AlBarclay

That was unexpected. It seems like something cosmic wanted me to have a night of connecting with old friends before Jersey. First of all I went and saw Boy’s mum in Camden. Good chats and catch ups and then another dear friend was nearby. We have collaborations we have been talking about for ages. We catalysed some thinking about that. London is fecund if you want it to be. She came and joined us in Camden and we drove back to mine as it’s on her way home.

I wanted to go home as tomorrow I need to leave packed for a month in Jersey and I’m not very good at that. Then a text from NATHAN.

Nathan lived with me here for six years, sleeping in the room I’m in now. Long before I started this blog we were up all night together regularly,.going out looking for the things.

When I moved in here he moved in. The same day. We walked in to a flat with nothing but a single beanbag.

He had been a close friend at drama school. Max and I realised that I couldn’t live with him and his burgeoning family anymore so I landed here just as we were about to sell it. Nathan was looking at the time so we made sense of it together.

Our time together was varied and nuanced and often delightful. We fought and we made up and we helped each other and caused each other problems. We played poker and wii bowling and cooked and dreamed. We helped with auditions and shared contacts and hopes. He helped me into a part time day job that led to an excellent deal for a leather sofa that has been central to this place for over a decade. He has fully quit acting now and gone into sales. Charismatic bastard. The industry is weaker without him, but it can be a slog.

He showed up this evening with a friend, both of them in dinner jackets with bow ties. They had been over in Battersea Park for an award ceremony in their industry. Both of them live in Manchester with two children. It was remarkable to see him, and lovely. Considering people used to literally assume we were closeted lovers, we haven’t stayed in touch since life changed for him and he got married and had kids. We were friends in an older time, but we were so close. We wanted the best for each other. We still do.

He’s just left mine to go to his posh hotel and I’m running a late night bath. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up trying to get into a club somewhere… I miss the fucker though. For a wee while we would finish each others sentences.

The plan is to try and get back into the habit of sending each other pointless text messages often. I guess that’s how we make these connections consistent. I’m not very good at it. I can go years and then I might ping you something as if it was yesterday we last saw each other.

But yeah. So I’ve had a lovely unexpected friend night just before I’m out of London for a month. Partly it was made possible by the fact that I didn’t hear from Nathan until an hour before he showed up at mine. I’m so much better at last minute.

This kind of night is why I love being here in the thick of it though. Frank got stuck meeting my old friends. He got on very well with them.

My last night at home, and an evening where I get to relax with such a variety of lovely friends. A rare and surprising joy and I’m feeling very lucky. There’s loads of people I haven’t seen for ages. It is a reminder that, no matter how much time has passed, it is easier than we make it to reconnect. Thanks universe. I’m gonna sleep happy tonight.

I’ve often heard people say that time speeds up as you get older. My feeling on it is that it only speeds up when we hit routines. If we do the same thing over and over again then our memory forgets the individual days and the small variations, and even though the present experience of them rolls along much as it always must, we look back on those periods and wonder where the time went.

November is almost over and I am about to go to Jersey. It felt like we had forever at the end of October and suddenly it is here upon us. The downtime in the month was eaten up by small things. Sure, I went to see Diversity and down to Brighton and had the gala auction and so on. But in between times I was cold and I read my books and messed about on my Steam Deck and had endless baths and long lie ins to try and outfox the cold. And it all went so quickly. I’ve got one full day left before I go up to Oxford. My car is full of clothes and a chicken trolley that needs to be returned. I have to empty it and then load in the things I’ll want in Jersey.

I’ve started to pack my bags. Things I might forget include my accordion, a load of old metal planes that used to belong to my uncle and are going to go to a Jersey cousin’s plane obsessed son, toothbrush. But I’ve started packing earlier than usual to try and catch things like that. Socks pants etc all done. Various bits of tech. If I’m gonna be in a hotel room I’m gonna wire it for sound so I can ask Siri to play music when I get home after the show.

The guys that cast my face for dead Scrooge have arbitrated my facial hair for me. They’ve painted it with a few days of stubble so I won’t be beardy Scrooge this year. So be it. He was only beardy cos I have grey in it so it makes me look older. I don’t need to look older now cos time has done its magic trick and I actually AM older. It’s comforting that Frank has also experienced a swift November as he is only 24 so it’s not just my advancing years. It’s the dark and the cold. At least I’m about to be very very busy. Although I think I’ve just got a cold again. Dammit. It better not be like the one I had at Halloween.

