AlBarclay

I love the Natural History Museum. I can easily lose a day there looking at dead stuff. It helps that it’s my brother’s office. If he’s there I might end up round the back, in the roof eaves, looking at Darwin’s beetles from the voyage of The Beagle, or at a giant squid pickled in formaldehyde, or at the gargoyles up close. He wasn’t there today – he’s in Russia with his family. But I went there with Oliah and we looked at stuff. We gradually worked our way through rocks, children, quakes and icthyosaurs to the huge main hall. I had an agenda. I wanted to see the blue whale.

When I was a kid we had a video of the Disney film “One of our dinosaurs is missing.” It was a relative flop for Disney so it sold cheaply. As far as I remember it involved a martial arts nanny, a Chinese Peter Ustinov and, front and centre, the iconic diplodocus skeleton from the museum entrance, which gets stolen and driven past London landmarks accompanied by hilarious music and fog. For hours.

I was skeptical when the diplodocus, or “dippy” as some trite committee had decided, was taken down. Giving the whale pride of place is, perhaps, important considering we are poisoning the oceans with plastic and toxic waste. That’s the sort of argument you can’t win. “I don’t think they should’ve taken the diplodocus out.” “Don’t you care about the whales?” “Oh sod off.”

The whale is cool. But I liked the diplodocus. An example of quite how BIG creatures can get. It took up a lot of space. As I kid, with its long tail trailing down behind it, I’d frequently try to work out how many people it would take pulling that tail to move the fucker. But when I was a teenager the tail was raised from the ground. There was a scientific paper written that argued that the creature would have a raised tail to balance its neck. It’s notable how quickly they acted on the evidence of this single thesis.

“Dippy” (*gak*) stayed there with her weird raised tail, like she was taking a shit, until earlier this year. Now she’s been replaced by the blue whale skeleton that was already on display elsewhere in the museum. The whole business smells of shenanigans to me. The Hintze Hall now seats 1,200 people for corporate functions, charity galas, prize givings and so forth, out of hours. That’s a huge amount of covers, and the museum will be funding itself largely from these parties.  And well it should, as the NHM is doing great work, it’s a terrifically important collection, and valuable in many ways, and it’s free entry. When that paper was published about the tail, though, I can’t help wondering if it was commissioned by the museum precisely so they could raise the tail and fit more tables under it, raising the number of covers and thus profits.

But the problem with her is that, as I said at the start, she’s BIG. If you can organise an ironclad reason to get her off the floor entirely, then you can get a good 200 extra covers in. Rather than paying a scientist to write a paper arguing that diplodocus could fly, they brought in the wale. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you care about wales?

On the flip side, the diplodocus is currently touring, so loads more kids can imagine dragging it by its tail. Hopefully the van isn’t being driven by an aging character actor in ridiculous moustaches doing suspect mildly insulting Chinesey-acting. Because if it is, why didn’t I get the call?

 

If I offer to pick you up from Heathrow in rush hour just punch me square on the nose. Thanks. I know we’re British so we are supposed to love queuing but really, I could’ve spent those lost months today sticking needles under my thumbnails, or gouging out my eyeballs with teaspoons. I eventually arrived at the airport to pick up my guest. She was sitting patiently by International Arrivals, with the inevitable build up of cobwebs from years of waiting. Discreetly brushing them off, I introduced myself and she introduced herself back. So far so good. No punch in the nose, but I hadn’t made my intentions clear to her about the rush hour/Heathrow thing so it’s not like she forgot.

I don’t know much about her, but she’s staying for a week so I’ll probably find out. Thankfully Brian has gone to Edinburgh, so I get to slink into his bed rather than cocoon on the sofa, while she sleeps in my unnaturally tidy room. Unfortunately my bedroom has been under siege for the last few days.

I’ve been prioritising my guest’s cat allergy by keeping Pickle out of my room before guest arrives. To get the poor creature used to it. After all she sleeps most nights on my feet with impunity apart from the occasional dreamy kick, and noxious fumes.

She really wants to get in there. She’s very very quick when she chooses. I haven’t got that the velocity, but I’ve got opposable thumbs. I’ve got lateral thinking. And I have a Hoover. She loathes that Hoover. If I’m hoovering, she is making certain she’s anywhere but where I am.

