AlBarclay

A couple of early phone calls. The first one was telling me I was supposed to be invigilating (oops). It’s a good thing that Imperial College is so close to my flat. I was up – just hadn’t written it in my diary. Shifts have been pretty scarce recently and my mechanisms have slipped as my priorities have shifted to more reliable ways of earning in the gaps. I jumped in the car. As I was driving up the other call came in and someone is gonna shove a camera down my neck in Paddington on Friday morning. When I took one up the arse I had to change my diet and then drink something that made me extremely void down below. It seems when they shove it down the other hole they don’t need you to get ready. I’ll just lie back and say “aaaah” and pretty shortly thereafter I’ll be able to stop worrying about this neck discomfort. Interesting.

Shift done I had a little wander about the streets, round by the Albert Hall and up into Hyde Park, then back through the charity shops in Bute Street and to a quick coffee at Pret. I like it round South Ken and it is close to home.

Home then and settling in with the cats. No Brian and Maddy all day and so I just got antisocial with the cats and booted up my new laptop and tried to get things running and shifted across which is always a slow and annoying business but I’m very glad to not have the old one anymore – admin should be possible once more hurray!

I refilled my carousel of pills. Some of the stuff I’m taking at the moment is just because it was in my friend’s fridge and he asked me to chuck it. I don’t even know what Chromium Picolinate is for. Glug. Turmeric and Bee Propolis and Magnesium Citrate. Aloe Vera? Cognitive enhancers and men’s health things and biotics. Collagen. I should be able to fly before long.

While I wait though I’ll have a little snooze and a cup of chamomile. Another quiet day. “For people in The Arts its just about surviving 2025,” a friend said to me yesterday. She’s right. We are in peak Fatima’s next job could be in cyber territory now. Je ne suis pas Fatima.

Over in Highgate up on the hill there’s a little shop attached to a very lovely little distillery. It’s called Sacred Spirits. They got known for their gin. Their brand and location makes them an excellent match for Peculiar London with whom I do the Haunted Hampstead Halloween walk.

Peculiar London is, essentially, my mate Siwan. She’s been running the walk with or without me for just about ten years now. We met about halfway through and if I can do it, I will. I’ll put on a top hat and make up ridiculous stories and reframe true stories. Last year I couldn’t, I was up at the RSC darling. No such luck this year. This year I’m very much doing it and I need the work and the money thank you very much.

We cap the audience at about 40. It’s a bone of contention as I reckon I could manage more in exchange for more cashmoney, but it is also smart cus we do get very strung out sometimes. 40 means we won’t lose anyone. I can be heard by more, but there are actors as well jumping out and doing silly things. It’s very handmade, don’t get me wrong. It’s a pub walk with some silly things and a man in a top hat shouting at you. At one point we do a traditional silly oath called “Swearing on the horns,” and we give them all a shot of something odd.

This is where Sacred comes in. One year we had Rosehip gin, another year it was Cardamom gin. This year I went up Highgate hill and got a car load of spiced vermouth.

I’m off it now. That’ll be a new experience, running the walk sober. I know I can do it though, I’ve negotiated all aspects of my work sober before, and less than a month in I’m already at the “why was I ever drinking?” stage. This means, though, that I won’t know what the stuff tastes like. Still it isn’t my job to recommend it.

“Can you get some photos for the socials?”

I write a daily blog sure, but that doesn’t mean I’m good at that shit. “Hi, this is me getting the booze from Sacred…” Nah. I solved it with the help of the shop assistant by pretending to be Igor shuffling in to buy the stuff. Recorded it on one take through my GoPro glasses and the shop assistant was ace. That’s all it needed and I’m actually quite proud of it as a social media thing. Maybe I am good at that shit so long as I don’t take it seriously.

If you don’t come expecting high art, it’s a pleasant boozy evening in North London. There’s a crap prize for best audience costume. I won’t be doing the 27th. Gonna train in Canice and pay him for it… Hopefully nobody will die. But yeah, if there’s availability and you fancy it, let me know you’re coming in advance so I can try and work out something odd to do to you.

Another glorious weekend by the sea with Lou. She had to be in London today so I slung up in Bergie in the morning. A blustery day largely and one where it is good to be in a car instead of on foot. I do love Bergie. I use him far too much but he’s like a little extension of me on wheels. I put too much rubbish in both of us, we are both scarred but functional. I’m sure I could extend this comparison indefinitely. Expensive to run. Bigger than he should be. Pumps out hot air. Might blow a gasket.

