AlBarclay

I remember at university when people tried to randomly make you care more about their shit than some other rival’s shit. This was me coming into my adulthood. We didn’t all get it but those of us that did, there were factions – there was so much noise. If I went to one person’s party it turned out to be at odds with someone else’s party. “How dare you go to Mulchy Cranbrook’s bedroom escape party! You should’ve gone with me to Perineum Slabnut’s evening at The Purple Turtle.”

I’m finished with a Christmas that went well. No unexpectedly tricky people, nothing showy. Just another Brian And Al Christmas. We try and find the lovely ones who slipped through the cracks. We find them.

Still it was fucktons of people but we made food and now we will have to establish how to make continued food out of the leftovers tomorrow, because that bird was barely touched. I think that I’m gonna have to make a whole load of soup. Tomorrow will be a scratch point for me and most humans in the world to make a vegetable turkey soup thing. I can likely start with club sandwiches and then just use all the things I’ve been left.

“Did you think you would end up with such a trans positive Christmas?”

I love the question cos that’s just the way my life has fallen. I didn’t know the extent to which trans people needed to have humans not be wankers to them. Without any flag, we had a good number of people in various stages of transitioning and I don’t think there was any moment where it was the topic. I know Mel and I, my longest collaboration, we’ve often felt that the whole notion of gender is a construct. She agitates towards traditionally masc things while holding her fem, I shift to fem in my solutions and identifiers but hold my masc. It’s all a game, largely. We had a wide variety of people today and they shifted through the palate of gender presentation. We had a lovely saffer, that horribly alpha culture. He managed not to explode at the abundance of shifted humans. It was a safe room, thankfully, as I had been concerned going in. It only takes one person being a cunt for the whole thing to go south.

Happy Christmas you maniacs. Thanks for touching base with me. Boo is going mental next to me as I write. Lou is to my left. I’m on my back. I want to snuggle Lou and somehow stop Boo. All at the same time. I’m sure I can fool Boo out to the living room so she keeps Sarah up not us…

I’m one eye open. there’s nothing left but noise. Enjoy your time between Christmas and New year, your Malcolm. I’m off to see if I can invest in play to improve my sleep.

Up late for Jesus. Eating a bit of his body, drinking some ribena. I’m not sure transubstantiation works on ribena to be honest. I’m willing to trust the little wafers for my fix of holy cannibalism but if it’s not wine it’s just a sugary drink, my Godvampirism won’t be sated.

Nevertheless it was glorious. Chelsea Old Church. Hymns in exactly the key that is easiest to play on organ but literally nobody can sing them in their register. A huge congregation of tipsy rich people pretending to be devout. Vast old money, trophy wives and idiots like me, all mixed in together. Alex the bass from Othello sings in the choir there.

Last time I went to that church for that second was probably thirty years ago now and the vicar at the time gave us all a right bollocking for only showing up for that service. It put me off enough that even though it’s fifteen minutes walk from mineI sacked it off for a few decades and just focused on the sprouts.

Brian and I have been prepping. We peeled potatoes, trimmed veg, peeled carrots. I made two Mushroom Wellingtons, some cauliflower cheese and some vegetarian roast tatties as most of them will be an apocalypse of liquid goose. I stuffed the turkey and baconned it and wrapped it.. I’ll chuck in the chipolatas tomorrow. There’s a lot to do still, plus picking up in the morning. I’ll get underway when I can. Need sleep now.

I’m happy to be shriven. Most of the church I’ve done recently has been Catholic mass which is comforting and Latin and there are nice smells. This had some modern language in the creeds and so forth, still using the “trespassers” version of the lord’s prayer which is comforting, largely a pleasant service. The vicar kicked off his sermon with a Shakespeare quote, threw in some casual ancient Greek… I was best friends with him by the time he had finished what was a very nicely balanced thought for the day. A few assumptions and generalisations but the guy believes in God for a living so I cut him some slack. We all sang “little town of Bethlehem”. “Not so fucking still we are seeing it lie right now,” one of my neighbours pointed out in a whisper. “We were in the naughty section,” Lou said on the way home, but I have a feeling our whole section was the naughty section. Most of the people around us had already had plenty of the Blood of Christ. The ribena probably stopped them tipping over the edge.

