AlBarclay

I’m sitting in my car waiting for two people to get to me in an uber. The car is already full of stuff. We will have to put one more tent and more bags in somehow. Then we will drive out to Reading. To an actual festival that is actually happening in the actual world. Medicine Festival.

It is in partnership with the health department people. If the health department is as competent as Education or Culture then the chances are we are all already dead. But I’m hoping it’ll be a pleasant experience. 600 people. Booze free. A field. Some tents. Lots of talking. People with lots of beads and Sanskrit tattoos will be talking slowly with beatific smiles. I’ll be lapping it up, enjoying the fact I can be at a booze and substance free event like this in times of Covid.

Part of me is worried though. Part of me expects to be ushered down narrow channels in the trees by stern men with hazard suits and gas masks. All the hippies conveniently in one place. Corralled into a field where a helicopter drops a gigantic statue of Boris Johnson onto us all.

On the list of things to bring, the first thing is your mask. Will we be sprayed with strange chemicals, injected with trial vaccines? Will we come back with six arms each. Ah. My friends have arrived. Time to drive and find out.

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So far there has been a conspicuous absence of tanks. It has been mostly lots of people dressed in tribal clothes, some earned and more pretended towards. There’s lots of lovely music and it feels very small and intimate. Right now I’m sitting on a log a long way from the fire. There’s enough space here to accommodate many more than the 600 people gathered here.

I’m out on the edge, writing this. I’ve been sitting here a while, listening to the music, looking at the trees, taking it all in. There’s a camp fire burning a short distance from me, that I could go to if I chose. Right now though I choose to sit here. There’s a little bit of my self identity in this space – in the bit between the light of the campfire and the dark of the woods. The liminal space. I often feel it’s here that I am most myself – neither wild nor tame but happy in wildness as in society.

The stars are clear and sharp through the treetops ahead after the clouds opened like a burst bag of soup as I was driving up. Periodically the romance of my placement is shattered by someone coming over to have what they think will be an unobserved piss behind a dark tree. A very pleasant young fellow is telling us that “life is amazing” on the tiny mainstage, accompanied by drums, guitar and a flexible approach to tone. I like him. I think I’ve heard him before at something like this.

I’m very happy to be here. I didn’t think I’d get my festival this year. An important part of my wind down from the unusual stresses and concerns of daily life. This year has been harder than many, but life is bringing me light in many forms.

I suppose it’s time to go back to the campfire and pretend it’s where I belong. Four nights here, and it feels like a peaceful place.

It’s hard to believe that I woke up this morning in Harrogate. “Let’s mission it back to London,” I stated, instead of trying to get breakfast and take it easy as we’d been considering.

It’s a long long way across the country from Harrogate to London. Not in American terms – in American terms it’s a trip to the store. But in UK terms it’s half the fecking country. We chewed up the miles. I’m rather looking forward to a stop now as I’ve been behind the wheel for too many hours this week. One more drive tomorrow morning and I can let the pressure off. I’m glad to have made some momentum though, moving all this random stuff. There’s more to be done, but isn’t there always more to be done? I’ve started doing. That’s the key.

I allowed myself an evening of joy after the drive by getting a ticket to Alice in Wonderland – a virtual theme park – put on by my good friends at Creation Theatre and Big Telly – performed live and audience responsive on Zoom as we did with The Tempest, but bringing in all sorts of other layers of tech and wonder.

What an unmitigated joy of an evening! In terms of form matching content, the conscious playfulness that can be found in the Zoom-theatre medium blends beautifully with the eloquent madness brewed up by Lewis Carroll. There was some gorgeous play, mixed with virtuoso moments of problem solving, turned in by a universally strong and fun company who seemed to be embracing and loving the madness, and enjoying the complicity they have when an audience can see their constraints and enjoy watching them overcoming them live. I watch it and there’s hope.

Having said that, there’s the sniff of an audition in the air for some live theatre! Would you believe it?! Only a few months after aeroplane flights were considered acceptable. Maybe we won’t all have to do monologues at the front of 747’s. And if that IS the only option, then thank God we have the creativity and fun of shows like Alice to stop us all ending up as culturally dead as Oliver Dowden.

