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Dad collected old weapons. My brother ended up with a few, but he only has so much room and he keeps a neat home, so he jettisoned a load yesterday. As with all antique weirdness they ended up in my car, along with even more random stuff for the fabulous Chelsea Junk Vortex.

It has all found its way up to my flat. From whence, who knows? There’s a fucked old cabinet which I’ll likely try and get out of here ASAP. If anybody is obsessed with Salome it’s an attempt at that story painted on the outside, but my grandmother got somebody to paint over the severed head of John the Baptist as it upset her. Probably early 1900’s. The whole cabinet needs an overhaul and the work is almost certainly not worth the value. Lockdown cabinet restoration friends apply below. I’ll send pictures.

I also now have a long blunderbuss, a short dueling pistol and a cavalry sword. And I’ve got a thing that looks like an axe but isn’t. I don’t know the word for the thing. But I do know the purpose. I don’t even know how I know it. It’s dark. Here it is.

It’s for Howdahs – for the mahout. A howdah? That’s when you put a palanquin on top of an elephant, fill it with people, and take them for a ride. The mahout tries to steer the elephant. It’s not something that happens much these days. They were used a lot during the Carnatic wars. As the Romans found out through Hannibal, an elephant is a hell of a thing to have to fight against.

More recently howdahs have mostly been for showing off in the late 1800’s. The time honoured crap human instinct: “I am weak and so I will assert myself over something bigger than me in order to momentarily forget my weakness.” Dumb Yankees posing by dead animals. Silly Brits sitting in castles on top of annoyed elephants.

Problem is, in war as in peace, elephants can fuck you up. Up in the howdah, if Algernon knocks over the hot teapot at the same time as Millicent takes a shot at a leopard and Charlie screams with shock at a fly, the elephant might suddenly decide it doesn’t want these idiots on its back anymore. You don’t fuck with an angry elephant. It’s huge and tough and very very hard to subdue or take down.

This is where, God forbid, the little decorative axe thing in the photograph comes in handy, so long as the driver (the mahout) doesn’t fall off.

The axe bit isn’t a weapon. It just looks like one. The axe bit, or feather bit etc – that’s decorative and you can use the base as a steering wheel.

It’s the stick itself that’s lethal. Or what’s hidden inside. In case of emergency, unscrew base.

If you look at pictures of howdahs there’s almost always some guy there, sitting on the elephant’s neck, holding a stick. Dad had a few of these goads at Eyreton, all very different. They do look nice.

But if you unscrew them there’s a concealed six inch stiletto hidden in the handle. Why?

Think about where the guy is sitting.

If the elephant goes bananas, the mahout can unscrew the handle of this fake axe and drive the hidden stiletto right into the brain of the elephant, stopping it dead.

It’s dressed up as something else so as not to upset the passengers. “Why are you carrying that?” “It’s my steering stick. It’s a ceremonial axe. I like it.” “How quaint.”

Attractive things are frequently deadly.

 

More and more I start to realise how we can set arbitrary parameters in order to determine whether or not we’re doing well, and then we can spend far too much time lining ourselves and each other up against those parameters and making judgements.

One of my brothers – (technically half brother as different mum) – died far too early of complications with Parkinson’s Disease and MRSA. I just sat with someone as they dismissed his entire life and threw out the possibility of his happiness because it didn’t fit their parameters of a “successful” life – (a word they applied to their own life which I wouldn’t touch). His whole life was dismissed in the remembering, partly because of obscure personal social grudges against his wife, partly because of an unexamined framework about personal happiness.

I popped out with anger for a moment at the thoughtlessness of it. I spoke their thinly veiled subtext back to them as if it was my actual text. “Yeah you’re right. Fuck her she should be dead too etc etc”. I couldn’t quite believe that a social grudge could destroy all contact with somebody who had been so close to our lost brother.

“Was that satire?” they quietly asked Max when I was out of earshot but cursed by good hearing. I’m not sure how he responded. But yes I suppose it was. It was closer to rage. Maybe my rage manifests itself as satire.