For two days the Hoover – (which is actually a Dyson, I mention in passing in case anyone in branding fancies a quick *head-desk*) – the Hoover … has been in my room. If I stumble out for a four o’clock in the morning pee and Pickle bolts past my legs and under the bed, all I have to do is push a button and she’s right back out immediately double time. It’s foolproof. My neighbours must think I’m up to all sorts, switching a vacuum cleaner on and off in my bedroom repeatedly at 4 in the morning. But it does the trick.

Right now my guest is in my cat free room and so far she hasn’t melted, which I’m thrilled about. Particularly as I cooked for her. I made Chana Masala, and it was great although we are contemplating jihad over whether it should have spinach or broccoli in it. The lines are drawn. I’m sharpening my pan.

As I write, I’m listening to her music on Bandcamp. It’s a live set she played with her husband, opening for Rambling Jack Elliott in Sutter Creek, which is a gold rush town out by Sacremento. It was recorded in a little theatre preserved from those crazy days. “I think most of the people came to see Rambling Jack, not us. But he’s a really cool guy. He smoked all our weed with us.” The music is redolent of that weed and old America. I need to remind myself, as the news gets progressively darker, that I love that crazy vast country. It’s been good to welcome one of its denizens to my home.

I was standing in my pants with bright yellow marigolds scrubbing geriatric turds out of the inside of a loo brush holder while listening to The Prodigy when it occurred to me: “You’re only doing this because *someone else* is coming to stay.” Right now my bedroom is (by my standards) tidy. That involved pants, marigolds and rave music too.

Tomorrow morning I’ll put matching sheets on the bed and make it nice. For someone else. Right now it’s two sheets that don’t match and an old coffee stained blanket. Because it’s for me. Why do I only bother to make things nice when it’s with someone else in mind? And more to the point, what’s with the pants and the marigolds and the old fashioned dance music? I definitely tidy faster in my pants. I wash everything. Then I shower myself and then I wash the bath. Job done, everything clean, maybe a bit odd, what did you expect? That was my morning. There are some clothes to sort and the kitchen is never done but you could eat your dinner off my loo seat. In fact, I did that this evening…

No I didn’t. I went to Waterloo this evening. I sat in a room with some lovely people and said the same four Japanese words repeatedly a few hundred times. I find it helpful. Afterwards we had a group discussion facilitated by a good friend of mine. It’s to do with a secular Buddhism that I’m practicing daily – another manifestation of my craving for routine around the unstructured mess that is the between jobs period.

Then we went for dinner and I ate off a plate. It wasn’t as clean as my loo seat. And it was all very healthy.

Not drinking has the advantage of meaning I can drive when I go out in the evening. I remember that! If you find friends who can go out and have fun without constantly going on at you about not drinking, it’s lovely to know that when it’s time to go home you can jump in the car. In my sober year I ended up playing chauffeur to a host of drunk friends, singing songs in the back as I spun through the empty late night streets. It’s a great time to be on the roads in London, the middle of the night. You can get everywhere quickly and easily, and the crowded places are empty so you can stop and be the only person on the steps at St Pauls, if that sort of thing floats your boat. The solitude helps bring home the age of this town, which you can lose in the colour and noise of the daily flood. At night you can almost hear the stones whispering to each other. I still sometimes walk home for hours through the dark streets, and just commune with the city in the peace of night. Where do all the people go? Well, I’ve gone home. To my shiny bathroom and my tidy bedroom. And my slightly crap bed. And the mutant orchid that with my assistance is gradually achieving sentience on my windowsill. Soon the world will be ours, my pretty one.

 

 

 

220 of these down and you’d think I’d have it pat by now. You’d imagine I’d just be able to lick the tip of my index finger and carve blazing patterns of words into the phone screen before dumping it smoking on the grass, fixing myself a whisky and punching a cow. But nope. Some days it just won’t come.

