AlBarclay

This morning I got a survey from my NHS practice, asking what I thought about triage only over the internet going forward. I said I worried that having that as the only option would mean that many serious things slip through the cracks because somebody’s following a checklist. It took me months of shouting to fix something that Vodafone had done by mistake because I could only get through to the call centre in Alexandria and it wasn’t on their checklist. A checklist rarely works in practice but frequently works in theory. This is life and death, not a phone contract.

On the radio this morning I listened to lots of people who haven’t been able to have medical things looked at in time, to their cost in terms of peace of mind or even months to live. Home visits are off the table. There’s barely enough funding to keep Nye’s dream alive as it is. It’s the death of a thousand cuts.

Then I heard Dominic’s blonde sockpuppet still taking to the nation as if he’s Captain of cricket jollying up the team before the big match with Brambletye. But buried in that familiar bumble is the sting. It’s only going to get worse. This frame is so much more convenient than terrorism was for curtailing liberties. We haven’t heard a peep about ISIS. When the dust settles – and I’m beginning to think it’s measurable in years – we will all look down and realise our legs have been chained together while we weren’t watching.

I’m starting to realise that this pandemic and the fallout is a big part of how this era will be remembered by posterity. They’ll talk about the economy and social damage and isolation and shrinking humanity from whatever dystopic viewpoint wins – it looks like America is preparing for civil war, and the UK is just crumbling and sinking under its weight of self importance. They’ll talk about the things that started, the things that grew and the things that dwindled and died.

They won’t talk about how Al had to stick his nose and mouth into the crotch of a dirty pair of longjohns and tie the legs behind his head because he forgot his mask again and needed to buy stamps. It’ll be the end of institutions that will be remembered. Big companies, ways of thinking. Things are tumbling. They might not all tumble bad. But it’s gonna take a while to settle. I want to take a year off and crew a tall ship. Seriously. I’ve had enough of this.

I’m going to an audition soon. They’ll take my temperature and I’ll fill in all sorts of forms. The result will be that I get to participate in a small workshop that might lead to some acting work down the line, and a year in London. It’s Brian again, with his Superman T-shirt on, trying to singlehandedly restart an industry that’s on its knees. More power to him. We need positive news. I’m almost in despair for the future of the world so I’ll see if I can bury myself in community and weird story for 365 days or so. It’ll almost be like a tall ship. Still lots of wind, rigging and sailors. Fewer sharks.

God I need a proper holiday though. I want an adventure. A helpful friend says “Why not find an adventure in England,” but I do that every week if I can so it’s not an adventure anymore.

I want to be surrounded by people I can’t understand, eating something unrecognisable in relentless sunshine with a back aching from loadbearing. I want to look out over unfamiliar peaks covered in dust with a bandanna tied around my head, worn out boots, and a donkey carrying my bed. I want to have so many mosquitos on every inch of exposed flesh that I’m past caring while the guy with the machete realises he’s lost with only an hour to sundown and we’ve pretty much drunk all the water.

I don’t want to go for soggy egg and chips and a rainy walk to see all the Macdonald’s wrappers and hate.

Mel just sent me a photo. She’s at the start of a 3000km walk in New Zealand. “Fancy it?” she sends me. YES! That’s a leisurely 120 days of walking. That’ll do. Dammit.

Lou fixed my jeans for my birthday.

Six years ago, in Austin Texas, I got giddy. I bought myself some bootcut jeans, some bright red cowboy boots and a stetson. Jack thought I was a real cowboy for a moment. They really do dress like that in Austin.

I still have the boots. I’ve worn them twice in Texas and once in London – (I looked a tit, it rained into them, and I got a blister). I loved the stetson though, but left it at some actor’s house over the course of a very busy New Year’s Eve. I have no clue which actor, but the house was almost certainly in Stokey. As for the jeans? I wore them out. I ran the pockets through with keys and phones and pens and bits. When I took them in to the local seamster to fix I got quoted £50 a pocket, so they’ve been on my shelf for years, unwearable without pockets as I’ll lose my keys and break my phone.

Lou got wind of this. She fixed them for my birthday. Then she tells me she doesn’t like them. That’s a labour of birthday love. I have the jeans back but I am going to be leery of wearing them around her. My instinct might have been to wear them every time I see her specially in honour of her fixing them, so it’s smart of her to break the news that they aren’t her favourite. A more ruthless person would have told me they were impossible to mend and have thrown them out.

“What sort of clothes do you like?” she goes on to ask me, and it makes me feel momentarily self conscious as it’s one of those things I know I’m supposed to have an answer to. I’ve occasionally been marched down the shops by people. I was a talking Ken doll for a few years, and about as much use in that particular relationship – but I looked great. My own taste in clothes is haphazard. They keep me warm. Usually.

