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All this stuff to do, and it would make sense to have a frantic day of scrabbling. But it’s a Saturday and I needed a break. Tomorrow I’ll be doing lots. Sometimes we need to pull back in order to push forward cleaner.

I had a lie in, only interrupted when Campbell hit the buzzer at about ten. He’s back in town with the Gennaro Maglioni mandolin I gave him half strung. I covered his bus back down from Scotland and bought some strings for the instrument. He was told at the shop that stringing it would cost £300 or break it. That’s just a shop getting business. This has been a working instrument before it was unstrung, and it didn’t break. I suggested that if I bought the strings we could have a go and get some sound out of it. If it breaks then it’s on theme for a show about breaking and we have a guitar as backup.

Campbell my nephew is very musical. He can noodle with guitar and mandolin for starters and I threw him an old mouth organ which he immediately made good as well. “I can taste the ancient dust,” he observed. But that harp is coming back into use now. I’m proud to have involved him in a thing I’m making. So many themes in common with the piece we are making about these machines that used to break things and now just sit and sleep. Old forgotten instruments, instruments that might break if they are used. It all fits the imaginative soundscape so well.

So yeah, we are thinking about the show. But also I’m just trying to have a day to chill out. I’m cramming my weekend into one day so tomorrow I can load up on random things and tweak the script for everybody else and also maybe finally work out what I will be doing in all this. Good lord. It’s a lot to be negotiating, but we have such a lovely team and I think Campbell will be a huge asset. I make most of my decisions through instinct and then go back over them and overthink them. I just saw him in my flat noodling on my guitar missing a string and thought he would be good for a joyful thing. Should you employ family? Yes, when it’s short notice and the money isn’t great.

argh and we got talking and suddenly it’s the wee hours and I’m gonna have to sleep… oops. Saturday night…

Another day in a room full of machines.

Today we were visited by a volunteer. He used to be a software engineer and now, for how many years, he has made this museum his home. He’s on hand to demonstrate the huge sleeping metal creations. We were mid flow when he strode in with complete ownership and immediately started overlapping facts to us, twenty to the dozen. He was quite quickly short of breath from sheer enthusiasm and speed of speech. “Did you notice he was foaming at the mouth?” someone observed mildly much later, and yes – I thought it was my imagination, but he was.

A good brain to pick though. He knows the facts, and since I’m trying to play the man who is the object of his retirement obsession, I will need to have some command of them. Conscious that every question leads to a very long answer, I tried to ask things that will help in what we are making. I have some notes from that. Engineering terms and evidence of his opinions on some things. There’s no recording of him of course. He died in the 1890’s, and they just caught Tennyson on wax tape. David’s voice is lost to time. I fear he was mostly Scottish though so I’m channeling my uncle. Campbell my nephew is coming down and is going to get involved, and he has a laconic North Scottish drawl – “people up in Scotland tell me I sound posh”. He’s gonna be banging his head against the machines as I improvise in an accent. Perhaps if I just go full Day Lewis and refuse to talk any other way until we open then it’ll start to feel natural again. It’s a family voice, but just not one I’ve been exposed to much in my very anglocentric existence.

The issue with our lovely volunteer was getting back to work. He took us downstairs and explained the Dennison machine for breaking chains – did it in such a careful manner that I actually mostly understand how it would have worked now. I’m allowed to move the weight, so I shifted it to where it is unlikely to cause any unexpected movements and snip off an audience finger. There’s public liability insurance with my Equity membership, but I don’t want to have to use it.

Eventually we got through the day’s plan. I need to scribble some things now. We’ve got the shape. It’s almost at the stage already where we need it to have living witnesses in order to understand what it needs. We have no director so we just have to give notes to each other. Thankfully nobody is precious here. We have less than a week. Joy will be found…

Back to the self tape frenzy and I really should stop insisting on learning all my lines and just read them off an autocue like some of my friends recommend. I won’t though. I tell myself the learning and specificity will make me better at my craft, that it is helping keep my learning muscles flexed. Learning lines is a crucial skill for work where the lines are set in stone. That’s about fifty percent of the work I do.

