AlBarclay

Reisen schweinhaxe. (And disappointingly not oven baked potatoes on the other side.)

That roughly translates as “Huuuge Pigknuckle.” Think crackling on a Sunday roast. Double it. Chuck in some fat and some darker meat. Then add a bit more of it. With 2 kartoffelnoedels which I guessed would be giant gnocchi and yes… Dumpling probably a better call. Potato-noodles doesn’t really work. But that’s the feeling. Oh and some sauerkraut. A mouthful of it. Because veg.

I’m in Hamburg. I won’t be here for long.

I’ve been to three Christmas Markets already today. They are all crowded.

I was in the third row of the plane. John was one row ahead of me. He was drinking his easyJet moretti as we flew. I was still digesting my breakfast. John is in Hamburg for Christmas markets, although he’s likely to eat in McDonalds. Which isn’t a British restaurant, an irony that might be lost on John.

He used to be a marine. His dad was in the army. He has travelled. I didn’t expect to be in a conversation with John. But it sustained a long long fucking queue to get our passport stamped, even though we were first off our particular plane. I learnt a lot about him. He learnt nothing about me.

It started when we hit the queue. The EU nationals were flying though on our right. I didn’t really expect anyone to hear me when I hit the queue and said in an undertone “It’s what we voted for. Taking back control. That fucking bus and here we are.”

He initiated it. “Tell you what mate, yes, I did vote for it and you know why? Cos our laws were being passed through other places. We couldn’t have any of our own law anymore.” This started a whole long chat where I was pretty much entirely asking questions and John was answering in monologue form. I was trying not to lose him, so I thought questions were the best way, and then try and get them in the right order to spark thought. ‘It’s all so woke at the moment,” “I don’t know what woke means, I hear it loads and it seems to mean just … anything people don’t agree with, what does it actually mean, John?” “When we were young we could say anything. A fattie was a fattie. A ginger was a ginger. Now we have to tread on eggshells…” John doesn’t like the small boats. He doesn’t like the fact he can’t call people names anymore, “just in banter obviously, they never minded” (they did but you had the power John. This is what they call privilege. Thin privilege. Blue eyed blonde privilege. It’s still a thing, John).

He was likeable. He wasn’t a monster. He just wants to feel safe. “You travelled a lot as a kid, you still travel now. Do you still stand by your vote?” “No because it hasn’t been the way I thought it would be.”

Brexit was a fucking car crash for us. Europe, with togetherness, could have stood up still now as a global powerhouse. I still think John and his mates might have eaten some vatrushka before that vote. Russia doesn’t want united Europe. And they haven’t got it so hooray for them and John. Because the Johns of this world were cluelessly voting for a personal fantasy that varied from person to person. John didn’t know what he was voting for apart from that he wanted to continue to stand in his privilege.

I struggle on some points. He asked me just one question among his many answers and I couldn’t have answered it even if he’d let me. “Why do you think they go to all the danger and expense to cross the channel in boats, coming up north all that way? They’re safe in Italy. They’re safe in France, in Germany, all over. But they still risk their life and get on a boat here? Why?” “I don’t know.” “It’s obviously our benefit system and the fact they get free hotels…”

I’m not sure John. I think we might have a very familiar language… I don’t know though. There are so many issues facing us, is this really the biggest problem we have? A drip of desperate people? Is it so many that it’s a problem. He doesn’t want ID cards, we align on that, and the fucking triple tax return can literally go jump in the fucking sea, that’ll be the one that has me looking to emigrate. I’ll be on a boat out if otherwise I’ll have to do a tax return three times a year.

We are in that queue for a good 40 minutes. I don’t end up hating him but, like all of us, his thinking is blurred by his needs and his position. We shake hands and part. He’s off to get leathered at a biergarten Christmas market big steins and boobies type thing. I’m off to see Gaslight at The English Theatre of Hamburg. I’ll never see him again and that’s totally fine. But he’s not a baddie. Just likes himself.

—

Soundtrack:

Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You am

Stones: Exile on Main Street pm

The cats and I are all lying together on a warm bed. Outside the wind and the rain is absolutely howling. I’m not at The Globe this evening. There’s an event and there was a possibility of it but the client is unsure what they want and are evidently costcutting. Tink’ll be there in white tie on stilts. I get to try and stop for a night. I’ve been trying to do my tax. Can’t settle my brain. I’m also extremely tired and feeling slightly unsettled. I’m connected emotionally to Lou and she’s fraught at the moment.