Happy happy Christmas you glorious people, wherever you may be. zzzzzz

Sorted out my wardrobe door with an impact driver. It’s a temporary fix, probably should have done it weeks ago, there’s nothing like having a girlfriend over. She just made me clear up my laundry. Tomorrow she’s not working and I’ll be in prep mode for Christmas. Should be fine. My processes might be scrutinised but they’ve worked for me thus far, they can be explained or adapted as necessary.

Picked her up again from the tube. That’s habit forming. Twenty years or so and I’ve walked it every time. Made good friends with the 170 bus. Spoiling her rotten. Largely I’m post bath and in my slacks, but she’s worked 73 hours since last Tuesday. She ain’t paid by the hour. She’s knackered. I can get off my lazy bum and pick her up from the station even if I don’t want to.

Brian and I purchased Christmas today. No vacherin which is a great disappointment, but nobody has it. Last year Waitrose did a big push so now nobody get it for blood or money. Fuckers. We bought the rest of it. I got home shaking from having forgotten food, and consumed an entire packet of quails eggs with celery salt. We have three more. I stopped shaking.

The flat is full of food. We tried to be restrained but it wasn’t quite as successful as it might have been. We have stuff. Much stuff. Tomorrow I’ll be a one man crusade for blinis and vacherin. We will be ok without, but let’s see what’s possible.

I’m knackered, the tired of the idle. A man who has just tidied a bit, gone shopping, consumed a dozen tiny eggs and chatted to a few tiefling over his Steam Deck.

Lou is home, home is warm, I’m looking forward to another night of weird dreams and catintheface. In keeping with her black cat look, she chooses her moment well, only interrupting the dream when it goes weird.

Bed feels really like the right place to be. Christmas approacheth. The light is returning…

Christmas is coming. Tomorrow Brian and I will go shopping for the big old loads of stuff we will need. I’m tempted to go with high quality disposable plates as it looks like we are in the twenties numberwise, but possibly Brian has plates and industrial cleaners at Kingswood. Tomorrow is plan day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Today being Sunday was given over to playing.

Boo got the lions share of the play. She likes chasing her bouncy stick thing. I also got my Steam Deck out and tuned back into Mass Effect 2, but with Christmas coming and the fact I’ve been looking forward to it for ages, I’ve just set the thing to download Baldur’s Gate 3. And this is gonna get geeky now.

Although I’m sad suddenly. I think I’m aware that I’m about to have a load of people over for Christmas many of whom I don’t know. I was supposed to be going off and being sociable this evening and even though it would have been restorative I just couldn’t face it. Saving up my energy for Christmas day and the early morning drive around and all that will follow.

Last night when Lou got home I was smashed out with red wine and pretended to be grumpy in the hopes she wouldn’t rumble me. Siwan and I reflexively did the bad vooze thing because we haven’t seen each other for ages and our entire friendship has revolved around pubs and clubs – she’s the ghost tour, and she’s the other dancing unicorn. We had fun but it didn’t leave me very capable of complete sentences. She went off to volunteer for You Me Bum Bum Train, which is slave labour and they even encourage you to drink in the bar after. Well done them I guess, but it feels like they might have vanished up their own arseholes.

Here we are at the dark part of the year. The light is finally returning, oh glory, praise be. But it’ll be a while before we notice. I’ll try and make light, but I’ll need to stoke the inner fire first. Christmas is energetically expensive with the madness I invite. It’s gonna be lovely as always. But it’s gonna be busy this time and I’ll get full use out of Bergman…

I was supposed to go out today. Didn’t manage it. I’m ok with that.

Early bed.

Last night Boo discovered so many different forms of disruption. By the time the night was done, I was thoroughly discombobulated.

