AlBarclay

Sometimes it’s good to just stop. I think of all the times before this happened where I wished I could do what I’ve been doing for the last few months. Just to stop and let go of the reins for a little bit. Go to bed without setting an alarm. Wake up and not think about what to wear. I was doing a great job of relaxing on a Saturday when I was reminded that I’ve only got two days to register for the self-employed grant. That put the wind up me.

I put in my details and apparently I’m eligible but I can’t log into government gateway and all the lines are down until Monday. Why in God’s name is the deadline just after a weekend? On Monday morning every self employed person in the UK is going to be calling the hotline to try and solve one of the many varied issues. There’ll probably be about three people on the hotline and the system will go down immediately. There will be many scenes of many hysterical actors having fits of rage and panic attacks at the obfuscation of the HMRC systems. It’ll be quite something.

So right now I’m just going to take the pressure off, calmly assemble all the information I’m going to need in front of me if I get through over the course of Sunday, do some practice runs and then set an alarm for Monday, make a cup of coffee and itchyfinger the hotline the moment it opens. Despite The Tempest I’m going to need this to sustain the coming months while things maybe start to move again but too slowly. It would be madness not to do everything I can possibly do to secure what little I can from this collation of my returns over the last three years. It’s a generous thing and I’m glad of it. If only I can log in.

Today I just consumed things. I did eat the mussels, mindfully, one by one, rejecting them on the most arbitrary terms. Seems they were okay as I’d be shouting the sea by now if they hadn’t been. And that was basically the highlight of my day. I barely saw the sun, only remembering to get outside as it was setting. Now it’s somehow 2.30 in the morning and I stopped reading because I remembered I have to make some thoughts before I slip into oblivion.

That’s the problem with lack of structure. Time, which is unreliable anyway these days – it loses even more meaning when there’s no concrete plan. I often seem to define myself by the things I’ve decided I have to do. But I’ve always been better at motivating myself for the benefit of others. It’s helpful to parent myself in this slowtime. Perhaps we’ll look back on it with a strange fondness. It’s a similar vibe to those hazy days of childhood, only the voice that tells me I’ve got to get out of the house or tidy my room or have some food – that’s now my own voice.

Thank God I don’t have kids. You guys are warriors. Things would be very different with them. I definitely wouldn’t be up at this time unless it was because I’d been woken…

TS Eliot was right. April was the cruelest month this year. It did something to time, from my angle. I could do a million things and then look at the clock and just an hour had passed. Somehow while everybody was shut in hard and unknowing, quantum made us all feel like it was going on for lifetimes. We have all aged. Have we grown wiser?

Now it’s May and the air is lighter, and time is suddenly shooting by. I bought 4 packets of mussels that expire tomorrow. I’m not sure I’m capable of eating them all in a day, but a moment over the expiry date is too long as far as mussels are concerned. How the hell was it the 16th so quickly dammit? That was forever away. I’m eating too little. But I always forget to eat.

Eating them late will probably help me slow time down again I guess. Some of the longest nights of my life were given to me by bad shellfish. I still go back to them, like you go back to an abusive partner. “Yes I thought I was going to die on the stone floor of that convent in Carrion de los Condos after clam spaghetti, but it was so very very tasty…”

Thinking about it I’m going against my own island boy rules by even buying shellfish when there isn’t an “r” in the month. Watch this space. I’ll either have a one man dodgy-mussel party tomorrow and see what happens, or I’ll quietly guiltily dispose of them and say no more about it. I hate the waste. But I doubt there are many homes where the kid is shouting “mummy why can’t we have some mussels!”

I crossed the Albert Bridge this evening at sunset. I went to the park tonight at along with everybody else in two boroughs.

Sat on a hill near to where we all sat for my birthday maybe two years ago. As the sun went down a little urban squirrel came close to hoover up some dropped nuts. A small and agile grey, with a shredded tail and what looked like long-healed claw marks in his side. Still brave and cheeky despite the wounds he carries so visibly. He watched me as he ate, but didn’t flinch when I shifted my weight. Experience has taught him he can be faster than something like me.

We have all taken a hit. Now it’s about how we recalibrate ourselves as time finds an equilibrium again. How are we going to move forward now if we feel that this thing has taken a chunk out of us?

