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And then I remember there’s a team around me. I’m having a drink with Cait post rehearsal. She’s the designer. She has made things lovely on a shoestring, and tells me she looks forward to coming to work in the morning because she knows she’s surrounded by good people.

Jack and Tom and Ria are definitely good people to be in a room with. Tom knows this show so intimately now. He made it. I applaud his trust in ringing me in New York 5 years ago and offering Scrooge to me. He made the show with Alex Wright, in a pub in York. It has grown since, in many unexpected ways.

There’s so much of my life embedded in this Scrooge now. Loss and self-protection.  The chance of transformation.  This year will be a different feeling, I hope, and a chance to abandon old patterns and find it fresh, as every year it is.

We have no candles. Fire risk. Humbug.

We have a good blackout. The best we have ever had. Merry Christmas!

I went out after rehearsal and had – probably -too many glasses of wine with the designer. Now I’m home.

I’m about to lose my evenings until January.

I got access to a powerful drill today and put in a bunch of stuff with it.

The show is in traverse for the first time. It’s interesting. It brings a lot. I’m very aware of pending evening loss.

Principally, this evening, you find me writing when I’ve had so much to drink that I’m genuinely unsure of my own ability to make sense.

Met nice person.

Did thing.

Did more thing.

Hello nice person

Look me do acting.

Life life life. Mess. Life.

“They told me I was good at being sentimental at Guildhall!”

Prancing.

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The prancing. Up until now I’ve run into a public space in a Victorian nightgown and exhorted passing strangers to get the prize turkey for Bob and his family. We’ll solve it. We already lost our candles because modern times, but I’m worried about what we use for prancing substitute. Also in past years I’ve been able to snatch a quick pint of water to down as I run out –  I’m parched by then.

I literally can’t keep my eyes open to write more. Call it jetlag. My eyes get heavy arbitrarily, and then I wake up full of beans at 3am.

The only photo I took today. I hadn’t realised how aware she was of me. He was being very noisy. I just thought to take a late night tube photo.

Now I’m going to sleep. Keep prancing. Even if they tell you it’s not practical.

 

I totally failed to post this last night…

Here I am again, gainfully employed because of Brian, thinking about the aftermath of his departure.

This time last year I bought a great big TV, ordered it online on a Black Friday deal for Brian. It was to replace his great big TV that broke. I sat down this evening to watch something on it as I ate my dinner as he hasn’t taken it. There are no remote controls and no HDMI cables. I couldn’t watch anything even if I wanted to. I sat and listened to the circles in my head. They don’t half talk some shit, but sometimes I find I’m listening.

Pickle is gone and Kitkat is never here although she’s taken his room. It’s pretty quiet. It’s just me and the mice and the traffic and the circles. I don’t like it.

There are lots of things Brian replaced when he was here. It was amazing. But looking around I’m lucky he left them. But I miss his company.

He left his bed, but the other option would’ve been to take it apart to get it out and rebuild it at his. That’s a hell of a job. It’s not like it’s a divan. Has anybody ever deconstructed and rebuilt a bed to move? You’d have to be broke and not busy.

But then things like the fridge, the washing machine, the dishwasher. When opportunity knocked he snagged upgrades and replacements for older appliances. The originals are now thrown out.

The cat is gone too. It’s cold, I’m on my own and I hate it. I forgot how much I liked living with the wonderful bastard. I feel like while I was in America I got divorced from the weirdest marriage you could imagine.

I’m sad. I’d normally put the telly on to distract me but now I’m just sitting surprised by tears. I think it’s just the darkness. It gets dark way too early these days.

A while ago a friend of mine told me I was codependent and I reacted strongly against the idea. I spend a lot of time on my own and I’m fine with it.

But yeah sometimes I need company. Even if they’re super busy and just rumble home for a hug and go to bed. Even if it’s just a cat that curls up and sleeps in the empty place.

I’m too busy to sink into this thankfully and I probably shouldn’t write until it’s passed, but why not? We all get variants of this from time to time, particularly at this time of year.

This was my hardest time of year before Carol started, because of the emphasis on family at Christmas plus the dark and cold. But the unconditional love you get from family is so unusual and unique and when it’s gone … it’s gone. Now my friends are my family. Call me if you’re sad.

I’m fine by the way. Lots of work to distract me. Good rehearsals with good friends and then I picked up an accordion in Lewisham. Loads of shows to do in the next week – last two Twelfth Night Monday and Tuesday. There’s an open dress rehearsal for Carol first, this Sunday afternoon. No dinner – bring your own food – and a rare chance to see Jack and I in action before the season kicks off properly. I’d love to have a full house as the human logistics are the most important thing to practice. If you’re free, message me. 12.30 for 1pm right next door to Bond Street tube.