I put a lid on my it. But the rage bit is still simmering because it’s tied up with grief which is slow and stealthy. I’ve written about Jamie before, my eldest brother. In many ways he was the best of us. He made some weird choices, but he never lost the twinkle in his eyes.

Nothing can make you as angry as your own family. I love them dearly too, the ones that remain, even when they get my hackles up like that. Christ, when mum was alive she subscribed to The Daily Mail. We would fight bitterly because I had this subversive idea that people I didn’t know still had value. The paper is very clear about how it’s only personal friends and a select few celebrity types who aren’t secretly trying to eat your soul. Mum got swept up in that nonsense.

There’s a certain isolationism and virtue islanding that happens to people who have cultivated a narrow frame of reference. You see it with both ends of the political spectrum. Daily Mail or 8chan or Language Police etc.

Very easy mistake to make, not expanding your frame of reference and flubbling around in your algorithmic ignobubble. Go towards people you don’t understand. It’ll reward you. I got angry with my family member, but then I went back and listened to them without judgement.

I sometimes go too far in my deliberate and active consciousness explosion and I forget to take account of my own history and my family and how it made me.

Family is so important but it’s never easy. Perspective is important too, and it’s even harder than family.

It’s so unhealthy to just make a decision about somebody and then stick with it no matter what. In both directions. Sometimes people should lose your loyalty until they earn it back. Sometimes people should lose your distaste until they earn it back. We are all hacking together a bunch of parameters around making ourselves happy. So long as you don’t put your happiness in one-upmanship then there’s no reason why you need to look with judgement at how others build theirs.

It’s clear that the cock pheasant on the opposite side of the road has just been hit by a car. Clipped but not yet run over. We are slowing down to turn left. As I drive past, I see it move, out of the corner of my eye – an uncomfortable move of the neck. Birds are, of course, fragile. It’s not going to be jumping up and immediately walking off after a hit by a car. Is it still alive though? Or was that movement a death spasm?

I brake a bit harder and pull into the bus stop on the opposite side of the road, as there’s nobody behind me. This is a FAST main road. The bus stop is one of those gravel ones carved out of the embankment. It’s there to protect the bus from the sheer speed of the traffic as it makes its pick-up for the good people of Sussex while the cars yowl past it on the right. Better than creating a long angry hardbrake queue, but in rush hour the drivers must have to bully to get back into the screwyou morning traffic.

No bus right now though. I stop, get out of my car, and open the boot (ahem trunk). On the far side of the road, cars are firing past this big prone bird constantly, narrowly avoiding it where it fell – which is right in the tyre line. It’s only a matter of time before one driver doesn’t do that tiny swerve and then bdunk bdunk – End of pheasant both aesthetically and practically.

Boot (trunk?) swiftly open I dump out the contents of my bag. I grab the swimming trunks (pants?) I didn’t even know I’d packed.

Thought is quick and time is slow. The cars are still haring down the road. Is the bird still moving? I’m not sure. I’m going to it.

What’s my motivation here? Seriously? Good or ill?

If you don’t hit it yourself, you can take home roadkill. Nice fresh pheasant. There’s a lot of that at the forefront of my mind. Is that it? Do I want this bird to be dead so I can hang it up somewhere for a few days and then pluck and roast it, send the feathers to a friend, stock the bones, eat well for a week despite cashflow problems? Or am I trying to save it? Whatever my kindness is doing, my carnivore is noisier right now.

So I walk across the road, and the traffic – so fast – sees me. A car slows enough for me to risk going for it and I rush across to the twitching bird. It looks at me. Our eyes meet. A universe in a moment. I’ve never seen a bird so eloquent. “Help me!” The cars are waiting now, three of them already – not honking though. Aware. Curious perhaps, as this man moves a bird too stunned to move itself.

I’ve helped pigeons out of buildings. I’ve handled a few chickens. I can pick up a bird. Like picking up a crab, there’s a way of doing it. I didn’t know I knew, but I did.

