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I woke up, threw on some clothes, went down to the car, stuck the keys in the ignition and just drove. My mind was empty of purpose. I just let my instincts take me. My instinct took me first to Brompton library, where I had my first drama school audition. Then just down the road and into a parking space that must have been left by providence – the nearest to the entrance to Brompton Cemetery. The first time I went there was in my third year at Guildhall, where I had my headshots taken by Fatima Namdar – in amongst all the mausoleums. There’s strong light – good light. She takes great headshots. They’re gold plated but they’re good. Back in 2002 the cemetery was mostly empty, but for the obligatory guys giving each other angry hand jobs behind the tombstones. (The attraction wasn’t death, it was geography. Earls Court had The Coleherne – prime gay cruising territory – and it’s a long way to the West Heath, so the cemetery was the place to go.) I didn’t go there for cruising, despite what some of you might think. I went for memory. In retrospect, that’s what the day was about.

I’ve been neglecting the thing I’m here to do. Here we all are, frightened of infecting each other, hiding in our homes and waiting to be switched back on again. I’ve been looking after things connected to existence – trying to declutter and decorate, to sort antiques, to connect with another human in an non-habitual manner. But I’ve dropped the most important ball. The acting.

The Crown is out. I need to assemble my recent footage and hit things running. I didn’t even land the fucking advert – (found out today). But the sets are up and running with constant testing and restrictions. Everybody I talk to seems to be about to go on set and do something. I absolutely need to be on one as soon as humanly possible and I need to work out which mountains to move in order to make that happen. Enough with the Del Boy Trotter shit. Dancing bears and driving, selling pictures and heavy lifting – fine. It can keep ticking over. But it’s not what I’m here for.

That’s the result of the walk. At the time I was just thinking “oh, I remember this place,” but it was all connected to remembering this thing which I’ve been servicing for so long. I stopped by The Finborough, a pub theatre where many plays happened in the early days. I buzzed by the site of a church where I did an early Hamlet with Lost, before I trained. I swung over to BAC and The Latchmere. I let myself remember the joy and the passion and the time and the love and the craft over years and years and years that currently culminates in my agent’s assistant telling me they took the pencil off for a reaction shot but well done for getting that far.

It was the perfect day for it. Shocking bright sunlight. Fatima would’ve got some nice photos. I did some grave watching, and found John Snow. He knew quite a lot, John Snow. He’d have been in his element right now – the epidemiologist who worked out Cholera was caused by tainted water, and took off the handle from the tainted pump in Soho. At the time his conclusion was widely resisted – that it was poo in the water. People didn’t want to think about it. They thought it was in the air – they were likely walking around with big thick leather masks on, overheating and having a nice cool glass of deadly water.

A lovely day to go for a walk through the past. It’s all still there somewhere. Those we’ve lost. The things we did. The people we were. It’s just an edge away. And it’s nice to remember it, to remember the hopes and dreams and temper them with the reality and forge forward into the future. Onwards, ever onwards, ships against the tide. Until we move on and the stuff we live inside ends up somewhere like this.

It was about an hour afterwards that I started to feel sad again. When I had the head on it all seemed to make sense. Life was simple. Achievable. I was just Lego Man. Big tall reliable Lego Man. I was wrapped in pink, fashionably dressed, constantly smiling, hitting that damn Spotty Frog with that gimp gummy bear thing.

An hour later I had crossed London in the rain, and once again I was installed in a penthouse full of antiques, dressed like a geography teacher, with just this weird head on with all the hairy bits. The inflatable balloons with “LOVE” written all over them had been replaced by possible tiny pathogens. Lego Man could’ve fought off the blues even though his eyes are in his mouth. Lego Man was still in Bond Street though. My head is smaller, and often it gets full of noise.

I sat in my flat feeling sad.

Thankfully I have good friends, even if it’s hard to raise them these days. I ended up in a long conversation with a dear friend, taking tea and finding a way to paint the smile back on without the Lego Head.

We are still a long long way from home.

The tube is empty. Completely empty. I would’ve walked into work like I did at Christmas, but the rain had other ideas, and so I went underground. And the tube is a ghost town. If I wanted to catch Covid I’d be much better off choosing vegetables. Still, I didn’t put my hand on anything just in case.

