It’s only about three hours to get home from Stoke. I did it in one shot. This might be a frequent journey going forward. A big American company have laid down some funding to encourage youth in Newcastle under Lyme to connect with the idea of being engineers. Facilitators like myself will mentor them over some two years. They will end up with skills. Quick skills. They will get ahead of the general. They’ll have a chance to change the world on their own terms.
It’s great work. You’re helping people grow, and at that age you really see it. These are smart young men and women and they are learning from themselves and from each other and from us. I like to mix up my day jobs. I do have to chase the money where it’s available, so I’ve turned down some life jobs on that basis. But if my time is adequately compensated I’m gonna try my hand at anything. It’s a balance. Life is important. Money is important. My daily fee for this work is almost twice what I get for Extreme-E, but this stuff happens in Stoke and I’m off to Uruguay next month. I know where I’d rather be working. Yeah, complicate that with the fact I’ll always be better off and happier filming than dayjobbing, but … that’s too unpredictable to plan around. And theatre pays in magic beans, which I tried to live off for ages and would again if the right offer came, but somehow I’m not in the frame and I’m not gonna sit at home waiting for the phone to ring.
I’m home now though, waiting for the bath to run, happy and chilled. I fancy an early bed. Tom cooked sausage and mash, ready for when I got in, which was incredible after a long day and a long drive. Tomorrow will be easier but I have to start booking ferries etc so I can do this crazy Majorca drive I’ve agreed to.
I adore my existence. It is full on. Thank God Lou exists. Hopefully we will get to go on a road trip. If not, December Holiday Fun!!!!
My second night in a plastic bed in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Ben and I have known each other for so long now. He was at Rose Bruford Drama School with Jo, my erstwhile emergency friend. Jo saved my life many times. She helped me piece things together. Hanging out with Ben helps me remember the haphazard nuance of that brilliant gobshite friendship. I miss Jo. She’s still around, but she’s got a daughter so we don’t call every night after midnight and break down the day…
This evening though we ended up in the pub breaking down our particular day. Ben and Katrina and I put the world to rights.
I’m up here in Stoke on Trent, helping to give confidence to a coming generation of engineers. Yep. It’s back to that. Shortly before cracking off with Extreme-E again, I’m trying to build a generation of engineers who think about solutions.
It’s half term today. These young men and women are in the final year at school and they are so totally brilliant that their half term is consciously being spent making elastic band powered boats with us… They have chosen to spend half term doing engineering, and they also seem to be making deep friendships. This is a wonderful thing, frankly. Even in a day I’ve seen people grow. This sort of thing at this age is golden. Shared experience. Shared making. Wherever they want to go, this is a foundation.
I’ll be off back into the desert soon. I can be a social wildcard, like so many of these engineering humans today. I’m so looking forward to fitting in to a strange team like a glove, as I seem to somehow do with Extreme-E. The Uruguay race will be much like Sardinia in terms of distances. I’ll be close to the site in digs. I’m looking forward to once again learning a new place. Bring it. You have to be flexible…
I may be wrong but I think this is an early version of the winner. It was always about the elastic motor though…
I’ve been thinking about my angry blog the other day regarding the Sunflower stunt. I didn’t know it was glassed. The picture itself was unharmed and I’m told that this was the thinking – to encourage people like me to be immediately angry about a work of art being disrespected as if we aren’t already more angry about the fact that we are destroying the world with convenience. They wanted to highlight bad priorities. I thought they had destroyed the picture, hence my reaction. They hadn’t destroyed it. Allegedly they wanted to provoke the very reaction they provoked in me, but to provoke it in people who are not already deeply engaged with the horror of how our desire to have everything NOW is truncating the natural world at a rate that most life will be unsustainable in a few generations.
I switched on the television in my digs just now and randomly watched a show where Jimmy Carr took a vote about whether Rolf Harris or Eric Gill were worse humans. They ended up dramatically taking flamethrowers to the Eric Gill.
The show is still playing. It’s a show trying to provoke outrage. It’s a show that is further normalising the destruction of art.
Just Stop Oil apparently knew that the Van Gogh was glassed. They wanted the discussion they provoked. Problem is, they’ve put art in the firing line. And shows like this bollocks with Carr are adding to it. This arrogance that our “now” thing is more important than the eternal – that’s getting compounded. “This helps us understand where our audience stands on offensive imagery,” says the narrator as they gear up to fuck up another artist’s work because of subjectivity.
Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley has just been shot through by paintgun.
“It feels like these are very dark times,” says someone on the programme. And yes. Yes. Based on this.
Back to Just Stop Oil. Absolutely we have to stop our reliance on oil. We have to break the relationship. We are so so lazy. We are making the world uninhabitable by being lazy. But, to Stop Oil immediately is not a just. Infrastructure would fall apart. “Stop Oil” is a call to revolution, and yeah we need revolution. But revolution is not a “just” thing. It’s bigger than “just”. And now, if we had that “simple” revolution, art is in the firing line. So who would emerge afterwards? People who don’t give a fuck about history? Is art is somehow part of the problem? This doesn’t fill me with confidence.
What are we fighting for? This home-made great extinction will eventually make convenience culture impossible, and going the way it’s going, once things finally snap there’ll be a generation that angrily starves to death waiting for a delivery. But art is something that raises us from beasts. It’s not at war with nature.
Nature will survive. Nature survives. It’s just another great extinction that we’ve catalysed. Even humanity might survive without The Amazon and without Amazon. Not in the same lazy form, but in some form. But … if we put art in the firing line, it’s only a matter of time before people stop caring about whether there’s glass in front of the art. And without art we shift back to just meeting our needs. Copycats who are angry about their small things will start wrecking beautiful “art” things to highlight their axegrind. And even now we find it informative when we find Neolithic cave art. “They were eating animals!!! Baddies! Smash it!”
Animals can learn how to play and we are filled with wonder and joy, but only we make art. Not even octopi or corvids or pigs make art. Watch now though, as people with no creativity but to justify something they believe in start to ruin beautiful things to highlight their whateverness.
Come the revolution, the galleries will burn now. They’re in the firing line because of this relative value stuff. It’s so narrow minded. We will lose generations of wisdom and beauty in exchange for trying to make everybody as angry as you are.
If we are fighting for families that can’t heat their soup though, surely we are fighting for humanity… and if we are fighting for humanity we surely are fighting for the humanities? For art, whose message complicates and changes over years. For the fact that we cannot believe what they believed when they made that beautiful thing, but the thing is still beautiful.
But … we start to put value on belief. The Anglicans destroyed so much Catholic art with the dissolution of the monasteries because Henry VIII forced the idea that Anglican was better than Catholic as an idea. Short termism. It’s everywhere. The internet has made it a blight. Causes are rallied behind and things with time behind them fall victim to flashes in the pan. Time is always ticking and all the things that matter to you now will be dust. The library of Alexandria burnt because, apparently, the only book we need is the Qur’an. Short-termism is so unutterably boring and self centred. Me me me. And so now, to save the something, we will shortly be butchering beauty.
Now, on TV, Jimmy Carr is chopping up a Hitler painting with chainsaws. Ok yeah so I think Hitler was a baddie too so apparently I’m part of the club. These paintings though, don’t they help us remember he was a human too? He tried to paint, the fucker. And he instigated genocide. We are close to such horrors happening again and if we only look at how we frame the past, we are fools. We have to learn. We won’t. But again, this TV show is just putting art into the frame for destruction. And so we get smaller and smaller and smaller.
We make people into monsters, we chop up the monster’s paintings cos monsters have no nuance. These nasty assholes lived and loved. With Hitler we all know where it ended up, but circumstances and unexamined prejudices allowed him to follow a line where it never would have occurred to him that he was being literally evil and his outcome would be detested for a generation before dumb people started trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. We can all get sucked into being terrible. Isn’t it better to be aware that “the monster” liked to paint? Especially when we are literally going that way again. If I’m playing a baddie I want to make them relatable, not just a two dimensional being. It’s why I play them so often. Success is about making the right people think “I’m like that… Am I a baddie?”
So many people I know right now are right on the edge of drowning in stuff. You know about my struggles with the accumulation. I’m in a stuff-out phase of necessity because stuff-in right now is barely possible. Any chance for me to give you a thing, I’ll take it. “You like it! Have it! Sure. No problems.”
