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Still no news on the snake apart from that he still seems perfectly well bar the lack of appetite. I’m avoiding writing about my work because I’m finding it so annoying. But it’s also so revealing. So helpful. Remarkably elucidating.

“I don’t like the shirt,” is a genuine reason to reject an actor based on headshot. I’m providing literal actual talented actors here to work anonymously like SAs. I could go to an extras agency and get Joe Fuck for marginally cheaper but I bolstered the fee and I stand by that decision, because it means I can throw a bit of work towards skillful and intelligent humans I know who are short of dollar and will raise the whole program by being interesting and confident if needed. The chances are that none of the humans I employ will see more than 0.5 seconds screentime. But I’m not going to put in people I don’t trust no matter what. My reputation stands on the people I recommend. And I live by my reputation.

Usually the first question I ask when I make the call is : “How’s money right now?” I’m trying to push things to people who need things. Be it money or validation. Ideally both. I’m honest about what this is. I’m not making art right now, I’m making money.

I’m aware that you should never ever ever consider doing an acting job if you think you’re better than the job. You’ll look a twat. I did it once, at The Finborough. Nevermore. So I’m making sure my friends are okay with what this is.

But oh my God I had NO IDEA how much your headshot impacts your chances. Actors: It really is as important as your agent tells you it is – maybe more so. In the last week I’ve seen multiple fantastic performers get jettisoned because of headshots that don’t sell anything. I’ve also seen a guy I barely know get pumped up as a legend that can do anything, based on a single decent photo I ripped off the internet that said “judge” to my beleaguered imagination.

My taste and my understanding of these performers is being sidelined utterly in favour of an interpretation of a photo that I’ve frequently just pulled randomly by instinct. Nobody is woefully miscast yet, but the level of control and judgement is such that there’s no real point even talking about skillset and ability here. It’s about face. I’ve stopped bothering listing credits now. Experience is meaningless in this sphere. I’m having to assure the decision makers that just because they have stubble in the photo doesn’t mean they can’t show up clean shaven for the shoot.

I’ve started to look at headshots in a different light myself as a result of this shit. These expensive pictures.

Photographers with a track record of taking actor shots raise and raise their prices to take them because they understand the game and have their finger on the pulse and get flooded as they get on a roll.

Eventually, like mushrooms, they reach the top of the industry and the top of the price tag where they slowly explode and collapse in on themselves until, ten years later and totally out of touch, they wonder what happened and why that whippersnapper took their business.

But yep. Now I really know it. All you need is a headshot that speaks.

“We might need an actor to play Shakespeare,” I am told yesterday. I shrug. “I’ve done that before. If it comes to it I can take that one,” I say honestly and artlessly, knowing that it’d be an utter ballache for me with all my other duties, but that I’ve done it before in a film, I know most of the canon, and he needn’t worry.

The guy laughs indulgently. He’s talking to a fixer, not an actor who knows most of Shakespeare and looks like him. He points at a friend of mine’s photo. “He could do it”. “Yes he could,” I confirm, smiling. And inside I learn. This whole gig – it’s all about money. But it’s simultaneously hard and helpful to learn the shape of how most of the producers I’ve met recently look at actors.

1:Positioning. 2: Calling Card. 3: Noise.

Know someone. Get a good picture or reel. Howl.

For them, all these things beat ability, when it comes to this sort of thing.

I’ve hated it for years. But more and more I smell the inevitability. I’ve never paid for IMDb. Perhaps I should. For £120 a year or somesuch you get my picture when you Google me.

I haven’t written my own Wikipedia. Perhaps I should. People I know have done that shit. They pretend someone else wrote it…

It’s depressing watching the Lego fall together in these brains. We never want to believe that the gatekeepers of storyland are made out of lard and petrol.

The only photo I took was of my late night cook. Yum. There’s my lard and my petrol. I’m off to storydreamland.

I need to work out how to deal with this anorexic snake. I’ve got enough going on without having to cope with a snake that won’t eat. I’m worried for him.

I’ve just picked him up from his temporary snakesitter. Tomorrow he goes back into his glass vivarium on Parliament Hill in Hampstead, darling. Maybe just in time for pub quiz at The Garden Gate. But I tried him on a mouse today.

