Author: albarclay

Normal service resuming. Yesterday was essentially a theatre review. I hope you enjoyed it.

I ended up naming people and writing what was both a blog and a review. I remembered a blog over the summer where everybody was mentioned but two of us in The Tempest and the two were very aware of the silence. I realised I had to name more names or nobody. It snowballed from there. I neglected to name people connected as well for fear of it becoming an unpalatable list – in particular the individuals in the production team that organised two tickets to a packed house for me and Tristan.

Someone in Oxford might have been smashing up effigies of me made out of teeth for failing to call attention to their creative input. I hope not. This is why I don’t write about theatre, though. It’s my world and I love it unconditionally, but it can get political in here.

“You should be a critic,” Kitcat said after I tried to answer one of her many many questions in detail after she said “What was the show like?” I disagree with her about being equipped to be a critic. I’ve got too much skin in the game to write about theatre successfully. What the hell happens if it’s made by friends of mine and it doesn’t work to my mind? I’m so glad I loved Bleak House.

I’m not one to compromise my integrity so I’d be compromising my connections instead if I hated something. I guess this is why we have the loosely anonymous online theatre writers that exist online these days.

I write unfiltered daily, sometimes drunk, sometimes extremely drunk, sometimes angry, sometimes cosmic. Occasionally maybe I can write a concrete review of something that’s struck me – that counts as a blog, aye? Just I can’t do that all the time, or transactionally. I need to choose my material or I’d probably have tried to solicit a column in a weekly rag somewhere. Al Barclay is unwell, anyone? I mean… It’s tempting. After all they pay you for the words. I’ve switched off ads for this, so I get bollocksycustard for a book’s worth of insight/ranting. In fact I have to pay WordPress ‘undred pahnd a year for the privilege of hosting it, the monsters. Better internet people than me might be able to help me port it to a website. I own albarclay.com. Tim Evans once did shit-tons of work porting old posts and then the hosting fell off and I wasn’t tech savvy enough to solve it and he hauled me out for starting again on WordPress.

My PayPal is alhimself@hotmail.com. But I’m not in financial crisis at all right now or doing a Wikipedia. I’m just looking at the shape of things in a little period of change and rethinking.

Bleak House was a wonderful watch. Go see it.

Full disclosure: I’d thought I might end up being involved in it, and sent a ridiculous tape from Chicago, but it fell another way. And thank God, because now I’m doing some filming which is not only lovely and very well paid, but will really bolster my CV. It wouldn’t have been possible if I was theatreing in Oxford. The lord giveth, the lord taketh away.

“This is what happens when you give us space to work,” says my agent, and I fucking love her for it.

Onward. Bedtime.

All this thought about Oxford has made me REALLY WANT A FUCKING MOTORBIKE AGAIN… This too shall pass.

Bleak House is one of Dickens’s long form serial novels, turned out in the 1850’s, telling a story about love and identity against the backdrop of a seemingly endless legal case, mired in dense fog at the Court of Chancery.

It isn’t necessarily the most obvious choice for a piece of musical theatre, but Creation Theatre are not the most obvious theatre company, and they’ve got the creative team and the raw experience to make something very special.

They’ve been lighting up the town of Oxford for decades now, making beautiful theatre in all sorts of different spaces. And for this Bleak House they’ve chosen one of my favourite places in the world. Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street, Oxford.

It is after hours when we arrive but the tills are open. We are presented with 15% off vouchers as we walk in. I’m already thrilled. The shop is a treasure house of wonder bound in paper. So many books, so beautifully laid out. It feels so full of books that you can almost hear them sing. The smell of it! The feel of it! Oh I love it so. There’s nothing like a good book, and doubly so in this age of scrolling.

We descend into The Norrington Room, where a stage has been built amid the books. A little grey square of wood tricked out with trapdoors and crawl-spaces.