I drove Lou up to town and would have ferried her around for longer but for the fact I had a doctor’s appointment. Just a little something I’m concerned about. Better to know than to wonder, so I’ve managed to get a referral to have someone put a tube down my throat and look around. Probably just a nodule or some damage – I was coughing like a forty a day man in April, then early summer was all about being sick most evenings. Now I’m sober and eating carefully all the symptoms have gone but the throat, and I’ve just been aware of something there. I’m not particularly worried but no point worrying while we still have the NHS. I don’t think it costs then too much to do an endoscopy. I’m in.

Still a bit scary when they call it urgent cancer referral but she reassures me that it is 1 in 10 where they find something. A good doctor and she listened to me. Sometimes at that place I’ve had to fight to get a referral but maybe they are just better when you’re older.

It’s just gone midnight. I’ve been chilling with the cats and the bath back in London town, just enjoying soft things and reading my book. Had a ramen for dinner. Nothing to report really. It’s Maddys birthday and I thought it was the 20th so she hasn’t got a present and I’ve told her I’m celebrating on the 20th regardless.

I reckon I’m about to have a great hard sleep. Lou is back in Brighton. The weekend is too short.

There’s a guy on my Facebook who often tells me what “the left” are doing or what they want. It involves everything bad you can possibly imagine. “And then they call me a fascist” Why do I keep him on my Facebook? Gotta keep plugged in with these people. There are people telling me similar bullshit about “the right”. It is getting worse and worse at the moment, this enforced polarisation. Remember critical thinking? It is so dead people can make nostalgic jokes about this crazy thing we used to do in the nineties where we looked at both sides of things and then made our own minds up. That doesn’t happen anymore, and unless we keep people like this on our socials who we almost always disagree with on many levels, we forget that there are other perfectly nice people who are absolutely convinced of opposite interpretations of the world.

This chap was on the march yesterday – there was a “we are scared of foreigners” march in London yesterday. There was one thing he wrote about it on his socials afterwards that got me thinking about this whole perspective problem we have at the moment.

I am paraphrasing but: “The mainstream media is telling you there were only about 100000 people here but I can tell you it was between 2 and 2 and a half million!”

He’s been in a crowd. It’s a big crowd. He wants to feel that his voice is the loudest voice. He knows he isn’t alone in his fear of the other. But: his perspective is shot.

Flat Earth. Because we cannot comprehend global physics.

Space Denial. Because we cannot comprehend celestial scale.

Evolution Denial. Because we cannot understand time.

Loads of these thinking fails come from an inability to have perspective.

Yes we are small little human people flapping around in this system we have all made up together. It was made up so long ago it is impossible to comprehend how even that has come about. We look at the edges of that and the creation of that, of society, and our brains go a bit burny because it is hard to see it because we are just tiny tiny blots of disease in the biosphere but we’ve learnt how to talk and write and make signs and shit like that but we can only have what perspective we have been able to learn, and we often learn best from hardship.

So he is in a big crowd of people who think like him and he thinks: “This must be the biggestest crowd forever of people who think like I,” and he feels validated in his thinkses but the “bad left” will do lying on him and he must tell us all the truthings.

We are all little tiny tiny tiny little people. But we have to try to think biggerer than the easy thinkies.

Yes I know the march wasn’t “we are scared of foreigners,” I was being glib. But it was a kind of “we all stand together against stuff we’ve been told to hate”. And that changes from person to person but there are trans and wokies and brown people involved in that.

“THERE WERE MILLIONS OF US.”

There weren’t but you are entrenched, mate. And you are indoctrinated. Most of what you generate is amplification and I bet at least half of the stuff you amplify originates in a building in St Petersburg. Because it is just gonna keep pulling us apart from each other as we dismiss those who are on the “wrong” side. Lefties do it too about “the right”. It’s nice to feel part of a big club. To be part of a millionty people but the wokes will lie it is smaller.

I am fucking scared now of where things are going. We are not clever enough to handle the social media algorithm and it is pushing us all into these little bubbles that we think are bigger than they are. “And if the mainstream media tells you it is just a little bubble they are lying cos I know what it feels like to me.”

God. Anyway I don’t know where I’m going with this it just makes me sad. There’s this thing I’ve noticed where people who don’t like “the left” are also desperate to tell everyone how they are victims. Aaaargh it is just getting worse and worse, and then Musk in his video basically trying to get the ball rolling to annex us as another state of America by telling people too dumb to see the endgame that we need to change how our political system works. Cos that’s what’ll happen for future “President for life” Heffalump.

