Al's Blog

2011-02-22T10:02:00.002Z

I like to say yes to things. Much more important to be someone who goes in with an open heart and cries YES to whatever life tries to throw. Most recently I said YES to a tour of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Richard III. Then I was asked if I wanted to build the sets and work as a Stage Manager too. YES.

It's kept me pretty busy. We were driving all over Ireland in a big white van, unloading, building, playing, loading, moving, sleeping. Richard III comes to the Tower of London on 1st and 2nd April - tickets are available through Waterloo East Theatre's website. I have many very funny stories, but I don't blog work. Dammit.

Happy new year

2011-01-05T14:39:00.002Z

Christmas is finally done with and the sodding easter eggs have already started loading up the shelves in Tesco. We're all freezing our asses off outdoors, and my Australian housemates have the heating jammed up to absurd levels 24 hours a day in my flat so I feel like I live in a sauna and I actively dread the arrival of the gas and electricity bills. And soon enough now I am going on tour with two shows in rep for a few months.

But in the meantime I am assistant directing my friend Mel Cook. I don't do this very often - in fact only for Mel - but it's a valuable insight into my job. You learn how valuable it is to have actors that offer things all the time. You see how visible it is when the actors think they can just busk it. You know who does the homework and who doesn't. And you love actors who work hard and play hard. It all feeds back in.

Mel is directing a play at the well-loved Finborough Theatre. The play was written the year before I was born. It deals with a middle english family imploding as a result of one man's inability to move his life forward. It treats with an England that is financially falling to pieces, and the apathy of the average englishman in the face of inevitable ruin. This is the right time to get it put on, and The Finborough the right place. The company is very diverse and joyful, and I am curently watching them work and chuckling to myself over the top of my laptop.

London

2010-12-06T11:23:00.002Z

London is cold. Yes it's comforting that christmas is coming, but after christmas comes january, and then after january comes february and by that time I am getting a little fed up.

After Thailand wound up, and my long long awake night on the way back, I hit London on Halloween and made the schoolboy error of taking the tube back to my flat from Heathrow. Considering the state of mind I was in - (my last post) - the fact that all the tube lines were shut and everyone was drunk and dressed up as a zombie made for a confusing and very long journey home, ending in a total collapse on my fantastically uncomfortable mattress.

And then it was back on the boats. I love my day job. It's turning into the perfect one for winter, as it is regular enough that I can pull in some reasonable money from it, and not so regular that it obviates the chance to go to auditions / prepare for them. Best of both worlds. My first day back in London I was booked for a full day on the river, so off I went dressed up in 8 layers with a wooly hat and a waterproof jacket and big thick warm goretex boots. Thinking that I would be totally fine. More fool me. As I arrived on the dock at London Eye, the sun was shining. Bitter cold, but bright. "I can handle this," I thought. So I embarked all the passengers and we got underway, and just as we passed tower bridge a huge black cloud rolled in and the heavens opened. Water down my back. Water in my trouser legs so profoundly cold and profoundly wet that they were drenched in seconds and my boots had filled from the top. Water gradually soaking through to the skin through layer after layer of jumper. Water water everywhere. Nor any drop to drink, as I had forgotten my bottle of the stuff. And through all this water and winds at near hurricane force, I am maniacally spamming energy at a boat full of people. Subtext "Look at the crazyman, he is having fun. If the crazyman is having fun, we are having fun too." Text "Ahhhhhhhhhhh this is the river at it's best! I know you might be wet, but this is how you WANT to be on the river! GOD I LOVE IT! And look - Tower Bridge in the rain! Let me tell you about tower bridge..." I have flash memories of the people in the boat with their hoods pulled over their faces and one eye peeping out. But smiling. Great fun.

So while I am on the river I have my friend Hanna call me and ask me to do a low commitment job for her at The Hen and Chickens in Huis Clos. No harm in that, since I ashamedly admit to her I do not KNOW Huis Clos. I didn't do A level Drama, so all the usual plays passed me by. Probably a good thing, but it was nice to be involved with Hanna and the delightful cast. But I don't blog work.

And then on to more boats, teambuilding in rainy fields across the country, pretending to be journalists, arsonists, kidnappers, santa claus, gangsters and a nuclear scientist. Strangeness. But delight.

Yesterday I was a hologram in Tottenham Court Road. Hologram Santa, being magically beamed all the way from lapland. I had a camera pointed at the people I was talking to, and it was really affirming to see the delight and wonder in the eyes of some of the kids. Santa is so iconic that the costume carries a strange power of its own. I just had to put it on and I felt possessed by it. It's like working with masks - and santa really is a mask - the wig and the beard and the hat make it such that the only window into you is your eyes, and a little hole for the mouth. The reverse of a classical character mask. But a similar.

And now I am assistant directing at The Finborough again, off to do more interesting work at The Factory on wednesday, and assembling a showreel after the Carlsberg ad came through and looks great. With all of that, the teambuilds, the santa, the training, the murder mysteries, the events and the boats, you can see why I haven't blogged since I got back...

Bangkok Night

2010-11-02T06:32:00.004Z

I just had a crazy night and I wanted to get it down. I still haven't slept, and am hanging out in the business lounge for Thai Air - I'm off in a bit to get a free spa treatment and massage - because I can and because it might help stop me from being so wired. I'll then save it as draft and post it after I get round to writing Crystal.

I landed in Bangkok, and figured I'd head in and find a cheap hotel not too far from the airport. After a brief adventure on a totally friendly moto-taxi who helped me out when I was trying to walk down the edge of the freeway with a whacking great rucksack, I found a cheap hotel. I then grabbed a cab to the Marriot in Sukhumvit where I had left my hat and jeans - (of course). I got there at about ten, and was fortunate to run into a woman who I had got on with well during the shoot, having pudding in the bar. She bought me a couple of Singha and we caught up. At half ten she had to go to her room to Skype her husband, so I said goodbye - (which I had been unable to do previously as I got whipped off to sign some forms). I then headed out into the soi, lost in thought, consulting my Lonely Planet guide and contemplating a depressing solitary final night.

And then - and forgive the tense shift but this was when the weird stuff started - someone appears right in front of me and says "Alex!". I know nobody in Bangkok. I have no idea what the fuck is going on. At first I fail to recognise her. She is in the remnants of a witch costume that she has been wearing for school assembly. It's the girl from the boat. On her way home from a meditation course. I ask her if she's eaten. She says no, and so we jump in a cab and she takes me to a place she knows. Before we are even seated she orders a jug of strawberry margarita. I figure she knows what she's doing. Unfortunately the waitress knows less, but it's palatable. I let her order food for me as she is bound to know what's good. She suggests something that is not on the menu, so I agree. It's brilliant. The best thing I've had since I left Bangkok.

We chatter for a while and then cab it to a massage parlour. It's shut, sadly. But on the way I am getting a whistle stop tour of Bangkok nightlife. It's past twelve though, and all the massage places are finishing up apart from the ones with "happy endings" which neither of us want. Another cab and we're at a converted tuktuk/bar somewhere drinking good mojito and talking random stuff about everything. I find an ease with this girl as if we've known each other for years. Despite the fact that I am knackered from an early start, a boat, a plane, a load of shopping and a load of walking. She clocks this, as I am more than characteristically silent. But quite rightly she overlooks it - "It'll help sort out your jet lag." But also how the hell can she read that from me on one meeting? She is intensely spiritual and has been meditating all day after the witchy assembly in the morning. This might have something to do with it.

Mojitos down, she starts to click into gear. Her self appointed mission is to give me a great last night and show me as much of Bangkok as she can. Another cab, or is it a walk? and "What Gender?" she asks, pointing. Got to be a man... Looks like a woman but no Adam's Apple. I ask her about this. "The operation only costs a few hundred baht. They can do all sorts of things - for 350 baht and an overnight stay you can be a virgin again!" She touches her belly. Suddenly we're in the Algerian quarter, in the shiniest restaurant I have ever seen. "Isn't it shiny!?!" She says with delight. It really is. It's right in the middle - all the bustle is around us. Two terrible western trannies are trying out their new kit on the table behind us. I snap them rudely, pretending to snap her. They see the flash and leave. "Let's get hummus!" I'm stuffed but the hummus is too good to miss. I shovel it in on good fresh cucumber and tomato. I can't finish it but she can and then it's THE FLOWER MARKET. By now i'm in a buzz. It's about 2 in the morning and exhaustion is doing odd things to my head. Trails are happening and I am getting motion repeats from the scuba diving. She asks eight taxis in a row to take us there. They all refuse. She waits a while until she knows that the taxis that are coming by haven't seen her get refused. She asks a new one and he takes us. But is he going the right way? Who knows? We wind through strange side streets and suddenly it's the flower market. By now I am totally tripping out and it is a blur of colour and people and sound. Millions of flowers, and hardly any customers as they are setting up ready for Saturday morning. Vast baskets of lettice are hauled around amid constant chatter and bustle. Orchids are piled high. Rare flowers, cheap flowers in bulk, bags of rose petals. Huge chunks of ice in a warehouse. A siamese cat. Stuff stuff stuff. Colour colour colour. Noise noise noise. It's half two but it might as well be day. An old man is changing his trousers. A blind old woman laughs uproariously at something her young friend has said. Trucks piled with veg are swarmed on by wiry antmen. Children run around all over the place. Many are helping. Dogs wander and sniff and wee on the lettice. Crushed veg is carpetted underfoot. We go in a wide circle. There is some water and a temple. She buys some orchids and some white roses. 70 baht in total. Less than a pound. "Feel how heavy that is!" she gets me to hold the orchids. "Think how much that would cost in the UK!" She's right. I hold her roses. They have no smell. "More market or look at the temple?" Look at the temple! We look. She reads a plaque at the base of the temple. I start at the same time as her. She is done in about 2 seconds, I in 8 to 10. Perhaps I am slow and time has truncated for me. People sit in a circle round coloured contact lenses, staring at the boxes in slow motion. I am occasionally groping my camera from my day bag and taking photos. Every time I replace it in a different pocket or part of the bag. My hands move slowly because the air is too thick. I am not functioning correctly. She notices. The logical step - go home! Another cab, the driver has no idea where we are going. We help. So does Lonely Planet, my constant travel companion. The hotel! I ask her if she wants to "come up." She has a boyfriend. I regret my impulse. It has not been what the evening was about. But it pulls at me like I know her, like i've known her all my life. I head to my room and get into bed. My eyes close and sharks and octopi dance in front of my closed eyes with diving bell helmets. Occasionally a voice reminds me that everything is connected to everything else. I read the secrets that I've written on the inside of my eyeballs in italics and smile. Something huge is explaining that I need to remember that the world is bigger than what I can perceive. This is exhaustion on a grand scale, or it's mushrooms in the food, or it's a flashback. A cockroach snaps me back by running over my chest. I bat it off the inside of my bed and it hits the wall with a satisfying thunk. It's ten to six. Sleep is no longer an option. I read my book a while. A wasp flies from the window into the centre of my neck and vanishes. I check all my cards and my passport. Nothing lost. All in place. Pack. Coffee. Taxi to airport. Check in. Take stock.

