Author: albarclay

We are all going to have a party tonight to celebrate the end of The Tempest. It isn’t the last show, but it is the party. Tomorrow post show they (and we) will have to break down all the things that have been constructed in The King’s Centre. All the truss and the drapes and the steeldeck, the minirigs and fans and tables and chairs. The costume rails and the dressing tables and the trolleys and the hazers and the lights and gels and microphones and amps and soundboards. The extended infrastructure that supports the visible work that we are all doing. Actors are like mushrooms – (and sometimes toadstools) – the visible organs of a complex invisible mycelium. The display part of something much bigger and more complicated.

I want to see this company of mushrooms off – aka get drunk with them tonight – but I’m booking a taxi to Oxford Station from Ginny’s at 7.50am in order that I can get to rehearsal on time on Thursday. I don’t want to do a day of work in that hot room in Brixton while being hungover and cranky, especially with a final Oxford show on Thursday evening, even though I’ll have the wings of final night adrenaline truncating time once the show actually starts. I have to get there first. And it’s tiring enough rehearsing plus doing a show before bringing last night’s booze into the equation.

Nevertheless I’m writing some of this blog early. I usually write shit down on the train back to London and use the Oxford train to just sink into senseless oblivion for a wee while, and contemplate nothing. But good to crack the back of it. On which subject I hope Trinculo’s back is better…

Now I’m strolling down the towpath north to Jericho, writing as I walk.

Hopefully I won’t fall in the canal. I thought I’d steal a march as there seemed to be a great deal of faffing and it’s a twenty minute walk to Bookbinders. I’m not in the mood to destroy myself but now we’ve finished what was a slightly damper and more reluctant show than usual I think I fancy a wee dram. I’ve booked a cab for 7.45 tomorrow morning. Hellfire, this has been a glorious job, this is the last night we will have before some of us – very probably myself included – will vanish back to London asap after the show goes down. I want to raise a glass with them despite risking exhaustion as a consequence…

Drunk Al is thrilled. He had a great night. There were songs, some of which he joined in with. We had a musical night. How lovely to have a musical night! All of this joyfulness lands firmly on one actor: Simon Spencer-Hyde. A glorious human if ever there was one. Secretly rehearsing songs when there was time, just to bring out a beautiful night for all. This evening was a validation of the extent to which I am surrounded by glorious humans on this job. We were even joined by actors from other companies. A big mash of glories. But I’ve only got 4 hours to sleep. Zzz

“My shoes smell of SHIT!” So says Miranda, wedding dress disheveled but mostly zipped up. “Smell them!” She pushes them near my face. God no! You can smell them in Chipping Norton. Once upon a time they were ballet pumps. Now Vladimir Putin wants them for a visit to Salisbury Cathedral. They are death. The only thing worse than those pumps are Trinculo’s shoes, which have been given to two hobbits to take to Khazad Dum.

Trinculo’s back went funny in his bed last night. He’s in agony. It didn’t stop him from doing his scene ten times and his scene involves getting in a little rubber dinghy which must be agony with a bad back. He got a lift there after the shipwreck to save him running, as did Sebastian and Antonio, leaving me sprinting down the road on my own. Late to the party as ever. There I was, panting and frantically plucking ivy leaves from a tree to make my boats. They sauntered past much earlier than usual. “We must do it like that more often!” Delightful bastards. They can call it character research.

Much of our costume has fallen apart, generally, as is usually the case one way or another.

I munged my jacket within a week but got a replacement which I keep safer. One of my cufflinks dissolved and is now a safety pin. Some of us have cut the legs off our trousers so the air can get to us. Close up, we are disheveled. But say one thing about this company – we all get stuck in and solve our own problems. This is a company of kind experienced actors with an understanding that just because an employer is making employment it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re rolling in filthy lucre. Jobs like this allow a company to exist, and provide employment for lots of actors and joy to lots of audience. But it’s not a big cash-cow and shouldn’t be treated as such.