I’ll take a hint from that squirrel. When the time comes I’ll be out looking for nuts… But May is rushing through to June. Wilderness Festival is finally officially cancelled today. That would have been ten consecutive years of my life doing lovely things in an August field in Oxford. Let The Light In was cancelled a while ago. I would have been leading some interesting sessions about science and philosophy via oranges alongside some Dutch artist collaborators I’ve picked up over the years. We thought about transferring the work to zoom, but even that’s unlikely now. Is summer cancelled? I’d best to gather some nuts now rather than wait for the right time…

My evening walk took me past the fire station, half of which is occupied by guardians now. One of them was out on the street with his kit painting positive murals on the hoardings. “Stay safe, stay loving” … I’m wondering if the final one is going to be “Stay home” or “stay alert”.

Around the station every lamp and tree has had encouraging laminated signs tagged onto it. “Go the Emergency Services!” Billboards are trumpeting “Yay the NHS” instead of “Buy Bill’s Best Beans!” Despite this change of focus, walking down the stairs in my block involves navigating through pile after pile of parcels dropped off by the Amazon guy who always somehow manages to get right to your door – unlike the Hermes guy who sets fire to your package and throws it in the river.

With the child drawn rainbows in the front room and all the people clapping through the window once a week, we are getting very good at this remote enthusiasm business. Remote enthusiasm and remote shopping and remote intimacy.

“Imagine I’m running towards you now,” my friend says on the phone just now. I’m jumping up – catch me. I’m giving you a great big hug! Mmmmmm.” And somehow a tiny tiny portion of the endorphins that the real contact would release are released. But it’s like watching a video of a flower blooming. There’s nothing like the real thing.

I once had someone send me a couple of sexy photos when I was abroad and she was home. Frankly it mostly made me feel a bit weird, like I was missing out on something. Objectively they were attractive shots, but the camera loses more than it adds. Look at how every single “influencer” is just an empty frame animated by rage and make-up.

I couldn’t send sexy photos back to her because I don’t really find any bits of me sexy and there’s no way on God’s green earth anyone is getting a photo of THAT part of my anatomy no no no. No substitute for the real thing. But we have to try…

Once again I’m in a zoom room with creatives trying to work out how we can bring life to a Shakespeare script and send it out into the world in a shape we can be proud of. This time it’s the wonderful Factory family and we are looking at Loves Labours Lost. It’s not one I’m certain about so I’m looking forward to finding a way through it with them. Normally we would do it from cue scripts in a beautiful theatre made out of a living willow in Wales. Last time I went there I broke my rib falling out of a tree so it’s probably best for everybody involved that this time I’m doing it from the safety of my own living room, playing with all my new bright green playthings. We might not have use for any of it – there’s precious little magic in LLL and The Factory is all about the text at heart.

But I’m sure we will find what magic or anarchy we can find… And it’s dear friends, making things. Again. Lucky me.

There’s a sheltered housing across the road from me. Chelsea Court. My mother’s ex boyfriend lives there these days. I sometimes see him, tousled and with his shock of hair, a “More” menthol cigarette perpetually in his mouth like Lucky Luke’s cheroot. I try to make conversation with him from time to time but there’s less and less I can talk with him about. His conversation to me is and always has been about his achievements. I like to force people to pull back the curtain and show me the picture. He won’t do that and I’ve never really been able to see him. Just the projection, which bores me and tires him. So we can’t hang out.

He probably felt some duty to be an example to me, as mum’s last lover. That just made him talk about his achievements every time we spoke. He was a very useful warning, especially in this industry which is all about story and positioning. “How not to do it.” Even as a fifteen year old my friends would make up bands in order to see him tell us he knew their manager. “Keithbaiting,” we called it, as unpleasant teenagers. Cameron was a master at making up bands. Keith would always tell us he could introduce us to them.

He was and is a very charming fantasist who was there every step of mum’s wet death and was certainly in the best position to try and help her stop it but didn’t. Again I don’t blame him but it’s in my head.

When she died he almost immediately glommed onto another attractive woman with property who again died shortly after. Once more, in my head. No more.

Mum was only 55 when she went too quickly. I always wonder if we could have done things better for her if we’d found a way to do it together. I was just a kid, really, swamped in it, impressed by his grown-upness. Willing to accept his words and thoughts as wisdom, rather than as suspect utterances. He was parental generation, I was still in kid generation in my self-identity.