Brilliant night. Information overload. Bangkok never sleeps. I met the right person at the right time in the right city. Our last exchange: "Of course I'll email you! I'm not going to be ashamed of telling someone that I think they're attractive. Now here's 70 baht for my half of the taxi, and thanks for a great night." "That's the thing I love about this town - those two sentences together. Perfect."

---

As for the crazy stuff, it took me all the way home. I was up for 36 hours and the plane flight was great fun if a little random. Insects were a common part of the experience but everything was benign and I relaxed into total knowledge that I was hallucinating when I got woodlice on my leg in the plane - the plane is full of insecticide. The woman next to me was a little concerned at me I think. Probably worried I was a terrorist, since I was sweating, fidgetting and grinning. And occasionally jumping and looking at things that weren't there. And mumbling to myself. The girl insists that she didn't give me anything holotrophic. Who knows. Could be a combination of factors : Exhaustion, a massive electric shock, flying too soon after scuba, and hey - maybe i got a tiny tiny bit of neurotoxin from the krait through a scratch in my skin. I don't care. It was a brilliant night, and without doubt it will stay with me for the rest of my life. This link goes some way towards expaining what it was like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6DD1k4BAUg

Crystal Clear

2010-11-02T06:31:00.006Z

The ferry drops passengers in Mae Hat, a quiet village with a rash of westernised restaurants and halfhearted tourist shops. Crystal Dive has carved out a good sized portion of land just north of the ferry port, and filled it with relatively comfortable shacks equipped with fans and in some cases, air con - (for a premium). Each shack has a wetroom, with all the things you want from a thai wetroom - a loo, a bumgun, an exposed lightbulb for the electrocutotourism industry, a sink and an unheated shower. It is comfortable, and infested with friendly geckos who have long since polished off all the roaches. So it feels fairly salubrious. And if you dive with them, the subsidy on the room makes it laughably, joyously cheap.

I arrive, fresh off the ferry, and after accidentally crashing a very vehement board meeting being held in english, I find the reception. Everyone at Crystal defaults to english, and the thais that work there don't bother with ka and crab. This is something of a relief as at least I can make myself understood. I book a course with the unnecessarily attractive receptionist - she is clearly a dive instructor too. They work them hard here. My course will start tomorrow - a basic PADI Open Water Course.

What is PADI? PADI is the bulbous all-seeing spider at the centre of scuba diving worldwide. It has cast its web to the far corners of the world and sits in the middle monitoring everything. It is implacable, vast and uncompromising. It has no sense of humour. It stands for "Professional Association of Diving Instructors," and whoever set it up is oh so very fond of acronymns. Also this sort of prose is standard: Scuba diving [ ] can help transform your life through education, experience, equipment and environmental conservation: It's like they brainstormed as many words as possible beginning with E. They make you read vast tomes of this crap. Now this is not to say that the content is crap. Just the style. It's a good thing that a company exists that homogenises scuba worldwide, as it makes it possible for you to hop from America to Thailand to Australia to South Africa and always be speaking the same language, and thus safer. And in a sport where you can't speak, this is important. But the presentation??? Oh dear. It’s hard to believe that the world’s largest scuba diving training organization was dreamt up by two friends in Illinois over a bottle of Johnny Walker in 1966. I agree - you'd need to be a whole hell of a lot drunker than that to write this shit.

The night before my course starts, I wander around the beach and the town, finding a cool rasta bar out of the side of a campervan. I spend a good long time on a swinging chair staring at the full moon, and paddling down the beach. Then I grab my book and head for the bar. Within a minute an Israeli woman joins me at my table and we get chatting. Twenty minutes later a whole pile of drunk instructors bundle onto our table, and begin to propose drinking games. Shaking off the feeling that I have somehow teleported to Magalouf, I join in and after a couple of hours of utter stupidity, realise I need to hit the sack and crash off to my hut.

---

Day one of the course is videotime. And after the new year celebrations on the neighbouring island, most of the people starting up are sweating alcohol and haven't slept. First of all you have to watch one of a series of scuba training videos. These videos were made in the late eighties /early nineties. They were made with the assumption that anyone that wants to learn scuba has the mental capacity and sense of humour of the six year old boy who sits at the back of the class eating lego. And they are desperately American. This is "Have a nice day" taken to the power of 10000. Scuba is FUN and FRIENDS and JOKES and LEARNING IS FUN and so are your FRIENDS. And so full of acronyms. SCUBA: Smug Cretins Using Bloody Acronyms. Nonetheless I learn all about my BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) and my RDP (Recreational Dive Planner) and my SNORKEL - (Suck Now Or Right Kidney Explodes, Lamentably).

And after each video our instructor Rob bundles in enthusiastically and helps us with our knowledge reviews and makes us do a test. And he is constantly upbeat, and constantly positive and informative. And you almost believe that the PADI spider is not watching him. He gives no indication that he thinks the videos suck. He is a consummate professional, and I can't help thinking a good actor. Probably after work each day he is sucked into a cocoon and tortured through the night.

In the bar that night Jodie tells us that if you get someone from Holland to say "Choose my side" it sounds rude. We do and it does. Without being able to prevent it, and despite Rob's protests, it becomes our team name.

---

Day two of the course is VIDEOTIME and I am beginning to feel very fortunate that someone else paid for my flight. At some point, probably after another few bottles of whisky, the guys that made these videos decided that they would be much better if they had some JOKES in them. But they have gone way too far. The whole course is much longer than it needs to be because you have to watch this middle aged "clown" and the "hilarious" things that he does. Is American television always like this? No wonder they're voting for the Tea Party. Nation of retards. While the jokes happen on screen I pore through my manual. I read fast. I'd sooner just lock myself in a room and read the manual than have to watch any more of this rubbish. At least I could listen to some good music. Towards the end of the videos they devote a whole section to this: "So how can you get the most out of Scuba? Spend FUN MONEY on PADI! Yes you NEED to spend MONEY on us. Giving us MONEY is FUN, PLAY and FRIENDS!"

Rob comes in to find me trying to dash my brains out on the table. I need a beer. But now it's off to the POSAP - (Pool Of Scum And Piss). Here is where we will learn our Subaquatic Helpful Information Tips. We all jump in, and instantly the fierce chlorine sucks all the moisture out of our skin and leaves us weathered and cracking. The pool is full of dead insects, consciously added I have no doubt to replicate the plankton that will affect our visibility in open water. A brilliant bit of thinking by the people at Crystal. We repeatedly run over the important basics. Rob is excellent underwater - comfortable and professional and reassuring. I can't work out how to equalise with my mouth held open by the regulator (Breathing bit). Equalising is something you need to get good at - it's to stop horrible pain and burst eardrums from the added pressure - you need to do it regularly as you go down. I work it out eventually. I also find it really odd breathing underwater. The air in the tank is very very dry and I feel it on the back of my throat.

The time ticks on and on and my skin grows more and more hideous as I constantly take accidental sips of the filthy filthy water in this miasma. But by the end of the day I feel like I have a good grasp of what the hell I am supposed to be doing.

---

Day three and it's up at crack in order to take a test. I get a good score and am relieved that I don't have to take another one. Then we have to take a swimming test. Thankfully this is conducted in a much nicer pool further down the beach.

There are four of us in our group, and Rob. Rob the instructor is only about 22, professional, fun and full of beans. Jodie is a proper northern lass gone travelling, burnt a deep mahogany by the sun. Plenty of common sense and very smart, but someone somewhere has told her she's thick and she sometimes believes it. She is a lot of fun. Then there's Brian and Sarah, providing the comedy in the team with their bickering and vast competitive streaks. Both from Ireland, both great foils for each other - a great couple and at times they reduce me to tears of laughter. I make up the fourth by being the opposite of Jodie - no gumption, losing everything, walking into trees and generally living up to my ability to make a prat of myself. A finnish instructor in training occasionally joins us and shouts at us. One time he howls "NOOO!" at me, as is his wont, when I am tucking the band of my compass back round itself. My hackles rise and I bark "Fuck YOU" at him. "I'm streamlining." He doesn't bother me so much after that. But during the swimtest, we discover that he lost his virginity at 13 to a 36 year old woman. Perhaps that's the root of it - I can hear her shouting "NOOO!" at him in bed. These things stay with you.

In the afternoon we finally get into the sea. It's a big old boat and it's crowded, and we chunter out to "Twin Peaks". My buddy is Jodie. We have to check each other. The PADI video, surprise surprise, suggests an ACRONYM to help us with our checks. "Begin With Review And Friend." I kid you not. Why that is any easier to remember than "Buoyancy Weights Releases Air Final check" I do not know. I suspect they chose it because it has the word "FRIEND" in it. WOOO We're all friends here!! _ (Another quote from the video, as we watch a bunch of grown men and women behaving like total idiots : "Scuba Divers have more FUN than regular people." By inference this is because they have all been lobotomised.) Rob suggests a more local acronym - "Bangkok Women Really Are Fellers." Better, but it still doesn't get over the fact that IN THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH WE CALL IT A BUCKLE NOT A RELEASE!

In 12 metres of water, I slowly get to know what it's like to dive. The visibility is great - 10 - 15 metres, and the temperature is 30 degrees - it feels like a pool. There is so much colour down here and so many odd fish. The rest of the guys see a Banded Sea Krait, but I am upset to have missed it. But then it can kill a man in 4 seconds with a seriously strong dose of neurotoxin. So probably a good thing. There's a lot of life down here - Damselfish, Sgt. Major Fish, Butterfly Fish, Red Breasted Wrass... By the time I surface I am in serious discomfort. Drinking all that wee in the pool has made my stomach go bad. Under pressure at the bottom it's not so bad, but when you surface, it expands...

The afternoon dive is much more technical - emergency things, buoyancy things, mask floods, getting your regulator back in. No time to look at the scenery. But necessary.

---

Day Four kicks off early, and we go to White Rock. There IS some current this time and the visibility is down to 5-10 metres. We still get to see some sealife when we aren't flooding our masks and pumping our BCD's orally. Loads of Giant Clam, Blue Ringed Angelfish and Longfin Bannerfish. At one point I see something large moving strangely. I go towards it, but Rob is signally frantically - "gunfingers gunfingers bang bang gunfingers." No he hasn't suddenly regressed - it's a triggerfish - they're nasty little territorial buggers. I steer clear and find a Marbled Sea Cucumber instead. Much safer.

