Author: albarclay

Thankfully, Darren and I decided not to make a big night of it. Jack went into town.”There’s a bar in Montmartre.” I like it in Montmartre, and if I’m going to be there on a work night it won’t be because of kickykick. I’m trying to have a generally positive life experience here, and that takes in the sockball, but only if the sockball doesn’t take me in.

As I write, had I gone into central Paris, I would now be finding my way back here on the metro with bad adrenaline. The England team lost again. As is their job they led us on. The lionesses men’s team is pretty good, but they were no match for the Spanish.

I’ve been bouncing around today. My pass no longer works at all, which is totally not surprising and really really obstructive. All the security is tight as fuck, and there seems to be no track to have someone who can be access all areas. Unfortunately that’s my job so I’m building a catalogue of contact numbers and Google pins that help me get in and out of all these places, but today my card came up cancelled because it is. My contacts can frequently talk me through security, but it really doesn’t help that once again I’m looking like a chancer while dropping off essential wayfinding. Get me a pass for the event… It’s nuts that I can’t ever identify myself. I’ll solve it, that’s what I do. But it is annoyingly inefficient.

They are having a huge firework display tonight for Bastille Day. Earlier on they demonstrated the full might of the French military. Six planes, a guy with a moustache and some cannons designed to spit out white flags.

The Swiss are next door at least. They have an army. If someone takes over again they can come and liberate when the time is right. Meantime bof. Lucky the pilots stayed at work the whole time those planes were in the air.

And so back to Paris. OTHER PEOPLE have been affecting the organisation of our little kingdom, and can you blame them? I’ve been away. Ali has been away. Darren has been here on his own and someone else has been pulled in to help. But as a result I’m back to perplexing decisions. Two new blue boxes on the top row where EVERYTHING ELSE is yellow and honestly how did they miss that? How? It’s just an OCD thing but… And these stickers on the boxes like they put on your car window when it’s clamped so there’s no fucking way I’ll ever reclaim them from what they have been doomed to randomly contain without acid.

Some picks laid out already but lo and behold whoever did it doesn’t know the difference between hook and loop velcro and has prepared nothing but hook. This is likely a better idea than nothing but loop because lots of things come pre-looped. But that’s just coincidence. I don’t know if venues have already received boxes of just one half of their velcro. I have to trust not. Velvet and Crochet. That’s where that one is from. Lou told me that. She’s good with fabric. She’s good with many things.

We still have access to a transit van but someone called Karim has nicked back our Luton. It’s on his card. We can use the Dacia but it’s full of tools and has a placeholder tyre on now. There are two pickups, one of which is as long as an artic, and allegedly they’re what I’m to use to go to venues now. Today I disobeyed a suggestion to load one with a pallet for the Trocadero – I put it in the transit – and about twenty minutes later the sky shat rain and lightning for about an hour, flooding most of the roads. I was glad not to have put it into one of those things as it would have been jelly on drop off. They aren’t fit for my purposes. They’re for scaffolding and forklifts, with loads of ratcheting.

We need our Luton back if we are to be efficient in the week to come.

Today I was on my own trying to deal with stocktaking, responding to people’s extravagant demands, picking up the shortfall of what has been seized in customs, taking stock of what has changed. Random boxes of things have been placed in thoroughly illogical places up on the mezzanine. I’ve been shifting between organising and solving. I did a drive out late this evening and I hate that there’s a team member having a weekend off but I can’t blame him when I’ve just had five days off for work. Especially work that finishes at 3pm and let’s me hang out with my beloved.

I stopped briefly and had Italian food. Escaloppe Milanese with Spaghetti Napoli on it. Nom. I’m beginning to know my way around this town now, even if I’m living in the suburbs. At some point I’ll likely do a milk run and get back the shit people don’t want. Not tomorrow though. As if they needed another excuse not to work, tomorrow is Bastille day. Getting vans into central will be a mess. Plus Spain are playing football in some sort of final, and they beat France.

Easy Jet. Back to Paris.

I’m in the air, recalibrating my body and my mind for a long old job now as we push into and through this massive event.

“The only bigger thing is organising a war,” says one of the lads, and there’s sense in this. Here I am, trying to help smooth issues in supply chains. Trying to anticipate when we are gonna run out of screws or bolts or cable ties, or tools. That’s basically bullets and mortars, shovels and weapons. Big events need a lot of supply. The stakes are lower but the need is still there, and the practical headaches of getting the things that are needed from the place where they start to the place where they should be are all part of my remit.

