AlBarclay

Between shows today, we had a moment where we could go and celebrate together. It’s one of my favourite spots on the island. El Tico.

Back in the sixties, a Costa Rican fellow realised how the west coast of Jersey looks to the Atlantic, and is just shelves of sand. It’s the best surfing beach you could hope for in the English Channel. The “tico” set up a surf shop. By the time I was a child it carried a little coffee shack with myna birds who could swear like troopers. The original tico is gone now. The business remains. And it is so much more than it was. A big restaurant trying to serve food that looks interesting and has local ingredients. Sure, my entomologist brother identified swimming crab claws once in the “local crab linguini” that could never be local to Jersey, but based on the description it could easily and happily be the linguini that’s local, not the crab. And either way I don’t give a fuck. El Tico is a joyful mess of a chaos service restaurant cafe, giving patrons tasty food that doesn’t always make sense with an atlantic coastal view. I will always defend them, even when you tell me it’s been microwaved. El Tico is better than most of the other bollocks on this island. It gets my vote. And in the spirit of the Costa Rican founder, if there are supply problems, improvise!!

We have struggled with food supply. We have struggled with Covid too. Tonight, with virtually no notice whatsoever, the whole of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust cancelled their booking. We were there ready. They didn’t show. For Covid.

They all work together. Jack and I aren’t mingling with anybody outside of the show. The whole audience is Jersey.

I’m pissed off.

I wanted to meet the Durrell staff. There’s a spot of Gerald and Lawrence going on with my brother and I. And that piece of ground – so far from a zoo that you would have to be a wilful bastard to hate it – it’s a powerful legacy. Max had his first job in the reptile house. I sometimes went behind the scenes with him. The place they call a zoo – it is so far from a zoo. It’s only changed its name to “zoo” since I left the island. It’s a dedicated captive breeding program, where they let humans pay money for the limited possibility of witnessing some of the animals. It’s an animal home where you might see nothing but vegetation. And it covers a huge portion of this tiny island. They are internationally extremely important. They have been focused on breeding and reintroducing endangered species for generations now.

I really wish I had had the chance to connect with them. These naturalists. These kind humans. Fear is a terrible thing.

Jack and I are hoping to go to Durrell’s on Monday. I’m so sad not to have had the chance to get the know the keepers as Ebenezer…

Here we all are at El Tico. This is the showteam. With the dusk surf just casually being epic in the background. I love that lot. Lucky me.

No Lou. She timed her exit very well. It’s getting busy. Busy busy busy.

Jack and I rose in the morning. Jack had made coffee and breakfast. Frankly, he saved my life. I hauled myself from bed and contemplated a beautifully poached egg, and some crushed avocado with marmite on toast which you should never ever knock until you’ve tried it.

We drove to the venue.

The Auberge du Nord is, as you’d expect, on the northern side of the island. It’s mostly cliffs up there. The bulk of the people live in the south. The north is largely cliffs and you can’t build permanent structures, thank God. “Stop the Urban Sprawl,” shouts a petition that is already too late near our digs. They are going to build on more of the cow fields. It’ll mean more traffic on overcrowded roads. Bad new change bad. I can understand it though. This place has managed to stay unfucked. Litter gets picked up. The beaches would be unrecognisable to anybody from Brighton. They aren’t covered in packaging.

We went to the venue and we did a show. I can’t remember it. I think it went well. We went home and straight to bed after. Two hours later we were back in the venue.

I tried to snooze. I honestly thought it would work. It didn’t.

We did another show. Yeah, details… So there were humans… Oh! Yeah we had a load of fucked paramedics. This was their night away from being on call. They were dressed up in Dickensian costume. One of them was an utterly terrifying human. He’s probably going to turn out to be a serial killer in about ten years. I hope not, but Christ he made my skin crawl. We also had lots of teachers. I love all the teachers. They aren’t killing, and I didn’t feel they were groping either, which feels like progress. It’s the end of term! They are very very happy about this. Their happiness seems to mostly involve alcohol.

