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I’m sitting here in Doldowlod and wondering how many times I’ve been lucky enough to be here. So many times over so many years. One year I camped when COVID was still pernicious. This evening I’m camping voluntarily. There’s a refurb of the upper floor. There aren’t enough beds.

This land is powerful. And this house is solid. People who haven’t been in a big old house frequently want to try and feel it is haunted, I see people do it when I’m here. This place is a science house and it is about as haunted as Misty the cat. It’s just big and old, full of portraits and clocks, stone and panels, creaking floorboards and noisy things. I used to say that Eyreton would talk at night. It was another safe house, much smaller than this one but… Big houses like to be part of the conversation. If there’s strangeness it’s usually the house, not the supernatural.

So I’m camped just outside. It’s wet. I’m not thrilled with myself for agreeing to this. But with no time to go to sessions, I knew it was the only way. And actually I’m looking forward to waking up on this land.

“It’s a thin place,” the vicar once said to me about The Willow Globe. He’s right. Phil and Sue have activated magic that was already on the land. It is exactly the right place for Shakespeare.

Tomorrow there’ll be Cymbeline. “Don’t give me a big part I’ve got no time”. I’m Soothsayer and Frenchman. Like Henry last week that’s a prose part and a verse part. Soothsayer is verse so he already lives in my elbow. Frenchman is prose. I’ll say it, I think, at the right point and correctly. It’s a smaller part than Philharmonous.

I love that the Soothsayer is named by a character. Philharmonous. Bringing all the sounds together. But the script calls him Soothsayer. His role is more important than his name. He gets one of my favourite “unnecessary Shakespeare character-giving” lines.

“I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, wing’d

From the spongy south to this part of the west,

There vanish’d in the sunbeams: which portends—

Unless my sins abuse my divination—

Success to the Roman host.”

What’s the prophecy, prophecy bloke?

Yeah so I saw this bird, and you know it stands for the Romans and it came up from where those absorbent fuckers live and into where we are and then instead of the bird I could see nothing but brightness, so this means – UNLESS I’VE FUCKED UP MY OWN MAGIC BY *!THE SPECIFIC THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING, ACTORS CHOICE!* – Romans gonna win.

I think of Jane Seymour in Live and Let Die, fucking things up for a generation of querents by playing to an idea that tarot is magic. But no matter how much the expression of the cards in that film pisses me off, there’s an interesting connection to something Shakespeare must have been aware of. She can’t read cards accurately anymore once Bond has had sex with her. “Unless my sins abuse my divination.” I wonder how old the idea is that we need to be pure to do magic? Certainly we can’t be part of the everything…

Anyway, it’s half twelve. I don’t think my tent has blown away. Everyone else is abed, I’m awake to write this in the house before hitting the tent.

Goodnight. Wish me good luck and a not too cold and wet night.

Slowly the mist is clearing although I can’t help thinking I’m overlooking something.

This morning was in The Balcony Room, giving a little talk about the history of the building. The reason behind it, the theft, the fire, the gap, Sam and then a whistle stop through the artistic directors up to Michelle. I get to mention my dear departed friend and teacher Diana Devlin, whose part in the campaign to make the building a reality needs to be remembered. I even got to mention my old school, who performed in the earthworks in 1993. It was well received. Another thing ticked off. As the ticks get ticked the head clears but I’m still a tiny bit overextended. Cramming lines again today and I’ve reached saturation point and they still aren’t fluent but there are two more sleeps so that’s ok. Tonight they’ll all reassemble. Plus I had to hold a couple of scenes in my short term for a tape playing a right old douche. Got out a regency frock coat and vintage riding crop for it. It is now in the can and edited and sent so that learn will get dumped by the 4am dream fairies to make room for more Cymbeline. It’s gonna be ok and I’ve just got to book the van and the first night out and the channel cross and I’m gonna be golden.

This evening I sent some invoices and Lou cooked dinner. It’s her evening off. She’s in bed as I write, nice and early. I’m in the living room watching Brian shoot things on VR. I’m trying to force more Cymbeline into my head but it just isn’t holding any longer so I thought I’d write this as something different for a moment.

