AlBarclay

I’m still flooded but life is a little tiny bit easier now. I’ve been in Kent today doing physics. My science teachers at school were largely completely uninspirational which is upsetting considering the reputation of the school. Today all I had to do is run a workshop that involved me trying to get a balloon full of water sucked into a glass juice bottle using fire.

My dad used to enjoy that bit of physics. Get a plate full of water and a glass, put a tealight on the plate. Put a penny in the water. “How do you get the penny out without getting your fingers wet?” Light the tealight, put the glass over the tealight. The water will be sucked into the glass by the vacuum caused by the tealight burning all the air and unable to pull new air. The penny on the plate will no longer be underwater. Science.

This is a new workshop about gas. We had three volunteers. It was hard work, with year 7, but a very good school. In many ways I was very very relieved.

So there’s a lot that I’d want done better next time. But it was a good first shift.

I don’t really get the chance to do these workshops much these days. I’m pretty clear without them. They tick me over very nicely though and damn I’m good at them now, do anything enough and you learn it. I can engage young people as a wild card even if it’s about fucking gas.

My best friend from school is an engineer. I still wonder how it was that these people who were supposed to be training a new generation of engineers couldn’t find a way to interest me. I am very easily interested in this sort of thing, but I guess I was always gonna be an actor. Adult life has taught me how incredible and vast science is. My god the things we have learnt over lifetimes of experiment and transfer and experiment and transfer. So much stuff that feels like magic until we understand it and even then still feels like magic.

I was a difficult fucker at school. Happy to hold my hand up to that. If I thought my teacher was stupid I pretty much entirely wrote them off. God forbid they were reading from a book. I still love a few old teachers, the clever ones. I think of them now.

Now… As I occasionally go into schools for science.  Who could’ve predicted that. But as I tell them, there are gaps between acting jobs and if you need to work to feel valid like I do then this sort of thing is perfect. I’m happy to share that. Some of them might have ha de yawn ha similarly to me. Like everyone forever in the whole world twice.

This’ll be my second ever night in Rochester. First one was my motorbike theory test when I thought I was gonna scream up to Oxford every night on a big bike from rehearsals.

“You should sell this stuff,” says Mel. I don’t like it. But maybe…

Here’s me with all this costume. I’m paying to store it. And sure, there’s been a bit of money back just through people knowing I’ve got it and asking for stuff that’s there. But if I’m not careful it will become an albatross.

Loads and loads of costume.

I really want an office space where I can set up a theatre company that has a sideline renting costumes. Pie in the sky? Maybe but if you don’t shoot you don’t hit. There’s a lot of work between the idea and the execution and I know all too well with the Yawn D H Yawn that I poo good ideas like a clockwork toy but I never see any of them through.

Still, we have made inroads into cataloguing it. There’s so much stuff. It’s wonderful, but the hoarder doesn’t want this to become a negative thing. Forgetting is expensive. Storage is an empire about monetising delay. There will need to be a “now” when I actually decide about all the costumes. But until then, for a while, I’ll pay to delay.

I’ve got a movie coming out in September which might help things along. Please universe. And it might be a long time before I have the headspace to drive a costume hire business. But surely something… Let’s see. For now though, damn I’m busy busy busy.

Today was a snatched day getting the globe stuff out of the old street building. Tomorrow is an unfamiliar workshop in Kent. Then I’m overnighting and another workshop the day after. And around this I’m getting ready for a show on the weekend with The Factory and a history talk at The Globe this week. Oh hell. Oh spite.

I’ll make my theatre company and make sense of this costume in the fullness of time. I’m just learning about making things happen right now. I keep getting asked to make things happen on a larger scale than the time before, and I move towards it…

I’m very happy, lost in all this. Hard to stop and see Lou, tonight is a rare opportunity. I am okay being flooded. I’ve learnt the trick. Partitioning. I put it in my diary to make sure it is logistically possible. If it is, I just know that when it is time I’ll apply fully. But things like this big drive I booked today, it needs prep. It needs me to be ahead of myself. It’s hard when it isn’t immediate for me, but insha’Allah. Plus lines lines lines. I need 3 sleeps.. I’ve had none on the latest gig and it’s on Saturday.

