AlBarclay

Rainy calls about zoomy things in the morning and then Lou and I braved the weather and struck out into the July storms to find and consume brachyura flesh in Worthing.

Lou did the driving most of the way. In a bid for more freedom, and despite the damocletian sword of tax MOT fuel parking permit insurance repair work etc etc she wants to get on the road and I don’t blame her. I thank the lord I was taught to drive by dad. I wouldn’t have the Paris thing without it… so much less would be possible. She’s paying for an instructor as well but if she can get time with me she will do. This is our window, while I’m back training engineers.

Worthing Crab Shack yielded excellent crustaceanmeat and then we figured the cinema was the right place for such a relentless winter day, so we went to “Wilding”. It’s about The Knepp Estate.

Double standards are everywhere so I can shamelessly hold my hand up here. I love nature, I love internal combustion engines. Wilding got me wearing my nature hat. It’s the companion piece to Clarkson’s Farm. There’s more overlap than you’d think.

The Knepp Estate is just up the road from Brighton and it was a farm until they decided to rewild it. Their work, or sometimes lack of it, has brought endangered species back from the brink and taught us all a great deal about the web of invisible connections that hold us all together. It has probably also made numerous traditional thinkers and nature averse ninnies apoplectic with rage. I adored Birch (Selsdon) for that one glorious moment it lived before repairing a horsehair roof in the heart of Soho brought down The House of St Barnabus and both the beautiful Birches with it.

I hope the work they are doing at Knepp keeps yielding fruit. It is astonishing the extent to which we are motivated and encouraged to control and stamp out nature. Dyed meat and bleached veg on supermarket shelves, so little connection left between origin and consumption. A populace so used to being served everything by the infrastructure of capitalism that it just needs a small collapse like loss of power for a week and thousands will die indignantly wondering why their delivery didn’t come.

We caught Wilding at The Dome in Worthing. A rare old cinema now, and being so close to The Crab Shack it seems rude not to. I’ve only got a few days so despite the rain we are trying to go to places I like in the area. Relaxation and luxury before round two.

Bedtime now again, and the rain is piling down on the skylight. This winter seems to be going on a tad longer than usual up here in blighty. Just three days ago I was building air coolers in Paris. Now there’s two blankets.

It is so absurdly cold in this country. Nobody needs this in July.

I’m in bed before ten. Been looking after myself. My body’s reaction to coming off the job in France for a few days has been to go into full rebellion. Yesterday I just stopped functioning entirely and slept like a lump of rock to the extent that Lou checked a couple of times because she thought I might be dead. And yesterday and today have involved some serious runs.

The warehouse has virtually unwashed hole in the floor loos. I dared it once when it was pressing. Horrible rusted pipe behind you and many times in my life have I dropped my car key etc on the floor of loo. I’m not risking that stuff. One of the chippies made a khazi but you don’t really want to sit on that either. Best solution if I’m there is to go to Macdonald’s and buy a coffee. But in the state I’ve been in for the last few days, I’d have had ten coffees every day. Add to that the fact that tired Al yesterday groggily ordered dumplings and thought somehow that hot and sour soup was going to be tasty and warming. I even remember thoughtfully chewing up a chili pepper. Hot food to combat cold weather? Fine, yeah but dear god I now know the inside of every seed of that damn thing and all its friends and they all hate me for eating them.

Thank the dear lord I’m not sitting driving around the Route Peripherique, or picking up heavy things in a place without good loos. By the time I’m back in Paree I’ll be fit as a fiddle again and I’m doing things about my booze habit that should easily mean that I can win through to August.

Tonight another early night and long sleep. I’ve had Lou’s Ayurvedic eye on my diet, and her long experience in India accepting the effects of whatever I consumed the night before last. I think it should be over tomorrow. I really hope so. I thought I was gonna drive back to Paris. Not so sure about that now. But maybe.

For tonight though, I’m loaded up with charcoal and chamomile tea and as the July showers drip drop on the frosty summer windows I’ll stay under this blanket and try and sleep like a rock again tonight… February soon.

It’s so cold here. What the fuck?

I’ve been in a T-shirt every day and that’s only Paris. It’s a frisbee throw away. You land ten minutes after you take off.

My body has realised it’s allowed to stop.

