Author: albarclay

“Panda has seen a lot of things,” I found myself telling someone today. Panda is a very thin veil for this guy writing to you now. He’s got gimlet eyes but he’s just as fluffy and approachable. Many pandas have seen more world than store manager Panda but it the wide angle is one aspect of his life where he will happily stand in front of his teenage panda self and not be found wanting. So long as he can keep the momentum up as there’s still a lot of world panda hasn’t met.

—

Meanwhile, my agent rings. It is comforting and unusual to get a straight offer for some interesting work – a radio drama, such as I listen to all the time on my long journeys. And I’m playing a calm but unconventional international fixer type guy. Could’ve been written for me. I literally had to calmy juggle some of my international fixing work to fit it in, but it ended up working fine, so art can imitate life can imitate art. One second I was reassuring a client that people I am putting into high profile driving jobs won’t be starstruck or unprofessional. Next second I am clarifying with the same client that I’ll be able to take a day out into a studio to help record this lovely piece of story. It all worked beautifully.

Right now though, I’m turning in, putting myself down, getting ready for nine hours of Panda tomorrow. I’m in the basement of Birch in Selsdon. I treated myself to a posh meal at Elodie. A taster menu with a wine pairing. Nine courses, 5 wines. I sat down at 8.15pm and didn’t get up until quarter to twelve. “Would you like to start the Elodie experience?” (It’s mostly waiting)

As a performer and student of the world I love to see how people work with text and improv in real world contexts. Waiters at restaurants like Elodie are a great example, as they are usually fundamentally not actors, just lovely people making money. They’ve learnt a script about the food. If you ask them questions they have either been asked before and now have an answer or they will either style it out with fluff, or charm it out with bald admissions of ignorance. I love it when I see people style it out. “What’s samphire?” “It’s … it’s asparagus of the seaside…”

My food was very slow and about halfway through the meal waiters started apologising to me as the wine pairings started going out of sync. I was totally fine as I had nowhere else to go, I was loving reading my book on my phone and I didn’t mind at all about not having sweet red wine with my strawberries, or waiting six months for my crab. The guy to my left wasn’t drinking but he got out much quicker than me. He was generally quite angry and peremptory though so maybe he put the shits up them. The part of me that has cared about being a fine dining floor manager winced when – after he had thrice stated very clearly that he didn’t drink alcohol – he was brought a chamomile and gin gimlet as an amuse bouche. His bouche didn’t look amused after that.

Food from the estate where possible. That’s the hook. It is a rewilding project so they are very involved in ethical sourcing. They’ve had a big crop of chamomile, clearly. Three dishes had chamomile involved. Everybody has had good courgettes this year. They had a whole course dedicated to them. (Zucchini as you call them across the pond.) Tomatoes, which they’d put with Cornish crab. I guess its a decent time of year for crabs. A touch of lamb. My waiter was very green, but they are just opening. Half remembered litanies of words ran under gestures that betrayed they weren’t even sure which one was potatoes and which was cod’s roe. I tried to be a good customer, as the first drink I was poured was poured with actively shaking hands and I could tell these guys were still putting the customer on a pedestal. Give them a few weeks to bed into their knowledge and they’ll start shining their personalities through the work.

Tristan was a sommelier at St John’s. He was serving there when Wes Anderson and Ralph Fiennes were regularly going there during the Grand Budapest shoot and I will eat my hat if they weren’t going there to study the fucker. Ralph basically does Tris in that movie. There’s a bald joyful chutzpah to being a sommelier. You have to hold your ground as a load of drunk high status amateurs try to impress their guests by knowing more than you. You also have to talk some absolute bobbins sometimes. My guys were both charming and didn’t feel rote learnt. I asked genuine questions and they answered. They do however have a pairing with some sourdough bread, which I found hilarious. “The notes of pear on the nose really bring out the apple juice used in the making of the bread…” It’s delightful, that stuff. You get to say absolute twaddle to people who are the same as you but are paying. They then nod and say “fwafwafwa”. Some of them adopt high status signifiers and expect you to adopt low status ones. It’s all utter tosh. It’s another of these delightful social constructs by which we inbue and shift status amongst us, and it’s always best if we remember that it is a playground game. Today I was fwafwafwa. I enjoyed it.

