Author: albarclay

Last night, post root canal, I went back to my flat and feverishly cooked a random pasta curry sausage thing. It was yummy, but I think I did it because it was easy. I was more tired than I was aware after the procedure.

Knowing I had an early start, I turned in early and set my alarm. I was meeting James at the archway in Waterloo at half 9 having already picked up a transit van from New Cross.

At 7 my alarm went off. I haven’t done this for years, but I incorporated it into my dream. I reset the alarm for something absurd like 2pm. I rolled over and into that sweet sweet terrible second sleep, and there I lay until 9:46 when the phone woke me up.

It was James. All the realisations happened at once. My first words this morning, into the phone, were “It’s bad, James.” James is the type to roll with it. “How bad?” “I slept through my alarm,” I remember myself saying. “Van in an hour.” “Do you mean you’ll be here with the van in an hour?” “Don’t know. Got to rush. Will tell you.”

At 9:50 I was out the door, in the clothes I wore yesterday. I had my car key. No coffee. No water. No breakfast.

By 10:33 I was in New Cross with all the paperwork done. Pace Van Hire are not in much of a hurry. The guy wasn’t there to show me the van, and when he finally showed up he wanted exhaustive photos of the van from all possible angles while I was absolutely losing my shit. I really really hate being late. With the chaotic life I’ve chosen, there are some boundaries I needed to set early, and one of them was to never be late. If you’re reliable you can get away with being a bit more chaotic.

I got to the arch by eleven, and we chucked a load in. We got the van to Kings Road. Caroline has a new space there, running studios and an events space. It’s cavernous. James and I hauled a huge leather sofa up the stairs. I was panting and drenched. We got the rest out. I ran for a coffee. Back to the arch.

Things settled. Thankfully everyone was very understanding. I’ve been reliable for them for long enough that I had one strike in the bag. But we had to work at a much faster rate than I was ready for, and come early evening I badly needed the egg and watercress sandwich I finally put into myself.

Three loads we took. I had to load the final one myself. Dropped off after dark and then had to get the van back through the early bits of rush hour, being seriously bullied by bus drivers on the Old Kent Road.

Home at last now, and wondering what happened to my body. I was lifting through the legs but that stuff was heavy. A good day though and I always like a solid graft. It just would have been possible to be kinder to myself if I hadn’t rolled over. I’m blaming the anesthetic. Pasta, bath, electric blanket, dreams.

Nectaria got stuck in to my root canal this afternoon. This is an old one, originally done by Harish Kasilingam, the butcher dentist who was all I could afford at Violet Melchett on the NHS. He replaced all my white fillings with amalgam and styled them as new fillings. I kept coming back without understanding. I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. If I could countenance suing anyone it would be him. He’s a monster. I thought I was lucky, on the NHS, but he was watching the clock without any view to health, and following his preferences without any eye to the patient.

This particular root canal, he ran out of time and basically just … stopped. He just sealed it up because of time pressure. So of course the decay continued inside the tooth. I’m not sure if he has been struck off but he certainly deserves to be. Now I’m going to competent dentists it becomes apparent what a disaster Harish was.

Today Nectaria got right into the mess of Harish’s leavings, and hopefully she cleaned it all up. If I’m lucky I’ll have that tooth in my bite for years to come, no thanks to Harish. At least I’ve found someone I trust now, but trust don’t come for free. Maybe Harish didn’t care because I was an NHS patient. Maybe he’s just a butcher. Either way, the man made a mess. I paid him a high proportion of my income at the time. I’m now paying perhaps 9 times as much. Your get what you pay for, sadly.

I do my job just as hard no matter what I’m being paid. That’s what sane kind people do. Not Harish.

I’ve been vulnerable today since the procedure. It is never pleasant. Apparently I’m doing it wrong socially at the moment, oops. I try to stay absent from such rubbish. I went and brought some dinner to Christine and paid attention to her bullshit instead of anyone else’s.

Christine is my downstairs neighbour. She’s not good at moving these days after a fall that she can’t really account for. I’m not sure how old she is but she’s what you would call old, and she is frail. But she’s lived a life. She’s lonely. I’m trying to take her at her word, bringing her food from time to time, keeping her spirits up. She struggles to move from her sofa. She’s hurt herself. Nobody wants to end up like that. But she seems to have nobody but Brian and I, and the block caretaker. Ugh.