Tonight Brian and I watched the first 2 Taken films. In Paris over summer with my decent french and my decades on events I did find myself saying “I have a very particular set of skills”. People quoted it to me. I found myself associated. Watching it, I can kinda see why. Bulldog etc. I haven’t shot anyone yet though.

Right now that set of skills seems to involve helping my beloved from the horror of walking from Sloane Square to my flat, even if in the morning she wants to walk round the block.

I’m sleepy.

Anyway, Brian and I had a lovely day today. A chilled day. We ate sourdough and watched movies and Siwan came over. For a long time Shoe and I sorted out the wonderful costumes that might have gone haphazard into my attic. I’ve got some really clear offerings now, and they are all well labelled and ready to go. A very good use of a day.

I’m knackered now, and Lou will be home soon. She’ll be tracking to bed and I’m already most of the way there.

It’s a new thing, sharing space like this.

She’s working on a show where the principles keep ducking their responsibilities. It’s in a major venue and they aren’t household names. It’s fear and laziness. Really hard to countenance so early in the run. Lazy arses. Just get up and work surely? I can’t be compassionate right now as it just smacks of entitlement. Show up, do the job, remember there are hundreds of people who wish they were doing the job instead of you, grow. That’s the pattern surely?

I’m tired and full of noise. Maybe I think I’m Liam Neeson in Taken. I need to get trim as it’s a part I totally get. Not one I have provision for in the attic. “Ringmaster” “Austere” “Footman”. I tried to categorise before putting bags up in the attic. I think I’ve got a handle on it now. There are some shapes I can throw. And I can make things happen for others too. Slowly. Over time.

Mmmm I was just zoning towards sleep when Lou messaged and I remembered I had told her I’d pick her up from the station. There’s something extremely Chelsea about an overcoat on top of pajamas and a pair of Gucci sliders. I bought the sliders on Vinted for cheap as an in joke with Lou because of all the saunas, and they have become a big part of my day to day. Convenient things, particularly if – like me – the only shoe option tends to be a great big pair of walking boots. I’ll happily kick around in bright socks and designer slip ons. Although apparently it is illegal to drive in socks. I was told that by an uptight female friend when I was driving barefoot, but I think it is actually a thing. Nuts of course, the better you can feel the pedal the more nuanced your use of clutch and throttle will become. But we all know that laws are largely a massive pile of buttsick.

Christmas approacheth. I’m not gonna be working now until next year. Don’t want to do any of that festive event stuff, Paris and RSC means I’m still ok for now without spamming energy into other people’s stuff. I’m just gonna be festive homebody. Today I sorted some sheets out a little bit. Tomorrow I will look at costumes and try and catalogue what I’ve got so it can go in the attic but come quickly into play.

Boo is being delightful, Lou is working all hours, Brian and I are starting to think about Christmas and what we might be having to achieve. Likely this weekend will involve a massive shop to get in all the things that we will need to get in. It is always carnage the morning after. I’ve got a floor mattress, some bits and bobs, I’m making sense of rugs and towels etc etc. We will manage. There are definitely lots of plates.

And I’m exhausted. Lou just made camomile and I had it’ll be head down and off into my extremely eloquent and lucid dreamscape. I’ve been spending time with lots of people I have almost forgotten in the waking world – dreaming into old friends and old alliances, breaking old tracks and patterns.

It’s ten. I have a feeling I’ll be flat out in ten minutes. I don’t think I can keep my eyes open. Winter. Early dark. This is the longest night of the year and I’m feeling it. From tomorrow, the light will be tentatively returning. It’s hard to believe it. Another corner, a happy corner, back gradually into the light again. Breath. Hope. Good things to come.

Very lovely to have seen a McFly musical, I feel like I missed out on something cultural. These lads were standing right next to me in the gala and sure they were well turned out but without any sense of judgement, if I had to say one lyric from them on pain of death, I’d be dead. I’d go with something love related. “Believe in love,” I guess that’d be my last words.

To me it’s Marty. The Power of Love. That’s probably where I got it from. His attempts to not have sex with his mother so his father could make him exist… a seminal part of an eighties upbringing.