This morning I dropped Brian at Heathrow then took some keys to a friend’s key box then loaded twenty seven bags of costume into Bergman and then unloaded it across town. Then I realised I was gonna fall asleep. I got back home and fell flat on my face and woke up groggy three hours later. Mad dreams. Now I’m aching all over and covered in bruises. I slowly shuffled downstairs and into Bergie and we hauled ass to Glyndebourne. Crashes on the 25 and the fact that my tummy is behaving very strangely meant that my journey down south was longer than it should have been. A day or two of taking it easy and I’ll be ready for the second part of the job. But it’s a useful reminder that there was so much backed up behind my endless drive to go go go.

Lou’s is the perfect place to be for me to reassemble myself ready for round two. The sea, the big light, the fluffy cat, the thoughtful routines and healthy food. If only it wasn’t so fecking cold. I might be aching but at least I’ve got a tan.

Now for a chamomile.

Delayed flight back to blighty. I’ve got some online work I couldn’t shift so I’m here for much of the coming week and it’s a chance to see Lou, which I’m looking forward to very much.

Right now though I’m sitting in CDG waiting for a delayed plane and England playing Switzerland is so boring I figured I’d write this instead.

My journey onto the plane this way has been much nicer than the monstrous arseholes who work at the EasyJet gate to Paris from Gatwick on a Monday morning. Nobody has been arbirtary or cruel and I haven’t had to throw away a perfectly good compliant cabin bag because someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

But there we are. I’m flying EasyJet again. But you learn to be alert. I’ve just checked my bag in, paid a bit more. “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.” I’ve learned.

One night at home tonight and then a relaxing time in Brighton. I’m really looking forward to switching off and switching out. This work is good and I enjoy it and respond to the pressure positively, but now I’ve learned consumables I’m trying to make sense of downstairs, and part of me wants to start coming in at 5am, as Stephan is very happy with himself for starting at 5, and wants us all to know about it, but it means that he is sending things that shouldn’t leave, and someone comes at 8 to add a box and he shrugs. He did it to me this morning. I got a text at 8 asking me to add a box to the camion leaving at half nine. I left the boys our whip and went in by uber, knowing full well that he would have sent the camion already just because. He had. The earlier the better with traffic, I suspect is his thinking, but if you think the timings are wrong then talk about it rather than sending things early and incomplete otherwise you are basically just not doing your job while being really visible. Which currently is Stephan.

So… as you can see I need to take myself out of it a bit. I became consumables guy in the supply warehouse and Darren became off site guy this week as no Ali with his shameless OCD. At least now I’m good at both off and on. Darren and I are both half jaguar though, with all the edges that brings. We will choose our battles and fight them even if they are stupid battles to fight. We will do three jobs simultaneously and all will be well unless someone comes halfway through and asks what we are doing.

I want to go lie on my back and look at the sky. England weather better behave itself…

It’s stretching things really, to call this place Paris. I’m staying in Noisy-le-sec. It’s a little busy urban satellite of Paris. A commune if you will. And very very crowded. The name suits it. It really is very very fucking noisy. Right now I’m sitting in the evening sun on a little stone bench. Behind me three men angrily and loudly gamble. In front and to my left, children play by the busy road. Men and women stroll around in pajamas and cultural outfits. Others parade the latest fashions.

This is my bedroom window – on the first floor.

HGV at all hours. The binmen early twice a week. Car radios with the lights off. Biker gangs. Arguments in the night. This town is alive with people but dead to nature. A pigeon got stuck in our oven chimney for over 24 hours before a builder let it out. Now it sits above the door, scraggled and reproachful.

Somehow it feels like community, but with all the shouting that community brings. If you look up, the sky is blue. But the streets are filthy and busy and fraught. People know us now though, the rosbifs who roll home late and leave early, often in hi-vis. We are in the build phase. It has been a steep learning curve but I’ve climbed it and man it is never too late for a dog to learn new tricks.

There’s a bit of wannabe gangster going on in noisy as well. I’m not dressing smartly as I am mostly in a warehouse and a jacket would stick out like a sore thumb. The burger joint opposite us is called O’Snoop, as the guy looks like Snoop Dogg. When he’s not flipping burgers he’s screaming around town on his big bike. Like many areas that feel rough, it’s actually friendly. Sure there’s need and addiction. But as goes the travellers mantra: Trust is almost always better than mistrust.

