragged Maddy into it.

At half twelve I gave a security guard my passport and totally switched my head. Musical Theatre, baby! A workshop with one of the silicon valley tech giants. No photos inside, NDA up the wazoo, escorted everywhere. About fifty of them. Each one of them worth more than the four of us combined. Jazz Hands! We got them all singing about tuna. It was curious and strange. I have never had a client as highly strung as the one who met us at the door. “Can you break down, minute by minute, what you will be doing and when?” “No.” Say it with certainty, kids. Say it with meaning. “No. We can’t.” The workshop went down a treat because it was responsive and alive and unfamiliar, like they wanted.

Finish that and back onto the phone and the company who made me sign up for a quote eventually get chased down by me and announce that they had no forklifts to begin with. Fucking oooh I want to post to their website. Absolutely fuming. I should have stopped at the point when I spoke to the AI assistant on their website that was pretending to have a name and actually making you wait for the reply as if someone was typing it. That’s absolutely demonic, to give you all the impersonality of an AI and then deliberately make it fucking annoyingly slow so you might think it’s human. What the fuck is the point of that? Whoever invented that needs to go to the same circle of hell as the guy who made up public benches you can’t sleep on. They wasted loads of my time to behave like they didn’t give a fuck about custom.

Thank God I found Lamar on my third call to another big old company. He got it. He’s helping. I want to give him love. He can have nice things please. We’ve got a forklift to be delivered on Monday at about noon. This is enough. Otherwise we all would have been standing round looking at wood. Week rental minimum but it doesn’t break the bank. They get you with the delivery charge. Something might go wrong but it seems we are one step closer to where we need to be. Fuck I’m tired from the stress of the unfamiliar. Everything hard is learning.

So then I picked up a ladder in Old Street, drove it to Holborn, drove it back to Old Street, and drove myself and Siwan to The Tamil Prince on Hemingford Road. “Something hot and a Lucky Saint please.” It came quickly. The lamb curry. Jesus I’ve had some excellent Indian food this week.

I have no idea if the vehicles I’ve got are up to scratch. I think you tippers will be very small. I guess they’ll have to do or I’m gonna have a very tough Monday and an endless Tuesday. I need to sit down and do some maths. Maybe I pitched this one right, maybe not, but next time I’m getting a deposit too. Kes knew it. “When are they paying you?” “When it’s finished.” He has offered to help me out with a loan if there’s a shortfall. That’ll come down to the tip. £75 a tonne for wood, £150 for mixed. I’ll have to sort things carefully. The next few days are gonna be logistics. My favourite thing oh yes oh yes yes. And the occasional musical workshop perhaps. And prepping an audio book read. Self tapes? Halloween rehearsal on Sunday? Fuck. Who am I?

Tomorrow I will stop a moment. All of the things can wait till Sunday and Lou and I can be. I am falling over but I’m happy I’ve put myself in the way of opportunity and seized it, even if it isn’t necessarily the opportunity I would hope for. This time last year etc etc

We were both working yesterday so Lou came up today. Just before she arrived I had a great big quote I sent in accepted about two weeks after I would have preferred to have had the news. Now I’m frantically playing catch-up as I’ve got a whole load of vehicles to book at short notice. Lou and I met up and I was worrying about forklifts.

Birthday Lou day plans went ahead though with lunch at Kutir and then a surprise trip to the theatre. Kutir is an extraordinary lunch – we are both obsessed with the jaggery sea bass. There are other things on the menu but there needn’t be.

A moment to pop into the V&A and look at Marie Antoinette things. A sad strange story, hers. Antonia Fraser’s wildly popular book made her alive to me, and seeing her clothes was a strange sad thing. The Austrian. The ostrichbitch. Propaganda is a terrible thing, as we are remembering worldwide. They even had the guillotine blade that dropped into that narrow long and delicate neck. Good God they corseted people until they were impractical back then. Some of her dresses look like torture devices for the average human.

Lou is about to go on tour for months with Wicked. I told her I’d never seen it. I’ve always been curious, it has felt like something of a cultural touchpoint having been to drama school on the millennium. Every time I’ve looked for tickets the numbers have put me off. So this evening that was my surprise present.

It’s such a lavish show. I loved every second of it. Her eye was on the quick changes and which costumes would likely need lots of maintenance, what they are wearing for the curtain call so what can start to be turned around etc. My eye was on the “Wow!” of it. A really strong piece of musical theatre, and such a great production, no wonder they can still pack it out on a random Thursday evening, and no wonder it is so hard to find tickets for actorprices. I don’t hang out with enough twirlies, I guess.

Walking home I felt thoroughly entertained. I haven’t seen the wizards of oz since I was a child so my child mind connected to the connections they drew. What a delight. For a few hours I stopped worrying about forklifts. I really need that IPAF licence and I need it yesterday.