Her show is opening as I write, the first official show, out in Riyadh. I’ve been there for five minutes once and the moon looked different somehow and then I flew out again to Tabuk which is basically an outpost. Lou has been swept up in it, going from hotel to compound and back on repeat, much like me on some of the Extreme-E events but with much more sewing. I’m really thinking about her loads at the moment just because no matter how knackered I’m feeling working multiple jobs, I’m still getting up after her and going to bed before her and she’s three hours ahead of us. She’s on fifteen hour days and running around for most of them like a crazy thing. She sent me a step count screenshot yesterday that was reminiscent of one of my longest days on Kumano Kodo. Those were long days but I was in woodlands and then got to stay in hostels with private onsens, and eat amazing tuna meals.

My weekend will be fun but not restful. Lots of flying, lots of visiting, fun and good friends. I’ll be seeing my accountant who is a friend and watching her in a show and I’m pretty damn sure we will end up doing tax things together as my return is underway for one of the better years I’ve had for earnings recently. I ran up lots of expenses but I have a horrible feeling I’ve spent the tax already… We shall see.

I’m happy I don’t have to be anywhere tonight. Listening to what’s going on in the weather, I’ve just booked airport parking instead of getting the train tomorrow morning. So much nicer to sling everything in Bergie. I used to fuck off randomly all the time to visit friends etc. Haven’t done it for a decade or so until Ellie and Scotland, and it seems doing that has reminded me that travel doesn’t always have to be for work. I won’t have long to make sense of being in two big European cities. But I’ll see two very dear friends. One of them will entertain me and then get frustrated with me and then hopefully have a nice walk. The other one will feed me dumplings and introduce me to his missus. He’s playing Hamlet at his national theatre, but in rep and not this weekend. I just wanted to draw the path because every time you draw a path somewhere it somehow gets easier to follow it again. And I’ve missed my mighty magyar mate.

Globe is really starting to feel like a family thing now. Tink the aerialist / stilts is someone that both Ffion and I have been alongside forever. Now she’s becoming a friend. She’s a consummate pro in the crossover between circus and events, meeting Ffi and I as we cross from straight acting. The discussions and experiences we share about clients and rates are comforting in the extent to which we ellide.

The events team at The Globe are a hardworking bunch as well, and have come to know us it feels. The live staff have become part of our working circle. We show up, slot in, do it and go home. Next week it’ll be every day. Mostly around dayjobs as well. Tis the season.

It was something different today. The client wanted us but in Shakespearean costume. We provide our own and it is strong thanks to the clearance work. I lucked into some great Elizabethan stuff. “Where do you get your costume?” That’s from someone in the education department. I can tell you where a huge amount of costume lives that was made for early seasons of The Globe and then rescued from a skip by actors of my generation. The stuff we had tonight isn’t from that haul though – it is no less authentic but perhaps marginally more practical. My ruff needs washing though.

It isn’t long until Christmas but I’m very happy that this work has fallen out in this way. It turns out it works very well, the little team we have built over time, Ffi and I. We know the space, the game and the staff, and Tink is good company and plays alongside us.

I’m exhausted though. Got to turn in. Got no words left for today. Turns out three jobs is enough.

I’m on the tube. I used to be on buses all the time, writing what I heard. There’s an apocryphal quote from Pinter saying his work suffered when he didn’t have to get the bus. You hear mundane conversations on public transport and there’s great joy in the mundane. I like transcribing it.

“Its called Popeye’s I think,” say the two old geezers. “They’re taking over. It’s proper like, grilled… not like kfc. I think it’s American”. “In America they do kfc proper like with grilled chicken. Over here it’s all greasy. I’ll eat it sometimes sure.” They are standing by the door. Proper London but you’d call them boomers. Probably got a house each somewhere out east. They’re benign. Passing the time. “Oh once in a blue moon i don’t mind eating it. Used to be one round the corner from Shepperton used to do Periperi and all that shit. That was nice.” “Ooh I can do that spicy. I like a Charlie Bigham. At home. Although even the masala is quite spicy.” I find myself thinking of “Royale with Cheese”. These lads aren’t about to shepherd the meek into the valley of darkness though. Hopefully.