I’m gonna go to bed early tonight. I’m full of anesthetic and poison. Sleep will help process. I’m happy to have another of Harish’s amalgams taken out. One at a time and eventually his damage will be overcome. Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to think about my teeth every day…

I tried to go for a walk today in the crisp morning sun. It was just so damn cold though.

Tristan was parked outside my flat and a traffic warden came. I spotted him through the window and I’ve never seen someone so indifferent to consequence as Tristan. Aye he was hungover but if I hadn’t gone down and driven away from the guy as he was waiting to print his ticket, Tristan would have spent £80 on an hour of sleep. I was utterly bewildered by his indifference. I didn’t want to go move his car for him on principle. But I was up having been woken before nine to let the expensive plumber in to – hopefully – finish the job with the bust up loo. Even despite a reasonably committed evening of dinner party foolishness I was engaging with the world and caught the best part of the day. His lack of desire to do anything, even to do such a simple thing with such an immediate effect… It baffled me. Drink is a dumb thing to do with your money, body, mind and time. I thought I was gonna dial it right back but then last night happened. His state of mind this morning was a real eye opener.

We trashed the place so I was mostly putting it back slowly as the day went by. Putting the flat and myself back. Dishwasher came in handy.

Then I ordered a vindaloo. I don’t know what possessed me. Spicy potato chicken. Never again. I’ve never had one before and thought I might like it, but it I almost immediately regretted it, not least because I had to get up and walk around for the spice, but also because it tastes like bum. Seems I’ll always be happy with a Naga – there’s more flavour. Vindaloo was just hot gravy curry. Warmed me up though which was the intention. Next time I should cook it myself. Right now I’m gonna brush my teeth and try and force myself into sleep so I’m at least half rested for the dentist tomorrow.

May 2019 I had a New Yorker stay here for a few nights. She came back in January 2020, as we totally hit it off the first time. Now she’s a big shot theatre producer and doesn’t need to sleep on no sofa. But tonight she’s in London. And she arranged with me weeks ago to have dinner here tonight. And I totally forgot.

Tristan has two self tapes. I persuaded him to come over. We did one already, and the other one is tomorrow morning.

My downstairs neighbour Christine is still very frail and unwell. She won’t go to hospital with me and I’m letting her lead that. But she woke me up this morning with a WhatsApp call and I had to go and pick her up off the floor and get her back into a sofa that was mucky now. She’s been there a few days. I made her coffee. She has barely eaten the food I’ve been bringing her, which was firstly steak and then steak pie. She wants chicken. She asked for chicken. I took an opportunity.

Tristan, Anna, Brian and I.

“Look what you did tonight.” Anna is asleep in my bed. I’ll work something out on the sofa. We fed Christine with chicken. I’m spent. Tomorrow is the anniversary of this blog. Tonight I need to sleep.

I’m having a proper weekend on the weekend. This is lovely and guilt free. I’m catching up with the reading, and the computer games. I just finished Inscryption on Steam Deck which is extremely strange.

I enjoy how computer games keep coming up with new ways to tell stories. Some of the stories are great, others very odd. This one was odd but I still enjoyed it. They won’t be making a TV series of it like they did with The Last of Us. But I’ve enjoyed myself.

Sweeney Todd pie with gravy and mash for dinner, and I took some down to my neighbour. I don’t think she’ll eat it though. She’s had a strange relationship with food for many years, and she is so frail at the moment. It’s hard to tell what is up with her. I had to pull her up in the sofa as she was not strong enough to pull herself up. Perhaps tomorrow she will agree to come to A&E as something has definitely happened and it is only me and the block caretaker José and Brian that seem to care, and we are all busy. I helped her to the loo and mopped up the coffee she had spilt. With luck she’ll be okay all night. I’ll knock on her door in the morning. I have her spare keys, but she’s not good with mobile phones and apparently was shouting for ages before I stumbled on her slipped down on the sofa.

I’m running a bath now and perhaps I’ll get to bed early even though it’s Saturday. Consuming a bottle of Reisling with my T last night most likely contributed to the fact I feel pretty wobbly right now. Nothing a good sleep can’t. I tried to play VR computer games with Brian and lasted minutes before I felt too sick…

Time to wind down, get out a book, find a story the old fashioned way. No more sacrificing talking stoats.

My friend was teaching in South Kensington, I was dayjobbing in South Kensington and the locksmith I met at her birthday party was coming over to bring the extra two security keys for the new lock on my door at my flat, very near South Kensington… I am out of the habit of entertaining at home but twas the perfect opportunity to make use of the two rib-eye steaks that I got at the butcher the other day before I realised Brian is busy every night right now.

