Author: albarclay

Under a tarpaulin in a garden in Littleborough is an old Suzuki “Marauder” GZ 125. It’s a lowrider. Her name is Ramona. She is the first of her kind, chassis number 0000001. She’s not the happiest little bike, having been in a garden a long time. She needs some love. I need a starter bike. And I’ve been driving around the North of England in a fat great big Luton with a tail-lift.

It’s almost mandatory for men of my age to start thinking about motorbikes. If I’m not going to conform generally, I’ll choose my areas in which to do so. I reckon I can scream around town dressed like a tank and legitimately be able to refuse beer after work. “Not if I’m on the bike, mate. I value my life.” It’s a great excuse. I grew up in the Isle of Man. You see some horrendous bike crashes over there in season.

Robin – of the whisky collection – broke his spine in three places three years ago coming off his motorbike. He was told he’d never walk again. Miraculously recovered, he’s a motorbike instructor now, and he has a whole hell of a lot of perspective on the fragility of life, on human resilience, and on being safe on one of these big machines. Yesterday he talked to me about equipment. Today we drove around in circles at his workplace. He used to be just an instructor there, but now he runs the joint. In the late afternoon we went out on the roads. I managed not to fuck it up, so I got a certificate that means that I can break my spine in three places legally for two years, (so long as I have a helmet and L-Plates.) Hooray!

Earlier this morning, I’ve been in Littleborough trying to persuade Ramona to get in my van. She’s been reluctant, but she’ll be a good bike to learn on. Her back brake is totally seized. No movement in the wheel at all and it’s a barrel brake so I can’t even get oil on it without taking the thing off and apart, which is outside my limited knowledge. She’s heavy. This is a two man job, and one requiring knowledge. Thank God for Robin.

I go back to his work, and drive round with him for a while on a brand new Honda, getting used to not dying. I turn a lot of corners and do some maneuvers. At the end of it I still have the traditional number of limbs, there’s no blood on the front wheel, and I’m feeling marginally less incompetent, although still a little bit like a glass meteor.

Then I get back in the Luton. After a motorbike it’s strange to drive a massive truck. Glass meteor to Steel Asteroid. They say your consciousness expands or contracts to the size of the vehicle you’re driving. My consciousness today has been like an accordion – expanding and contracting regularly, (and constantly screaming.)

We get back to Littleborough, we manage to bounce Ramona onto the tail lift.

Nowshe’s back in London, locked up outside Metropolis Motorbikes. I’ll go in tomorrow for opening and see what it’ll be to get her up and running.

Now I’m washing the oil off myself and passing out. It’s late…

I saw the dawn this morning from my bedroom window. I’m not sure how I was awake and alert but I was, despite last night. The flat was flooded with merry people at about 8pm yesterday. I’d had advance warning, so had made sure there were clean plates and had cooked a lamb tagine. I totally failed to take into account that one of the party people was a vegan. Thankfully there was couscous with pomegranate and mint and I hadn’t put the chicken stock into it by the time I found out.

Brian and I blitzed up some garlic balsamic mushrooms and a load of other veg. I like cooking for people. I like hosting people, generally. That’s another thing I’ve picked up from my dad. He had a bar built into the downstairs hallway and stocked it. He used to have Christmas in August and friends would come from everywhere and party. Even as a kid I thought it was brilliant. He was using what he had, back then, before it all went south, to make people happy. He taught me how to be a host.

At his wake, I manned the bar while his friends got through what was left. I still dream back to that house all the time. Sometimes I’m outside, stuck looking up at my bedroom window. Sometimes I’m inside, and it’s vibrant. Sometimes I’m inside and it’s dead. I was there last night. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” I don’t like dreaming back to it.

I was never given closure. My brother Rupert told me it was being sold when I was in production week for Richard III at university, playing Richard. I told him it was impossible for me to get there, and all my stuff was there. He said it was the only window I had. I couldn’t believe him. It seemed too arbitrary. And it was an impossibility for me. The show was booked, I was the lead, no understudy. I told him the date I finished production. “They have to wait until then,” I said. He scoffed. “If it’s important to you, you’ll get there.” NO I FUCKING CAN’T!!!!

I had to rely on my brother Max to rescue what he knew I loved – all my hidden secret things that had meaning only for me, they all got thrown in a skip. 