Meanwhile I’m trying to pack for three days in a field and so far all I’ve managed is a pair of trousers, a frilly shirt and a hammock.

The British consul to Guayaquil in Ecuador is a man called Colin Armstrong. In 1980 he lived in Yorkshire near Leyburn with plenty of land and plenty of money, lots of ideas, and enough money to make those ideas into strange reality. He and his architect friend geeked out and made a beautiful folly in the garden. The garden stretches out over 600 hectares and has been filled with ridiculous things, but with ridiculous things that fit well into the little fir tree windbreak, blend well with the natural and man made features, and are huge fun to encounter so long as you are sure to regress to a childish state before entry.You enter through a big stone mouth complete with aesophagus and gut. It belches and then poos you out into the labyrinthine garden. There are underground passages including a Mouse World, Hell and a haunted Mausoleum. Above ground there are things that talk at and squirt you or both, involved wood carvings and sculptures with little verses, things of beauty like an Ent made out of trees, and glorious vistas over the dales. It’s all a bit Covid at the moment, with masks on in the underground sections and guards whose job it is to tell you what’s going to happen up ahead. Some doors are held open with cable ties. Some are padlocked shut. We have to be careful while we regress.It’s still stupid fun. So much fun that National Parks tried to shut it down twenty years ago because stupid fun isn’t allowed unless everything has been chopped off and sanded down by grim faced admin junkies who start every sentence with the word “actually”. There was a petition and it still operates with restricted entry. We were very lucky to get in considering we just showed up. There had been a cancellation because it was pouring with rain.

We loved it. And it was perfect. It’s right next to the Saddle Room where we had successfully booked lunch after getting blown back by all the local pubs due to the thronging brought about by Eat Out to Help Out. And it’s just a short drive from Tennant’s where Diane the valuer said: “We can take this all, and what we can’t sell individually we can sell in job lots.” God Bless her and Bless them. The car is empty. Another successful trip to the dales, and my attic is very close to empty.The rest of the rainy day was spent sharing this lovely part of the world with Lou. Despite it having been intended as a day of rest from driving I’ve ended up smashing myself through about four hours in the lashing rain through frequently flooded roads. I’ve driven through lakes today. Some were so deep and long I had to guarantee momentum in case I lost the wheels for a second to floating. “Test the brakes,” I found myself saying out loud after driving through a padding pool or two. The rain here is astronomical, and it seems to be so across Britain. Gods, send the rain to California. Those ancient trees are burning again and I can’t bear to think of it…I’ll just get back to running around in Colin’s folly, and eating gorgeous food in vast portions in God’s Own Country.

Crawling up north, I ask my phone to tell me about beautiful places on the way. It directs me to Conger Hill. We break the journey there and find a little village full of expensive houses and lawyers. We walk through the field where Matilda keeps her horsey. The sky is huge, fishbone, full of promise. Not as much of a walk as we expected though so back to the car and further up north.

The National Trust are mostly closed on Mondays, which arguably constitutes bad planning on my part, but there’s still plenty to gawp at. Especially when you’re so conditioned to city life as I have been. I marvel at fields, stare at thatch, watch swans run howling from swans. A full on swan fight, before they turn companionably back to the reservoir. A lover’s tiff…

We see people as we travel, diverting to Walsall for careful visitation and the spectre of instant coffee granules. We eat cake in the black country and later I eat sausage from the roof of my Nissan. We are mostly on A-roads, and the British countryside flashes past us, festooned with simplistic digital diagrams of masks and billboards telling us how Jesus loves us.

We stop in a verge near some bamboo, momentarily wondering if we are still in England. We stare through a locked gate at a working cocker spaniel. We are.

Coffee happens occasionally and the miles fly by until the grey stone monoliths of Harrogate start to line the roads and my little Nissan chunters into neutral in a little parking space just outside the huge great “Black Lives Matter” banner in the window of my friend’s pad.