I once wrote a letter from the heart to a major theatre company. I wrote a few back then, young and optimistic, thinking that my delight in my vocational medium would be enough on its own to recommend me. It was before I caught on that many of the gatekeepers to the jobs are not practitioners and never have been. I was talking about how I felt I was moving from apprentice to journeyman, but I needed to raise the calibre of my collaborations in order to secure the edges of my craftsmanship. Who knows what became of that letter. I’ve never been considered by that company. But I still think in those terms. This making things up stuff is a craft. Learning a craft takes time and practice. I was apprentice, learning to journeyman. Now I’m journeyman and looking to master, but for that shift to come I’ll need much more time at the coalface. I know some apprentices that tell everyone they are masters, and I’ve watched people believe it. But I’ve always played the long game, in every aspect of my life.

Right now it is really helpful for me to be in a collaborative process with someone as positive as I am but utterly different in priority. Sammy is fab and very different from me. I’m learning again and I’m never happier than when I’m learning. Theatre is community. We all have different skills and needs, but if we push together we can make live art that has some kind of a truth at the heart of it, hopefully.

I was supposed to have written something today but I had an audition with a hard line learn. I chose to prioritise that. There’s time. Not much, and I forgot that everybody doesn’t work like me, so suddenly someone needs a script in a small immersive experience. I just learnt a tricky script and played it back with every word in place for a self -tape. That’s one thing. Immersive theatre is the opposite craft and needs a very different head, in my opinion. You cannot be responsive with a script. It immediately makes everything all about you. And this actor is meant to be in a healing room. Eek.

I went on a date once where the lady was working through a “date script” – (if you were a colour what colour would you be and why aaaargh) – and by the end of it I had actually eaten both of my arms. I can’t bear that shit in dates or in immersive theatre context, and they are both similar in intention. Find points of contact, push a narrative, seduce or charm. But … my audience preference be damned, she’s gonna get a script, but not today, and I’m sure she’ll be able to respond within the frame of it. Her imagination is excellent and she doesn’t need the crutch. But which of us can say we haven’t relied on crutches from time to time, he writes, with a glass of lovely young Ferreret from delightful José Ferrer vineyard in Binissalem just hitting the spot as he finishes writing.

Bedtime now though. Much to do, much to do. Script? Humbug.

Hurrah. We found the button. I do worry. We gathered the collaborators today and we talked through the thing we are making and I think I know more clearly why we are making it now. I think I might have been credited as Al Beverlay on the printed literature and there is a huge power in not giving a fuck. I’m not making this to push my name to the front of anything. It’s just another of the things I have made over the years where it’s about the thing. Big old life. I’m still in it, being ridiculous. I’m still hoping I’ll hit that vein of consistent work, but it comes with being known and the older I get the more I feel the lack of those early chances as I’m gonna have to be the late arrival now. But I’ll still be doing this when I’m ninety, cos I love it when I’m allowed to work. The industry is cruel and selective and contact-based and arbitrary. But the work and the people working? Glory. Apart from the inevitable plague of egomaniacs.

The guy in the coffee shop this morning was wondering. What’s the place you’re at? That building over there? I’ve often wondered what it is.

It’s a huge building housing a “universal testing machine”, where they would have to stop the traffic on one of the main thoroughfares in the area in other to pull or push huge girders. Bertha, the vast hydraulic machine, would pound and pull and twist and crush the best efforts of the world to make solid steel. She still sits, sleeping and hungry, likely craving another girder to destroy but ultimately starved in this new world. We have satisfied ourselves that we know the capacity of materials. We build higher and bolder because of what we learnt through that one man’s rigour.

What of the new tech? The latest revolution? The industrial revolution has overtaken us and there are too many voices making new things for a Kirkaldy to try and make sense of the breaks. There will be another Tay Bridge disaster as AI gets ahead of us, egged on by all of us who are only interested in what it can do and are failing to take into account how it might break.