It’s not like I haven’t been busy today. I live in constant terror of that day where I’m so hungover I do nothing but watch Antiques Roadshow and pick the lint out of my belly and then have to write about it. Today was a day-job day. I went and worked at Imperial College, meeting the new generation of “business leaders”, telling them what “amortise” means. For the day, I was “Amortise Man.” Amortise Man makes sure YOU haven’t forgotten your pencil! Amortise Man will notice when you are nervous and take a moment to help you calm down. But if you cheat, Amortise Man will see, for he sees all. Good old Imperial, they’ve been injecting small amounts of money into my account for years, and they’re walking distance from my home. It’s quite striking, as I’ve touched on in a previous blog, how some of the people taking “management skills” for a degree have the common sense of a baked clam. But it’s a good little temporary gig.

It’s these little jobs that keep me ticking over in the yawning chasms that sometimes open up between jobs. But invigilating days – they’re not event filled, action packed days. They’re just … days. I often use the exam conditions to learn lines. You can get quite a lot into your head over the two hours of concentration, while keeping an eye out. But I didn’t bring anything today. I just sat there and watched and thought. I’ve been playing with a few things to write outside of this, and was shaping some of that as they all worked around me. When I hit the year of blog, I’m damned if I’m going to stop writing daily. It just might be different forms, and for different purposes.

If i had only written the minimum word count daily, I’d have written 110,000 words. That’s a sodding novel. And I’ve written more than that. Sure it’s mostly unedited, usually unplanned, often unadvised. I enjoy the game of framing thoughts, even if the daily imperative means I sometimes spew something out when I get home at two in the morning and have to race my eyelids to the publish button.

I’d benefit from the discipline involved in having to keep a consistent story, with pace and colour. Sometimes the drunken raving, edited, will make the cut. I could of course experiment with a serialised daily novel on the same lines as this blog. That would be brave, ultimately foolish and almost certainly doomed to hideous failure and universal mockery. On that basis I find it very tempting. But it’s also quite tempting to edit and snip and cut and slice and boil and then proudly present something that has been manicured and powdered for months with an offhand “Oh this just slipped out one night after I had a spot too much absinthe.”

We shall see

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My little Suzuki has got a load of chunks taken out of it. It looks like crap. The previous owner drove it as a minicab. His reasoning for giving it up was that the air conditioning doesn’t work. Which is true. It doesn’t. But it’s also full of holes. Plus it smells of fish. You can’t really take paying passengers in a fishy car. I’ve filled it with magic trees, a little bit like spraying febreeze on vomit. It sort of works. “It smells like laundry in here,” people say. ‘Laundered mackerel,’ I think, but “Yep. Clean sheets,” I say, gagging on the smell and my own mendacity.

I took my test a few times in The Isle of Man and failed. Then I stumped up for driving lessons in London. I learnt to drive properly in this town. I’ve been driving here for decades now. But with this car at this time, I’ve noticed that something has changed.

There are documents that place the idea of a “Hackney Carriage” in London from before the Norman Conquest. In the 17th century they were very much a part of how the city ran. That has been the case ever since. The drivers have to pass one of the most stringent tests imaginable about London routes and times. It requires years of work and a highly developed memory. They need to be able to adapt to the needs of the passenger in real time. To know the right street without having to be told, and to be able to predict traffic based on time of day. They spend years building towards “The Knowledge”, on scooters, down every road in town, with a big map between the handlebars on a customised board. Ten years ago you’d see them all the time, working – learning. It took years. Now you rarely see them. Because Waze will give more accurate traffic info, and get you where you need to go most of the time without a problem. And all that effortless hard won knowledge, so joyfully presented in their heyday – “No need to explain, madam. I’ve done the Knowledge. I know it well.” – has been supplanted by technology. Fuck. Fuckety fuck.

Suddenly anyone with a phone can get you home. That work has become redundant. The knowledge is still a wonderful thing to have but it doesn’t make you more efficient. So where does that leave the black cab?

Adapt or die. That’s the Darwinian rule. Software seems to be the way forward for now. Possibly the black cabs will be saved by a reasonable software platform to get fares, if they are willing to adopt something new, after all the work they did. But they haven’t yet, or if they have it hasn’t become apparent, and it’s not competitive with uber. I swore off them years ago. The amount they charge is beyond extortionate. Last time I got in one was drunkenly after the Notting Hill Carnival. We regretted it hugely very quickly, and got out at a tube station. They’re priced at luxury point, but they’re everywhere. Possibly they will find another way. Possibly they will die out. I hope they won’t die out, but uber made cabs worth it in London. Now I want them to have competition, as they are creeping up in price themselves.