I think back to my first girlfriend. The first time I saw her she was in a white summer dress in a garden and I fell for her. Textbook. But I was a teenager at an all boys school. “I like dresses,” I find my mouth saying. Then I add “people can wear what the fuck they like, though.”

I find myself thinking that usually I notice breath use, gesture, eye contact quality, and gait before I notice clothing. I’m more interested in the things that are less likely to be curated as they can lead to a quicker truth than the bits we throw over our skin. Not just for research although that’s part of it. Also just plain humanity.

I’m wearing my newly cancelled jeans as I write. I’ve been wearing them every day since my birthday, but not because I love them. Because they’re there and the pockets work. But it’s got me thinking about my wardrobe. I’ve got too much stuff now and I’ll be moving out of here before long. Maybe I should be ruthless and Marie Kondo it. Problem for Lou is that these jeans will spark joy, perhaps more so now because she fixed them. And that’s my only measure really – joy.

Nonetheless I won’t be wearing them to the audition tomorrow.

It’s cold in Hampstead and since I’m just snakesitting for Mel, I’m not about to put the heating on. So I’m wrapped up in jumpers having herbal tea and, for the first time in a while, wishing that I was having a good long glass of fine dry red wine. A Chateauneuf perhaps. Which I shall drink python-scarved as I watch the city darken from the hill. Tea will have to do.

I’ve been happy bear and murdery panda and sexy cat all day again. There’s nothing like being cheerful to lighten the mood. And my mood needed lightening. I woke up under the weather.

You know that yearning feeling? I had that. I kept on saying “oh I just wish …” before realising that there was nothing specific that I wished for. I was experiencing a feeling of huge absence. I wasn’t really yearning for anything specific. But I was yearning for it desperately as the rain battered down. Yearning as the wind over the river crashed into the windows and forced flurries through the gaps and into my garret. Yearning as the absence of Proserpine started to make its impact felt in this world.

Perhaps partly it was indeed a yearning for the spring. Partly too for a world less cruel, less smug, less fearful, less righteous, less aggrieved. A kinder world. Also in there, a yearning for those who have gone. A yearning to be free of money worries. All these huge yearnings, all wrapped up in the cold, all packed into my busy head.

So I put another head on. Three other heads. And I danced and sprawled and played with strangers and it was lovely and I can remember the yearning now as the dark closes in, but it no longer lives in my gut.

But I’m feeling spent. Worked out. Tired out. Ready for bed. So I’ll play with this friendly snake for a little while and then just put the light out and hope for better weather on the morrow.

Addendum: I was so knackered I forgot to schedule.

The costume and dressing does a lot of the work for us. We just get to have little cute interactions. It’s better in the daytime, as we can actually see who is on the other side of the glass, through the gauze hole in the nostrils or in the neck.

Perhaps it’s the strip lights and the fact that you have to contort your body to make the head sit right. Perhaps it’s the constant movement and back and forth with strangers and moving around in s confined space. I feel tall and ungainly next to my partner in this who is smaller and younger and fitter than me. And now I’m home I’m knackered.

I’ve got three heads. First is Brown Bear. If he’s on straight I’m blind unless I stuff two pencil cases in the top and then I can see with peripheral vision, but I’ll overheat quickly. Brown bear appears to make an annoying enthusiastic squeaking noise and dances. He’s exhausting. Second is Sad Panda. He’s a bit scary. He’s slower than the bear and seems to growl rather like some idiot actor trying to imitate a Panda. He gets things wrong, holds signs upside down, and is addicted to caramel milk. He’ll likely wave or be fascinated by you. You can cheer him up for a moment but then he’s sad again. Then there’s Sexy Cat. You’re lucky to have sexy cat. Worship sexy cat. Maybe you’ll get a wave. Most likely a scratch. Often you’ll have to wait, particularly if there’s ice cream. “He’s practiced that cat noise,” someone says. I guess I have too… This is my JOB. Or part of it anyway.

I have no idea what the Business Secretary meant when he said that people like me need to get qualifications and get a better job. What a grey world they want to carve. The thing you might be surprised about is that I’m loving this work AND it is cheering lots of people up.

Not only do I have the qualifications, but this ridiculous random piece of work is a sheer delight and is bringing much needed smileage into a world in dark times. I am grinning underneath my unwieldy headpiece for most of the time I’m there, and it’s very rare that someone notices us and doesn’t grin back or wave.