Here again, much as we were two weeks ago, but this time examining “What did we do right, what did we do wrong?”

We have a second night so it makes the journey worthwhile outside of dropping the stuff off. We stopped at the same glorious restaurant for supper. I made the appointment half an hour later at Tennant’s. We have already booked for lunch as all the country pubs are packed to bursting because of the cheap food thing from the government. Now I’m lying in this lovely attic room once more, full of food and relaxed and warm. I think it’s time to just throw off the rest of the drive, brush my teeth and sleep long and hard, to dream of swans and bamboo.

Hex has missed me. I’m up with him in Hampstead. Lou is on the sofa with me and parked in the street below is a car that I really don’t want anyone to break into tonight. It’s completely full of stuff. Clocks and busts and porcelain horses and jugs and pictures and luggage and plates. Lots of stuff to do with William Gladstone. Much of it very patriotic. Much of it very beautiful. All of it covered in a thin layer of soot. I found it black. I’ve brought it back to some sort of life. I’m moving it on.

Hampstead is the perfect launch pad to drive to The North, but Hex is very aware we haven’t had any skin time for weeks. I’ve been rushing in to change his water, huck him out or feed him. I haven’t stayed and chilled with him for a while. An extended contact made him excitable and affectionate. Perhaps a little too much so. “Are you ok,” Lou asked as I went silent and my face went red. “Yes,” I squeaked, but his affection and warmthseeking warranted a gentle finger under his strongest part after he had a good accidental go at suffocating me. Royal pythons are the perfect size, as we will always be stronger than they are. It was a very affectionate cuddle. Very very affectionate. I just had to prise him apart and reposition him where the centre of his friendly grip wasn’t my Adam’s apple.

Once he let me breathe again, he wandered around on me for ages snuffling my ear and knocking my glasses off. Now he’s back in his tank just as I’m too tired to stop him hiding in the smallest place be can find – usually a door hinge, under a wheel, in the mechanism of a sofa bed. It doesn’t matter so long as it’ll kill him by mistake. He can’t be let out of sight for his own safety.

I’ll have him out when I’m alert again in the morning for more necky cuddles. Then I’ll take the laden car up to The North for more frolicking in the Nidd Valley.

Things are starting to make sense. I’m still in a transitional place, but it feels like we all are. My agent rang the other day to say that one of my favourite people won’t be coming back to the office in this new version of the world. No turnover… Fuck this virus. I’m finding other ways but I’ve never felt more ready to channel some energy, interpret some humanity through text, share the telling of a living story with other practitioners on a stage for and with an audience that wants to be there.

In the interim I’ll fill the little Nissan with bits and bobs, I’ll drive and teach driving, I’ll read people’s tarot, I’ll sort redecoration, I’ll housesit dogsit catsit and plantsit. I’ll find ways to keep in flow and be ready for nice things when they come to visit.

Standing at the kitchen sink in my gas mask and rubber gloves I’ve been thinking about the past. And about fire. The tranformational power of fire, for better or for worse. What it takes and what it leaves behind.

In my hands have been a selection of large Staffordshire figurines, cracked with heat and totally blacked out with soot. You’d be forgiven for thinking they were irredeemable until you discovered the cleansing power of chlorine and bleach mold spray. Slowly but surely these vast hideous Victorian decorative weirdnesses have been nurtured to a sort of mutant half-life – a state in which they are good enough to sell to someone who wants a load of vast Victorian tut by one of their fireplaces. I’ve pretty much got everything down from my attic, and with the clock ticking on getting it out of the flat, it’s time to stop being picky about absolute identification and cleaning to a high standard. It’s time to throw the lot in boxes, take it up north and tell them they can sell it in a job lot if they have to, just so long as it’s gone from here. They’ve been pulling at me too long, these things I have no real connection to.