My instincts have pulled me to grabbing a pair of swimming trunks (shorts?). The trunks provide a cushion for my grip and help calm the wings. I reach down whispering those soft and senseless words you whisper to the broken. “Sshh it’s ok, I’ve got you. I’m gonna pick you up. It’s ok. Ssh now.” He remains completely docile, one eye turned up to me. I gently take him up. He lets me lift him with no struggle. Anything is better than the road and these speeding cars inches from his dazed head.

I can feel his fragility in my hands. His hollow bones some of which might be broken. His big breathing. His heartbeat?

“Hey little buddy,” says my mouth. “hE muSt bE dYiNg!” says my carnivore mind. “You took quite a hit there,” says my mouth. “ThEre’s a rOCk thEre, yOu caN KiLL iT!” says my carnivore.

With him cradled gently in these possible hands I find a shady patch of soft grass.

We are a distance from the road. A rabbit startles. “Good,” I think. “A prey animal and it let me get close. It’s unlikely there’s a local fox or it’d be more alert.”

I settle him gently on the grass, my pheasant friend who I might have killed. He twitches a leg. His leg is hurt. One of his stupid big colourful dappled legs is badly hurt. Perhaps the wing on that side too. “Help me!” the one eye on my side begs again. This shit is out of his comprehension. I’m going to do my best.

He’s in shock, this pheasant. What do you do for somebody in shock? Water. He’ll be hyperventilating. It’s hot. He can’t go looking for water in this state.

I go back to the car. Louise is in there. Earlier today we went to the spring at Fulking. We filled a thermos with lovely ancient “not for human consumption” spring water. She gives me the thermos and I fill the cup-lid with spring water. Pheasants can consume this, even if the local council is justifiably terrified about pesticide runoff.

I once again cross this maniac road, and return to my charge, clutching precious water. I leave Lou’s cup in easy reach of his head. “Water,” I say encouragingly, knowing he doesn’t speak English but trying to intuit the pheasant for “I mean you no harm”. He blinks. He’s not taking his eyes off me. “I’ll leave you alone and come back in a bit to check on you, ok? You should be safe here.” It strangely feels like he is taking it all in. He’s having to make sense of human communication for a moment.

I walk back to the car deeply conflicted. I got myself into this situation on an impulse borne almost completely from opportunism and base carnivorous greed. I went mostly to pick up a fresh roadkill. Now I’m the fecking pheasant doctor. “IT is GoNNa DiE frOm sHocK,” says my carnivore, while the rest of me is literally surprised by being close to tears at the eloquence of this being that is in need of help. Lou puts a hand on my arm. It’s welcome.

I cradled his weight. He trusted me completely. He is a wild bird and he was calmer in my hands than a chicken that gets lifted daily. With the cars and the road he must have (at split second) understood that trusting me was his best option, so he suppressed his “DON’T PICK ME UP” instinct. I find myself hoping he’ll be ok now.

We drive on up Chanctonbury. Up the hill we go and we are there for many hours. In the course of which time the carnivore part of me phones a friend to ask if he knows how to butcher a pheasant – just in case, I tell myself. “JUst iN caSe It’s dEaD whEn We retUrn fOr thE flaSK cUp”? Ugly call. My morals are all over the place in this.

Up to the top of the hill we go. We make friends with the beautiful cattle who roam more freely and happily than any cattle I’ve ever seen. They’re happy up at Chanctonbury. Before likely being sold for incredible premiums to the top top restaurants who will buffalo every inch of their usable bodies. But at least they are truly roaming, not in boxes or in burnt out rainforest or metal warrens tormented by thoughtless pricks.

One of the cows becomes gruntily curious. We commune for a moment. The finger is not touching the horn. He’s much bigger than me. But I like the perspective trick. EDIT : (I was playing the old game of pretending indifference to her while leaving a bit of me behind for inspection. Animals are suckers for that game, from cats to cows.)

Then. Then it’s back down the hill. Back to the bus stop. Back for the pleasant pheasant. Hazards on, boot open. Louise ain’t budging. It’s likely dead.

Grim, I return to the patch of soft wet grass, mostly expecting to find a dead bird. I find where it was. There’s no pheasant, but the upright cup is completely empty of water.

There’s a trail of small feathers in the grass. Doctorbutcher becomes doctorbutchertracker.