And so my custodianship of another strange delightful and wilful creature has come to an end. This is the correct thing. I’m happy to have been able to provide a safe and comfy home for Boy, but his mum is back so it’s important to send him home quickly.

I’ll miss him, but on balance I know I couldn’t sustain a full time cat, what with my habit of buggering off to far flung places at a moment’s notice. I’d end up spending loads of money on catsitters. It was pleasant to borrow her little furry child for a short while, and thanks to Frank it was possible.

Boy came at the right time, despite my being too busy at the start to welcome him properly. Frank was about to go into a major operation, but he had a week or so to get to know Boy while I was pratting about in Aberdeen. I got back just before his op, and Boy had bonded well with him by then. They cared about each other. They looked after each other over the convalescence period.

Tomorrow morning I won’t wake up with his furry paw in my mouth. That’ll make a change. He was very good at making sure he had his breakfast, to the extent that we had to text each other when we fed him cos he was a big one for munching it all and then immediately trying for a second breakfast.

We can close the doors again though. We always made sure he could get in and out of all rooms as he hates closed doors. And when I go to the loo in the middle of the night I won’t have to be on high alert in case he has placed himself exactly where he needs to be to send me head over heels. All the cat stuff went off with him but for the litter tray and shovel which is now sitting clean in the bathroom awaiting the next feline visitation.

I’ll miss his little fluffy face but I feel happy about a job well done. He was happy here but missed his mum. Now he’s back home, and what’s more he seems to be tolerating the doggie even though they only met yesterday.

I had to go on Reddit for this one. “How to introduce dogs to cats”. The answer is, slowly. Problem is they are both pretty old. Marshal is 9 and Boy is 11. Boy has never met a dog before.

We tried to take it slowly. Marshal stayed in the car and smells were exchanged first. A rug and a bed. Boy seemed indifferent. He was relaxing in the bedroom.

Boy’s mum is out of hospital and this dog comes with a new man. Boy will go home in the next few days and Marshal is likely to be around from time to time, so it’s worth introducing them carefully.

He’s a big dog. Half Rottweiler half Labrador so you’ve got a mix between a breed with a rep for being nasty and a breed of great big softies. To my eye he looks more Labrador, but the owner calls him a Rottweiler. He’s a lab in temperament. Up in my flat he seemed to just want to sniff things and bang around. I was relieved to see how gentle he was. He’s a rescue, but in a year he seems to have bonded well with his keeper, so I was happy he wasn’t gonna chase her. That’s the dealbreaker, apparently. It breaks the trust.

When he came up, I closed Boy in the bedroom so he could have the sniffs. I was in there with Boy. He was right up against the door immediately, curious but not bristling. When eventually they were in the same room Boy was being held but he fought the hold and then growled hard at Marshal, who was at first too curious to understand he was being threatened. There was a bit of noise eventually and Marshal started responding so we parted them and went and got treats.

Both of them then had a veritable cornucopia of treats, all the while being manipulated closer and closer to each other. We let time work and once Boy seemed satisfied this thing wasn’t going to run at him, his curiosity kicked in. He didn’t get right up to Marshal, but he got close and it didn’t feel threatening. Marshal was mostly oblivious to being under scrutiny, and didn’t even notice when he got hissed for rolling on his back on Boy’s bed. With care and patience this might work between them despite their advancing years. Which means it’s likely I’ll be sending Boy home before too long.

I’ve come to love having a cat around. They are there on so many levels, keeping us company as they depend on us for food and snuggles. I’ve had a fair few pass through me in the last few years, none of them full time. I’ve been lucky like that. Could I have a full time cat? Not if I want to jet off all over the place doing weird jobs. And I DO want that. So I’ll stick with the temporary cat carer thing, and learn as I go.

I’m glad it was a successful introduction. I won’t lie, I was anticipating disaster. Pickle didn’t get on with Boy at all.

Treats go a long way.

“Love me, love my kids.”

That was my mother’s insistence when she was dating in London in the nineties.

I look at what I was like and feel sorry. I was a jealous son, protecting the memory of my dad. Nobody would be better than the unit I had always known.