Meanwhile, I’m probably too busy for a chat. But I’m feeling pretty alone despite that…

Another morning in an ex rifle range in Mayfair. They’ve got me a new nightie. It was £100. It’s very modern looking to my eye. I objected but nobody else did so I’m probably just resisting change. Extremely successful political parties have been built to serve that very particular human instinct – the fear of change. I try to catch it in myself when I notice it. For someone that lives so immediately, my first reaction to change is instinctive resistance. Then I very quickly come to terms with it and get on with it. And so I will.

There’s a tester show on Sunday afternoon. This is the first time we’ve played in traverse, so it’s really just in order for us to bed in the shape of Christmas Carol in a long room, and to make sure that people enjoy it and hear it and see it. The kitchen won’t be cooking, which means the first full service will be live for a paying audience, but we’ve got a good team and I have a suspicion it’ll go off well. We should practice the tables coming in and out and the shape of the service as that’s always the logistical nightmare. We’ve had some incredibly weird things that we’ve had to do over the years in this show, to make sure that everybody gets to sit at a table.

It’s odd coming straight back from America and putting on the nightie. It feels both familiar and unfamiliar. Jack and I have a deeply inscribed shorthand now, having spent one month every year for half a decade in each other’s pockets. This version is going to be glorious and strange. Pickle is above my head the whole time, in Brian’s new flat above the shop. I still haven’t seen her since I got back and it makes me sad, especially since the mice have come back. Trigger warning. I’m going to go into detail about my mouse murders.

A cat is a heck of a deterrent for those little critters. Even though I’m on the third floor, they come in when it gets cold as soon as they can’t smell cat. I have killed so many mice over the years. Pickle provided a welcome break. So many little souls. It’s a messy business killing mice… It really is.

I found one in a snap trap once with a broken lower spine and legs but still completely alive and panicking, unable. I ended up getting another trap and snapping it on the head manually.

One afternoon I got home in summer and there were three mice on the kitchen work surface. One of them hid under the microwave, but its tail was sticking out, unaware. I was so angry that the creatures had worked out how to get up there. I somehow I managed to pick up the thing by the tail. They aren’t monitoring their tail. It pissed and tried to bite my fingers as I walked it down three flights of stairs, crossed the road and threw it overarm into the Thames. I stood and watched it drown. I had already decided I’d throw it tide low or tide high. It would’ve lived at low tide. It didn’t at high tide. It tried to swim. It was a low point. I’m not proud of that. I was so angry, and I guess as they say, it’s easier to kill the second time.

Third time a flatmate put out glue. I found a mouse stuck firm. At first I thought I might be able to free it with water, but it did nothing. The thing has already lost its feet. It was tearing itself apart with fear. Killing it was mercy. Glue is evil. I carried it outside thinking I might drown it and there was some building work at the bottom of Tite Street. Great big masonry slabs on the road, and no workers on the weekend.

I put it on the road. It screamed at me with all its malice as I dropped a slab on it. To my shame I left the slab with a crushed mouse glued to the underside just lying there and went home feeling sick. Somebody had a terrible Monday morning when they started work laying pavement.

Fourth time it was dying of poison and I got home drunk. I trapped it in a jar and released it in the garden. “Maybe it’ll recover,” Brian and I told one another. Then Pickle came and no more mice.

I don’t want to have to do this genocide again. I don’t want to have mouseageddon. But I have a feeling it’s coming. 17 in 24 hours is my record, when I got home from As You Like It with Sprite. This isn’t so bad. But it will be if I don’t either borrow the cat or start priming traps.

Small victories. It seems I have beaten the lag. It’s 8pm and it feels like it’s 8pm.

Rehearsal in the morning, and then Jack and I drove to Bishop’s Stortford. I’ve got a pin in the map to a place just outside the village of Ugley where there’s a warehouse. I’ve always felt an affinity with Ugley as I drove by. This was the first time I’ve been a passenger.