Stephan in the warehouse deliberately sends things out earlier than scheduled because he thinks it’s efficient, but it means that last minute additions can’t be added. He’s proud of himself for starting early – he starts at 5 – and he shows his pride by causing problems. Then the drivers often offload things to the wrong venue if they have multiple venues on the list. That means that things that need to be in one place get ignored in another place, so while one venue has chucked 25000 unwanted screws into a corner, another venue is getting an Uber to the warehouse and asking me why the hell they didn’t get their 25000 screws.

I have no idea what I’m gonna walk into tomorrow having been away five days. I’m on the plane back and I booked a room in the little hotel opposite the warehouse as I thought there was a chance that my Airbnb room is now occupied. I’ll land, go straight there, get an early bed and then go in and assess the state of things early tomorrow. At least it’ll be the weekend so even though we are getting close to event day the French will still not be working so I’ll be able to get on without too many demands on my attention. I suspect I’ll just have a quartermaster hat on again tomorrow. Maybe a bit of pick-up driving.

Glad to be heading back in having rested. I feel new minted. Healthy sober summer seaside time with Lou, despite the weather. I’ve got some incense in my bag this time and some Palo Santo for smudging. Gonna pace myself, take each day as it comes and find time to connect with nature and sleep.

Or I’ll just work every hour that God made and then collapse on my face until my alarm jolts me up…

The best bit about teaching is that the day is over early. Last few weeks of term and it’s always hard to find workshop leaders so this is the gig I couldn’t shake for Paris. On the plus side though I’ve been totally able to work from Lou’s and then go chasing quality of life afterwards.

Maybe we brought the summer at last. Keep hold of it. Remembering that school is not quite broken up yet is helpful in remembering that we could well still have those endless months of heat and joy that we all remember growing up.

We managed to get over to one of my favourite parts of The Downs – Wilmington and the area around about. The Sussex Ox for a remarkable rack of lamb, knowing that they are hard to find in France. Then everyone should have a favourite tree. Mine is in the Wilmington churchyard, propped up with sticks, 2000 years old. Still alive, home to a bees nest, the Wilmington yew.

They’ve touched up the Long Man, so he is clearly picked out on the hill above.

Behind me and down the road a bit is the tree, a wooden temple outside a church. I’m sucking in the opportunities for nature right now as a lot of my life in France will be urban and concreted, dealing with fixings and consumables. This time with Lou has been a restorative nature shot, and a chance to pull back the spring ready to fire forward into strange french life again. I feel totally restored. Ready to go go go.

Tomorrow travel and then back at it bright and early Saturday, taking stock on the weekend before everything really starts going. When I booked it, I didn’t want to take the time to come back – I just wanted to go all the way through. After my runny tummy and vast amounts of sleep, no booze, healthy food and wellness and lots of lovely Lou I’m now wondering how I would’ve got on without this fire break. I’m champing at the bit to work again now. It’ll probably raise my productivity.

One more night in London. Needed to sort out my car so I can come back and it’s still insured and it won’t get towed for lack of parking permit or fined for lack of tax. Cars have so many parasites. I still love the things and the joy, possibility and money outweigh the outlay.

I’m in my flat. It’s dark. I’m quietly repacking, knowing what I need in terms of clothes now. For a while I thought I would drive to Paris, but frankly it’s pointless and the warehouse is crowded. One more car would be rude.

A bit of work that turned into a lovely break with some early mornings. Worth honouring the work, as it’s what I was driving in to do when the call came through about this.

Sure it’s raining again. But it was hot today. Flesh was out. It is coming…

Summer poking its head out from under the carpet this afternoon in Brighton. By then we had taken the law into our own hands. If the heat will not come to us, we will go to the heat.

Wowo Spa, up in Wapsbourne, and Lou has booked us an outdoor sauna for three hours.  Arguably a normal July is no time to go to the sauna, you just have to sit in the car. “Normal”.

Three saunas. A converted horse box, a converted greenhouse, a room in a hut clad with clay. Heat and wood. Fire and air and water. The horse box is the best sealed and hottest. The greenhouse is a dripping steam room – a piece of genius making wet heat like that. I enjoyed it there, steaming out my voice until I made the mistake of saying to the sauna-bore that it’s good for your voice. He immediately telling me his vocal range and that he hates opera and I know he’s about to ask me what I’ve done or what I’m doing. I’ve already clocked this guy, in his sauna hat, doubling his volume when he expressed an opinion. Why is there always one? Blithering on about their property investments or this or that. I get out and go to the little one before he starts a conversation. Apparently he’s rude about me to Lou later on. I did close a door on him mid sentence but I didn’t come to the sauna in mid July to listen to a phone in on LBC. The little clay one is pleasant enough and you aren’t allowed to talk in there.

For hours we are in there, plunging, pouring buckets on ourselves, crinkling up, warming. At one point we both lie in a hammock and the sun comes and for a moment we pretend that we aren’t in a GCSE project summer.

