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In Berkeley Square, the only other people are working for “Supper”. The square itself is chained shut and there are no taxis, no buses, no cars, no pedestrians. Wind is blowing in the trees – milder than it has been but if there ever was a nightingale here, it’s not singing now. I’m just getting the staccato consonants of one of the drivers on his phone. I couldn’t guess the language. “Supper”. A new venture in these reduced times. Should I desire an entire Peking Duck with caviar to be sent from Hakkasan to my flat, he would get off the phone and leap on his natty little custom electric scooter. He’d take it to my door for £7.00. Or anything I want from Fortnums or even the Harrods food hall. Money for luxury. And we all need a bit of luxury. But I’m not gonna buy that duck. Not without a table to eat it on and friends to eat it with. Besides, I’ve done two unexpected jobs today and both of them together wouldn’t pay for the thing.

Garden waste. Two bags of it. That’s the advantage of having a car. It was only Chelsea to Wandsworth and they slipped me £20 to take four of them. Lovely. A little job like that and at least the day isn’t negative like most days are in these times. Didn’t have to touch any humans either, whether or not I’d have liked to. Then, as I was driving home, another message came in and I changed my route to Old Street. Now, hours later, having had the congestion charge paid, I’ve stopped in windy Berkeley Square to write this blog.

I exist in some people’s heads as the “let’s get Al to do that” bloke. I like to be able to say yes when it involves being helpful to others and paying me at the same time. I just drove past a billboard slowly about 30 times in a row while a friend tried to film it from the back seat of the Audi. The ad he wanted to film was on a ten second loop with a Sky ad, so I kept on getting honked and shouted at as I held up traffic, slowing down in order to get the timing right for him. I mostly avoided flipping people the bird but it’s almost reflexive when the windows are open and somebody is honking immediately. I must have performed about twelve illegal U-turns. This blog is a work of fiction. I hope there were no cameras. We got the shot, and nobody punched me. This is the Sky ad, because he didn’t want me prematurely blogging the ad he was filming.

Then I drove through London. Sleepy sad broken London. The theatres were dark at 9pm. Nobody outside them. Lights still cycling on some of them. Others just switched off entirely. Truly dark theatres. So sad. Seeing as I’ve never actually auditioned for the West End in twenty years it’s not likely I’d be on those stages if they were lit. But hey, the world is shifting. When it switches back on I’ll be coming on with it. It’s the hope that keeps us alive. The hope. Good food and the hope. I’m going to drive home for the food bit. I want that duck. I’ll make do with whatever’s in the fridge.

“All legal restrictions on social contact could be removed by June.”

This fucking world. “Legal restrictions on social contact.”

A friend rang me up today. “How are you?” people still ask at the beginning of conversations. With social mixing gone, so have the social niceties. It used to be a reflexive question reflexively answered. One of the reasons Minnie and I are close friends is that we synchronised in college on a bad day, and we didn’t answer reflexively: “How are you?” “Well, I feel fucking shit, actually. How are you?” “Yeah, I’m shit too and angry. Let’s get a coffee.” Today my friend and I both opened the conversation saying how shit it all is.

Everybody does it. It’s the new thing. We aren’t walking around with painted on smiles anymore. It’s pretty nice that we can tell everybody we feel awful without confusing people socially. It’s shit that we feel awful though, just as it’s shit that we’d be breaking the law if we hugged each other. The only people that don’t feel awful are the people who now have generations of their family in comfort because of money made out of bent contracts awarded because of this fucker.  But to be one of those people you basically have to know Boris personally.

All of the restrictions and limitations would be easier to bear if the people nominally in the hot seat weren’t such blustering crooked idiots. I’m sick of the thought of them. God save the Queen.

This isn’t about politics. Look at them. Watch Hancock trying to duck questions. Look into Boris’s eyes when he weaves his words. I hate to say it but he and I share a very very similar upbringing. It’s a choice not to evolve from it.

And yet here we all are. Let by idiots, on our island surrounded by water, still hiding in our homes while on the other side of the world another island has a maskless wreathlaying ceremony for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake ten years ago today. New Zealand is the same size as us, and it’s summer and they’re all in the pub. Bastards.

On the plus side, the plumber came round and fixed my boiler on the insurance policy. I’m running a bath and it hasn’t depressurised once, nor has it made that loud banging sound as if a small person was trapped inside it. Brave new world. One less thing to worry about. And this week the spare room is gonna get paint on the walls at last. And it might become my bedroom again. I kept on saying February is often the beginning of spring. It has been a huge disappointment. I shall be writing to my MP to complain about the cold. Likely he just gave control of the weather to one of his friends from school.

