Author: albarclay

Everybody owes me money and nobody is paying. It’s like I’m a national debt. It’s ridiculous. If I hadn’t been turning over on eBay I wouldn’t be able to get on the tube. As it is I had to borrow money for cat food tonight. There’s plenty due. It will ALL come in on the 24th. Between now and then I’ll just have to tidy my bedroom and spend the “floor money” which I deliberately accumulate for just such a time. Typically the best pieces on eBay went out on the Global Shipping program, where they employ actual bears to unpack every item, before drunk chickens repack it in a box full of sharp rocks. It doesn’t matter how many fragile stickers you put. If it’s on the shipping program then “your men are already dead.” And you have to wait ages before you can even raise the concern that they fucked it. Although as soon as the buyer raises that concern they lock out your money for the refund until you can prove it was them. eBay global shipping = caveat vendor. They will destroy all your things. They will. And if they don’t they’ll lose them. And sit on your money while they try to absent themselves of responsibility.

This cashflow hole means that, as I continue to shuttlecock through existence, I have to ease off on the mayhem.

“Do you want to come for a gong bath? I’ll pay.” Well. Yes. Yes I do.

The last time I went to a gong bath it was run by a German, in a field in Oxfordshire. A festival for well-to-do people from the home counties to. A festival I love despite this.

The German guy running the tent had studied a manner that was pointedly alternative, deliberately challenging and a little wearing if you could see the joins. He ran a good room though, despite being camp as Bestival and very much wanting us to see his nipples and show him ours because he tediously thought it would help us in some way. Halfway through the gong bath a man randomly and finally stood up, shouted “This is why I voted leave!” and left very noisily, amid halfhearted left wing heckles and lots of giggling. I think I laughed for about a week about the whole shape of that moment. It was a beautifully placed deflation of perceived self importance, done with sincerity rather then artifice. None of the people working the tent engaged well with it. Sure it was a dick move. But you have to admire when it lands.

Those of us who love spiritual things have to be very careful not to appear sanctimonious. This stuff is only helpful if it’s helpful. If you start to pitch it like it’s magic then by default you are pitching yourself as the magician. Why tell people what to feel or think? People are instinctive and responsive enough to do that for themselves.

A gong bath. Lots of people taking it very seriously as they lie on their back for an hour in a room with a gong. It’s utterly completely totally incontrovertibly ridiculous. And I love it because it works if you let it, like all these ostensibly ridiculous things that are associated with the cultural set we call “spiritual” or “hippies” or “bullshit” depending on where we stand towards it.

I tend to use my time obsessively. Right now if I’m not acting I’m driving, if I’m not driving I’m researching antiques or learning lines or writing. The prospect of an hour lying on my back while someone banged a gong and I couldn’t even write was daunting. A whole hour of nothing? Fuck.

I needed it though. Good God. Tension melted away and that gong vibration… There really is something in it. I let it spin me into a sort of lucid dreaming state.

We all arrange ourselves into camps because it’s easier. “I don’t like football” is one of the camps I chose to be in at one point today. Plenty of times I’ve enjoyed watching football, or being with people who care about it. But my tribe is the Nonfootbalgenses tribe. For no reason other than to lazily identify myself as belonging in a camp and to arbitrarily paint out areas of interest I haven’t got time for. None of us can care about everything without going a little bit insane. Although I still think it might be worth a try…

So yeah. Gong baths. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. You might even find that it somehow validates your political decisions. I had a great lie down, did some helpful thinking, saw pretty fractals and then got a cup of licorice tea. Tomorrow I’ll have to work out where the short term cashflow is landing. But that’s tomorrow.

I’ll sleep well tonight. I want a gong.

I paid for the full four hours parking in the morning, 8.30 to 12.30 so I could sleep it off. Last night I literally passed out halfway through writing a sentence.