Many of them have found new homes one by one. Scarf to Anne-May. Picture to Peter, resin to Emma, a few busts here and there and random gewgaws either given to or smashed by guests. Cows to Sandie. Piano to Gatsby. Plates to Christmas Carol. Scores of scores to Adrian at The Music Hall Theatre and Film Guild. A bunch of stuff to Phil Grainger left in the van. Patterns to Lou. Leopard to the NHM. Quite a lot of it is now in use around my flat for various decorative or ritualistic purposes…

In fact now I think about it I’ve achieved my initial aim of redistribution very well. My first instinct was just to save it from the tip, where it was being hurled by friendly Latvians.

I’ve also come to a much finer understanding of how to assess value across a wide spectrum of antiques. With confident forward progress now I can finish moving it on in less than a month, and get my space back. A year and a half after it came into my possession, sure. But better late than never. It took me time to find ways of taking the soot back, time to find the confidence, even time to find the right auctioneer.

It’s sad though, putting the collected bits of a life into boxes like this. It’s sad to think that this sort of thing will eventually happen to whatever nonsense we’ve accumulated. My altar is covered in things I’ve gathered together over decades that would be meaningless worthless junk to anybody but myself.

 

It’s doubly sad for me because, strewn among the boxes are sealed plastic bags which, when I open then, turn out to be redolent of my mother’s perfume and to be filled with, for instance, her jumpers. My dad’s stuff isn’t here, but here’s bits of mum, reminding me of the fleeting nature of the things – (to steal from my dyslexic friend) – of the things we “take for granite”. I’ll be wearing some lovely jumpers come winter.

The flat is chaos. Tomorrow I’ll load up the car. Then off to North again. It’ll be at least two trips to do the lot though. I’m trying to be organised and ordered about it. And I’m praying Kitcat doesn’t roll in at 3am, as there’s no floorspace left.

My flat resembles one of those crazy bric-a-brac shops you occasionally drive past and think to yourself “I’ll stop and look in that place next time I’m going this way.” Books and icons my dad bought next to huge great still lifes and weird cabinets and card tables. Smoke damaged busts and my mother’s collection of blue and whites and horrible figurines and Dolls and naval bits and bobs.

A lot of it is going to get slung into the boot and driven to the auctioneers on Monday. Not the truly personal things, but a lot of it. I’ll have a little Yorkshire adventure with Lou into the bargain. “Why are you going all the way to Yorkshire for the auctioneer?” asks my agent. Two reasons. 1: Tennant’s is bloody marvelous – a family business, flying at the top of their game right now, smart and friendly and grounded. 2: I love Yorkshire. Bloody love it. Since Sprite wound up I haven’t had the excuse to connect with God’s Own Country so much. And I want to. So I will. And I get to share it with Lou and hopefully see some friends into the bargain.

Meanwhile today instead of loading the car with boxes and trying to clean soot from things of beauty like I should have been, I went visiting.

I had a Friday evening with an old dear friend. She showed me her snails.

During The Tempest in lockdown I asked the audience to show me their pets. I was shown lots of cats and dogs, a hamster, some fluffy toy animals and one bald man. Nobody showed me snails and now I’m disappointed.

Achatina Fulica – The Giant African Land Snail.

They sit on damp peat. There are two of them. The big one is a bully. The small one is oppressed but horny. We’ve all seen that dynamic in our friendship groups. It seems toxic relationships carry through to gastropods, despite them being pretty simple in design. “Stomach-foots” They eat. They move. They poo. And they bang. Like so many of us during lockdown.

While I watch, the big one tries to steal the small ones lettuce and the small one reacts by hopefully obtruding some kind of bizarre proboscis and waving it around. “I think they might be about to have snail sex. It’s disgusting,” is my friend’s assessment of the situation. She puts the lid on and consigns them to the dark from whence they came. But not before googling replacement peat. It’s a bit too damp in there.

They aren’t actually her snails, so she has to look after them extra specially. I promise her a cuttlefish as I grabbed a bunch off the beach last time I was in Jersey. Great for calcium, apparently.

It’s a school thing. She’s got a kid who likes to attack me with Lego, although he’s not home.