You have to be alert, as the drivers close the door as soon as it’s open. They’re used to finishing their rounds in record time. If you’re dreaming you’ll miss your stop. There’s no faffing. I very nearly DID miss it.

Christmas ads vie for your attention with health warnings and the occasional leftover summer festival banner. The few people who are using it are isolated and scattered. Leaving the station at Bond Street at noon it struck me that we are hopefully never going to know another time where London is so peaceful. I might look back on this and miss it. I bet the people who live in Soho are sleeping well for the first time in years. It’s probably them licking all the avocados in the hopes they can sleep well for another six months, the buggers.

I’m in the bath now, with my big teapot, surrounded by candles, trying to cheer myself up so I don’t have chaosdreams again. My dreams are bonkers these days. Psychedelic crazy madness. I dreamt I was a Lego Man, hitting a spotty frog with a gummy bear, and somebody was paying me to do it.

Having been tempted for some time to go back to The Isle of Man, they’ve now got themselves into the news for being mask free. Mel had heard about it all the way over in New Zealand. “I wish you were out here,” she says, and I concur. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and there aren’t people suffocating to death on wards. I try to explain to her how it feels over here and I just can’t. All the precautions. Everything being cancelled or postponed. The different types of anger and grief. People aren’t well in the head in London. They never are. But it’s worse than usual.

Mel goes to the pub quiz every Thursday. She’s directing theatre in the daytime and socialising in the evenings. She’s barely been touched by this thing that has left so many of us with invisible scars. New Zealand tourism is gonna get bumped right up once they open the borders. “Why not visit a place where everybody isn’t suffering from PTSD! New Zealand! Where you can clear your throat and nobody screams!” New Zealand and maybe The Isle of Man – future popular holiday destinations to look at the unbroken humans.

Maybe I should wrangle a ferry ticket and sit in the flat on the island and eat Ocado for three weeks over there safe in the knowledge that things won’t have improved in London in that time frame. Likely there’ll be all sorts of admin involved. If I were to suddenly appear on the island, my neighbors would come round wearing horses heads and carrying torches. They know my business when it isn’t Covid times. I’d end up getting burnt in a giant wicker motorbike for accidentally breaking one of their obscure bylaws. Best keep hibernating in my nice flat.

My flat is beautifully warm and comfortable, up on the third floor above the miasma. I’ve filled it with daffodils.

Every obscure receptacle capable of taking daffodils has them. Those ones are in a pretty little Royal Worcester Pheasant Vase that I pulled from Tennant’s cos I liked it. The grey thing they’re leaning on is the compass from the destroyer HMS Vanguard that my grandad pulled from the wreckers for the same reason. Still tons of random stuff in here…

I haven’t finished decorating the spare bedroom. Chelsea Flower Show is postponed to September but I’m an idiot. I need to get on with it.

Seven fire trucks this evening, all at once outside my window, bundling down onto the sheltered housing where the smoke alarm is rigged up to automatically call them in. I’ve written about it before. It happens every few weeks in the evening when somebody there is cooking a steak and sets the beeper off. I was standing at my window lighting a candle when they showed up, having taken down all my baubles and switched off all my flashing lights.

Immediately the flashing of my Christmas lights was replaced for Candlemas by the maniac blue blink of seven simultaneous fire trucks. They had everything. Big ones, small ones, ladder ones, all packed with volunteers who usually have to do very little and then occasionally have to do everything. This is the same district as Grenfell. Tough people, these. Something like that will happen again some time, as the companies at the heart of it have neither changed their ways nor paid anything but lip service to any requests for change. Lots of noise, no difference.

It’s like “Clap for carers”. It’s all very well to clap in the window, but it won’t fix decades of under-funding. Bless Captain Tom for walking around the garden, but that only further conditions us to think of the NHS as privately funded. And now Captain Tom has died with Covid. Great shame. He picked up the public imagination and walked with it a while. One of the early tales of hope in this mess all the way back in April. How did he even get noticed? Providence and timing, I guess. And his niece probably works for a newspaper. You rather wish that he might have made it out the other end of this shitshow and died quietly in his own bed. It doesn’t seem fair really. But then very little does these days.

Here we all are, at home.

I finished posting pictures, and some of them even got feedback already. That’s a thing that isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I’m pleased. One inch closer to the end of the storage.