But. It’s done for the day. And I’m knackered. And I did nothing but show things all day. Lou was great. She helped me not disappear up the arsehole of this thing…

Right by the house I grew up in. Just at the bottom of the meadow. A short way beyond the edge of the grounds… No more than 6 minutes walk from where I used to play in the summer evenings, there lies a powerful and mostly completely overlooked Neolithic dolmen.

This island has been inhabited since the stone age, and as a result it has some extremely important sites if you are interested in ancient civilisation. The dolmen of mont Ubé was used as a pigsty and before that it was hacked up by quarrymen. Now it sits right next to a nasty modern house with atrocious plastic Athena statues and climbing frames for the kids. The house does nothing to complement the site. The owners must be oblivious or contemptuous. But it’s just down the road from the soil that sprang me. I really hope some of that ancient shit rubbed off on me as I was running around digging in the soil. Turns out I grew up right next to a Neolithic place of power.

Not the biggest one in this island though. Not by any stretch. La Hougue Bie lies here. One of the ten oldest man made buildings in the world. A mound, from about 6000 years ago. Cruciform on the inside, because yeah that was a thing a long time before you know what. To get in there you have to prostrate yourself. A small tunnel. “People were shorter” my arse. Bow your head before the power of *insert here*. The Christians have shat a chapel on top of the mound, as was their way. “Place of power? It’s OUR made up story, not yours. Ours.” Unlike the ridiculous arrogance on top of Glastonbury Tor, this little “worthy” Christian folly still stands and leeches energy from the omphalos below it. The true power is clearly in the mound. But there’s a pimple on top with a cross.

It’s closed. Whatever function this served visibly peaked at equinox, not solstice. There’s probably something that can be found at solstice there but it hasn’t been worked out so they’ve basically closed it completely. I’ll have to come back on an equinox. I’ll likely show up at solstice anyway, although it’s all locked up for the off season with iron gates so there’s no way in. Whatever power is there will be surely magnified at the solstice. If there’s nobody else trying to connect with it maybe it’s even better to try.

For this morning, I crouched at the entrance. I could feel power radiating out of that tunnel. There’s something. There really is. “It fell out of use some 4000 years ago.” Out of use, but not out of power. Right there, surrounded by roads, with little room for more than a very worthy bunch of reenactors making a longhouse, this feels like one of the biggest missed tricks in the world. Hougue as in Sutton hoo. Hoooo. Bie means a home. So both a place to honour the dead and a place you live. Six thousand years ago. Mostly ignored, overlooked and passed over by all these accountants. There’s power here. And fuck it, I grew up in sacred ground for whatever the fuck that ancient faith structure was. Maybe this is my ministry. I just have to work it out. Meanwhile, Hooooo!

Up at a reasonable time. There’s still plenty of Jersey we haven’t gone to in the limited window I have here with Lou. We went to Plémont up at the Northwestern corner of the island. It’s usually pretty peaceful there and the views are strong, from clifftop scrubland down to a roiling sea. There are the ruins of an old Napoleonic barracks overlooking a little cove. Not too much wind today, and the sun was peeking out as best it could. We got our fix of rugged gorse, and then inevitably found our way to my beloved El Tico for a bowl of chowder. The evening sun setting over the high tide helped make it a beautiful last evening on the island for Lou. Sun sets too early right now. Not long until the solstice, but we are still on the wrong end of winter.

By five we were back in the venue gearing up for our single show today. With all the news over the channel, people are perhaps unsurprisingly becoming more cautious about coming to our intimate show. They’ve already paid for the tickets so we lose nothing but their energy, but we had close to twenty people from the same office party just deciding not to show up this evening. I don’t think we’ve had a great deal of this new brand of Covid here in Jersey yet. The new restrictions and guidelines don’t count over here. Jersey moves at its own pace and I have a feeling we will manage to finish our run, even if its by the skin of our teeth. Jack and I bounced pretty swiftly after the show tonight though just as we have a big week still to come, and it’s Lou’s last night. I’m glad she came again though. It was a fun and gentle audience. She ended up going backstage and reading everybody’s i-ching in the interval. I forgot my cards when I was packing so I’m glad I had her to represent for the oojie-boojie stuff.