The last time I was here was 2012 for The Odyssey as a performer. This stage is a clear evolutionary leap from the one I knew so well, and it’s beautifully and cleverly lit by Ashley Bale. I am able to appreciate it more as well, knowing that I’m not going to have to make up a whole Homeric Odyssey for 200 strangers. Other people will be doing the hard work tonight, turning the bookladen shelves into other worlds in other times for our entertainment.

And there they are, the actors, immediately pinging out in simple but effective flexible costume skillfully organised by Ryan Dawson-Laight. Three women and two men standing around the edges of the stage, in the reflected murmur of the settling audience, screwing on their show-heads, watching the watchers wander in, adrenaline speeding up their thoughts: “have I got my plectrum oh look there’s the bishop of Oxford is the bird-book set in the right place have a good show guys God I’m a bit nervous ok so the director’s sitting over there is my fly zipped up what’s that line again”.

It begins and I’m immediately lost in it. This sprawling strange book has been crystallised beautifully by Olivia Mace, who fits everything we need in, keeping the spirit and poetry and theatrical vigor and adding a dash of mischief and a wash of music. Not content with just adapting and converting Dickens’s opus, she provides us all with songs and some tender choral moments.

Deborah Newbold’s direction encourages truth and focus so that the broader characters can ping with movement when they need to, and uses every method possible to shift and change the space and keep her audience following this complicated tale through its many changes. All the actors are playing multiple parts, aided in changes and safety by movement director Cydney Uffindel-Phillips. Frequently they’re grabbing instruments as soon as they are out of the main action of the scene and feeding back into the soundscape. When they can they keep that soundscape going, but there’s only five of them so I guess it couldn’t be a constant underscore without totally frying all of their brains. I wished there could have been, but budgets are budgets, and we all tend to have a maximum of two hands.

Eleanor House brings violin and great humour to her work, making, among others, a fantastically awkward singing prat of Mister Guppy and a delightfully funny Hortense motormouthing GSCE French. Some of my most unexpected laughs were courtesy of her choices. Joanna Holden has the job of playing the most characters, and pulls all sorts of shapes and voices out while swarming up and down the ubiquitous stepladders in boots with surprising assurance, snapping from high status to low and back again, bringing surprising humanity to Lady Dedlock. Sophie Jacob is the heart of the play with Ester, setting the tone with the opening lines, and working with such specificity and clarity that it came as a surprise to read that this is her professional debut. Offstage she brought great music as well on keyboard. Bart Lambert is still and sharp, smouldering in moments and bounding in others, veering deftly from warm to cold. And my old mate Morgan Philpott, playing a load of parts plus guitar, heartbreaking when he had to be, when the wind was in the west.

It’s easy to forget when you watch theatre how many people go into the making of it. So many people from conception to execution. This show was rumbling along in summer when I was up in Oxford doing the Tempest. The Creation Team and Olivia literally made it from nothing but an idea and now hundreds of people will come to Blackwell’s and buy lovely books and watch lovely actors and have a lovely time in Oxford from now until the 7th March. You can be one of those people!

This is a very warm hearted telling of an eccentric and wonderful novel. It moves along at great pace guided confidently by good people in a beautiful place. Catch it if you can!

Terrible traffic on my bus up to Oxford but for the first time in many journeys from London to Oxford I don’t have a lump of fear in my throat about time pressure.

Sure I’m going up to SEE a play. But usually I’ve been going up to be in one. It’s not such a high pressure thing… If I miss the start, the show goes on anyway. I just miss seeing the beginning.

I’ll likely dedicate a blog to writing about the show tomorrow. Today I’ll just use this moment of downtime to write something, so I can have a few drinks at the press night and catch up with old friends without feeling the weight of 500 words pulling at the edges of my fun.

Tristan and I are off to see Bleak House. It’s Creation Theatre, who I did The Tempest with over summer with the scary commute. The show will take place in The Norrington Room of Blackwell’s Bookshop. We made The Odyssey there with The Factory far too many years ago when we were all so young and foolish. The smell of the room will almost certainly trigger huge strange memories. I look forward to it. I dread it.