This poor pheasant is easy to track. He’s blundering and he’s hurt. I go through nettles in my shorts, meet a bramble or two and hear a rustle.

There, in a protected bush, I see my new friend. He’s hopping, but strangely, just for a moment, he’s hopping towards me. But keeping distance.

I speak words he won’t know. “That’s a good safe place. Stay there. I’ll get you more water. You stay there.” He does. I go.

I go back to the car and we improvise a vessel out of a Coconut water tetrapak. I fill it to the brim with spring water and I bring it to where he can find it. I’ll certainly stop and get this litter next time I inevitably go up to the Chanctonbury Ring, before you derail this. This experience is torched into my memory.

He seems energetic already, my new pheasant friend. And capable. He’s back on his good foot. He has had a hell of a shock though so I’m not going to encourage anything but rest. I don’t want him leaving this safe thornbush he’s found on the edge of the woods until he’s slept the shock and adrenaline off.

He’s not doing the thing you might have seen where the bird with a broken wing keeps trying to fly. He is very much working out his new parameters and how to thrive within them. This pheasant is tough. I reckon he might hole out successfully in that bush for a while, even if there are owls. His wing might not even be broken. And he can hop for England. He might be in pain and shock with a fucked leg. But yep he can still move. 

(Maybe one day he’ll be the wise old lame pheasant, disseminating random yet seductive names and theories to make sense of a personal experience completely beyond his ken. Loads of the other pheasants will start making the same noises. He’ll be propagating half understood experiences as fact: “The Waterbringers, they make a noise like “shhh” and they call us “buddy” when they lift us.. They are completely outside our understanding as pheasants but even if they could eat us they choose to save us from the evil Cars who truly hate us!”

I leave him his new big water pot and I return to the car. Before I go I tell him goodbye and I wish him good luck. I hope he grows into that wise old pheasant. I hope the wise old pheasant doesn’t overlook that it was a mixture of his own personal strength and trust that got him back on his feet. If he’d fought me in the road there would have been a time when it stopped being worth my efforts. He definitely wouldn’t have got water. He made his rescue as much as I did.

Part of my recent journey towards myself has been a huge recalibration of my relationship with meat. I know that if that pheasant had been profoundly dead when I took him off the road, he would have ended up in my bag and eventually in my oven. (Sorry).

But through my perhaps badly motivated “help”, he will actually continue to live. And had he been dead when I returned after making friends with the cow, I can’t be certain if I’d have picked him up to eat or just performed a ceremony and then taken him up and buried him in the little Chanctonbury pet cemetery next to Red Rackham.

It seems that sometimes even things bad begun can find their way to good ending. Everything is a balance. The scales tipped in the right direction this time and the pheasant recovered brilliantly. I helped make that possible despite part of my initial intention. Once again I’m finding myself looking at my relationship with meat. I wonder how many of you would have snapped its neck and said “it was dead when I got there.” I’m surprised how close I came.

We are all completely sober. Four women and I. We are sitting above the village of Falking, at Devil’s Dyke. Incense and simple South American music. Cold but companionable and peaceful.

Earlier today I was swimming in the sea, joyfully smashing my legs against sharp rocks. Now it’s the peace of the hillside and occasional exclamations; “Is that the comet?” “No, it’s another plane.”

The dark is properly closing in. The last rays of the sun are getting lost to the curvature of the earth. We need to find the plough in order to see this comet called Neowise. None of us really know what we are looking for though. But it’s fun trying, and a good coda to a different day. This view of the Dyke makes a difference from London from The Heath. “I’m really happy,” says Lou out of nowhere. Suddenly: “WHAT’S THAT UP THERE??”

It’s another plane. I’m going back to cometwatch though.

---

We found it. We also had a shitload of shooting stars. Tons of planes. Some satellites. And some UFOs. All in all a good night’s cometwatch. The comet itself, of course, was basically static. And mildly underwhelming compared to some of the other things.

It’s such a clear night, and not too cold either. Still some low level light pollution which doesn’t help with contrast on the comet. But we can see the milky way here. The constellations are clear. It’s good to be out. But my feet are freezing.