Second dive and we go back to twin peaks. Unperturbed by the fact there are about 200 other dive boats here, we all leap joyfully into the water and sink. This dive is a little more fruitful. We watch a Blue Spotted Stingray as it regards us grumpily - "What are you staring it - We did for that Steve Irwin, so you better be careful." We also find a little White Eyed Moray Eel, sticking his head out of his hole. Sadly there are way too many Scuba Divers having more fun than regular people wherever we look. In my logbook I have logged them as "wankerfish." But with the skills I have learnt I am now a certified Open Water Diver. Apparently. One of them.

That evening in a bar a man called Jace shows us a video he has made of us underwater. It is well cut considering it's a rush job, and made with a sense of humour. Unfortunately is is cut onto a DVD made out of diamonds and platinum, hand build molecule by molecule by ancient monks in the distant cloud cities of nepal. And the price tag reflects this. Despite the fact that I have no older generation left to show it to I get one. It seems unfair not to get some beer for the guy Jace. He seems nice, and went to the same school as my ex. Maybe one day I can bore my kids with the video too. We all get very very drunk. I stagger back to my shack, knock the top off the fuse box in a quest for the lightswitch, give myself a staggeringly vast electric shock, fly like superman onto my bed and wake up face down four hours later with my jeans soaked in blood. Remarkably, I haven't pissed myself.

---

Recovery takes some time, but now I am certified I want to go on a night dive. This is the best idea I have ever had. On the way down, I briefly see a Banded Sea Krait as it swims between me and the rest of the group. On the bottom it is peaceful and dark. If you cover your torches, you realise that all around you the plankton is bioluminescent. So if you move, it lights up with kinetic energy. There are loads of bad tempered looking Great Barracuda. They dislike our torches. Some are bigger than us. It is quiet, serene, fearsome. I imagine what it would be like to sink here in a ship - to have your last moments in this void with the bioluminescence. I decide you wouldn't really care, as you'd be too busy dying.

At the boat, I take off my fins and pass them up. Then I put my foot on the ladder, and someone shouts "Snake!" "Where!" I say - I want to see it. "Round your leg!" Oh. It's been drawing heat from the boat and become curious about these hot things that have come. It lazily coils around inspecting us for what seems like ages, and I am smitten, despite the fact that the only girl in our group is screaming blue bloody murder and telling me to get off the ladder. Only later does it occur to me that I must have come within an inch of putting my foot on it as it was on the ladder. Docile or not it would've taken a chunk out of me then and I'd be going home in a box. Still, I am humbled by the beauty of nature and resolve to come back to Koh Tao and to Crystal as soon as I can afford the time or the money.

Crystal is a really well run operation. I was attracted to it because Lonely Planet describes it as "The Meryl Streep of dive operators," and I think Meryl Streep is a fantastic actress, but it turns out that my arbitrary decision was a good one. The impressive thing is that there are enough staff working hard enough for it to feel uncluttered and uncrowded, while in reality they are putting a vast amount of people through their PADI course every week. And they have a good selection of languages too - all of europe is probably represented.

I just wonder if I can persuade PADI to update their video. I'd be happy to help with the filming! Hey I could be one of the friendly divers!! Or the hilarious clown!!! In fact no, scratch that last one. Not if you paid me a million dollars.

Going to Koh Tao.

2010-10-29T09:45:00.003+01:00

Koh Tao is a little island off the southeastern coast of Thailand, North West of its larger and noisier cousins Koh Pha-Ngang and Koh Samui. It has a population of 5000 or so, and it's only about 13 square miles. So my heart sinks as I get on the Catamaran at Koh Samui and find that every seat in the hideously over airconditioned downstairs seating area is not only packed, but packed with the type of half drunk overweight british sex tourist that I have so far managed to avoid contact with. I buy a bottle of water and then get the hell out and onto the deck. Where I find a great place to sit in the sun. The crowd is worrying me. Drunk american teenagers strut around with their tattoos, shouting at each other and playing drinking games. I read my book - I'm on those Steig Larsson books about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Which are perfect holiday reading and I can get lost for hours. 45 minutes later we arrive in Koh Pha-Ngang and a girl comes and joins me in my little corner. "Don't go downstairs," I warn her. "It's hell down there, and freezing." She looks at me as if I'm insane and says nothing. I go back to my book. Ten minutes pass and I decide I want a conversation and a beer. I ask her if she wants a beer, but she declines, and I head down to the lower deck of the boat to discover that there is virtually nobody there anymore. What the fuck? I come back up and announce to her "They've vanished! Last time I went down there it was packed to the gills, now there's nobody - no wonder you looked at me as if I was mad." She laughs. Apparently it's a full moon and they all got off to raise hell in Koh Pha-Ngang. I try to work out if i regret not doing the same now I know. We get talking - she's a yoga teacher by vocation and teaches kids for money. She wants to set up her own yoga studio and she is so peaceful and present that I think that it's a brilliant idea. By the end of the conversation I feel that I have made a friend - after all I've been craving company for some time, and hers is easy and intelligent. All too soon the ferry pulls in to Koh Tao and we say goodbye.

At the ferryport waits the usual chaos of howling taxi drivers. I wade through them and am relieved that there are only about ten of them. Quite suddenly peace happens. I walk down a street and nobody shouts anything to me. The streets are pretty basic here - open drainage on the sides of the road, a rash of shops and restaurants, and hundreds of dive outlets. This is the major industry on Koh Tao - scuba. It's unavoidable. Not wanting to get ripped off, I have made a decision before arriving about where I want to take my PADI scuba certification. I want to check out a place called Crystal Dive. Unfortunately, my distaste for the shouty people means that once again I have ended up lost. Knowing this place is small, all I really need is a map, or some helpful advice. I approach a man who - refreshingly - is sitting on a bench smoking with a sign saying TAXI, and not shouting at anyone. "Crystal Dive?" I ask. He tells me that I have to go to Sairee beach on the other side of the island, and that he will take me there for 300 Baht. I know this is a lie, and 300 baht is far too much, so I smile and wiggle my fingers - "I'll walk." "Which way you walk?" he taunts me. "You say you walk but you not know which way!" I shrug. Which turns out to be an excellent idea as about 30 seconds later I see a gigantic sign reading "Crystal Dive - this way." I look over my shoulder and indicate the sign. The taxi driver is laughing. I laugh too, shake my fist at him, and head over to check it out. It's awesome. I'll write it up in my next post.

Scuba dooba doo

2010-10-25T16:02:00.002+01:00

My fingers are like prunes. I have just spent the whole day in a swimming pool that was more a mulch of snot, urine and dead insects. Yesterday was spent watching the PADI training videos, which are inexcusably awkwardly shot, and shockingly badly written. And peppered with jokes that I doubt I would find funny even if I was the mindless american idiot for which they are designed. I can't believe I spent so much of my life exposed to them. Especially when the last one did everything but ask us to just send our money to PADI in an envelope. "In order to share and continue your fun diving with friends experience, you can improve your happy friendly life by giving fun money to PADI." That's not a quote. The guy in the internet shop has switched all the lights off and is glaring at me. I'M IN THE SEA TOMORROW! Wooooo

Phooey to Samui

2010-10-24T06:33:00.002+01:00

Samui is corrupt despite my optimism. Too many people shouting at you all the time everywhere. You have to get way out of the main drag before you can walk down a stretch of road without everyone expecting you to buy things from them. I stopped once, as they wore me down, and was surprised that they don't even haggle like they do in Bangkok.

"How much is this hat?"
"600 Baht" - (12 quid)
"600 Baht too much. 150 Baht better price." (Still too much, but it's hot, and I am haggling"
"No I say 600 Baht, 600 Baht is price. This hat very nice."
"This hat same as hat every other stall."
"600 Baht is price you put hat back go away."
"Ok."

Bought the same hat a mile down the road for 250. A fiver still way too much for a basic sun hat, but you know me and hats. I was mourning the one I left on the top of a lamp in my room in the Marriot.

I packed up my bag, finally said yes to a taxi, and went to the ferry. I got a boat to Koh Tau. Much quieter. Been walking around all morning and nobody has tried to sell me anything. A taxi driver asked me if I wanted a taxi. I said no thanks I am just looking. What you looking for? Coffee. Go down that road. Ok - korp khun crab. Crab.

You assert your gender identity at the end of sentences here in order to be polite. Women say Ka. Men say crab.

Ka is the wily hypnotic sinuous dangerous and charming snake in the jungle book. A crab is a nasty vicious grasping haphazard bully. Go figure.

No I don't want a Taxi

2010-10-22T15:29:00.004+01:00

I flew into Koh Samui. Not initially my intention but faster and my per diems covered the difference between train and air so worth it probably.

Koh Samui was meant to be a staging post. I reckon I'll manage to keep it that way, but I missed the last ferry to Koh Tau so have to stay the night here.

I am terrible at being approached by people. I just say "No" and move on if someone says hello to me. Instinctively. And then my pride goes up, so I don't go back and say "I changed my mind." I just strike out. So the plane lands in Samui and my bag is one of the first on the belt, so I grab it and am utterly bombarded with smiling crazy touts. They try every single note in every single octave, often in one word. I am saying "no" "no" "no" and slowly pushing through the smiling crowd firmly heading for the exit sign. With no idea where the hell I am going. Whatsoever.

Outside the airport I see a robot shop. I have never seen a robot shop before. I covet the robots. I want them to do things for me. So out comes the camera. Oops. Not only am I a HUGE GIANT, but now I am a HUGE GIANT with a backpack, a collared shirt, a day bag and a CAMERA! All of the tourist alarms in a mile radius go off simultaneously, and ordinary citizens who moments before were sitting on the grass doing each others hair are suddenly exploring their vocal range as thoroughly as possible while enunciating the word "TAXI". And before I know it there are 4 enthusiastic people with motorcycles surrounding me, and the only reason I am not intimidated is that they are all grinning like maniacs and singing "Taxi" to me. One of them is boss eyed. Another has an eye patch. I want to take a photo of them but I know the flash will attract more and I might get crushed in the press. So I make stubborn "I am walking" gestures, and strike out firmly in the wrong direction. Once I go round the corner I hide behind a tree and break out the crap map from my Lonely Planet. I realise I've been stubbornly walking into the middle of nowhere. I turn round and ten minutes later sheepishly run the gauntlet in the other direction. Thankfully they have given me up for lost by now.

Koh Samui is clearly very used to tourists, but as always this still means that the bulk of the prosperity goes right to the centre. I am shocked at the poverty as I walk from the airport to the town. I have no idea how far it is from one to the other. Every third car honks at me and slows down and shouts "Taxi". By now I WANT to walk. But I have no idea how far it will be. I keep on, past tied up buffalo, and millions of dogs. Millions of dogs, but no cats. (Later this evening I will comment on this in a bar to an Irishman. He will nod wisely, and announce "It's cos they eat them. They eat the cats." )

I have found a negative hand gesture that seems to discourage taxi drivers and instinctively flash it every time I hear a honk behind me. I find myself wondering if there is some sort of repellent.