Oh and I stopped by Rita’s flat on the way home from The Globe. Turns out I’ve got a diploma in being an SGI Buddhist which is almost as brilliant as it is pointless. Just level 1, which mostly involves having a cursory knowledge of the practice. Got a long way to go but a step is a step.

Being overextended is not the best time to make decisions like “Do you want to be involved in the Old Harrovian production of Julius Caesar?” “Yeah fuck it. I’ve got Marc Antony half learned anyway and never got to play him at The Factory.” September.

Glutton for punishment? Maybe. But I came within a hairs breadth of agreeing to get up at 6 tomorrow to drive to Chatham and shout about gas for two hours then drive back to London, and panic about lines before I drive to Wales and sleep in a fucking tent. I’ll still do the second half. But Chatham would have killed me. I said no, even though it was physically possible. Can I have a cookie?

I suspect a number of people reading this who have learnt my ways will be surprised to hear that, up until tonight, I have never eaten a lobster thermidor. Finally this evening I popped my thermidor cherry.

Gastronomically the day started very badly, with a strawberry yoghurt and a banana at the Medway Premier Inn. I slunk into Bergman and took myself back to The Hundred of Hoo where there’s a school that sounds like a sci-fi entity. We did a load of experiments that help explain the properties of gas and various sciencey engineering basics. We filled a pleasant morning. Then as the weather finally broke I drove myself back to London and mumbled lines to myself while ordering packing materials on Amazon and trying to arrange people to help with a self tape tomorrow.

The partitioning is starting to overlap. I need to clone myself. Instead I’m just feeling mildly schizophrenic. And still, there’s always time for lobster.

West End perks, innit. Lou booked a half price meal at J Sheekeys and we went and sat at an oval table after the show, right by the star of the show and a much loved director. There were some Americans in there as well, flying the flag for embarrassingly awful Americans in London. They were shouting at the top of their voices to each other all night. I tuned them out and got the thermidor.

Napoleon is tangled up in the origin of this dish, I’m told. Thermidor, for the hot months. Take all the lobster out, mince it with mustard and cheese, put it all back, charge a millionty twelve hundred pounds for it.

I got mine half price and it was worth it. I wouldn’t want to pay full just as the food to money ratio is out of whack and I’m a gannet. But tonight it was perfect and we both ate handsomely late at night and left feeling happy. When I get my first West End gig I’ll probably spend my wage in there.

Home now and an alarm set for early so I can get my facts straight about the history of the globe before filming a self tape and drilling lines for the weekend while booking vans and accommodation and workers. No time. No time. Where’s my PA when I need one? Maybe that would be a better spend than all the lobster thermidor.

I’m still flooded but life is a little tiny bit easier now. I’ve been in Kent today doing physics. My science teachers at school were largely completely uninspirational which is upsetting considering the reputation of the school. Today all I had to do is run a workshop that involved me trying to get a balloon full of water sucked into a glass juice bottle using fire.

My dad used to enjoy that bit of physics. Get a plate full of water and a glass, put a tealight on the plate. Put a penny in the water. “How do you get the penny out without getting your fingers wet?” Light the tealight, put the glass over the tealight. The water will be sucked into the glass by the vacuum caused by the tealight burning all the air and unable to pull new air. The penny on the plate will no longer be underwater. Science.

This is a new workshop about gas. We had three volunteers. It was hard work, with year 7, but a very good school. In many ways I was very very relieved.

So there’s a lot that I’d want done better next time. But it was a good first shift.

I don’t really get the chance to do these workshops much these days. I’m pretty clear without them. They tick me over very nicely though and damn I’m good at them now, do anything enough and you learn it. I can engage young people as a wild card even if it’s about fucking gas.

My best friend from school is an engineer. I still wonder how it was that these people who were supposed to be training a new generation of engineers couldn’t find a way to interest me. I am very easily interested in this sort of thing, but I guess I was always gonna be an actor. Adult life has taught me how incredible and vast science is. My god the things we have learnt over lifetimes of experiment and transfer and experiment and transfer. So much stuff that feels like magic until we understand it and even then still feels like magic.