Christmas Carol is cancelled. Kirkaldy is delayed. Suddenly I’ve gone from knowing what is happening until the end of the year to knowing that I’m gonna run off the edge of the cliff with my legs still going. The solution? Chipping away at the stuffmountain.
Things I haven’t done: Sorted out the spare room. Sorted the costumes properly. Got all the ridiculous knickknackerie gone and gone and gone from my home never to return. Organised my life. Made a proper list. Worked out what to prioritise. Stopped for a moment. More.
Brain and I are doing our pick-up Christmas again, in my flat. Something for me to build towards.
This is meant to be a solution. I used to be lonely at Christmas. I used to feel it was an imposition to join a family unit that wasn’t mine, and my family unit was mostly dead or self-determined. I would go to friends and it would be lovely but it sometimes felt like I was the charity case. So I decided to try to make a world where there was a great big party and you were invited and you were the one bringing Christmas. My friends have been my extended family for decades.
You weren’t coming to my curated Christmas back then, as now. You weren’t being served last and being watched when you reached for the bottle. The rules of the day were yours not mine, as were the timings. And it was lovely and it was mad and people fucking flew over from America! Tasmania! And then Brian happened and it got bigger and brighter and foodier. Now it might be a huge party and it might just be a few people, but as ever we are gonna try to welcome those who are stuck without options and who don’t want to inconvenience anyone or be the fifth wheel. Brian and I want to welcome you. We usually ask that you bring something that means Christmas for you. But yeah, if you’re stuck or know someone who might be, drop us a line. We’ve made good friends over the years from this. It can be a bit of light in the darkness. And God love Brian… I think I’d have been too tired to do it some years and he is a burning candle.
For it to work I need to move an ocean of stuff from my flat to the world between now and then. I have the will. I have the car. Bring it.
Today it was three loads of Bergman, up three flights of stairs in Dalston. I’m knackered. I’ll be walking like an old man tomorrow. I’m gonna go get horizonal.
I was working outside all afternoon and I arrived in an absolute rainstorm. Somehow it all stopped and sunshine happened for a tiny patch. Then back undercover in time for the storm.
I was driving from home up to Hampstead when the heavens opened. Lightning storms so active I was very happy that I have big tyres on Bergman. I’ve driven through many storms, and many that are worse than the storm tonight. But usually I’m not about to take a bunch of people out onto the heath. I worried tonight when I couldn’t see the road markings.
I got as far as The Freemasons, and ordered myself a trio roast which I then tried to persuade Chris to eat some of from the other side of the plate. Time was ticking on. And somehow the rain eased off.
We gathered all the seekers. The dark was closing in. We broke out into the night. We crossed the heath. It was just a little group, and they stayed together well. We had fun. We made stupid delightful things. I’m trying to persuade Siwan to release ten more tickets a night, as we’ve been sold out and we have never had a crowd we can’t handle. Might as well push the limits until we know… More people get to come, more money for us… Too many people is never fun, sure, but we’ve never come close to that in my opinion. Tonight the loo was flooded at The Old White Bear, and they still sustained themselves as our midpoint. All the performers are … performers. The more the merrier I say.
I worry about finishing at the King William IV, because I love the pub but I currently get people to clap us for the end of the walk directly outside the flats of the joyless humans who tried to shut the pub down to raise the price of their property. They are likely gathering evidence to have another go at making money by shutting down the pub. Pigs. I wanted everyone who came on the tour to sign a petition, but the pub internalised their struggle instead of externalising it. Maybe we are too wacky to be helpful allies. Either way, it’s a good pub, but for the fact that they decided to make a Crêperie ten foot from the original Hampstead Crêperie. It won’t last long I hope. It’s a stupid and aggressive thing to do. I suspect the King Willy just has a short term managerial issue going on somewhere high up. Whoever it is will leave or get sacked before long, one would hope. It’s a very actorish pub with a good kitchen. I’d hate to see it lost.
Also, if you love pubs, go see Choir of Man at The Arts. It’s a great and well priced West End show. I’ve been driving instruments around for it, they were featured on This Morning, and it’s just a beauty of a singsong piece about masculinity and pubs and life and stuff. Why not?
Another full day. Lou and I rose early and up we went to London. There’s a show on at The Garrick Theatre called “My Son’s a Queer (but what can you do?)”. Lou had made some costumes for it and wanted to see it after an Edinburgh Festival that was triumphant enough to have it programmed in the heart of Soho. I’m always happy to see things.