At 12.25 I was wandering up to the van still feeling awful when a traffic warden sprinted past me. It’s the Chelsea Flower Show at the moment so they’re out in droves, and evidently they’re competitive with each other. I watched him as he ran up to the van only to be disappointed by another warden already waiting by it. They stood together in silence watching the clock, armed with their machines, twitching like Samurai before a duel. There’s probably a thing where if you manage to start the process quicker than the other guy you get to issue the fine and the kids get to eat. I was almost sorry to disappoint the pair of them as I slouched up to move the thing and wished them a cheery “Good morning.” They looked crestfallen. Thank God I’d remembered to bring the key.

Now I’m back home running a bath and still feeling rancid. I’ve got about three hours now to go from grotbag to fabulous. It’s an award ceremony at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel and I’m presenting it. I know I can switch it on but oh God I don’t want to have to. Can’t I just lie here and occasionally swear out loud?

Well. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing. Strode out of the hotel with head held high having had the client say in her closing speech that it was “the slickest award ceremony in London” and then caught me as I was leaving to ask me to do it next year. I forgot all about the fact that I wanted to die for most of the afternoon. Lord knows I’ll probably crash out spectacularly once it wears off, but right now I’m on the tube looking a million dollars and grinning from ear to ear, despite a niggling sensation that I might have run that whole award ceremony with my flies undone.

As much as anything else, it was the band. Bamboozle. They were bloody marvellous. Sat up on stage with me the whole time providing drumrolls for the sometimes interminable “short lists” and little funky riffs to underpin the bit where you have to wait as they come up to get their award. It’s nice not being on your own up there. There’s often a lovely complicity on stage between MC and band, and that was the case tonight. A somewhat niche award ceremony had four skillful craftspeople to make it look and feel sexy and fun. They’re playing now. The frontwoman pulled out a double bass. I kind of wanted to stay for their set but there’s a crash coming and I’ve got auditioning to do tomorrow again. It’s going well. Jobs are rolling in. I’m converting them. This summer is already looking good and I have an honest sense that it’s only going to get better. Cue the music.

Not tonight though. Once I finish processing all the crazy thyroid juice I’ve been sucking on like a crackhead I’m going to fall over. I reckon I’ve got about an hour left in me. Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.

Oh dear. It’s turning into a very naughty week.

The builders in my block are finishing their detail work. Somewhere along the line the idea of pigeon spikes has been abandoned, thankfully, so we don’t have horrible plastic nonsense on our windowsills. They’ve been finishing the detail work, which is handy as they’re out the front. I took the van round. “If you see a traffic warden can you buzz my flat?” “Yeah no problem.” All those cups of tea paid off. I think that’s the end of their work here today. A family firm, and hard working. Next time there’s torrential rain I’ll know if it’s been worth the money we laid down. Hopefully…

What a glorious day. I’ve been rationalising the contents of the van, carrying busts upstairs, sifting through muck for brass. Towards the evening I got an audition for a commercial, and it was spot on. I went in expecting to be French, but there had been a last minute creative change to “very posh”. It might land, as I’m basically playing myself when I’m working at Royal Ascot. It’s a mask I know very well indeed. But commercials are always a shot in the dark, so I’ll write this and then hopefully forget about it.

Post audition, mumbling, I found myself briefly stumbling into some old friends – all three of us actors. We had those conversations you only start having in your forties. Cooking onions. It was a glorious serendipitous meet. Even if you don’t feel it at the time, the old auditions still give you a hard hit of adrenaline. I very much enjoyed a couple of pints and a middle aged chat in the last rays of the spectacular sun this evening.

Then it was all the way to Hampstead. Pub Quiz. Normally pub quizzes are won by the same team week in week out, but however those fell out we smashed it and then i fell asleep halfway through writing this blog…

The audition is running late. It’s for a commercial so I shouldn’t be surprised about that. I’m up for “bald man”. The van is on a meter. “But you’re not bald,” says the assistant. “Maybe they want options? They’ve seen my photos.”

One actor shows up, takes stock of the backlog, takes himself off the list, and leaves immediately. I persist but a little bit of me envies him. There’s the risk of a parking fine growing ever larger. But these are good folk. I like them. It’s maybe worth walking into that room, I think. But the longer I wait the more my head leaves the room. By the time I go in I am already imaginatively at the van. They’re perfectly lovely in the room but it’s slow. I literally have one word to speak. “What.” That’s it. They roll the camera. They play the scene. I say it with my eyes not with my mouth, rush out of the room, and only realise halfway to my van that I didn’t say the one word I was supposed to say. In a flawless American accent. Ach. Life’s rich tapestry. I’ve got jobs landing all over the place. Someone else can fly to Mexico.