I was a difficult fucker at school. Happy to hold my hand up to that. If I thought my teacher was stupid I pretty much entirely wrote them off. God forbid they were reading from a book. I still love a few old teachers, the clever ones. I think of them now.

Now… As I occasionally go into schools for science.  Who could’ve predicted that. But as I tell them, there are gaps between acting jobs and if you need to work to feel valid like I do then this sort of thing is perfect. I’m happy to share that. Some of them might have ha de yawn ha similarly to me. Like everyone forever in the whole world twice.

This’ll be my second ever night in Rochester. First one was my motorbike theory test when I thought I was gonna scream up to Oxford every night on a big bike from rehearsals.

“You should sell this stuff,” says Mel. I don’t like it. But maybe…

Here’s me with all this costume. I’m paying to store it. And sure, there’s been a bit of money back just through people knowing I’ve got it and asking for stuff that’s there. But if I’m not careful it will become an albatross.

Loads and loads of costume.

I really want an office space where I can set up a theatre company that has a sideline renting costumes. Pie in the sky? Maybe but if you don’t shoot you don’t hit. There’s a lot of work between the idea and the execution and I know all too well with the Yawn D H Yawn that I poo good ideas like a clockwork toy but I never see any of them through.

Still, we have made inroads into cataloguing it. There’s so much stuff. It’s wonderful, but the hoarder doesn’t want this to become a negative thing. Forgetting is expensive. Storage is an empire about monetising delay. There will need to be a “now” when I actually decide about all the costumes. But until then, for a while, I’ll pay to delay.

I’ve got a movie coming out in September which might help things along. Please universe. And it might be a long time before I have the headspace to drive a costume hire business. But surely something… Let’s see. For now though, damn I’m busy busy busy.

Today was a snatched day getting the globe stuff out of the old street building. Tomorrow is an unfamiliar workshop in Kent. Then I’m overnighting and another workshop the day after. And around this I’m getting ready for a show on the weekend with The Factory and a history talk at The Globe this week. Oh hell. Oh spite.

I’ll make my theatre company and make sense of this costume in the fullness of time. I’m just learning about making things happen right now. I keep getting asked to make things happen on a larger scale than the time before, and I move towards it…

I’m very happy, lost in all this. Hard to stop and see Lou, tonight is a rare opportunity. I am okay being flooded. I’ve learnt the trick. Partitioning. I put it in my diary to make sure it is logistically possible. If it is, I just know that when it is time I’ll apply fully. But things like this big drive I booked today, it needs prep. It needs me to be ahead of myself. It’s hard when it isn’t immediate for me, but insha’Allah. Plus lines lines lines. I need 3 sleeps.. I’ve had none on the latest gig and it’s on Saturday.

Home! I won’t sleep in my bed tonight but I’ll be on the sofa and that’s comfy. No airbed. No dawn cooking. If I need a wee I can go pretty easily rather than having to get my sandals on and trudge somewhere.

I loved Chalke Festival. What a treat to be involved. A brilliant woman napped a flint axehead in the stone age area. She spoke well about pattern matching and how useful it is in evolution. This instinct that helped us survive that has now become an exploitable trait, causing so many ostensibly clever people to get lost in rabbit holes.

I ran some power into my phone while listening to Kate Mosse on Cathars. Showtime today again and whichever way you turn it my Welsh accent sucks. Still, I didn’t hit it too hard on purpose. The company was wonderful. I wish I could say I turned in a great show but it was sketchy. Second show energy. A very forgiving audience. You learn by doing… But there were some hard drops. I like it best when everybody looks great including me.

There’s a lot we can learn from history. We had quite a deal of current affairs this year and unfortunately it’s because we live in interesting times. Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the innocence and safety of the nineties in this country. Now we have a very real and trackable resurgence of acceptable fascism, and one of our greatest democratic allies is sliding inevitably to totalitarianism and in so doing playing perfectly into the hands of the Russian chessmaster who called NATO “fascists’ when they weren’t yet and must be loving how with minimal string pulling they are going that way so he can retroactively justify his war.

Mel is in my room, in a tent on my bed. She got the fuck out of America. I’m hoping she’s here in this country for a while but we need to find her a home. I’m happy to sleep on my sofa tonight, it’s a step up from the airbed. But I’ll want my room tomorrow not least as Lou will be back.