Max and I are close, but not deep. Much of what he knew I loved went as well, as there just wasn’t room in the van and his stuff had to be prioritised – he was there. Basically, my childhood got binned before I binned it myself. It kicked off tricky hoarding tendencies which I’m now trying to curtail. I’m still angry about it, upset about it. I’d like to have had some more control over the wholesale destruction of my childhood sanctuary.

And yet the past is another country. If we are borne back ceaselessly into it, we end up atrophying. I can’t get stuff out of that skip. So I might as well just forget I ever had it and keep filling my flat with merry people and my life with warmth.

I’m off to have food with dear friends and it’s going to be great. So often I encounter people who are holding onto something from their past as an excuse not to venture forward. That shit with the house was something I carried for some time, now finally processed and understood. Just another thing I sacrificed for my acting. One of the first though. But we all do it, all the time. I hear it from my friends, encounter it in my behaviour as well as that of relative strangers. We make choices and we must stand by them. The past is … information that informs us. We have been forged by it, but it no longer burns us.

Every day is a dawn. All we are is who we are now. All we have is what we have now. If we had less or more before, if we were happier or sadder before – what can it matter? It’s information. We either move forward or we indulge. Keep moving folks. I’ll be running alongside you, and when you trip I’ll try to pick you up and hope you do the same for me.

I’m off to dinner. Have a great day NOW. He says, having monologued about the past for ages. But where would this blog be without contradicting myself?

Tristan and I have grown used to helping each other with self-taped auditions. Quid Pro Quo. We’ve done some strange things to camera over the years with each other, and today was no exception.

Knowing that I was going to be dancing in my pants in front of him in the afternoon, we thought it best to have a morning stroll first. We hit up Bishop’s Park in Putney. It’s a strip of land running up the side of the Thames from Putney Bridge. The winter sun hits it well. 

It’s a good place to soak up vitamin E while watching better men than I am sculling down the rotting Thames, biceps glinting as they thrust that little bit harder. I’ve been going there for years – I had a day job selling fine leather sofas just opposite, and this time of year was when they were likely to need me. I’d go there before work and snatch a moment of morning before sitting in a dark room full of leather for hours.

There’s a little market in the middle where fools like me can be duped into buying sausages and steaks and pots of expensive honey made out of sunlight by artisan hipster bees with beards. I’m a sucker for good honey. But there was work to be done.

We tore ourselves out of the park and headed back inside, rearranged the sofas and made a reasonable temporary home-studio lit by the sun.

Three years at drama school. Fifteen years honing my craft. It’s all been leading to this. Lip-syncing to a terrible love song in nothing but a pair of bright red pants. It’s being sent to Germany. I’m reliably informed that that sort of thing is funny in Germany.

The brief was acting 101. “Don’t play comedy – the situation is funny enough.” I’m surprised that these are still pretty much the only castings I get – commercials that are throwing a wide net. It’s a funny thing – I’m still as determined as I was when I left Guildhall, despite all these years of not having the opportunity to fuck up the audition. But that’s me and so many other practitioners. There’s something delightful about getting a friend to film you dancing in your pants and calling it work. And on that basis I’m working pretty often, which could be enough.

We got it all done for the 4pm deadline, and then I noticed the dates. Fuck. I’m already committed. Tristan and I spent bloody ages, I was prancing around in my pants, and I can’t even do the shoot dates. That footage can never be deleted. When I’m 64 and I’m playing the deadly serious part that somehow captures the public imagination, Tristan can just casually put a video of me dancing in my pants up on YouTube if I don’t invite him to the premier. I knew I shouldn’t have let him shoot it on his phone. I just, foolishly, trusted that the dates would work.

Driving home, my car died. Karma. It was only a matter of time. I managed to push it into a parking bay in my borough. It can sit there until I scrap it. Damn. Still, that’s a monthly expense that I no longer have to meet. My insurance is huge because I NEVER have a car for a whole year, so my no claims remains at 3 years despite 20 years driving. Pants!

At least I’ve got some honey.

Most actors have day jobs. Without them it can be hard to weather the gaps. I have found some great ones over time. My major criterion is that they should have nothing to do with my primary job. I don’t want to be surrounded by actors.

This week I’ve been invigilating exams for Imperial College.