It’s on an estate, secure up to the nines, full of absurd items with no fathomable use outside of a particular context. Hundreds of fake jars of tinned meat, weird shaped painted carts on wheels, offcuts of timber with random words sprayed on them, “This machine kills fascists” written on a calculator, wood, wood, wood, scaffold scaffold scaffold, a forklift, a load of truss, boxes full of dead phones and dead laptops and perspex and lights and trophies and pictures of people in the eighties and a suit of armour and a giant fish made of chip. Theatre stuff. Buried in the back, not so far from where Tristan and I left them, were four astronomically heavy boxes of Victorian plates. A little bit more broken than they were when I left them from whoever moved them. But mostly present. Eclectic. In no order at all really other than a vague attempt by Tristan and I in the height of summer when I filled the flat with boxes.

Now the plates are the focus of my attention at last. Now I can work through them. I’m loaning some to Adam, who I’ve never met but who is taking on a production role this year and is doing a version based on the script that Jack and I hacked together in Brighton. But we are taking the most bonkers plates for the London run.

They’ll be anachronistic joyful talking points in the show. I was so thrilled to take custody of them last summer, knowing what they might bring. But it’s been a long and twisty road from boxyflatday to dropping them off in Davies Street this evening knowing that suddenly this weight of ridiculous china is going to go to an artistic purpose and be random joyful and brilliant. Many will get broken or fucked in dishwashers. By the end of this run I reckon we will know which ones are worth keeping and I’ll get some catering boxes so they stop breaking when we move them. Then going forward I’ll have a huge collection of serviceable Victorian decorated plates. It’s the sort of thing you could never find affordably if you were looking for it. In the right context I could rent them for Victorian dining events when Carol isn’t running and turn them into an asset. Right now they’re just fun.

The nature of this job with your relation to stuff… People in theatre are more likely to be excited to find a hideously burnt rocking horse than to find one that’s perfect. We love the weird stuff and we provide a context where it can be right.

2 years ago Scrooge had a creepy taxidermised partridge in a glass fronted box. He loved it disproportionately, called it his “creepy bird,” and checked on it immediately when he awoke from his dream. 1 year ago, I watched Max as Gatsby in the syndicate ask a large group of people to take a moment to admire his “creepy bird”. It was the same bird, now a part of Gatsby, with the same exact name. Because it was horrible. That’s the joy. Find weird things, and give them meaning. Hell, that’s why I’m still in theatre. It gives me meaning. And helps pay the bills…

What the hell is this jet lag? Peter, one of the professors out in Notre Dame, had a theory about jet lag. He thinks that the exciting place is the place where you don’t get it, and the boring place is where you do. I’m not sure. I think it’s to do with going East. Whatever it is it’s a plague on me right now. At about 9pm I can’t keep my eyes open anymore and I have to go to sleep no matter what. At about 4am I bounce up like a kid on Christmas morning and start running around my flat talking to myself.

It’s coming up to 9pm and I’m waiting for some friends so we can eat half price food at Maze Grill on the 50% Monday deal I get for living nearby. That’ll help me stay awake, I hope…

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It did. It’s eleven, and I’ve eaten good steak. Now my eyes are droopy again, but I’m going to arbitrarily force myself to stay up until about 1 so there is no chance at all of the 4am BING.

FIRST DAY OF CAROL. Rehearsal. Tom Bellerby, myself and Jack Whitam. In a room. Thinking about sightlines. Working out why I might keep turning around on the spot. It is in a former shooting range. It’s the definition of long thin space. Vocally it means we are off the hook. We can do it with diction. Sound carries beautifully. It’s why they have to wear ear guards when they shoot. There’s room for subtlety, heaven forbid. And it’s not going to be freezing cold. In fact I have a suspicion that it’ll be hot. Lots of happy warm people enjoying a story of redemption while eating tasty food as part of the story and having an all round delightful time. It’s going to be glorious.

Tomorrow I’m going to go and get the Le Foe plates – a huge and varied collection of Victorian plates collected by the parents of a friend of mine and about to be pressed into action in a serious way as eclectic dining for large numbers of people in Mayfair this season. I rescued them from the tip and have been looking forward to what they are going to bring to proceedings. They aren’t universal. They might be pretty bloody weird. But there’ll be joy. There’s always joy.

Coming back into that room today helps me remember why I keep on coming back into that room, outside of the basic “because money” reason. I love this show. It is literally at the foundation of some of the deepest friendships I have in my rather odd life. I walked into the building in Mayfair and immediately recognised one of the building managers – Will used to intern at Sprite with us in Yorkshire. Now he’s here. I took him down to show him that Tom and Jack were there too. All four of us were in a field in Yorkshire ten years ago when he was but a teenager, making beautiful things for the sheer hell of it (and money). Some things never change…

I’m debating as to whether or not to risk my original Gladstone and Distraeli salt and pepper shakers. Back in the day when there were statesmen, not nasty self serving egotists.