It’s Brian’s birthday drinks now, and we are on the South Bank with a constant trickle of lovely humans. Jack is here. Tom has just shown up, who made Christmas Carol. Nice to have the set.

I haven’t eaten and somewhere in my system is probably still that old weird adrenaline that pumps into your system even for a commercial casting. I didn’t get a parking fine. But if I’m not careful I AM going to get drunk.

So I’ve taken myself off into a little corner, also because I’m freezing cold, but ostensibly to get this down before I’m incomprehensible. I’m wearing very thin shoes and the cold has gone right into my heel bone. I should probably go and buy some chips. But I’ve never been very good at looking after myself and tonight is no time to start making exceptions. Brian is off to Namibia tomorrow for ages. In fact, I think that’s enough for now. I’ll attempt to finish this drunk. Back into the fray!!

A lovely fray to be in. People that make theatre are generally pretty cool people. I’ve had a lovely evening but oh God it’s a Monday night and I’m pretty far gone. Some of us ended up back at the flat plugging into the new VR for a game where whoever is wearing the headset has to defuse a bomb whilst all the drunk people attempt to make sense of a wilfully obscure and difficult bomb disposal manual.. It’s a clever use of this burgeoning technology. Only one person can see the bomb, so you have to communicate very clearly. They’ve named it on the nose – “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.”

Now I’m in bed. eBay global shipping program destroyed one of my expensive mugs from the first week of sales and I just found out when the guy lodged a complaint. I guess he doesn’t speak English so can’t talk. I have no idea how this will resolve as, if I refund him they don’t take the blame and it’s their fault… That’s for tomorrow…

Another quiet weekend day. Definitely nothing to do in the evening. Just a nice day of gradually listing things on eBay and possibly attempting to put the VR headset on again. (I managed about 39 minutes and I literally spent the bulk of that time in the configuration trying to make it behave in a way that didn’t make me almost instantly sick.)

I suddenly got an email from eBay telling me that today is a special listing day, but it came after I’d written this weekend off for eBay so I had to click into gear. I had a few beers over the course of the day whilst listing things, which is fine considering I definitely had nothing to do in the evening. No shows to be in. Definitely not. Drinky drinky, listy listy.

At shortly after 5pm I opened my unused gmail account to see if that woman Sophie from Bonham’s had bothered getting back to me. She hadn’t. But I had another email from Scott at The Factory. “Just checking you got your casting on Sunday?” Sunday? Wait that’s today… Oh fuck. Hang on, yes I remember…

I’m three beers down. It’s 5.45pm in Chelsea and I have a show starting in Soho, at Gerry’s Club, in 45 minutes. I am playing Murderer 2 and Siward. Thank God it’s small parts. I’ve never played Siward before though. I must’ve told someone I knew it, knowing it’s small and knowing my brain.

Now I’ve got 45 minutes to learn the fucker and get there as well. Better than Malcolm I guess. I shell out for an Uber. As I arrive I tell Jack – who is playing Banquo tonight – that I kind of wish I had his job as I can wear Banquo like a glove. But The Factory isn’t The Factory without actors stylishly managing fear, with or without three pints of beer. Better for me to break comfort zone than to trot something out unthinking. “What wood is this before us?” “The wood of Burn’em.”

We are performing tonight in a little club in Soho. It’s the place you normally end up in at midnight when whichever old boozer you’ve been having a knees up in decides it has to stop, and an unusual person volunteers “I’ve got a place!” It’s downstairs, in the heart of Soho, very much not Groucho in that it’s a glass of wine, not a mortgage payment. It’s an old school actor’s bar – there are fewer every year. Signed photographs all over the walls with people you’ve never heard of unless you care in which case you’re probably too drunk to notice.