Then I round a corner and see this.

Now I know why I walked from the airport.

I keep walking as the sun sets around me. I am delighted by the colour in the sky and the breathtaking natural beauty that surrounds me at every turn. A woman with a toddler emerges from one of the shacks on my right and jumps on a motorbike. "Where you going?" she asks. "I don't know!" I reply. She points - "Go left at end, then go right at market - Chaweng!" "Thank you!" "You want lift?" I have a rucksack, a day bag, and am twice her size. She has a toddler behind her on her moped, and about half an inch of space. "No thank you! I like to walk!" "Ok bye!" Damn, the people here that don't want to sell you shit are awesome people. So now at least I know I'm on the right track. And suddenly I arrive in a metropolis. And still everyone is howling "Taxi" at me because I have a rucksack. And perhaps because I have been walking for a few hours and am sweating like a pig. I ask someone "Where is the beach?" and am pointed down a narrow alley. I chance it, and walk through dark empty streets full of dogs and chickens for ten minutes. Then suddenly there is white sand, and music, and a full moon hovering over a wide bay full of crystal water. And I realise how absolutely knackered I am. And I throw off my rucksack, and my drenched shirt, and leaving them behind me on the beach run to the water and throw some onto myself. A guy in a red shirt shouts "Beer?" at me. That's better than "Taxi." "YES!" I cry, loving the fact that I can reply positively. "YES! Give me beer!" And for less than a quid I am lying on the most perfect beach in the world under a full moon with an ice cold singha.

A few hours later and I have a room on the same stretch of beach and nobody lives here. It's silent. Because I walked into town, and all the taxis drop in the centre. So my accomodation is not only beautiful, but also cheaper than any of the central places, and pretty quiet. And it's only about 15 minutes walk from the centre of Samui which is tourist hell. But I'm off into it, as one thing I haven't done for ages is HAD A CONVERSATION with someone.

The work. Very brief.

2010-10-22T06:08:00.004+01:00

It doesn't take long for culture shock to subside. Pretty much simultaneously with my jetlag, I just feel totally comfortable in this town. Which is an advantage as my 5 star living is coming to an end and it'll be a bit more scraggy from then. The one thing that really is amazing here is the food - everywhere makes good food, although I haven't tried the street food yet as I don't want to risk having to run off and chunder every five seconds while on set.

I've been lucky to work with people that really know this industry. In terms of movies I am still a baby, despite my first job being one. A bit too much of a gap in between, which I won't blame on my old agent... The crew and the two actors I have been working with are so professional and self contained and just get on with the job. Experience plays a key part, of course. But I can tell that this is going to be a great piece and I am so stoked to be involved with it. It is being made for love by experts. In a short time I have come to understand a great deal more about the craft of being an actor in film. I hope and trust that I have made the best I can of the work I have done for them so far, and look forward hugely to seeing the finished product when it emerges.

In my spare time I have managed to get my holiday hat on, so not feeling as isolated as I was earlier in the week. I am supposed to be booking a flight somewhere for when I finish. So I'd better get on with it.

Deathtrap Dungeon

2010-10-20T09:36:00.003+01:00

When I was a kid I was a voracious and indiscriminate reader. My quest for information and imagination took me through many old classics, greek dramas and modern tales. I started with Cider with Rosie and never stopped. As I reader I was ferociously loyal. As a selector I was woefully inefficient. I liked Greek myth so I read them all. I liked Norse myth so I read them all. I liked Willard Price so I read them all, and still today find that I have irrational understandings of animal behaviour based on the disgraceful dramatic fictions that he made out of ordinary creatures. I also ran across "Choose your own adventure" books. I was discriminating enough to find them profoundly unsatisfying in terms of story and writing. But I enjoyed the pictures, and I particularly enjoyed the grisly endings. And I had access to some very extensive, and almost completely unoccupied and unused school libraries, where I could vanish for hours and nobody would even think to look for me. Over a few years I must have covered almost every "Choose your own adventure" book. But soon I found better alternatives.

Infinitely more satisfying were the "Lone Wolf" series of books by Gary Chalk and Joe Dever, where you play the last of the Kai lords - some form of Nordic fighting monk - as you try and reestablish your order of monks while being hunted by the Darklords of Helgedad. These had a coherent plotline running through many books. There was a combat system too, with charts and dice - very involved but it was pretty well designed and more pleasurable to commit properly to than many other fighting systems in these books.

Then there were J.H.Brennan's Grail Quest books. A light hearted look at Arthurian myth, with in-jokes about King Pellinore's Questing Beast and Merlin and Excalibur and most other aspects of that world. I remember these as being the most enjoyable to read of that kind of book. The Poetic Fiend was a source of great joy to me. And unlike all the other books that take things so seriously, these books were written to be amusing. One choice I remember very clearly from the third book in the series was: "Rescue the carrot (Turn to page xxx) : Don't rescue the carrot (Turn to page xxx) : Play your xylophone (Turn to page xxx)." Like most of the gags in Tristram Shandy, this choice is more amusing in the context of the books that were current at the time of publication than it is in isolation. They were not particularly popular, probably owing to the nature of most kids who are attracted to fantasy worlds. I remember them as a humourless lot, taking their fantasy very seriously, and painstakingly correcting people who had made some error of lore - "I think you'll find that it is in fact a HOBgoblin to which you are referring and not, in fact a goblin - the creatures are very different you see uh huh huh huh *cough* " Like any other branch of specialist knowledge, the people steeped in it determine the market for it. It was a surprise when Terry Pratchett broke through so massively to the mainstream with his fantasy satire. With Brennan the tone wasn't quite right. But for these kids, the Fighting Fantasy franchise was allowable. I could read it and only occasionally be mocked by some dork who wanted to tell me that what I was referring to as a dark elf is technically in fact a Drow elf etc etc blahblahblah because in the end the bible for these people always falls either to Gygax or Tolkein. Although I imagine these days warcraft plays a part.

Fighting Fantasy was everywhere when I was at school. Despite a woefully inadequate fighting system, which can be summed up roughly as: Roll a six sided dice and add 6. This is your skill total. If you rolled anything less than a 5, waste a few hours of your life, then start again. This is assuming that nobody ever cheats at these games of course. The books were mostly the creation of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and they ran and ran and ran. Sometimes they were brilliant - City of Thieves, Deathtrap Dungeon, Appointment with FEAR... Sometimes they were pretty mediocre - Citadel of Chaos, Starship Traveller... But they always had great pictures and plenty of grizzly endings for people that made the wrong choices. Although the right choices were often totally arbitrary and dependent on luck rather than logic. But why, you might ask, are you writing about these books when you're in Thailand?

Well. First of all it's raining. And when I say rain, I mean I am being drooled on by a million gigantic basset hounds in the sky, while someone drags a net full of rocks over the roof and all the little fairies pump water into my shoes with syringes. And secondly I am staying in the district of Sukhumvit, and it has been bugging me. All of this post has been from memory. It's amazing what sticks in your head from a childhood of voracious misguided reading. Although I have probably made all sorts of mistakes of lore. But every time I see the word Sukhumvit, little alarm bells go off in my head.

Fighting Fantasy book 6: Deathtrap Dungeon. Blue spine. Welcome to the distant city of Fang. Fang is a stinking, semi lawless metropolis - a port and a shanty. It is ruled over by the tyrannous Baron Sukumvit, and he builds a Dungeon full of terrible traps, and uses it as a form of twisted challenge - basically "If you can get through this without dying I'll give you a stack of money". One can only imagine that he had somewhere he could stand and watch as people got killed by his cunning traps. And I have just realised what provided the inspiration for the name.

So there you go. I have just wasted a good few minutes of your life in a random, badly structured journey through the inside of my hypothalamus. But this can't be as frustrating as having to repeatedly go back to the beginning of a poorly written book, that's uncomfortable to read as you have to constantly make notes and roll dice.

Sounds like the rain has stopped. Shall I : Go and eat some street food at the risk of making myself sick for filming tomorrow? : Go back to my hotel and have Roast Beef? : Play my xylophone?

Five Star hotels vs Hostels

2010-10-20T09:28:00.002+01:00

I am seriously considering moving into a hostel tonight - certainly tomorrow. Five star hotels are all very well if you want to have luxurious sex and room service champagne but they suck balls if you're in a country where you know nobody. I didn't even meet anyone on the plane over as I was in glorious luxurious isolation in the business lounge. But now I think I am about ready to go stay in a shitty hostel and meet some people and get drunk and have a laugh and SPEAK to someone since I am going a little stircrazy with all this bowing and monosyllabic politeness and saying "crab" at the end of every sentence to be polite. And HEY if I meet someone hot we can ditch the hostel and go have luxurious sex and room service champagne and I can put a new spin on the ball sucking aspect.

Bangkok Marriot

2010-10-19T05:43:00.003+01:00

Despite the automatically reclining seats and the pampering I still feel like I've been through the wringer as I gaze out of the window of business class on Thai Airways. and catch my first glimpse of Bangkok. Dawn is just breaking, but for now it's still dark and peppered with streetlamps and the lights of the early risers. In the middle of town something is burning, belching vast stacks of black flame into the air. I can see no flashing lights on the ground around it. From up here, the view is clear and the sky is cloudless. As we make our final approach, and dip in over a packed road towards the runway we pass through an unmistakable wall of sweat. This fug is clinging to the ground citywide, and I imagine it will be my constant companion. Along with the noise.

Everything talks. And if it doesn't talk it clangs, whistles, boils, squeals, farts or plays soothing music to you. Once I locate my escort, I am taken out to wait for the car. We are on an upper level, but below I can hear someone desperately - frantically - blowing a whistle. Again and again, as if a party of ten year olds had never seen whistles before. My escort doesn't bat an eyelid. She is called Ratt, and seems delightful. But we don't have a language in common, and I have no whistle. A man drives slowly past in a small red tow truck. He has a megaphone, and speaks into it constantly in a monotone. He is not repeating himself. I think he might be telling us what he can see. Very loudly. But he has to compete with the whistling and the farting horns of the cars as they pick up and drop off and pick up and drop off. And my car arrives. The whole side of it opens up revealing reclining sofas. I bundle my bags in and we are off. Bullet straight and bullet fast through toll roads, always the fastest thing on the road irrespective of corners and lane selections. I catch a glimpse of storks at the roadside. Are these the carrion birds over here?

Billboards are mostly without images, and in Thai. I see that Tesco has already arrived here in force, as some of the biggest are for their stores or their credit cards. One billboard has english text - a picture of a glass building and the words "Sense of London Condo". 'Who the hell would want that?' I laugh to myself as we shoot past it and squeal into a toll point. And from there into the Marriot Executive Apartments, where I am staying. Pretty damn nice too. Ratt gives me a welcome pack and I dare to think that finally I am going to find out what I am supposed to be doing in this movie.