But the black cabs are angry. The streets of London are currently flooded with bored men in their 50s and 60s driving great big expensive cars around all day without fares. They did a load of memory work back in the day, now nobody is hailing them. So they just drive. Round and round their old routes. Getting angrier and angrier. Surrounded by other angry cabbies. Honk honk honk. Shout shout shout. Moan moan moan.

In the month or so I’ve been back on the road I’ve noticed a disproportionate number of Hackney Carriages behaving as though it’s their job to police everyone else’s driving. And to shout at people. Apoplectic grey haired white men howling at cyclists or people at crossings or cars that are slow or “wrong”. Faded boozy Knights of the Road, slinging their corpulent bodies at perceived injustice. They hate bicycles. “Why are there so many? There weren’t so many in my day.” They hate minicabs for a multiplicity of reasons, many of which are connected to “my day”. This is their city, and anyone who isn’t them should be inarticulately raged at.

My old workmate Joe took The Knowledge when we were working on the boats. He’s a beautiful human. I wish him well. But recently, his fellows have been devolving. I hope he gets work out of it and a living considering he did it so recently. He was thrilled to have converted to a cab from skippering boats for Mammon.

When you think about the individuals you always wish them well. It’s why roadrage is so nonsensical. I wish Joe well, but I’m fed up of seeing these impatient devolved thugs shouting at people while presenting themselves as the gentlemen of the cab industry.

I’ve agreed to let a complete stranger sleep in my bedroom next week. I’ll sleep on the sofa. It just seemed the right thing to do. She’ll be visiting an unfamiliar town in an unfamiliar country, and money is tight for her. I know how that is, and even though I hoped and failed to find someone like me in LA last time I went, I still try to angle karma when I can. After all I’m waiting on a lucrative job, so any positive energy is good. Besides, she’s a vegan and I am back into another month of that sort of thing. I’m not very good at it. Today I’ve eaten lots of chicken, and mussels and red wine. Tomorrow I won’t. Over the last few months I’ve been smashing myself with everything I could find, and like the tide I feel the need to pull out for a while after a full flood, before smashing back in again.

My forthcoming guest is allergic to cat hairs, and Pickle has been in the habit of sleeping at my feet every night. Last night I was woken at about 3am by pain. I sat up until it was gone and she came and nuzzled my face. Then as I drifted back to sleep she curled up near the painful bit. As she goes about her ministrations she explodes hairs like a mushroom pumping spores. And not wanting to accidentally kill my guest, I began operation de-catify this morning.

First things first, I spent a good few hours at the launderette, washing all the towels and sheets and cushions and blankets etc etc. She loves to jump on the towel rack and spread thick chunky portions of herself all over the towels. If there’s a sheet drying she’ll make sure it’s covered in her. I don’t know how she manages. She’s tiny. Lady Macbeth says “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.” I’m in a similar state of bafflement about her hairs. If I were to sleepwalk tonight I’d probably do it miming a cat roller.

Not having a tumble drier means that we have to hang sheets on doors etc. Then they look like cat toys or climbing frames. And they play host to yet more hair explosions, or get pulled onto the floor and rolled on. I love Pickle. But I have to look at space differently now.

I took my laptop to the launderette and tethered it to my phone. As I sat in a coin operated launderette I still somehow felt like I was living in the future. Sure I probably could’ve gone online and paid about the same for door to door laundry with a sexy logo. But I’d sooner give it to someone in Pimlico with a shop front. I sat while the wheels went round and round and sent a load of invoices and emails that were just coming due. Then I read my book. People around me were doing much the same, and one woman was meditating.

Now I’m back at home. There’s a new hook and eye on my bedroom door, so you can lock yourself in now. I’ll consider doing that tonight so Pickle doesn’t sneak in, tempted by the freshly hoovered floor, and gaily explode hairy catastrophe everywhere as I sleep.