I get there in time, but normally I’d put my phone away in my coat and trust to memory. Not tonight. I am constantly having to check the script, as I know all the parts in the scene. Which bit do I actually say out loud though? It’s really hard to calibrate the small parts.

My phone is in my hand just before I go on. Fuck it. I switch it to camera and make it part of the scene. Naughty? Maybe. I can never do it again. But it worked. This evening, Siward was very good at social media, and Malcolm’s distaste for being filmed made it into something familiar and apposite.

I utterly love The Factory, and my work with them and my growth through that work. They are a powerful community in this industry that I’m thrilled to be part of. My work with them has changed everything in terms of my outlook, and it continues to challenge. Tonight I broke my lifelong rule, never to have alcohol before I go on stage. It’s fine. I forgot…

In what other company can an actor forget they have a show that night, and for it to be completely ok when he rocks up half cut just before the start not knowing his lines, and still get there before the guy playing Lady Macduff and Fleance? Literally everybody trusted that the company would pull together if we were short. Literally everyone was chilled, forward, and ready. Apart from me, but we are all expendable and by showing up I committed to try and bring the thunder. We do our utmost if we’re there. And we all did. And so did I. Phew. Thunder. Joy.

Now bed. Here’s a friend doing his thing. I suspect he won’t object. It’s the only photo I took today. The rest was video, taken in show. I promised I wouldn’t publish it.

Brian bought a PlayStation Virtual Reality headset today while I was at work, and a copy of Skyrim for it – a sword and sorcery game, for those who don’t play computer games. Now we are both lying next to one another on the sofa, both a bit green in the face, both occasionly doing mini belches, both very happy that the screen is firmly switched off for the night. The only coherent sentences we are uttering are to ineloquently express to one another how terrible we feel. “My head hurts.” “I feel sick.” “Oh God.”

Earlier this evening I threw the headset off, staggered to my bedroom, hurled all my clothes onto the floor, snuck between the sheets and literally passed out for half an hour. Pickle woke me with concerned noises nuzzling my hand. I sat back up, got dressed again, went back to the living room, tagged in with a whey faced Brian who couldn’t carry on, tried another half an hour of playing, and had to switch it off again and lie facing a wall for a bit moaning.

It’s incredible. It’s horrible. It’s too much. It’s amazing.

What the hell have we created? People all over the world must be sitting alone in a dark room with a plastic device attached to their head, in the actual matrix. Although I have no idea if my brain will get used to it. Also you look ridiculous playing it. Helpless, clumsy, and dissociated. You have to be guided around the real world by hand as if there’s something seriously wrong with you. You could step on the cat, knock over a table, fall down stairs. But the ugly plastic bobbles in your hand look like a bow and arrow in the blinding screen that is located less than an inch in front of your eyes. This weird digital world is filled in and made complete by your brain, which then can’t work out why all the people look like they’ve been drawn, and it looks like you’re moving but it doesn’t feel like you’re moving. It decides that you’ve been poisoned with some form of aggressive hallucinogen, and starts trying to make you puke it up.

Perhaps as a first game we should’ve tried something a little less high octane, like a nice contemplative Tetris or Tsuro. Something beautiful and slow that doesn’t involve running around being chased by dragons and hitting things with axes and fire. There was a time in my late teens and early twenties when I could play games like this for hours on end and not feel weird, but now I can barely manage an hour on a normal screen, and it seems I can’t get close to half that on VR before I’m running perilously close to being sick.

Brian and I have both gone to bed now. It’s not yet eleven on a Saturday night. On the plus side I’ve had one beer all night. Motion sickness helps cut down booze, for sure. And I’ve barely been able to eat anything at all, so it’ll help me lose weight too…

Pickle doesn’t know what to make of it yet. I think she’s worried about us. She probably ought to be. Boys and toys. Dear God though, it’s incredible. But we both have work to do…

I woke up this morning, got in the van, programmed the postcode into “Fiona” – (Google maps) – and drove to Somerstown – to a very odd estate where we once watched someone trying to kill someone else from the top floor window of a pub while one of us rang the cops.