They’ll probably get nicked if I do. But it might be worth it.

I’ve been wondering what it would be like, coming home from the US to wintertime and to a new home order. Turns out it’s fine if a little quiet for a Sunday. I’ve been taking stock.

I could argue that I’ve come back from America with no more money than I had when I left the country. That’s what it looks like, but it’s not taking into accou n the amount of debt I paid off. So long as I’m careful with money, I will finish the run of Christmas Carol with a positive balance. A year older, but not an hour richer.

A week today we have a dress run for Carol, and then the madness starts again.

Year 1: Manchester, in a converted Hooters restaurant, with a fake hessian ceiling and chandeliers. Brian hiding behind a pile of cardboard boxes operating the show with both hands, both feet and his nose. Jon Holt-Roberts as Marley with his magic fingers and Christmas Dragons. Then briefly to a tiny room with gorgeous light in York Guildhall.

Year 2 and 3 with India and Jack above The Arts, running out in my nightgown to Leicester Place, worried I was going to get pepper sprayed. The arrival of Belle in the 2 way mirror.

Year 4 in Liverpool Street, freezing our ass off with Anna-Fleur, too many audience all of who had come to eat the tellyfood, and power cuts. I was really sick for pretty much the whole run, as was Anna-Fleur. I’ve never had such a hard run of anything.

Year 5 in Sheffield in a space that Sam, Jack and I had built specially for the show, and where we could have huge fun even if running into the parking lot was usually a little bit of a damp squib. Then to York in a huge vaulted room with a mummified cat in a secret cupboard.

Now Year 6. It would be nice to have a consistent space to invite people back to, as I’ve run into audience members in the street in like June, who recognise me as Scrooge and always ask where it’s on as they want to come back. “Oh it’ll be back. You’ll have to be cunning to find it!”

Off we go again, in London again – Mayfair – with all we’ve learnt and all we haven’t learnt yet. This time it’s in a shooting range. I haven’t seen it, but it’s really really long and really really narrow. I’ll have to be a clever boy. There’s no window, so no run out into the real world at the end, which is a shame but also a challenge to find a good replacement.

Some of the stuff we had in store has been assimilated into various other immersive shows, and I’m not even sure if we’ve kept the top hats. Jack and I could do a decent shift of the show with no props and costume whatsover though. We will make something wonderful because we know it so intimately that we can’t help but do so. I’m going to get an early bed. Eyes are still droopy. Come see Christmas Carol! I haven’t got a ticket link. But I will and it’ll be lovely. It’s not cheap. But you get a meal.

Humbug.

Flavia met me at the airport, or at least that was her intention. I landed early and shot through immigration. My bag was first out (as last in). I got to the platform before she even got to Osterley. We converged at Hounslow in the sleet. Her professed duty was to keep me awake from then on in. She did it admirably but now I’m on my own again. I’m in bed with a hot water bottle. It’s cold and my body thinks it’s ten o’clock this morning and is properly confounded about the fact it’s dark in the world and there has been virtually no sleep. I don’t have much left in the tank. My eyes are drooping.

It’s good to be home even though home is weird. Things not there, most notably one large human and one tiny cat. I’m going to arrive first and then calibrate. Flavia really helped me arrive.

Lying in my bed I’ve got tinnitus again for the first time since I left the flat which implies to me that the “tinnitus” I thought I had in London is actually something making a horrible noise near my head. I’ll investigate tomorrow though. I’m too tired for digging through electrics tonight. I can barely throw words down here. My eyes are heavy. But there’s an advantage to three months in quiet rooms. I can come home and know that either I’m exhausted and it’s a coincidence or I need to get a good electrician and I’ll sleep a lot better for it.

I like my home. I feel at home here too. But it looks like the nomadic existence might be carrying on for a few more months pretty soon, so getting the electrics sorted etc now there’s no Brian could allow for a time of dropping the place on Airbnb while I sod off around the world having fun with other people’s words.

Flight home was fine. I watched The Last Jedi and enjoyed it much more the second time. I think Star Wars films, for the kids that grew up with the mythos of the first three, are always going to be an exercise in recalibration. It was odd thinking that both Chewbacca and Leia have actually died in real life since the movie was shot. Two lovely humans vanishing just after the wheel had spun them to the top again. I suspect the last film is gonna be a bastard to edit using what they have in the can and cgi. I imagine I’ll catch it in the cinema.