The mouse comes in a packet. The packet has nutritional values. It contains one entire being, now deceased. But on the packet you are informed that it is 21% protein, 9% crude oil and fats, 67% moisture.

If you were in a packet the packet would say much the same. Humbling. But we are missing 3% of the ingredients. What’s missing?

3% God? 3% the love we have left behind? 3% shit, bones and yesterday’s lunch? 3% splinters and dead skin? 3% leftover technology from the alien abduction? 3% tiger? 3% coward? 3% liar? 3% hero?

It’s quite a high percentage unaccounted for…

You tear open the packet like tearing the top of a pack of Waitrose quinoa. Inside is a very dead mouse. It’s eyes are weird. It’s curled up. It’s sad and it’s strange and it smells of mouse in a way that you always knew mouse smelt even though you never knew you always knew how mouse smells.

NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION the packet reminds us. Useful, in case you stagger in drunk, open the freezer and think it’s some sort of fluffy lollipop. It isn’t appetising. I try to dangle it temptingly by the tail. I give it a voice for a while. “Yummy yummy yummy,” I say, thoughtlessly puppeting the frozen then defrosted remains of a euthanised rodent. I try not to imagine some giant doing the same with my corpse to a disinterested kraken, as is inevitably happening in a parallel universe right now.

Hex doesn’t want the mouse. I had defrosted it overnight. I had warmed it up in running hot water. I had puppeted it valiantly to an almost pointed lack of interest from Hex. So I left it there for him to find and I went to work.

He found it in the day, but he rejected it. I got home and it had moved, head a bit crushed and bloody but clearly rejected for food. Regurgitated. After a day at room temperature I discarded the poor thing.

I’m thinking it might be a bad batch of mice.

I’ve taken him in because his keeper has not been able to get him to eat for almost 3 months and the owner is a friend on a long trip away. My first attempt to feed him has landed in failure, although he’s still in his travel vivarium which might be affecting his mood.

Tomorrow he’ll be home. I’ll go to the pet shop for a fresh dead being. I’ll puppet it for him again in the hopes he strikes it. I might take advice from the pet shop as to how to guarantee he takes it. I’m not letting another whole mouse go to waste and I don’t want this strange predatory reptile to starve. If a snake can have a personality he has one, in terms of predictable behavioural patterns and an unwillingness to bite or constrict anything. He’s the king of the Royal Pythons. He’s a wuss of a snake.

I think – I hope – that he’s sulking because he’s not in his happy home. I have a strong feeling that tomorrow evening he’ll sort himself out and get some yummy mouse down his craw.

But with eating disorders you’ve just got to give time and love and consistency. Even with snakes. He’s just as mobile and curious as ever and his scales are good. He’s clearly just in a weird headspace. We’ve all been there. Hopefully I can help him find the mouse at the end of the tunnel. Silly old scaly idiot.

In the morning I find myself back underneath Hyde Park, walking the miles and miles of subterranean caverns full of beautiful and not so beautiful cars.

and security everywhere. I’m very wary of taking a photograph. “Oh look, it’s a Rolls Royce silver ghost in one of the Dorchester spots. Parked next to a Peugeot.” Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Aston Martins galore, likely driven more frequently by the guy – I’ll call him Steve – who is paid handsomely by the owner to turn it over once or twice a week in his absence. “Steve, I’m flying into Scotland on Tuesday! Be a good chap and bring the rolls will you? I’ve put a couple of grand into your account.” I’d do Steve’s job, but for the old obsession…

I get to the underground Enterprise in Park Lane. Drilon is there. “The company only booked it last night. We haven’t anything the size you need today.” “I’m only picking up one guy. So long as I can tell him I’m getting a bigger one tomorrow we’re fine.” “I’ll definitely have a bigger one tomorrow.”

I drive to Heathrow to pick up a producer. He’s concerned about the car. “I’m going to get a bigger one tomorrow,” I assure him. I drop him off and I get a phone call.

“Are you keeping the car you’ve got? You need a bigger one.” The dashboard IS in headbutt range but I stifle the impulse. “I’m changing it tomorrow. Don’t worry.”

An hour later I get a text telling me I’ll be changing the car tomorrow for a bigger one and giving me Drilon’s name as contact. We know each other too well. Between this company and Cragrats I’ve become a regular face at the morlock Enterprise below Hyde Park. I know them all. I miss Hussein. But Drilon is an A1 dude. And the two of us HAD THIS IN HAND. Ach.