She divorced dad because it wasn’t working but also because she had an idea of freedom that she had never lived. She married him still a teenager in the summer of love. What sort of life did she miss?

She got the men to treat us as well when we were around. “I come with two children.” That’s a lot to bite off, but she insisted that it helped sort the wheat from the chaff. So often I was there on “dates”. These men… I gave them such a hard time. They were looking at mum. That was hard enough: brittle and forthright, beautiful and kind, easily put off, totally aligned with her own value. Then they had to get in with these two precocious neurodivergent children.

You’re on a date and they’ve brought two kids. One of the kids is watching you, deliberately challenging your bullshit, naïve and gauche but thinks he’s clever, protective of a mother he has habitually had to pull out of deep sadness. The other is mostly uninterested in you but for how you fit into the system that makes up the world, observing and interacting with you with a scientific eye, examining your behaviours generally and responding to your suggestions based on his assessment of your value in a grand scheme. Where do you take them before they suck your soul out?

It’s a miracle any of them stuck with dating her, but mum? She was worth it.

I went to Wimbledon Centre Court for the Becker vs Edberg with one guy. Many of them took us to all sorts of events or walks or experiences. And one of them took us to Bibendum. He was a (perhaps celebrated) cartoonist, about twice mum’s age but charming and louche and I liked him as I found him unusually honest. He wasn’t pretending. I like that in life. He also took the brief from mum and gave me some attention. “Draw me when I’m fifty,” I requested when he said he would do me a sketch. He drew a monocled rogue grinning with a moustache and pinstripe jacket largely bald but with some sticky up hair, catching my nose and my twinkle with a few lines of biro, evidently in the same seat at Bibendum with cigar and red wine, mid conversational flow. “Alexander at 50” dashed off above it, and he signed it. I had it on the wall in my room at school for a year or so.

Mum never saw him again with me but he won my vote by avoiding safety. I lost the picture, but I wonder who he was. I think he was with a newspaper.

I haven’t been back to Bibendum since.

Alexander is close to fifty now. Still no monocle, and he quit smoking. This evening was the first time he went back to Bibendum since he was fifth wheel when an artist dated his mum. I went with Justin.

Justin and I haven’t hung out for years but we are old friends. These days I find it easier and easier to forget the passage of time. It didn’t feel strange to go and eat at Bibendum together even though we haven’t seen each other properly for decades. He’s got kids now so I know that these things are harder for him. I figured a sexy restaurant made more sense than Pizza Express. He was on board. We both have expensive tastes.

It was lovely to see him. We didn’t sit inside so I didn’t quite lay the ghost of the mum-artist-date thing. Mum rarely seriously dated artists. Too unpredictable. In retrospect it is no surprise I approved of him.

We sat, Justin and I this evening, and we both saw how we have peace in our various crafts. He is a writer. I am mister pretendyface. Both of us are happy and have carved out… something.

We mostly talked about life and family. We covered a lot of ground. He’s a good man and it is great to see that there’s still a friend there. Time is an illusion. This evening we were both sixteen again, but without the bullshit that goes with being sixteen.

I know a lot of people who would really hate my morning.

I left slower than planned but happy to be slow in company with Lou. It has been so lovely to visit her world for a while. It has been full on for her, and I like being able to put faces to the names. Her Tiktok boys and their mums and the various physically or emotionally eloquent humans who she has covered so much ground with on that bus. The wildly varying personalities that make up this eclectic mix of lovely touring humans who are packing out these big venues with dance, facilitating the dancers, feeding them, dressing them, organising them, massaging them. I had my hotel breakfast and then I jumped in Bergman. Off to Stoke Newington where a friend is waiting to make a cast of my face.

They’ve been practicing and reading up and watching YouTube tutorials. There’s a workshop built in their flat. Yesterday they did it to Jack for practice. Today they are gonna go full on and cast my face. It’s for a MOMENT in Christmas Carol. Just like with the fire last night at Diversity, it is just a moment. But these moments accumulated are the things that build into magic. Every moment cut is a moment of potential wonder lost. Why not have dead Scrooge, I say? Even just for a flash of lightning.