“You have reached your destination,” said Fiona, cheerful as ever at the death-corridor, but I smelt a rat. “I’m not picking up theatre costume from here,” I thought. “It’s meant to be closer to Brent Cross.” There’s beautiful theatre that is made exactly where Fiona took me, but it’s made by brilliant kids from this difficult area, supported by the charity – Scene and Heard – : Donate and see a show – it’s the biggest ticket in town and it always sells out.

No pretending to be a pretzel this morning though. I trusted Fiona but she took me wrong. I thought she was being clever. No. Dammit. Human error. Fi is nothing but obedient. She leaves the discretion to the humans. I’d given her the wrong postcode. NW1. It was supposed to be on the same grid for NW2. Bugger.

25 minutes later and it still makes no sense to me. I’m in the right place, because I’ve been given the name and that name is written on all the huge trucks, plus the trucks are branded telling us they’re for the entertainment industry. The shutters are down, police cars are everywhere because it’s a trading estate, and there’s one dude with gloves on slowly tinkering with electronics on one of the vans.

I’m in my cashmere greatcoat with two scarves and nice shoes. He’s covered in grease and didn’t expect any jumped up strangers interrupting his engineering. He initially makes out like he has no idea why I’m there. Admittedly I’d been expecting to find a little building called “reception” at the front, full of useless well spoken graduates in suits with bullshit smiles and immature prejudices and utterly continuously generationally no fucking clue despite their enviable wage which they think of as nothing.

Thankfully I deal with a skilled human instead. He can fix hydraulics and he doesn’t need me to know who his daddy was. I tell him I’m utterly stuck. I show him the following which is, apart from the company name and address, the entirety of the information I’ve been given for this job:

“…in addition to the costume we are going to need the show laptop so that R can run sound in rehearsals it is in a green box with a black lid near the doors of the truck and is labelled ‘fragile, do not stack’. There is a rucksack inside and that is what we need from that box.”

That’s the full extent of my knowledge for this pick up. I know no truck. I extrapolate from the message that I’m supposed to get costume. I thankfully make friends with this solid engineer. I tell him my truth; “I haven’t a clue what I’m picking up, or where I’m picking it up from. But this is the right company.” Thankfully he likes me. He calls the head office.

Ten minutes later I’m getting stuff out of the back of an articulated lorry. He is helping me. While we do it, another guy comes up and tries to persuade him, in a Slavic dialect that I’m not 100% following, that I should be paying him for his help. My smart clothes are part of his argument. God it’s interesting, dressing in a suit.

My engineer friend ignores the provocation of his friend quite actively and asks for nothing. He even discreetly dresses the guy down for suggesting screwing me over. And he helps me get the clothes rail out of the van…

Then I went to IKEA and got stuff. I did this job for free for friends. It’s part of the borrowing deal with the van. It cost me charges plus petrol and most of the day but it kept me moving. Which probably works out the same cost as parking in visitor’s bays. With a rental letter the van would be manageable on resident parking terms, but since my rental agreement ran out it’s £40 a day and I have to move it every 4 hours and the guys at Chelsea town hall will be obstructive if I come back with another agreement. So I spend most of my life sitting in the cab. It’s virtually impossible. Tomorrow I’ll have to pointlessly burn diesel at half 8 just to move. I wish it was gone back up north, or that I had a new written agreement, but I frankly can’t afford what RBKC think parking the thing is worth if it’s not owned by me. My own van is the only way forward. And there’s no point of that when I’m looking at a big pile of acting work coming up.

I thought I had two auditions in two days. “That’s the way of it,” I thought wryly. “Like London buses,” I added to myself. “None for ages and then three show up at once and whichever one you get on stops for half an hour to regulate the service almost immediately, with the heaters blowing full on a hot day, making someone sick all down your front. You try to get out in traffic three foot before an official bus stop to clean up, but the driver literally pretends he is deaf and you don’t exist, and then eventually after half an hour crawling the final three foot he won’t open the door you’re right in front of because it’s an entrance door, so you leak vomit through to the middle of the bus to exit by the middle but he shuts it and guns the engine because you weren’t quick enough and you bing the bell and shout and he shouts back contemptuously in Ancient Greek for not knowing an esoteric piece of knowledge about how buses work whilst three other overheated gangrenous people vomit on your hat and you decide to throw in the towel and collapse finally, defeated and confused as well, since nobody has actually updated the digital next stop information display since it was invented. Which is when the driver randomly opens the middle door in traffic and starts shouting at you that you have to leave or he’ll call British transport police, not because he’s upset with you but because he’s worked out it’ll piss off another passenger, which, outside of moving the bus, is what he’s actually paid his 6 million quid a year to do.