Sometimes when people have a lot to do, they spend a long time doing things that have already been done.

In the afternoon I park the car up in Somerstown. I leave all the doors unlocked and my laptop in the back seat and I go to sightread a new play written by a ten year old in front of about 50 people alongside an actress I’ve never met before.

It’s a beautiful short play. It really is. Loss, love, past, present, future. A bright new day. I’ll be playing an ice bucket. She’ll be playing a venus flytrap. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.

I heard a lot of other wonderful plays and briefly met a large number of delightful old friends and acquaintances and kids. You’ll inevitably hear more of this project anon. But it’s always sold out so it’s not like they’ll need for audience.

I return to my unlocked car –  plum in the middle of one of the roughest estates in London – and clearly nobody wanted my laptop. Maybe they didn’t notice the car because it was so small? Perhaps I should think about asking someone to change it…

I drive it to Peckham to pick up Hex.

Hex is a royal python. He’s acting up. He’s not eating. Mummy’s on a job in New Zealand and he’s been living in an IKEA plastic bucket with a burlesque dancer and instagrammer who definitely definitely didn’t want to relinquish him and looking at the insta I can tell why. Poor thing must be knackered. No wonder he hasn’t been taking his tasty dead mice.

I’ve brought him back to my flat and tomorrow I’m taking him home to his happy glass terrarium in the hopes that he stops sulking and eats his mouse like a good little snake.

So that’s been my Sunday. Always the fucking same, my life.

Business as usual. I’m picking up a car tomorrow morning and then going to Heathrow to grab a passenger from Switzerland. The spectre of total shutdown hangs frightful over London though, and over every city worldwide.

In the face of a particularly virulent airborne disease that appears to be not particularly lethal, how do governments respond? Is their inaction going to be held to account if this thing suddenly mutates and turns out to be 70% fatal or somesuch? Nobody wants the financial hit of missing out on work until everybody has to. So people will still get up and go to work until prevented. And anything to officially prevent movement brings both panic and huge financial trouble. Both things we have had a lot of recently in the UK anyway so I guess so a bit more won’t be so unfamiliar. The Mekon can try to use it to bang another nail of distrust into the tattered remains of our glorious NHS that they’ve been starving and torturing for so long now it’s a miracle of altruism and the Hippocratic oath that the underfunded undervalued staff are still alive to stop us from dying.

I’ll pick up a passenger from Switzerland tomorrow afternoon. I’ll try not to sneeze as I carry him back to Waterloo. Everybody is worried sick suddenly. If my passenger sneezes, I’ll notice. If I sneeze he might email someone. After all the Swiss have all got fallout shelters in their houses.

This is flu season! This is the time every year where we all get a cold, sniffle, cough etc. Winter into summer or summer into winter. But suddenly it’s loaded with prefab panic.

I have a cough. When I have a cough I always cough hugely on purpose. I was taught by a physiotherapist aged 12 that suppressing it to be polite was what had helped fill my lungs with mucus. I’d had undiagnosed pneumonia for a surprisingly long time as a kid. It was exacerbated by my attempts to keep the coughing secret and away from others. I didn’t want to make a fuss and inconvenience people. I ended up with lung collapse, a whole year off school and a much better understanding of my breath capacity and bronchial system than one normally has. And if there’s phlegm to move I fucking move it but I can hold my breath longer than you can and next time we’re in a swimming pool I’ll prove it.

I still haven’t fully learnt that sometimes it’s important to make a fuss and inconvenience people though. Anyhow…

I’m hoping to meet a Lennon tomorrow who will get past the client. It’s frustrating as I had a fantastic guy who doesn’t even need a wig but was deemed too young. It’s a lesson. Casting: it’s often all about positioning and nothing about ability. Not at all levels, but definitely sometimes. These casting decisions are made on appraisal of a photo sent digitally across the Atlantic. I could send a different photo of the same person with an adjusted name and it might pass the second time. Obviously I’ve not done that twice already honest guvnor but I could’ve…

If you want to get the part, find out what photo the producer has on their moodboard and make sure your hair is similar and your clothes are the same colour. Ugh. Night. Achoo.