Apparently straws up the nose are frowned upon. They just make sure there are holes. I relaxed my face and took it as a rare opportunity to let myself meditate as they applied alginate all over my face and then waited for it to set. I was in there for about 45 minutes all said. I took the pressure off myself to do anything because I couldn’t. Thankfully I don’t have a cold any more so breathing was easy throughout. It is odd though, having your whole face covered like that. I’m glad it was friends. I allowed myself to trust them, and tried to relax my face so it would cast well.

The time shot by. A little itchy but I’ve always been good at the old mind over matter. Mostly I was in a calm space, although swallowing was a little odd mostly as I didn’t want to do anything inadvertently that would spoil the cast. If I’m gonna have my face covered over I might as well aim for a good result.

I wonder how many of us really know what the shape of our face is. I found myself thinking like I looked like other people I know when I saw what they made of it all. It’s definitely a face.

All in all a very strange morning.

Then I went to Imperial College and had a 2 hour training session to stay up to date with one of my day jobs… Life’s rich tapestry.

Well that was delightful.

Lou has been working with a dance troupe off the tellybox while they do a number one tour. Being totally out of touch with popular culture they had passed me by… Diversity. It’s a family affair, largely. A tight knit group of clever bodies and hard working young men and women. They dance. There’s a story. But we are there for the bodies. There’s a plot and all, and that’ll help get repeat custom, but with what these guys can do they just need a light shining on them really.

Supernova. We are all made of stars!

This is a not the sort of thing I normally go and see, so perhaps I enjoyed it more for the unfamiliarity. I loved the self conscious style of it. I really enjoyed seeing them throw and catch things on stage and bounce balls off each other without ever losing or dropping things. I liked how they left the stage in one costume and came back in another one way too quickly. I knew the jeopardy and could sense the backstage frenzy. Loads of them. Visuals to blend with, lights to find, doors to get through, stages to not fall off, rain machines… They even had fire.

It would maybe benefit from an editor, but I like that this is an expression of sheer exuberance. “Fuck it, let’s have two torches for about a second and a half.” “Noooo!” screams the producer in me, knowing how much health and safety and cost is going to go into a flashy unnecessary moment. But the more of these moments we habitually lose, the duller the general theatrical offering we make in the world becomes. So yeah, good on you guys. Do a backflip with two torches for a second and a half and then put the stupid rain machine back on in the curtain call so there’s no time to dry that shit after the matinee before the evening show and everyone might pop their knee out losing a foot in a puddle. BECAUSE WE CAN. BECAUSE IT’S THERE.

Sometimes we don’t need to be sensible. We need to be a flashy great big supernova.

A teenage girl near me passed out watching the curtain call. She woke up in a wheelchair laughing. “The plot was really good!”

There’s gonna be dancers made out of this. What fun.

Diwali. The triumph of the light. It’s a five day celebration and today is day 2. Lou and I were in the perfect position to enjoy the festival in that neither of us were working today. We were in Reading, but you can’t have it all. And it benefits from being much more multicultural now than it was thirty years ago.

Just down the road from the sad little terraced house where three of us took shelter from the constant rain and made unrealistic plans late into the night nearly thirty years ago, Lou found a pleasant little Nepalese restaurant that was open. It’s been there 9 years and it is superb. Dhaulagiri kitchen café and restaurant. She spent ages in the Himalayas and a little bit of her heart is still in India. She recognised the name as matching a mountain range in Nepal, and figured quite rightly that it was going to be a good place. We book for mid afternoon. It’s a one meal day, and it has mostly been about lounging.

If I was reviewing it I would use words like “unpretentious”, “family run” and “authentic”. You get the vibe. If like me you like food, probably some of the ACTUAL best restaurants in the world are places like this. “This is the best Tarka Dhaal I’ve had in England,” says the only other guy there at half 3 in the afternoon. He’s clearly very specific about things and from him it feels high praise. He is less enthusiastic about his pilau rice but that makes the praise feel even more truthful.

We get a Thali, momos, some chicken and various other little lovely bits and it really is a welcome to the light. Here in the darkest winter we can eat this excellent Nepalese food and talk about Hanuman and Lakshmi and the guys in the restaurant can burn good happy burny things while we eat our tasty food and the light is coming back the heat is coming back it’s coming is coming!

Man, me and winter are gonna have to have stern words. Hot food on a cold day though. I’ll be doing a lot of that in the next few months I suspect. Gonna seek the spiciest late night food in Jersey cos I’m gonna be staying in a Premier Inn all December…

We spent most of the rest of the day chilling out in the Pentahotel today. I know I can relax in a hotel. I might even bring my pillows to Jersey.