It’s a strange and beautiful bookshop, Blackwell’s, as Bleak House is a strange and beautiful book. I studied it closely at university. My personal tutor Nicola had written the foreword to the most recent penguin classic edition, and her knowledge and passion for the piece were both contagious. Time has allowed me to forget most of it – although how could I forget the spontaneous combustion? But I’m sure it’ll come back to me in the watching. And knowing this company it will be a sparky and unusual fun telling, rather than an earnest worthy and ultimately dull endeavour such as you might get out of a different company’s theatrical re-working of Dickens. In the same bag as our Christmas Carol, you could argue. Tell the story, mark the changes, have fun while you’re doing it and bring in some music. It’ll be fun.

That’s if we ever get there through this traffic. Tristan’s brother’s son was finally born this morning. The news and the need to celebrate it slowed us down considerably. And the daytime fizz made me slow and fuzzy. This bus is unpredictable at the best of times. The first time I used it to get to rehearsal it broke down. This time it’s gridlock.

Still, we have two hours before the show starts and we’re almost out of London now. Fingers crossed we make it. I might have a doze.

Still not at Oxford, and I’m contemplating the fact that I genuinely believed it would be a good idea to commute by motorbike for three weeks. I am so glad I didn’t get through the test in time. I’d be dead for sure. I was livid at the time. It’s a long dull fast road. I was so tired at times over the summer. Phew.

Back in the afternoon to Moorgate – one last journey to get back my tools. It’s funny how close the building I’ve been working in is to my old drama school. I partly love it, partly hate it. I wonder what the fresh faced cadet would’ve said about me working as a carpenter twenty years later. If you’d told him, he wouldn’t have believed you.

Here are my tools after a week. I really punished those kneepads.

But I’m coming to feel that this is what it means to be an actor, properly. Split focus.

I’m doing some filming on a series with a name to conjure with, under NDA. For a fortnight I’ll wake up and get on the tube through all the rush hour paranoia in order to spend my body tearing up floors and taking down walls and ceilings. The next day someone will pick me up at home in a car with blacked out windows and I’ll go off and pretend to be someone else for considerably more money than I’ve earnt in that fortnight. But I guess I’ve got a bankable skill now in that I’m unruffled on set and know how to focus on my work and turn it in. That took time and maturity.

But there are many days in the year and it’ll be hard to make sure they’re all spent using that skillset, even though that’s the dream.

I’ve always had an advantage with the ability to just turn my hand to something else for a while without question. This time it’s been carpentry and wrecking. I’ve learnt a great deal over this fortnight. The world of wood is much more comprehensible than it was. I want to try to apprentice myself making things now I’ve apprenticed breaking them. Maybe I should start by putting new doors in to my flat…

At the same time I’m glad to stop for a while and focus on gentler pursuits like putting actors into roles and helping find drivers and PA’s and so forth. The next few weeks will be a good opportunity to get work for people I know are reliable. I’m helping a group of people I love make a large scale thing. You’ll likely hear a lot more over the next few weeks, but once again NDA. I seem to be signing them left right and centre these days.

I treated today as my second day of weekend – (Monday is the actor’s day off after all.) The diary is empty of timebound obligations now for a few days, so I can focus on my freelance stuff and do some writing. I’ll be making a lot of phone calls tomorrow and making things happen for myself and other people. I’ll need to make sure I move my body a little bit. All this carpentry has helped the weird left shoulder thing be less forward, but something is still going on there, I still feel it twitching, I still can’t sleep on my right without the weight of it causing me discomfort. God knows what I did. I suspect I’ll never know now. But at least it’s just an annoyance rather than a huge pain now…

Home after a very boozy pub quiz and not feeling particularly competent at writing. I found out I’m not working on the get-out tomorrow in time to raise a fair few more glasses than I would normally raise on a Sunday and tomorrow can be a lovely carefree day of not taking up mouldy floors and not taking down mouldy ceilings.