The snails are about keeping things alive. Teaching kids to be responsible, on paper. The kid takes the snails home for a week or so, the parents plus kid stop the things from dying, the things are pretty robust, live a good five or six years, and make matters easier by being adept at stopping themselves from dying. They only need to last a week or two before the kid comes proudly back with two living beings and everybody tells them how well they did and their name goes up on the list on the wall with dates and a gold star or whatever. It’s all very American.

They live too long, in my opinion. Give kids a hamster or a goldfish or something else with a short lifespan. The most helpful lesson is the inevitability of death.

This is why I’m not a teacher.

 

To my knowledge, the first time that Tristan got behind the wheel of a car was in Yorkshire.

He drove it straight through a hedge, over the edge of a three foot drop and onto an ornamental lawn. He and Geoff then panicked and attempted to improvise a ramp back out of the lawn using huge great railway sleepers somehow scavenged from the local farm store. Not being in the best state of mind he dropped one on his foot. Heavy fuckers covered in tar and filth. He took a big chunk out of his foot which complicated to blood poisoning that thankfully responded to antibiotics. They got the car out of the lawn using the sleepers propped on the wall. “Nobody will EVER know,” they thought.

They then discovered the next day that they could have just kept going and there would’ve been a gate to escape from. That was fifteen years ago. He had been pumping the clutch as if it was the brake. “I did quite an impressive figure of eight on that lawn,” he tells me with what could almost be pride. “The whole car immediately started stinking of fish. The next day we went over the lawn and tried to put the divots back … They didn’t have the actors back to stay the next year.”

Up until July this year he’s barely driven since. I’ve been the guiding light on this journey towards conduisance. God help us all. Today I took him on an extended lesson, broken up into segments.

“You made this,” he tells me at one point, after a good run of controlled driving. “There’s a long way to go yet,” I reminded him. Half an hour later he was stalling repeatedly while a police car with sirens on farted angrily at him at a turning and his usually calm instructor was growling “just fucking give it some welly” and encouraging him to over-rev in order to guarantee not stalling, which is the sort of behaviour that drove him through a hedge .

On balance though my unusual late starting pupil is beginning to make sense of things. He’s driven too much with me when I’m not teaching so will occasionally grumble eloquent sweary insults at other road users – a habit I’m trying to limit. He also has a tendency to drift over the speed limit which makes me a little nervous of cameras. But I can sense the shift from intellectual to instinctive process. It’ll be a long long time yet. But without my own set of pedals I rarely felt worried and never felt actively unsafe today.

It’s funny to think actively about all the bits and bobs involved in driving a car. The buttons you need to push without looking in order to blow air or open windows or adjust light or clean windows. All that fiddle with your left foot on the clutch that most Americans have never encountered. Feeding the wheel, observations, indicators, blind spots, handbrake. Time at the wheel has made it an embedded process for me that I’m having to pull out and examine in order to teach it. It’ll make me safer I expect, this active thinking about how to communicate the nuts and bolts. It’s always worth looking closely at the things we do without thinking.

Meanwhile it’s a pleasant enough way to pass the time, and I stopped to see my brother and spend some time with his family.

Now I’m getting a beautiful meal cooked for my efforts – one of my favourite Yorkshire things – a Barnsley chop. Those long summers in Yorkshire will stay with me in various ways it seems.

I’m sitting in The Sun Inn, Barnes on my own in the corner with a bottle of Big Drop Alcohol Free IPA. I’m going to stay off the sauce for a while this time, until I start to forget I’m doing it. Right now I’m dreaming of wine because I can’t have any. Until that sort of thing stops it’s worth drawing that line. It doesn’t prevent me from going to the pub on my own on a Wednesday night to drink a placeebeer in company but separate. I occasionally take great pleasure in sitting on my own in a public place. But we all sit so far away from one another nowadays.

Last night as I was getting ready to settle down I realised that there are no books in my friend’s flat. No books! She must have a Kindle. I couldn’t really understand a flat with no books. Confused, I walked from room to room a few times believing somehow that a shelf would magically appear loaded with Murakami, or Cromwell or something. Coffee table books or a pile of Reader’s Digest. Loo books even… I needed something to wind me down towards sleep. I hypnotise myself to sleep by moving my eyes quickly from left to right and back across a page.