Hex had a mouse this evening. It’s incredible to be part of his life – I’ve been his sole carer for a year on March 3rd. His wayward manner and his cold warmth has been some measure of comfort to me. He is just a snake though. He isn’t pretending to be a man of the people. He isn’t making policy. He probably should be.

And that’s that. It was foggy in London. All this and weather too? Get in the bin, February. I’m done with you.

Back in the mists of time I shared a student house in Reading with Tim and Adrian. It was on Elgar Road. We trashed the place and we stayed up all night playing the Braveheart soundtrack and dreaming and planning. Tim directs films now. Adrian writes books. I pretend to be other people. It kind of went in the direction we predicted for all three of us.

Sometimes after Tim went to bed, Adrian and I would change the soundtrack to The Mask and the Mirror by Loreena Mckennit, and we’d break out the Magic cards. “Magic the Gathering”… I came in just too late to be rich from selling the ones I had back then, although I did make a little bit of money out of my dual lands on eBay a few years ago when I was completely brassic. It’s a strategy card game for absolute geeks, and it got me hooked immediately. I like games, I like fantasy stuff, I like colourful and thoughtful ways of wasting time. Tim couldn’t give a fuck so Adrian and I would square off into the small hours. I became obsessed with making Minion of Leshrac work because I opened 4 of them. I rarely managed but when I did it was glorious.

I still play from time to time. It’s very niche, super geeky, but there’s money in it these days. Much of the rest of this blog is going to come across as gobbledegook to the uninitiated.

Yesterday I joined a qualifier, online for the Magic Arena Open Tournament, and somehow I managed to win it. They are showcasing a new set based on Norse mythology with heavy metal influences. I think this is because a large proportion of people who play this game wear unwashed T-shirts with pictures of ladies on them and listen to Viking Metal. It’s trying to appeal to their fan base. It is literally printing money. Magic the Gathering is owned by Wizards of the Coast and it is HUGE now. They bought Dungeons and Dragons for crying out loud!

So yeah I opened six online booster packs of random virtual cards, from which I had to make a forty card deck, with seventeen land cards. Fifteen cards in a pack, so 90 in total and you make a deck with 23 before lands. I decided my best bet would be to make an “Orzhov” deck. There are five colours of magic – Black, Blue, Red, Green, White. A deck will usually have two of them predominantly. The pairs are all given names, and Orzhov is Black and White. Angels and Demons. The star of my deck was Reidane, an angel who can also be an artifact that prevents damage. I played it as an artifact every time and it won games for me, hands down. I wouldn’t have qualified without it I don’t think. The final match was tense and was 100% won by me because I had the “Valkmira, protector’s shield” on the table. How do they come up with these names? They’ve renamed Odin “Halrund”.

So today I have to play more magic. I have just opened a new Sealed Deck – another load of random cards. I don’t think it’s as good, sadly. I’ve gone Rakdos. Black and Red. Demons and Berserkers. My best card is probably a Calamity Bearer. A cheap but angry giant. That and a Dragonskin Berserker, which might win games if unanswered. I’m delaying playing though. The tournament started at 2pm. It’s just gone 4pm now. It ends in 9 hours and if I can win 7 games in a row I’ll make $2000 US dollars. I thought I’d wait a bit as then the obsessive pro players will have finished and the South Korean farmers will have gone to bed. Just two losses will take me out of the running completely, but right now it’s all possible. That younger version of me, cursing as Adrian put my huge demon to work on a plough with another “Swords to Plowshares” – he’d be excited about the possibility of making some dollar out of a silly hobby. Me? I reckon yesterday was a fluke and they’re going to wipe the floor with me. But I figured I’d write now while it’s all possible… And I’m gonna make a cup of tea and go in… …

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Oh dear. First match up, called “Xraphie” and they’re playing Boros and empty their hand almost immediately and run all over me before I can even begin to get established. One more loss and it’s over and no wins… In we go again…

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Second match up and I honestly thought it was the last. Called “tothelimit” and they had made a four colour deck in everything but blue, to shoehorn all their rare cards in. They had so much removal, and I was lucky to close them out with a single dragon from a suicide run by my Dragonskin Berserker. I told you he could win games. 1 / 1.