When the weather isn’t disgusting, this island can be so beautiful. I’m glad we’ve been able to rush and catch some of it in the time we’ve had. Lou’s leaving just before I kick off into two show days until Monday.

I’m gonna get off this and have tea with her and work out what to do tomorrow.

We slept over twelve hours last night and when I woke up I was still sleepy. My voice was recovered but I just wanted down. Nevertheless there’s plenty of island left to share with Lou, and only a limited amount of time. We tried to catch the light.

We went to Grève de Lecq barracks. I wanted to show Lou where we had been with the residency. It’s a powerful part of the island and strong to share. The sounds of the waves in the bay. The power of the wind up the headlands. There’s nature there. It was a strong headquarters for the residency.

Lou and I walked on the beach where I swam every day. I was very struck by how much it resonated with her.

It feels like she understands the beauty of this island, and can see the wild beauty that has always been here through all the crowds of oblivious moneyhumans. It’s a relief. I see potential here, and beauty. If only I had property here. Mum and my uncle sold my grandparents house, and I was always told that it would pass on to me through my uncle’s flat. Turns out that wasn’t the case. Poor Peter died, and who knows what happened to the flat.

Anyway. Right now we have a lovely rental for the duration of the show. I just wish I still had a foothold here as I’m seriously thinking of returning and there’s nothing and property is very expensive…

Lou and I went to Bouley Bay. I have had my eye on the derelict hotel there ever since I reconnected with the island. I love it there. As we walked past Mad Mary’s – (the eccentric tea shack)- we found a half stunned buzzard with what seemed to be a broken wing. Something had happened to it, clearly. It was gallumphing around, and not avoiding us even though we were unpleasantly close and it was bushed in with loads of brambles. Something was clearly wrong.

I didn’t want to get too close to it as picking it up would involve having a chunk taken out of my fingers without gloves. I love and slightly understand birds of prey but I’m not going to pick one up like a pigeon. I called the JSPCA. I got hold of Steve. He’s new on the job. But his job is animal rescue. The JSPCA is underfunded.

Steve showed up. He had big fat gloves and a bird carrier. He went in from the front, and I came round the back so the easy walking escape route wasn’t on the cards for our buzzard friend.

When we all got too close, the buzzard just suddenly thought “fuck this” and flew away.

I had been convinced it had a bad wing. Clearly it had just been stunned by a near miss from a car or something. Steve was like “The majority of bird calls we get, once we get close they fly off. Often they just like to sit there in weird places and look at you until they get too close.”

Steve was brilliant. I’m thrilled we were wrong about the bird. Most people in Jersey don’t give a fuck about animals so come on you non-Jersey legends: help pay Steve for the extent to which he massively cared for that bird when he thought it was injured, and the extent to which he will massively care for genuinely hurt animals he is called to as time goes by.

There goes my little fantasy of saving a buzzard. But I’m so glad it was basically just a bit stunned and hoping it could chill out without somebody trying to bundle it into a basket and fix it.

Donation link to the JSPCA here. I’m gonna help pay Steve’s wage with a donation of my own. But Steve is a great big healthy lad and he loves animals, and he was with me on my pointless call less than half an hour after I first contacted him.

Finally a day here when the good ship Jersey is not sailing through a storm. Grey skies and cold, but being outside was tolerable. Lou and I went up to St Clement to visit mum and her parents. Somebody has left little poppy crosses on their grave, and it’s pretty well maintained. I introduced Lou to them.