That’s auditions. Yep. Just like buses. Just the same. Yep.

Turns out I didn’t have two auditions in two days anyhow. I had one. And a whole fucking week in between. I arrived a week early for an audition. The opposite of what buses do. It’s not the first time I’ve done that sort of thing either. Won’t be the last. I spend hours sitting in random places just around the corner from where I’ll have to be. I’ve been late for two auditions in my life as far as I recall. One because an old agent’s assistant told me one thirty over the phone and emailed me the 12.30 and I didn’t have the means to check email. “Where are you?” “Driving to the beeb” “You should be there?” “Wtf?” Fucked that CD relationship, to this day. I was “stuck in traffic” apparently, is what the angry CD had been informed, and I’d literally been told to learn a Shakespeare sonnet for camera – “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” I learnt it but never got to do because the CD expected me to have read a script I’d never seen and to have learnt a scene from it too. I sight read it atrociously with no context, flustered and filled with rage at my agent’s assistant. That was fourteen years ago! I remember it like it was yesterday. Because it was a powerful relationship for me, scuppered.

The other one you couldn’t make up either. It was just for a commercial, and I was clusterfuck late because of a suddenly closed tube station, then a bomb alert at the station I sprinted to, and then an expensive black cab in traffic to finally arrive just ten minutes late to a casting director immediately talking down to me like I was some spoilt infant, leaving me literally lost for words. “You should always leave extra time! You should know that.” Um… After I’d have literally been over an hour early having a chilled out coffee in Soho if it hadn’t been for another perfect storm, where I’d run myself sick and then spent money I actively couldn’t afford to spend. But you remember these things. Especially because you know that people talk, and that’s their experience of you.

Buses. I made up a funny story about buses at the start of this because I use them lot. People whose job it is to put actors into jobs can fall into the same patterns of dehumanising. I’ve seen some foul hashtags over the years about things actors do in auditions. I guess there are a lot of actors doing a lot of things in their desire to work and if your job involves watching lots of us you can occasionally forget we are also subject to chance, despite frequently looking immaculate when we show up.

Anyway anyway anyway, today someone who isn’t a friend of mine offered me a job, based on things I did in a room while they were watching me. I get in those rooms infrequently enough that this is great news. Hooray etc.

Buses. There are more buses queued up too. This is the beginning of a powerful change for the better.  Bring it. Onwards.

Our little pussy cat has been living here for two years now. I’ve never lived with one before, but I think we lucked out with her and her pointy ears. She’s tiny. She’ll always be tiny. She expresses her rage through the medium of poo and wee which is occasionally horrible. But mostly it just means we try to keep her happy, and she’s usually pretty chilled these days.

There are some things I’ve received in my understanding of cats that don’t tally with her behaviour. First of all, right now I’m sorting all this Porcelain and glass and stoneware… Every surface in the house has got something breakable right by the edge of it, and something else breakable next to that breakable thing, almost deliberately lined up in some macabre game of dominos.

With one swipe of her paw Pickle could bring my whole porcelain empire to a crashing end. But instead she just … ghosts around everything. Mel pointed out that she’s got neck muscles like a bull now, so she would be more than capable of havoc. But so far, nothing. No lots cancelled because of BAD CAT BAD CAT BAD BAD BAD. She is just instinctively careful. It’s uncanny.

Those neck muscles have come from her daily workout which is to jump on my lap and try to close my laptop / knock my phone out of my hand / make me drop my book. In that sense she’s true cat. “Me me me not the thing look the thing is mine now it smells of me me droppit me me”. But she doesn’t realise that it usually goes both ways, as whilst it’s still cold I get a free hot water bottle while I’m writing, and warm company while I sleep which is really all people are after when they go on Match.com, right?