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Third match up. Called “eschooz”. Mirror match in Rakdos but he has a Draugr Necromancer which serves me my own deck cold despite him having no snow lands. As expected I’m out of it. One win better than nothing, I guess. So much for all the shiny dollars. But I haven’t put the time in to learn the set, nor am I likely to, so one win is plenty. At least I’ve made back some of the entry fee. And had fun doing it.

A year ago today I was in a chapel dressed up like the houses of parliament, listening to Geoffrey Howe resigning and giving a barnstorming speech. Paul Jesson played the part and you could see his years at the coal face in his remarkable day on set. All eyes on him for the whole day of filming. Assured and free in his learning, he gave a performance that was full of work and telegraphed none of it. There was no bullshit, no apology, nothing other than clear professionalism. Every day on set there’s something to admire and even if I first walked onto a set in 2002 I still absolutely love learning from the old hands. More of that please. Damn I love my job.

While I was pretending to be a politician, my phone was going mental all day with actors I’d employed to do ridiculous things for a race show on TV – they were just about to film the first leg of the race in London. They were worrying about things that I couldn’t fix. Some actors need comforting. With Jesson’s approach to his work on display I think I sent some rude text messages to people having little wobbles about timing.

It was fun, last February, filming The Crown on and off and helping organise large scale television shoots full time. They got the TV thing in the can before Covid shut the whole industry down – and The Crown, but they even finished the season. The TV show had to abandon the series after the London leg, so we were lucky to get paid, frankly.

Covid existed in the world at this point but nobody really gave a fuck about it.

My ex army friend Charlie had already posted on Facebook anticipating the emptying of the supermarket by panicking shoppers. He did it more than a month before it happened: “Don’t be a civvie. Buy enough supplies for two months.” I took his advice and filled my cupboards. When I lost my sense of smell and coughed lots early into lockdown, I was glad of his advice as I didn’t have to go anywhere. Although nobody could have anticipated that it would be LOO PAPER that all the panicking shoppers were buying. I still find that astonishing. We really would all be dead in a week if we weren’t carried.

It’s been a long year of very little. I can’t quite believe it. It’s like the time got eaten. Days blip by like dots into Pacman at the moment. And I feel like I’ve got stuck in an old track, because the fucking boiler has packed up again. It’s absurd. D&G charge me £30 a month for insurance, but I don’t think the engineers get properly paid as they’re always bad tempered and rush it when they come in to work. I’ve got one booked for Monday though. It’s the only insurance I pay for and long time readers will know why – Brian and I went a whole winter with just a panel heater and a small kitten for warmth, showering at gyms on trial months and at work. Not again.

Remember passports?

In my early twenties I carried mine around with me until it fell out of my pocket in Liverpool. “Just in case I fancy jumping on the Eurostar,” I said. I was even more gauche back then. But Eurostar was doing great last minute deals for under 25s and cheap travel is too tempting. I ended up in Paris on a shoestring and with no bag a fair few times back then. No chance of that now.

Recently, of course, passports were a touch point in the idiocy wars. “We want blue passports and to be breastfed, like it was in the old days,” they cried as they set fire to their own arms and punched themselves in the face.

I kept the damn passport in a safe place in the flat so as not to lose it. I kept it on my altar, where I keep all the precious things. Problem is, for the advert that I didn’t get, they made me and all 685 other candidates fill in a bunch of forms including passport details just to make things a bit easier for the people doing the casting. I picked it up, but I was thinking about building the studio in my spare room and what to wear etc. I wasn’t thinking about decent passport management. I took the number and then …

I lost it.

It’s in the flat. Mislaid not lost. This is no comfort.

This might be the catalyst I need for a proper committed tidy-up. I’ve been procrastinating, and things have stacked up. I don’t want the cold water injection of my agent phoning up saying “great news, you’re flying to Morocco on Tuesday” when I still can’t put my hand on the damn thing. I’m going to have to find it. But this flat…

In front of me as I write, an incense burner sits precariously on a light box. Inside the light box is a plastic owl, some carmex, two fabric reindeers, some early Beatrix Potter books, a WW2 officers tack set with buckle, an expensive watch, a cheap belt, a sewing kit, two rulers, pliers, napkins, post-its, pencils, an oriental table runner, a chess set, a Commando magazine, a fan and a tigers claw on a gold plated chain. There’s more too. Much more. The passport might have found its way into there. Or into one of many many other similar storage facilities located in every spare inch of space. My bed, my bathroom, the kitchen and a corner of the living room are the only sacred spaces and even then it’s touch and go. The rest of the flat is filled with piles of stuff balanced on other piles of stuff. In one of them, or in a pocket, or under a bed, or ANYWHERE is the passport that I absently put down after filling in form number AJ76391b for a job I won’t do. Grrrrr.

