Category: Uncategorized

Old Soho, running up against New Soho, running up against tourists.

I sat in The Coach and Horses tonight and watched Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. I recognised Hilary from The French House sitting just next to me. With her, a well known cartoonist, an epoch maker of old Soho. Through Maddy and The Factory in the past I’ve been made welcome by that shrinking crowd. The cartoonist tonight was angry about tourists. “I was there, you know, when he decided to kill himself.” This is a play about a personality, magnified, localised, amplified. You can’t be like that any more. Ollie Reed. O’Toole. They all died their wet deaths, and what remained? This kind of thing. Eulogies to people who threw their colour at nothing.

There is nothing to celebrate with this story, but for the “glorious past. This is a fucked story of self abuse pushing to idiocy. This is a charismatic beautiful man who fell apart and took his own life, and the play we have about him promotes his monster. I really struggled not to hate it. It was located so perfectly, acted without bullshit and with compassion. We sat together in the pub where so much of it happened and he lost his fucking LEG to bad circulation.

Some very funny audience snipes after the show, particularly into the “20 grand an episode soho dwarf” now running private eye. I had a good night. I didn’t want to celebrate wet death.

This morning I woke up to remember we had guests for lunch. Mad rush to M&S to buy chicken and bits. Frank went tidy mad and I cooked the hell out of everything. Three hours after I left the house in a panic there was bird with cauliflower cheese and honey carrots and roast tatties and stuffing and gravy. Nom. I got to hang with old friends and Frank.

Now I’m happy to be home again post show. I drunk loads of wine. I’m good to stop. But Tristan, Frank and I are sat around a table, and Tristan is likely staying on the sofa.

Sleep? Hopefully. Soon.

Ahhhh quarter past one and oh yes I write a blog every day. This day doesn’t really qualify, but I tried to exist despite my desire to just vanish into plop. I did put my boiler on for the first time in ages. Only for a few hours. Just as humans were coming round my flat. Siwan came with my spare car key and a friend. By a quirk of geography I get the best view of the Battersea Park fireworks display. People line up along the river outside my flat. Boats anchor and hang out. I just get to look out the window.

A little part of me was going to do some Shakespeare tonight for my old school. Inch Thick. Knee Deep. I decided not to. I was making the decision about the time my teeth exploded. I’m very glad I said no this time. I might have stressed myself out for no great benefit. Now I’m home and never had to leave, and I saw some lovely fireworks.

I played classical music and we watched it all happen. No sense of missing out. It is better from my side of the river than if you pay and go hang with the humans. Still I was happy at the end that I can just chill out now and I don’t have to fight my way through crowds to get home.

However long I still have in this flat, the time is precious. Frank and I live very well together thankfully. Him being here came out of necessity but has become very positive.

I’m writing this late and sleepy and there’s been little new to report. So screw the notional word minimum. This is me, human, humanning out and into sleepy bed bed. .mmmmmm

Thinking to stay sober, I drove into Soho at half nine. Unbelievable traffic. Still no parking spaces. We were booked for a late night show at Soho Theatre. In the end I gave up and parked in Brewer Street Car Park. They want a tenner an hour plus change. We walked into the crowded Soho Theatre bar at ten to ten.

I used to exist in places like that. There’d be little pockets of mates by coincidence all over the place in there. I’d be catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, doing something that felt like making friends even if after a while you forget who you’re with.

It was familiar but different in that bar tonight. Still the same bar, the same noise, the same vibe. No familiar faces though. My lot have all moved out of town or they’ve got the kids to think about. They watch the show and go home. Considering the cost of parking and the fact I couldn’t drink, my plan was the same tonight. Things were made easier by not knowing anyone in that bar. Too many times I’ve ended up somewhere underground at 4am after a late show in Soho. Tonight I got home just after midnight.

I like that space at the top. I brought a show there once in the faraway long ago times. I’ve seen friends scratch the things that made them famous up there. Tonight Frank and I were in to see Lachlan Werner with his Voices of Evil. It was fab.

Friday night in Soho and the audience was gobby. Lachlan knows he’s quick so he’s built loads of audience chaos into the show which is always a joy for me, and he rolled with it. He held people to account. He doesn’t let audience fob him off with crap answers, and he quite rightly hauled out one audience member for responding in their “acting voice”. There’s memories of Red Bastard in the way Brew, the (puppet?) witch piles into people trying to get off the attention-hook or trying to show off.

It’s a clown show with ventriloquism. He’s a delightful mischief of a clown, and when Brew talks she really talks. The show is exactly the sort of thing I love, and I’m so glad Frank introduced me to Lachlan. His joy is apparent, he sets things up to be live, he sends himself up and shares vulnerability with us, but also he’s witty as fuck and there’s a backbone of extremely hard work invisibly holding the whole silly fun ritualistic joyful nonsense up. He’s worked hard enough that all the chaos can happen and it will always hold together.