When I’m filming for a big budget job sure I will wait until someone brings me wellies and holds my shoes and someone else carries an umbrella over before I walk exactly as instructed across the uncovered mudpatch towards the location. But that’s because there are people whose job is to do all of those things, and it makes it quicker in the long run for everybody as you can’t have a mudsplash on trousers suddenly that then vanishes in the next scene. As a general rule, in theatre muck in to help solve and on set wait until you know you can definitely solve the problem before mucking in.

In this sort of community we do the job of dresser for ourselves once the show is open. As long as I’m there physically I can say the things that need to be said for my scene, with or without cufflinks, even if I’m wearing a tutu. It’s only if there’s something impossible to surmount that we must reach out to the massively overworked team around us for help.

We are approaching the end of this glorious run. Our costumes are disintegrating. This is familiar to me from many previous shows with different companies, over the years. You fix your own stuff if you have to. Ferdinand only has one and a half working buttons left on his waistcoat. We only have 2 shows left.

The magic of theatre! You can get away with murder if you sell it hard. I’ve made my first entrance with mud all over my trousers and shoes from the previous rainy matinée and just thrown my arms and energy up and acted high in order to draw attention off it.

This is theatre. Magic can be cheap and still magical. Even in the moneyed theatres, the backstage area is narrow, crowded, smells of feet or microwave cooking and carries paggro notices. You’re the character until you walk offstage through that exit and then you’re actively reminded that you are a big pretendyface and have to put the prop exactly in the right place – for very solid reasons. I heard of a Julius Caesar being actually stabbed with a letterknife when an actor hadn’t picked up the retractable blade from the table but found the letterknife instead.

I’m the king in a cheap shirt, dyed and pumped up with a button-down ruffed front that can’t be washed. I’ve got a clip-on bowtie that I personally wouldn’t be seen dead in. My shoes are covered in mud most of the time. But it works. It is a glorious illusion, and a storytelling. And I’m thrilled to be part of it.

I’m winding down on the train. I thought I’d have a friend for this leg of the journey – I’d sorted her a comp and all – but she had a writing deadline out of nowhere. So it’s me, Marks and Sparks beer, you lot and the train.

I just bought a toy accordion online against the possibility of bringing it to America. It has one octave and who knows how many or how few stops. It’ll arrive at rehearsal tomorrow lunchtime. I’ll know almost immediately if it’s viable. Right now Kaffe is making all the music, so we are experimenting with Valentine being vaguely musical himself – as vaguely musical as the actual actor playing Valentine is in reality. It’s one of my parts. Run for the hills.

If it’s any use at all, I’d be glad to have a miniature squeezebox to upskill myself while touring and to bring more music into our show. If it’s no use at all then we will find another solution and it was only about £25. We are in that very fertile period of rehearsal where all ideas are considered and examined, and as a company the five of us are currently invested in shoehorning as much joy and as many gags as possible into the telling. We might strip back later. But it’s fun right now to see what we can get away with. Similarly we are making absolutely no cuts so we can offer the client an uncut version. If the last tour is anything to go by we might need to go at it heavily with scissors at the last minute to keep the run time down, but if we include everything then we’ll know intimately what works and what doesn’t by the time the scissors have to come out – if they do. That’s the theory at least. It all heads towards giving us a deeper knowledge of this beautiful play, so we can sound authoritative in post show Q and A sessions with academics, and unlock the depth of meaning.

On which thought I arrived and hit the dressing room for The Tempest with these brilliant reprobates.

Dammit, I’ll miss them when it’s done. Every single one of them. We get changed in a little room to the side of the conference hall with this little mirror for detail. Until last week we had to evacuate all our costume etc on a nightly basis – a job that fell to the three of us who have the least tech. Now thank God we can leave stuff in the room overnight. We don’t have to wait for the audience to be gone from the space before we take out the costume rails.

Although the audience knows we are actors… The idiom for this show allows for a huge amount of play in that world.

I had a contact lens fold itself around in my eye during a scene today. I had to take it out immediately before it went round the back of my eye into sickypanicland. It was my third scene of ten. No way I was going to be an hour with a lens in my brain. I got it out of my face immediately.