The trend for the “show about me” still rides high, and often as I watch them I understand why. If people get them right, the performer can make everybody watching key into their own personal story. We are all so different, but we all have similar keys.
This was about a young human growing up queer in the town where Lou was born, to a brilliant family that worked out quickly how to support them. With a male name they were getting bullied for being Cinderella. The mum got a job a dinner lady to keep an eye. The whole tale is stitched together with exhaustive home videos taken by the parents. Our performer Robert is only 26. Rob has never not been YouTube generation. Rob has likely never not been fabulous. In many ways, watching them as a straight white (Hispanic?) downwardly mobile upper class middle aged male I might not have expected to have found so many points of contact. I found many.
I found myself swamped in memories of the things Max and I performed as children. Max was always the consistent character, I played everybody else. I was both parts of couples, where the husband would go off for a drink and then talk loudly to the wife offstage I was changing before coming back on in one of my mum’s dresses. We worked hard on the stories. We made them really as another form of playtime, but I quickly started to cleave to the performative life, and occasionally forcing my parent’s friends to watch us was golden.
Sadly for me it was not an easy win to get my parents let me perform. The stage is no profession to the world I grew up in. Many of my childhood friends are literally actual plants that can talk. The morals and behaviours of actors are base and to be shunned, they have been conditioned to believe. And lest they “go off the rails” too, they treat us like we are dangerous.
“Go into any other profession,” my father told me. “Go be a long distance truck driver. You’ll make more money and see more of the world.” He was wrong on the seeing the world thing, which is just as well as that is my chief delight. Money can go twiddle. The single most interesting job I have ever heard of being advertised in my life – the one job I always wish I had at least had an audition for – was the Globe to Globe Hamlet that went to every country in the world. Fucking hell. The only reason I’m glad I didn’t get that meeting and that job is because then my bucket list would be ticked with short ticks. I would love it… I could’ve gone window shopping then returned. Still, I’ve seen loads of world. I will see more.
Regarding the show today though, I fell in love with the performer’s family. So supportive. So full of love. My family had love for me too of course – so much. They would have hated a performance life themselves. They thought that love was to discourage me from that life. Of course it just cemented it. Oops. I put myself through drama school after dad died. Shortly after I finished my three year course, mum was dead from a sustained period of alcoholism.
It was wonderful to see the videos of Rob’s family being brilliant. Rob didn’t have the space to put a stage in the back garden, or build a theatre in the basement. Rob did it in a crowded living room with a supportive mum and dad. And now they’re sharing it with a wide and delighted audience. Good old them. All of them. It takes a tribe. I wonder…
Oh and we joined a protest to get there. Fastest way through London.
Huge wind in from the sea. The distant electronic thumping of beats from one of the local clubs. Low cloud and light pollution but the air is not so cold that I can’t sit here a moment, at the top of the Madeira Lift. It’s a Victorian elevator, closed for COVID but have they reopened it yet? These benches around the side are convenient on sunny days for sitting and boozing. If it was still tonight I might have had some energetic company incoherent company. As is it’s almost too windy and too cold for me to be here. Almost. But not quite.
And as I write three local kids have made it clear that this is where they want to light their spliff. They have a bluetooth speaker and are trying to stand facing into the corner and shielded in order for the fire to take. It’s so windy, and through their eyes I’m the weird beardy guy with his hood up. I’m cold anyway. I’ll go sit in Bergman.
I just got here to Brighton from London post ghost walk. It’s a habit I need to get back into. It’s twenty past eleven and we finished about two hours ago. Lovely audience and I just blitzed up afterwards. Sea air and good company. She’ll be asleep when I get up there, but it’s still worth the effort to go up and sleep warm with her. Lone sleep is a different sleep from the sleep we have in proximity to others. It’s good to have a bit of both. It’s good to know we aren’t alone, even if it’s just being banged into or grunted at at 3 in the morning.