(Photo credit Tanya Feldman)

Occasionally a photograph of me holding an accordion goes up on Facebook. Look at this beauty from Mike Shelford:

This sort of thing might lead the credulous to believe that I am an accordionist. This could not be further from the truth. They’re just photographs of me holding an accordion. I got drunk one night after I’d been paid and I bought a cheap one on eBay because I thought I might like it. It surprised me when it arrived some time later. Since then I have occasionally hacked something resembling music together in front of people. The key is to play a tiny tiny snippet and then put it down. Leave them wanting more? Leave them without getting anything in the first place. “Oh, wow,” say the audience. “He can play the accordion too.” And they imagine all the other notes I can play. The poor fools. If only they knew that I’d played those three notes repeatedly for twelvety hundred years until my fingers and ears were bleeding, and there is still a very real chance that at any time I’ll hit a wrong one, lose track and have to style out an abstract cacophony.

A month or so I found a sticker on a lamppost near my flat from someone called Anton. He’s an accordionist from Slovakia looking to pick up some cash by teaching in my area. I rang him up. £35 an hour. Unlike when I was a child I actually want these lessons, so I decided to give it a go.

He’s in a bedsit near Battersea Bridge. I arrive and he’s leaning out the window. He laughs at my antiquated case, which I have to hoik awkwardly in one hand, whilst it hangs half open from a broken strap. I get it up the stairs, and into his flat. “You need a better case,” he tells me, showing me his. It looks expensive, the case. I tell him it’s nice, and I’ll think about it.

He takes my accordion and puts it on. “This sound is bad,” he muses immediately, as he tests the left hand. “I thought that was just when I play,” I attempt, but he’s right. It’s picked up a lisp since Christmas. Some of the reeds are damaged and make a constant sound. I must’ve dropped it. Damn. I need a better case.

He gives me the address of a shop in Lewisham which, he says, shouldn’t be too expensive. The right hand gets his seal of approval, so it’s only half fucked, much like its owner. It works enough for him to teach me on it, so we begin.

I like this guy. He’s patient, and willing to state things that are totally obvious to him. We do some isolated music theory, and he watches as my eyes glaze over, so adjusts to practically teaching the application of theory and watches as I perk up again. I know a bit more about how these weird noisy external lungs work. Probably about time considering I’ve played them in five different shows now!

It all started at Guildhall. With the only bit of third year show casting I got in the main theatre, apart from the musical. I was playing a 93 year old Patagonian domino enthusiast who could only express himself by playing “The Grey Song of Absence” on his accordion, until the end of the show where he has a three page senile monologue about memory, war and friendship and dies. Commercial casting that. Hell yeah. I still grabbed it with both hands and practiced that song for weeks and weeks and weeks non stop. By the time we got to performance I had a handle on it. It went fine in the shows. And I knew I had found my instrument. So I’m grateful to drunk Al for buying one many years later.

My fingering is all wrong on the left. That’s the first thing we realise. I’ll have to do some reprogramming. But the lesson has progress and now I’ve got homework.

Maybe next time I end up wheeling the thing out in a show I’ll be know which note corresponds to which button. Maybe next time I play to an audience, nobody will run from the room bleeding from every orifice and desperately howling in a language lost to the world for thousands of years, like the last few times. It’s getting wearing.

This morning I was reading about bubonic plague showing up in Arizona. It’s treatable with antibiotics these days so it’s unlikely to be a problem. But it got me thinking about old diseases coming back again. Things that were horrendously damaging and wiped out millions of people, rearing their ugly heads again. It’s the silly season for news, August. I’d prefer cats with wigs. But instead we’ve got these people with tiki torches and hate, who genuinely think that it’s people like themselves who are under threat.