I’m happy to be back in technology.

The company who are partly responsible for the power flow in this festival, watched me try and charge my phone with the plugs at the side of the forum so they switched them off. Profoundly unhelpful and antisocial. I know my way around this shit, I almost brought an adapter from outside to inside but there are plenty of venues running monitors etc that have a spare plug. I don’t have to charge my phone in the most logical place. So I plugged it in where I had to watch it.

Where does one go to charge phones? I checked at info tent. “Nowhere”, I got back. Fine, there used to be ridiculous bastards charging a fiver to plug your phone into a slow charger for an hour at Glastonbury. Perhaps it needs to be down to the individual. But… I’ve been here three days. Firebird are being dicks even though I’m working in the venue and I think it might be because I was open with them. “I came in to try and charge my phone,” I said to some idiot child playing with dinosaurs. They’ve not only switched off the outlet I was using, they’ve also barricaded it. I’d say it was a bunch of cunts but more likely it’s one cunt, Mr dinosaur cunt.

They have gaps everywhere but they closed the circuit I openly told them I was aiming to use which probably feels to them like they’re doing something. There are always multiple circuits still free scattered about but needing the right adapter or just being in the backstage area and needing supervision. I used to carry an adapter from out to in but stopped doing it when pretty much every festival realised that participants needed to charge their phones and made provision. Years later! Firebird are amateurs compared to most of my international jobs, how can they deliberately isolate plugs to prevent participants from charging? They have managed largely to run this festival without plunging us into darkness, and maybe they are nervous about it. It’s very important to get these things right, I guess, and they might be new at this stuff and punching above their weight. In the desert, where everything comes from solar and wind we have to be really careful. But these guys have mains power. And I’m plugging in my phone, not a fucking kettle. 

Arguably the guy is just being a gargantuan twat. I might try and talk with him tomorrow as I didn’t think it was legit to ask him to stop isolating the circuit on days we aren’t working in his venue. Tomorrow we are in his venue again so hopefully he can push a button.

I’m in The White Hart, a pub local to the festival. They have WiFi. The crowds have come to Chalke now and I had an important email to send. No point trying to use phones on site anymore, the exchange will be flooded from now until the end of the festival. Still I’m pretty used to Festivalling these days. What I had forgotten is how much joy it gives me, living outside on these long hot summer days, and getting involved in what is always such a rich and varied exchange of craft, ideas and passion.

Toby Capwell started my day with a smile, teaching me more than I thought there was to know about English Armour and radiating charm and passion while one of his jousting buddies sat stoically by in his (modern functional) horse armour to provide visuals.

Then a potted history of the loo in England with David Musgrove. Again more information than I really thought there was. I went to look at horses. They have a very beautiful destrier and a palfrey and now I know how to tell the difference. Gorgeous calm creatures, clearly very well loved, not spooked by all the banging from the artillery and the rifles of the WW2 lot. The world wars occupy a disproportionate amount of space in people’s thoughts when it comes to history in this country.

This is a really gorgeous thing to be part of, this festival. It wakes up all the little geeky bits of my brain that love to dig into myth and history and connections.

As the festival progresses, every few hours there is a team showing their work in the “Remaking History” area. “Discover the Guillotine”. Some practical and thoughtful men and women are building a working guillotine from scratch. It isn’t finished yet. I went and listened:

“I spoke to the health and safety guy this morning. He asked me if the blade was sharp. I told him it wasn’t and he said ‘It needs to be sharp’ so we will be sharpening it up.”

The guillotine will be finished tomorrow, I am told, with the blade fresh sharpened.

Michael Gove is speaking at this festival. Not about an area of expertise. Just a puff piece about himself.

Sometimes you wonder if circumstances have brought you to a place where something begins. It is a terrifying and hungry looking thing, a guillotine. There are strange energies around the construction of it, even.

I’m happy here. Going to drive back on site soon and see if I can get into Al Murray.

Wind in the morning got me up, not the heat. My festival tent is very much a festival tent. It would blow off the mountain if it didn’t break the back of the yak before I got there.