Down the carriage a young man is hanging his weight off the ceiling handholds, both arms up, body heavy. He’s skinny and he looks a bit sweaty and twitchy. He doesn’t look well. Has he been drinking or is he so full of propaganda he is actually afraid and defensive?

This is the circle line, just after half four. It’s not super crowded. The young man is singing. In the stations we can all hear the words. We stop at St James’s Park. “Tommy Tommy Tommy. Tommy – Rotinhim.” Something like that but the second word is a man’s surname that I’m not writing. Here’s to you, Mrs. You are the weakest link goodbye Anne… I’ve heard it a lot recently, this name taken by a Huntingdon-Irish named twerp. He’s becoming a rallying point.

Our sweaty boy is doing it pointedly, singing this name to himself not to himself. Because to him saying the name equates to validation for the opinions he has projected on that name. “Tommy Tommy Tommy. Tommy Rottenbum.” It feels targeted, like when you look in the mirror and say “Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse.” I imagine what would happen if that wet fart were to teleport into this tube. Precisely nothing, I think, apart from people recrossing their legs and him looking momentarily apoplectic and then grounding himself in that learnt way.

His tune is improvised and childish, our tube singer, mirroring his viewpoint I’m sure. We all listen for a moment as a carriage, and look at him and each other. It’s the unspoken rules: One doesn’t make noise on the tube.

The chicken geezers don’t play by the rules though: “Fuck’s he doing?” asks one of them with a world weary shrug. They all shrug. And they go right back to their conversation about different chicken meals, pitched a little louder to drown out the idiot. And various worried looking people on our carriage breathe out, cos these old boys have come down on things. But yeah… Fuck is he doing?

I look at his section of the tube. Sure it doesn’t look like a nineteen fifties advert for toothpastebread. But neither does it look like Mos Eisley Cantina. For too long I think about him I wonder what he thinks his silly little song is for. Looking for a reaction most likely, sadly. He’s eyeballing a family sitting down that have some traditional wear. Two kids, a dad and a mum with face covered.

Just like the roundabout kids and the flagboys. “I was only showing my paterrotism”. Hateyface people have noticed the idea of victimhood about people they’ve been horrible about. They’re aping it. “We’re supposed to feel sorry for them? People need to feel sorry for us.”

I just happened to be writing when this happened. Dammit now this blog that was gonna just be a transcript of a conversation about chicken (I’ve eaten at Popeye once and hated it) – this has turned into a thought dump about the way the simpler thinkers are being bamboozled into divisive behaviours.

Internally our singing lad is hoping for a chance to say: “What? I was just singing a name at you and now you’re cancelling me? Why shouldn’t I sing a name? Nothing in the law says I can’t sing a name. I’m singing about someone who loves their country. Don’t you love your country?” News Story: “MAN CANCELLED FOR SINGING ON LONDON JIHAD TUBE” “I was just minding me own business, staring right at this young family that had seats when I don’t have no seats after a hard morning’s ket,” says John Englishface 32 from Stockwell. “I didn’t even think that the family I was staring at might be like immigrant or whatever honest I was just innocent singing a patriotic name and this Spanish looking geezer in a hat he tells me to stop being a dick’ead. Great big beard ‘e had, jihad durka durka, but ‘e could speak English too like he’s integralating. All I was doing is singing is there a law against singing, probably is now with Keir. I care about are children! I wasn’t threatening that young family I was just singing. It’s not my seat anyway, I know that, I obey the law, I’m FROM this country but yeah it’s not my seat although maybe it should be my seat right like? I blame that Mayor of London. There’s something funny about him. I can’t say it, what I don’t like, but it’s… something. London is dangerous right now, I was told by someone in America.”

There are some things that are quite evidently ridiculously stupid. But it is clearer and clearer that we can’t trust people’s filters. People are being stuffed with tommyrot and it maybe comforts them in some way despite the fact that if you scratch the surface of all these “just saying” things all you find is fear and hate underneath. To me it is self evident that we are the target of the most sophisticated propaganda machine you can imagine, trying to prise open the cracks between us and splinter splinter splinter. Reds under the bed? Yep but they aren’t red anymore. That huge country under an increasingly mad megalomaniac autocrat. Ghengis, what did you do? Well, we know what he did. And the more they can divide the more they can conquer. Vlad the Impaler.

It might be nice to go to America again with the old bard williewoowah, mix it up a bit, get creative, do some art in the land of the free. Eat some of that juicy chlorinated chicken. Teach workshops. I’m probably less likely to get nuked out there. 