Home! I won’t sleep in my bed tonight but I’ll be on the sofa and that’s comfy. No airbed. No dawn cooking. If I need a wee I can go pretty easily rather than having to get my sandals on and trudge somewhere.

I loved Chalke Festival. What a treat to be involved. A brilliant woman napped a flint axehead in the stone age area. She spoke well about pattern matching and how useful it is in evolution. This instinct that helped us survive that has now become an exploitable trait, causing so many ostensibly clever people to get lost in rabbit holes.

I ran some power into my phone while listening to Kate Mosse on Cathars. Showtime today again and whichever way you turn it my Welsh accent sucks. Still, I didn’t hit it too hard on purpose. The company was wonderful. I wish I could say I turned in a great show but it was sketchy. Second show energy. A very forgiving audience. You learn by doing… But there were some hard drops. I like it best when everybody looks great including me.

There’s a lot we can learn from history. We had quite a deal of current affairs this year and unfortunately it’s because we live in interesting times. Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the innocence and safety of the nineties in this country. Now we have a very real and trackable resurgence of acceptable fascism, and one of our greatest democratic allies is sliding inevitably to totalitarianism and in so doing playing perfectly into the hands of the Russian chessmaster who called NATO “fascists’ when they weren’t yet and must be loving how with minimal string pulling they are going that way so he can retroactively justify his war.

Mel is in my room, in a tent on my bed. She got the fuck out of America. I’m hoping she’s here in this country for a while but we need to find her a home. I’m happy to sleep on my sofa tonight, it’s a step up from the airbed. But I’ll want my room tomorrow not least as Lou will be back.

I’m happy to be back in technology.

The company who are partly responsible for the power flow in this festival, watched me try and charge my phone with the plugs at the side of the forum so they switched them off. Profoundly unhelpful and antisocial. I know my way around this shit, I almost brought an adapter from outside to inside but there are plenty of venues running monitors etc that have a spare plug. I don’t have to charge my phone in the most logical place. So I plugged it in where I had to watch it.

Where does one go to charge phones? I checked at info tent. “Nowhere”, I got back. Fine, there used to be ridiculous bastards charging a fiver to plug your phone into a slow charger for an hour at Glastonbury. Perhaps it needs to be down to the individual. But… I’ve been here three days. Firebird are being dicks even though I’m working in the venue and I think it might be because I was open with them. “I came in to try and charge my phone,” I said to some idiot child playing with dinosaurs. They’ve not only switched off the outlet I was using, they’ve also barricaded it. I’d say it was a bunch of cunts but more likely it’s one cunt, Mr dinosaur cunt.

They have gaps everywhere but they closed the circuit I openly told them I was aiming to use which probably feels to them like they’re doing something. There are always multiple circuits still free scattered about but needing the right adapter or just being in the backstage area and needing supervision. I used to carry an adapter from out to in but stopped doing it when pretty much every festival realised that participants needed to charge their phones and made provision. Years later! Firebird are amateurs compared to most of my international jobs, how can they deliberately isolate plugs to prevent participants from charging? They have managed largely to run this festival without plunging us into darkness, and maybe they are nervous about it. It’s very important to get these things right, I guess, and they might be new at this stuff and punching above their weight. In the desert, where everything comes from solar and wind we have to be really careful. But these guys have mains power. And I’m plugging in my phone, not a fucking kettle. 

Arguably the guy is just being a gargantuan twat. I might try and talk with him tomorrow as I didn’t think it was legit to ask him to stop isolating the circuit on days we aren’t working in his venue. Tomorrow we are in his venue again so hopefully he can push a button.

I’m in The White Hart, a pub local to the festival. They have WiFi. The crowds have come to Chalke now and I had an important email to send. No point trying to use phones on site anymore, the exchange will be flooded from now until the end of the festival. Still I’m pretty used to Festivalling these days. What I had forgotten is how much joy it gives me, living outside on these long hot summer days, and getting involved in what is always such a rich and varied exchange of craft, ideas and passion.

Toby Capwell started my day with a smile, teaching me more than I thought there was to know about English Armour and radiating charm and passion while one of his jousting buddies sat stoically by in his (modern functional) horse armour to provide visuals.