There are burnt out cars by the road and others overgrown in lots. Parking is tricky. Everyone has a vehicle. Try and get this place switched over to electric it’ll never take on. You’d have improvised cables stretching across the road. It’s easy to forget how obedient the majority of people are in England and America. You can lose touch and start thinking “Yay, no cash is great and everyone in electric cars,” without realising that the world will be on fire in a week.

The other day I picked up a box of screws on the mezzanine and the bottom fell out. About fifty screws fell through the crosshatching to the area below. I went and cleared them up. Nobody was below me, so nobody got a screw on the head, but the French clocked it. As I was sweeping I said “Il pleut!” to them. “Oui, il pleut des vis.” It’s one of those things that we all knew might happen. I even thought about putting a cardboard floor down. Better to shift it entirely.

So …  I’m making a new station for vis, with a concrete floor. Much better. Des vis – the screws – are a constant problem. The office guys can make orders at the hardware store but they have to choose the brand and then the French hardware store inevitably says “we only have 999 of the 1000 screws you ordered so you are getting none”. It is actually better by far for me to show up and buy screws by weight. I’ve done that twice today and so long as I keep changing branches I’ll keep us in cheap screws until the fabled unicorn brings the delivery of screws that was promised in the faraway time. These weight boxes are just as good, they just require a bit more work to count.

You measure screws by weight, which I wish I’d known when I first counted out 300. I’ve bought a kitchen scales now. Amazon lost my first one, but it is a crucial tool. Nobody counts screws, but … anyone with a modicum of sense can work out how much ten screws weighs and then multiply it to get their amount. I’m making a chart. I’m checking it twice. I’m becoming the screw master.

Then it was boxes. Everything always comes at last minute. 150 80x40x40… No office store is gonna stock that many. Another big hard call, but there’s two of us and we are both good at this. I’m gonna be on stock tomorrow, and Darren will roam. This means I’d better turn in. Wednesday morning can be pretty full on. And there have been a load of trucks. It’s getting really busy here now. I think I might need to crack in early. Just had to tell Dean the driver where the Luton key was so someone could drop the back of their artic.

Ali has gone to work on other events for a while, so I’ve shifted onto stock and Darren is into response. There’s A LOT to do. Like tons. We are trying our best to do as much as we can. But each person is only a person.

Today I’ve been making boxes up with all sorts of things. Not screws, somehow. Never any screws. Where are all the screws? Will I have to purchase more screws? When will this screw shortage ever end? Darren went to the hardware store today to get an order and once again they came up short. It’s endless.

Darren was running around in the transit while I calmly made loads of piles of consumables. Lots of it is running out so that’s the conversation I can have tomorrow morning. I wish I knew how much was needed. I’m in the dark about the bigger picture because the other option would likely involve having to go to meetings loads and filling in forms. This way I can just be a blunt tool and get things done when they need donegetting. And while the big orders downstairs seem to keep getting mixed up and not by Greg, there’s some seriously overspeed French work going on while we are upstairs ordering things. I sometimes see them getting things ready for loading and it really doesn’t feel thought through. Upstairs it’s a system now, and it’s hard to fuck up even if it took Ali and I a while to arrive at it by combining our opposite brains. We conjured up a way of things that isn’t too particular but is meticulous and can be transferable if, as will happen next week, we both need to be off elsewhere leaving Darren holding the baby on his own.

I’m waiting by the tumble drier right now. It has said six minutes for it last twenty. I want to go to bed. But I put all my clothes in it but what I’m wearing. Tomorrow isn’t such a really early start which is comforting. But I’ll need to be in clean clothes.

It still says 6 minutes. I reckon there’s a moisture gauge or something.

I wanna go to bed

Into the warehouse and into the orders again. There are so many venues and they all get a standard order of cleaning supplies, tools, fixings and other consumables. They get them when they request them, and the gamble tends to be that they never ask for more than about six on the same day. The ideal is that we have nine set up at all times, unwrapped but ready to accommodate special requests.

The supplier has fucked up royally. We should have had a load of screws at wholesale prices ages ago. It’s ridiculous that I’ve had to buy tens of thousands of screws to make up the shortfall. I had to tell my captains how much they’ve made me spend. I have a company card with deep pockets, but that doesn’t mean I should spend it badly. I wanted it to be clear it was all on the line. Nobody will fuel their vehicle if they know it only comes back when they invoice, and ditto nobody will do a hardware run. That’s why I’ve got the card, but then I end up being the one that runs up the money and nobody wants to be thought of as the one who spends more than anyone. I know it will all end up back in the same place though. Still I’m trying to choose my battles.