With luck, in another 150 years we will still be growing and caring. David Kirkaldy was exactly the kind of pioneer I’m usually annoyed with. He was a man who wanted everything measured and quantified. He was almost certainly out of the same Scottish Presbyterian “wee free” stable as my paternal grandfather, who was held up throughout my childhood as an example of everything that was wrong with the world. Excessive care. Measurements. Facts not opinions. “He’s like a cult leader,” Sammy observed, when I tried out some of my written bits. And yeah, certainty can be intimidating, because there is almost no foundation available to us. We base all our notions on blancmange. It’s just about who insists that their blancmange is concrete.

Thoughts flowing more freely today and words following, but still obstructed just because nothing is ever easy, least of all the process of creating something from scratch. Thankfully I’m not alone in this and my collaborator is more ordered and less inclined to trust the universe.

There are pricks on a page now. I made them. I’ve started to write on iPad and to make things more easily transferable to others as I still can’t find some of my early notes for this project which were scribbled in one of about eight identical yellow notebooks I saved from the bin on a set break.

Making work transferrable… there’s a skill I need to develop. I like to develop and respond, but in much of what I do the stuff comes out of somewhere squealing into the light. I pull it and dump it steaming in front of you. Then I immediately forget it cos I’m scraping for something else. So I’m trying to write a script for myself even though I’m 100% certain I’ll never come close to the words on the page when it comes to delivery. The points will carry. The pertinent information and facts. But this show I’m making is billed as “immersive”. My grandmother is billed as”immersive”, the loos in the Cirencester Rotary Club are likely billed as immersive. The word lost all meaning long ago and just became a shorthand for “we want you to buy this”. But I want to be able to respond if the audience does anything, and I know from experience that the tester audiences will be the only ones that do nothing honest. So I want to keep the frame loose, but I know that I’m probably in the minority as someone who is happier when I can’t control things.

I’ve been thinking about different ways of breaking things. Twisting and punching and bulging and crushing. The language of destruction and measurement is rich and lively in this project, and ripe for the plucking. I just want to make something fun in a remarkable place, but we also need to make something that has meaning. Something that hangs together. This place is about breaking things and so much has been broken recently. The edges and the limits – we have learnt much more than we expected about ourselves under pressure after what some might call an extended campaign of fear and isolation. Two years, we lost.

I still haven’t found the button. There’s a bit of time left, but without a button we are just showing off in an interesting place but in a way that’s ultimately empty and pointless. I trust my collaborators though and we only have a week of rehearsal which hasn’t even started yet. There’s a heart to this thing and we will reach in like Mola Ram and pluck the thing out and hold it up to be seen, somehow. We just need to know where it is.

With all these bouncing thoughts, I unscrewed my head and replaced it with my Factory head, and went off to walk the verse on Julius Caesar for a few hours in the evening as Mark Antony, as plebeians, as myself.

Joy. Now once more the heated bed. A varied day of thinking. I’m exhausted.

I wonder if anyone else felt obstructed today. Being alive felt a bit like wading through soup. It’s the last day before the equinox so perhaps it’s just the clinging fingers of winter. Wet and cold, uninspiring. I was trying to write and the thoughts were like mud. I found myself wanting to just go to sleep at about 4pm. My wellspring was dry, and time is running out.

It would help if I wasn’t too tight fisted to put the heating on. It would help if the government wasn’t favouring the oil companies over the idiots who voted for them. It would help if a dying Russian lunatic hadn’t decided to try to make the USSR great again by imitating his genocidal forbears and murdering as many human beings as possible in pursuit of a delusion.

Nothing in the world is really making sense. Even the Hot Cross Buns are flavoured with blueberry and lemon. I bought them by mistake. They are… incorrect.

I’m hoping that a night of dreams and rest will help reset the general feeling of dread and horror that has dogged me all day. It’s totally irrational, but we are irrational beings. I’m dreading collapse. I’m dreading life. I’m dreading everything.

Aries new moon though, and equinox. So we have an excuse to look to new starts. A beginning time, and a time when the light is getting stronger. Even if you think its all hooey, the days are going to be longer than the nights now. We can all do with a bit of freshening up, and but for the temperature, all the signs point to spring. Crocuses. Snowdrops. Tulips on sale in Tesco. Daffodils.