---

I’ve been lying on my back again, on this hill, looking up at the sky, for ages. Last time I did this was in Texas and for nothing like as long but my feet were warmer. When I come to write these portions it destroys my night vision. But fuck me the sky is endless. Good to be reminded of the minuscule proportion of this rock on which we play out all our hopes and dreams and loves and rages. Carl Sagan’s “small blue dot”. There’s me worrying about money which is just a tiny idea in this sea of nonsense invented and named by us to make it easier to communicate and get by, while out there – all this stuff. So much stuff. Endless impossible stuff that we will never ever fully encompass or comprehend. Especially when our feet are cold.

---

Warm feet again. I’m back at Lou’s. Tea and tarot before bed. It’s her birthday so she gets what she wants. I’m glad to have a car again despite the cops. With any luck the joy of easy mobility will offset the inconvenience of considerably less money. Many of the best things come for free. Good company. Nature. The sea. Ok so food and petrol cost money. But the balance of my joy today, particularly with no booze, has been in simple but lovely things that connect me to the world and to my body.

I’ll sleep well tonight. There are definite advantages to this “fuck all is happening in my industry” vibe. Not that I want it to continue.

Today has been man versus technology. Today I’ve been working all day, recording and editing. Today I gave hours of my time for no financial renumeration at all. But I was enjoying most of it. Until I got to the technical part.

It’s not so much the time taken recording stuff. It’s the time in post. This is my issue with self-tapes, and it carries through to all the “do stuff from home” malarkey.

As soon as there’s a bit of money on the table then my whole attitude changes. I’ll put the hours in tinkering. But if I’m working for free I don’t like doing the technical stuff and I lose patience almost immediately, particularly if I start getting chased for unpaid work. That’s a sure fire way to bump yourself down the list.

It’s not what I signed up for, the technical stuff. Nevertheless, something made me agree to do these things. I’m a man of my word. Today was the day I did the bulk of the work. I recorded an unpaid thing. I edited it a bit. I edited some video for another unpaid thing. I fucked with WeTransfer. It’s done. I’m not doing any more unpaid things. Well, apart from a quick easy one for Jack but that’s basically working for myself. But yeah. I’m not a graduate anymore, lockdown or no lockdown. Silly idealistic fucker. Pay me.

Exposure? Meh. A useful practical kit test? 100%. Getting better at the post production shit? Indubitably. Money? *cries* Now I’ve sorted the kit and my editing is stronger, bring me the dollars thankyouplease.

I was on a roll before lockdown, fuck it. It’ll come again. But this is getting long now, and things are mounting up.

My council tax bounced because Kitcat has only paid half her rent so far with no explanation. I’m getting seriously worried about cashflow, particularly with the fine from the coppers. But I haven’t spoken to many entertainment world people like me who’ve been used to living through graft and attention and who aren’t worried at the moment. There are a few clever ones who have found lucrative lockdown hustles. A few who aren’t earning the money they live on in the first place, and are thus always going to be fine. A few who have already banked the big money gig and are sitting pretty.

I have to thank my lucky stars I’ve got the flat – (and kitcat will pay the rent eventually, she just forgets that other people have needs.)

Like a fucking Oscar speech I have to thank Esta Charkham and AFTLS and The Christmas Carol Team and Sylvia and D3 events and Nina Gold’s office and Netflix and Creation and Big Telly for that impossible run of work before and into the lockdown that has meant I’m not quite yet working out which foot to eat first. I thought that that money was gonna help me fly, but almost more importantly it helped me not drown.

If I hadn’t paid my credit card off entirely I wouldn’t have the buffer zone I’m now burning through. It’s frustrating as all hell to go back to where I was, as it felt great clearing the debt. But my instinct at the time was not to cancel the credit card. And evidently that was a good instinct dammit.

I hate getting back into debt but I’ve got no option for the moment. And I’ll be angling for flow again as soon as possible. If I’ve hit it once, it’s there for me to hit it again. It’s what I’ve worked for. What I’ve chanted for. Onwards.