Nice audition today for some Germans and then just a relaxed afternoon finding out what I can find out about the stuff that I still have to get out out out out out of my house. Brian is off to Namibia soon, as one does, so I’m going to have a short period of time to explode the contents of all the boxes into the living room. Late next week would be a great time to have someone that knows stuff about Porcelain to come round my flat and know stuff about porcelain at me. I also need someone to digitise some celluoid, although I’m working on an angle or two there. This Porcelain period must pass soon, and once it is done I’ll be an amateur expert and able to rinse car boot sales, while turning my weirdly retentive brain to silver hallmarks. Might as well fill it with something while I’m waiting to fill it with more lines. Although there are four jobs pending at the moment, some from a while ago which is always a good sign. I trust the universe to throw me a bone before long, which puts even more pressure on me to put an end to The Antiques Roadshow – Al’s Flat episode, hosted by Pickle. In this week’s good news, I fully emptied the storage. In this week’s bad news, it’s because I threw it all in the van, which goes back to York soon.

“Dear Sotheby’s. I have a huge collection of antique porcelain. Almost all of it is broken. Much of it is smoke damaged as well. Here are some rushed photographs. Can you send someone over to work out if anything is worth selling?”

“No. Go away.”

“Dear Christie’s, hello. I’ve got all this lovely Meissen porcelain. Some bits by other major houses as well. It’s all beautiful although I should mention that it was in a catastrophic fire, and then it was thrown haphazardly and half wrapped into boxes that were then chucked around. It’s often hideously disfigured, some pieces are missing their heads, all are missing something. Many still look almost pleasant despite this. Perhaps you could send someone round to… Hello? …”

“Hi, Bonham’s… So this is the situation…” *click*

Meanwhile eBay sits there in the corner smirking. “I always knew he’d come back to me in the end.”

It seems my mangled collection of Frankenstein’s Meissen is not gaining the traction I’d hoped among the great and the good, mostly because I open the conversation with how fucked it is. And just as I send my last fruitless cry in the dark by email trying to get an expert to show up at my house in Chelsea and just say “that one and that one, the rest is shit,” the speculative “not as fucked as some of the other Meissens” Meissen goes ping in my pocket as someone bids the minimum, which is still a sum of money. It’s only dealers bidding for it right now and I can’t work out why it’s so low on the eBay search list. Apart from the fact I forgot to put the word “figurine” in the title. I put the word “damaged” in the title and even with that there my little trinket seller comes in at number 14 for “damaged meissen” which NOBODY IS EVER GOING TO SEARCH FOR anyway. He is a smug looking bastard, my trinket seller. He clearly knows more about selling trinkets than I do. He’s probably buying himself cheap on eBay so he can fix himself and then walk down the red carpet at Sotheby’s and sell himself and the carpet for five times as much as I get.

It’s all about presentation, of course. I approached all three of the auction places saying “This stuff is fucked.” That’s true. But they’re probably used to people saying “This stuff is great!” cos it was grandma’s pride and joy. It’s a useful reflection though. I often present myself on the same terms, leading with the flaws. Like I put “damaged” in the title and forgot “figurine”. “Hey there, dating site, I’m damaged goods.”

It’ll make someone happy though, and that’s the purpose of this repurposing work. But for a glorious moment I thought I’d be able to afford to get a pony and teach it how to fly like I’ve always wanted. As it is I’ll still get some money for nothing and then as like as not someone in the postal service will chuck weights on top of it and I’ll have to refund it anyway.

Well, there are other ways to get rich, Rodney. Like acting. Ha ha ha ha ha haaaargh. I’m auditioning tomorrow and Thursday for two fun things that will give me more pleasure and pay me more than googling Porcelain marks until my eyes bleed and scrubbing smoke stains until my fingers dissolve.

Here’s the link, in case clicks mean bumps. Or in case one of you collects Meissen. Because talk it down or not I’ve got a stack of it coming up some of it is glorious, and even if some of it is damaged, it’s good entry level stuff, and not my bag.