Then a potted history of the loo in England with David Musgrove. Again more information than I really thought there was. I went to look at horses. They have a very beautiful destrier and a palfrey and now I know how to tell the difference. Gorgeous calm creatures, clearly very well loved, not spooked by all the banging from the artillery and the rifles of the WW2 lot. The world wars occupy a disproportionate amount of space in people’s thoughts when it comes to history in this country.

This is a really gorgeous thing to be part of, this festival. It wakes up all the little geeky bits of my brain that love to dig into myth and history and connections.

As the festival progresses, every few hours there is a team showing their work in the “Remaking History” area. “Discover the Guillotine”. Some practical and thoughtful men and women are building a working guillotine from scratch. It isn’t finished yet. I went and listened:

“I spoke to the health and safety guy this morning. He asked me if the blade was sharp. I told him it wasn’t and he said ‘It needs to be sharp’ so we will be sharpening it up.”

The guillotine will be finished tomorrow, I am told, with the blade fresh sharpened.

Michael Gove is speaking at this festival. Not about an area of expertise. Just a puff piece about himself.

Sometimes you wonder if circumstances have brought you to a place where something begins. It is a terrifying and hungry looking thing, a guillotine. There are strange energies around the construction of it, even.

I’m happy here. Going to drive back on site soon and see if I can get into Al Murray.

Wind in the morning got me up, not the heat. My festival tent is very much a festival tent. It would blow off the mountain if it didn’t break the back of the yak before I got there.

I incompetently bungled round the outside of my tent, meaninglessly pushing thin pegs into chalk soil with my Birkenstocks. Bending half of them.

I wandered down the hill. It rained.

A woman covered in reindeer teeth and skins who knows my brother told me about pre-history. I bought a bacon butty and called Lou. Then I found a programme for the day.

This is so wonderfully varied and geeky. What a delight to be able to be here. I listened to people debate about The Long Man of Wilmington. Is it old or is it landscaping? I go and see him pretty often. He lives on a slope just down from my favourite yew tree, in Wilmington Church. A talkative temple of a tree, in the grounds of a church as so many are, being trees that were planted in places of power. Thousands of years old and it has responded eloquently to many generations of benign humans trying to prop it up and keep it safe. There’s old broken chain embedded in it, the props have been moved with time, it still berries bright and feels so wise. I write about it from time to time.

Then William Dalrymple. “It’s wonderful that such a good historian can write so well,” is the general consensus. He’s a friendly and forthright man. I buy his book and he signs it, dedicating it to Lou. “She loves India,” I tell him. “I applaud her. Encourage it. Join her.”

Callum gave a talk about original practice and the man is a calm fountain of knowledge. I’ve landed very well with this group. People are earnest and thoughtful and hard working.

Then some Scaramanga fellow got helicoptered in to do a talk entitled “Me and me and me and me and me and trump and me and me and me.” I may have misremembered the title slightly. The whole festival went to see him like he mattered. I couldn’t bear it, not that it isn’t relevant, but that I am in a field and don’t want to think about that man. Someone started playing “Summer is icumen in” on a hurdy-gurdy and a crumhorn and frankly that was enough to pull me away even if it only led to a very performative Robin Hood show for kids.

Then I met a knight, who was extremely knowledgeable about chainmail. I saw some old cars and a lot of tired clever experts. All the while someone kept firing blanks in the WW2 area. There’s even a tank.

This festival is so varied, I couldn’t have possibly expected it. I met a steward walking up the hill. “Imagine if you were a time traveller and you wound up here,” I said. There absolutely must be a Doctor Who episode where something goes tits up and the doctor winds up here and doesn’t have a clue what era he’s in.

I got to the top of the hill to find my tent beautifully pinned and stable, rather than halfway down the hill with all my stuff scattered hither and yon. I am told by Callum and Emma that there are magical tent fairies in Wiltshire. If only there was some way to thank them.

Now I have my new £3.50 Vinted Cerrutti denim jacket on and I’m gonna go listen to people being clever about things again for a bit. The sun is falling. I’m feeling very chilled.

This is the second time that many of us have ever met. We did Henry V. We all had nothing but 3 line cues with no character attribution, and the lines our characters spoke. No idea how long or short  inbetween them all.