Up in my room I dump my stuff on the armchair by the washing machine, and gleefully throw my clothes off and jump in the vast, tiled walk-in shower. Having washed away the plane I dive into my welcome pack. Nothing. No shooting schedule. No script. No idea of when I might be needed. No wardrobe fitting. I want to talk to someone about whether or not to lose the beard. If it's no use to them I am getting mightily fed up of it. But nope. Still no clues beyond a character name as to why these people have flown me halfway around the world. Still, ours not to reason why. I call the production assistant, hesitantly make inquiries - "Is there a script? Am I needed?" "I don't know." "Ok - well I am going to go for a walk then." "Good."

And then the alienation hits home. In South America, a lifelong nodding acquaintance with Spanish gets me by. Europe is always manageable. But this is totally alien. The language works differently. I cannot even begin to decipher the labels on things, I don't know how to say please or thank you or water or hello. Thankfully everybody is always smiling. Smile and bow seems to work as a starting tactic. And speak very very quietly in English while smiling, bowing and using sign language. Before long I take refuge in a mall. Downstairs, insane birds howl from wicker cages in perfect discord to the piped sounds of frogs and crickets. The shop staff all have madness in their eyes behind the smiles. I find an internet cafe and write all this down so I can process the total weirdness of this place, combined with the frustration of NOT KNOWING WHAT THE HELL I AM DOING OR WHEN I AM DOING IT.

And now I can get a cup of coffee and go back out into the midday sun with the mad dogs.

Reactivate!!

2010-10-17T17:09:00.003+01:00

I forgot about this. But since I'm off to Thailand tomorrow for a while I thought it would be as good a time as any to start keeping people up to date. And this is a better way than sending those interminable travel emails.

It's really strange working in a movie that has such a huge amount of secrecy attached to it. I have no desire to break the NDA accidentally by blog, so I might be so hideously vague when I get to Thailand that it's pointless reading this anyhow. At the moment I have absolutely no idea what I am supposed to be doing. I know the name of my character, and I know how much I am being paid. I don't know what my character does, even. Last night I dreamt I was on a boat with the director and he told me I had to jump into a river full of hippos and wrestle them. When I expressed that I was concerned, hippos having a reputation for being vicious little buggers, he eased my concerns by informing me that they were really rhinos, but they'd been made up to look like hippos...

When I get there i'll probably be behind a desk in a dinner jacket being posh at someone. So perhaps it's pleasant to be loosely panicking about hippofighting and nudity in the meantime. Tomorrow is going to be a long day and my sleep patterns are going to get shafted by the flight. And then I'll arrive in Bangkok and have to stay up for a whole day of wardrobe fittings and whatnot while trying to cram a load of lines into my head. Gogo gadget adrenaline.

BUSY BUSY BUSY!

2009-03-09T12:00:00.002Z

Life took over so I stopped bibbling to this. And to be honest I can't be arsed to blog at the moment. Why write about the minutiae of my life when the sun is shining outside and spring is here and I can go out and play in the park.

The Beautiful People

2008-10-08T16:49:00.007+01:00

This is what I've been doing for the last few weeks - it's a depression era American play by William Saroyan. The things about this play that take me by surprise are the lack of cynicism and conflict. When I was at Guildhall a rather odd woman came and taught us a course on playwriting. The course was designed to help us to understand and respect the process a playwright goes through. The first thing she made us do was write an argument. The rest of the course revolved around making that argument the centre of a piece of theatre. So she began with conflict and prioritised it. Which is rife in playwriting these days. I have heard people dismiss plays out of hand because they have no conflict. Surely this is foolish? The best reason to dismiss a play out of hand is because it is crap. I suppose there is conflict in this play, in the sense of conflicting objectives and worldviews. What is not present is violence, malice, smallmindedness, ill-will - things that I come across in plays all the time and that are at the heart of most of the plays I have seen recently. I think perhaps people are mistaking conflict for violence, and who can blame them with the preponderance of violent writing and entertainment in our culture - reality shows which focus on screaming and shouting, which are informed by soaps of the same ilk. People watch the soaps, absorb them, and then when their lives are being recorded they alter their behaviour to reflect what they consider to be normal. The theatre is an entertainment medium, but it should not be trying to fill the same slot as television. It's a night out and a night out should be rewarding and fulfilling, rather than just reaffirming a sense of bleakness. And now we appear to be about to enter another worldwide depression. It's time to start trying to cheer people up without being schmaltzy and artifical - an optimistic message, well delivered is all that is needed. Dammit!

William Saroyan is not very well known in this country. He won a Pulitzer for "The Time of Your Life", which is the only play of his that is regularly performed in the UK. This is because it has a cast of 24 and won a Pulitzer - perfect for Drama School shows and thus in the mental furniture of lots of theatre professionals over here. He dashed out The Beautiful People for a bunch of friends of his over a period of 2 weeks, and you get the sense that he workshopped it with his actors and added and took away throughout the rehearsal period. His stage directions are almost Shavian in their specificity, and we found ourselves picking and choosing which ones were useful and which ones were artistic fascism. Our company is brilliant, and have humbled Mel (the director) and I with their commitment and positivity. It's so hard that they cannot be paid - the only way we're even going to be able to give them something towards their travel expenses is if we pack the houses every night for the rest of the run. We nominally had a producer who came to the first meeting and promised the earth, but then had a series of disasters so constant and so relentless and badly timed that it was almost as if she was making them up because she was too lazy to do anything. Floods, illnesses, deaths in the family, more illnesses, domestic disasters... One time she phoned me up with her sick voice and I found myself thinking that no matter how sick I am I never phone with my sick voice. It's hard to tell if she is honest or not, but I will never work with her again for sure. In 3 weeks she never met the designer, watched a rehearsal, or, I suspect, read the play. On the day of the first performance her name was taken out of the programme. She rang me in the morning and told me she had managed to secure an anonymous donation of £50. Thank god for that, I thought, and put her name back in. I won't name her in this blog unless she finds some reason why that £50 cannot be paid. I think I can guess who the donor is... And here am I being cynical. Dear me.

So what am I doing in this play? Assistant Directing. I'm not in it. I always say that I like directors that know what it means to be an actor even if they are shit at it. I wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the table and it has been very insightful. I will be a lot less worried in auditions now - we had to turn down so many lovely and talented people and it was very rare indeed for us to dismiss someone because they were crap or insane. And it's good to have confirmation that actors that offer things in rehearsal are loved - having to tell someone not to do something is so much better than having to find a way to get an actor to ... just ... do .... something!

But these actors do. And it is joyful. So come if you read this before the run ends - come and pay for the travelcards of these wonderful talented actors who have given pots of their time to do something out of love. Cheer yourself up, it's only an hour and a bit, so you'll be out by nine. On Sunday evenings the pub downstairs is open after the show. Here's a link to the What's on Stage review, which was good and gave 4 stars: http://www.whatsonstage.com/blogs/offwestend/?p=550

It runs Sunday and Mondays only for the next 2 weeks. 12th, 13th, 19th and 20th October at 7.30pm at the Finborough. Latecomers can't be admitted. http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/ is the website and you can book there. Hurrah!

Speaking Freely

2008-10-02T11:07:00.001+01:00

"Got it. Beautiful day."

spoken through SpinVox

Reflections in London

2008-08-10T16:18:00.004+01:00

Twelfth Night in Ripley was a wonderfully refreshing job to do.

A great company of good people, and a lovely show that was well received. And in a glorious place. Being back in London is strange and unfamiliar, and has left me feeling more vulnerable than usual. I went to Planet Angel on friday for a night of clubbing and relaxing, had a great night and danced like a fool, and then came back to my flat with a few lovely people. I then decided to show them the pilot that Tim had just finished editing. Now this came up as the result of a chat in a bar about 2 years ago, and Tim and I ran with it and started to work with it. After about 6 months I began to worry that what I was making was not what I wanted to be making, in that the values celebrated in it and the intentions behind it were corrupting. It was becoming a venomous attack not only on ourselves but also on the career that we have chosen. And since I love my career, and most of the people I have worked with, I lost interest in the project. But Tim took the baton and carried on, with spectacular energy, and kicked us all into shape until he had enough footage to cut together a loose pilot. And for what he was trying to make, he did a great job. Now it is going to get sent out to people and seen by them, and I am a little worried. I have been happily rumbling along as a jobbing actor for a good few years now, and this pilot could contain the seeds of destruction for that career. I get my work by being good, and good to work with. This pilot makes me look like a vast uncontrollable talentless ego. The mistake I made was in choosing to personify all the aspects of myself that I hate. The character is too close to me, and not sharply enough characterised to be distinguishable. And it's not particulary funny. Now this could be a manifestation of my insecurity. After all I am putting out something that shows all that I consider to be wrong with me and my acting. And insecurity is nothing more than ego turned in upon itself anyhow. After all, we have to think we're important in order to think that people hate us. But one man said "this is going to make people hate you." And perhaps I'm too wrapped up with wanting to be loved? So many people in this profession have insecurities about themselves. Maybe this is why we want to put ourselves into other people's circumstances. All I know is that showing a pilot with a character based on the worst of me to just a couple of people makes me vanish into insecurity. Especially if I consider much of my work in it to be suspect. So how will I feel when this is sent round to all the people I might want to get auditions from?

Two weeks out of work and I am already in the hole. And that's all this is. I need money and a little pretence at job security and I'll be posting things to you telling you how fucking amazing I am.

Nathan has just requested that I write horrible things about him. Nothing springs to mind so I will instead tell you that he just made me look at his ass, while individually clenching each cheek, and announcing "See - getting tighter already." And that's true.

Don't wanna come back

2008-07-08T16:43:00.002+01:00

I have less than a week up in Ripley left. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I wouldn't be surprised if a little bluebird fluttered in through the window and landed on my shoulder. I have eaten good food in good company. I am doing a great show with a gorgeous bunch of people. I am wondering what the hell I thought I was doing living in London.

Kidnap Victim

2008-05-16T14:41:00.003+01:00

It months ago that it happened but it feels like yesterday. The wounds are still fresh. I wonder if I will ever be free of the lingering sense of fear. The terror that it could so easily happen again.

I was in my flat. It was a sunny day - not summer sun, but spring sun. The sun of hope. I was on the internet when it happened. Checking my bank balance. Looking for work. Wondering how I was going to squeeze out what little money I had left until I got another acting job. My mobile phone rang.

"Hello." (pause) "Is that Mr. Barclay?"

-- A withheld number. The speaker mumbling deliberately so as to be unrecognisable. Vaguely accented. Who is this man?? --

"Um... Yes..."

"Are you the owner of vehicle registration number..."