The timing was atrocious. I was holding a filthy muddy stick that had just been pulled from the water. I simultaneously cried hard and blinked as I realised it was my son’s disintegrated case, and I felt it fold on itself. I dropped the stick, wiped my hands, licked my finger and took it out. I covered with some form of extended improv about how I needed to be vain and not have glasses as the king but that after the shipwreck I’d lost my servants. I popped out my lens to the end of my licked finger. Then all the “strange fish” text had me blind and enchanted, with all the audience very aware of the lens on the end of my finger. There were so many metaphors about perception and clarity of thought to clarity of sight. I even found myself bastardising Lear on that theme – “see better Alonso”. One for the scholars there. I managed to get the fucker back in while they watched me, and used it as the reason not to seek my son in the river deeper then ever plummet sounded and with him there lie mudded. “You shouldn’t swim with lenses.”

I got that mucky fucker out ASAP after the show… I think I’ve avoided amoeba attack.

On a human level, them knowing that the man who had been handling the muddy stick just put fuck knows what into his own eye in the name of art… ick. I didn’t want them to be worried. But I wasn’t going to lose the lens. They’re monthly disposables. Dailies have always seemed too wasteful to me. But maybe they make more sense for the acting if I’ll be doing the cry cry face collapse shit.

Or maybe I just need to save up for lasers.

A bit of space. I’ve been trying not to use my voice but forgetting. We had a Sunday Roast, lots of The Tempest company, all together at Oxford Blue. We had booked it for 1pm but virtually nobody was there on time. Ryan arrived and immediately needed to stream the rugby as it wasn’t playing. The pub WiFi was down. I ended up tethering my laptop to my phone and streaming it through a Sky Sports day pass on a Now Tv trial subscription that I’ll have to remember to cancel before next week. Harder than it needed to be, and Ryan bought me two pints for it, but it was worth it for him when England beat Wales. Half of the company was cheering for Wales. I had no real affiliation but was glad we could all hang out in the same space and relax. The Tempest company is glorious. I can’t quite comprehend that we only have four shows left.

I’m home in London and it’s after midnight. I forgot this blog existed until I had had a bath and was on the wind down towards bed. Four more days of being swallowed. I’m looking forward to having time again, like I had today. It was so lovely to just slouch round Oxford with the company.

Pickle is home again. She had the weekend holidaying at Rebecca’s, but I managed to find the time today to swing over in an uber and grab her, and catch up with a friend into the bargain. I’ve been able to socialise! It’s been incredible. Miles and Rebecca and I sat in a room and spoke like humans.

Until it became so difficult I didn’t notice how necessary it is to just shoot the shit with other human beings. I’ve had the best day. I’ve even shot loads of demons in Doom 2016. I’m using my laptop to try to catch up on about a decade of missed computer games if I ever get time to sit down. It’s the opposite of being a teenager right now.

I’ve got a house guest. She’s going through a tough time. Brian just handed her his keys when he found she was unhappy and needed a change of scene, knowing he’d be away and she could have his bed. She’s great, and we shared a roast chicken this evening and chewed the fat.

I’ve had the day I needed. Two Sunday roasts. Beef and chicken. Lots of good conversations. Exploding kittens in Oxford – (it’s a card game). Miniature Pickle kittens in London that didn’t explode. “It’s amazing how she responds to her name,” says Rebecca, and it’s true. That cat knows her own name. Her use name. She has secret names too. She has to – she’s a cat after all.

I’m happy and rested, full of food, eyes insisting on closing down. Only four more days of overlap and from tomorrow the USA company is complete in the rehearsal room. The dynamic is already excellent, and there is definitely room for my dear friend’s positive energy.

The hardest part is over. Now a day of rest beckons. Then four more days of overlap and that’s the end of the commute of doom.