 

It’s very much Saturday night in London. An hour before midnight and I’m walking across Hampstead Heath. Off to see Hex and give him some playtime. I was filming in Archway this afternoon and then to dinner with my scene partner, around that smattering of roads north of Archway station that are named after Shakespearean characters.

The Heath on my walk home is busy with voices, rich with sound. With lockdown still not eased enough for the dogshit dance clubs where people sweat into your mouth, people are bringing their Bluetooth speakers and their shouting out here instead. Earlier there was a tree, dressed with balloons and an improvised table. “Happy birthday,” it announces still to everybody who passes, as the abandoned balloons slowly atrophy and the wind spreads the paper and crap they’ve left hither and yon.

It’s dark now, and with the echoing familiar sounds of party I might feel uncomfortable not being invited were I inclined that way. As it is I am just enjoying the sound of revelry, drinking in the smell of the dry grass where I’m lying, counting my blessings, not particularly inclined to go towards the noise but glad of it. People are spilling off in those deep involved conversations you have when you’re drunk where you spit out the contents of your head to one another without really listening. Safe venting.

Gigi cooked me an astonishing dinner and insisted I invite a friend. Thinking Gigi a vegan I invited Helen. I’ll likely be helping her out with some business before long. She’s running a retreat in the woods in August – I’ll likely be driving some bits up beforehand. I can’t attend as I’m a bloke. But I can be helpful beforehand. And helpful is my albatross.

Turns out Gigi ain’t vegan anymore. She’s still vegetarian though and gets veganism. So I’m glad I made the call on inviting Helen. Even if I noticed I was terrifically socially anxious having been to nothing even approximating to a dinner party for bloody ages. We even shared service implements. WITCHCRAFT.

A mosquito has found me here in my dark grassy hiding place on the Heath. It is catalysing me back to Mel’s flat, only ten minutes from here, containing camomile tea, honey and whisky.

---

I’ve stopped again. It’s too glorious here. I’m looking at the city and getting pissed off at the fact that all these closed offices are still leaving their lights on all night. How many months now? But I’m loving the atmosphere here. All the people who would usually be in a basement with damagingly loud music are scattered through this protected remnant of an ancient wood.

There’s a pocket of people down the hill teaching one another simple vocal harmonies. Nearer to me, Fun Carlos completely dominates a conversation about nothing held between four friends who are as drunk as he is. All around me come the laughs and squawks of happy fun conversation. It’s like the last night of a festival, once the music has stopped, without the ostentatious people in hi-vis putting out fires and shouting “no beats!”

I stop to take a photo. Between me and the lights of London two people sit silent and still, in harmony, looking from this ancient place at what we’ve done in the valley below.

Home for tea now. But as so frequently in this bullshit I’m counting my blessings.

 

 

I can’t make these words stay in my head. It’s weird being back in work mode. I remember this madness. But I can’t make ’em stay, these darn words.

I’ll manage it. I know that. I’ll sort it out. But the old muscle has atrophied a bit while I’ve been chilling out at home along with the rest of the world. It’s shrunk a bit while we were all freaking out about microscopic organisms. This is why you haven’t heard from me the last few days, dear human friends. My communications have been reduced to monosyllables and grunts as I go over and over these slippery thoughts, rebooting myself into work mode. The world is coming back a little bit, drenched in caution…

It’s written verbatim this piece, a transcript of recorded conversations. This means it’s is excellent discipline to learn. It’s how people really actually speak as opposed to the cleverly formed complete thoughts that we’re usually given to utter when the lights go on. If you turned these scripts in in a writing room for fiction you’d lose your seat in that writing room. These thoughts are beautiful and messy, contradictory and honest. A lot of the meaning is in the intention rather than in the text. Written on the page, this stuff occasionally defies logic. Spoken in the mouth the logic becomes more apparent.

But first I have to find it. I have to unpick the thoughts. A reminder of the way we substitute gesture for words. These nuances of communication that are lost in a zoom call. How we abandon a sentence when we know it has served its meaning from observing an almost imperceptible nod on the part of the listener. How we weave through ideas as we speak, dancing on the shifting patterns we observe in our interlocutors, riffing on the unexamined content of our own mad minds.