I finally resorted to a Juicing Recipe book that my friend uses as a mousemat. I read the introduction and then got stuck into the recipes. That’s how desperate things were. It was godawful prose full of unconsidered wordruns, superlatives and forever the adjectives and adverbs you expect. Most of the book was ghost written around her recipes, but the recipe constructor – a healthy looking photogenic person – had clearly insisted on writing the intro themselves. Now I know a little more about amino acids and digestion from the point of view of somebody who’s selling something.

And I’m annoyed with myself for forgetting that I’ve got two books on the back seat of my car that are both so much better than the jarring words my eyes were dragging themselves over in the closing minutes of my waketime. I could’ve got some literature out of the car in no time. Ach well.

I have benefitted from learning about making juice.

Gordon the barman just told me that my bottle of alcohol free beer is over five quid, which is daylight robbery. If I could just munge up a load of carroty appleginger juiciness like Simon’s stuff the other day then I wouldn’t have had to leave the flat to satisfy my craving for sugary liquid.

Being here is part of the pleasure too though. It’s old school. Stripped rinsed out wooden floors, fairy lights, framed cigarette cards and photographs of slightly famous humans who once existed in this area. Kurt Schwitters, anyone? He lived at 39 Westmoreland Road. He’s on the wall to my left. Maybe he bought a round once.

Closing time at the pub. I’ve had one too many of these expensive booze free beers. Where’s Kurt when you need him? I’m going to stumble sober around the duckpond and take in the night air a bit before going back to a flat that now has two actual books in it, plus an annoying juicing manual. I’ll finish one book, move to the next, and return the juicing manual to its rightful place as a mousemat.

For anyone who might have started thinking of my daily witterings as episodic narrative I am honourbound to tell you that Kitcat emerged safe and satisfied from A&E in very good time. She had a doctor who told her that on no circumstances should the stitch be pulled out. He sterilised it and cut it off at the head, letting the rest just suck gently back in. It will quietly do the job of sitting in her leg pretending like it’s still holding her skin graft together now. Maybe the tectonic movement of her body will eventually push a bit more to the surface in another two decades. But once the hole is closed hopefully there’ll be no more trouble. The only other option would’ve been reopening her leg which is to be avoided at all costs really as it’d be horrible for something so minor. I’m glad it was dealt with quickly before any infection. Hopefully that’s that.

Once we made peace with A&E being the only way, it was a relatively quick experience. Glad it’s still working, the old NHS, propped up by the pain and passion of too many underpaid wonders, limping towards Trump.

Then I went up to Barnes. I’m looking after my friend’s flat overlooking the duck pond. A little further Southwest, and the local Londis has truffle crisps by the counter, a wide selection of different types of liver pate, and gigantic glass bottles of ginger Kombucha next to cucumber shots and craft beers in the fridge. It’s another world down here. Happy looking people in clothing I’m probably supposed to recognise push around the correct number of children in buggies worth more than my little Nissan. Occasionally they stop at Londis for raw superfood balls and matcha. This is Londis! Anywhere else you go to Londis for Fray Bentos and they charge you for using your card and glare at you balefully throughout the exchange. It’s so very middle class here.

Not that I can talk. I’m at Rick Stein’s. “Do you always come on your own?” asks the maitre d’hotel, proving his worth with just 7 words. I came last week and had the cheapest things on the menu. This time I’m back for the second cheapest. I might even do it once more next week. Being alcohol free has its advantages. I’d normally end up spending more than I’m paying for the whole meal on a single glass of red.

August is always the slowest month unless you’re at Edinburgh. But you often pick up a little commercial here or a spot of telly there. I’m really hoping that things start to roll in soon to help support this expensive fish habit I appear to be developing.

Note the weird plastic bag. All the cutlery comes sealed in one of them. Another layer of misery for the unfortunates who are in the kitchen somewhere polishing them all.

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