But now I find myself having to write 500 words. Hmmm

I stayed up late because Kitcat was home after I got back and we ended up talking about tarot and next thing I knew I was doing a drunk reading for her. I think it’s given me a headache. It was that or the booze. It’s 1.40am. Damn. I haven’t been able to justify being an idiot for ages. It was past time, I guess.

Scene and Heard pub quiz. A very lovely charity and a good way of bringing kind people in the industry together. We made a good show of the pub quiz but we didn’t win anything. I was on a team with an old friend and an ex of many years past. It was good to remember how we can be friends. She has two kids now. Two. And she literally hasn’t changed one iota. I sat opposite her and felt simultaneously young and old. I wish we’d won the quiz, as we did so on an early date at The Dover Castle. Lots of lovely people at the table though and if only I hadn’t decided that getting blotto was the answer I might have had some better conversations than I did. Still. Apparently my tarot reading at home was helpful.. Small victories.

I’ll head onto site tomorrow and get back my wrecking bar and hammer and my impact drivers. I am very much more acquainted with my tools now, and will inevitably put them to good use again in the near future.

But now it’s bed. Bed bed bed oh bed. There’s a spot of casting to be done but I had the next two days marked out for work so it’s a shift to find I’ve got them to myself. If I don’t get to sleep soon though I’ll waste half of tomorrow, but maybe a lie in would be a good thing…

Kitcat keeps trying to talk to me through the door. She’s asking about her tarot reading because she’s sending a breakdown of it to her dad, who loves tarot. I literally haven’t the energy to explain how the deck I used is a heavily customised deck created by Alice Instone, and virtually every card of hers was one of the artist’s inventions and not included in the traditional tarot. If I’m reading drunk and tired it’s the only deck I know well enough that I can see it through the fug.

I still find it emotionally tugging to hang out with my ex. She’s still extraordinary.

I think it might have had something to do with why I had a spot too much to drink. Ah well… Night night.

And that’s the week.

Today I’ve been taking up floors and dropping ceilings. The building that I walked into to see the Wolf show a few weeks ago looks almost like an empty brick warehouse once more. There’s much left to do in the mushroom basement, but above ground level we are looking shipshape now.

Thinking about it, the build quality was very high for the show, despite the threaded screws and the enthusiastic glue.

They couldn’t drill into the walls, so most of the rooms were free-standing timber frames decked with ply and occasionally anchored in either the floor or the ceiling. Once we had a handle on them, we could laser on the anchor points and then bring the whole wall down to deconstruct, frequently exposing a blacked out window behind it which we could use for light and ventilation. Yes they would have felt fragile, but given the constraints there was no other option.

Outside of the basement and the endless stairs it’s not a bad place to work. There aren’t many of us on an average day, and I’ve been paired with Tristan so frequently it’s just the two of us for hours on end communicating by grunt and working through long repetitive physical tasks. Yesterday we were joined by Jo though, and today by Mitch.

Yesterday was tiles. Between three of us we must have prised up a couple of thousand individual bile green vinyl tiles, all the while cursing the name of whoever thought that was a good way of dressing a temporary space. Today was more varied but just as mundane.

We are spent. We were laughing about our lack of strength in the morning. In situations where we normally would’ve been able to rely on a combination of hand and core strength to pull up bits of hard-glued lino we were pitiful. Useless. Children.

We had to resort to tools and cunning, cutting the floor into strips along the adhesive underlay and then using body weight and the remains of our tattered grip to tear it up. My fingertips are gouged and wrenched and bloodied as I work in fingerless gloves. The padding on the gloves has done a lot of work, but there are still tiny blisters.

So I’m home, alone, listening to Beethoven and decompressing and I’m glad of it – an honest fortnight’s work. I have a feeling I’ll be in next week for a few days, back in mushroom land for the last push. I’ll need to gear up to that, as they’ve left the worst till last. That basement is a disintegrating, humid, pox-ridden hellhole. Even the mice don’t go there.