I incompetently bungled round the outside of my tent, meaninglessly pushing thin pegs into chalk soil with my Birkenstocks. Bending half of them.

I wandered down the hill. It rained.

A woman covered in reindeer teeth and skins who knows my brother told me about pre-history. I bought a bacon butty and called Lou. Then I found a programme for the day.

This is so wonderfully varied and geeky. What a delight to be able to be here. I listened to people debate about The Long Man of Wilmington. Is it old or is it landscaping? I go and see him pretty often. He lives on a slope just down from my favourite yew tree, in Wilmington Church. A talkative temple of a tree, in the grounds of a church as so many are, being trees that were planted in places of power. Thousands of years old and it has responded eloquently to many generations of benign humans trying to prop it up and keep it safe. There’s old broken chain embedded in it, the props have been moved with time, it still berries bright and feels so wise. I write about it from time to time.

Then William Dalrymple. “It’s wonderful that such a good historian can write so well,” is the general consensus. He’s a friendly and forthright man. I buy his book and he signs it, dedicating it to Lou. “She loves India,” I tell him. “I applaud her. Encourage it. Join her.”

Callum gave a talk about original practice and the man is a calm fountain of knowledge. I’ve landed very well with this group. People are earnest and thoughtful and hard working.

Then some Scaramanga fellow got helicoptered in to do a talk entitled “Me and me and me and me and me and trump and me and me and me.” I may have misremembered the title slightly. The whole festival went to see him like he mattered. I couldn’t bear it, not that it isn’t relevant, but that I am in a field and don’t want to think about that man. Someone started playing “Summer is icumen in” on a hurdy-gurdy and a crumhorn and frankly that was enough to pull me away even if it only led to a very performative Robin Hood show for kids.

Then I met a knight, who was extremely knowledgeable about chainmail. I saw some old cars and a lot of tired clever experts. All the while someone kept firing blanks in the WW2 area. There’s even a tank.

This festival is so varied, I couldn’t have possibly expected it. I met a steward walking up the hill. “Imagine if you were a time traveller and you wound up here,” I said. There absolutely must be a Doctor Who episode where something goes tits up and the doctor winds up here and doesn’t have a clue what era he’s in.

I got to the top of the hill to find my tent beautifully pinned and stable, rather than halfway down the hill with all my stuff scattered hither and yon. I am told by Callum and Emma that there are magical tent fairies in Wiltshire. If only there was some way to thank them.

Now I have my new £3.50 Vinted Cerrutti denim jacket on and I’m gonna go listen to people being clever about things again for a bit. The sun is falling. I’m feeling very chilled.

This is the second time that many of us have ever met. We did Henry V. We all had nothing but 3 line cues with no character attribution, and the lines our characters spoke. No idea how long or short  inbetween them all.

I’m gonna put it right up high on the list of fucking terrifying things I’ve done for the craft of acting, a little bit under the first night improvising The Odyssey in Blackwell’s. We have to challenge ourselves. We did that and actually I think I’m gonna make good friends through this. A wide age range, and I should add that M from my pissed off blog the other night made lots of sense in his context. We have costume, we can be a bit wacky and it’ll land.

We are working alongside re-enactors and massive history enthusiasts. We get to put this show on together as part of a delightfully geeky happening. And now we have done it once we can relax into the festival a bit.

Right now I’m under my new sleeping bag on my new air mattress in my new tent. It’s almost 2am. The show went up late and then we inevitably de-adrenalised. I’ve only just finished pumping my mattress… Didn’t have the headspace to do it before the show. I’m knackered and the sun is gonna cook me out of this tent shortly after dawn. The next few days will be much more relaxing than I have budgeted for. We don’t have another show until Sunday. All my energy has been pointing to opening this. Now we are open I can chill.

Bren guns, potatoes, Alfred the Great. Rationing, Thatcher, Offa. We walk in our Elizabethan costumes past WW2 reenactors and busy men and women dressed in the smocks of medieval serfs. This is gonna be a strange few days now we are open. I’ll get my few hours sleep now while I can and find out about the programme tomorrow morning, now the learn is out the way.