I’m approaching my old nemesis, March 23rd. Perhaps the looming sense of dread is rooted in there too. It’s a hard time of year for me every year, this little week. New life inextricably linked in my memory to the death of both my parents. Falling down memory holes. Sad. Not alone though. Held by friendships. Held by memories. There’s love still there. Time is still proving unstoppable, but there’s joy to be found.

I’m setting an alarm and falling into dream. Writing tomorrow. Lots of it.

What a glorious day. A Sunday. A time to settle and relax and slough the weight off before going back into the fray.

Lou teaches a Sunday morning class. It’s at 9.30am, and its candlelit meditation. I normally sleep through it, as I’m often pretty knackered when I’ve slung myself down to the seaside. That has been foolish of me, because of course it is wonderful. It’s a new studio in an old performance venue. We were in an upstairs room where no doubt there has been decades of cabaret. Now the purpose has changed to peacefulness. A touch of morning sun was firing beams of light through the gaps in the blinds. Loads of women and one other man, and we all sat and were guided into peacefulness and care first thing on a Sunday.

I gravitated to the mat by the heated mirror. Nobody sneered at me, which was pleasant. A long time ago I went with Minnie to a Vinyasa Flow class in Chalk Farm with Triyoga, again where I was very much in the minority as a man. At the time I was used to Bikram so I came in basically speedos and nothing else, and the instructor appraised me like a Christmas turkey in the corridor outside the class, and had no qualms about making it clear they disliked my outfit. This time I was perhaps more appropriately dressed, and the instructor was deep enough in her practice that my presence wasn’t going to excite any judgement positive or negative.

It was beautiful to be guided in a group into peacefulness. I find it very hard to shut my head up. There are ways.

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Sunday lunch, seaside for a moment more, and then the frantic slog back up to London town and the fray and the smoke and the roadworks and the rage. Back again. Much to do.

Morning Sunday yoga. It’s a great way to start the week.

Down to the windy coast. Stanmer Park again and mud. It has been raining. The roads are flooded, huge puddles along the riverside out of London. Still too cold for my tastes, but things are improving. This is a rushed visit this time. I last saw Lou in Majorca. I’m about to be very very busy until the end of the month. For one night, a moment to switch out and down. To unpick the confused longings and concerns that constantly fight each other in my disordered head. To align with the sea and the silence and peace. To breathe out again without talking.

All the thinking and moving things and worrying about detail and writing and making up and ordering and laughing and talking and improvising and auditioning and learning and operating and booking and offering and emailing – that can all switch back on with the week. Here now it is peace and wind and cat and good food.

Mud at Stanmer though, but still we walked, sliding through it as we yomped towards equinox in a wind a bit less icy than it was a month ago. Then back to this seaside flat, with a characterful and eloquent cat and the chance of food that is mostly green and no incredible bottles of cheap Bordeaux screaming “You could open me!” The wind is still up, battering the window directly from the sea, but we are warm and companionable. We tried to watch some mawkish Braveheart tribute but we ended up switching over to a more predictably happy movie about some overoptimistic Pole in Pennsylvania stumbling into a multi-million pound Ponzi Scheme. Jack Black can’t really help but be charming, and it’s a very kind account of a man who must have accidentally attracted a great deal of hatred from people who were perhaps a bit too greedy. The power of the way a story is told… I’m sure there’s a documentary that paints a darker picture of the man but I was happy to get my facts processed through a bright and colourful and mostly kind telling of The Polka King.

Now it’s bedtime. It isn’t bedtime at all, it’s just gone nine. This always happens when I’m here – I get sleepy early. Lou has the lights low while my place is always studio bright. My brain goes into night mode. I’ll sleep soon and feel better for it.

I’ve got so much to think about, so much to do. Jobs are piling up again. Even through this mess, I find myself tangled about an audition I sent too rushed, where I didn’t challenge myself as much as I should have. Letting go is hard when we desire we desire we desire. This strange obsession of mine has deep roots into my heart.

But I can stop for a night and a day. And I will. And I am.