I had a yummy slow thoughtful meal and now it’s pushing 1am. Panda needs to sleep so he can be 9 hours straight through tomorrow. Fwafwazzzz

About a week ago I was driving back from Brighton and heard two people on Radio 4 talking about La Cage aux Folles at Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Their appraisal was so staid and joyless that it sucked all the colour out of the car as I was driving. At one point one of them said “I could see that everyone else was enjoying it much more than me,” and having just seen the show myself I can only fear that, for them, that sentence applies to the entirety of the shared human experience that has been thrust on us.

This is just pure unadulterated joy on stage, and it is done SO WELL. We were thoroughly entertained. What an incredible night at the theatre.

I have skin in the game here, I’ll admit it. Lou and I met because of amazing Ryan, costume designer extraordinaire. He was there tonight. We almost came to a matinee so Lou could get back to Brighton in good time, but he quite rightly said we needed to see it under the lights. We did.

God it was fabulous. Everything you could imagine. Sexy cancan, sequins and big dresses and bigger numbers. I’m full of the show. The tunes are buzzing, the performances are bringing smiles in memory. As soon as the curtain call started every single person in that house immediately stood to clap. Very few empty seats. Very many happy people. We wanted to send the energy back, to thank them for the joy.

A French teacher at Harrow made my class watch the original seventies film. I first encountered this story as a stranger. So I was a protected teenage straight boy at a traditional all boy’s school where the focus is narrow. “The world outside is wondrous wide but here the world is narrow,” says the school song. We sang it but didn’t understand it. Some of my lot still haven’t seen the width. They’ve remained narrow. You don’t need to evolve culture or kindness or morals or expansive thinking when you never have to really struggle. It doesn’t make them baddies. They’ve been tricked into a narrow frame. They don’t know that they are lost. There are lots of people from these delightful institutions who feel they have experienced life but have actually experienced a lovely safe puppet show with the word “life” written below it. They’ve been laughing and pointing as behind the stage people are hacked to death and burnt to power the lights. “I understand suffering,” they say, thinking of that sad-faced little doll called “suffering” that they felt sorry for. “I understand privation,” they add, remembering how long it took to get served their drink at the interval. But I digress. This idiom or whatever it is, it gets my point across but it doesn’t really hold water much as it is fun to write. They’re all so varied, but many are definitely still stuck. My eventual intent with it is to illustrate that I came to this Cage aux Folles story as a baffled outsider to queer culture.

Lots of my erstwhile schoolfriends still believe that being queer is a choice. They have enough self knowledge that – being very straight – they would have to go against their own nature to fancy men. Then they miss a thought. It’s like a record skipping. They go from “I would be weird and forced if I tried to be sexy with a man” to a conclusion that being queer is unnatural. If pressed on it they gesticulate towards certain obscure passages in Leviticus, while ignoring vast swathes of celebrated antiquity. My generation mostly has no context as Ancient Greek was being phased out in public schools, probably because of the normalcy of same sex love in the biggest book in the canon – The Iliad. Achilles and Patroclus.

Buy a copy of David Logue’s book “War Music”. Read his modern reworking of the death of Patroclus. If you don’t feel something you’re made of stone. It’s the most incredible piece of work and Homer made it before things were being written down.

I’m getting distracted very easily here. Sorry.

But. Yeah. Read War Music. And if you can get one, get a cheap seat for Cage aux Folles – £25 we paid each and the view was great and we were part of a very very happy audience. Weather is always gonna be the bitch, but summer has been hiding so maybe now it is gonna show up.

I called it work and wandered round the heath. Nobody else is gonna employ me so I might as well play with friends for money. The last two years I’ve been able to run this evening Halloween ghost tour. Once it did go to the wire and the driver from set got me there just in time. It’s evening work. It can usually fit.