Lou is working on Creakers. It’s glorious. Some really strong performers, all telling this hilarious weird story made up by a famous pop human. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

I did my first London performance on that stage. An award ceremony for school musicals. They played my track an octave too high for me to sing. Bob Holness from Blockbusters was judging it. I could’ve fucking killed whoever it was that sent me on as a tenor when I was a bass. We didn’t have time for rehearsal. It was a year since we had done it. The track was wrong. I remember being one of the only people in that group knowing this would be my job, and I remember fruitlessly reaching for the high notes in front of a big crowd and it was really uncomfortable and the original version for which the song was picked was in my register.

Nice to come back as a functioning practitioner, to see a show where I know a fair few of the creatives. Nice to be there just after coming back from Stratford and to see Fin in the audience with me, who was up there with me, who is supporting his girlfriend.

In particular, nice to see Lou in her element. She’s here in town with me and was running wardrobe tonight. She’s made this thing. She’s knackered in my bedroom now and Boo has widdled on the floor which seems significant somehow, I think largely because she needs to have her litter changed and I don’t understand her auto litter thing.

I’m gonna stop writing just as it feels I need to.

Up in the morning just to be up in the morning. I had to take my beard off. José the caretaker was tidying up the fire escape for the first time for many months, which is typical as that’s where I wanted to go to shear myself. Still, Mel was faffing all morning and she agreed to help with the tape. She’s flatsitting for a friend in Chelsea, just up the road from mine. Too good an opportunity to miss – a good friend, a great actor, local, American and female where most of my scenes are opposite an American female. I spent my day attempting to shunt words into my short term memory, whilst occasionally bumping up the Steam Deck to play Mass Effect 2 (oh my god).

Mel is off back home for Christmas and I know her well enough that I can guarantee you she’ll get swept up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I won’t see her until late March at the earliest once she flies away on Friday. So I’m making the most of the time we have now. I was always going to fall into this hole in the run up to Christmas. I am trying not to do Santa, so it is just me and my bank balance at war until I get a decent acting job. Gotta make the plans, roll the dice, believe.

Lou has just returned home knackered from her Christmas show. Mel and I retired triumphant to The Rose and Crown for a pint of beer post tape and pre edit. I’ve just come out of selecting the scenes and editing them all together. It watches fine – nearly three minutes of footage – I hope they cast me. I want this one.

I’m clean shaven again. Back to being mister sharpchin for the festive season. I like him but he can be intimidating. Boo doesn’t care though. She’s attacking my feet as I write.

I enjoy the discipline of self taping these days. Learning is still a bugger, particularly with these tight turnarounds. And nothing beats the magic of being in the room live, so long as you have your lines well enough that you aren’t searching on camera.

I’m off to sleep though. It’s easy enough, but it still can be draining, and Lou is flat out. Seems like a good plan to join her.

A lovely meeting with an old friend and collaborator at The Curzon Victoria, although I hadn’t checked my maps and just assumed it would be accessible by car without going into the congestion charge, so I had to turn around and go home when I got to the red C and get a Lime bike instead. Still, she’s written a feature. There’s a bit of tell not show still left in it, so she’s aiming to get it read by actors so she can hear when it is slightly overwritten. Like when my character says “You’re drunk. smell of whisky”. All you need is “you’re drunk”. We know he smells of whisky, we’ve seen him drink it. We also can see how my character determines he’s drunk, by getting in his face and owning a nose. My character wouldn’t, in that instant, be particularly concerned about showing his workings. Even “you’re drunk” needs a target, a reason. That’s fine. But “smell of whisky”… it can be sold, sure. You can make my character a particular hater of whisky – maybe his dad was a whisky drinker and beat him. There are many ways of selling the line as an actor, because our job is to sell these lines as truth. Eat the lines until you don’t have to try and remember them anymore, then pretend to be someone else. Technically it’s you under a different set of circumstances. But you under a different set of circumstances is basically someone else. It’s all about terminology. There have been some right plonking alpha males who have tried to mystify the whole process of acting over the years, just as with improv. Given it a whole load of language and rules, governed massive self-referential cults, disapproved of anyone using other language idioms. It’s kinda weird. In the end we are just telling stories. People love to be in charge of chaos, to have sets of rules and if other people don’t know the secret rules they are wrong and you feel clever. It’s bollocks but it keeps people happy.