Now I’m gonna try and sleep. My patterns are all out of whack. I’ve been going to bed way too late and waking up at lunch. No more of that.

There’s a great big papier maché dead chicken in the back of my car. We couldn’t leave it at The Flask. It feels like it needs some sort of ritual burning, and now we are in bonfire season surely the opportunity will present itself. If not perhaps we must make the opportunity ourselves, but… living in London makes spontaneous bonfires a tricky idea. The Heath is crawling with law enforcement. Every night we would encounter these mildly overzealous park rangers, driving slowly through the walkways, making their presence felt. Any attempt to light up a chicken there and they would be on us like a gull on chips.

I can’t carry the thing in Bergman indefinitely though, and I don’t want to just dump it as it has too much personality and history. It’s pretty much ruined so we will have to find a solution. If the walk goes back to Pond Square, it won’t be for a few years, and we can find a new chicken should we need it. It’s a good story – a genuine ghost of a chicken. It was killed by Francis Bacon during a drunken row about freezing meat in the 1620’s. He caught the pneumonia that killed him while rolling it around in snow. People most frequently reported it during the blitz and rationing, but this strange avian ghost is a genuine London haunting. Our big chicken is deliberately a bit unwieldy and silly. It nicely sets the tone for a broad comedic walk.

This evening Siwan and I ran about deconstructing that walk. Getting the chicken out of The Flask was a small part of it. We also had to get the gin and the horns from The Star. That’s a lovely silly thing we do, swearing on the horns. A mischievous nod to Cernunnos dressed up in boozy silliness.

In Highgate people have been “swearing on the horns” for centuries. Siwan nicked the oath. There are very formal reenactment groups that do it from time to time for charity. We do it for fun and false pomposity – arguably the original purpose. It never really had any meaning other than silliness. But we all keep forgetting : silliness is important! Swearing on the horns is a silly way of making a false hierarchy and then all coming together in a pointless consensus. We do that sort of thing every day and call it office politics. More and more we have to remember to be silly just for the point of being silly. If it is all very very serious then we start to forget the joy that we are surely here to try and find in this existence. Then we might forget ourselves in seriousness.

Rain outside and I don’t have to be in it. It was meant to be a day of relaxation but inevitably the ghost of work. Thank God I’ve created this existence where things happen. I had to go on Microsoft Teams and be formal with people about some performative work that’s coming up. It’ll be a bit of work in the next week, but that’s nothing I’m not up for, and the rate is perfectly fine. Charity auction stuff so I’ll likely end up donating part of my fee, but round and round the mulberry bush we go until that weasel pops.

I’m happy to have a quiet day. I’ll be running a bath soon, and I had time to play with Boy and give him the strokes he craves. I ordered a curry for lunch and then heated up lentil pie for dinner. Then in the evening I rang someone a few times on my phone and sightread my side of a scene that he was filming. I’ll film my half in January. It’s just a phone conversation. All very gangster. I’m playing some high status London chancer gone over to the wrong side of the tracks. A friend of mine who really knows film but doesn’t know money. It’ll be arthouse, and but for the learning it won’t take up much time. If the conversation I’ve just had is any indication, the lead has only learnt a vague approximation of his lines so it kinda takes the pressure off to be perfect. But I will be.

Frank rang up as he was about to be disgorged at Battersea Park Station by Citymapper, for which someone needs to be shot. It was pouring with rain and it takes about a year to walk to mine from there. I went and grabbed him, we broke bread together. Now he’s warming up in bed and I’m gonna go lie in the bath and then finish either my book or GTA4 or both.

Sort of a day off. Doing nothing isn’t my special skill. I can feel a tired body holding me up. Some pampering is in order before I raise the octane for this auction. Here we go go go.

One last night of it. I park the car halfway through the route so they can use it as a changing room. I don my top hat and cape at the car and jump on a Dott Scooter to get to The Flask. This time I grabbed a pizza and shoved it into my gullet before the scooter, but that’s a break from routine. It has left me feeling sleepy but I’ve got an hour before kickoff in which to metabolise that cheese. Hopefully that’s enough time.

Everyone was out with their children, dressed in scary costumes, carrying buckets to load up with sweeties. Trick or Treat. Every year at Halloween people pretend to be scary things that don’t exist. Ghoulies and Ghosties. I’d like to see little Putins out there. Nineteen year old American Incels. Brexiteers.

It’ll be lively on the streets tonight. No rain until we are done but then the storm is coming. We can have one last energetic push and, for another year it appears we have avoided any complete washouts, plus we haven’t picked up any regular maniacs who try and make themselves part of the narrative. Phew.

Fun. Fun fun fun. Loads of fun. I’m gonna get myself into the right state of mind for it though as I’ve had a very peaceful day mostly in bed finishing my book and occasionally having extended conversations with Boy. I need to get myself into wakeyland.