Shoe had a route in mind. It works but there’s a big old suburban walk in the middle. I’m gonna have to work hard to find suburban Highgate ghosts… But it’ll end up populated. “We do a different route every year,” says the company ethic. They get a lot of repeat custom. Great… Although I can see why many similar but lazy “experience” companies just hardtack one narrative and make people learn it. I’m good at tour guiding and improv so… I’m happy to pull people down these odd streets and go with whatever madness they bring. I love my Halloween walkies.

And I’m knackered again. I’m sleeping on my own sofa at the mo so my guest has a door they can close. It’s not ideal but thankfully the work I did selling fine leather sofas maybe two decades ago bears out. “Your sofas are more expensive than any others like them,” I was told, often. “Yes, but you get that back in time,” I would say. I sold a load of expensive sofas to people when I believed that they were just higher quality. It was only when I inadvertently discovered that exactly the same sofas were available for half the price elsewhere that I stopped giving a fuck. I’m not gonna rip you off. That feels bad. And if you know me well you will understand what might have been happening in my face when someone went “Oh but it’s a lot more money for me than if I go to DFS. Are you sure it’ll be a better investment for my sick grandson and his family?”. I KNEW that it was exactly the same sofa and my boss wanted double the price. I hate lying. Acting, for me, is about self-delusion. “If I was under that set of circumstances then…”

Everything sofa related finally died in me when a renowned film maker worked out I was an actor. “I used to be married to an actor,” he told me, and seemed interested in my shit. Sure he wanted a cheaper sofa, but he befriended me and gave me his business card. I still have it. “Call me if you ever want to make something,” he offered. But then my boss refused even the basic friends and family discount for the guy. Looking back, my boss was mostly eating his own face with coke at the time. No surprise when the mark-up was so much. I chose my sofa with knowledge of his shady business, when U was already happy to jump ship. He had too many Salvatore Corner Sofas in the warehouse and they weren’t selling but they were excellent. I knew he wanted them moved. And I had successfully flogged two at three times what I paid. I must be one of the only people in the world to have paid a reasonable price for one of these sofas, and the salesman in me is proud to say that it has paid itself in time. It’s a very very good and very comfy leather sofa. All is well.

When we were kids, we would sometimes try to come up with the most horrible possible images. Maybe we were camping and maybe someone told a ghost story and then the discussion would go towards what might be genuinely frightening to witness. We would really push the envelope. My equivalents are nothing to the creativity of the brilliant awful people I was friends with back then. The notional status of the people involved mostly guaranteed their involvement in the images. The closer to the debate the more frequently they’d be used. Maggie was popular, and strangely so was Terry Waite. Nowadays the tiny envelope of … people considered to be worth noting … It has been colonised by the dullest humans that have ever been invented. You have to be creative to make these colourless nobodies into something hideous. “Rishi Sunak dangling from a ceiling by multiple meathooks in his back, priapic and laughing constrictedly as he spasmpisses into the face of a delighted Vladimir Putin who is lying on a blanket of rotten meat wanking in his leopard skin bikini as he screams “I’m not gay!” You get the idea.

We don’t need these images. We don’t need these fucking idiots leading us. Other people were always better than me at making these assholes look even dumber than they are. In many ways there’s nothing to be gained from looking at our Prime Minister and observing that he is a whore who would say anything about anything for the right price even though his wife has already got everything. He’s a plug. He’s nothing but greed wrapped in skin. But apparently it’s what we want. Starmer is offering the same with a different badge. Anything else is made pariah.

But… But…

How can we make sense of it all?

If I fight it too hard, I’m called anti-capitalist, which is no description for me as I enjoy trying to make sense of these silly systems.I hate thoughtlessness. I detest the ease with which some of the privileged fail to understand the struggle their forefathers made to give them their safe standpoint. Apparently I’m from a Spanish aristocratic line destroyed by Franco. I’m lucky in that I have never had advantages from it, so it has never made me complacent. Also my father made his own name from Scottish organised prohibition era crime, and he worked very hard before he died to teach me that respect is EARNED. I remember being this posh kid aged 22 facing down a youth and his gang. A knife appeared and my dad’s voice in me almost got me killed but also stopped me being robbed. “Do you respect me? *knife* Do you respect me?” This is like Sands End, about 11pm. on a night like tonight, near the fuckawful graffitied rollerskater statue that I believe has finally been removed, before it all got gentrified. “No. I don’t respect you. I fear you. You have a knife. I might have to defend myself. I have no weapon so… yes I fear you. Not respect . Fear.” “You FEAR me?” “Um… oh… Yes… yes I fear you.” “He FEARS me!!!!” “I fear you”.