She came for dinner at my flat. Nom. The locksmith swung by but couldn’t stay. He’s a brilliant lad and ended up charging me fifty quid less than we had arranged as I paid him cash.

The beginning of the evening was a little muddled as, by chance, my lovely french neighbour downstairs took a bit of a fall and was feeling pretty bad about the world. I wanted to give her time, as her family is mostly absent and she is a brilliant human. She used to model back when mum was doing it, and still has all the copies of Tatler. We have a trust and an understanding, both of us being perhaps old fashioned enough to still seek community here in Chelsea. She isn’t very well supported though by friends and family, and I think her landlady is moving to sell the flat which will leave her in the schtick. I sat with her, brought her water, kept her company, and later on I brought her down a plate of food scavenged from what we had up here. Easy enough to make it go three ways, and she has had a hit. It is possible I’ll have to take her up A&E tomorrow morning, but for now she’s wanting to let it sit a night, and I’m happy to go with that as nobody wants to be in London A&E on a Friday night. Sometimes she catastrophises, so it is hard to tell if she is genuinely injured. I’m gonna let her lead in that regard.

My friend and I settled into a proper old fashioned catch up. One of the ones who has stood the test of time, she is, despite emigrating to Australia and moving back. She was at Uni with me and was the source of all the brilliant Aussie nurses who I shared this flat with for maybe ten years when they were on their walkabout… I’ve always got friends in Brisbane now.

A few days of concentrated dayjobbery. It’s been good to be back in the saddle with the invigilating, even if the last exam was plagued with technical hiccups. They often do it all on their laptop with a lockdown browser, but it is new enough that it is absolutely plagued with problems.

And the end of the week. My friend is off home in an Uber. I’m gonna wash off the week and hit the hay.

Lou is in Bulgaria and it’s something like minus 9. Helps me remember that I’m just moaning when I say I’m cold here.

Another day invigilating and I’m back home and in bed before ten. These early nights still seem to be happening at the moment. It seems to make sense when there’s so much to do. I have to keep making money, plus sort the flat. The diary is filling up again and looking as varied as it ever does, and I’m not getting any younger so it’s good to preserve the energy levels for the bouncing around. “Periods of rest and periods of frantic activity”. That’s what I signed up for. Yes I still get annoyed when someone asks me if I’m “resting” when I’m out of work, as it feels like redundant slang. But also I get it. My true work can be all consuming. One needs a rest, even after filming. Fuck being a dancer. I’d be dead by now. So yeah, I’m kinda “resting” right now, even if that involves standing up in a concentrated room watching people take exams.

These little exam periods are always better served if I’ve got lines to learn, but as usual I’ve just dispensed the most recent load of lines. I’m in the process of reformatting the hard drive to make way for some Shakespeare as I’ll be up to Hay for one day shortly to jump back on the Merchant wagon with the delightful folk of The Willow Globe.

For now though, bed in a warm flat. So much to do but I’m done doing it now. Still trying to do a little every day that is home related rather than acting, earning or writing. I feel a tiny bit splintered but all is well and all is well and all manner of things is well.

Things happened today in the course of work, but I can’t really remember them or articulate them. I think I’ll just switch out, read my book for a wee while and pass out.

Back today to the local emergency money job that I am trying to keep spinning in case my legs fall off. Invigilating exams. You just need to be calm and attentive. I have a cold so I was sneezing, and I was wearing brand new trainers that I just ordered off Vinted because I’ve only worn walking boots for a decade or two. They squeaked. I was very aware that I had to move extremely tentatively and that I was the only sneezer in the room. Many of the students have cultural mask wearing from long before the COVID nonsense, so my sneezing felt really loud and egregious to me. I’m supposed to be the calm centre.

The majority of the students are from China. They come over and many of them take Western names, so I’ll often see Xi on my list but Hannah on the card. One student was Minger on the list, but has westernised the name to Bella, which I thought was clever.

Nothing happened in the exam. When does it ever? I’ve only once had a cheating incident. He was so crap at it that I had to write it up, and even then I gave him the benefit of the doubt as best I could. All of this, the qualifications, the stratifying and hierarchy… it’s all nonsense and we know it deep down. Learn as much as you can, do as much as you can with it. Nobody is better than anyone else and certainly not if your metric is to do with specialised knowledge. But it’s good that so many Chinese students are learning about a different culture as they study. If only the same was the case with our students. They recently dissolved Erasmus, which was one way of helping the British remain internationally relevant. It seems that the current leadership actually wants us to become a tiny irrelevant protected island nation, rather like North Sentinel but with no trees.