Now I’m not. Now he bores me and I feel guilty as he’s getting older and frailer, and he lives just over the road. I once offered to ghost write his memoirs as a means of reconciling – (and because he’s a good storyteller and his version of the truth will be a good story.) He blew me out of the water, lip curling at the very thought of it being me. “No! God no. I need an actual writer!” . Fuck it. He can die waiting for Ian McEwan. With that comment and the attitude beneath it he lost the last of me. Out.

The fire service is linked to the smoke alarm in his block, which is what got me thinking of it today as I curtain-twitch through lockdown. We are close to the Chelsea Fire Station, and I know for certain that the guys at the station are fed up of being called out every time somebody cooks a steak.

Four engines showed up tonight, all sirens and lights, as they do perhaps twice a month on average. They go in hard every time, and then reverse out with demonstrated difficulty. It’s their way of suggesting that Chelsea Court ease back on the instant call to the fire service through the smoke alarms. Problem is, as soon as they do so Keith will fall asleep with a More menthol in his mouth.

I haven’t seen him for a month or so.

I hope he’s alright…

Somebody jumped in the river today at Westminster Bridge, on the inward tide. With centuries of experience, the police and the fire service came immediately howling downstream past my flat. They knew that this arterial urban waterway floods hard and pulls under harder. I guess at the start they were hoping they might be able to find them in time to pluck them out alive if they popped up. Loads of fire engines zoomed up to Albert Bridge. Plenty of cars. A miniature flotilla of boats. One great big chopper.

The chopper chose to hover just outside my bedroom window for a fair while and a good few patrol cars stopped outside my flat as well. It was all very dramatic. Tall men and women with sidearms and so many pockets came and peered over the river wall. Within minutes the wall was lined with people who had stopped their cars out of curiosity.

The chopper hovered above, side door open, fire service ready with abseil ropes as crowds gathered quicker than you’d imagine.

Staying alert, (!) I briefly cross the road and ask what the hell is going on.

“Somebody in the river off of Westminster Bridge,” I am told, freely, by a beaming cop in a hat who stands six foot five and looks like a stick man made out of runner beans. My interest wanes pretty quickly after that.

All these people are looking for a body. Last time there were this many people it was a humpback whale – much less common. At least they did their utmost to get the person out alive. I don’t think they managed though. The river’s a bastard. It wasn’t long before they all went home and the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had formed.

These trying times. Nothing is certain. Nothing is clear. We can know the waterway but we can’t find the body. We understand this tiny little pathogen but we can’t stop it. It’s all wrapped up in politics as well. Preventable deaths? Expendable people? Money over humanity or humanity over money? Control over freedom or freedom over control?

I’m learning the wires in my flat, and in so doing learning the wires in my brain. When am I stymied by fear? When am I overconfident? For me, despite being a financial disaster this lockdown is helping me have the time to look at my immediate surroundings instead of SHINY SHINY SHINY!

But for somebody on the bridge today, the wires were crossed. It’s back to the thing I was thinking last week. We are all experiencing the symptoms of depression without the illness. Reduced contact with others, prolonged amount of time indoors, social interactions codified in incomprehensible and tedious ways. Anyone who remembers the shape of the black dog might start to think they see it again there, in the shadows. We have to remember that this is not the same thing. We can hibernate. Learn wires. Tidy up. Write. Think. Or even just take the fucking pressure off, relax, do fuck all and trust in the universe.

Just don’t jump off a fucking bridge. If it’s that bad, come knock on my door. I’ve just made the most ridiculously rich carbonara. Oh, you’re vegan. Have some whisky. Teetotal? I’ll find something.

It was just a single plug socket. I thought it would be easy. As I was taking it off I took this shot for reference as it occurred to me that something ooky was going on in there. I’m glad I did.

Two wires in the neutral. Two in the earth. A load of random badly insulated wire jammed in the corner. One live wire.

The new plughousing puts the live and the neutral wire intake within a centimetre of each other  (“ftupid defign”, I mumbled to myfelf as I was connecting it, fcrewdriver in mouth”)

It haf a UFB flot to the Neft Fmart Thermoftat which I … forry … hang on …

Right yeah so as I was saying I’m gonna connect my Nest Smart Thermostat to the power full time through the USB slot on the new plug housing.