“I have a heart condition,” Ali tells me. “I’m sixty five. I have three grandchildren. I am told I must not work, but still here I am, I’m working. My friend who normally does this, he is on holiday. So here I am.”

This is Jaflong. It’s a little place in Ham. It’s very much geared to takeaway but they have a few tables beautifully appointed to catch diners. No licence to sell booze. This is just good quality Indian food at a good price in London. And Ali is great.

My friends have had another row. It’s a bollocks row and they both look foolish to me in it. One of them expected the other one to remember something but they forgot it. Rather than sending reminders and easily preventing it they let it happen so they could sink into the sweet sweet feeling of being right. The other half of it then realised they had fucked up and reacted like a teenager instead of taking account. It’s doublebullshit. We aren’t fifteen anymore. I went for curry. “Keep the places made up,” I said to Ali. They might show.

They didn’t.

I’m home now. Off to bed. Earlier than usual but I’m still on continental time. I start to get sleepy earlier than I’m used to these days. Likely that’s helpful as I’m just about to go to Lou’s and she is early bed early rise.

A proper weekend beckons, with a proper week thereafter, pushing this strange thing into reality in a museum in Southwark. There’s still work to be done. There’s maybe some writing to be done too. We are making up a thing but we need to know we can fill the time. There’s a lot put on the creativity of the individual humans, and we can’t afford to book them for more than one week so it’ll all be made at last minute.

But we work with the constraints we have. Ali has his heart condition, but there he is helping people like me to have tasty food on a Friday night. I am healthy. I can hopefully find a way, with a good team, to bring some form of joy to the people of Southwark.

I’m a bit tired and a bit bilious. I’m off to bed and a long long sleep. Nothing but weekend for two days. Oh joy.

zzz

Ahhh man. I’m tired again. I’ve been shifting energies. I’ve been putting stagnant things into flow once more. Maybe with them, I have moved internal things that needed moving.

I’ve got the hoarding gene. They say it’s neanderthal. Wherever it’s from, it makes it hard for me to chuck things out. I’m better at it by far than I used to be. I learnt via doing it for other people, and then applied my learning to my own loaded stuff. There’s this sense that the things that other people handled somehow carry those people. It’s not the case. The things are just things. The people…? When they are gone they are gone. I am currently in a flat surrounded by absolute shit connected to memories. Give me five minutes and I can tell you the things that have actual meaning for actually me. The things that have value? I’m not sitting on any million pound surprises here. There are a couple of things that a good dealer might be able to get a few grand for given a month or two. Mostly though it’s showy things that were valuable once perhaps but currently are just pleasant to own. I don’t want to throw them all into fire because they are better than that. But I’ve done the work, and I can tell you that there’s enough distance between selling price and specialist buying price that even the best stuff here is honestly just gubbins.

And yet I sit on it.

I’ve been moving energy for people I love again. It has become part of what I do. Even the Majorca drive was part of that. Both times up and down, I took stagnant items and put them into flow. There are wooden giraffes, knick-knacks carpets and shelving units that might have gone 50 years and more gathering dust, but are now once more on display, visible and loved. I’m no shinto, but I do think that these things have an energy. Generations of stuff has overtaken generations of people. Right now we don’t want the well made old thing because culture tells us the dogshit Swedish flatpack is better. At some point this idiocy will flip and then the few who have kept hold of these lovely things will be validated, but that kind of cultural shift takes time. Right now, most people look to estate agents to tell them where and how other people want to live. Right now most estate agents have a generational lack of creativity, imagination, humanity and colour. It’s not their fault, it was a lie-based profession for decades before Boris made it acceptable for EVERY profession to be shamelessly duplicitous. They think they are helping by making the world beige like them. The market responds. Second hand furniture dealers should be much more appreciated. People who mend things too. We gave enough good stuff – even appliances – that we can function now for decades if nothing new was made. We aren’t plundering resources anymore for necessity. We are burning the world because somebody watched an advert. Maybe I was was in the advert, I’m not out of this cycle by any means. But fuck we need to stop being so short term in our consumption. We can reuse. We really really can.