This guy just made me see in that post the lack of perspective. The very very soft fragile tiny little vulnerable ME in the very heart of all the noise and hate and bluster that really really needs to feel as if what they are is validated and what they feel part of is the big safe thing please mummy.

Because if it is just a system we made up to try and stop us constantly murdering each other when we were just tribes in the stone age, if underneath the mask of society we are all capable of desperate things, that is too much to comprehend too. We’ve built this system for ages, it doesn’t work but it’s the one we’ve got.

I’m in the doghouse now for writing too long.. Haven’t read any of this back but I guess I’ll just click schedule and hope… Yikes.

Stanmer was empty, but it was cyclonic this morning in Brighton, right up until just after we pulled up there. Perfect timing, a gap in the clouds and some bright light and we thought there’d be loads of families, but it was just a few zedders in front of us in the café deciding what they wanted for half an hour. When out of civilisation, civilisation didn’t follow us. Hurrah. A moment of peace in wet nature. I found and plucked up a Destroying Angel. My friend got some in Hampstead recently. Beautiful tasty looking absolute fuckers. Same toxicity as a Death Cap and similarly there’s no cure which is never a good look. Probably best to pull them out in case there’s a well meaning clueless forager. I’ve known people to eat mushrooms on a hunch and it is madness. But maybe I’m a little overzealous with my 3 strikes and a second opinion before I can eat each one even the easy ones. But certain death is high stakes for a free vegetable.

From Stanmer into town. Metta bhavana at the Buddhist centre. I assumed it would involve chanting it but it was more of a deep dive into love through meditation. We don’t have to like everyone, we won’t like everyone. But we can try to love everyone. Even the very very hard to love. Even people you think are absolute idiots.

There was a march in London today and lots of people turned out for it by the sound of it. Likely it would have been very crowded in town. After a week of tube strikes it is likely to be a febrile night once Wetherspoons is shut. I’m glad I’m in Brighton.

Sad to miss my friend’s party tonight for not being in town, but I’m really enjoying this peaceful mindful time by the sea. After the Buddhists we went to Lunawave Beaconsfield which is up by a viaduct, a gorgeous new sauna in an old pub garden. The woowoo crowd in Brighton are very active and it seems saunas can pull in the numbers at the moment – everyone is doing them. With autumn closing in, of course I jumped at the offer from Lou, and got good and hot and relaxed.

Now we’re chilling at hers. Watched the rest of our crap action movie, discussions about ways to make shit writing sound like people. (Targeting and commitment, mostly targeting. There was so much woolly stuff or people trying not to say it cos they didn’t know why they were saying it. ’twas ever thus, it’s why I switched out of regular TV watching a long time ago. I think the nail in the coffin was an episode of Made in Chelsea (which I know was pretending to be real but was evidently staged and just so hard to filter that I lost all faith in the medium). Large scale American series bought me back but fuck me there was a dark patch. Nobody speaks when they actually don’t know what they mean). But I’m not feeling particularly ranty. I’ll leave that for those people in London.

Suddenly buckets of rain coming in from the sea. It really feels like we are doing seasons this year properly. I’m in Brighton.

Sent my pitch in for a potential big clearance job and then came down, to thoroughly unwind over a weekend at Lou’s. That quote has been preoccupying me lately. There are two consecutive parties in London tonight and tomorrow and they’ll both be full of friends of mine. That was every weekend in my thirties, but the quantity has dropped right off and I’m kind of … sad not to be at either. My friends are my family and I haven’t had much occasion to be social. But… the booze free version of myself that has emerged from this latest bout of disappointment and bodily frailty, it would find it very hard to be in the drinky rooms right now. Give me a couple more weeks sober and it’ll be easier.

That said I’m starting to see the point of this self denial now… Back pain has faded into the background, and the ability to wake up fresh is the payback to the inability to switch my brain off at night. All the minerals and vitamins are starting to kick in and make me feel more vital in the day. I’m not choking in my sleep anymore, and it’s interesting to be mixing my diet towards less interesting food for a while, with greater regularity. There’s something to be found in everything, perhaps. I’m still not at the stage where I make porridge with Manuka honey in it every morning. But I’m not washing down the hottest curry in the shop with a bottle of Chateaneuf at midnight. It’s a good decision for bodily health, and it’ll definitely help the bank balance too, and invigilating occasional resits is barely gonna cover an occasional margarita pizza and some porridge, it can’t stretch to Dishoom and a crate of Primitivo. Can’t be running up the credit cards. Gotta tighten the strings. Even if this pitch comes in. Last time with these guys I massively underquoted and ended up having to ask for a bit more as it was much bigger than I thought. Thankfully they agreed, but even then I paid everyone else plus the costs but came away with nothing but a shiver for a lot of work. Lesson learnt though and learning is expensive. I’ve been more thorough in my thinking this time and it’s a much bigger job. Hopefully this’ll make up the shortfall somewhat if if if I can find an elegant solution for the wood the wood the wood.