I didn’t bother making sense of why the old plug was wired like it was. Someone had big plans many years ago, and did many very very strange things with wires and switches all over the flat. You can now turn my thermostat off by using the wrong lightswitch, and eventually I’ll have to do something about that. It’s all above my pay grade though. Perhaps I should take an online course or somesuch. I almost laid down £26 to get a fucking certificate that told me I was a Druid, but that was more because I thought it would be funny. I then realised I’d immediately get annoyed with the tone of the course and wouldn’t complete.

Back to wiring. Right now I’m just happy I got the fucker wired back in and to a standard where I’m not in imminent danger of death and all the things work. But I’m gearing towards proper landlordy type stuff and that means that before long someone will have to properly fix this mess of lethal wiring. This is DIY on top of DIY on top of DIY. There’s a pile of wires in the attic above the bathroom that was originally created by a keen amateur in the sixties putting dimmers in everywhere on those small round three pin sockets. They are all offline and incomprehensible now. So Phil went up and did some emergency surgery when it all started dying. He lights for theatre, so we’re talking LX tape for insulation and gaffer when it runs out. Tristan and I tried to put it into a proper breaker box. So far nobody has died.

The long and short of it is, I’m a slightly pissed spider at the centre of an impossible arcane web of ancient circuitry, casting around an ancient top floor flat that has recently started to let in the water when it rains, up in the eaves where all the wires are.

The light I can shed in the flat so far shows me badly painted walls, some pink, some off white. It shows me boxes full of esoteric bollocks that needs to be shifted on eBay, or charity. It shows me bags full of clothes. It shows me oubliettes full of other people’s memories that needn’t be remembered in entirety. It shows me some walls that are rotting from water ingress and others that are cracked from subsidence shifting.

Motivating myself for change is often slow and cumbersome. Making sense of that one plug socket took me hours and sucked the confidence out of me when I realised I would just have to copy the wiring without understanding why. I hate parroting. Something to do with switches, clearly. But what?

Much still to be done. Non specific amount of time in which to do it.

On the plus side, I found this jigsaw which was abandoned over a decade ago by someone, before I got handy : “This is fucked. I get a new one on the company. You might be able to fix it. Worth a shot and saves me getting rid of it.” The blade is bent. Probably a reasonably cheap fix and then I’ve got a working jigsaw. I’m not good enough at this shit to find a use for it yet though. If I’m putting up shelves I’ll get the timber cut to fit. And I need to put shelves up as the ones put up by the ghost of DIY MAN past both chose to collapse this week. They were crap mdf with plastic chocks and I’ve got too many books.

Which reminds me. I found this. Shantaram.

It came highly recommended but the recommendation didn’t seem genuine. Will I enjoy this book? Thoughts on a postcard.

It’s ten to midnight. I just took the bins out as they leave early tomorrow and I won’t be up. Then I methodically worked my way through an entire can of smoked oysters, with toast and copious amounts of hot sauce. I had already eaten supper, but I did it between shows and the nutrition was likely absorbed by adrenaline-speed metabolism in what is likely to prove the LAST lockdown Tempest, oh woe!

I’m zooming in to speak to some drama students about the process we found and the play in general on Wednesday. That’s the only external obligation I have. For now, even though it’s been down for the last ten days, I’m going to keep the living room studio up anyway. It makes it impossible to watch TV. But it’s useful to think about what can be made. In about ten minutes I’ll be calling an old friend and collaborator in New Zealand, who owns the snake. “Is there anything satisfying we can do with this sort of thing?” (Adding to the mix my drunk Amazon morph suit…)

This form is not about the technology or the kit though, as we’ve discovered in Tempest. You don’t need morph suits or flashy lights and a screen that is actually green to tell a story and  to make people feel connected to it. They all contribute to deepening the world of course. But the things that brings stupid joy in the watching and the playing is just when people at home who are there with us do honest things and we all get to see it. There’s a delight in catching a glimpse of someone like us who is lost in the story we are all telling. Someone who doesn’t have any investment in controlling and directing the narrative, but who is enjoying the cause and effect of flicking the actor to magically torment him, seeing him be flicked and keeping flicking despite being asked to have mercy.