Meh

I’m going to bed. Long forgotten interactions with assholes…. nah.. I’m done.

I was doing a decent job of custodian in this flat until Lou got back. Then I was trying for good boyfriend points, and ran her a nice post festival bath. I put candles into the bathroom sink as they make pleasant relaxing light in there. Now she’s spark out and I’ve just realised that one of the candles leaked so much wax down the plughole that I’m gonna have to take the ancient u-bend off tomorrow, or call a plumber if I haven’t got the tools in my car. I haven’t a clue how much wax got down there but my attempts to break it up released such clouds of ancient muck that I reckon it’ll be a catharsis to clear up that u-bend anyway and there might be an gold earring in there, a lost civilisation, a new strain of botulism, an entire yeti made of nosehair… Who knows what wonders we will find. But not tonight.

Sounds like Medicine Festival was gorgeous. I’ve been watching endless videos of people who aren’t me having a delightful time in a field. I’m working next weekend or I’d get myself a Shambala ticket and go sink into something woo-woo. Can’t. Mister Panda.

So, instead, I’ve been looking at how much it’ll cost to go and do a week long Ayahuasca retreat in Peru once winter comes. I think that might have to be the safety valve this year, and I’m happy to start saving up for it.. Mister Panda will be out and about a fair bit, and I’m helping out with some production etc. Lovely things to come. It’s gonna get busy again for a bit.

Peaceful seaside night right now though. The cat and I are in the living room. I want Lou to sleep deeply for a few hours before I blunder in next to her trying not to snore and occasionally waking up shouting. No time pressure for me tomorrow so I can make sure the plumbing is done before I head back up to the smoke. Of all the bad things you can pour into the sink, hot wax is probably the worst. Ha Eejit. Should’ve paid more attention to those candles.

I’m in The Barley Mow in Kemptown. I’m wearing my battered “Choose Love” T-Shirt – one of the few garments I took with me on Camino and still had at the end of it. I’ve been looking after little miss fishyfussyface. She is eating again. She went off her food for two days after I arrived. I started to worry, but I think she was trying to manipulate me into giving her nothing but treats and she can call it food. I think one of her carers can be manipulated thus. Not I. If I didn’t have to syringe medicine into her face in the morning, she would never get a single treat out of me. As is she gets the bare minimum to sweeten the medicine deal.

Around me in the pub, life is happening. There’s a guy on the table behind me who loves to speak in absolutes. He’s greybearded and maybe a touch older than I am. He’s a mystical bore. I hope I never get to the stage where I think I’m Gandalf. He seems to. Yes, life and love and blows and time help hone our instrument. I’m piping clearer now than I was. But he seems to think his instrument is superclear even if his tune is reflecting to himself. It all might be more about his *instrument* than his instrument. The young women he is with are polite. Save us all from ever being targeted by such politeness. oop and they’ve just now found their excuse to leave. Tough luck, Gandalf.

A lovely huge fellow came by just now and thanked the bar staff for a raffle prize. The Barley Mow had donated something to the rugby club. They had a raffle and raised over £750. “That’s a year of cleaning!” he told me happily. The prize might be connected to the fact that two big lads with sports gear to my right are currently stuffing themselves happily. Maybe they won the bar tab. They’re talking about love and expectations. “Mark my words, five years from now Jo is gonna realise…”

I like this part of the world. There’s life here, and nature is close, and we have THE SEA THE SEA just there, bringing the swift weather and the freshness and the salt. All the wipers on all the cars are rusted in Lou’s square. It’s corrosive here. Metal is attacked. A strong and moving seaside reminder of how arrogant we all are thinking we’ve made something endless.