I’m gonna put it right up high on the list of fucking terrifying things I’ve done for the craft of acting, a little bit under the first night improvising The Odyssey in Blackwell’s. We have to challenge ourselves. We did that and actually I think I’m gonna make good friends through this. A wide age range, and I should add that M from my pissed off blog the other night made lots of sense in his context. We have costume, we can be a bit wacky and it’ll land.

We are working alongside re-enactors and massive history enthusiasts. We get to put this show on together as part of a delightfully geeky happening. And now we have done it once we can relax into the festival a bit.

Right now I’m under my new sleeping bag on my new air mattress in my new tent. It’s almost 2am. The show went up late and then we inevitably de-adrenalised. I’ve only just finished pumping my mattress… Didn’t have the headspace to do it before the show. I’m knackered and the sun is gonna cook me out of this tent shortly after dawn. The next few days will be much more relaxing than I have budgeted for. We don’t have another show until Sunday. All my energy has been pointing to opening this. Now we are open I can chill.

Bren guns, potatoes, Alfred the Great. Rationing, Thatcher, Offa. We walk in our Elizabethan costumes past WW2 reenactors and busy men and women dressed in the smocks of medieval serfs. This is gonna be a strange few days now we are open. I’ll get my few hours sleep now while I can and find out about the programme tomorrow morning, now the learn is out the way.

An unexpected visitor. In my fantasy world, this evening would have been to do with pulling my lines into place with cues and making sure my packing stuff is packed. Not so. Oh lord, am I going to be ready tomorrow? It’s like being on set, all this learning in isolation.

I went to an outdoor shop in Camden and bought the lot. My old festival stuff is all fucked. But I’ve been using it for over 15 years. A five year gap where I weirdly wasn’t getting the festival jobs started just as it reached the end of its life. Now again it is happening. I know this so well. I should bring my tarot cards and my outfit for Melisande and The Master, but I’m not sure I can be bothered to add value and for this festival it would probably have to be Marseilles which is flat to read. I could get away with Ryder Waite but it pisses me off. There’s a conversation between artist, reader and querent. All three have a voice but if one voice is too loud it kills the vibe.

Mel is coming round tomorrow morning fresh from landing at Heathrow. She isn’t coming to the festival but I’ll have a jetlagged festival friend to help me emergency pack. This isn’t a wreckhead festival, I need to keep remembering that. I won’t need lifesaving things but I’ll want comfort things.

Mostly I’m going to have to remember my cues and my lines. Sounds easy but I’m expecting some serious moments of brainfry tomorrow.

And John Holt Roberts appeared. He and I have delightfully improvised many a strange situation. I love him through my bones. He was Marley to my Scrooge, before Jack Whitam, before Will Seaward. Musical Marley, and a good heart, but I needed to work tonight. I’m now writing this as fast as I can so I can do an hour of lineblitz before bed as tonight is the last sleep I’ll get before remembering it live without peeking in front of people.

Half a week at a history festival might be a delight, but I’ve got to get the first show out of the way before I can relax.

Multitasking today and I just threw money at one problem to make it go away. Someone will come and take away our old dishwasher and replace it with one that works, next week. We are all perfectly capable of washing up after ourselves but we are also all very busy and distracted a lot of the time and robots do make things easier. Like the one that eats our cat shit.

I’m sure that some investment is going that way, but… so much of the robot industry investment seems to be engaged in stealing and repurposing the work of creatives instead of cutting back on the drudgery of daily life – it makes no sense.

I backed a Kickstarter a while ago for a butter-bot, absolutely based on Rick and Morty with the blessing of the franchise. It is an AI driven desktop robot equipped with existential crisis and the power to pick small things up and carry them to you on demand.

It is the modern day equivalent of the eccentric grandfather’s train set for passing the salt around the table. I am looking forward to it coming just as it will be simultaneously dystopian and hilarious, and it will be using AI in a more creative and practical way than just stealing your voice. There are no tiny people who will be put out of a job by my butter bot. There’ll probably be at least one voice actor not employed, and it will have that flat and dead inflection that we are going to get so used to that maybe we will forget how lucky we were when Fiona was the living voice of Google rather than dead dead dead dead Fionalike.