Lou is back in Brighton, and I’m trying to be ordered about what to prioritise in the long list of things I still have to do to get my life in some vague order. I don’t mind the chaos, sure, but there’s the notion of some sort of peaceful existence where I’m not living surrounded by noise. It’s years away most likely, and I wouldn’t really like it if I ever got there, but it’s something to strive towards and have fun on the way. It keeps me honest. There are a lot of scripts I want to write now, and the dream of having a space in my home set aside for writing – it is getting more and more persuasive. Better a surface than yet another pile of plates.

One step at a time. Like Captain Tom.

Imbolc is upon us. The triple goddess Brigid shifts to maiden from crone. Her saint’s day is honoured as her rituals are observed. All sorts of beliefs all pointing in the same direction – towards Proserpine returning from the underworld. Towards the tomb being found open. Towards life returning to a cold and bitter earth.

Perhaps this has been a colder winter than many. We saw a pied wagtail at a service station today. We threw it some bread. The ground is bare, the empty branches rattle in the cold wind. Light falls early and comes back late. Tomorrow, before dark, I’ll finally be stripping down the Christmas decorations that I’ve left up to cheer my flat. Baubles and lights and even a little Nativity scene for nobody but me.

They’ll all be bagged and boxed and consigned to the attic for a year, despite their absence making the flat less cheerful. I’ll put candles in the window instead, and trust that the change of the year will come, the light will return, the shoots will shoot up, and we’ll finally start to be able to pretend like we’re normal human beings doing the fun things and the worky things that we always do, and we’ll be able to do them in sunshine.

I packed up my car like Santa’s sleigh today and drove the rounds of eBay buyers between London and Brighton. I dropped off little presents in the porches of people’s houses between my flat and Brighton. A tray in Battersea, a fan in Beckenham… I’m already getting surprised messages from buyers who woke up to presents they’d paid for. I couldn’t do it for everybody – one guy was in Moray, for instance – but a fair amount of people are going to get their item early. The least I could do for them helping me make my tax bill.

When we finally got to Brighton I sent Lou back to her lovely seaside flat and slogged back to London to get my nose into the grindstone once more. There’s the golden acting job just waiting to be dug up. I’m back on the hunt, ready to be ready when the light comes back and shines by my face again. Dig dig dig dig dig dig dig.

I’m ready for the spring. For the world. I need it. This has been a long dark time for so many of us. We’ve lost a great deal. Some of it will never return. Some will come back slowly. But when we can, together, we will build beautiful things again and we will honour the memory of those we’ve lost along the way.

Right now I’m thinking I should just go home to The Isle of Man. I’d have to quarantine for two weeks. But they’ve switched the world back on. I’ve got a place to live there, things to do there… It’s tempting…

Far too much time was spent today wrapping pictures up in bubble wrap. But it was happy time, because some of them sold well. I was particularly surprised by the damaged ones landing well. I think lots of people want to restore art during lockdown. They’ve been vying for doer-uppers.

My favourite watercolour didn’t make the reserve so I’m probably going to put it up on the wall instead. The prints didn’t go either but they’re hard to photograph well because of the glass, and they’re even harder to send easily for the same reason, plus they’re not unique. Nothing to really recommend them. The idea of putting them in the post filled me with enough dread that I chose to put the starting price high enough to take the dealers out of the equation. I guess I’ve saved myself the bother of posting them for bad returns by pricing them up, but I’ve still got them in the flat now. Hmmmmm.

Quiet Sunday. Tous ça change. Morrissey had it in 1988. Every day is like Sunday. Today WAS Sunday, at least, so it’s perfectly justifiable to lounge around. We watched Lucky, a film by John Carroll Lynch. Very glad we did too. The directorial debut of Lynch (a character actor), it was Harry Dean Stanton’s swansong, holding down the lead six months before his death at 91. It has a cameo by David Lynch that had me googling to see if he’s John’s dad or something. But no, they aren’t related. He must’ve just liked it. It’s a good script, done gently and with honour. Dean Stanton shows us all how it’s done. I hope I have that in me at 91. He’s so old, and has nothing to hide. The film is as much a study of the life left in Dean Stanton as it is a contemplation of the characters struggle with mortality. That makes it all the richer. And there’s so much life it makes me sad to think he went so quickly after the release.