Our window is very small though. Throughout the day we would see people rushing past, full of the thinkings of the moment – perhaps scowling into a phone or maybe lost in distant thoughtplaces. They pass by inches from us without ever knowing we are in the window with the sole mission of doling out unexpected momentary joy. My partner in crime observed it this morning: “It’s a reminder that we need to look for the joy or we don’t find the joy.” She’s so right.

My pride could get involved and scupper my joy here. It isn’t and it won’t. I’m happy to blog about it. It’s actually hard work in those masks despite the fun, and there’s a skill in maintaining things and interacting which I know well over years of street happenings and audience responsive work. I’m glad I can make a fleeting moment of simple stupid joy right now.

But right now I’m getting in the bath to wash the fluff off.

Remember when everybody on the internet started throwing buckets of ice on themselves and then nominating you? That was for ALS. Motor Neuron Disease. It’s a bugger. And it can kill quickly. Another of these desperate side effects of knowing next to sod all about the brain. One thing that has been observed in the treatment of this condition is that the state of mind of the patient can have an effect on the speed of degeneration. So it becomes about finding ways to stay happy.

The artist I’ve been working with today lost her husband to it. While he was suffering, she was making ridiculous and beautiful installations in their home using great big mascot heads and balloons and anything that struck her as fun – just to cheer him up, and thus to prolong his life. Now, at this moment while the world is in the clutch of fears both nameless and well known, she has found a way to brighten up a tiny patch of London for anyone who happens to be passing a particular window, in the same way she brightened up a hard time for both of them as he was slowly taken.

It’s Mayfair Art Weekend. Almost directly opposite Claridges, on Brook Street – that’s where the window is. It’s brightly lit by striplights, and this evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday evening you’ll find me standing with a friend in the window. Or sitting. Or crouching. Or lying. Or attempting to ride an inflatable horse.

I’ll be wearing fashionable clothes, brand new Nike trainers, and one of a selection of great big animal heads. I’ll be rolling on inflatables, or holding up messages, or bothering inflatable animals, or preening myself, or dancing. I’ll be trying to see anyone who stops and looks in the window, and to respond to them, although observers have the advantage of me. My visibility is awful through the mask and dwindles with the light until I just have to guess what the owner of the moving white thing might be doing.

By the end of my first shift on Friday night I was knackered from squinting but happy to be back doing what I do best – something completely random and high energy. This whole business of saying “Yes” first and then asking the details – it occasionally gets me into trouble, but it also brings great joy. This is one of the joyous ones, particularly coming at this time, when the whole world is reeling and employment is as hard to find as joy. I get both. Lucky me.

I knew I was in the right place for me when I arrived at a very big formal looking building in the heart of Mayfair and saw some people throwing an inflatable blue tyrannosaurus out of the window…

It’s 10am and the sun is glorious. I’m in Cardiff, sitting outside Bill’s.

Apart from getting back to London, my work here is done. I had to drop bits of tardis off at the Dream Factory. This involves multiple levels of security, general open suspicion, muted hostility and a bit of carrying. Wearing my gas mask and my chauffeur’s hat I felt as if I was radioactive. Wales is pretty much in lockdown with more to come into force this evening. I wasn’t even sure I was going to get over the Severn successfully based on all you hear in the news. But then the news is mostly utter catshit.

As I drove here through the dawn I was listening to Radio 4 and observing how the daily news is generated. Get somebody on the early show, repeatedly ask them a leading question that fits an agenda, ignore everything but their polite attempt to engage with the stupid question, then roll out that response as news and get people to angrily react to it. Listener reaction is a quantifiable guage of popularity. Outrage is easy to stimulate. Boom, the day ticks over.

Problem is, even though we all know that news isn’t, we still have to get our information from somewhere. Some of our current crop of demagogues are waging war with “mainstream news” because it still occasionally tries to show us how most of the familiar world leaders are walking around with their pants down. The little sites that have set themselves up as legitimate alternative “news” outlets often try to do it in the frame of whistle blowers – “don’t trust the mainstream media!” they encourage you to crow smugly. “We know what’s really going on!” But they can’t be trusted either because the model is the same. Focus on one shaky premise, explode it from every angle, get clicks. And behind a screen in silicon valley is yesterday’s teenager, grinning to himself over his high end skunk as he notices the number of shares go into the millions for the latest iteration of the scary story he made up in his granny’s basement while he was mining bitcoin.

At the heart of it is always the sense that it’s just about to happen. We’ve had decades of things just about to happen that won’t. Today it’s putting asylum seekers into old ferries and creating some sort of floating shanty town. It’s a shift from the gold standard as the basis of currency. It’s fishing rights and zoos. It’s revolution just coming.