Now we are in bed. England are still kicking a ball about and I reckon I’ll just listen out for a big cheer as it is gonna go into extra time surely. People are hooting their horns though. It’s over 90 minutes through…

Honking car horns. And little live score widget just updated. Good lord so it looks like England are in the final unless something changes in next minute..90 plus 4…

One more match to watch then and I’ve got a fiver on England are terrible odds, but still it’ll be worth the bet if it comes in.

Game over. bedtime. So early. Don’t care.

Rainy calls about zoomy things in the morning and then Lou and I braved the weather and struck out into the July storms to find and consume brachyura flesh in Worthing.

Lou did the driving most of the way. In a bid for more freedom, and despite the damocletian sword of tax MOT fuel parking permit insurance repair work etc etc she wants to get on the road and I don’t blame her. I thank the lord I was taught to drive by dad. I wouldn’t have the Paris thing without it… so much less would be possible. She’s paying for an instructor as well but if she can get time with me she will do. This is our window, while I’m back training engineers.

Worthing Crab Shack yielded excellent crustaceanmeat and then we figured the cinema was the right place for such a relentless winter day, so we went to “Wilding”. It’s about The Knepp Estate.

Double standards are everywhere so I can shamelessly hold my hand up here. I love nature, I love internal combustion engines. Wilding got me wearing my nature hat. It’s the companion piece to Clarkson’s Farm. There’s more overlap than you’d think.

The Knepp Estate is just up the road from Brighton and it was a farm until they decided to rewild it. Their work, or sometimes lack of it, has brought endangered species back from the brink and taught us all a great deal about the web of invisible connections that hold us all together. It has probably also made numerous traditional thinkers and nature averse ninnies apoplectic with rage. I adored Birch (Selsdon) for that one glorious moment it lived before repairing a horsehair roof in the heart of Soho brought down The House of St Barnabus and both the beautiful Birches with it.

I hope the work they are doing at Knepp keeps yielding fruit. It is astonishing the extent to which we are motivated and encouraged to control and stamp out nature. Dyed meat and bleached veg on supermarket shelves, so little connection left between origin and consumption. A populace so used to being served everything by the infrastructure of capitalism that it just needs a small collapse like loss of power for a week and thousands will die indignantly wondering why their delivery didn’t come.

We caught Wilding at The Dome in Worthing. A rare old cinema now, and being so close to The Crab Shack it seems rude not to. I’ve only got a few days so despite the rain we are trying to go to places I like in the area. Relaxation and luxury before round two.

Bedtime now again, and the rain is piling down on the skylight. This winter seems to be going on a tad longer than usual up here in blighty. Just three days ago I was building air coolers in Paris. Now there’s two blankets.

It is so absurdly cold in this country. Nobody needs this in July.

I’m in bed before ten. Been looking after myself. My body’s reaction to coming off the job in France for a few days has been to go into full rebellion. Yesterday I just stopped functioning entirely and slept like a lump of rock to the extent that Lou checked a couple of times because she thought I might be dead. And yesterday and today have involved some serious runs.

The warehouse has virtually unwashed hole in the floor loos. I dared it once when it was pressing. Horrible rusted pipe behind you and many times in my life have I dropped my car key etc on the floor of loo. I’m not risking that stuff. One of the chippies made a khazi but you don’t really want to sit on that either. Best solution if I’m there is to go to Macdonald’s and buy a coffee. But in the state I’ve been in for the last few days, I’d have had ten coffees every day. Add to that the fact that tired Al yesterday groggily ordered dumplings and thought somehow that hot and sour soup was going to be tasty and warming. I even remember thoughtfully chewing up a chili pepper. Hot food to combat cold weather? Fine, yeah but dear god I now know the inside of every seed of that damn thing and all its friends and they all hate me for eating them.

Thank the dear lord I’m not sitting driving around the Route Peripherique, or picking up heavy things in a place without good loos. By the time I’m back in Paree I’ll be fit as a fiddle again and I’m doing things about my booze habit that should easily mean that I can win through to August.

Tonight another early night and long sleep. I’ve had Lou’s Ayurvedic eye on my diet, and her long experience in India accepting the effects of whatever I consumed the night before last. I think it should be over tomorrow. I really hope so. I thought I was gonna drive back to Paris. Not so sure about that now. But maybe.

For tonight though, I’m loaded up with charcoal and chamomile tea and as the July showers drip drop on the frosty summer windows I’ll stay under this blanket and try and sleep like a rock again tonight… February soon.

It’s so cold here. What the fuck?

I’ve been in a T-shirt every day and that’s only Paris. It’s a frisbee throw away. You land ten minutes after you take off.

My body has realised it’s allowed to stop.