Tonight I’m just gonna write about it. Tomorrow and Sunday I’ll pluck up the courage to go in with both feet, delve deep and see if I come out clutching the fucking thing. I could always reorder it I guess. It expires in 11/11/21, so it’s due a change over anyway. And hey, the new one might be the blue one. I can hold it and gnash my teeth about being unable to go touring in the EU anymore…

It’s just gone midnight. I’ve just sent the WeTransfer to my agent with the audition that came in yesterday. Two short scenes. I managed to get them learnt last night and this morning. It’s blindingly obvious when an actor is searching for the words on camera, and it looks shit. Yes it takes up time, but you’ve got to know your lines for an audition if you can, even though you aren’t being paid for it. It’s why it’s such an advantage if you live in a house made out of money and you sweat gold. It means you can come in fluent while some of your rivals for the part have been working to make a living. Covid is a leveller there. Very few of us have work to distract us so we can all do the basics.

My friend and I took our time. We tried to make sense of eyelines and we had a few shots at each scene. Often with a self-tape, somebody’s in a hurry and you’re forced to send something you can’t 100% stand by. Apart from sound issues, which can’t be fixed without an expensive clip-on Android mic, I’m ok with what I just sent. We didn’t stop until we knew we had a decent one. But not including time spent learning lines and selecting clothes etc, I’ve still spent the best part of a day.

I arrived in Camden and was met by a friend and a familiar if wayward cat. This is work. My friend sat me on a stool in the kitchen and cut my hair with a small pair of blunt scissors and some bulldog clips. She did a great job, miraculously. I was having second thoughts almost immediately, but it’s a good cut. It feels weird – I had a ponytail for the first time since my early twenties. But I’m happy to be cropped again. My ears aren’t so itchy.

We built a studio in her living room and then I did the same thing lots into my mobile phone camera. Then after driving home, the biggest ballache of the lot is always getting the files. I had to WeTransfer them to my laptop in batches and then watch them all to find the ones I wanted to send, rename them and package them up to go to my agent.

It is done, and in time.

Now they’ll hopefully get watched, and hopefully they haven’t already got their heart set on somebody for the part and hopefully they’ll say “I like that guy!” It’ll be nice to spread my wings again. I’m supposed to be reading opposite a dude, but I’m sure they’ll see past that…

I’m home now, in bed, relaxing, gearing up to put my head down. I’ve been synchronising with Lou who sleeps and wakes with the sun so midnight feels late for me rather than the start of partytime like it used to be.

I don’t let myself binge box sets very often these days. Not enough time in the day and the list of unfinished business is seemingly neverending. But today so far I’ve watched 6 episodes back to back of something I’d never normally choose. I can tell myself it’s for work, you see.

Email this morning from my agent, as I was in transit from Brighton back home to pick up the threads of my life here. One of the aspirational casting directors has remembered me from something I did twenty years ago and has called me in. Sometimes it amazes me how that can happen. I’ve got a couple of scenes to learn and put on tape tomorrow, and I’ve got a season to watch if I want full context. I can enjoy it and call it work as I establish how to pitch myself.

I’m gonna need a haircut though. My agent said it’s fine, just tell them it’s lockdown and you couldn’t manage. Maybe… But my guy is traditional. He’s old school. I’ve already shorn myself like a new born lamb. It’s my job to give myself the best shot I can, so I’m gonna find a way to snip the locks tomorrow before filming the scenes and sending them off. For however many years, I’ve waited for a shot at meeting this casting director. A tape is just a tape. But it’ll do, so long as I pitch it right. This could be a nice thing to do as we struggle back up into the light, and I’m enjoying the first season enough to know it’s something I’d be happy to give my head to. Certainly I’ll make myself look neat and learn some words and bother a friend and give up an afternoon for the chance of it. It’s part of my job.