I love watching really old actors. I love meeting them. Like the woman whose shopping I was doing. She must be in her eighties. I wish I’d been able to hang out and drink wine with her. I have lots to learn from her I’m sure.

John Mills came on set for Bright Young Things at 95 and did a lovely cameo. I got to talk to him a tiny bit – it was my first movie, while he was in the hundreds. I’ll have to seriously up my game to catch up with him. But I remember his joy, undimmed through near blindness and being trolleyed around in a wheelchair.

Some of us just keep on going. But there’s not much work for ninety year olds. Michael Beint – Tristan’s grandpa – is still on his agent’s books and he’s got to be the same age as Dean Stanton was in 2017. He’s still painting and I bet if the agent rang for the right job he’d be out the door quicker than his hat. Last time I saw him, just before this Covid lark changed it all, he showed me his latest oil painting. He’s still bitten by the need to create things. He’s good at it too. I bet it would’ve fetched a good price if I’d eBayed his one with all of mine.

Enough pictures. This evening I’m nesting, warm from a bath, happy of this chilled out day, safe and warm in my lucky flat. I’m supposed to have paid my tax bill today but I haven’t as it’s huge by my standards. I had a good year before everything fell to pieces. Now I’m just thrilled so many of the pictures sold as that’ll help me effectually pay back my SEISS furlough type thing. But I said enough pictures. Pictures.

I’m helping a friend record a corporate video on Zoom. In front of me right now there are two lovely men in their middle age – on a screen. They’re going into business together and they’re making a video about the services they offer, and the overlap between their skillsets. Believe it or not, I’m onboard as a tech consultant and general person with an eye on performative things. It’s fine. They’re doing great – but it helps me see how much those of us who do this kind of thing for a living take for granted. I can think of dozens of people I know under the age of thirty who did really badly at school but who could deliver this content swiftly and engagingly. Drama is useful, kids.

These guys are dropping the vocal energy constantly, and falling into speech patterns, but it’s difficult to help them hear it in themselves. As a result it’s hard to hear their content through their tics.

Right now my friend is getting them to say “Wahoo” before each line just to raise the energy a little bit, and I’m snatching a downtime to write this.

It’s been an interesting process, helping them. They’re both in their own home made greenscreen studio, so there’s been all sorts of hijinks with lighting. It’s moving towards 4pm now so the balance of natural to artificial light is shifting in their homes, which will probably throw up some issues before long. And we aren’t in the same room as each other, so much of the environment tweaks we make are guesswork. We might have just discovered what was reflecting in one of their pairs of glasses… It’s all such a lot of business… I love it but I also love being in the room with people.

Two years ago I hated self-taping auditions with a bitter passion. Now I’ve adapted, and partly because of the learning experience working through Zoom for The Tempest, I’ve come to enjoy the process. I’m not busy working twelve jobs suddenly, which helps as it’s easy to get angry at the fact you know that you’ll be up against some fucker who has all the time in the world and their own studio while you have to throw it together with an iPad gaffered to a picture on a hook in your kitchen at 2am against a recording of yourself before starting work again at 8. Now I’ve accepted self taping is part of my craft I’ve agreed with myself to apply to mastering it even when pushed for time. I tr with all aspects of my craft. And that involves finding it less stressful and more fun when I’m having to improvise a studio in my home.

These guys are thinking of this shoot as a difficult thing, which I think is making it harder for them. Often, the easier you think something is the better you are at it. But often, ease, like inner peace, can be hard to find.

Anyhow. We’re going for another take.

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“If you did that on a movie set you’d be fired,” says my friend to one of these lovely men – smiling. He just let out a huge yawn to camera while his scene partner was talking, and binned the take in the process. We are almost at the end of it though. The light is going and soon one of them will start inevitably glitching into the greenscreen. I’m gonna stop snatching moments to write and focus on what they’re doing.

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All said it was an interesting day. One of the two guys has had a fascinating history, betrayed in snippets of his life casually stated over the course of the recording. He’s been flying to some of the most dangerous places in the world at short notice to try and stop people dying violently. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s seen things, certainly by my standards. To most people’s standards. To him his stories are commonplace, so he needed to be reminded occasionally how unusual his truth is for most listeners. We are all like that, to a lesser or greater extent. The things we take for granted are frequently the most unusual for others. Everybody’s story is fascinating if you dig past their reluctance to accept that of themselves.