This morning I dropped Brian at Heathrow then took some keys to a friend’s key box then loaded twenty seven bags of costume into Bergman and then unloaded it across town. Then I realised I was gonna fall asleep. I got back home and fell flat on my face and woke up groggy three hours later. Mad dreams. Now I’m aching all over and covered in bruises. I slowly shuffled downstairs and into Bergie and we hauled ass to Glyndebourne. Crashes on the 25 and the fact that my tummy is behaving very strangely meant that my journey down south was longer than it should have been. A day or two of taking it easy and I’ll be ready for the second part of the job. But it’s a useful reminder that there was so much backed up behind my endless drive to go go go.

Lou’s is the perfect place to be for me to reassemble myself ready for round two. The sea, the big light, the fluffy cat, the thoughtful routines and healthy food. If only it wasn’t so fecking cold. I might be aching but at least I’ve got a tan.

Now for a chamomile.

Delayed flight back to blighty. I’ve got some online work I couldn’t shift so I’m here for much of the coming week and it’s a chance to see Lou, which I’m looking forward to very much.

Right now though I’m sitting in CDG waiting for a delayed plane and England playing Switzerland is so boring I figured I’d write this instead.

My journey onto the plane this way has been much nicer than the monstrous arseholes who work at the EasyJet gate to Paris from Gatwick on a Monday morning. Nobody has been arbirtary or cruel and I haven’t had to throw away a perfectly good compliant cabin bag because someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

But there we are. I’m flying EasyJet again. But you learn to be alert. I’ve just checked my bag in, paid a bit more. “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.” I’ve learned.

One night at home tonight and then a relaxing time in Brighton. I’m really looking forward to switching off and switching out. This work is good and I enjoy it and respond to the pressure positively, but now I’ve learned consumables I’m trying to make sense of downstairs, and part of me wants to start coming in at 5am, as Stephan is very happy with himself for starting at 5, and wants us all to know about it, but it means that he is sending things that shouldn’t leave, and someone comes at 8 to add a box and he shrugs. He did it to me this morning. I got a text at 8 asking me to add a box to the camion leaving at half nine. I left the boys our whip and went in by uber, knowing full well that he would have sent the camion already just because. He had. The earlier the better with traffic, I suspect is his thinking, but if you think the timings are wrong then talk about it rather than sending things early and incomplete otherwise you are basically just not doing your job while being really visible. Which currently is Stephan.

So… as you can see I need to take myself out of it a bit. I became consumables guy in the supply warehouse and Darren became off site guy this week as no Ali with his shameless OCD. At least now I’m good at both off and on. Darren and I are both half jaguar though, with all the edges that brings. We will choose our battles and fight them even if they are stupid battles to fight. We will do three jobs simultaneously and all will be well unless someone comes halfway through and asks what we are doing.

I want to go lie on my back and look at the sky. England weather better behave itself…

It’s stretching things really, to call this place Paris. I’m staying in Noisy-le-sec. It’s a little busy urban satellite of Paris. A commune if you will. And very very crowded. The name suits it. It really is very very fucking noisy. Right now I’m sitting in the evening sun on a little stone bench. Behind me three men angrily and loudly gamble. In front and to my left, children play by the busy road. Men and women stroll around in pajamas and cultural outfits. Others parade the latest fashions.

This is my bedroom window – on the first floor.

HGV at all hours. The binmen early twice a week. Car radios with the lights off. Biker gangs. Arguments in the night. This town is alive with people but dead to nature. A pigeon got stuck in our oven chimney for over 24 hours before a builder let it out. Now it sits above the door, scraggled and reproachful.

Somehow it feels like community, but with all the shouting that community brings. If you look up, the sky is blue. But the streets are filthy and busy and fraught. People know us now though, the rosbifs who roll home late and leave early, often in hi-vis. We are in the build phase. It has been a steep learning curve but I’ve climbed it and man it is never too late for a dog to learn new tricks.

There’s a bit of wannabe gangster going on in noisy as well. I’m not dressing smartly as I am mostly in a warehouse and a jacket would stick out like a sore thumb. The burger joint opposite us is called O’Snoop, as the guy looks like Snoop Dogg. When he’s not flipping burgers he’s screaming around town on his big bike. Like many areas that feel rough, it’s actually friendly. Sure there’s need and addiction. But as goes the travellers mantra: Trust is almost always better than mistrust.

There are burnt out cars by the road and others overgrown in lots. Parking is tricky. Everyone has a vehicle. Try and get this place switched over to electric it’ll never take on. You’d have improvised cables stretching across the road. It’s easy to forget how obedient the majority of people are in England and America. You can lose touch and start thinking “Yay, no cash is great and everyone in electric cars,” without realising that the world will be on fire in a week.