I’ve been working with Brenda, Chris and Jacqui. It’s delightful to hit a break and not have to listen to some actor moaning about how they can’t get seen for whatever job they’re fixated on being seen for, and “why not this and why not that and why not the other and this person and that person and aaaaa”!? I know my job is hard, and arbitrary. That’s the rules. I don’t need to vanish down the arsehole of that unpleasantness while I’m not directly tackling it.

Brenda was a holiday rep, and then a trolley dolly. Now she’s retired. She’s entirely disciplined, as you’d have to be if you’re working for BA. She’s also liberal to her very core. She was doing this before any of us, and her positive energy helps make the gaps between exams pleasant. She’s an expert at passing the time, although prefers to be able to speak. She’s done this for years, and I’m sure that it’s her consistent instinctive kindness that means we aren’t expected to burn students at the stake if they have their mobile phone on their desk at the start of the exam. Allegedly things are much more fundamentalist elsewhere.

Jacqui programmed COBOL for years. She kept doing it in different countries before finally realising that it wasn’t where she was that she didn’t like, it was what she was doing. That’s an important and difficult realisation. Many people sit on it their whole lives. She’s lived on her own terms since then.

Then there’s Chris. He’s a thoughtful and creative man – a painter. He has a huge body of work, but he has never let go of a single original painting, despite struggling for money. He has all the originals and just sells prints on his website.  He hasn’t sold many though – “actually I’m about two grand down.” – but he makes no effort to market these prints. He’s spent more on building the site than he’s made selling prints from it. He doesn’t even know the IP address – he insists it’s .com where I’ve already ascertained it’s .co.uk.

He only told me about his Parkinson’s today. As soon as he told me, I noticed, but not before. He deals with it by being very physically contained. He told me today that every lunchtime, his father counted how many baked beans were on the plate. He also told me about his dad taking him outside, and pointing at the sky. “You see that? It looks like it goes on forever, doesn’t it, son? Well it doesn’t. If you go far enough – *bang* – you’ll hit something.” He’s not let himself hit anything.

“As soon as my hand is holding a paintbrush, my brain knows what to do,” he told me. I mentioned that my brother had had Parkinson’s, and then immediately regretted it. Chris is older now than Jamie was at the end. “How’s he getting on?” he asked. Fuck it, I wish we knew more about the brain. I wasn’t going to lie, although I made much of the fact he had MRSA. Which is irresponsible of me because we’ll all die from MRSA or its more aggressive followers, no matter what we’re admitted to hospital for, and it won’t be on any of our death certificates, so as to keep the stats down.

Bleh. I’ve been thinking too much today. I hung out with Brian in the evening which helped decompress. But it’s taken me until 2.40 to get today’s blog down. If I had another half an hour I’d try to wind into some sort of conclusion. As it is, death is shit. Life is great. Live life, avoid death, don’t sabotage yourself. Be like Brenda.

The clothes of mine that are not scattered all over my bedroom floor are either on the sofa in the living room, or on me. Everything is liberally dusted with cat hair be it clean or dirty. This is the reality when I’m busy daytimes and evenings too. If I were to meet someone tonight and sparks were to fly, I wouldn’t want her to come back here. I won’t meet anyone, thankfully, because time is not an abundant resource this week, plus I’m never looking. Hopefully I won’t get called on to dress smartly for an audition until after the weekend either. Although an audition is always nice.

I get home, throw food on while running a bath and writing this blog. 

Then I wash, put a hot water bottle in my bed, set my alarm and crash. But that’s day to day existence for a large chunk of the working population in this country, barring the ever present threat of dropping everything for an audition, the bath that takes 45 minutes to run, and the daily blog. I should get a cleaning lady but I’m kind to strangers. Plus I’m not exactly raking it in despite the hours.

I’m going to employ camomile tea as my sleepjuice tonight. It makes for a better sleep than twenty barrels of grog, and a better wake as well. I’m sure I could murder a firkin of ale, a Nebuchadnezzar of krug or even just a glass of plonk, but a cup of camomile tea with two bags (indulgence!) will help me survive the mindnumbing tedium of tomorrow’s day job.

Tomorrow I’m back invigilating exams. Students taking exams are marginally more interesting than drying paint, although there were times that I hankered for a good roller of Dulux Lunar Falls and a shaft of light. I forgot to bring in something to learn, which was a waste of six uneventful silent hours. Four 1.5 hour exams plus set up and turnaround. I’m a machine at it now.  It’ll never make me rich, but it makes the day money positive rather than money negative. I need as many days like that as I can to offset my social habits and bills and to keep me in camomile tea until Carol starts. Tomorrow will be long silent hours again but I’ll bring in Macbeth and arbitrarily learn one of the smaller characters, and one of the speeches I don’t know yet. That ought to at least keep me happy and let the time go by without me having to drop my eyes too much. I just have to remember not to say stuff out loud.