It feels auspicious. They just shot on a beach where I was walking a few weeks ago, and cut to a street behind my flat. I’ve learnt by now not to give my hope too soon, and anybody wishing me good luck will only annoy me, but this is where I write about my day so that’s the thing that happened today. I’m forced by NDA etc to be vague as anything so you won’t hear me name the show. Scripts for these things come watermarked with your name, so if you forward it and it ends up leaked then it all traces back to you and you’ll never work in this town again motherfucker. I’ve got the whole episode I’m meeting for to read before I go to bed. It’s all a bit rushed for me. I could have done with a second sleep on the lines, but clearly they want my tape in before the weekend so they can marvel at how right I am for the part for two days and then call my agent with the good news on Monday.

So tonight, four more episodes and read one, secure lines, sleep. Tomorrow morning select clothing and run lines, groom and pin down friend for help and possible haircut. Tomorrow afternoon to evening record it. Then get it sent and try to utterly forget I ever did anything until the phone rings. Gah. But I said I needed to get on set. Here’s the shot.

Cheddar Gorge town is totally shut, as you’d expect. I imagine the same is true of Niagara across the water and loads of other tourist towns. These places that only really have an economy because they’re near a thing that people go and look at… Many of them are going to be driven into the ground by now. The windows of the hotels are boarded up at the bottom of the gorge, the lights are all out, nobody walks the streets. It’s like a ghost town. We drove through looking at the shutters swinging in the breeze. We were just glad to check out the gorge on our way home. We stood in an empty coach stop listening to the birds fighting. We saw just two people who were working in the area. A construction worker held a sign saying “Go”, and a single shop was open selling coffee and cupcakes. By the side of the road we also saw a single oblivious brown goat. Cheddar Gorge.

I had chosen the scenic route as I had plenty of petrol. Before long we turned a corner and saw Glastonbury Tor on the horizon – unmistakable. We didn’t stop on the high street, but the wells were still running and bereft of crowds so we filled our water bottles with well water. Back in the car and a bit more south and eventually we were in a car park looking at the Cerne Abbas giant. For some reason, he had been my destination all along – I probably diverted about an hour and a half just to get to him on the way home. I don’t really know why, either. I just knew he was kind of in the right direction. I’ve never been to him before. I just felt called … drawn to his vast priapic cock, your honour.

It was cold and wet. We stood admiring him from the car park, with neither of us wanting to trek up the hill to walk on his member.

Nobody really knows who he represents. Some say Hercules, some say he marks the burial of a nephilim. Others say that because there is no record of him before 1694 that he is just some obtuse jibe at Cromwell. I call bullshit on that, not in this area. Far too much ancient stuff buzzing around here. His penis called to me because he’s of an older world than Cromwell. Hercules is familiar, but only because he was written down. Our tales were lost with the genocide of our storytellers and druids and wisdom keepers. Who knows who he is. Gog? He’s a colossal ithyphallic clavigerous petrographic figure. He’s got a big cock and a weapon and he’s made out of stones. Who he is doesn’t matter so much as what he is. If you ever need the energy of a dude with a big cock and a weapon, he’s your man. Clearly part of me felt I needed to connect with that energy right now. I was glad to look at the happy fellow from the car park. I might go lie on that vast dick another time, when the summer has come down and restrictions have lifted. That’s what you’re supposed to do, I think – sprawl on his manhood. That’s what I have been led to understand anyway, m’lud.

The rest of the journey was less loaded with ancient sights. The lovely village of Chettle came and went – gorgeous with a manor house to die for that was recently sold because the incumbent family were burning money trying to fight each other for ownership. That’s in Dorset, and we passed just as the rain was starting. We saw a lot of England through the windows of the car before the rain came. Now I’m safely installed by the sea again in Brighton with my emotional support bubble, AKA Lou. Tomorrow I’ll have to go back home to sink into admin hell while she attempts to make sense of her existence here after her long foray into meditation and her brief stint as my plus one on the driving job.

Blagdon Lake, North of the Mendips, is a little man-made lake near the village of Butcombe, just out of Bristol. Near here a man and his daughter have constructed a tin hut in their garden, plumbed it, and stuck in a wood burner. This can’t be a good time for Airbnb hosts, but tonight they’ve got guests. It’s already dark. I’ve been working. I had two choices and I chose the nicer option – to sleep here.

This morning my lovely assistant and I picked up a box of puppets from a haulage depot in Bognor. “All the boxes were broken so I got the lads to shift everything into this one,” says the big unit I’m picking up from. He hands me a box of broken puppets. They’re off to Bristol. I hope they were broken before they got moved from box to box. I don’t want to get accused of breaking them.