I’ve been pounding the streets of Waterloo looking for temporary office space. This former police station is fucking terrifying.

The receptionist literally panicked and walked me outside when I asked him a question, and then when I tried to take a photo of the name of the business so I could email enquire about space to rent a thickset and dangerous man appeared literally out of nowhere and forcibly said “no photos”.

It’s likely a torture house. Or organised crime. I’m glad I escaped with my life. SSCL. “Transforming Services in the Public Sector”. All joking aside, I’m sure they’re a completely legitimate business. Please don’t kill me.

Bathtime. I am the walrus.

I’ve started another short term gig, but this one isn’t quite what I was expecting yet. I was hoping it would be “Here’s your car, at x o’clock you’ll need to be at y for z.” But first of all they’re using me for the old finding actors and places gig. I’m back on the hunt for a John Lennon after discovering too late that the client wants a specific era of Lennon. I found a young John, but they want Abbey Road John. Full whiskers all over the place. Big hair. White suit. The full hippy.

There aren’t many people in my business who have that look as it’s not very versatile. You can only get so much work playing “pacifist guy” or “white Jesus”. Your majority of actors have shaved the beard and the hair. The lookalikes, who proudly provide their own suit and wig… even they don’t have the beard. And the numbers they are throwing around are eye-watering, after which they continue with “and transport from Scotland and a double room in London plus a deseeded pomegranate every ten minutes and a personal serenade from Michael Buble.”

Considering they’re just geezers with no specific acting ability, a face, a wig and good positioning on the internet, I think I’d rather blow myself up than give them the work for what they’re asking. I have no guarantee they’ll be any good at it and they are totally taking the piss pricewise. So I’m looking for hairy dark haired actors, 30’s, guys…

I’m also looking for a reasonably large room for three early hours on a Sunday morning near Albert Hall. Hence I’m shouting out to RCM students for a practice room, although the college might not even be open yet at 7. I can’t picture many students getting in to practice at that time…

And I’m also looking for ground floor office space in Waterloo for a temporary art department. They’ll be the guys putting the wig on hairy Lennon, and renting the clothes…

So yeah. Just some stuff. It’s good to be busy. But until I’ve got this fucking Lennon signed off I’m not going to be able to relax. The situation is complicated by the fact that whoever I get has to have a photograph pass over a desk in America where someone who is looking for actual John actual living Lennon will go “Nah. Not him. Next.” John’s dead. The Catcher in the Rye. If he wasn’t dead he’d be old. If he wasn’t old or dead he’d still not do this gig.

I’m doing it though and as with everything I ever do I’m trying to do it well. Help a girl out with your forgotten Lennonresemblance and let’s hope I can get some money to someone who will go “oh, great, I needed that” instead of “SUCKERS, I’m off to Lanzarote to get Coronavirus with my family on a resort beach! Oh.”

Because we’re all going to die. That’s the narrative. It’s got so you can’t sneeze in public without everybody looking sideways at you. Conferences being cancelled in Europe. Milan is semi shut down. Is London going to end up the same? Maybe I don’t need to worry about Lennon cos I’ll have plague.

 

Ahh the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Nestling gently in the hallows of Pall Mall, close to the Athenaum. Here we are, replete with the reassuring clink of billiard balls and the gentle hum of oh so much clever conversation. Here we are where expensive wine is consumed vastly by vast expensive people. Where deals are struck and feels are snuck. The panels on the walls. The roar of the fire. “I’m sorry sir, you’re not on the list ” “Yes, madam, we have a spare tie for your friend to wear.” “Get this hobo out of here he’s an actor, it’s disgusting.”

I’ve never stepped foot in it in my life. I’m just imagining.

My old friend from school has invited me, somewhat cryptically, asking for “a favour”. I like him. He was the alternative but clever one. He had all sorts of unusual ideas and became a good friend when I was at school. We saw eye to eye. He went to Oxford and now he’s a vicar and this is his club.

I’m just about to go in now. I’ll report back.

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Turns out a lot of my guesses were on point. But the fires are gas. Clean air act promoting fracking.

They have menus in there without the price. The “host” knows the cost of everything. The guest knows nothing. I’m experienced enough with menus to go with the set menu rather then get the venison from the à la carte – men of the cloth are not famously well paid. I’m not going to skin him. I still let him get me a half bottle of claret, mind. When in Rome?