Two shows today. You should’ve seen us before the matinee. Oh I don’t much like matinées. Who does apart from families with children and old folks? We were all at low ebb energywise beforehand, slouching around the dressing room together in our pants, occasionally swearing. It was a classic example of actors before matinee. Casual undressing. Creative ways of expressing exhaustion. Making even the fact that we are knackered into a joke. And then it started raining, just before we got Front of House Clearance.

Cut to shortly before my first entrance and we are all standing outside the door to the auditorium. A large part of my professional life has involved waiting at doors. It’s the sort of thing they should do workshops about at drama schools. How to stand at the door so you can hear your cue and not be seen. Where to stand so when they page the thing they don’t hit you in the face. When I die if I get a statistic about time spent standing at doors, mine will be an unusual spike.

It smells amazing in the venue. There are 700 Nepalese people having a conference and they are cooking Nepalese food. We all hope there’ll be leftovers. (There are no leftovers).

Chris has been wondering if he can Skype his part from the pub. I was thinking of just writing a laminated instruction manual for my audience and going to sleep next to it. “Now read this bit out loud.” All of us are at low ebb. We hug each other almost by reflex. There’s a lot of love in this company. But we don’t want to do this matinée. Kids kids kids. You gotta work hard in immersive theatre with kids. If you lose them you lose the scene.

But Maddy’s dad is in. Annabelle’s boyfriend is in with his parents. We can’t phone it today. We wouldn’t anyway. “King Alonso of Naples” says Giles, and very deliberately, with a wink to my colleagues slouching by the door, I burst round the corner and spam even more energy then usual, almost as if I wasn’t pretty much completely spent. That’s the truth of this acting game. Going from slouch to king in half a second.

And then I’m on the job, and so are we all, and the nature of time changes. We go from moment to moment, connecting with so many different humans, rolling and playing with their strange behaviours. Playing with adults like children, playing with children like adults. Rolling on the text with the text, moment to moment, as sharp as possible. Making the immersive bits truthful and satisfying for audience and actors alike. I had hilarious interactions with people today, but it’s making sure that the scene is honoured around the chaos.

My energy was low, but it was enough. I like to give everything I’ve got when I’ve got it but the cupboard was pretty much bare. My voice is ragged. It grounds my king though having just the bass, as he’s connected to the earth by necessity. He growls and he barks. He can’t shriek. I have to do the final scene rooted. But I’m not going to talk at all tomorrow if I can help it. I need to give it time to recover. Steam, not too much beer, and total vocal rest.

“How was your show today,” I ask Annabelle. Her head is on my shoulder as I write. Her response comes out of her tiredness.

It was the show. It’s a great show. Far from deadly. Living theatre. And even though we were all exhausted, we kicked this week in the dick.

I’ve learnt that I’m capable of more than I thought I was. And I’ve got some amazing new friends. It’s the most incredible company. Massive hearts. Infinite kindness. It’s almost impossible. I’m sad we’ve only got 4 shows left.

Pickle is off with a friend, as neither Brian nor I can be at home for her this weekend. Going to sleep at home without her curling up by my side last night was strange and revealing about how much she has been a quiet spirit of company – how much I’ve relied on that little wayward furry plaster to puffalumpf onto the bed, walk over my leg, find the space by my chest, go “murrp” once and curl up against my warmth.

I’ve been going from job to job recently, and even my interactions with friends have been largely work related. “Can you feed the cat?” “How is the show I cast you in going?” I’ve been single for over a decade, so I’m used to being alone but it feels my chemistry is changing a little bit in that regard. I have these two hours on the train every day. I can decompress into a book or a computer game, and I do, but I rarely have those simple conversations that start with “How was your day?” Or those quiet times where you just exist with someone.

I’m starting to hear Shakespeare’s constant insistence that we shouldn’t be on our own.

I’m surrounded by people I like. Both of the companies I’m working in are lovely places to be. But this morning I was crying into my coffee. The main reason is obvious: I’m knackered. I’m absolutely completely and utterly exhausted. My head is full of words. My body is full of work, and even though I like the work it’s all consuming. I usually get tired when I’m in just one show and I live near it. It’s fun but Sunday can’t come quickly enough.