It’s back to the old “shared experience”. It reminds me of the thing I used to think about with The Odyssey, where it is apparent that the Homeric bard whose one night version we have had taken down was responding live to the interests and desires of his audience. A story doesn’t exist without someone to tell it to. And a true bardic story shifts and morphs in the telling.

As a kid my brother and I used to tell each other stories when we stayed at our grandparent’s or our uncle’s after we were sent to bed. I still remember some of the shit that I made up, all of which was responding to the aspects of this work in progress that my brother showed interest in. We created worlds together, and populated them.

It’s important to remember that stories aren’t definitive. Fairy Tales have many different endings in different versions. Different resurrected Gods were killed and reborn for different purposes, or left dead. All myths have regional variations – even within the Greek and Roman and Norse pantheons that are still influential in our culture, different tales have different outcomes depending on the source. People still polarise over different angles on monotheistic deities or wise men or whether we should salute crows or magpies.

We tell things to the people we tell them to, live. We try to tailor it to be helpful or interesting in the moment. But stories should remain ephemeral and shifting, despite a culture that tries for the definitive (as if that’s possible). Stories are a sea of shifting waves and so they must be because we are too.

The Tempest variant that we all told together is gone now out into the wine dark sea of memory. Even recorded versions that exist will immediately lose their “now”. It’s why I love theatre. I can’t wait to get it back. But this form has been a wonderful discovery and something that will continue to interest me as we patch the world back together.

Meanwhile I’ve got a zoom call to make.

Well here I am, sitting on the old bench again on what appears to be official London “Everybody leave the house” day. I didn’t get the memo but I’ve gone to sit on the bench anyway.

Looking over the river there are more people wandering around in Battersea Park than I’ve seen in two decades of living opposite. There are certainly more people strolling up and down the pavement than is customary on any normal weekend. I’m one of them so I can’t throw stones.

People who at this time of year would usually be lying on the sofa with the blinds down and crisps falling out the side of their mouths as they skip intro on yet another episode of “America’s next dull celebrity” are going to the park because they aren’t supposed to. Some of them have never been in a park before, reared on a lifetime of processed food, concrete and plastic they are frightened of mud.

“What’s this?” they ask, in fear and wonder, seeing a duck. One of them runs in mute terror from a syriphid. Should a sick mole come to ground there will be mass panic and casualties. “ALIENS!”

It’s the perfect London weather. Not yet hot enough to expose the complete lack of air conditioning in the UK. Not cold enough that we have to wear all the clothes in the wardrobe. The rain is staying away. The warm air is moving around. Halfway blue, halfway clouded. Perfect but for the fact that all the introduced plane trees are shitting out their neutered arrows of hell-pollen into my eyes and up my nose. They suck up pollution and drop it in our faces. I am weeping and my nose is running. It’s a pleasant enough evening that I don’t much care. But I won’t last long in it before I put my mask back on.

I bought antacid and now I wish I’d bought antihistamines. I too have been protected from nature enough that it can easily discombobulate me. And I spent my whole childhood with mud under my fingernails.

At least next time my body goes to war with me I’ll have something a bit better than milk and bread. I’m not a hedgehog, even if I’ve been hibernating.

Turns out the night I was up all night was a freaky moon night. I normally know the moon phases in advance and get all ritualistic on their asses but that one crept up on me. I barely know what day it is right now. But it’s comforting that I can retroactively brand my fucked up night as a form of spiritual warfare if I want to. It wasn’t. It was bad diet, lack of exercise and unfamiliar stagnation mixed with too much booze. It was my planet going retrograde and a supermoon in my mother’s birthsign pulling the bile out of me. Perhaps it was both.

I think a bit more walking while we still have the light. Then back home for a sensible bed. The Tempest is back on tomorrow for one last hurrah, so I’ll have to be rested and spend a bit of time working out the greenscreen now I’ve completely rearranged the living room…

 

It’s a Friday night and a spring bank holiday. By all rights I should currently be in a crowded bar somewhere in Camden after a day catching the sun with friends and beer and then some lunch and maybe taking a chilly leap into the pond on Hampstead Heath. Sun and fun until the dark and then under cover of darkness off to town to do bad things.