He’s not drinking.

“I’ve given up booze for Lent,” he tells me. I look furtive, having not thought about Lent. “I’ve given up class A drugs for Lent,” I attempt, with a winning smile. Worried he won’t get the joke I double down. “And sex. I’ve given up class A drugs and sex. So far it’s going fine!” Jazz hands! … !!!

He’s wearing his dog collar. He’s quite serious.

You have to speak reasonably honestly to that uniform, and you feel bad when you’re glib. It’s like a more extreme version of talking to a policeman. Just a simple rectangle of white, but it’s effective. The older the uniform is the harder it’s wired into our subconscious. I respect the collar. I will be honest to the collar. The collar has no power over me but the collar must be treated well and never ever lied to. What a wonderful place to exist in. But my bad joke doesn’t land.

We talk a while about our respective ministries. I try to put into words how I feel I’m called to heal from within the darkness. “I needed to understand the darkness before I could help people to find light,” I tell him. I talk about my extremely confused but fully functioning catholobuddhist pantheism. We see eye to eye about a surprising amount. It’s just the names.

What did he want? He wants a space. God, don’t we all? It’s the conversation I have the most frequently. A central London location where we can meet once a week and do wonderful things.

I wish I was a property magnate, although I’d be shit at it because all my empty properties would be filled with burlesque dancers or Christians or Buddhist Christian burlesque dancers reading the Bible and tarot… But I would like to find him a space because he bought me dinner and he seems serious. 3 hours from 5pm on a Sunday to effect “the drama of Catholic worship in a contemporary fashion, and more inclusive in terms of gender and sexuality.”

You’ve got an empty theatre on Sunday? How about you get some powerful good vibrations coming into your building? Call me, baby. Call me.

I’ve just been to see Jack and Annabelle playing in Macbeth in Guildford. What a lovely chance. They never did anything false. It was a treat.

I sat with a pile of old friends, by coincidence. It’s lovely to see good friends working well. Annabelle sorted me out with a ticket. She’s Lady Macduff and a witch and many other parts to boot. She told the truth and worked with her usual interesting choices. It’s so hard to watch a show you know backwards forwards and inside out without making comparisons, but I enjoyed myself this evening. When you know what everybody is about to say, it’s about how they say it. Delivery…

I find it virtually impossible to watch cheap telly because of the large obvious lies by actors who are only being monitored for look, and muffing the truth hideously. My television is very large mind you, so I get to see them lying even bigger… Once one of my flatmates put on “Made in Chelsea” and it almost made me apoplectic, watching the human zoo doing an acted staged version of their untrue truth and doing it worse than I thought possible. Through my fingers I said to my friend “I live in Chelsea – this shit reflects on me.” She was aware of my horror although not necessarily aware of the roots of it – how we were being fed staged interactions pretending to be spontaneous. “I know Flumpy!” my friend attempted as if knowing whatever nonsense it called itself makes me watching this lying fraud more palatable…

Anyway, I was writing about Macbeth. About two friends of mine succeeding in being wonderful in a Shakespeare play. Much better than the likes of Flumpy.

Uncut, Macbeth is already one of the shortest plays in the canon. It’s still a long watch, but if you go to watch a Shakespeare play you know you aren’t signing up for a quick fix. You’re more likely to get a short night with Maccers than a lot of the others. And like Dream and Twelfth Night, it’s a beautiful nut of a piece of work. It holds together. It’s made by a master. You can put it on in a school and it’ll carry almost as well as Dream.

This Macbeth is by Guildford Shakespeare Company. Like dear dear old Sprite (RIP) and good old Creation (very much alive) they’re making theatre outside of London, and reaching out into the local community as they do so.

I’ll be hanging out with Will soon, one of the lads from Sprite who I randomly taught back in the day. He’s old enough now to audition for drama school. He’s recalled to a few places, and no surprises there. He wants me to look at his speeches. It’s likely that the entirety of my job will be to help him understand he is ready for a training and build that confidence. I love that I met him back in the day on a regional theatre job. As with India. Even with Brian!