This blog really is starting to resemble public therapy. Gotta write the thing every day and right now you get it in one of the very few periods of stoppage time so I’m using it to decompress.

And time passes, the show goes, and I’m sleeping in Oxford tonight, so I have a powerful decompress with the Tempest glories involving lots of crisps.

Eventually I sneak into Ginny’s place.

She hears me. She pops out onto the stairs. She wants to talk. Glory be! So do I! Oh hell so do I. With her nurse’s instinct, she has emerged at exactly the right time. Tara used to do the same sometimes. Nurses are just extraordinary humans, undervalued.

God I’ve been lucky with where I’ve landed in Oxford. She’s a huge force for good, Ginny. We snatched conversation over port (from my agent) and rosé (from her fridge).

Her three kids and her husband were sleeping upstairs, so we quietly sat with each other and talked about our lives – two friends who met each other in the early eighties, back together now. How remarkably beautiful that we still align in our priorities. How insanely kind of her instinct too that despite her impossibly busy existence she chose to get out of bed and envelop her post show post pub ancient lonely friend in a form of delighted human welcoming. She’s one of the best kind of hearts there can be by my understanding. One that has been brought up to know what it is to be selfish, but has rejected it. A rarity in my childhood peer group. And a headspace that can be dismissed easily by the deadhearts who put constructed systems before anything.

The loneliness with which i awoke has been expertly consumed and transformed by the whole Tempest company – this crazy hotchpotch of mad fools. It has then been buried by my dear old friend coming forward with her bed hair to just be human with me for a bit on a Friday night. Glory be.

A week today is the end of the bonkers commutefest. I won’t know what to do with myself. I’ll have huge long evenings not filled with shouting in a tree and dozing on a train. I’ll be able to clean my room, sort my shit out, get everything together in time for flying out to the USA for endless months. I’ll be able to stay until the end of rehearsal, and then do social things with the lovely people in the cast. My tired voice will relax a little. My tired brain will stop trying to sabotage my ease. All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

It’s that time where we have to start dropping the book in rehearsal now, and stand exposed in the unsure learnings.

Learning Shakespearean prose is considerably harder than learning the verse for me. I’m having to shove Toby into my head with a plunger, and the more I shove it in the more shit comes out of my mouth. It’s one thing to’ve learnt the thoughts, but when you haven’t got the iambic frame to hang them on, you find yourself in the spur of the moment saying crap like “The youth hath in him all the intelligent cleverness that clever people have usually got, it’s why the count duke count duke lady duke the count fuck it’s why the count uses him so much um well um he’ll see this letter is so excellently ignorant and know it comes from a clodpole.” Which isn’t quite Shakespeare even if it gives the right reaction cue for Fabian.

So much to do. Time to do it. But so much to do. It’s terrifying and brilliant all wrapped up into one. We don’t even have a full company yet. Aargh.

Today I didn’t want to leave the run-through until we had got to the bit we started the day working on. As a result I stayed too long in the room and sprinted to Brixton Station. It was only when I got to Brixton that I realised I’d left my phone in rehearsal. We run The Tempest through a WhatsApp group. I need my phone. I sprinted back to rehearsal – “we tried to chase you but you’d gone”. I got it, sprinted back to Brixton, elbowed my way onto the smooth running tube. I flolloped onto the right train about 2 minutes before departure, caked in panic sweat overlayed with heat sweat, but still clutching a triumphant ginger kombucha and satay chicken that I had garbled an order for in Leon with no time left. I’ll have the energy I need for the show. Saturday is looming and despite two shows it’ll be restful. Sunday will be line sharpening and lunch with The Tempest.

I’m still on the train. I’ll be on stage in forty minutes. This is madness, I tells ya. Madness!

At least my costume is easy to put on. I reckon I’ll get ten minutes of sitting still. You can do a lot with that.

I keep telling you I have a lot on, but I’ve got no kids. One of my friends with a 3 year old helped with some of her wisdom, acquired much harder than this. “This is your yoga – find the stillness.”