Today we were just enjoying being with each other and not having much to do. I did some dreaming about trips to South America and we did some planning of brief escapes to The Canary Islands or anywhere that is hot in January. If the sun won’t come to us we will go to the sun. Both of us are going to get busy soon in not-the-sun so we got to looking at diaries and making sure we optimised the windows we share for company and vitamin D.

The light is winning.

I’m in Reading with tired hands. Driving up here and listening to the radio it’s all exploding again for the idiots that have been running this country into the ground. Oh well.

Lou is staying at The Pentahotel on Oxford Road, and I’m trying to remember what this place was called twenty years ago. People would occasionally book a night here with their girlfriend. I once missed my last train back to London after a birthday party and checked in here drunk as a skunk. It is just round the corner from The Hexagon Theatre. This evening we walked through St Mary’s Butts and The Purple Turtle is still there. All the drunken nights I spent trying to pull. The kebab van. “Extra Chilli Sauce please.” At the time there was a rumour that the science bods at The University had sequenced the DNA from the meat in that van and found the meat of 38 different animals including seagull. You needed the chilli sauce to mask the taste.

Mostly the town has changed. Sweeney Todd’s pie shop is still there, with a hairdresser next door, but Vicar’s Butcher no longer makes up the holy trinity, so they must be buying in their meat. Maybe they’re using the seagull stuff too now. I might see if it’s still up to scratch as I had so many pies there back in the day. York Ham and Stilton was the big one. I used to load up for the freezer every time I came here. Twelve pies. They’d be gone in six months, easy, every time.

There isn’t much reason to come here though. Strange to see the changes. I lived here before The Oracle came, and it was dead. Just pubs and kebabs and that pie shop. It looks like there are more people here now. More business. Maybe … maybe some people actually live AND work here nowadays.

We are just passing through town. Lou has two days off before a show next door. I didn’t go to the Hexagon often back when I was here as it was expensive. My mate worked as a stage hand there and taught us fight choreography for our shows. That was my only connection with the place and it went bitter. He was a good teacher of intention, not so good at safety. His fights were dynamic, but most stage combat these days is slow dance, safety demonstration. He ended up in prison…

I don’t think of this town much these days. Nice to reconnect with memories of so long ago, both positive and negative. I wonder if any old friends are still here…

The launderette next to Lidl. If you don’t have your own washing machine then you are paying eight pounds in that place just to spin your wet sheets. You only need a year of that to buy your own machine, but you can’t buy the space to put it in. Stupid world.

It’s busy for a Sunday. A mum is there with teenage girls talking about Roblox. A man with a flatcap alarmingly similar to mine is intermittently coughing, and he’s largely on the phone loudly to the estranged mother of his child. He is gushing with intention. He talks of “love” like he’s read about it. It is colour and noise.

A bit later he panics that he’s put money in the wrong drier. His movement is wobbly. The Roblox mum intervenes. He feels strange and hostile, but she jousts him into being present with her. Her daughters have gone to Lidl. “You should get off the booze,” she tells flatcap. “It killed my brother at 36. His liver was the size of a football.” She is right in there with him, she’s helped him with the drier but she’s making sure he’s paying attention. He looks sad and evasive “It’s so readily available,” he pleads. ‘Yeah it is, but you make the choice.” “It killed my mum too,” I volunteer. “She was fifty five.” “That’s my age,” she says. “Close to yours too,” she sends over. He looks shifty a bit. She stays on him. She saw the alcoholic before I did. This is her mission. “Get yourself off that stuff. You can. It’s alright, but you have to stop or you’ll be dead soon.” He looks at her, and he leaves, saying nothing. He’ll be back when the timer is out but I’m almost done.

Remorseless and brilliant, that mum. “He’s a nice man but …” she confides to me. I bag up my stuff and bid her good day.

Sunday roast and I struggle about whether or not to have wine with it. We’ve all seen it, the disease. Booze is only fun when its fun. That man wearing my hat was dizzy at noon. He had been eaten by it, and she knew that the only way out was his intention.

I’m ok in my ivory tower. Rain on the skylight, the roar of the waves to my left, no booze. Sunday night. Just Tessy and I hanging out.