I’m home and in bed. Locksmith fixed the door lock today. Finally. Early start for more exams tomorrow but fingers crossed one of my tapes is gonna land…

Up early and I bought some good coffee in Brighton which is just as well as there’s no milk. Espresso pot on the bubble and I go to neaten up my beard. I’ve laid out my costume already. Black velvet blazer, blue collared shirt, black trousers, my nice watch. My shoes won’t be in shot but I bring my best. The coffee is bubbled. I pour it in a keep cup. The lines are going round in my head. I run the scenes as I drive to Wimbledon. This is a low budget film. Normally I wouldn’t be providing my own costume or getting myself to location. But it’s interesting, and it’s what I do, and even though my last few days have been a white noise of line learning, it’s fun.

I learnt a long time ago that you absolutely have to know your lines backwards forwards and inside out when you go on any kind of set. Especially one like this where the budget can’t swing to long times in the venue and multiple days. With four scenes to shoot and pick ups etc I was pretty sure this would be one take per angle and then reset. I also figured that things might be shot in a funny order. Important to have the lines fluent so the camera doesn’t see you remembering. Reputation.

My character is very talkative. White collar criminal, probably with a family and a country house, sitting at the head of a boutique drug trafficking ring, volatile and charming, dangerous and petty. Almost certainly getting high on his own supply.

I was playing opposite Andrew. It’s a strange fellowship, this game. I met him in character. We looked at each other. I liked him and the day flew by. I know nothing about him. Once the shoot started I never stopped until wrap, and then I had to run to my car before it got ticketed.

This movie will look good I suspect for the budget, which is extremely low. No gaffer. No wardrobe or make-up. They’re very much flying by the seat of their pants. One camera and a sound guy. The director knows his movies, and it was a pleasure to work with him after many years. I am very curious to see how it all falls out in the edit. Glad to be back on set, and I got to play with guns.

Between shots at about half one I switched my phone on briefly and had about 12 missed calls from people in my block. No messages so no clue what it was about but probably flooding by the urgency. There’s a shower stuck in the cistern to work around a problem I’m having fixed on the fifteenth. Someone left it on.

Testament to the people in my block, they were kicking off because the overflow was going. Not because any damage had been done. Good to be safe though and it could have got worse. I didn’t have time to fix it so asked Brian to teach the caretaker the emergency break-in protocol.

Supervising the fellow from the insurance company it really struck me how the mechanism of insurance largely disadvantages the policy holder. My friend’s dad had three policies out for home insurance, inexplicably. He died recently and the night that the funeral was announced, the house got raided.

According to the police, gangs look through the death notices. Higher chance of a house being unoccupied if one of the occupants just died. Whoever did it knew what they were doing and came prepared. They knifed the lock on an outer porch door, sledgehammered the front door, taking out chunks of lovely old stained glass, and then stood in the hallway realising that this place has been hoarded in for years. In a fit of optimism, they bashed in the locked door to the kitchen. What did they take? It’s impossible to tell, but I reckon they would have been flooded by all the junk.

I was there this morning to let the insurance guy in to look at the doors. I was looking for value while there, hoping to be able to tell my friend that they had some lovely things to keep or sell, but this lot is not good. Things that I thought were good all turned out to be modern replicas. He lived just next to a TK Maxx and so even the clothes are mostly the weird brands that they have there – Cavani instead of Cavalli. Still nice things but there’s little worth.

The insurance guy, meanwhile, was looking for reasons to weasel out of paying for everything. I said to just write it and send it, I have no authority here. He didn’t seem fazed by the piles of crap everywhere. “I imagine you’ve seen much worse.” “Oh yes.”

How many homes across the world are just crammed full of junk? Seeing other people’s takes even more status from what remains of mine. Nobody wants this crap and when you die the whatever system you thought you had for the distant magical day when you would sort it all – it dies with you.

If there’s time I’ll help my friend sort it all. I’ve got my own things to sort as well though. It is sad, always sad, to see the aftermath of these lives in the debris. All our stuff just becomes work…

I’m hoping the insurance company is kinder than the man who assessed the damage…