All of us are capable of more than we think we are. Jen has two kids and she’s commuting from Bristol to be in a hot room with us and cover for Olivia/Maria this week, book in hand.

Running around like this is having more of an effect on my mental health than on my physical health, weirdly, but only when I’ve got time to think. But I’ll always find time to think.

I’m probably getting accidentally fit. Summer Shakespeare jobs often do that – build fitness as a side effect of making the work. There’s a lot of running around in hot places. Shared warm-ups. Even the act of speaking the verse is more physical and muscular than you might imagine. Patsy Rodenberg, our old voice teacher, would often come back to this. “You’ve got to be fit to be an actor.” If I’d understood that at secondary school I’d probably not have been such a deliberate outsider, ducking out of teamsport when possible to go fuck around on my own, forgetting that it is in those games that the spirit of togetherness is forged. There’s that apocryphal quote that “*insert conflict* was won on the playing fields of Eton”. It might have been won a lot more effectively if it hadn’t been, of course. But whoever seeded that quoteshape had probably played on those fields, and thus have understood from the inside how playing together in safety either at a fee paying school or in the park or anywhere you can find a space without someone yelling – it brings people closer together in adversity.

It’s part of why we always start Twelfth Night rehearsals with a game of Foursquare. Brings us together. Gets us ready for the day. Also it’s fun. And we all hug at the end. Bloody snowflake actors. It’s lovely.

It’s been hard again today, making Twelfth Night in a hot room, but hard in a good way. We have had two consecutive days looking at long tough scenes. As Patsy says, even the comedies are physically hard. Tomorrow we’ll look at some more tricky stuff and it’ll be lovely but hard again.

My brain gets in the way on a normal day and when I’m tired I overthink stuff even more. The thing to remember in that circumstance is that everybody else is tired and hot and thinking about their own shit too. Someone asked me “Do you find you work alone a lot,” and my brain immediately went to “oh God I’m not listening well enough I’m being too vocal and shutting down ensemble work I’m a bad human FML.”

No. I’m just worrying so much that the double job is affecting my work in the rehearsal room that I’m looking for validation of my negative expectation. Or am I? *slap* Stop thinking Batman!

The stillness my friend is talking about will come when I see those wandering concerns for what they are, float them away, and just knuckle down and make nice work well without the internal noise. If I can truly learn that watery wisdom from this process then that alone will make it worth the difficulty. If I can learn that AND have shitloads of fun with glorious people making wonderful work, all the better. I meditate pretty much every morning for fuck’s sake. This should be child’s play. NMHRK

The train should’ve left by now. It’s filling up still but it’s ten minutes late. This is because it’s actually the wrong train. Yep. Nice one Al.

Sometimes, to mix it up, Great Western swaps the platform for the 17.22 to Hereford. Keeps us on our toes. Today was one of those fun swap days. Bugger. I’m sitting on the 17.33 to somewhere not including Oxford. Thankfully it still goes to Reading where I can change. In fact, by sheer chance, I won’t be much later than usual – so long as people don’t start running around on the tracks again.

I finally had a good sleep last night, staying over in Oxford, so I’m back in the room for Twelfth Night in terms of energy. Good thing too as we did Act V which is tough with so few people and even tougher with the company not fully formed. I’m enjoying Belch and banging my head against Antonio, perhaps because I don’t think he should be funny. Maybe if I just sack that blockage and go full pirate it’ll be a problem solved. It just won’t be quite to my instinctive taste. Often it’s the problems that turn into your favourite part of the playing though. We’ll work it out.

It’s still pretty stressful, this commute. In the state I’m in, I’m exceptionally glad of the no motorbike thing. I’d probably be mangled up already, which would make it harder to play Belch (but facilitate the decision for Antonio as I’d already have a pegleg.)

Now I’m sitting at Reading. Still got my neck cushion on but haven’t been able to snooze owing to my train mistake. I’ll be a wee bit later than I usually am but I worked some contingency time into the plan just for this sort of eventuality, and my costume goes on quickly and easily with no make-up involved. They won’t have to delay the show.