Meanwhile the wind is whistling on the windows hewe in Bwighton. It’s great to be with Lou. And somehow I can switch my brain off better by the sea.

My mood is all over the place at the moment. Yesterday I was sad and tired, somehow I was feeling bright all day today. It might have been because I took the time, even briefly, to chant in the morning. And also I had my first ever home ground espresso.

I drove to Imperial through the tube strike traffic. Rush hour and I hate the tube at that time because everyone is so passive aggressive in this city, but now they’re all on the bikes they normally reserve for going up hills on the weekend in their lycra. I am careful to obey the rules in my area as there is a local YouTuber with millions of viewers who lost a father to a drunk driver and makes it his business to cost as many people their livelihoods as he can – his alternative to therapy. He’s a self righteous prick and it annoys me that he would be glad I’m putting my seatbelt on right away because otherwise he might film me and send it to the cops. The last thing I want is for him to be effective. He’s too smug.

It’s strange that I felt bright. It’s a complicated day. Some big things going down.

But there I was invigilating exams again. It’s nice being in that concentrated room. Only a few people, doing resits, not the sharpest tools in the box some of them, others with chronic illnesses.

Home pretty early, and costing costing costing. I’ve bitten the bullet and bought a new laptop even though I’m nervous about money at the mo. My old one took three hours to send three invoices yesterday. It’s got to go.

Splintered today as you can tell. I only had two of those home ground espressos but good heavens I have no clue why I didn’t start properly doing coffee at home sooner. It’s rare I don’t want more than 2 coffees in a day and it’s 9pm and I’m still going. And I’m still sending out feelers to people building bonfires. I’ll get the pitch in tomorrow. Costing forklift driver was slow. And I’ve really been trying to get it right even though it is just a quote at the mo.

It’s been good today but I’m more tired than I ought to be at this time. My little cough is back and I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I think the lack of booze will lead in the long term to much better sleep but in the short term I can’t go and spike my chamomile with a shot of whisky to make sure I go down. Last night all the thoughts all the time until I somehow tricked my brain off.

When I woke up I constructed a little vocal booth with filming capabilities on my stairwell. It’s the quietest bit of the house now that Christine is no longer here. When she was here I tried recording there and she kept coming out of her door as she thought I was talking to her. Today it was peaceful. I could have had the cats come through the back sheet and break the world but it was their morning snoozy time so I got away with it, and the upshot is that I’ll be going into a studio before long and recording a short story. It’s a nice idea, pleasant visuals mixed with ASMR. You can watch someone tell you a story. We did that all the time as kids, how could I ever forget Jackanory? Or Mister Davies reading us The Animals of Farthing Wood, or was it Shane? I will enjoy preparing for that, and delivering something lovely. And its work. Doing what I do. Tick.

Then I went and spoke to a lady about a panda.

There’s an artist I collaborate with periodically and she has another bananas idea up her sleeve. We had a coffee and a very good deep conversation and I’m really feeling that we can come up with something satisfying and strange together.

Phonecalls from The Netherlands and Dubai with other old friends and I ended up checking an old friend’s flat – he’s been away a while. Came home with his coffee grinder. I’m going to experiment as I’ve considered getting one for a while now.

In its way it was a full day, with lots of beginnings. I’m happy it went like it did.

But yeah, I’m disproportionatey tired. So I’ll follow the impulse and get myself to sleep early, so long as I can shut my brain up. Maybe a quick blitz of electric blanket to make it cosy…

I went out to Welwyn Garden City, contra flow to all the tube strike traffic thank the lord. Morning found me in an industrial estate, beavering around. There’s a warehouse full of wood and metal. It’s largely pretty decent wood but used. The metal is mostly iron. I’ve been asked to empty the warehouse. Nobody buys scrap iron.

The trick is going to be to find someone who wants this stuff, but as always it is a tight time frame. Moving this stuff is one problem – it is a hellish avalanche of pallets just waiting to happen. It looks like it was slung in there at 2am after a long night loading, with someone half asleep on forks for the unload. You can almost hear them say “ah that’ll fucking do lads,” as they pull the tarpaulin randomly over a small section of it and switch off the floodlights. It has settled there now, this junk. Cobwebs. But … it is gonna have to move, all things have to move eventually. The purpose this had will never again manifest – and if it does somehow, the budget will have to build it all again. There’s no real order to this anyway. It doesn’t feel like it is intended to be rebuilt. It’s an oubliette.