We were thinking about the music for the show on zoom the other day – the show being As You Like It. I like this bunch of people, they have an ethic, they are weird and positive and very different from me. And very serious, it seems. I’m in the right role as the dark jester Melancholy Jacques. I’ll bring the mad joy and the edge. I quoted my cousin Gordon twice in the meeting: “The context of life is death.”

Well then. I just got my first ever Notice of Intended Prosecution. Apparently I was going at 37 in a 30 zone. It was just after picking up my car from Gatwick after getting back from Scotland. I remember the flashes – hoped I would get lucky but not so. Christmas is coming. Those donuts don’t buy themselves. I’m going to have to dance through my first ever “And we all acknowledge that the thing is an important thing?” “Yes, we do. We acknowledge it. We are bad and will do better.” And I’ll only get to do that if I’m lucky. When I didn’t realise I wasn’t insured they threw the fucking book at me. They’ll choose whether I get to do my first ever course.

They are stepping up enforcement at the moment. The price of beer is up you see. All the little misdemeanours are suddenly resulting in letters. I’ve had a clean slate for years and suddenly this month a deluge. I haven’t changed so I can only assume that they have. It certainly seems that way. I’ll have to do an admin and once I’ve done it they will decide if it is straight to car insurance hell (please God no) or if it is gonna be funtime with being told I’m a baddie. “If you hit me at twenty there’s a strong chance I’ve got a baby voice.”

Max was round when I discovered it. “Oh I had one of those the other day,” he told me. Good older brother work, experiencing the thing first and telling me about it. Helps me realise it goes with the territory. Cars are expensive. They are deliberately making them more so. Tax tax tax.

7mph is the difference between a thing and a thing. Had there been someone in camouflage waiting to throw an unwanted child into that empty quiet fast straight road near the great big car park in Gatwick Airport, I might have hurt it a touch more had it been a good throw. I’m sure that’s the eventuality they placed the camera for, people hurling people into a clearly empty road. It’s not just a trap for tired people who have just got off a plane and are trying to demist the windows. That would make them a bunch of absolute fuckers. And they aren’t. They are good people upholding the law, and they deserve the occasional pint with their donut.

—

I’m into Thriller with my listening project. Watched the John Landis video today. Man, Michael Jackson was the king of pop. But maybe it is his baby throwing tendencies that caused the cops to choose that quiet straight empty road for their trap. He could have been there I guess, armed with an innocent child, just waiting for someone. “If you hit me at 37 there’s a high chance I am trying to make you feel guilty.”

I’m enjoying existing today. I just got out of the bath. There were civilisations beginning to burgeon in my armpits. I think one of them was on the verge of a nuclear age when I just washed them away with a deluge of water and some of Lou’s excellent rose scented soap.

I sometimes imagine that this planet is merely a strange cell in some incomprehensibly vast being operating on a schedule of time that means nothing to us its so slow. The whole observable universe to us is merely the equivalent of a tiny tiny portion of the interior of this being. We are no more significant than this single cell in it crawling with disease, trying to spread. And maybe the being we are infecting lives on a planet that is itself just an infection and so we go out and out forever and as it gets bigger and bigger time slows down more and more. There are my daydreams… The idea that we are cosmically unimportant, a tiny weird error. It gives me more hope than when I see people think of us as somehow mattering. If we are just a weird mistake then we can largely exist according to the rules we’ve all made up together and try to have a nice time. If we think we are here on purpose because of SKY PERSON that not everyone believes in, then we are justified to behave awfully towards anyone who is wrong about SKY PERSON. Also it allows various iterations of this fleshy mistake to play the rules generationally and position themselves where they can say “I’m an important flesh thing, so I can make other flesh things go to places or do things or have things happen to them. And other flesh things will help me do my desires.”

I’m not making any sense am I? If I’m not making sense to myself I’m surely not making sense to you. It’s cold and I’ve been on my own a lot and then I lay in a bath and soaked and all the heat pushed my brain into thinking too much about nothing and everything.

But yes, I’m enjoying existing. I miss Lou, she’s back in the hard work tech madness. The cats have been good company and Brian and Maddy are back now so I’ll see people. I’m going to do my tax return, the rest of it, tomorrow. So I don’t vanish into my own head again.