Then I was thinking about the tolerance paradox. I value tolerance highly. But where can I stand regarding people who have no tolerance? Surely if we are intolerant of intolerant people we will be sucked in by our own pursed lips. One argument, with historical precedent, is that tolerating the intolerant leads to the decimation of the tolerant by those unchecked intolerant people, and thus the destruction of tolerance. So tolerant people have to be intolerant of intolerance…

Then I was thinking about the language of self styled “intelligent” people regarding the intolerant people empowered on the right in America at the moment, and the man that is their rallying point. People call them stupid and ignorant a lot. It’s hard not to think of them like that if you value community over individual. But this is just a worldview clash. That orange dude can’t be purely stupid – he got himself elected. And if we call him names, surely we are just doing the same thing as the guys with tiki torches. Nobody thinks of themselves as stupid. If I publicly call him stupid to his followers, his followers know I think they are acolytes of stupid, and so they have nothing to gain from listening to my views, as they think they aren’t stupid, making me the stupid one. I’m just another liberal that doesn’t understand whatever danger whatever value they are concerned about might be in if they don’t hate whoever needs to be hated. They are being brave and having unpopular opinions for the good of the many.

I’m trying to get to the bottom of the thinking behind the hate, but I don’t want to. It can’t be just about preserving how it’s always been, can it? Adapt or die is part of evolution, but I guess if you also think we were made out of ribs on a flat earth by a bearded white dude, evolution is not part of the deal. Is it just a chance to be angry? A need for identity?

There is comfort in breathing as part of a crowd. You get it at the end of yoga classes, at the start of Hitler rallies, in assembly when you sing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” We breathe together and somehow feel more connected. More complete. Part of an entity. But time and time again in our desire for unity we miss that the person at the front of the crowd is a monster. But of course. The bulk of the crowd feels fulfilled by being part of one big breathing community unit. The person at the front is never fulfilled. “I want more and more and more.”

I don’t like this August. I don’t like where it is going. I feel so much self preservation in the air, so much greed, so much misdirected fear. I don’t want to dismiss the people swept up in it as stupid, even if I can’t agree with them. But at heart I fear I’m a hippy. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all just get along?

I’ve got a little pencil moustache because I might have a lovely job that wants it.

If it comes in I’m going to spend as much as I can bringing loveliness to the people around me. That’s about all I can do, as an individual. To use my windfalls for good. To try to be kind, considered tolerant and generous and hope that some people who are swept up in misplaced fear and hate can see a kinder way. “Haters gonna hate, plague is gonna plague.”

I’m the youngest of five boys from my dad. Max is the only other one from my mother. I was brought up to call and think of my half brothers as “brothers.” Jamie, Rupert and Jeremy-Norman. Joan, their mum, is still alive and living in France. My mum was only a few years older than them, which must’ve been really weird for them growing up.

It was around this time last year that I understood that Jamie, my eldest half brother, was not going to live another month. He had been suffering with Parkinson’s, and with his weakened system he got MRSA during an overnight stay in hospital. His wife sent me photos of the drips he was on. I sent them to my friend Tara, a nurse, who confirmed they were end of life palliatives. My best friend and I jumped in a car, and drove to the south of France to say goodbye to him. We missioned it through the day and into the night, and caught him in his hospital room near Poitiers the next morning. On his back, flat out on morphine. It was desperate. The passage of time is so cruel and inevitable. We stayed a couple of days, and then, as we boarded the ferry to return, the phone call came. Another person that I had childishly assumed would always be there, taken. Just a year previously he had been vital and happy. I had given him my grandfather’s stamp album in a garden on a beautiful summer’s day. We had told stories and laughed.

I saw another brother, Jeremy, this evening, the middle brother of the five of us. He’s a dreamer like me. He’s been in Hong Kong for the last few years, but has just taken a job in Cairo teaching art. Like my father before him he has multiple broods of children. He was there with his youngest, Campbell, who is off to art college himself in Aberdeen in September. Jeremy is looking forward to Cairo – “At least it has culture”, he says. To be honest, I’m looking forward to him being there too. I might take the opportunity to go!

But it’s been ages since I’ve seen Jeremy. About 2 years. He’s been out in Hong Kong, so it’s not been easy. But I bet I could’ve found a way to see more of him and his kids. Family is important. Jamie was sick for years in the south of France. Not that far – it took a day by car when he was dying. I could’ve come and helped out a lot more before he got sick. We can get so swept up in our own lives that we leave other people behind, and you only get one family. I remember when mum died I felt terrible about the fact that her period of sickness had been over my final year at drama school and then the filming for my first movie. I beat myself up over what I considered to be prioritising my career over her existence. It took me years to forgive myself. I still find myself habitually deprioritising my needs over those of others all the time to compensate from some imagined neglect I did her by caring about my own shit too much.