The church was open and being dressed up for Christmas. I told them I was visiting my grandparents and mother and was asked their name. “Oh yes, my husband knew your grandfather very well.” This small island…

We parked a moment at the gateway to Les Silleries, the land I grew up on. I haven’t plucked up the courage to go down the driveway. Sometimes it’s nice to just remember how things were.

We went to Gorey, which hasn’t changed since the seventies apart from the fact that if you ask for a flat white you get a coffee. We looked at boats, and the huge squat threatening fortification of Mont Orgueil.

Then we shot over to St Aubin for lunch and then hopped to St Brelade. Lou’s parents remembered staying at the St Brelade Bay Hotel a long long time ago. They think she might have come with them as a little girl. We had a hot chocolate in the bar, sitting on a huge comfy sofa and listening to local ladies dish the dirt on each other’s husbands in a little scandalous huddle by the window.

Up the hill from the hotel is a floodlit church. Lou was immediately drawn to it, so we ventured up to St Brelade parish church and her instinct proved excellent. There’s a fisherman’s chapel up there, reasonably recently excavated and filled with incredible medieval biblical art. They really look after it. The chapel and the church were both open and unattended and beautiful. I think my godmother used to do something with her donkeys there for the Easter parade. It’s hard to piece things together from the flashes of memory I have. But it was a truly beautiful church, and a place of power here.

A walk on the beach in the dusk and a good meal and I’m sleepy before the show would normally be over. I might end up turning in. Why the hell not? Rock and roll. It’s not even nine yet. Just so long as I am good to go tomorrow evening… Good to have a rest.

It’s the end of a long week. I’m feeling it. I’m at the end of my string. It was just Jack, Estelle, Andy and the shreds and tatters of my voice tonight, with another tricky audience. Sometimes if it’s a big loud room I can vocalkick over them and silence the buggers with the right note, but at the end of 3 two show days I had no kick left and precious little upper register. I’m tired. We are all tired. It’s a good tired but it’s a tired tired. Undeniably tired tired. It’s always an onslaught doing the first week of this. Maybe more so considering we are coming out of a period of “this is impossible” and very possibly going back into something shitty. There’s some messy rhetoric going on right now. I have a feeling that before long we will see everybody talking to one another in capital letters again.

I’m writing this sitting in front of the woodburner. Jack and I are winding down in front of “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons”. We’ve become slightly obsessed with Raphael the presenter. He’s our best mate. It’s a Netflix series, but counterintuitively you mustn’t watch the first season. Just click into season two when our man Raphael took over as presenter. Not to denigrate the much less weighty Irishman who did season one. He just didn’t have the je ne sais quoi to make it interesting for us.

We sit following our high energy audience corraling show, and we watch this empathetic hardened human getting stuck in to unbelievably nasty situations. It puts our various show specific woes into sharp relief. We can remember that we are just jokers telling a story and no matter what the boozed up accountant twit did it’s nothing compared to what he’s having to put up with in the Ukraine. Or Belize. Even Raphael isn’t sleeping in these prisons… But he at least gets them and knows how to earn a degree of respect from the prisoners.

Lou is here! She’s absolutely knackered though. She’s gone to bed. I’ll be there before long but had way too much adrenaline coursing through my system for an easy sleep and it’s early for me. But I get to hang out with her on my day off and show her the island. Apparently it won’t be pouring with rain or blowing horizontal ice tomorrow. I picked her up from the airport and we went to El Tico between shows. There’s the advantage to the huge gap between shows! We just have to activate our time more. I wouldn’t have covered so much ground today if Lou hadn’t been arriving. Frankly I’m likely to be more active than I would normally be tomorrow because I want to share Jersey. It’s still a novelty, being here, and doubly so being here with her.

Sleep is calling. A shower first as I stink. And then sleep. Oh sweet sweet joyful joyful sleep. Soon I think it’ll be possible.