—

ENTER THE CHILDREN

This evening they run the streets of London unchecked. Little howling imps, barely escorted by hard pushed mums and dads still clinging onto the idea that they can relive their first tooth fairy money by having made these hideous creatures.

The first stop in Pond Square they were onto me like children on a man in a tall top hat on Halloween. They barely let me get the story out, and once the chicken was revealed I sicced them on it. “Children, attack that CHICKEN!” “Ok, the rest of you, while they’re busy let’s escape.” I knew the chicken is going to be destroyed at last, this huge ungainly paper maché monstrosity. We talked of setting it on fire tonight. It has been used 3 times, but we won’t be going back to Highgate for at least 2 years now so we are done with it as otherwise Siwan has to store it under her stairs for years unused.

We are done. It has been lovely. I’m knackered. I’m glad I don’t have kids.

Someone shared a Facebook memory from 13 years ago. We were at The White Bear, a pub theatre in Kennington, doing a very well turned rendition of Bloody Poetry, a classic now, by Howard Brenton, about the romantic poets. He came to a Q&A. I made good friends on that show, but the thing we remembered most after all that time was the dressing room. It led to some reminiscing about “crap dressing rooms we have been in”. Various other pub theatres were mentioned.

Now I’m sitting in this tiny pokey kitchen at The Flask, about to go be shiny. Right now I’m just coalescing though, and looking around this is not a romantic place. There’s a papier maché dead chicken, loads of folded napkins, pots and pans and crates and old bits of material. It wouldn’t have been cleaned in decades. There’s one chair, where the junior guy has to sit when he’s folding napkins. My top hat and cape are slung over an empty chest freezer.

Outside in The Flask garden a big group of screaming oafs are bellowing at one another from their collared linen shirts and immaculate hairdos. “They’d better not be coming on the walk,” I say to Siwan. I’m tired. They aren’t.

This moment is in so much of what we make, the tired actor sitting in the crap room, resting and completely unlike the thing he will be when he walks out of the room. You see it in hotels and restaurants too – we live in a dressed up world. Go round the back and you realise the extent to which everyone is selling fantasy to everyone else. I like it though, that edge.

Growing up I didn’t care much for presentation. I didn’t really see the point in presenting a front – I was a zealot and I wanted honesty. Living with actors I have learnt the power of it, in context. At The Factory we work in our own clothes, and it is good for that particular work as costume can be another substitute for truth. But tonight I will put on a tall top hat and probably a bit of a voice and a front. The hat does so much work, and I have to be able to run my benign walking dictatorship for the next few hours. Might as well use it. I tried barking for a side show in minimum costume once as they weren’t paying me enough to provide my own. I quickly discovered that my look did as much work as my gab. There was a less gabby guy better dressed who was pulling in more trade. If the restaurant looks like the kitchen, even if the food is excellent you won’t trust it so much. We’ve got used to the charade to the extent that we expect it. When I was guiding the boats I would sometimes human myself “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s my lunchtime and I’ve got a sandwich, and I barely slept last night, but it’s okay because the tide is coming in and so I’ll be guiding you on the way back up.” I learnt through TripAdvisor that you mustn’t do that. People don’t want humans in service. “The guide prioritised his sandwich over our experience,” someone would write, and I hadn’t. But people like the shine.

So I’m getting ready to be shiny again. I’m having a stealthy pint out of sight of the punters, which might take the edge off it a little bit I kinda need to be in that place tonight. Can’t let them see me do it, but it’ll set be up nicely for a cold walk. Here we go go go.

It’s interesting to observe the extent to which my mood is affected based on the confection of the audience I’ve just had. I guess I’m usually writing these blogs just after getting home, so my thoughts are always close to the experience we’ve all just had. Just because I’m leading the walk doesn’t mean I’m not experiencing it too, and when everyone is low energy I really feel it. That didn’t happen tonight.

Tonight was a delight, even though we had a contingent that was absolutely hammered from the get-go. Regulars, and dressed up with spiderlegs on their heads, but they had all been drinking since 3pm, and they were straggling. We cover a lot of ground, and until everyone is caught up I have to fluff as otherwise people at the back worry they’ve missed out on material. They took ages to catch up and then started to want to contribute, which would be fine if their contributions were interesting, but … I am tired and I really didn’t want to have to fight noise. I told them so at one point. “Don’t make me have to fight you.” We also had lovely Jo in with family, and she has been IN IT the last few years, so I wanted to turn in a good night for her. (I don’t think she liked the swearing)

Largely I was trying to balance their enjoyment with that of everyone else… I run a liberal version of a totalitarian walk. I have to be the leader and in control of the narrative, but if you want to participate then it’s usually more fun if I let you have your voice before I take it back. I’ve had some wonderful moments from punters. But there are times where it is nicer for everyone if you let me create an atmosphere and take you on a journey and be the domineering man in a top hat. Friendly drunk jokers are never gonna have an eye on overarching narrative, but I can always shut them down if I must. I just like to try to incorporate. There’s a whole journey within the walk if you want it… I’ve even constructed some vague narrative for my ghostly love rat landlord character.