The beasties are pretty well squished despite the darkness. I just needed to bring them out in the open so I could see how stupid they look.

Now I want to sort my clothes out and make my flat what it can be. I want to instigate a thing whereby I try to make sure I make everything at home a little bit nicer by the end of the day than it is at the beginning. Otherwise it’s too easy to slip, and fall asleep, as I am about to, in a sea of hairy shirts.

I’m in my top hat, heading home from the press launch of Christmas Carol. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Certainly in Broadgate, where they’ve built a Winter Forest out of Christmas trees and lights and bars and wood and those Christmas-yurts that we remember so well from our childhood. No reindeer though. In keeping with the times, they inform us with notes in the trees that for every tree used they are planting two. They also tell us how they’re using the woodchips once the the season is out – (they’re off to Whipsnade apparently). It’s very sustainably Christmassy. Although it all still feels a little early, to be honest.

I was on duty/not on duty this evening, essentially with no brief but the need to be present – be Scrooge at the press launch. The show is a two hander and Jack’s in Malaga. I solved it by giving out flyers in the guise of a concerned Ebenezer who has discovered that some dreadful vaudevillian is pantomiming him nearby, and that they need to burn out this charlatan- (pictured but not named) – and set the dogs on him. It mostly involved messing around in loose character based on who I was talking to, looking for ways to make them laugh, humbugging, freezing my tits off and wishing I was in Malaga. I had already established that I wouldn’t be prancing around in my nightie in this cold, but also that moment when I’m running around in my smalls is earned. I always run the risk of getting knifed or arrested, and without the context of a show it didn’t feel right. So it was unreformed Scrooge prancing around tonight, humbugging for warmth but still freezing.

The Winter Forest is at the back of Liverpool Street station, just by Broadgate Circus. It’s right in the heart of the City and it’s lovely. When I was at Guildhall we would walk around that area and it was a ghost town on the weekends. All these vast buildings with the lights on and nobody home. Empty desk after empty desk and then – just occasionally – one human in an empty office in some minor bank that you could spot through a window, lost amongst the desks, desperately trying to solve whatever problem they’d built before the endless microtasks and work-proofing kicks off again in the week.

I wonder how the Winter Forest will do on the weekends. We’ll bring some footfall. But not enough to fully fill that place with life. Maybe it’ll be just that one dissolutioned weekend worker who came in on a Saturday, commiserating with themself after rogue-trading another business into the dust, trying to decide if it’s worth popping down to the nearest bridge. Maybe the Christmas Carol audience will descend and be full of life and joy – as how can they be not? Maybe the trader will get swept up in their Christmas cheer and forget the fact that they contributed to ruining the economy by failing to understand the difference between a game and reality. Maybe. Or something. I don’t know. The power of stories etc. I keep doing this nonsense hoping people will be a little nicer in my wake.

I’ll be able to share a ticket link soon, to encourage my friends to come and play. I was going to do it now but they’re still getting all the stuff up and finalising their copy. Currently there’s still nothing online that mentions either Jack or I by name, so it’s pointless sharing. I’ll link you once that’s all fixed and we’re credited, so you can be secure it’s the right show, and I can be secure the reviewers actually know how to find out the cast.

It’s only when I stop for a little while that I remember why I drink in the first place. Humaning is painful stuff. I’ve been feeling the old sadness well up. The darkness falls. There’s less to see. The day is done. Outside it’s raining, inside it’s cold. All the little snickering beasties come crawling out of the cracks and point at me. “You can’t get the boiler fixed.” “Didn’t get that advert, did you?” “How’s your love-life?” “Wanna go skiing this year?” “Had any theatre auditions recently?”

The thing is, if I hadn’t been hammering myself and my bank account, these problems would be different. But there’d still be problems. The little pointing beasties would just have different shit to say. Because that’s the human condition. We can be restless souls. And we’re reared on stories, but we live in the actual world where stories don’t work. So some of us look for ways to take the edge off, or narrow the parameters. Things are simpler when you’re dumb. Magical dumb juice, magical dickhead powder, magical crazy pills, magical sleepy powder… There’s a roaring trade in this city for things that stop you being fully present. And I’ve been helping prop up the sales of that dumb-juice something chronic.