I want to see more of my family, more of my old friends, more of my new friends. There’s nothing to be gained from rolling through the same groove day in day out. Hopefully I’ll get the part I auditioned for today. It’ll be 12 grand for 2 day’s work (!) so I’ll be able to fly to Montreal and Cairo and Scotland and America and Australia and see all the lovely people I never get to see. Look after your family, and your old friends. But I guess it’s worth remembering that your oldest friend is yourself. And they need looking after too, with a mixture of nurture, forgiveness and tough love.

I’m not going to post a picture as the only pic I have of Jamie is him dressed as Madonna. Plus this feels a bit maudlin and if I don’t put a picture it doesn’t get so many hits. 🙂

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Today we finally got paid for the geegees. Considering the hours we worked and the care we put in it’s almost criminal how long it took. But it’s in today. Myself, Tristan, Will and Gillian all met up in Soho and went to The 10 Cases on Endell Street. Expensive but you can get very good wine. And having lived on toast and charity for the last few weeks I’m very happy to be in a position to pay my way for a change.

We got a seat outside, as the sun was setting. We watched the world go by. We enjoyed good wine. And good company. Four friends who had been in a hospitality warzone. We bought a lot of expensive wine in the sunset. As we were talking, various people stopped at our table to ask for money. We politely rebuffed them. One guy stopped twice and we heard him out twice before saying we wouldn’t help. It’s noticeable how many people there are these days begging in Central London. This guy’s English was good, and he had the air of an addict. I’m not an expert and I have no idea of his circumstances. But when he came to us a third time I made the mistake of cutting him off as soon as he said “Excuse me,”. I said “I’m sorry, we won’t help you.” I looked him in the eye as I said it and spoke without aggression or tension. But I clearly judged it wrong. Perhaps he didn’t know it was the third time. He very quickly became aggressive. Which made him drool. Whatever he was lacking, he definitely needed it. But I was enjoying an evening with friends, not selling whatever he needed. So I couldn’t really help. I had to stand and calmly reiterate that I wasn’t being aggressive, that I had nothing against him personally. His response was that we were sitting in his chair and drinking his wine and this was his town. As he was starting to tell me this a long drool almost landed in Gillian’s wine, which made me stand up so as to move him somewhere he would only drool on me, himself and the pavement. But of course it looked like I was squaring up to him, and I’m a head and a half taller than him. So all the waiting staff came running out : “I’m sorry sir, he’s becoming a problem.” ; “I’m not going to punch him, I just don’t want him drooling in my friend’s drink.” Meanwhile I’m trying to tell the guy obliquely that I understand he’s a human being and I only cut him off because it was the third time I’d heard his spiel. I didn’t even critique the spiel. In the past I’ve slightly dickishly given people advice on the colour or layout of their sugarblood, or how they are directing my eyes to it, or the evidently bad detail of their story sometimes to very bad reception and occasionally to very good. Elements of the discipline I practice. With him I was just trying to undo the bad blood I’d caused by dismissing him before he’d started. Pride is huge, even in addicts who can’t stop drooling. Nobody wants to be dismissed before they’re heard, even if their short term memory is such that they can’t recall being dismissed twice before in the same night. We want to be heard. To feel like we are not just shouting “I EXIST” into the void.

I have no conclusion. No pat way of turning this. If I was minted I’d probably give everyone the benefit of the doubt plus change, and not be minted for long. I feel bad about not being patient with him, but also it’s interesting how the thing that triggered his rage was his feeling of dismissal. I struggle with being dismissed in my craft. I worry that my TV CV (or more specifically lack of it) causes me to be dismissed before I’m considered. Which concerns me as I see how television has unexpectedly become the home of the long term story arc. I want to get a piece of that pie. But drooling into people’s wine, and shouting with mad eyes – that isn’t going to get me the changing job I need. I’m not sure what is, but I’m going with sheer optimism and bloody mindedness, just because that’s what I’ve got left…