I got an audition for someone really exciting. A self tape. I have to do it tomorrow, it’s very short notice, and tomorrow I’ll have to wake up and shave off the beard, pick clothes, make myself ready. It’s pretty much a year to the day since the Deep Cover audition so I’m fucking thrilled about it and even though it is not a long turnaround I am gonna do my best to make sense of it and turn in something good. Thankfully I’ve got all day.

Lou had her first day of work today so I’ll be picking her up from the station shortly. A long day for her. I’m ready to turn in, even if largely I’ve been winding out the ceremony and coming back into the world. I’m hoping to get to bed pretty quickly once she’s back, just as I want to activate tomorrow properly. This is not an audition to trifle with. I’m tentatively going to thank the medicine for aligning the stars so well. I was dreading an audition coming in on Friday night for Monday morning, God knows what I might have turned in with grandmother rolling through my veins. Tomorrow I can slowly and thoughtfully shear myself like a sheep and then set up a wall somewhere and bang out a bit of energy that might snag into a really bright slice of life.

Corners. Post RSC, post medicine, and things look different.

Onwards.

This morning I woke in Glastonbury with Lou. An expensive hut in someone’s garden with expansive views. Lou got the train last night. “I won’t be much use,” I warned her, but she was right to come. She wasn’t working today but she’s about to start a long shift on a Christmas show. This morning we could spend some time. We had papaya and then a lovely hippy brunch. Then a bit of browsing the bullshit shops on the high street. I managed not to buy much. A bit of catnip and some dragon’s blood. My i-ching this morning talked of the dragon and once at a ceremony I was given a dragon blood bindi and it helped with my resolve.

Then a walk up the Tor. Grey day but no rain. Not as many hippies up there as usual. It’s a place about the heart, a place of power despite the fact that humans have absolutely swamped it in bullshit. Old weird beardy tutting douchebags being more spiritual than you at the white spring which IS ALWAYS CLOSED WHEN I GO TO GLASTONBURY, ALWAYS. I stuck my head under the outflow. I thought I was gonna get in. One of the volunteers had a piss in the stream of it as it rolled down the hills. Another scowled as I examined the gate. Amateurs everywhere are woefully bad at peoplerising.

Up the Tor it was clear though. The paggro was all at the base. And as Jimbo, my neighbour in ceremony, said: “You gotta be careful in Glastonbury. It’s full of all these wankers who think it’s clever to try and do black magic. They haven’t a clue either. Dangerous idiots.” I filled my flask with water from the wells and after we had breathed our fill of the four directions we drove back to London.

I’m still feeling wrung out but it’s good too – there’s motivation tangled up in it. I’m a bit sad, a bit tired and happy to be back with familiar things, the flat the cat and all the stuff. The stuff is gonna be doing some shifting with me I hope now, especially in these dead weeks when I’m unlikely to see an audition. Christmas. Although it was this time last year that I sent the tape that led to Deep Cover, so the wheels are still moving.

Lou is fast asleep in my bed. I’m waiting until I’m tired, sitting up with Tom Bellerby and I’ve been flicking into my Joseph Campbell and playing silly buggers on the iPad. It’s ten now and likely I’ll get myself to bed soon as ideally I want to be up and good to give Lou a lift to Sloane Square for her first day on a new job. I haven’t promised her, but that’s my intention.

A different shaped Al in the world of the old shape. It’s familiar but it looks slightly unfamiliar too through these wide open eyes.

I’m actually looking forward to having a few weeks unemployed, even if it’s terrible for the bank balance. There’s stuff to look at and I think it’ll actually be fun to look at it as well, just so long as I break it into little tasks.