I will barely see Brighton this time. Back up to London tomorrow morning and another walk Saturday evening. Just for now though, at the turning into darkness, I can be outside in the wind here and admire the huge sea without getting so cold I can’t think. Oh God winter is coming. The clocks will steal the light soon. Hex is still lost in the bones of an underfloor, my body is behaving strangely and Christmas Carol is cancelled. This has been a shit week. This is another reason I’m in Brighton. With all the shitshow at home I wanted to connect to her as a beacon in my life. She’s working her fingers to the bone up there making costumes for Christmas shows, but we have allocated tomorrow. I wanted a sleep as well as a day. A bit more time. A bit more connection. Humanity.
And on that note, that’s enough with the writing. I’m gonna head up to the seaside home of om and fluffy cats. Enough wind. Enough Friday night Brighton. Peacetime.
Oh good lord. So I’ll definitely be doing a strange and lovely thing in The Kirkaldy Testing Works on and around the 5th November. More about that anon. Something else to keep me distracted.
And the news… The conservatives are trussed up like a turkey. Are we honestly going to see Boris back? I could believe it…
I went in for a blood test today at Chelsea and Westminster. Just a check-up. Downstairs in the basement there’s a little room with a display screen. Phlebotomy. You take your ticket at the door and you wait in the room. There’s no receptionist – ain’t nobody got time for that. Just lots of people looking at you. I lasted about a minute and a half before working it’d be be about an hour’s wait, and going back up into the sunshine. I had a coffee and a ginger shot and looked in windows. Better that than watching people waiting in that airless basement room. I timed it reasonably well.
“I might pass out,” I tell the nurse. “It’s pretty common after I get injected.” “What have you eaten today?” “Nothing…” “And you wonder why you pass out?” Touché, miss nurse. She was going to get the trainee to do me, but knowing I’m shit with needles she did it herself. I felt a bit wobbly but got back quickly and sat in the airless room until I was happy I wasn’t gonna fall over. Then back upstairs and the sky had opened. A thick curtain of rain. I ran across the road to The Chelsea Crêperie and had a disappointing and expensive crêpe. The staff were great, but the crêpes are better in Hampstead, dahhhhlimg.
The blood test is gonna check for all sorts of things. Lipids and liver function and I think they are looking for scary things. It’s an MOT and in good time as I’ve been worried. I wanted it in February but I wasn’t allowed to have anything but COVID back then so I had to wait. Sometimes peace of mind is worth a huge amount though. I’m in the throes of accepting that it’s time to look at going about things more mindfully and more carefully than I’ve been used to. We are none of us immortal. Time to change outlook.
I’ll be leading a load of people around Hampstead tomorrow on the creepy pub crawl, and I’m going to see if I can get around the whole evening without a drop of alcohol. Double points if nobody notices. I actually cancelled my morning workshop tomorrow though, just as I couldn’t think beyond the blood test and there was stuff I was supposed to learn. Dumb of me. Throwing away money and making myself look wobbly to the day job. But sometimes it’s good to have a rest.
I’ve been back to being a corporate stooge. Smart clothes and a top hat. Show up at The Globe. Do a thing. Make it nice. Have some wine. Go home.
Ffion and I have done similar things many times. The hardest thing is the learn. Once they are learned they become about delivery and nuance, something which is ultimately about the audience when it comes to Shakespeare text, even if it’s a hotchpotch. We know the deal, we are unruffled, we show up and we make things go well. I remember the first few times I did things like this and it felt like it was super important. I suspect I put off clients by asking them about the nuance of delivery… Our job is just to get on with it.
I remember one corporate gig where I had to just man a great big bookshelf door. The other side of the bookshelf door was a desk where people had to be signed in. The door was excellent until it was opened when it became “oh and now we need to sign in.” a WELCOME TO NARNIA? ADMIN.
I had just let twenty people through the door and they were literally just the other side of it signing in when the producer – I can’t remember his name so I’ll call him Powdery Joe Cokeface – he came to the door with like twenty VIPS. I knew if I opened the door then his important delegates would just be queuing through the door, which would then be wide open, exposing the artifice and making everything they had built look shit. I then had the invidious position of extemporising reasons why the door had to remain closed whilst powdery Joe was demanding in between chews that I just opened the fucking door. I ignored my employer knowing that the experience of his guests would be better for it. I defied him, knowing that I knew better in the moment what would work. When I opened the door finally it was perfect timing, the queue had died down. Coke-face and his hokey friends weren’t in a queue for ages cos they’d had me doing whatever about Phileas Fogg. Still, Cokey Joe never stopped making me feel like I had done wrong, when actually I had added value to what would have otherwise been a worldbreaking queue through the open door. That’s coke for you.