Anyway. Bla bla bla. It’s half six. I literally have no waking left within me. I’ll try to write something better tomorrow, life permitting.

 

Two and a half hours before my international flight from San Francisco, I was placidly ambling down Crissy Field. “Oh look, a seal,” I thought to myself happily. Check in officially closes two hours before an international flight and I still have my bag in the trunk of a car that’s a 40 minute drive from the airport. I’m not even pretending to be in a hurry.

I drive through the streets of San Francisco to the airport, still in no rush. La la la. Driving in San Francisco is an ugly thing. Narrow streets thronged with people with no depth perception and a desire to always be in front, and who behave as if they’ve just discovered their car has a horn. I’m still pretty calm though as I poodle to the airport. I’m listening to The Magnus Archives, a podcast that has taken my full attention for a while now. Spooooky.

It’s not until the woman at Avis says “You’ve got an international flight? You’re supposed to check in 2 hours beforehand,” that I start to worry. I look at my bag. Uh oh. Cue adrenaline.

The car rental is as far from International Terminal G as humanly possible on the Skytrain and suddenly I’m overheating as my heart rate goes through the roof. People hold the doors for their friends at every stop we crawl through. All the while I’m working out which of my possessions I’d be happy to throw away if I had to strip down to just hand luggage.

I’ll lose the hot sauce. The clasp knife. They’re both gifts. Sad. They can’t pass security. I’ll have to chuck most of my clothes but they were largely chosen with an eye to disposability. Of course, they might let me put the bag on but I’m running worst case scenario so I’m ready if I meet that human that should by rights be returned for a better version. I’ve met them too many times in the past.

Like the woman at Thai Airlines Heathrow twelve years ago who insisted I wake up the entire Bangkok production team for a film I was shooting in order to verify the credit card that my business class flight was booked on. “It didn’t happen with any of the other actors,” said the extremely put out production manager when I eventually arrived on set, persona non grata before I’d even started. I had been excited to fly business. Happy when I arrived at the desk. She just … decided she didn’t like me, perhaps thought I looked too scruffy to fly business class, and gave me the old “fraud check, it’s out of my hands” routine. I can still see her thin lips, pulled taut, and her little piggy eyes with just the hint of cruel satisfaction. She made a lovely job hard for me, just by exerting the tiny power she had. I still hate her for it, and still wish her ill when I think of her. Which is rarely.

I’m thinking of her when I get to the desk though. I’m assessing the faces, trying to choose someone who looks kind. I find the right person, and my bag goes on. “Just as well you checked in online,” she reprimands me. But it’s done. I’m coming home. Ten hours in the air. I’m not tired or drunk so sleep might be an issue. But there’s my bag, on the conveyor. Phew.

 

I reckon I haven’t seen Leslie for a decade. We met in Edinburgh during the festival something like fifteen years ago, maybe more. We went to watch Daniel Kitson and he did a routine about someone in a train. Then we drank all the wine. Come to think of it I think we met before then, at The Elk in the Woods in Islington back before it was bullshit. I had my birthday party there. Either way…

We hung out in London for a good while thereafter, whilst our lifestyles and needs converged. She used to play water polo as a striker, and she worked as a lawyer but loved theatre. I was in a deep depression, trying to work out how to reconcile my expectations of life with my reality as everything crashed around me. She was living with a friend of mine by sheer coincidence. Circles bleed into circles. The world is very small. With the miracle of Facebook we are still in touch. But I haven’t messaged her for five years. Last time we messaged I was doing a job, writing the official blog. Late one night she sent me “I don’t hear your voice in these blogs you’re writing.” I told her it was because my voice is a bit too anarchic for the company I was writing for. We exchanged pleasantries and went back to our respective lives. 8 hours is the most antisocial time gap, London to San Fran. It’s hard to keep anything together. I tried to maintain a nascent relationship with that gap once and it fell apart utterly in less than three months.

The night before last, up in the big trees, I sent her a message just out of curiosity. I told her I’m flying out of San Francisco tomorrow, asked balls-out if I could stay tonight. She’s in Oakland. She has two kids now, and lives there with Fishtea. Her oldest, Samuel, is 4. I know it’s full on and said I could stay in an Airbnb near them and just hang out, but they were welcoming. They put me in Samuel’s room.

I’ve just finished doing the washing up after some glorious jerk chicken with rice and peas. The first home cooked meal I’ve had for three months, here in Oakland as the trains honk their horns. It’s been lovely to catch up. Friends stay friends if they’re friends. And our friendship covered a lot of ground, and carried an intimacy that is unusual and was mutually beneficial.