Tomorrow I’ll be in the warehouse on consumables, shifting and sorting things and making everything shipshape. Inevitably someone will want something. That’ll fall to me as Darren has to go be glamorous at an airport tomorrow because he’s a racing driver when he’s not response team, and the racing driver that was supposed to be there can’t be.

Darren is 47 and ripped, but with him I hear the voice of my wonderful Guildhall movement teacher Wendy Alnutt telling us not to go to the gym. His well wrought muscles have pulled his body out of whack with itself and he’s having the same sort of issues you might get if you have a big belly or, God help you, if you have massive knockers. He tried to get me to lean my whole body weight on his chest to pull it wider and ease his back pain. We will keep trying to find a solution – he’s got elastic cables and maybe we can pull against each other. It’s not a bromance. How dare you.

I’m in early tomorrow. Bunch of orders going out first thing. I need to be there to add whatever the fuck they need last minute and make sure nothing catches fire. We are coming together as a team now. Two weeks. I sent my first invoice today… I’m at the bottom of all my overdrafts. Thank fuck for this work. Still, it’s low blow. Darren gets a third again on my rate for the same work with the same experience level. Interesting how it all fits together and I’m thinking about systems going forward and what I hold to be my value. But … I’m an actor primarily. I love this event work but it will always be secondary to my vocation, irrespective of the money. I’ll get a fraction of this wage at the RSC, and that’s considered to be top of my beloved theatre industry. I hear my dad’s advice: “Go into another line of work.” He was pragmatic I guess. The event work has made the acting possible. All hail the event work. That’s why I’ve been here, not Wales. Wales would have been charitable, fun, all about friendship, but ultimately it would have been hard work for no remuneration. I’m getting to the stage where I can’t allow that anymore.

Right so. I could take stock today. Needed more screws, believe it or not. Got them.

Base is sending out tools and cleaning supplies and consumables to every Olympic venue. I’m based at base but solving problems as they emerge so pretty mobile.

Darren just joined the team and is living in the Airbnb, and to my enormous surprise he is at home to the oojieboojie. I didn’t bring any incense thinking I’d be in hotels, but now I wish I had. I didn’t bring my cards, which is not like me really. I’ve had them on many events before though and never used them apart from a daily for myself. No time and nobody with inclination. Typical that the first time I don’t, someone aligns. Events people are enormously practical, generally. There’s no time for listening to the wind though. There’s too much to do.

If I hadn’t been here this evening I would have been at The Willow Globe in The Tempest. Magical place, magical play. The whole piece has been carefully guided towards that magic by Maddy. Shakespeare is about channeling anyway, the last piece the most magical. It was the words around which – (with some adlibbing) – I first drew the interest of wonderful Lou. He left more of the light that he was channeling in that play than many others, did our Willie. I’ll need to find my Prospero in time, but right now I’m not ready to break my staff.

Darren and I went to the park after work. The Bois de Vincennes. We lay on the grass a while. We looked at the water. We contemplated the trees. We connected with the world and each other.

We are largely working on a metal mezzanine in a vast concrete warehouse at the moment. The work involves “consumables”. What are they? Screws. Cable ties. Bolts. Les vis. Les Cableties. Les Bouleaux. A million types of tape. Toffee tape, glass tape, gaffer tape, masking tape, packing tape, insulating tape, double sided sticky tape, hazard tape … … there’s more. Yes then tools and everything else but this evening, after the park, my thought is on the screws and cable ties. And staples. They’re gonna be everywhere, these tiny things we are handling.

You know me by now, oh constant reader. You know my obsession with the movement of energy, and my mission towards myself, to shift and process and pull the badness out of things where possible. Well, this is the finest opportunity I’ve ever had, and Darren has just come to join. We can send millions of tiny flickers of brightness and positivity to every venue in this town. Nobody will pay attention to the screws and the cable ties and the staples, but if these things are resonating at the highest level they can resonate at then all the better for this broken world. Every country in the world will send their finest humans. Why not try and make even the bolts and fastenings as bright and energetically healthy as the athletes. This is my work, under my work.