Yesterday we all had to stay home for fear of terrorism. Now we stay home for fear of Covid. Presumably the terrorists are staying home too.

As long as there’s something we are made to sacrifice liberty for, then there’s something we can be told has been generated from within to keep us down. Bush vs Osama. Chinese Bats vs American scientists.

Meanwhile the autumn sun is glorious. I’ve got it on my face. I’ve just had a beautiful drive and I have no answers – no more than anyone else really does no matter how convincing (or convinced) they sound. I’m gonna turn around and smash back to London posthaste, and next time I come to this part of the world hopefully it’ll be in kinder times and I’ll be off to do a spot of filming.

Be kind out there. Treat each other well. This too shall pass. I hope.

Hop out of bed in Brighton at half six and into the car. Hard drive back to London and almost as far as home before stationary traffic South of Wandsworth Bridge tells me I’ll never make it to the dentist on time if I go home first. Reoroute and pay congestion charge. Off to the dentist – Ego Dental Clinic. No drilling but a filling. The last version came out stuck to some food two days ago. Tasted kind of nice. Lead and mercury. Yum. Oh to be young again.

Coated from head to foot in sterile plastic and having filled in a form in so much detail that I’ve learnt something about myself, I finally lie on the seat of horror.

Squidge squodge scrape scrape and that’s a dentist with over £150 in his pocket before 10 in the morning. I’ll be driving 8 hours tomorrow for less than he made in 20 minutes. Still, at least I won’t be in pain from my tooth, but we need a more permanent solution before too long. The dentist wants to crown them because then he can buy another house, but money money oh money money you elusive little vixen you, I will tempt you to come and play with me for good, but right now I’ve got to pay all my service charge and council tax and bills with a wounded industry and nobody renting the spare room until I can get some work done on it. Fuck. Real life is hard, even when you have lots of nice things already. I am so glad I’ve got a high level of basic privilege. Even then it’s worrying.

But I will find a way to crown my damn teeth with GOLD.

Home from the dentist, build greenscreen – getting good at it now. Do some acting. Book a job driving to Cardiff. Am I even allowed to drive to Cardiff? The van is booked so I’ll find out tomorrow when I get arrested on the Severn Bridge. Drive to Bond Street. See Brian briefly. Get laughed at. Smile with my newly fixed teeth. Realise they’re invisible behind the only mask I own that’s too big for me to easily lose.

Contemplate a bath. Decide against it as it’s full of smoke damaged busts again and I’ll need to scrub them as I remove them. Set alarm for 5am and cook Paella. Write blog. Fall asleep. Dream. Win the lottery.

This feels like it used to. I’ve got loads to do at home, but the next few days are going to be a slew of semi-random little varied jobs either being creative or being run off my feet or driving or carrying things. Right now it’s not ten and I’m gonna have camomile tea and fall over. Happy October. White Rabbits and all that.

Lou gave me a mushroom knife for my birthday. Good present! It’s a little curved wooden number, very sharp, locks itself, has a tiny brush on the end. “Careful,” says John. “That might not be legal. You don’t want to get in trouble.”

A blade that locks itself and is over three inches long is illegal in the UK. We carefully measured it. It’s 2.8 inches. I was relieved to find out my little mycological geektool is legal.

I didn’t have it with me as I loaded a 30 inch sword and a 22 inch stiletto into my car today and blithely drove across the country. Thankfully nobody stopped me. It could’ve been tricky if they had, as the car is never one to instil confidence in the stable mental state of the owner. The temporary cardboard numberplate hasn’t washed off yet, although raindrops have made it look like art department have distressed it for use in a horror movie. The heatshield rattle is back in low gear, and the spring bangs loudly if you turn the wheel more than 45 degrees. The engine still runs marvellously. It’s just everything else that’s fucked.

Add to that the fact that I now have a new toy… “That’s how we get you,” I was told with a smile. I was watching an automobilia auction a few weeks ago and I got giddy and bought myself a vintage Rolls Royce chauffeur’s hat. It’s bloody marvelous. It’ll live in whatever car I’m driving as a statement of intent that one day I’ll have a car that fits the hat.

Meantime I might do one more shuttle to Yorkshire if there’s time and the things, but right now the idea gives me the chills. I’m done with driving for now. Another fucking 14 hour 500 mile round trip over two days. It’s still beautiful in Yorkshire, but I’m not sure it’s the most practical solution to use Tennant’s, especially since half of the car today was filled with a table that will likely not even cover the price of petrol. Bums.

I’m in Brighton again now. Calm by the sea. Tasty food incoming through the magic of Lou. Time out. Gonna relax. Up at 6 tomorrow to get back to London in time for dental hijinks. Oh the joy.