We went walkies and it was lovely, but the happy drunk guy started speaking his internal monologue about three quarters of the way through and it meant I had to double my energy right as I would normally be winding it out.

Still, yet another lovely night, and we were lucky with the rain. The nights are dark now, and the moon is just off full and makes a wonderful background. Only two more nights, and yes, if you’re in London Monday night just message me as I can tack you on. We start at half six at The Flask Highgate.

Three years I’ve been part of this team now. A lovely way of doing it. We all work hard, and we share it evenly. A working friendship group. I’ll miss it when it is done.

Saturday night, but the threat of rain decimated our audience. Not that it affects us really as they’ve already paid. But I took a bedraggled lot out into the elements tonight. When they’re wet it’s harder to transfer enough energy to them for them to remember to have fun. Also the sound of rain on their umbrellas necessitates more projection. I’m good for it, but I’m still recovering from whatever that sickness was last week. I took them out in the rain but I was marking the moments, counting down to the first pub stop. Using what I could but I’ve learnt not to empty myself into bottomless pits. Still knackered myself.

The Star is warm and dry, but who the hell has a baby shower in a pub? The whole place was full of people and presents and balloons when I showed up with 30 people in tow. A baby shower. What even is a baby shower? Bloody Americans. Just another excuse to go to the pub en masse. I suppose it’s harder to get stuck in once you’ve got babies, and having an official shower thing helps people remember that they’ve still got that pram in the attic. But all this has only crept over from America in the last few decades. Like having a prom. We never had a prom. People are having proms now. Next thing we’ll be doing Thanksgiving.

For now though, I’m part of making a fuss out of Halloween, which really is another very American thing. Over there right now it’ll be gardens full of cobwebs and pumpkin patches. Here we might just occasionally see a jack o lantern but mostly it’s just another night, Halloween. And for a few lucky people an excuse to tramp out into the streets of Hampstead for peculiar stories and boozy fun. We’ve still got a few tickets left on Monday as we threw in an extra night at short notice out of optimism and greed. Come get stuck in. I’ve had surprisingly few friends come walkies, but then I never really strive for it as it’s just another random thing I’m doing.

I was shot to hell at the end of the night. Got myself home in short order and now I’m trying to wind into sleep with the happy knowledge that we get an extra hour tonight. Or is that tomorrow? Soon anyway. I’ve got three walks left and then I’m back open for business until Jersey. What next, I wonder.

I’m having a cup of coffee here at The Flask in defiance of the prevailing Friday night “let’s get drunk” energy. I think I’d like to get home completely sober and just … treat tonight fully like a job. Friday night crowds are always a bit larey. I want to be alert for them. It’s cold and I’m gonna be doing this every night until Tuesday. No point knackering myself at this point. Do the tour, go home sober, sleep well. That’s the plan. That’s the dream. It should be easy, but there’s always that moment when someone offers to buy me a drink. Oh, self control. I knew thee once. Or did I?

I’m still using those Dott Scooters to get up Swain’s Lane, and get back to the car at the end of the night. There’s something hilarious about gliding along on one in the gloaming with my top hat on and my riding cape billowing out behind me. Black on black on the winter night roads though, so again it is best if I have had absolutely no beverages. That would be a supremely dumb way to kark it. I’m sure I’m adding to local legends though as people drunkenly catch a glimpse of me shooting past like a witch on a broomstick. Next year I’ll be telling stories about myself.

It’s too cold to have my phone in my hand though. Oh God winter is coming. I’m gonna jump up and down for a bit before kick-off.

—

“You’ve got a big booming voice,” says Ethan, folding up napkins while I sit trying to warm up in the little kitchen. “It gets tired though,” I tell him. “How long is it?” “Almost 3 hours.” “Of you just shouting?” “Pretty much. People pay good money for that.”

—

And they did. It was lovely. Some regulars in big groups. They come every year, and they made an effort tonight. We had to think hard for the costume prize. In the end it went to Red Riding Hood and The Wolf, but it was touch and go. There was a birdwatcher with robins eating her brain, but it didn’t take the public vote. Too weird perhaps. You needed to look closely.

I’m home now and I did accept a drink. Only the one as I didn’t want to have to leave Bergman in Hampstead. Still I’m wired instead of sleepy. Friday night London energy and I’ve picked up on it. I reckon I’m in for a marathon Kindle session before I can turn my brain off, but I don’t have to leave the house tomorrow until 4. Luxury.