When I lose my voice, I never use anaesthetic drops or sprays – if you numb the pain you can start to tear your vocal folds and give yourself nodules. You have to work inside the parameters of your damage until you’re better. There’s always a voice to be found. I haven’t been numbing my voice, but the dumbing has been numbing my being. And likely damaging it acutely along the way.

It’s bloody hard to shut my head up though. I’m going to have to obsess about something or I’ll just go bananas. Yoga might be a good option, especially hot yoga at this time of year, as it involves using my body.

I’ll be busy for the next few months. The day-jobs are ticking over, and I’ve got two shows to think about so I’m not going to have much time to vanish up my own bum. But that also means I won’t have much time for the yoga. I’ll have to make time, and rinse a month’s cheap trial somewhere nearby, so that when I get to bed I’m exhausted. Right now I’ve got no sleep in me. I’m chewing my own arms off and drinking gallons of herbal tea despite knowing it won’t magically turn into a hot toddy. I’m fully aware that my alarm is set for six.

Thankfully this isn’t my first rodeo. I put the bath on when I started writing. I reckon that’ll do the trick. It’s ready now.

Beautiful crisp winter day today. I spent the morning with great hearts and good friends thinking about ambition and witches. First run of Macbeth since broken ribbed Banquo staggered about in Wales. It feels really exciting. Lots of new players, lovely to find a new perspective on the play. Great to see so many new friends and old stepping into the unknown and flying.

Rather than numb myself with stupid-juice, all I really need to do is show the beasties the stuff they can’t see from their little cracks. There’s so much in my life that’s fantastic. Remarkable fulfilling deep friendships, exciting challenging work, beautiful things to look at, comfortable place to sleep.

Stupid narrow minded little beasties. *squish squish squish*

It’s quiet time for a few weeks. There’s been a bit too much party, and with Christmas Carol kicking off soon and December coming there’s a whole lot of party on the way. So the plan is to give my poor liver a break, eat well and get some exercise so I’m ready for a high energy show and post show every night without collapsing.

This evening I went home, refused all offers that involved going anywhere, cooked a two course meal for myself and lay on the sofa under a duvet with a cat on top for added warmth. I switched on iPlayer. Who needs a boiler? Cat heat is free. Time for Attenborough. Blue Planet 2.

David Attenborough is 91 years old now. Like the Queen, he has just … always been there. Unlike the Queen, he’s teaching us beautiful things and paying his taxes. I’m thrilled we still have him narrating these incredible documentaries. He must be thrilled to see how far technology has come since he first started making content like this in the 1950’s. His tones are all about wonder. It’s as if he’s just constantly astonished by life on earth, which I suspect is the case. It’s got him out of bed every morning for decades now, bringing images and thoughts about the diversity of nature right into our living rooms. You have to be made out of bricks not to be astonished by much of his content, and this latest show is a masterpiece. And I’m sure that his fully developed wide eyed sense of wonder is the thing that has kept him looking so alive and able to still talk to us from the prow of a boat.

War drives technology, yes. But profit drives technology too, and these shows sell, so they get a big budget to play with. They use it brilliantly, pushing the boundaries of submersible exploration and camera technology, boldly going where no-one has gone before, and bringing back videos.

In the course of two episodes I must have had my mind blown about 8 times. Bird-eating fish, transparent headed fish, fish at the bottom of the Mariana trench, surfing dolphins, walrus-fights, volcanic life generating stack things… It’s remarkable watching. Particularly if you just want to zone out and let that familiar voice carry you through endless wonders. Yes there’s also an environmental message, but as you’d expect from Attenborough it’s done gently. He just shows you things and tells you we’ve done it, and plays a bit of inauspicious sounding music.

He likes his comparisons. “Energy of ten thousand nuclear bombs”, “pressure equivalent of 50 jumbo jets.” But he’s 91. It’s better he’s making these eccentric comparisons than getting handsy with the intern.

What a remarkable life he must have led. After that double dose of wonder, I’m going to make a hot water bottle and curl up ahead of a ten a.m run through of Macbeth tomorrow. I expect I’ll dream of traveling round the world with Attenborough. Screw being The Queen. David Attenborough has the best job in the world.