It’s good to know that I’m capable of this sort of double up madness, but in future I’d definitely prefer all the jobs to be in the same town if possible, not to be demanding. Now I’ve worked out how to portion my energy the only losses are teambuilding, company fun and spare time. I won’t get to ever go for a drink with the Twelfth Night company after rehearsals until Tempest is finished. I won’t get to do fun lunches in the daytime with Tempest. I’ll be sad when Tempest is finished though. It’s great craic…

Well I made it in time for the show. I have suspected for some time now that my guardian angel is run ragged looking after me, but she came up trumps when even the wrong train was going in the right direction. “Welcome to the GWR non stop train to Swansea.” That might have led to delays as a man with his shirt wrapped round his head pulled the emergency alarm and pranced out the window howling “I’m the king! My subjects need me! Those hope boats don’t float alone!”

Now I’m back at the train station waiting for the train home. I would be very curious to see the results of this Fitbit… I’m run ragged, but every room I stop in is a beautiful place to be.

We got cake from an audience member…

All the actors in The Tempest are wearing a Fitbit. We are being monitored for science. They’re curious about the stress levels of performers. But we wear them constantly. And my general stress levels are higher than usual right now.

I’m worried I’m not helping their results as it’s all so full on. This morning I woke up in Oxford after 4 hours sleep, panicked I’d miss my train but made it, warmed up (thankfully yoga not cardio today), and played foursquare. I started feeling lightheaded in foursquare. I could still mechanically play the game, but my ability to understand who had won the point vanished entirely. I just played until I was told I was out. I found a headspace where I could do the thing in front of me excellently but if you’d asked me to do something I haven’t prepared myself for I’d have stood blinking and confused for a few moments before calibrating it. I doubt I’ll ever be so tired again in this process. I have taken myself back to Ginny’s comparatively sober and before midnight. I’ll need a shower in the morning and then a train to London for a nice late 10am start. I’ll get a good six hours sleep. That’ll be plenty. It has to be.

My Oxford bed is full of glitter from Wilderness, and I have no idea where my contact lens solution is. I’ve got the pots with yesterday’s stuff in them but I’m a bit more cautious about eye infections after the carnage I had a few years ago. I no longer want to be using the same solution for three days, or clawing my lenses into my face in a field after three days of dancing having used alcohol sanitiser on my hands and then crying through the backlash. I quite like my eyes, and they’re useful for seeing things. Maybe I should take more care of them. And my body in general.

I had to answer loads of questions about my health for the study. I didn’t like it. I don’t do enough exercise. I hate most classes, although I can deal with a yoga studio as long as it’s not one of those arrogant dancers who try to guilt people into hurting themselves. But regular attendance at a yoga studio requires a monthly intake much higher than my usual “good for me” budget. Arguably I could divert funds from the catastrophically overfunded “bad for me” budget into “good for me.”

I was talking with Madeleine today and noticed a double standard. She said “I know you’ve had a history with depression – which anti-depressants have you had?” Having never had them, I was about to say: “It’s ridiculous to medicate for these things,” and then I thought about the fact that I was sitting there with my beer taking the edge off after a particularly lively show – loads of school groups from London having it large. I have used various things as various crutches in various circumstances. Mostly they don’t work for me, as they just replace a thought-pattern with a craving. I suspect it’d be the same with the things doctors prescribe you.

Change is the biggest healer of bad headspace for me. Change and variety and movement. Connection with my body. In times like this, I haven’t got time to indulge my propensity for self loathing. I’ve got too much to do, but my body is engaged with doing the stuff I’m working on. So my head hasn’t wandered off on my own. We are in touch, head and body, because we have to be right now.

It’s nice to see how well I can run on empty, frankly. I walk around with a neck cushion so I can shut down quickly when possible. I almost missed my stop at Oxford Circus because of being in dreamtime. But I’m in two safe workspaces. Surrounded by good hearts. This is my industry. I love it. It’s why I’m still running.