-- Oh my God. My car. Where is it. It is on the street outside my flat. I parked it there last night. How does he know the number? How does he know my phone number?? --

"Yes... Where is it? It's outside my house."

-- A hint of smugness creeps in. He knows something I don't know --

"It is in Lots Road Car pound..."

The man turned out to be a kidnapper. Someone had put a yellow sign on a lamppost near my car, and although no skip or van or anything needed to use the bay in which it was parked for the entirety of the day, rather than move the car to any of the many vacant bays that were surrounding it, it had been stolen and hidden in a little car park near the train tracks on Lots Road. Okay I was a fool to have not checked the lamp-post. It was late and I was tired. I was willing to pay a fool tax - surely it couldn't be more than £80 pounds, I thought. Which is fine since I have £300 left of my overdraft limit.

"What's the ransom?"

"If you collect it today, it will be £260."

I almost fell over. Dear lord that is totally absurd. It is two fines for the same offence. £80 for a "serious parking offence" and £180 for recovering it from the pound. This, in my opinion, is disgusting. One or the other would be reasonable as an idiocy tax. Both not only totally destroyed my financial stability such as it can ever be in this profession, but has also left me deeply traumatised. I wake EVERY MORNING with a vague fear that I may have inadvertently left my car somewhere where they can ransom it. My first act is to check out the window, and if I can't see my car I run down the stairs with my heart in my mouth and some hastily thrown on clothes to check that it isn't about to be stolen. If a garbage van pulls up outside the flat at 7.15 I think it is the sound of the poundeteers getting in some early thefts. I have to check, recheck and check again all the lamp posts near the car. I don't dare leave town for more than a day in case they come in over night and stick up their yellow signs and run off with my car. Because if they steal it again I can't afford to get it back. And then they'll start removing wheels and windscreen wipers and sending them to me in the post. If they steal it again I will have to disown the car and all it's contents, as I would not make back the money that I have to spend on rescuing it by selling it. I am genuinely traumatised by the vast and crippling fine levied for the simple offense of leaving my car overnight near a yellow sign that had been speculatively put up in order to make room for work which never took place.

I know the arguments. Why do you need to have a car in London?

True.

I'm just angry because I'm broke.

Summer-stock

2008-05-12T16:48:00.002+01:00

Well then the old joke is true as usual. Book a holiday if you want to get some work. I was meant to be going to Tuscany for a lovely week in the sunshine, all flights booked, accommodation thankfully not finalized and a big cool fun wedding with all the trimmings to head to in the middle of the break. And then I was going to go to Glastonbury festival and see Leonard Cohen play live, and it was going to be sunny and amazing.

Now I am instead paying for all my non-refundable tickets and biting the bullet and heading up to Ripley to do a Shakespeare in the grounds of Ripley Castle. Which Shakespeare? Twelfth Night. But hang on - deja-vu... Haven't you already played Malvolio in an outdoor Shakespeare over the summer? Yes but I don't care it's work, and money and sun and frolics and I want to see if I am capable of finding it fresh with a new company in a new setting. The director seems great which will make a change from last time, and from what I know of the company there are no idiots, lunatics or clowns. So something to look forward to. I must book holidays more often. Usually I don't in case I lose the money by getting a job - but then perhaps I'd sooner get the jobs. Oh god that reminds me I am supposed to be playing Lord Astor at Hever Castle on the weekend before we open. And the costume is booked. Meeh how can they book actors so far in advance - is that pessimism or optimism? Right enough blogging time to look for a replacement. How about YOU?

Temple

2008-04-12T17:11:00.003+01:00

Having just got back from the Isle of Man, where my brother and I had spend a hideously busy 3 days carrying things and doing DIY and driving big vans round in circles, I went to Linklaters in The City to do a performance of Asylum Monologues to a room full of lawyers on their lunch break. One of my partners in crime were an iraqi kurdish man called Narwaz who had been brought into the mix by Emma Laird-Craig, one of the actresses who did The Performance Lab's piece at The Globe in December with me. He did some extraordinary singing between the sections read by me, Emma and the lovely Christine Bacon, who set up the network in the UK and in Australia. It was, as always, very rewarding. The piece is essentially outreach work, putting genuine testimonies about the asylum system into a loosely dramatic form and presenting it in the least patronising way possible, with minimu acting.

Emma is involved in The Actor's Temple, which was set up in part by Ellie Zeegen who is also in The Lab with me. I have already written about their production of The Three Sisters which I saw in a country house in Scotland. Ellie has been trying to persuade me to get down to The Temple for some time now, and she had already told me that Friday would be a good day to come. And Emma was going too so it seemed too good to pass up. Problem is, I really hadn't been blown away by the work in The Three Sisters. I get a little pissed off watching actors trying to achieve a state in themselves regardless of the needs of the text. We've all been guilty of it at some point, but there was a good deal of it present there and I was pretty much ready to write of the whole Meisner thing as another "acting as therapy" trap. I got bored and felt disconnected from the work as I felt like I was being told how to feel, and that the actors were working too hard making themselves feel something that was no use. As a Marcellus the fight director says repeatedly to the extent that you want to dispense with all the knaps and twat him one; "excited is not the same as exciting". But it's a good point. We are craftsmen... God I am beginning to sound like Jake. But I was willing to believe I had just come on a bad night or been in a bad mood. So hi-ho and off we go to The Temple again for a second dose.

The work was presided over by "this amazing teacher" called Marty. Oh fuck. Another amazing teacher. In other words someone who has terrible ego problems and alleviates his own self-hate by destroying the lives of others in the name of learning. Not so. Thank God. This guy is a rather camp and very bright American who seems to be an enabler, not a crusher. Good start. He reminded me in some ways of Peter Clough, who directed me at Guildhall in Twelfth Night and who makes you understand firmly that everything comes from you, but knows how to make you bring out aspects of yourself, almost unknowingly, that you were burying or repressing. So to the work. I had to watch it on a screen in the room next door, as it was packed out. Nonetheless the intensity came through on the screen. The first scene was crippled by nerves and did nothing to wake me up pretty much because of that. After that it was scene after scene of gripping stuff, not overdone, human, true and deeply moving - in many different ways. I loved it, and I was surprised how much. So now I'm going to do this introductory week that I won in the Christmas party for The Performance Lab. We're always learning and I know I have got so much better at all the aspects of this bizarre and wonderful job - even the letter writing, which I used to be excruciatingly awful at. So I'm not going to approach this as anything other than as a place to kick back and do the things that I went into the profession for.

So I stayed at the party afterwards and spoke to all the people, and found them all very interesting and diverse. And passionate. I had some very honest chats with people. Like with The Lab, I love to spend time in the presence of passionate people. It wakes up my passion, and that has been dormant for a very very long time. So all said a really good day, and now I feel a strange mixture of excitement and trepidation about stepping into something true and potentially life-changing.

Iona

2008-03-18T22:13:00.001Z

Good to have talented friends! This is iona who i'm with in a pretty overpriced bar in battersea. She's doing a set and she really is good. As long as the music industry lets her in she'll sell millions to disaffected teenage girls and students finishing their education. And other people too. Ordinary people. People like you. People like me. People with noses. And legs.

Just lovely

2008-03-07T13:54:00.001Z

It seems i have done nothing for the last two weeks but rehearse and sleep, so how bloody gorgeous to travel from one rehearsal to another and realise that spring has - for the moment at least - sprung. What am i rehearsing? The empire builders. 7.45 from 13th to 15th march at the pleasance theatre in caledonian road. Plug over. Back to the joys of spring.

Friends

2008-03-02T01:16:00.001Z

Clearly when i am working i can't be bothered to blog. And yet here are the chaps i'm out with and how the hell did they manage to dress identically... X

Feed Gorn

2008-01-24T17:12:00.000Z

I took the feed from Facebook off, as I found it hard to blog about anything knowing that, like so many of us, the word "friend" means something different on facebook. Like "person I once spilled a drink on", or "person I never spoke to at school" or "enemy". Now you have to dig deep to find me. Not that you'd want to.

Also I really didn't see the point of everyone getting notified everytime I experimented with that Spinvox voice to text thing.

4 days into the yoga experiment. Already my body feels infinitely better - I am feeling quite evangelistic about yoga right now - take the time and do it. It's one and a half hours of concentrated agony, in return for the rest of the day of feeling great. Better than the slow drip of discomfort that lasts all day and all night.

2007-11-14T00:18:00.001Z

Ok this is a vanity thing, but it's also something I feel strongly about. The asylum process in this country is fucked and I have got involved in a group called Actors for Refugees. We've been operating for a couple of years in this country now, and the coordinator is an absolute powerhouse of a woman called Christine Bacon, who originally set it up with great success in Australia.

One of the things I should mention is that the company is woefully short of men. Actresses seem to more frequently give a shit about "things" whereas actors tend to veer more towards "beer" or "football". which count as "things" but are perhaps less pressing. But then I know loads of guys who do give a shit about "things" so if you do check out the website for Asylum Monologues. For those of you who know Sarah Masters, it's an offshoot of Ice and Fire, her company. For those of you who know me, there's a brief clip of me doing it on the video at that link - it starts around 1:55 and goes on for no more than 30 seconds. Enjoy. X

Grievances

2007-11-14T00:02:00.000Z

Does your boss undervalue the work you do? Are you overworked? Do you not get enough time to see your family?

FEAR NOT. Soon there will be a new video that will help you understand better how to file a GRIEVANCE.

Bosses! If you need to know how to go through the grievance process, follow the hi-jinks of Jed and David and Natalie and their unnamed wives and partners as they file grievances and have loving conversations in kitchens.

Coming soon at Aspina. Starring Alex Barclay as David.

David has a family! His daughter Sienna is growing up by the day!! His son Ben has taken to building cardboard tanks that he never gets to play with. Laugh, cry, and shit-yourself with him as he talks to his boss Jed.

Also starring the incredible Kevin B as "grumpy extra". I used to have a link to his website and his full name, but after a man I namechecked in an earlier post left a string of remarkable comments, I felt it was kinder to avoid using his full name.

Kevin played the lead in Poliakoff's "Remember This" at the National, although the website cruelly fails to credit his work. He trained at RADA, although his CV does not state this. He occasionally does extra work in corporate videos where he looks like thunder for ages. When asked in a friendly manner - "did you know what you'd signed up for," he will respond "I should think so - I went to Bristol Old Vic and RADA."

Ok this man is a warning to actors. He probably does have credentials BUT... I really don't give a toss how desperate you are - unplug drains, clean up shit with your tongue, be someone's gimp. Don't do extra work. It WILL kill you inside. If you're not an actor, GO FOR YOUR LIFE! The money is great if you don't have self-worth wrapped up in the work.

Bless him. Give him a part.