MAN: “I HAVE CREATED BIG IRON RAILINGS”

SEA: *continues to do what it always does*

MAN: “Until there is no money, I can always pay workers to protect my big iron railings with filing and care and paint! Ha. Screw you, sea!!”

SEA: *continues to do what it always does*

MAN: “Sea! I’m buying Bored Ape nfts at the moment. Can you stop on the iron railing for a bit until I get my investment back?”

SEA: *continues to do what it always does*

MAN: My iron railings have collapsed and now I have to put scaffolding up my whole building.

SMALL VOICE: Why?

MAN: Just you wait, soon my railings outside my home will prove that man is stronger than sea! Yeah! Hoo-Ah!

SEA: *continues to do what it always does*

SMALL VOICE: Maybe actually nature is going to take over when we finally make ourselves redundant.

All this shit we do will come back to nature. If we all simultaneously died right now, I reckon at least half of us would be part plant in six months.

I met a guy called “Steve”. He hammered into all this as I was writing. He’s angry. He’s been banned from the casino and loads of the local pubs. His anger drew me but I quickly wasn’t interested in being truthful to him. I lied to him hard and lots. He was very very results driven and he wanted me to be interested in sex with him.

I fabricated that I was cat-sitter for a rich lady, just because when he asked me my job I said “catsitter”. I’ve long ago learnt that I don’t want to have to have the fucking actor conversation. He was flirting so hard. It was mostly just annoying. We reached an accord.

Nice guy. He’s been banned from the local casino. He’s a troublesome angry man. We passed the time. That was enough. I’m home.

Warm Brighton night. Towards the sea the manic beats of a wannabe Fatboy are drifting to me, reminding me how many of my friends are in a field right now while I look after miss fishy face.

She ate her food today which is good as I’ve been wondering. This is a sickly cat, who has medicine every morning. Looking after her involves listening to her.

She’s totally fine. She likes me to handle her. We have unusual conversations. We can sit together for hours. All her behaviours were familiar but for the lack of eating so I was relieved a few hours ago when she chowed down at last. The relief took me out and into the sunset.

A summer day, perhaps. Slow movement of happy people. Light and space.

I went and lay on stones near the edge. The tide was coming in, the salt spray on my face. Nobody was swimming despite warmth, likely as aware as I am that our entitled and profiteering so called leadership have enabled industry to turn the waves to filth. Still, the gentle spray is still a few years from being corrosive so I enjoyed being part of this final carefree decade or so. I finished yet another Robin Hobb trilogy on my Kindle as the sun set. And I had a pint by the Volks at Fika. Atrocious music played too loud, but we have all learnt to ignore that. I watched the sun set.

Now it’s me and the pusscat again and she’s gonna have me up at dawn. I’m gonna get my sleep while I can.

I wish I could be in a field tonight with Lou, with my friends. It’s lovely to be here with the mistress, but I miss a festival. Work starts next week again, if I can call it work. Commitment. And from thence, onwards to all the strange and wonderful things that are pending.

I woke this morning to the insistent complaint of my new mistress. “Food!” she demanded, and I staggered out of bed. Blearily I made my way into a room with two full plates of food. I looked at it, looked at her, returned to bed. Half an hour.

“FOOD,” she demanded again, face thrust into mine, pulling me from dreams.

I changed old for new and gave her medicine and a small amount of treats. That’s what she really wanted. Then we had obligatory call to strokings. I cut out a deep buried knot. She purred. Still though she ignored the food. The food. The food.

The rain came. I put in my contact lenses. I shut the idea of the door. Observed by the cat, I very seriously began a day of playing Baldur’s Gate 2 alternated with reading chapters from my latest Robin Hobb trilogy and stroking the cat. That sort of a day is normally reserved for some guy over six foot tall with a motorbike, a pizza habit and a “hilarious” T-shirt highlighting happy moobs. I’ve got the beard for it. I rarely let myself have a full on nerd day. It was delightful. Still, even when I cooked and ate my easy cheesy lunch, she did not munch as I hoped she would.

She’s behaving normally. She’s just not eating. I’m hoping that tonight she will go for it. I’ll find out at 5am, no doubt.