But… Start with passing the butter. Rather than the hubris of thinking that this vast regurgitation we are encountering – like those images – is doing anything other than providing a footnote about the decline of this civilisation in a book written three thousand years from now about how we trapped ourselves forever on this planet by ignorantly putting all the precious metals and vital resources into things that would draw us a derivative picture of a goblin on a bicycle in thirty seconds.

There’s about to be a generation of people entering the workplace forty percent of which don’t really know how to write having got people from the internet to do all their work via the aggregators they are calling AI. Decline and fall. With all the nuke talk and with measurably moronic narcissists in positions of almost impossible international power it feels like civilization is pushing to the equivalent of the collapse of the Roman Empire. All the markers are in place. I can’t think there’s gonna be anything other than us getting stupider and stupider as a species. I think it has already happened. Who reads books anymore growing up? Now it’s too often just summaries of books, online articles after articles. Generations pass knowledge down through literature.

Yes there are large language models that have been trained on that literature but if you aggregate the individual voices of these incredible teachers we have had, we lose the fact that every one of them had an edge, they all had their perspective, their boundaries. We learn from flaws too. Coleridge was a dope fiend. Wordsworth was a bore. Byron was an arsehole. But they were flawed people making money and pushing their agenda and they cannot be expected to be perfect, none of us can. But this aggregation and the resulting homogeneity – even of prose as we are encountering now. Look at advertising copy, look at social media posts about whatever, anything the algorithm has identified you’re interested in. The copy is all AI, and likely measurable in an exact amount of words. But you can taste AI copy when you start to get a feel for it. Like the voice stuff it lacks life. It just… Isn’t. All the words are in the right order, there are carefully placed deliberate errors. It’s everywhere. I am so bored of it. I’m not making any money out of this, but honestly that’s how this sort of noise is best.

Hopefully I’ll have my little weird programmable butterpassing robot before the collapse of civilisation. Meantime I’ll get off my soap box and go to sleep.

I am not Rick, but the whole adopting adapting and transcending tech thing is admirable in the writing of that show, Rick and Morty. I rarely persist with anything. It gets convoluted at times, it starts badly, it is almost unbearably dark in moments and didn’t the original creator fall into his own trap by turning out to be a baddie? But… God that show is a show for our times. Maybe I’m drawn to animation as I don’t get pissed off when there’s a bad actor. Bojack is another show I consumed utterly.

I thought this cough thing was signed off. Couldn’t quite make sense of how it happened so quickly. It was just retreating momentarily before another advance. I’ve been wheezing all day to the extent that Brian was worried enough about me that he not only bought me but made me a lemsip. It was very comforting, and the paracetamol is a wonderful edge removal device. I’m off to make myself another one as the evening closes in and the manflu tries once more to dominate my thinking.

The cats have been exceptionally good company while I’ve been feeding sorry for myself. They are hot so they don’t want cuddles but they want to stick their faces in your face and generally make cute noises. It can be a healing thing when you feel sorry to have a stupid catface in your mouth. No licking my hair though at 4am, dammit.

I had a hot bath. I’m a glutton for it. Here we are on the hottest day of the year and at noon this idiot has run a bath with nothing but hot right up to the overflow and is topping it up with only enough cold that getting into it won’t flay the skin from his bones. I wanted to sweat out this thrice damned beastie in my bloodstream. This tonsilfucker. It won’t get any further down, I’m fighting it with rest and steam and solid food. Gotta be in a field soon for a few nights. Festival season. Happy memories.

Highlights of the day: a chance to chat to Lou and a tiny walk around the local streets, feeling sorry for myself and tired. The dishwasher is broken so I used that as an excuse (less washing up) to order Burger and Lobster from Burger and Lobster, and have it carried to my door my someone on a bike. Dreams again soon. Much organising to do with the securing of cues etc. Rest now. Festival Al was in younger than this Al. Gonna keep an eye on my endurance and look after myself. Rather than order £150 worth of max strength pills, some buffers and sinks and grounders and a little bag of MD, I’m just gonna get a nice new sleeping bag and a tent, a foldyout table and a wind up lantern. Maybe some coconut milk.