Tonight it is already late. I’ve had a lovely day but achieved nothing. Now I’m gonna read my book and listen to the wind and the rain outside. Thank God for this wonderful place to live.

I’m still very much enjoying my Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums listening project but it’s getting slower and slower. It’s an incredibly subjective list, made by multiple people and then likely reordered by editors with an eye to balance and keeping the readership happy, but that only matters if you care about which one is higher than which one. I don’t. It’s a long list of albums that have made it through multiple filters from a wide range of opinionated individuals. And I like an album – I grew up in the nineties. It’s what I got used to. Singles charts never interested me. I wanted the long form, even then, just as now. I’m happier with a five act play, a great big long RPG, a shaggy dog story. Lou took me to Tristan and Isolde and I felt enervated. I like long books.

So I keep listening to these albums multiple times. I’ve only got as far as #11. Purple Rain wasn’t familiar and I still haven’t seen the film. That took a few days to listen out. Then Blood on the Tracks. I used to love Bob Dylan but I’m ashamed to say he annoys me now so I went through pretty quickly into Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation, which I had on CD and which has kept me happy the last couple of days. It’s started to wear on me at last so now I’m seeing how long before I get fed up of Revolver.

Meanwhile off to the South Bank to see an old friend. I’m sure we should be worried about the fact that it is like spring in the daytime and then overnight it rains a whole year’s worth in an hour.

—

A lovely relaxed stroll through the Christmas market and an opportunity to catch up. I’m home again and switching off. Too zoned out for complicated thinking right now. I think I’ll just go to sleep without washing. The cats prefer it when I pong and I’m knackered anyway through inaction. Sunday doing what it is supposed to do.

Park Theatre. It was a long time ago now that I was there, we were there, The Factory. I remember the audience gave us bread one night. I broke it with Odysseus. Katie was with us that night I think. Penelope? Calypso? Maybe both.

There was so much curiosity in that show, so much attack, so much bravery. A little bit marred by availablity issues and fearful playing – “are we really gonna do the scene the same again?” But unlocked a great deal for me in terms of trusting the company, jumping off the cliff and knowing you’ll be okay. We improvised The Odyssey and we told it well enough most nights. We won more than we lost. And many of us grew through it.

I’ve been back a few times since to watch things. Tonight is the first time I came to support a fellow Odyssean. Katie Katie Katie.

Her husband and two kids are there when I arrive. The kids are amazing – they listen and respond in conversation with adults, they hold their own but remain kids. It’s a skill not to get bored and they are only young.

“Your industry is horrible, why do you stay in it,” asks her husband. “She just tells me she’s stuck in it cos she can’t contemplate doing anything else ” “Yep, that’s the extent of it.”

A allegorical show about post partum depression of a Saturday night? Whyever not. Fantastical autobiography. Magic and mundane. “I’m not like that,” her husband assures everyone afterwards.”That’s what the play’s about,” I reassure him.

I am very happy to have seen this and seen her. She marketed it with a load of video diaries on her social media and it’s proof that it works cos I often let these shows go by me, I think time is infinite and suddenly it’s over and I missed it. I held this in my memory long enough to make an arrangement with a friend to go tonight. Then my friend got stuck as all the trains into town from Hitchin are fucked tonight. I ended up sitting on my own, as the family kindly sat at the side. I didn’t want to sit right in her eyeline but I sat where I could see into the doll house that has been taking up space in her home for the last year. “That stupid doll house,” the family call it. I tell them how much space in my life is put aside for costumes I might need and occasionally use. Mummy isn’t the only person eaten by this madness. These shows can be hard to make, hard to do, hard to sell. Personal passion project, I doubt she really knows why she’s doing it other than that she must. And I get that if so.

It’s called Fox. Go on, buy a ticket. Katie wrote it and I know and like Lisa the director. She consulted me one memorable night when she was directing a one woman Edinburgh show about Ayahuasca. Apparently in my friendship group I’m an expert now on cosmic drip. As if anyone could be an expert in something as entropic and mischievous and winding and deep and ancient as grandma.

I’m home again early with the cats. The Park Theatre has pizza ovens and that’s no bad thing. I’m full and warm and happy and I’m gonna go to bed.

Tube back from Mansion House. I remember discovering this station when I was at Guildhall. Realising how much easier it was to get here from Fulham Broadway and walking than to Moorgate or Barbican. No Citymapper app in those days.