Powdery Joe… He never let the delay at the door go, like I had held them up in order to do the talking instead of doing the talking in order to hold them up. Like I had no eye on anything other than the literal task I had. I can’t remember him too well now though, powdery Joe, but I can tell you with certainty that he was a total jerk. He recently appeared mid drunken night. A card carrying official state sponsored Jerk. I think he might even have been the same jerk who supervised me throwing out about four crates of beer post gig in a weight paid for dump because it would be “unprofessional” to do anything else with it – like take it home. I might have conflated two asshole producers in my memory, because a certain white powder homogenises people. I think they might have been one person. Who knows. I have done a lot of events over many years, and now my instinct is good enough to steer me away from the likes of Captain door-twat. Chances are he’s got no septum by now and a ravaged face. I wouldn’t recognise him or care to. I had a lovely time with decent people at The Globe tonight.
I’m sitting in a room in Waterloo that stinks of mouse.
We have a heater on. In front of the heater we have a dead mouse in a bowl. The heater is making the room warmer. It is also making the room smell of mouse. Once you learn to identify the smell of mouse it is unmistakable. It’s not unpleasant. It’s just… mouse. We are both sitting in it. She’s working on her laptop. I’m drawing up a quote for a driving job and writing to you.
Outside the door, Meg the cat is very very curious. She’s trying to get in but she’s not allowed. I let her in a while ago just to see if her nose could help us in our investigations. It wasn’t. She was interested in everything.
Why have I chosen to make a warm room stink of mouse and sit in it? For a change this isn’t performance art. It’s not character research although it might turn out to be. It’s an escaped snake. Hex is out. He’s gone.
Thank God Mel saw him last night. It’s been years. I immediately assumed that we hadn’t closed his cage properly or something. Not so. He popped a vent in the back. After one evening with Mel, he was looking for the edges and pushing the boundaries. This is the effect she has on everything. But he’s gone. Escaped.
He likes to go downwards. He was ground floor. There are floorboards and there’s a hole in the board. If he’s gone down there, he’s maybe kept going. I can’t see snake tracks in the dust but there’s a chance he is three buildings down by now. Totally harmless, of course. Faced with an actual live mouse, I would put my money on the mouse. He’s lifelong domestic and has been gently hugging puppet carrion. He has no venom. But my downstairs neighbour in Chelsea immediately started to believe that he would come up her loo when she was sitting on it even though he never left his tank unsupervised.
Snakes are pretty much the most misrepresented animal that exists. They’ve already got no legs… They were symbols of power in the ancient world. The Ouraeus of the Pharaohs, the infinite Ourobouros, Jormungand, the Caduceus and Hermes etc etc etc. Tiresias watched two snakes fucking and changed gender. Ancient religions held snakes in high regard. But… the Judaic Christian myth has become so extremely familiar and prevalent and in that one it is a snake that represents the baddie in the very first story where the ignorant go in quest of a knowledge that makes the whole of everything possible but destroys their safety. The snake is punished. Poor snake. You will still see stupid Christians on Facebook trying to make out like Caduceus is satanic or somesuch and that’s why vaccines whatever.
Generations of story gives credit to the ophidophobic. Shared fear strengthens it. I’ve spoken before about that urban myth of a snake stretching itself out next to the owner. It’s amazing how many people tell that story, wide eyed, clueless. “It was trying to see if it could get big enough to eat the owner!!” Yeah right. That one was certainly made up by someone who doesn’t know anyone that keeps snakes. You would have to live in a hermetically sealed house, and you’d suffocate. If the snake isn’t in the tank, it goes into a small hole, seeking somewhere dark and warm. It then stays there, or it maybe follows the smell of mices. The biggest risk is only ever to the snake itself as it can get underfoot, into hinges, into the springs of the sofa, and it will.
We tried what we could to get him to reappear. It might be a few days. We just have to hope he hasn’t gone into the sewers somehow and been immediately destroyed by rats. I’ll let you know if he comes back. We think he’s gone through a hole in the floorboards and then under the house. Thankfully the house is having the boards pulled up very very soon…
AlBarclay 