I’m going to try one last push before I go to bed. Sleep arranges these things. It’s just gone midnight and apart from the worry that the returning heat might keep me awake all night, I’m hoping that one more half hour blitz will burn in enough for me to wake up early and ninja the last of it. We film in the afternoon tomorrow.

I learnt something today which I’ll share in case it stops you getting hot potato all over your hand. You know the way we sometimes do things without knowing why? I used to make a hole in the side of a jacket potato with a fork before putting it in the oven. I stopped as I put it down to an inherited superstition. This evening the thing exploded at my touch. Not completely but enough to have me running but the cold water. You couldn’t write that either. Exploding potato as a plot device? They wouldn’t buy it. The truth is weird. We prefer fiction because there’s justice and logic in fiction, mostly. People talk in complete sentences. Potatoes don’t explode.

I still ate it. With some fish. Yum.

Now I’m going to learn this hard stuff again and then roll around mumbling for hours.

At least I took a brief break for the sunset in Battersea Park.

This morning I drove across London and sat next to somebody in order to rehearse some filming. I’m not sure if that makes me a murderer or not. We’ll do it again on Saturday. We are both very careful about contact and about our bubbles. We didn’t make positive human contact with each other the whole time we worked. We made sure we were remote and uninvolved. It’s horrible. Utterly horrible. But we have to.

We are meant to be filming some excerpts from a book. It’s an interesting book – an observation of conversations overheard by a hitchhiker. Many thoughts within it push towards how we think we’re tolerant and we aren’t. But lovely humanist thoughts made by somebody who took the time to stop for somebody who needed to get somewhere, damaged by bad inherited thinking. I’m happy to embody it. I did a similar thing for Index on Censorship once, and ended up having to read excerpts from a manual about how to effectively torture women prisoners. Dimbleby was compere. Then it was me and an actress friend, telling the guests where best to attach the electrodes to female prisoners based on the handbook.

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this..” – that wasn’t really an option. “This award and this publication is about keeping an eye on Censorship. Your personal comfort is secondary.” Big lesson. Huge lesson.

I was paid to publicly read parts of a torturer’s manual. Sure I hated it. It was nominated twice. They found another section for me to read. It was horrible to read. But I still kind of think I should’ve read the original ‘censored’ one even if it made me feel slightly sick. The whole purpose of the Index on Censorship is to prevent moral standpoints from influencing what can and cannot be published – something that is getting more and more relevant the deeper we go into our bubbles.

I guess this stuff needs to be publishable or otherwise we live in a fettered world. It’s better to have free speech. Even if the “left” desire for free speech is frequently coopted by the “right” : ‘well you want us to be able to say anything, so your mum and her whole family and race are evil and should be exterminated painfully and I’m free to say that or you’re a hypocrite with going on about free speech, get yourself out of that Ha!’

I’m sad about the guy I’m playing. He’s not the sharpest tool. He thinks he’s switched on but he’s kind of missed the point. But I’m happy to embody him, partly because his accent isn’t mine so it can never be spun as a genuine Al vox pop, and partly because it’s just fascinating to take these unheightened voices that you get in verbatim pieces and to put them out and remind us all.

Hum.

Right now I’m playing backgammon with a friend. Nice to go back to analogue. I’ll likely stay over tonight, as I have a toothbrush here. But yes… My head is full of stuff. Not sure what order. Just … stuff.

Today has been something of a write off. There were lots of things I was supposed to be doing and I either rescheduled them or just plain didn’t do them at all. I think it’s partly to do with the state of the world and partly to do with the state of me. It’s just so hard to stay positive at the moment. I didn’t manage. I’m going to run myself a hot bath and then just call it a day. Sometimes you just have to flush one away.

It’s St Swithin’s day. Folklore has it that the old Bishop of Winchester asked to be buried outside where the rain could wet his grave. He was moved inside after a bit and there was a terrible storm. Nowadays it’s popularly held that whatever the weather is like on his day – St Swithin’s Day – it’ll be like that for the next 40 days. There’s little doubt that this is a Christianisation of an older tale for that date. But likely there’s something in it, as there often is with old wives tales. So maybe 40 days of muggy mizzly pizzly greyish ick.