Fishtea has made me feel welcome in this home despite never having met me. He welcomes me because I’m an old friend of hers. He’s Rastafarian and carries huge kindness and depth. He was a deep sea fisherman. “You learn in the near sea. Then you go to the far sea.” He went to the hard places. He was loading and emptying traps for lobster mostly and occasional groupers etc. He tells me of times when the boat was so laden that one asscheek was in the water as he ran the engine, and there was an entourage of thirty clued up sharks following sniffing the food…

I’m getting ready for sleep on my last night in America, here in the family house of someone I knew in a very different breath back when the world was an unfamiliar shape and we were younger and more certain and less aware.

The length of life is the thing that amazes me now. To see the two of us in such utterly different contexts. To appreciate how far we have both come and also to notice how much we have remained consistent to who we were back then. This tiny life, compared to those trees. We still shift and change all the time. Sometimes it’s the seasons. Sometimes it’s just life.

Let’s keep shifting, knowing that the heart of who we are cannot change. Leslie is designing gardens now. She’s acing it, with two kids. I tell her I’ll have to get rich in the next ten years and then bring her in to do my garden. I can buy a coastal estate somewhere and plant three Redwoods, one for each of my parents and one for me. My prep school had two in the grounds. They were doing fine and they were in East Sussex.

I’m off to bed I’m Oakland. Night night America.

The thing with trees is they keep on growing. I’m here to see the biggest ones. I’ve got the secret location of the tallest living thing on earth. My plan is to go bother it. It’s protected to stop people like me finding it. It also happens to be completely surrounded by other trees that are within a few feet of its height. There’s already a known younger tree that is predicted to beat it in a decade or so. (These races are slow for trees.)

I’m in one of the Redwood National Parks, bordering on a reservation. I have to go first to register and get a free permit. Daily numbers are closely monitored. They also need to keep track of who goes into the park to make sure they come out. “There are loads of bears and lions,” she tells me. “Stick to the path.” “Of course,” I tell her. This isn’t grizzly territory. And “lions” are basically cougars with a sexy name – they’re only still alive because they prefer not to eat humans. Anyway, they say this stuff because they have to, right?

I drive for miles up a long dirt track. Eventually I find the cast iron gate I’m looking for. I put the combination into the padlock and pull it open. It screams like a wounded teenager I drive through, and close and lock it behind me. Then down the dirt track into the park.

The parking area does have a few cars in it. Despite the isolation this is a known and frequented area. I hit the trail. It goes down hard, but only for a mile or two. And all around, these huge ancient trees. These titans. Many have fallen. Their husks lie where they fell, except for where people have come with chainsaws to free up the pathways for people to follow the trail.

I leave the path – of course I do – and I hit the creek. My notion is to cross the creek and head upstream a bit, then strike up a hill. But the creek is in full flood. There’s no easy crossing place. I cast around. I see a semi-dam of fallen logs a way down. Perhaps I can ford it there.

I head towards it, but there’s something there that hasn’t expected me. I startle it, and it startles me. SPLASH. Whatever it was leaps into the creek heavily. “A beaver!” I hope.

Then I hear the growl. My instincts beat my rational brain immediately. Millions of years know that sound in a remote area. The hairs go up on the back of my neck. My arms go above my head bent to make myself as tall and wide as possible without any real thought and I’m backing away gently and firmly even before I see her as she hauls out of the creek shouting.

I become acutely aware of the bag of jerky in my back pocket which might distract her if she runs at me. “I should record this,” says my social media brain and a hand almost snakes down to my pocket for my phone. No, Al. No. I’d sooner maximise the chances of not getting eviscerated by this wet bear here in this remote place. It’s just a black bear. I mostly get angry with people who are afraid of nature. But she’s growling low at me, and that sound is full of threat. I’ve surprised her, and she’s got wet, which is enough to piss her off. There might be cubs involved too…

I go backwards downstream, never taking my eye off her. She hasn’t run at me, nor away. I go backwards up the bank and turn when a tree blocks me. I return to the path. Phew.

I spend the rest of the day on the trail, surrounded by ancients in this valley. Peaceful giants, protected for the moment in this national park. Beautiful and serene and old. I’m glad I drove all this way. I don’t care that I didn’t get to see one tree, off the path, that someone recently worked out happens to be a few foot taller than the ones I did see. Let it be protected by the lack of paths, by the National Park, and by the bears. All I would’ve done is marvel at it, and trust me I have had plenty to marvel at already in the last few days…