Brian cooked breakfast while I was contemplating all this, early in the morning. “What about bonfires?” he says. He’s got a fucking point.

Tis the season. Various official people across the country might be looking for a load of wood. Failing that, if I can book a venue and organise the permits, it isn’t too late to organise a bonfire with fireworks somewhere, do it nicely, lay on some concessions and entertainment, charge tickets. If anyone knows anyone where that sort of thing could be done legitimately let me know – I’m not here for guerrilla bonfires these days, not now I’m running a burgeoning theatre and haulage empire sideline alongside my job of crying and shouting for money. But I’d have to get the ball rolling immediately to organise and sell in time for November 5th…

So, things to think about. Many many things. There’s an incinerator up the way that burns waste for power. Would they take it and put it back into the grid? There’s a pallet reconditioner… There are many places where things can go back round! One guy says to me “There’s a pikey site up that way where they’ll take almost anything.”

I’m not under time pressure in the same way as the last job like this so I can afford to move towards my company raison d’etre, which is repurposing things nicely that would otherwise be destroyed. A bonfire is a purpose, a destructive act of creation, both purposes met and a house for fire… All I don’t want to do is pay tip weight on perfectly good / perfectly flammable wood. But maybe, just maybe, this is the sort of thing that leads down the line to an established bonfire night somewhere…

All I had to do was drive from mine to Imperial College. It’s about 10 minutes drive. Free parking outside the college for me. Had to be there for 9 so shot and edited a short self tape first, then jumped into Bergman but I forgot that today is one of the regular holidays for London Underground staff.

It’s a great job, working for London Underground. Very much better paid than most jobs like it, and you get these semi-regular holidays (or “strikes”) that sometimes result in being paid even more. The job description is: Do fuck all most of the time and occasionally gawp at someone or push a button. Then sometimes do even more fuck all for a few days and get a pay rise.

Tube Strikes aren’t treated like other protests in this city. If someone sits down on a lawn because they don’t think its a great idea to try and kill literally everyone on a patch of land thousands of miles away, they’ll end up with a criminal record and they’ll be carried by four policemen into a van to go get it. If tube staff stop the whole town working properly so they get even more money pushing buttons for fewer days per week then they usually get more money for their lack of effort.

Occasionally there’s a drunk person shouting. Welcome to London, kids. They’ve got us over a barrel, knowing how much disruption they can cause by not showing up. Imagine if it was air traffic controllers playing this silly crap. Or Nuclear power plant workers.

So yeah, 10 minute drive. I knew within a minute that there was a tube strike, cos suddenly everyone is driving for the first time in ages. Assertive when they don’t need to be, passive when they need to be assertive, closing gaps when gaps need to be left open, causing gridlock and then just sitting there looking helpless and complaining about the gridlock they have caused. I know the rat runs in my area and I know they’re all using Google, and I know what Google tries to make people do so I got to work and back fine. After work though I walked back to The Kings Road, and ended up helping two awkward situations resolve on the way. There was a black cabbie shouting “Salaam aleikum mate you need to fucking reverse,” at an Uber driver with his face switched off who did need to reverse but was pissed off. And there were some terribly well off cheerful useless ladies in a mini cooper convertible that were terrified at having to reverse ten foot. I walked backwards behind them, reassuring them the whole time, “left hand down a bit” “You’ve got a foot and more between you and the bikes”.

I don’t know how many days of this shit we will have to put up with, but they don’t need any more money, they pull this stunt all the time, I’m not on their side here. Tube fares are already so much I just drive and pay for parking. I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure they get paid a whole hell of a lot more than the secondary school teachers whose morning they fucked today, and those teachers earn it – I’ve been into some of those schools and probably worked to teach the kids of some of those London underground staff members and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Workshops once in a blue moon are fine for me. Every day? No. No. No.

There are massive schools in London where you can’t hear anything all day – some smart kids might learn to tune their ears to frequencies and understand a small portion of the lessons, but largely the places are just kettles for the restless between the hours of 9 and 3. And after work those exhausted disillusioned teachers are either gonna have to fight through the traffic, luck into a Lime bike or, I dunno, walk to wherever they’re going, to mark things first and then collapse into shit sleep knowing it’s all happening again tomorrow. I remember Luke worked in one of them and they stole his bike by throwing it over a wall. “Sir, sir, we stole your bike sir,” and they had as well.