Meanwhile it’s lovely to be in Brighton, even if I only had a wee break in the rain at about 4pm to go and hit the beach and take in the summer. It is not predictably pleasant weather right now. Lou has been at a festival and I’m glad not to have to sleep in a tent right now. Way too damp.

I’m enjoying being the cat slave. I’ve enjoyed being irresponsible and childish today. Before long I’ll have to step up again, but for now, sometimes, days like this are perfectly allowable.

A quick run back to London today but it was time consuming so I didn’t get to hang out in Brighton. A friend needed to get the hell out of his living situation, and I always like to know there’s someone in the flat so it’s not wasted. I picked him and his stuff up in Deptford and I moved it all over to mine, introduced him to the cleaning lady and gave him my only set of keys.

Now I’m back in this peaceful flat in Brighton and engaged in a full on turf war with Tessy the delightful cat who has decided to ignore her food in favour of making sure she gets her place on the bed. I’m totally happy to let her win, which she’s not expecting, but I do very much want her to eat something today. Thankfully I’m here all day everyday from now until Lou is back so whatever she’s up to I will have time to get her happy again. She is… a particular creature. I’ve got the scratch marks to prove it.

Tomorrow is going to be about doing very little, and I can’t wait. If the weather is nice I might lie on a beach. If it sucks I’ll just sit up here above the world and the sea with miss fishy face and write, read, generate, consume…

In London today I came very close to grabbing my laptop. My plan was to download Baldurs Gate 3 and then spend the whole weekend like teenage Al with the whirring of the fan in this incredibly deep and detailed world that Larian have managed to make without selling their soul as a studio. I thought better of it at the last minute. There is light and air in the world. I want to see the sky and the grass and not think about how well rendered they are and whether or not I should find a patch to make them better. So I’m gonna play BG2 on my iPad instead, because as a teenager I literally stopped playing it because it was too good and I had I life to live. iPad is portable so I can actually take it outside in the sun. I’ll find out what that dastardly Irenicus is up to this time dammit.

Games… I’ve got multiple friends playing characters in BG3… I’ve played through whole games voiced by mates of mine now. I’ve watched YouTube videos of people where my voice is their character. It’s so odd to think how that industry has grown since the Alien Breed Tower Assault intro video (devs doing hilariously bad acting). Now it’s dolla! But it is also consuming. I’m ok with a droppable mobile game these days. I can’t sink into a desktop at the height of summer, no matter how bad the summer has been.

Peace and quiet and cat.

Tonight I’m at Lou’s on my own with Tessa the cat. Lou is at Medicine Festival and even though I’m jealous of her and I miss a festival, I have already settled into the idea of a quiet and lovely time here just soaking up the sea energy and being a slave to the cat. She’ll have me up at dawn so I’m winding down already, but this place is designed to make you sleepy. I’ve had nothing but low light since the sun went down so I’m pretty much ready to pass out.

A perfect summer day though and I drove her down the coast to Hastings. We stopped on the chalk cliffs near Beachy Head and pulled in the prana and the sheer rugged beauty from those collapsing walkways made so iconic in WW2. She hooked up with her friend and an airstream, and they’ve all gone off for a ladies festival while I’m left holding the pussy.

Once she was off I nipped to Hastings for lunch with an old friend, and I found myself thinking how well everyone looks when they have been out of the city for a while. Tomorrow I’m seeing a friend who has been up in Edinburgh and has come back to find the city unmanageable. I get it. It’s not a friendly place. You can find the joy in the cracks, and I do, but you have to dig your fingers in sometimes.

So for now I’m gonna forget all that London stuff and lounge around with the cat. It’s not the easiest, of course. I’ve already got scratches on my arm, but that’s how she shows you she loves you. But a bit of medicine, a bit of love, occasional treats and a careful stroking regime and she’ll repay you by watching over your dreams and occasionally killing those pesky little pests.

I’m so sleepy. I kept myself on the edge of sleep until morning to prevent snoring last night. Didn’t want to send Lou off to a festival already sleep deprived. Tonight I can make as much noise as I like. Yay.