Apart from mine this evening. Not much I can do to make what I’m doing swashbuckling. I’m once more ensconced in my cosy bed with chamomile tea and a sleepy Lou. Mmmm.

I’m gonna turn in. Nice to be helping out on some sort of filming again. I need to get in front of that camera again. Never felt readier, just as the industry is buried in poo. Roll on the changes…

February is coming and the daffodils are starting to poke their heads up. There were still snowdrops in Herefordshire, but things are beginning to angle towards the memory of spring. We need it as well. Winter is helpful, in that it has made us all nest – although it seems everybody is still getting Covid left right and centre somehow. Ugh. Another one I knew just died.

It seems so long ago that this all started. Over a year now. Although this time last year we were mostly oblivious to it over here, even if I was wearing a mask every day. I was part of a team tearing down the set for Wolf of Wall Street, and today’s the anniversary of a little goblin called Josh trying to nick my respirator – he even wrote his name on it. Looking back, perhaps Josh knew how useful that mask was going to be in the first few weeks of the pandemic when nobody had PPE. PPE…

This bastard year has given us so many new words, and I hate all of them. “Social Distancing” is the one I hate the most. I wonder what will come when the wedge is finally removed. Whether we will all ping together again or whether there will be a generation of slightly frayed slightly suspicious people crossing the road to avoid each other and glaring at you for existing long after this madness has ceded to whatever we decide to call normal… Will January 2022 feel as remote from today as January 2020 does? I kind of hope so.

We still managed a walk in Richmond Park. A little under 1000 hectares, it’s an amazing stretch of protected urban parkland – formalised by Charles I before he lost his head, for hunting. They don’t chase them with dogs anymore (barring Fenton – Jesus Christ!) but they still have to control the population. There are signs up about it on the gates. They’ll be closing the park at night next month for a “deer cull”. At night?! How are they killing them? Is it some sort of sanctioned nocturnal hunt with rifles? Does Boris Johnson cover himself in woad and go in personally with a club? Why at night? To prevent photography? But how do they shoot straight in the dark? I guess there’s money in it. Maybe they’ve got all the infra red kit and silencers… Most likely, to be honest. Three or four highly skilled park rangers with enough kit to rival the garage contents of some of those oafs who stormed the capitol. Red dots and heat vision and a button you can push to make the world slow down for a few seconds.

There’s not much about it online apart from the numbers. About 180 males are gonna get nobbled in February. The meat will make pots of money for luxury game vendors. “Have a lovely London deer pie, Mrs Venables. Only £80.” It’s an economy, I guess. And the deer are a captive herd with no predators but us. There are already signs up saying “please don’t take the chestnuts – the deer need food”. They want fat deer for Mrs Venables. But also if there are too many deer they’ll start starving. Plus disease risk. The risk of disease in captive populations often gives rise to somebody calling for a cull…

Well, it’s a glorious park most of the time even if we were there on the eve of a battleground. We saw no deer, which is rare. Likely they were hiding, and can you blame them?

Google maps doesn’t seem to understand local lockdowns, or perhaps it was the most expedient route from Hereford to Somerset. However it happened I ended up on the Severn Bridge, and Lou took a photo. I love the bridge – it’s gargantuan. You used to have to pay to get into Wales but it was free to get out. They’ve scrapped it entirely now, which is a relief. We didn’t get out of the car in Wales and I only mention that she took the snap so people don’t worry I’m the type to drive into the river for Instagram.

She’s beside me as I write. She’s finished making curtains and meditating. About 100 pairs of curtains she made, and likely more than a hundred in hours of silent meditation. God knows how many malas, and now she’s drifting to sleep next to me as I write. I said to her a few weeks ago that I knew it would be a bit like harvesting a lettuce when I picked her up. When you’ve been ascetic for a long time, the world seems overwhelming. I remember being a shocked immediately after Camino, and integrating slowly. And she’s not going back to her place immediately, where all her stuff is. She’s coming to join me and Hex and fishies and clutter.