I’m definitely getting fitter. I’ll need to keep this up, as even my shoulder is easing with the constant movement, strain and hard use followed by self care, good food and relatively early bed. I’ve rarely had to take painkillers this week for it. Time is playing its part, but I think it’s a lesson that I need to carry. Accidental exercise in the course of my work might not be adequate anymore. I need to make sure I’m fit enough to sustain another four decades in theatre. I know a fair few actors still bounding around near eighty. Let’s aim for that…

As we walked off site tonight we noticed that the open plan office opposite our building had a huge union flag pinned to an internal wall upside down – (by mistake?)

All the staff normally have to work arranged in the windows, with the young attractive ones evidently placed in the most prominent desks by the slugs in the boardroom. This evening they were all standing facing one way, flag to the left. It looked like a miniature rally.

Today we leave the EU. Many people are celebrating. Many people are sad. I still don’t know what it means, frankly. All I have to judge it by is media sources – (which are, by their very nature partisan) – and personal pieces like this which are likely even less reliable and likely to be influenced by the mind of the writer no matter how hard they try to appear neutral.

The group in the office, with the big flag to their left – they had everybody standing to attention, hand on heart. It looked like pledging allegiance. We are closing the doors out and in. We don’t know how this will pan out yet, of course. But the voice says it’ll be good for us. Taking back control.

The ascendant voice at the moment is full of fear though. Hatred of the “other” unveiled and free “at last”. No longer can the “woke” people stop me from saying that I FUCKING HATE CAULIFLOWER AND I ALWAYS HAVE. Simmering, burning, ongoing, long-harboured actual hate of something almost arbitrarily chosen – borne of fear.

I see it in this city much more than at any time in my lifetime since the eighties where it was rife and all the rich boys at my prep school – only a few years after Boris left – tried to tell me that my good mate Navin’s sister Artie, who I rather fancied aged 10, smelt of poo. I didn’t understand it then. I don’t understand it now.

Fear. That’s the catalyst. And notice how we are immediately being encouraged to fear China now we have “beaten” the “enemy” EU. It’s in keeping with US policy – the Americans are our best shot at allies now that we’re local pariahs. It’s trad in the US to fear Jina. I’m not worried about Jina. I’m worried about fear. I fear fear.

I’ve hated it for so long, fear. I try to be fearless if I can. I manage it in my work and my movement.

I have areas of fear in my life, unaddressed, and they are my trigger areas. If you try to persuade me to go on a date I’ll bite your face off. Because I’m terrified of opening my heart again. Perhaps because I’m terrified of certainty, I’m not sure. But at least I’m aware of it and trying to look at it, slowly.

I think it’s a crisis of faith that we have in this country – and the western world.

We are more secular now than we have ever been, as a nation. A lot of my intelligent left brain friends are very proud to be rational atheists. I keep trying to tell them that’s ignorant and dogmatic.

We have evolved as a species to have irrational beliefs. If we don’t put our faith in Baal or Jahweh or The Flying Spaghetti Monster or Mohammed or Buddha, we still need somewhere to put it, so we put it into Katie Hopkins or Barrack Obama or Jordan Peterson or Richard Dawkins or Tommy Robinson. Or the EU, or Brexit. None of us are fully informed. Not even Tusk or Johnson or Trump. Nobody can predict the future. We can only look at the here and now. Experts will try to project. But it’s baseless, and the most trusted voice is usually the loudest.

I honestly miss religion in society. We wouldn’t be in this mess if all the fearful people could be told that they just have to chant more or not miss morning prayer or say hail Marys or burn more heretics or go to synagogue or pray at bedtime.

But no. Instead more and more people are being told to hate more, and they’re lapping it up.