Another joyful if extremely busy day of shows. The schedule has always been pretty full on for us, but this one is even more so. Friday Saturday Sunday matinees, and early matinees too. Previous years with two show days, the first show hasn’t been until like 3pm so we get to recover in the morning and then just do two shows back to back almost like its one long show. This year we have just enough time to lose the warm before we have to warm up again. It means we are on for very long days too in terms of hours. We get there in the morning. We are there until late. Added to which, the house opens a full hour before we start the show. We used to open it as late as we humanly could and smoke the place just before they wandered in. In this venue, we will have spent a full 24 hour day of our lives waiting backstage in a little dark improvised cupboard type hiding place by the end of the run. Still, we won’t have to clunge blocked loos with broom handles just before the show while in costume, there won’t be daily dogshit in our dressing room, nobody will be shouting “when the saints come marching in” through a traffic cone just outside the window during the tender moments… Carol has always had strangenesses, and they have never stopped us from absolutely loving it. I’m loving the team this year once more. It’s a joy. It’s such a good team. I’ll tell you about them one day but I keep forgetting to ask for permission until too late and I don’t like writing about people until I’ve cleared it, as most of you understand by now.

Anyway, Jack and I hung out in the space again between shows. He watched the footy. And I can say what I like about him. There he is. Such a fine figure of manliness. Look on him.

I sat before the show as he watched the footy. I consumed a plastic spaghetti from Marks and Sparks, despite all the sexy food happening nearby. We don’t get show food unless there are fucktons of no-shows as its not on platters so they can’t plate us leftovers. Surprisingly that’s totally ok by me. In previous years I’ve been bored of turkey by now anyway. I would end up shunning leftovers and stopping my bicycle at the burger van on Chelsea Bridge… I never got bored of Natalie’s Pavlova when it was available, but we aren’t having it this year, and leftovers aren’t in the game because of Covid. As a result, I haven’t tried her figgy pudding. I probably never will, but I expect it’s good as Natalie really understands dessert… But I’m not gonna want Turkey every day of December. Occasionally, when loads of people don’t show up, yes. Otherwise nah…

I’m loving Carol this year. I’m loving this group and finding out about this audience. The Jersey audience is wide. They are surprisingly game. They get stuck in. Jack and I can safely say by now that there’s very little that hasn’t been thrown at us before. We let it flow as much as we can. We follow the river, trusting that we know the material well enough to hit back into the story. We give the drunkies their rein, and then snatch it back. There’s astonishing complacency in these people, and literally frightening entitlement. But they are mostly kind at heart. They are just … looking in the wrong direction. This is a good story to tell in this island. A man who followed money too far and forgot his humanity… I just hope certain members of our audience so far see the very obvious comparison between themselves and the humbugging miser they feel safe from..

It’s a two show day. We are on the office Christmas party circuit right now. They really know how to drink on this island. I’m sitting writing from Scrooge’s chair in between shows. It’s cold. But before long this room will be full of extremely merry people and Jack and I will be stretching the bounds of our energy to keep them from being sick onto each other.

Scrooge picks on an alcoholic in every show. I try to make sure everybody in the audience knows their name by the end of proceedings. It’s usually pretty easy to find someone, and in Jersey it’s even easier.

Last night it was Vicky. She was an easy pick. She had the day off the next day and it was her stated intention to get aa drunk as possible. Jack and I went home quickly after work last night. Vicky and her party stayed in the space getting more and more incomprehensible until the bar manager called time on them because one of them almost knocked over all the clean glasses on the way to the loo.

This morning, just before the matinee Jack suddenly noticed that our little joke puffin had been taken out of its belljar and replaced with a wine cooler. It’s not show crucial by any means. We like to have something ridiculous that Scrooge secretly loves. A few years ago it was a creepy stuffed partridge. This year it’s Oscar the Puffin. Anybody who grew up on his island and is similar to me in age will remember how the local ITV kids presenters had a toy puffin called Oscar. You could write and ask it to wink for you. Scrooge has it in a belljar. We can reference it in the show and then reincorporate and it makes another nice little moment. But it also calls attention to it. It brings it into the game.