Not that there’s much actual science in folkloric stuff like that. It might turn out lovely and I’d be glad to be wrong. The weather tends to shift around midsummer anyway. But I like to get stuck into the stories.

Not only has the weather been grey and nasty in in this angry frightened world, but there’s even been all sorts of strange and unsettling news coming from the lives and behaviours of friends. Add to that Six the Musical’s drive in tour has been cancelled which is upsetting when it felt like a ray of hope for some sort of pick up in the industry. There are the usual videos of various world leaders being oafish or ignorant, the handcart is rolling ever closer to whatever madness actual Brexit brings. Loads of men are shouting at each other in Battersea Park over the river right now. Oh boy, It still feels pretty weird in muggy London.

One of the people I like to listen to for interesting astrological snippets said today from his point of view that we should say to ourselves this week: “It is extremely important that I not become rigidly fixed, as a broader truth may reveal itself that my hard heart and closed mind misses.” He’s taking about how there’s more to come in terms of all this civil unrest, and I agree with him about the importance of wide angle thinking and balance. There’s a tendency to dig in and entrench augmented by the strange echo chambers that we can so easily find ourselves fed into by our smart devices. Let’s be kinder than we have to be.

I’ve had my bath now. The men are still shouting at each other in the park. I’m going to ring a friend who has had some weird news and listen for a while, but then I’m pretty happy to cross today off the board, go see if my dreams are more bearable, and bounce back on the morrow.

“Fine, I’m just going to masturbate in front of you.” That’s what I get this evening when I say it’s time to write my blog. Thankfully it’s a knowing joke. I now find myself lying on the sofa opposite a very active Tristan who is learning in “Forgotten Weapons” about double stack magazine housings for the MP40 (not adopted). Whatever the fuck that means. (Well, the Wehrmacht decided not to pick them up)? (I think my friend is a geek not a fascist…)

Most of the time these days I get away with making words in all sorts of different circumstances. Being able to eloquently write into my phone via swype integration to Google keyboard – that is pryceless. I write swiftly and eloquently into my phone, and I do it by tracing curves. It’s the perfect balance for somebody like me who loves curls and corners and strangeness but also needs to feel like it all needs to make some sort of sense. Aisleen once saw me writing like this and reacted with surprised interest. It is, to my mind, a revolution in writing. Since Apple destroyed iPad typing with multitouch, this iteration of Google keyboard has been far and away the swiftest and most intuitive writing medium for someone like me who thinks in curves.

There’s some sort of contract I don’t fully understand that I try to maintain with this blog. My main concern is consistency over time. I try not to name people because I’ve learnt. I once agreed to “promote” somebody in exchange for cheaper photographs and I very quickly realised I should’ve held back on that offer because their expectation was far from my truth. Nothing would have been good enough but for “I had my photo taken by the best photographer that has ever existed, please don’t kill me.”

This blog is just a bunch of words thrown together, but the words are mine.

And I enjoy throwing different words together. And at least I can try to pretend to myself I’m honest so long as the market doesn’t get involved. But the longer I go the more I feel I should start to make monetary sense of this daily idiocy, or of the instinct that promotes it. But that is another story and shall be told another time.

I let Tristan out onto a main road today. It was terrifying. He’s a contentious bastard at the best of times – that’s his special skill. But having to let him be the one behind the wheel? It required a certain level of terrified surrender. I’m glad we managed a whole two hours without dying or crashing. Now I’m round him and Tanya’s and I’m winding out. Tomorrow I’m doing a read-through that involves a reasonably good publisher, which should make me care about my material, but… Well but A: I am not writing for gain. B: If gain becomes an issue I’m unlikely to get giddy about it. Which obviates C: Profit. Sorry, C. Sorry, underpant gnomes. Keep gathering underpants. It’ll make sense one day.

…

The one thing I can be glad of is my recent journey out of London, down to the coast. I can think into the sea. There’s clarity in the water, if I look that way.