I bought some brushed cotton sheets so she’d be able to sleep here without coming out in hives, and now I’m snatching a blogtime with a candle burning and chamomile tea.

I combined a delivery with her pickup, and threw in a site visit for good measure. A friend of mine is doing something extraordinary in Hereford and he wanted to share it with me. He emailed me yesterday out of the blue, and he was 20 minutes drive from my pick up location. Coincidence? You might have gleaned that I’m a big believer in that thing we call by so many names – the universe, fate, divine providence, coincidence – what you will, I watch for its work and encourage it when I can. I was able to go for a site visit and dream into his dream for a wee while. I have very little doubt I’ll be writing more about it later on, and spending even more time in Hereford engaging with this incredible thing he’s made possible. My head is literally rushing with it right now and has been all day, but until I’ve collected my thoughts I’m just going to dangle it here for a bit like this and move on.

Eight hours driving and it shot by with thoughts and company. Much of it involved having Lou in the passenger seat and even when brassicated she’s a good talker. I’m glad of her being here as I’ve been quietly going feral on my own. The new sheets likely helped prevent her exploding with discomfort when faced with all the pictures and socks and boxes of hats and half finished mugs of tea and cold blooded animals. The sheets are ASDA sheets by the way and you get good cotton – a whole set for thirty quid. And I’m not getting free sheets for saying that. Dammit.

Now the rain and the road is behind me, both in time and in space – it’s pouring again out there behind my back and I’m hyper-aware of the traffic noise coming in through the window, and the drunk people talking and the sirens, knowing how much of a light sleeper she is. But these sheets feel great compared to the crap I usually sleep wrapped in. So all in all, a good day. And so to bed.

I’m listening to the rain behind me, glad of a warm comfortable haven, even if it is still full of clutter. I’ve been in the bath. Water without and water within. It’s a big part of my wind down, plonking myself in hot water. I get a lot done in the bath. Catching up on reading for one. Books work great in the bath so long as you don’t drop them. Even so it’s less risk than a phone. It’s something of a blessing that mobile phone screens go crazy in steam. I get lots of my reading done in the water.

This evening I’ve been back into The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen – it’s a rich contemplation of many things and very helpful for winding down, even if it makes me desperately want to pull on a pack, hit another trail and walk for a month in a new place. He’s in Nepal. It’s always been on my list. So much world. Such short lives. The list is already longer than the time remaining. Once things switch on I’m gonna have to prioritise.

I’m getting better at staying in the bath though, for now. Time was that I was so active in my head I’d run the bath and only be in it for five minutes before pulling myself out again to “do” the “thing”. I’m getting a little bit better at switching off the constant spinning and allowing myself to just be for a while. That kind of thing is more possible in lockdown.

Tomorrow I’m driving for about eight hours though. I’ll likely be missing the splishy sploshy before long, giving the Audi the runaround. I’m delivering a box of plates to Somerset. On the way over I’m stopping to scout a venue, and then I’m picking up Lou, who has been meditating quietly in the Welsh borders for ages. Once again I’m overloading myself. I should’ve booked an Airbnb in Somerset. I’ll have to leave pretty early in the morning to drive long hours. I know myself well enough that I’ve already put the plates in the car so I don’t arrive in Somerset without them. “I’ve got your plates. Oh. Oh fuck.” Done that sort of thing before. Just so long as the idiot that smashed the window on the Nissan doesn’t fancy some Scott’s of Stow cockerel plates I’ll be fine. And it’s raining too hard for idiots.

I always find the sound of rain comforting when I know I won’t be out in it. It’s warm in here, I just put the heating on for a bit so I have a toasty sleep. Twenty to one and the alarm is set for seven. I’m gonna sink down now into the sound of the water and find those dreams I enjoy so much.

Last night I hugged my dad, in the garden at Eyreton. I hugged him and he hugged me and I remembered in my dream the sensations – the feelings and the smells. It was as if his spirit came and spent some time with me. I woke with him so near, so vivid, so clear after twenty years and more. Even the smell of him, forgotten until just upon waking, conjured back in a dream. Then today, clear memories of mum – circular regrets about what wasn’t and what might have been. These are the people that made me – long gone now, but the sense of them is so close in memory today that it’s as if they are just a flicker away.

I’ve been on my own too long. Haven’t we all?