I miss Sprite. Thank God for the small creative companies like them and Creation that help tick over our strange and delightful community. Jack’s Macbeth is, at heart, a small group of talented people in a church on the high street in Guildford, using all their expertise to tell an ancient story as beautifully as they can.

It’s lovely for me to sit back and watch Jack work. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Tempest, Much Ado, Christmas Carol … we are always working alongside one another. It’s nice to sit back and watch him without thinking that I’m about to go on in the next scene.

He’s great. An assured and layered Macbeth. And Annabelle does a huge amount with little, as is her way every time she works. Text over trickery. I heard every word from both. I’m proud to have skillful friends.

The people I’ve been working with, myself included, are all a bit shell-shocked today. We’ve been loosely communicating as there is still fallout to be fixed but two shows were shot in two days, Sunday and Monday, and now we have Tuesday off-ish. I still had a car to return, and I was very upset about having lost my driving glove so I resolved to find it. And I did!

If I’m driving for hours and hours day after day, I like to wear a leather glove on my right hand. I find my hand takes some wear just from constantly holding the steering wheel, and the glove is very helpful. It’s also a little bit of an affectation. Part of the game is to make your passengers comfortable. Little things like a driving glove exist in a confidence place in the imagination. “He has a driving glove. He is evidently serious about driving. I’m in good hands.”

Also the glove used to belong to my uncle. It’s one of the many memories of him that I carry. Perhaps I have too much of the past around me, what with decking myself in so many of Peter’s accessories, living in my mother’s flat, filled with strange esoteric items that have come to me from Dad and other people long lost. But I like making use of old things that would otherwise be abandoned. And they remind me of the ones we’ve lost. So I wasn’t going to let that glove go easily.

My car was supposed to be returned to the rental people in the morning, but I used it first. I took it shopping and then went on a glove hunt and – miraculously – found it in the gutter on one of the streets I’d parked on yesterday evening. Hooray! Now I get another two weeks of Michael Jackson jokes on the next job…

Then I phoned up the rental company and asked them what time they were picking it up: “I’ve been waiting a fair few hours now.” Cheeky, but I should’ve returned it at 8am but they dropped it off to me, as they can for corporate rental, and I made out like I thought they were collecting, which we hadn’t arranged. Thankfully they bit, although I could tell they were being merciful. I drove it in many hours late and they didn’t hit for an extra day. Good on them. Now I’m home and somehow I’ve agreed to go out for a drink tonight. There’s an imminent danger of me falling flat on my face so I figured I’d get the bulk of this down before alcohol and pancakes…

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Drinks at Vault with a mate, and then pancakes and wine with a treasured old friend. If I was tired when I started this blog I’m totally exhausted now. Virtually nothing left, frankly. So I’m in another uber, splurging my ill gotten gains, luxuriating my way home through the cold, to a flat that should be warm, and a good bed with no 6am emergency phone calls tomorrow. Probably.

 

My whole life is an NDA at the moment! The last week has been particularly weird as I’ve had three simultaneous NDA projects running alongside one another. It has been a crazy and fascinating week. I’ve done so much. And out of caution I’ve confined myself to just saying how tired I am or talking about random encounters. I think if I were to break all three NDA’s I’d be liable to the tune of about 26 million dollars. It’s all on the dotted line.

I was waiting for my last pick up of the job this evening when I got a call from Tom, who is staying on my sofa tonight. “Your flatmate says she has corona virus,” he says. “She’s in her bedroom. I don’t know what to do.”

I am forced to go into a painstaking dissection of this whole thing. She doesn’t have Corona virus. She has a sniffle, perhaps. She has massive constant anxiety, for sure. She also has the delusion that she is significant coupled to the conviction that there are only about 10,000  people in the whole world, thus statistically speaking, ALL THE THINGS are likely to happen to her or someone she knows. You know the type. You might be the type. Small world syndrome.

Won’t swim in the sea because sharks. Taxi door to door in *insert notionally dangerous city / suburb of London* so not shot / stabbed. The hitchhiker is definitely a murderer.  All of this, rooted in a bad assessment of odds, until life if stifled into tiny tiny safe safe patterns.

“She was sick – she puked,” says Tom. That’s not a symptom of Corona virus. A hangover, maybe. Anxiety, yes, at this level – and she’s an anxiety ninja. Anxiety yaks are a clear possibility here. But it’s not speaking to me of anything other than that she assumes she’s got the thing because the thing is in all the papers. A&E must be FLOODED with hypochondriacs.