I had fun on that job, although I stayed two nights in some hideously awful faceless golf motel in Suffolk, and was already feeling like Alan Partridge by the time I left.

The Nokia N95 is a piece of SHIT

2007-10-29T18:04:00.000Z

My dear friend Whatleydude - otherwise known as James Whatley - advised me to get an N95 when I upgraded my mobile phone. This is Nokia's latest offering. It is massive, heavy and delicate. The screen is huge and the battery is weak so it runs down daily. It crashes every day at least once, it takes ages to switch on, it keeps freezing, the operating system makes no sense, the GPRS doesn't work, when it is fully charged it beeps and wakes you up, the camera is very very slow - (but good quality - as is the web browser) - and I have had it for less than a month when the microphone stops working completely and I have to take it into a Vodafone shop for repairs.

In the Vodafone shop the guy at the door points me over to the help deck and I stand in the queue. When I get to the front the guy says - "hang on I have to call out the customer numbers". He bellows the number 342. I wonder what the hell he is doing. I have no number. The bloke behind me does though, and it's 342. He says to the guy - "it's okay, let this man go, he was before me." The assistant in the shop looks at the bloke who has stood up for me, and something explodes in his brain. A membrane passes over the front of his eyeball. He tics briefly like faulty digital video. Then after a pause he bellows 343, ignoring both me and the bloke with the number. A teenage boy leaps up and crashes past us oblivious, full of hormones and the joy of life. I object loudly. Mad shop guy ignores me. I lie down spead-eagled on my back in the middle of the store in protest. The bloke next to me sits down beside me.

I have never lain on my back in the middle of a crowded store before. It's curious how much attention it can draw, considering it is such a passive thing to do. Within a minute the manager is talking to me but because I am being very polite he doesn't quite know what to do, so he helps me.

All this was after a horrid audition, hence my state of mind. I went up for the part of The Fireman and The DJ in "Mrs. Norris Plays it Safe" - an educational play for the elderly. I want it because the company is good and I am broke. But I found myself having to lie in the crazy PR firm because they are all lovely and politely interested in my career and I couldn't bear telling them I'm taking a half day to audition for something like that. I always feel awful after auditions. And I did the old - "Well then, good luck with it all" again. Must learn to practise what I preach - I quote my rather smug "actors have no business being shy."

But that's off the subject. The subject being The Nokia N95 is a piece of SHIT! For fuck's sake Nokia your brand can only hold you up for so long. Make a decent phone next time. I'd go back to sony tomorrow if I didn't have to wait another 11 months for my contract to go up for renewal. I now have to carry around a "courtesy phone" which is, dare I say it, even worse that the N95. In fact fuck it, I'll stick to my guns. It's probably better. But I have to give it back in a week when they've fixed my one.

Grubbing for pennies

2007-10-20T11:54:00.000+01:00

Back to the money-grubbing. It's looking like I might get a good tranche of work doing the auditions at my old drama school. I did my first day yesterday and it's amazingly interesting. Also good for my ego, as one of the candidates had seen me in something and recognised me. I did my best to pretend not to be surprised. Essentially you meet lots of hopeful young people and occasionally get to witness one of them doing something wonderful in the most depressing basement room in the world ever. I had a 17 year old lad from Salford go completely and utterly mental all over the place as Mercutio yesterday - so completely all over the place that he gave himself a stitch the poor love. He was the only one to get recalled and it was a close thing. He had to convince people that he wasn't completely insane and that he could be simple and honest. I find myself having to do the same thing sometimes. Bless him though - doing the auditions can be profoundly depressing if nobody does well, but all it takes is one rough diamond to make the whole day worthwhile. And you learn how boring it is when people are afraid of themselves. Actors have no business being shy.

Even bigger houses.

2007-10-15T15:58:00.000+01:00

I just got back from Norfolk. The day after I returned from Peru I found an email from my agent suggesting I should have a look at a proposed audition for the part of Victor in Private Lives. I had been agitating to get seen for a part in Present Laughter at The National, so by comparison this was something of a disappointment. Added to which was the fact that the money wasn't great and I was emotionally completely fucked. Nonetheless it seemed like a good idea to go along to the audition, principally because the place they had chosen was right next door to my opticians so I could order some new contact lenses after my glasses made their suicide dive into the Amazon. So off I trotted, convinced myself I had totally muffed the audition, and thought no more about it. I even went so far as to tell the director - "Good luck with it all, then" as I was leaving. Typically, in true audition form, the ones you think you've buggered are the ones you get. So it was two weeks of rehearsal and then off to Norfolk for two shows at the disguistingly vast residence of - correct me if I'm wrong - David Rock-Savage, the Marquis of Cholmondely. I say it was his residence - actually it's his shooting lodge. Which is humungous. And full of deer, which come right up to the house. And stunningly beautiful. And full of amazing pictures and clocks and carpets and chairs. Oh god I want to marry him.

We were performing in The Stone Hall, which was carefully selected as the most echoey room in the whole building. And it was a bloody marvellous job. A great play in a great place with great people. We were given digs at a B and B run by the goddess of food, a sweet, loud and virtually completely deaf christian called Janey, who bellowed at us merrily all evening while cramming meat down our throats with a plunger. As the week went on the cast grew more and more hysterical, and I think our sanity was only saved by the sad fact that we were only there for a week. Nonetheless it was packed out every night, and even though Prince Charles didn't show at the last minute - (This is the second time I've missed him. I think he's avoiding me.) - we raised over a good ten grand for FARA. So next time I go out filming in Romania I expect to see some jolly grateful orphans what ho.

Being back in the smoke is strange. I miss the good local produce, the dogs and sometimes even the fact that everybody howls instead of speaking. Still I wouldn't mind moving out there some time.

Big Houses

2007-09-18T15:05:00.001+01:00

My chum Ellie is married to a lovely man who has a nice old house in the Scottish Borders - rather like Westerton for those of you that know it, and in a similar area - it's wonderfully eccentric inside, but virtually devoid of furniture at the moment. So Ellie filled it with actors from The Actor's Temple, doing Chekhov. Abigail and her sister Alex and I drove up in a sick pimp electric blue convertible car - was it a peugeot of some sort?? It was ghastly, yet hilarious. And we watched the show. I love The Three Sisters, so it was no chore to zoom so far to see it, and the three of us had a fantastic time, and camped in a walled garden in the grounds of the house.

After the show we drove around and got tangled up with a load of bikers on a memorial ride. Once upon a time there was a biker called Steve Hislop. He was someone I was very aware of growing up on the Isle of Man, and he died in a helicopter crash in The Scottish Borders at 41 after winning the TT something like 11 times. So the roads were completely blocked with fans from all over the place, all in their leathers and stinking and drinking, and occasionally exploding. Which was a problem as two of them chose to explode close to where we were heading so we had to change our plans. We were going to go and see a waterfall called The Horse's Arse colloquially, and The Mare's Tail in the guide books. All the roads were closed as they picked up the pieces. So instead we went for a drive and found a fucking huge great tibetan buddhist temple. In the middle of the gloom of the Scottish borders. Complete with big gates and a wishing tree and Buddhas galore and prayer wheels and peacocks. So I went and sat cross legged for a while with Abi and Alex and emptied my mind of bad thoughts as far as I could manage in the time I had.

The next day took us to Alnwick House and Gardens in Northumberland. This is testament to marriage being important for the aristocracy. The Duke of Northumberland is known as "the reluctant duke." He didn't want to be duke, we are told by a volunteer helper-person. He just had greatness thrust upon him. "Dammit," thought he. "It is my desire to sit in my pants and watch daytime television. It is my will to shoot small birds. I need not this house and grounds to maintain." Thankfully, the Duke had married the great goddess Gaia. She squeezed people until all their money fell out and then used it to build an incredible garden - and she's still at it. There's a poison garden where she has managed to wrangle permission to grow hemlock and weed and various opiates for educational purposes. There's a water garden where she has persuaded a water artist to come and show off his structures. The structures are great, but the explanations are disappointingly pretentious and uninformative. There's a huge great big landscaped fountain which jets off blasts of water every half an hour. There is a great deal to see, and much more planned. All said it was a great stopover and if you're around Northumbria pop by. There's even a big treehouse where you can eat in a lovely looking restaurant with a fire in the middle and a chef that ought to be hanged drawn and quartered for serving such horrendously mediocre food in such a wonderful location.

Weekends rock.

The day I died

2007-08-31T23:49:00.000+01:00

I woke up this morning after a drunken fondue the night before with a lump on my tongue. It looked rather odd, so I went on the internet to see what it might be. "tongue lump" I put into google. That ought to help me put my mind at rest.

I get this: http://www.doctorhoffman.com/wwlump.htm

Q: I have recently noticed a lump in the right side of my tongue, approximately 1 inch back from the tip. I cannot get in to see the doctor for a few days because of the holidays, and was curious if you could help me narrow it down. It does not hurt, nor does it protrude from my tongue. If I pinch my tongue, I can feel it in there. In size, it is about the size of a pea, or possibly a fraction larger.

A: One of the odd little facts about the tongue is that cancers arise far more frequently on the borders (sides) of the tongue than on the dorsum (top surface) of the tongue. The bottom surface of the tongue can also occasionally give rise to cancers, especially in folks who chew tobacco.

Small tongue cancers usually look like ulcers (small craters with "raw" centers) but can also be nodular (a nodule is a firm ball). Since this lump is on the right side of your tongue, my first concern is that this might be an early tongue cancer. The only way to know for certain is to have the lump biopsied. Your doctor will inject a little bit of local anesthetic into the area of the lump and will then cut out all or part of the lump. This is not much fun, but neither is it as painful as it sounds.

The main risk factors for tongue cancer are tobacco use (smoking or chewing) and alcohol use. Tongue cancer tends to occur in older folks, but young people– even teenagers– have been diagnosed with tongue cancer. Survival of tongue cancer is critically dependent on early diagnosis and treatment-- so do not delay in seeing a doctor! Tongue cancers spread rapidly to the lymph nodes of the neck; even for very small tongue cancers, the doctor must consider treating the neck (either surgically or by radiation therapy) to eradicate lymph nodes that may be cancerous.

So... see a doctor QUICKLY. And if you do use tobacco or drink excessively, this little lump (even if it is not a cancer) should serve as a wake-up call for you to QUIT.