Is this how I justify working really hard on mundane things? Or have I been given a fantastic opportunity for global lightwork? I dunno. I’m just moving stuff around. And that involves moving ideas around. And ideas are powerful.

I tend to take Pascal’s Wager generally. If you take it pure, and don’t complicate with what people have done, most belief structures are more positive than their absence. You don’t have to do anything more than allow a bit of cosmic thinking. And Pascal brought the word God into it, but that’s just one frame of understanding of the unkowable. Whatever it is, either I’m sorting millions of screws and I can’t fill them with light, or … or I can. Or I can believe I can and be happier about sorting millions of screws.

Either way, you’ll all be getting a bit of the light I’m sending out via these screws. Best I can do with the life I’ve led up to now. Someone else can do the pole vault.

They took a van out earlier than scheduled for a delivery. They also took it out incompletely loaded. This is happening too often. And it changed my day totally. I thought I would be able to make sense of consumables for the future. As is I had to get up and run to buy some bolts, box them up and chuck them in a crate, get the crate lifted down from the mezzanine and loaded onto our Luton and then work out where the hell MPC is. MPC. is the main press centre. The official address we have all been given is very much not where it is for the purposes of driving there in a great big van. They’ve cordoned off a bit of road disconnected from the venue where they can check your accreditation and it is nearby, but you need to be told about it really. Then you have to go back round once you’ve been safety checked, and get past another layer of security. All is as it should be in terms of it being difficult to get into places, but people who are supposed to get in should be able to. I asked the head of transport if, after however many weeks he’s worked here, he has a pin or any helpful info. No. What a silly question. So I work it out and add it to my list of pins. I am gonna try to use some spare time to write up an English guide to some of the more complicated venues, for any non-francophone drivers. I ended up in a long french conversation with a french logistics guy and Curtis, where the logistics guy and I were both feeding back exactly the same issues. The info we have isn’t helpful. We need to share info as the closer we get to “go!” the more fraught everything will get and the more important it will be to have people get stuff quickly.

Edward works at MPC and he’s bilingual English French and the contact I get from Grace. We have been alternating languages messaging one another as we haven’t worked out what the other one speaks. Head of Transport can’t get me a van pass, but Edward gets me one in less than an hour from me messaging him to tell him I’m coming with forgotten stuff. I’ve saved his number now. He saved my bacon. I’d never have gotten close without a pass – it would have taken even longer than it needed. I would have had to walk a pallet across one of the busiest roundabouts in Paris and then have persuaded the concierge of a posh hotel to let me put it in the goods lift. You can get away with a lot in hi Vis. but not everything.

All hail Edward. He’s lovely on pick-up although I’m shortly going to Google “Best way of getting a pallet truck onto a tail lift,” because if there’s a knack, I haven’t got it yet. I can get it down but it ain’t pretty.

Still, I don’t drop the pallet or break my foot or the van. And on to the golf. The golf course is way out of town. They want 8000 80mm screws. I have a suspicion, from what I’ve observed, that they will all stand around simultaneously looking at an empty pallet for however many hours or days it takes for someone to bring them the screws. I don’t stop at multiple hardware stores to make them universal as every hour I delay is a wasted hour by everyone who has decided it is impossible to buy screws for themselves. They are getting all sorts of different heads and sizes. 80mm by everything from 3.6 up to 6.

They don’t like the 6 but they will work better than everyone running out of screws and Guyancourt is miles away. I’m not gonna come back with more screws. They can fucking source their own now if they’re fussy about the size. They’re all the right length.

Long drive home. Another stop at a hardware store, topping up consumables that we have never had enough of. By the time I’m back at the warehouse, Ali has left the building. He’s off on other events. He’ll be back in a week or two. He and I balance well together. We both have big memories but our priorities are very different. I’ll miss his very well understood brand of OCD. I’ll maintain the systems we made. I’ve even bought a digital scales so next time someone asks me to count 300 bolts I can weigh one and do maths. Expedience sometimes trumps precision.

When I arrive, someone is adjusting the number and type of cable ties in the orders Ali and Darren have been laying out while I’ve been away. I restrain myself from worrying about what else might have been changed without our being told, as the someone knows these events better than anyone and is making a knowing change. I’ll make sense of it all on the weekend and make it all ready.

Tomorrow and Sunday will be hopefully a little less runny roundy. I can literally take stock. So I will.