Ok, if she’s been kissing some guy who has since been diagnosed and he’s sent her an anxious message, fine. If she sat next to a guy with “I went to Wuhan and all I got was this stupid T-Shirt”, and he wet sneezed in her face then fine. But in those instances she could legitimately have gone to hospital and said “I should get tested,” and unless she’s mental she would have. Rather than the action she chose: swanning into the living room, announcing it like Blanche dubois would to a somewhat nervous young fellow, yawping sumptuously into the porcelain prayer pot, and retiring to the bedroom therein to languish incommunicado with the blinds down. Light the blue touchpaper…

I’ll have a word with her tomorrow. Through the door. You never know. I’ll ask her why she thinks it’s Corona. If I get “Well there was this guy called Barney and now he’s in quarantine,” then I’m calling the guys in the hazmat suits myself. But if, as I suspect, I get a list of loosely connected symptoms, maybe an “I just know,” and inevitably a whole lot of disconnected noise then I’m going to go about my business as normal and take it with a heavy pinch of salt. Until I get home to a corpse and then die horribly just before all my friends do the same with my name the last thing on their foam speckled lips. “Fkucklinghg Ahhhlll Bhlarclhhlayychchkkkkt t nnnn ….”

Tom was worried sick. His worry was not contagious thankfully. He takes people at their word. I’ve had to go into great detail about the nature of anxiety and self importance in order to step him down from his original suggestion that we both just get a hotel room. It’s neurotic imaginings, or I’m Tom Selleck.

She had cancer just a month or so ago. That turned out to be a false alarm after all the private doctors checked it out.

It’s my bedtime. I’m tired. I just sneezed.

It’s smallpox, guys. I’ll try to keep writing as long as I’m able.

Unconnected photo. Yeah. That’s how I roll.

In a moment of quiet, knowing I won’t have a pick-up for a while, I walk over to meet an actor I’ve booked that I’ve never met before. I’m considering using him for another job in a week or two. He’s pretty obvious, in his costume, surrounded by people in high vis with lights.

I go up and greet him by his name. “I’m Al,” I say and extend my hand. He looks at it. Looks back to me. “Yes?” he asks, face neutral, defensive.

“I thought I’d come over and shake you by the hand.” He looks down at it again. His hand remains deliberately completely still. It’s a studied insult. He looks back to me “Why?” he responds, and is that hostility already in his eyes? My my, I think it is. I look at him for a while, right into those eyes, curious. Eventually: “Because I recruited you for this job and I wanted to get a sense of what you’re like.” And the veil goes over the darkness.

“OH! Hello,” he effuses, and a smileish thing switches on and he’s shaking my hand too late, too late, far far too late, I’ve already seen him now. But I’m smiling, and jolly.

It’s not a long conversation. He apologises at the end of it. With a dismissive gesture I throw away the idea of him needing to apologise. “It’s fine,” I laugh, and it is – for my pride, but not for my faith in him to fill this role.

He won’t be getting a call. The job I’m looking to fill needs someone with charm. I don’t care how cold or tired he was, if that’s his default talking to a stranger behaviour then it doesn’t matter how polite he is once he knows there might be some work at the end of it, it’s not work he’ll be good at. My instinct is my guide and in two words he eloquently talked himself out of a job. I’m sad about it. But somebody else will be glad of the work.

Outside of going and talking to some of the actors I booked, I have just sat in a car. Flashes of activity when the team get back to me and I have to race to another venue, but mostly just waiting. The day came and went, the rain came down, the sun came back. I waited. The sun went down. I waited still, and then some more. Waiting waiting waiting. Now it’s dark and I’m waiting outside the building where I did Christmas Carol. I think I’ll be up early tomorrow and it’s almost nine so I decided to start writing so I can just fall flat on my face when I get home tonight.

I’ve been fortunate to be driving a very pleasant man around town. We get on, although his brain is evidently flooded. I’m hoping we won’t be at it too much longer but I’ve got a feeling it’ll go until midnight. When I get home I’ll likely have an immediate bath, a glass of red wine, draw a line through a potential actor’s name in the notepad on my desk, and fall flat on my face again…