The road to Yorkshire is thick with the past now, mostly built up over a decade of summer Shakespeare at Sprite. Parts of the A1 will always have colorful memories attached to colorful times.

Late night midsummer post show rushing to London for an audition and I’m breathalysed at 4 in the morning 7 months into a sober year. “When did you have your last drink, sir?” “December the twenty third, officer.” “Blow into this tube please.”

Many a meal in many an OK Diner and they were ok. That angry hitchhiker and he wasn’t. Phil and I convinced we wouldn’t get back in time for the show while playing Daft Punk and driving at 100mph every time he stopped looking at the speedometer. Quiz time with Jack. Guess the song with Phoebe as we sailed into London with the dawn. Fiercely competitive games of HORSE with Jo…

Now I’m yo-yoing up and down to Tennants trying to excavate my flat, accompanied brilliantly by Lou, sharing time and this part of the world with her.

This time the car is not overloaded. A table and some bits and bobs really. Nothing much compared to some trips.

I need to collect things and bring them back though, which is part of the deal. Some of my lots didn’t sell. Now I can keep them happily in the knowledge that they aren’t worth loads so it won’t matter when I kick the shelves down in the night by mistake. And until then, they’ll bring a smile to my face.

Meanwhile Lou and I get to experience the sleepy and not so sleepy towns between London and Leyburn.

Today we stopped in Northamptonshire and ate at a little pub by the canal – they were extending the eat out to help out scheme into September – and quite right as well considering I only got about 4 tortellini. Fifty percent of the food for fifty percent of the price. I can say with certainty that I won’t be going back there, because I can’t remember where the hell it was anyway and I only found it when I got hangry and shouted at my phone “show me good pubs to eat at near me”.

We arrived in Harrogate for evening, and as has become traditional, we went for dinner with our host. A fucking wonderful curry from Cardamom Black. If you’re anywhere near Harrogate it’s worth the drive. And I’m counting New Zealand in that. Yum.

I’m writing this in post prandial torpor, sitting on the floor of our little attic room. I have a feeling movement is about to get restricted again so I’m rushing this trip so I can keep up my side of the relationship with Tennant’s Auctioneers. I have a feeling this will continue to develop into a fruitful and long standing partnership. Plus it’s a good excuse to regularly get to Yorkshire. I do love it here.

Aware that the rules are changing about movement every three and a half minutes, I’ve taken a risk anyway and packed up another car load to go to Yorkshire. Then, in a great illustration of my disordered brain and my atrocious geography, I’ve driven it all to Brighton so I can hang out with Lou. I’ve just arrived. She’s sewing a costume for an actor friend of mine to be gainfully employed whilst wearing it. It’s a bit more fiddly than she expected so I thought I’d write while she works.

The flat is empty of tenants at last – a situation that can’t last long, but one that’s considerably preferable to having a tenant with a flexible approach to payment. I’m trying to work out what I can usefully do with the room while it’s empty. There’s some work that has to be done by others, some work I can do myself and some work that can just be ignored for now. I need to be quick about deciding what’s what and about getting it all done so I can start to tick over again. Service charge has just been put up because everybody else in my block is a millionaire and thinks that a few hundred quid more per month is peanuts, plus they love scaffolding even though every fucking time they put it up I tell them my flat leaks and they tell me they’ll solve it and don’t.

Glad of a little bit of weird work from the artist, but I’m determined to try and get ahead of myself at last and stop this decades long flirtation with the sharp end of my overdraft limit.

So I’ll be up to Yorkshire again tomorrow so long as Dominic Cummings doesn’t decide that he’s the only person allowed to drive to Yorkshire these days. This time it’s larger items. Bits of furniture and so forth. And it’ll be slightly rushed as Lou has to be back in Brighton on Tuesday evening, and I’ve got to be doing random stuff in my greenscreen next week anyway.

This really hasn’t felt like a weekend. My days of the week are cancelled. I haven’t even got the habitual drunken Friday and Saturday leading to sleepy Sunday. Every day is … just another day trying to work out how the hell I’m going to keep butter on the parsnips. Decades of hard work, sacrifice and refining our skillsets has been designated “unskilled” by the chancellor because when he does acting he does it without skill. It’s like thinking a doctor has no skill because you can lance your partner’s boils, and you quite enjoy it when you do.

It’s very chilled out here though in this lovely familiar cluttery home by the sea. The sea always takes the weight off and brings me back to myself. This place makes me miss The Isle of Man. It might be time to go back there for a while soon. For now, though, it’s making sense of my uncharacteristically empty flat.