The miles fly by beneath me and Bristol happens almost before my bum gets numb. It’s helpful having a lovely assistant for jobs like this as the journey is peppered with good conversation. I drop the box off and explain what the guy told me. “They’re in for repair,” says perhaps the wife of the man I’m delivering to. So that’s good. No harm done. They’re dropped ready to be made lovely for when the theatres open again. Job done. Time to drive twenty minutes into the Mendips with my lovely assistant and stop in this cabin with her.

It’s basically a garage – or it’s where the garage was. Tin on the outside, wood on the inside, with a burner and a stream running audibly past the windows. It’s a beautiful job, and feels very new. I’ve filled the wood burner and it’s blazing away, roaring and banging as the chimney heats up. I can’t even really remember what it’s like to be cold now. We brought curry to make. There’s a big hot shower.

These well appointed but spare Airbnbs are a reminder for me of how you don’t need a million busts of William Gladstone, sixteen boxes full of music scores, a tank of fish, brass fire implements with no fireplace, three different people’s collections of ceramic ornaments, furniture on all the furniture, a Buddhist Catholic pagan altar by the chimney, all the books about Shakespeare and a snake. I’ll be comfortable here tonight, surrounded by little. A few books, a roaring fire in a wood burner, a trickling stream to sing me to sleep, and my lovely assistant providing company and warmth.

I won’t get the accommodation on expenses, but it’s pretty damn good when you can have a stop like this in the line of work – especially when work is so thin on the ground. I’m glad those puppets needed moving to Bristol, and I’m lucky to have my lovely assistant with me. Now for that shower.

Sometimes I’m Tigger. Sometimes I’m not. Today I wasn’t. Today I’m not.

I still had to stand in a window for hours being enthusiastic. Looking on Instagram I clearly pulled it from somewhere as there’s videos of me bouncing and looking delightfully happy. It’s just as well they weren’t broadcasting sound though or my jumpy happy dancing would’ve been put into sharp contrast by my heartfelt cries of “FUCK YOU I’M COLD!” or “MAKE IT STOP!”

Nevertheless I’m likely one of the only human beings in my sector who were working live this weekend – despite lack of footfall and the desperate chill. Oxford Street is still deserted – usually such a mess of humanity. I avoid it at all costs normally as you get pushed into the buses on the road by angry walkers, by speeding cycles and by idiots trying to force their beliefs on you. Even the pigeons avoid it. This afternoon I strolled amid the empty grey shops failing to find a sandwich that wasn’t Pret à Manger, barely seeing another human soul. It’s a strange privilege to see the city so shut down. I still allow myself to think of it as unusual, rather than the new way. When it comes back it’ll come back different and it’ll come back slowly. It’s unlikely the landlords will be evolved enough to lower rent after they’ve spent so many years crushing out all colour, so things like Topshop will sit empty until they’re tenanted by some other monstrous arsehole and the whole faceless machine will start grinding into gear once again, and chewing us up with it because in the end we are lazy and will sacrifice our everything for convenience.

I ended up back at Pret because I didn’t pack a lunch. There I was, ordering a quick cheese and ham toasty for a fiver. Not much cheese or ham. But the only other options were Macdonald’s and Starbucks. Pret is owned by Macdonald’s. Starbucks is owned by Beelzebub. All of us are owned by Nestle. Or is it Facebook? I guess it’s split. Like the old belief that having your photograph taken splinters your soul – we’ve mostly been portioned out now, spoonfed bit by bit into the wet fat mouths of shiny looking brandspiders in exchange for a quicker lunch break or a sticker on our shoe.

I wandered back and I shoved my nasty hot sandwich into my face under striplights surrounded by plastic as Marie danced alone to cheer people up. If St Peter keeps statistics and you get them at The Pearly Gates when you die, I reckon I must be pushing 300 lifetime Pret Cheese and Ham toasties by now. I’d sooner not find out. But they’re warm, quick, easy to eat, and EVERYWHERE. And they aren’t a Big Mac, even if they’re basically the same. I need to learn to pack my own lunch.

I’m back home now and I think it’s warmer than it was but it hasn’t got through to me yet. I’ll be driving all day tomorrow. For now I’m just lying on my back with the fish bubbling to my right and Lou packing up things she sold on eBay. We had fish and cassoulet and now it’s chamomile and bed and chances are I won’t be such a grumpy sod tomorrow, and my feet will have warmed up.