Today, small offices standing hand on heart by the flag. Tomorrow the guillotine. Oh no, that’s French. The gas chamber. Ach no, German. The blood angel! Ayy no it’s Norse. Oh but hang on, we who make ourselves “English” – we ARE French. And before that we are German. And Norse… Fuck.

I never want to look at another polyvinyl floor tile in my life. I have no idea what I’ve done to my wrist getting them up, but I hope I noticed in time not to go down another painhole now that my weird shoulder thing appears to be on the mend. This whole experience is giving me solid physical reminders that I’m neither as young as I used to be nor as young as I think I am. I feel like I’m disintegrating.

I wandered over the road to the bar in Theatre Deli to write this and wait out the rush hour, as has become my routine for the duration of this job. I’m covered in chips of wood and paper and dust and fiberglass and dead insects and ground up bone and pain and age and time and human skinflakes. Every bit of me is a gritty shade of grey. I’ve been rolling around on a sad floor. Tristan left at lunchtime so I’ve been on my own. My bones ache, my wrist in particular. The repeated impact of slamming my wrecking bar under a hard glued floor tile only for there to be another one immediately afterwards.

Pirates have been here today, loading up an articulated van with junk. They are a well named company that sends a crew of big burly people to take your stuff. They clear sets for the theatre industry. Their banter overheard is always amusing. They seem a little disaffected though. They were commenting today that this is more like a construction site than a theatre set. It really does feel that way but I knew what I was getting into. There’s a shitload of stuff here. And there are definitely too few of us to get it out. There is so much to be done and literally not enough time in the day. We either need an army on Monday and Tuesday or we need longer days.

The orc and the goblin are here. They’ve been making friends with the pirates all day and carrying stuff to the artic parked out front rather than doing work that only they can do, so I’ve been on my own all afternoon in the growing gloaming, pulling up floors. I know the orc by name now. He’s Ryan. I still like him, the big lazy galoot, despite how clumsy he was about my respirator. He’ll never know I like him because I’m an antisocial fucker when I want to be and I’m not going to be doing any banter when there’s so much work to be done. I’m such a fucking puritan when I choose to be. And right now I choose it. Too many people I love lost too much time, blood, sweat and tears in this building. I’m going to rip it up until it’s ripped. It’s the least I can do. The production manager is so sick they’ve gone back home to their parents. I know their parents and that home. It’s a good place to recharge. But this is what this building does to people. My migraine the other day? I’m an energy sponge. I suck in negativity, process it and convert it. This is hard work physically and spiritually. I’m glad to do it. I’ll be glad when it’s over.

There are two work-shy carpenters on site, with us from an agency. I only know one of their names so I’ll call them Josh and Bosh. They spend most of their time chatting shit with each other. They know exactly what they’re doing work-wise though, so when they do work they swarm through the room like termites and leave everything arranged beautifully in piles of like. If only they worked.

When I wasn’t on site yesterday, Josh grabbed my respirator and wrote his name on it. That’s why I know his name. It’s written on my respirator.

There are a couple of respirators that were bought for the site that people were encouraged to take. I got myself a good one a few days before that for the job and left it there, you see. I knew they’d become necessary and I thought of it as an investment. Besides I need it in my attic. If I work up there without one I’m coughing for days.

He must have found it and thought he had a nice freebie. It wasn’t easy to get back. Possession is nine tenths of the law. Josh was willing to be nice about it but Bosh wasn’t having it. “That’s his respirator, mate. It was given out to him yesterday.” “Yes but I wasn’t here. Whoever gave them out didn’t realise it was mine.” “A respirator’s just a respirator right?” “Well… No…”

I had to check the brand of all the other ones, and point out to them that it was different. Even that didn’t sway them. Eventually I came back to them with a photo of it. They then gave it back in the most aggressive manner possible and told me to “jog on”. I successfully bit back the words “Go fuck yourself,” and then broke the hell out of some things for money for an hour or so in masked silence and rage before I calmed down enough to go on a coffee break.