My journeys into drama school were full of quiet internal hopes and dreams. “If I walk this side of the column I’ll be lucky,” that sort of thing. “Where do you think of yourself being in twenty years?” That’s a question I got in my recall at Guildhall. I remember it well. “Twenty years? I guess I want to be known in the industry to the extent that occasionally I get asked to be in something at the RSC or The National. I want to be filming small parts and working in theatre. Occasionally a big part on film. Working. That’s where I want to be.” “That’s surprisingly modest and realistic compared to what we normally hear,” they replied. And here I am. Got a few more years before twenty. National Theatre isn’t on my bingo card yet. Jobbing jobbing jobbing.

I have a few friends who use me as an Uber. I really like the arrangement. They need a thing moved and them with it. They know how much an Uber is. They ask me if I’m free. If I am they get a friend instead of an Uber. I can be flexible and help with carrying. They pay the same and get more. I get money and no cut taken. Everybody wins. That’ll be my tomorrow.

Today we did Alice again, and it is unseasonably warm. I’ll be dead before the world dies so I guess I can enjoy the heat. We are in such a pickle though. The people with money can direct the narrative, and Al Gore got it right calling this general warming “Inconvenient”. ManBearPig will come back worse than ever, you can count on it. Meanwhile I’ll be on South Bank in my tights at the end of November.

My make-up arrived in the post so now I’ve got Guyliner on and I feel like Johnny Depp. I’m gonna run a bath and get rid of that. It’s nice for the work, it makes me feel a bit sexier, but make-up generally is a right faff to get off. I’ll end up regretting it.

Marilyn is in Marlborough, right near the mound and the school. I remember sitting on that mound with my mother aged 11, discussing my future. I almost went to school there. As I drive by I see the boys and girls in their uniforms and I wonder about a life that would have come from that start instead. Perhaps a gentler journey through the early years than the one I found.

Marilyn is part of an accordion choir. She’s practical and robust and doesn’t want to keep all the 12 bass accordions. Everyone always upgrades if they stay in the choir.

A 12 bass is all I need for America, I think. I won’t have minor keys though which I’m not sure about. Melancholy Jacques is often talking of how we fall apart, warp, decay, dwindle. It limits which keys I can play in not having the extra two rows of stop. But it fits in the overhead locker of a plane. This one is black. It replaces the one that was stolen from my car but it’s smaller and missing the extra keys. I’m thrilled I got it for under £200, even if I have to drive to Marlborough. I wish it was a like for like replacement but…

Being in Marlborough, I know I’m near Swindon, so I drive there past the Avebury stones, all those megaliths scattered on either side of the road. I have never been that way before, through that vast neolithic henge. This is a strong part of the world. I say that to the old man.

The old man is 100 now. I’ve brought him a card. Michael Beint. Actor. Raconteur. Tristan’s grandfather. I missed him last time I was in this part of the world. Didn’t want to make a habit of it.

A hundred. He is entirely present. Tristan’s mum and sister are there too. It’s good to see them. “I didn’t think you spoke to Tristan anymore,” his mum says. I don’t really, but we don’t ignore each other either. We’re not twelve. He told me where the old man was, so I came to see him.

Lovely to see him too. He remembers and forgets, remembers and forgets, in waves. I’m happy to hear his voice. Sometimes he gives way to wailing, in a conscious way, processing recent grief and the whips and scorns of time. I tell him how I’m the corporate stooge at the moment at The Globe and he’s happy. We often connect over Shakespeare. He drifts into reverie and then, quietly, for himself really, he speaks the words of Sonnet 18, word perfect, without hesitation, propped up with a pillow. “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see, so long lives this and this gives life to thee.” For a moment his eyes are shining. I applaud. He hasn’t been on stage for decades but its in his blood. Mike at The Factory was at The National with him back in the day and has sent me photos. He was a fine looking young man. Some serious cheekbones going on.

I’ve stopped on the way home, at The Red Lion right amongst the Avebury stones to wait out rush hour with a 0.05 Speckled Hen that doesn’t taste like sick. I needed to stop as seeing Michael made me emotional. He just lost his partner. Time is so fucking cruel. I’m happy to know him, to be halfway to his years. He’s not quite the seventh stage of man yet thank God. Got some teeth. Got both eyes. Got good taste. Bless his heart. I’ll be rehearsing during the funeral of his missus sadly.

I can see why he howls howls howls. Grief must be expressed to be known.