By now we’d be venturing on the drunken trail of one of the many birthday parties. “How do you know so and so?” “We did a thing together years ago!” “Drink?”

As it is we all stayed at home. One guy in my block started playing the bagpipes in the morning. One of my neighbors played “We’ll meet again” at top volume three times back to back on the stereo, no doubt standing to attention and weeping over a glass of brandy.

I could frame things in terms of war and victory today. I had a hell of a night last night. Haven’t ever had one like it. Won the night but it was nasty.

Heart burn and acid reflux the like of which I’ve never experienced, coming on just as I was turning in. I made the decision to keep myself awake and upright until it abated which meant I was sitting cross legged on my bed reading until around 5.30am with a bucket next to the bed in case I suddenly jolted up a mouth full of fire. Belching like a child with wind for hours, band of fire around my chest, neck full of bubbling acid.

I felt that if I let myself sleep I was rolling the dice about whether I’d wake up in time to deal with a mouth full of alienblood. Rather no sleep than the long one, I rationalised. The brain gets busier at night in the dark. Mine is busy enough already so it really wouldn’t shut up about possibilities.

I finally drifted into something like sleep in the wee hours, still waking regularly, skipping over any true rest as I forced myself upright to sip water and belch at regular intervals. By the time proper morning came and Brian showed up outside on his trusty steed with a goodwill package of old school computer games I might never have time to play I was thrilled to thrust myself into waking life again, put clothes on, and leave that night behind me.

I can still feel the residue of it in my chest. There’s probably anxiety wrapped up in there too. I had a good run of work before all of this, but I’m going to have to start being really really careful now with money, as we all will if this madness is likely to keep us locked in for a few more months, or when the doors open I won’t be able to afford that sunny day with friends on Hampstead Heath, that filthy night in Camden or wherever with a bunch of actors and crazies.

I don’t even know who most of these people are. Bring it.

We’ve all become mildly agoraphobic.

 

There’s a dentist in the Isle of Man who bought a camera on eBay. He’s been making a movie for a decade. The concept is potentially interesting and he’s a lovely man. But I have a strong suspicion it’ll never be finished. It’s something he does between his other ventures. He’s got property out there. He’s got his practice. He’s got his community.

He’s a good man, if unusual. I didn’t know him at all, but he found me through a friend over a year ago. I got a phone call. I had stuff I needed to do on the island. It aligned.

He flew me to the island where I grew up. I had received some handwritten pages of script, photocopied. Inexplicably, surrounded by the sea and the wild, he has set it in London. He paid me a bit of cash to do some acting. He put me up in a nice hotel. I tried to do alright by him, but the other actor in the scene, a local – he didn’t show up. We only had the one day. I delivered my lines to nothing.

The crabbed photocopied handwriting on the script, the fact he’s not on any social media, the lack of a mobile phone or even email, the fact that when you call him back he doesn’t answer and you get an actual FAX MACHINE … All these things worried me a little bit, flying on my own from London to this small island.

But I’m at home in The Isle of Man. I’ve got friends there, history there. I feel safe there. He flew me back to my home island and I did him a favour. I felt a little worried when I realised quite how low budget he was. It crossed my mind that I might be involved in something weird. But I’m a big boy and I can take care of myself, I wasn’t in anything weird, and apart from the fact that the footage might end up on This Is Your Life there’s no harm done.

He has rung me periodically because he can’t find actors out there. He’s hoping I’ll help him.

If easyJet is running it’s pretty cheap to fly there these days from London – not like when I was a kid and Manx Airlines had the monopoly.  Back then we always traveled by boat from Heysham. But now there’s a regular plane. He’s happy to fly some actors over.

He means well but I’ve usually blocked him as I won’t send someone over to him on their own. It’ll be too unfamiliar even though he’s harmless. But he’s looking for a couple of parts once lockdown eases. I have a couple of mates who might fill them if we can go out there with another project in mind. We stay a week, film for him one day, and borrow his equipment to make a short over there. It’s beautiful and lends itself to filming. The Isle of Man film commission almost had a heyday but it was mired in bureaucratic incompetence and suspect behaviour. There is a lot of space and a lot of beauty there. Why not capture some of it.

I just had this idea today though. So now I need a story …

Meanwhile the ducks and the tide.