Then one of the filters from the mask vanished when I was on lunch and found it in a totally different part of the building…

I’m not going to get swept up in this bullshit but I hope they don’t start hiding my power tools just because I held my ground about a respirator.

If they try anything else I’m creative and persistent enough to improvise an unexpected and unpleasant response. I’m not going to drop to their level if I can help it.

It’s not even Josh. It’s his mate Bosh. Josh is the goblin. Bosh is the orc.

He’s a funny lad, Bosh. I kind of like him – more’s the pity and he’ll never know it now. Bosh is the most popular twelve year old in the playground. Poor nervous Josh walks around with his shoulders around his ears apologising for his existence, while big Bosh has enough front for both of them. Anyway, I barely know them outside of observation. I’m too busy actually working, which is what I’ve noticed they aren’t doing so much.

I could probably wear my respirator on the tube and not look out of place right now. We are looking to be in closer alliance with America after “getting it done” in Europe which means the media needs to try to get us all to hate China ASAP which is a bit of a stretch compared to what we’re used to. What better crowbar to start the China-hate than by trumpeting Corona virus as a bigger threat to our existence than the sale of the NHS? As a result lots of well meaning people have started to wear breath masks in rush hour – to protect themselves rather than other people, as the Chinese tourists have been doing on our tube system for years. Next it’ll be long form articles about animal cruelty to catch the liberals and about weapons capacity to catch the tories.

Some of the masks on the tube look to be very high quality. They are mostly worn by well dressed people over 40 so far, but that’ll filter down. I thought about wearing mine on the tube. It looks like a gas mask. I decided that would only make matters worse.

Here’s Tristan, aspiring to the Main Office. Like so many people that aspire to such things, the door just leads to another door. And another after that. Until eventually there’s a brick wall.

I didn’t see that coming. I’ve never had a migraine before. It’s the most viable explanation for the fact that I woke up to be sick at about 6, went back to sleep for an hour, switched off my alarms in some sort of personal hell and then vanished for most of the morning. At one point someone tried to communicate with me by telephone and it was as if I was a dog trying to understand human speech with the volume all completely wrong.

Sometimes I’d get home and find a trail of carnage leaving to Brian’s room and then the man himself flat out on his belly fully clothed in the bed. He was incommunicado or he was monosyllabically responding that no he didn’t want a nice cup of tea and yes he was fine thank you very much. Thinking about it, those occasions would frequently combine with when he was on the crew for Get-out – the job I’ve been doing. Low light. Dust. Fumes. Physical impact. Labour. And the constant need to focus on the tiny tiny thing that is the head of a screw. Thousands and thousands of screws.

I didn’t go to work. I can make up the day anyway as I’m being paid for 6 days a week and this will go longer than two weeks. But I didn’t go to work and I feel okay about that. At first I was trying. I had convinced myself it would all pass and then I’d go in. I hadn’t had much to drink the night before but maybe it could just be like a hangover.

Tristan reminded me that if I hauled myself in like a sack of shit I’d still have to operate power tools all day and the very idea of having one of them in my hand made me almost sick at the thought. In the wisdom of advancing age, I’m aware that sometimes it’s better to choose your battles. Rather than coming in useless I just went back to bed and rested all day. Now in the evening, still fragile, I’ve managed to eat good food and drink lots of water. It’s just past nine and this is my last obligation before bed. I’ll be good for the rest of the week after this, but I think I just needed to shut down.

Not that the day was wasted. Far from it. I looked at a few actor friends of mine for some low key casting I’m doing, and I started to draw up some lists of people to send to the client. I’ll have to finish that in my spare time but at least the work is underway now. Then I loosely tallied up all the income from the last tax year and threw a vague figure towards Marie for an estimated tax return, knowing I have definitely not got the time to do a proper one and getting the estimate in will be enough to prevent a fine until I can get the figures done properly. It wasn’t a bad year unfortunately, considering its all spent now. Self assessment. Hate it.

Here’s my head in a wok.