Somebody drunkstole Oscar the Puffin last night. It was probably Vicky.

Jack and I became criminal investigators. “The belljar is fragile and unwieldy. The puffin was replaced with a wine cooler. The culprit is likely to have had accomplices in order to help with the switch. Also it stands to reason that the wine cooler was from the same table as the culprit, implying that the guilty party was drinking white wine or rosé – something requiring a cooler. They would have waited until most people were gone before attempting such a bold maneuver…” It was probably Vicky.

We were slightly spun out before the show as it felt like a safety thing and we started worrying about the security of our other props going forward. Was it malice, or just drunkenness? We worried for a short while. We sent an email. It was probably Vicky.

By the time the show was over, we had a deluge of emails from audience members. “We saw a certain merry group doing selfies with the puffin.” “We saw Goody Proctor doing witchcraft with the puffin.” “The puffin thieves were sitting in the chairs located exactly to the left as you come in.” “We know the name of the company the puffin thieves work for.” We knew everything about the puffin’s last few hours. This small island. You can’t even get drunk and kidnap a toy puffin without everybody dobbing you in. It was probably Vicky.

The puffin was guiltily returned to the car park during the matinee, with a foot broken off. Probably by Vicky. We found it in time for this evening’s show. Nothing lost but one show worth of gags and a bit of superglue. More flesh for the Scrooge’s puffin thing. We even contacted ITV Jersey and discovered that the original Oscar the Puffin still exists and is in the kitchen there.

It’s not gonna make us glue him to the set like they had to do in Punchdrunk.

I’ve been playing a game on my phone while we have been bedding in this show. It’s called “Bury me my love”. The phrase is one of great affection. I love you. I want you to outlive me.

It’s a game played out through fake text messages that come to your phone. The premise is that your Syrian wife Nour is leaving you in wartorn Homs in order to try to escape to the UK. She’s brought plenty of battery packs and has cashed in the life savings. She asks for advice and help and it tries to play out in an approximation of real time while you try to continue your life in Homs.

It’s written by a woman who made that journey, from Homs to London, and then spoke with many others with similar journeys. I first downloaded it a few years ago, and happily hit on a very optimistic ending on my first playthrough. I think it’s possible to end it badly…

I figured I was fortunate. Out of many possible endings it felt like a good one. I didn’t play through again until recently, when enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten the first playthrough. It doesn’t feel like a game made for entertainment, even though it is extremely compelling. It feels more like a game and an education simultaneously. The top review on Google after a quick search is snarkily written by some 24 year old called Oliver Roderick. It totally misses the point. Send him back to Fortnite and employ somebody with a backbone to review your games, switchplayer.

But yeah, so. First time I played it we got through fine, and she got off the bus somewhere in the suburbs of London and she seemed happy and felt safe and it all kind of worked. This time I’m deliberately giving her slightly sketchy advice, but nevertheless she’s made it as far as Lesbos by the skin of her teeth and thanks to the coastguard. It’s such a weird game. I like it because I suspect it is helping me deepen my understanding of something way out of my experience. Also there’s just something geeky and cute in the way it is written and in the way the characters communicate. Unlike poor soul-free computer game reviewer Oliver Roderick, I find it moving at times, and relatable. But also unlike him, I have had real relationships with real hew-mans.

It’s more of an interactive fiction than a game, sure. Your responses are limited. But I find it effective. Just before the show this evening I got a garbled call for help from Nour, with a GPS pin. My character tried to call the coastguard.

It’s worked out okay. She’s in Lesbos now. Meanwhile I was pretending to be Scrooge and dancing around like a tit.

It’s just midnight and I’m already in bed with a chamomile tea. Nour is asleep in the camp in Lesbos, Jack is asleep in his room over the corridor. Lou will be here on Sunday. I’m only just processing that for the next three days we have two shows and I’m in at half ten in the morning. I’ll be asleep shortly and having happy dreamtime. Humbug. Night night.