I am going to die. Clearly this is the only possibility. A little more research on this terrible cancer proves to me that I only have a very short amount of time to live. I may be saved by surgery that would remove most of my tongue and half of my neck. Shit shit shit shit shit. I haven't written my book yet! My books!! How will I ever get that part at The Globe with half a tongue?? I'll be reduced to playing people with half a tongue if I live. What roles are there for people with half a tongue. I can't think of any. Shit shit shitshitshit shit. I need to go to the doctor. Biopsy - that's the solution. They can catch it early. Then maybe I won't die. Oh God I split up with my girlfriend. I'm going to die alone. Must call her! No I mustn't worry her. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Okay think straight. I don't have a doctor. Get a doctor. Which doctor? There's one down the road - my brother uses it. Get him to call. Make an appointment. Run to the doctor. Register. Oh god the nurse is going to see me now. Oh fuck ok keep it together, Al. She's taking my blood pressure. Why is she taking my blood pressure? She doesn't like the reading. Oh shit, she's asking me if I'm stressed. NO! I'm dying!! Look at my tongue?! She looks. Gargle with TCP she recommends. FOR CANCER!! You FOOL!!!! Okay it's fine. It's not cancer. I'll just go home and bring up some photos to make sure. Here are the photos - they look the same as my lump. Shit what does she know she's a nurse not a doctor. I'm going to die after all!! Oh god I need to go to hospital. Maybe a dentist will be able to do it - they could use their dental needles to numb my tongue. Then maybe i'd be able to play those half a tongue people. Hey maybe with half a tongue I won't be able to act anymore and I could actually allow myself to get a job where I make real money. That could be good! But not if I die. I need money for an emergency dental appointment. I haven't got my card. I'm near my brother's house. He'll lend me money. My brother looks at my lump, and then passes me to his wife for a second opinion. I stick my tongue out. She looks. "I get those all the time" she says. CANCERS!! All the time!! My god how does she look so healthy. I get a cup of tea. Slowly my brother persuades me that I am not going to die. Oh thank you lord, thank you. I am saved.

The good thing is I am now registered at a GP so next time I am going to die I can get saved quicker. I think everyone should have a paranoid delusional brush with death from time to time. It helps you realise the things that are important, and gives you a kick up the backside.

Donegal in the Irish Mist

2007-08-31T23:14:00.000+01:00

I had a brilliant weekend with Harriet in Donegal. We went up THE HIGHEST CLIFFS IN EUROPE, and couldn't see a bloody thing because of the deep deep fog and howling wind and spitting rain. In August. So we stood right on the edge and leant over trying to see the sea and seeing instead a wall of white wind rushing up the vertical face. We stood far closer than anyone would feel comfortable to stand, because it looked like there was just a big white pillow below us. Now I realise that bungee jumping is probably more freaky than skydiving, because you can see the ground and it looks close enough to hurt lots. After a while we gave up on the cliffs because the fog was never going to lift, so we moved on a to a little village which has a pilgrimage route of ancient celtic crosses. The fog promptly lifted, of course. The village was hilarious. Glencolmcille it was called, I believe, and we were following a pilgrimage route around many ancient stone "stations" and a well. We followed the sign in the village to the well, and eventually ran into a large gaelic shepherd, who slipped from gaelic to english with fluidity and ease. Gaelic was for his friends and his dog. We explained we were lost. He explained that he had moved the sign to point in the wrong direction because he was fed up of Americans coming through his land in their cars. He then pointed us up the hill to the well, which is surrounded by a vast pile of stones - all the pilgrims bring three stones. The well itself had an altar where things of value had been left, clearly as prayer offerings. I said a few prayers, and then rummaged around in my wallet for something appropriate to leave. AH HA! My discount card for The Hen and Chickens theatre in Islington. Perfect! It still has some negligible value, and it's about my career which needs a turn up. So I popped it there, and there will it lie until it decays or someone nicks it.Then we had a big fat tasty meal in a twee but comfortable hotel in the village of Portnoo - http://www.lakehousehotel.ie/ Good food, and yet probably quite expensive for the area. The next morning it was frolicking on the beach and wading through a vast pile of hermit crabs to a small island, where I found a big snail shell. Brilliant!! I chucked it in the water, so one lucky hermit crab can find it and be the Uber-hermit crab. Harriet did loads of gymnastics on the beach and it was fun.

On the way home we stopped in an ancient stone circle built for the feast of Beltane. If it had been in England it would have been full of people, but no. It was in the middle of a working field with nothing but a plaque and a whole hell of a lot of pagan sheep shitting on the ancient earth-grass in the middle. But there was a lovely view.

By the time we got back to Belfast we were both feeling relaxed as if we had had a proper holiday. And I got to fly business class back! All said a brilliant holiday courtesy of Harriet who sorted the flight out on her work and did all of the driving and was superb company for a couple of days exploring Ireland!

Brief Hiatus

2007-08-24T13:19:00.000+01:00

I got back to London and the weather is unutterably terrible. It's August. These things should be banned. I then had some shit happen to me which I am not going to go into here, but which has been a deciding factor in my having no desire to blog anything since I got back. I would just have gone on about equations. If x + y = (ab), then z. If x + (ab) = y squared, then z. If x = y, then z. Always then z.

Anyhow in this murk I have been rushing around auditioning for stuff with various results, as well as working in a PR firm as general dogsbody and doing educational theatre for Islington council. We had to devise a piece about street safety and present it to a room full of hyperactive children. It was me and Kesty and a girl called Vanessa. It turned out to be a lot of fun only because it was completely nuts. But the second half was about nutrition and I think it got a bit out of hand, since there were three actors involved in a discussion about nutrition. If you want someone to teach your children about nutrition and you could choose from any profession in the world, surely the last one that anyone would choose apart from serial killer is actor.

PR is a bizarre business. It sounds terribly legitimate, but at heart it is nothing but bribery. Friendly, charming and well spoken bribery. It makes you realise that there are very specific perks to being a journalist, since there's a whole industry snapping at your heels and trying to give you free things so that you like them more. Of course I am merely the man who fixes the sliding doors and photocopies and stuffs envelopes and arranges boxes, but it's fascinating to see this fluffy steel machine that goes on all around me. And I have to bear in mind that it's not all bribery, even if it seems that way on a brief acquaintance. Why am I fixing these shelves and carrying these boxes? Because all the girls in the office have perfected the "make that man do something for me" voice. I get brainwashed. It sounds like a great idea. It's nice to do a job where I don't have to question, and it makes me realise how easy it must be to lose sight of yourself in repetition. I only did it for one day as well. Chances are I'll be back though. The woman who runs the firm is brilliantly understanding of the protean nature of my work, as well as being brilliantly understanding of the vast hunger-monster that hides in my wardrobe when I'm not working and that I fear will leap out at me one day and make me devour myself.

Just because I can I've put up a photo of me on a swing in Vancouver. To remind us all that we like swings. And that there is such a thing as summer.

Chums and totem poles

2007-08-08T08:09:00.000+01:00

Vancouver would be a much better town if it wasn't so horrendously expensive. The taxi from the airport cost me more than all the taxis I'd taken in Peru. I arrived in Yaletown where my best mate Dan's wife Minky works, and had a few huge lagers while waiting for her to finish work. I was peckish, and was unable to find anything on any menu anywhere that wasn't gargantuan, so I had to make do with liquid lunch.

From a tourist point of view my favorite part of Vancouver was the Museum of Antropology. This is located on the biggest university campus I have ever seen, and is a testament to how much space there is in Canada. It is a vast glass and metal structure crammed with totem poles from the restrained Musqueans, the figurative Haida and the completely over the top Kwakwakawak. I like them the best, partly because of the silly name and partly because of the brilliant dramatic sculptures. All the sculptures tell amazing stories passed down in the oral tradition, but only people who are born into the right tribe are allowed to know the stories, so all Joe Tourist can do is wonder why that bear is holding that bloke and what might happen next. (The picture is of a modern work in the Haida tradition called The Raven and The First Men.) There is plenty of information about how the British tried to wipe out the oral tradition and homogenise the aboriginal cultures by preventing them from holding Potlatches, which were clearly very important ceremonies to celebrate marriage, victories, and anything else. It made me feel quite guilty. Ironically the whole of Vancouver is involved in a more insidious homogenising project from the USA. There is a street where two Starbucks are opposite each other, with another just down the road. Worse than London.

From a personal point of view it was good to see my friends and come back to western culture. At least I got the culture shock out of the way before the jet lag kicked in. The last day was spent on the beach in the blazing sunshine, sneakily drinking beer from the cooler, as it's banned in public, and swimming in the sea. The perfect end to a crazy holiday.

Oh and we went to the auquarium and they had whales! Beluga whales, with an underwater viewing area so you could see their blubber wibbling. I worried myself a little about how they go about catching the whales, as for the most part their ages are approximates which means that they were caught. It is good to instil a respect for nature in people, but at what cost? What percentage of the whales die in the attempt to get them to the aquarium? Here's a piccie of one anyway.

Long live my Dad

2007-08-06T04:40:00.000+01:00

My father taught me that when you fly you should always dress in a suit and arrive as late as possible. This maximises your chances of an upgrade to first class. And it worked. Besuited, I crashed the gates at Lima as late as I was comfortable and made sure I was the last to board the plane. And just as I walked onto the gangplank, my boarding pass was seized and replaced with one for Business class. SCORE! Big seats, metal knives and forks, as if your average terrorist is only going to travel steerage, and wee tiny ceramic salt and pepper shakers. And free booze and big seats. So I got tanked on gin and then passed out. Oh joy.

Muyuna and me

2007-08-02T18:08:00.000+01:00

Having spent a day and a half in Iquitos sweating like a pig and fighting my way through touts, all of whom are hungry for my blood, I choose a jungle lodge for my six day expedition. I have some small misgivings before I leave, as all of the lodges had showed photos of fat Americans with cameras and baseball hats groping dolphins and sloths. I don`t want to grope the animals. The lodge I choose is Muyuna Lodge. I choose it for a number of reasons. It focuses on conservation. It doesn't offer commission to the legion of touts that infest the town. It is 130km upriver, and I want to get as far away from Iquitos and civilisation as possible. A little hint to anyone planning on going out to the jungle from Iquitos : No need to book ahead. Seriously, most of these lodges are busting for custom and have plenty of space. Even the big ones are going to be hard to fill. If you just show up, you'll always get a reduction on price. Although Muyuna is not an easy haggle.

The lodge is built in the local style, entirely from locally available materials. Recycling occurs and most food is from the jungle. The chef is a genius - utterly incredible. There was not a meal that wasn't superb. It is located on the Yanayaku river. Yanayaku : yaku = black, yana = water. Yanayaku is a tributary of the Amazon and just a short boat trip from the major river itself. It is built on stilts, but at this time of the year the water is very low, so all of the flooded forest can be walked in. The guides will often point to the waterline on the trees, some six feet above my head, and my imagination goes wild at the prospect of the vastness of the Amazon at high water.

Muyuna has a good selection of boats, which are driven by villagers from the local village. The language in which Yanayaku was named has been all but lost. The villagers speak heavily accented Spanish. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is going to be a very long post.

Day One

I am met at my hotel by a smiling potbellied man of about 46 who introduces himself as Julio. He is full of vitality and laughter, and we bundle my vast bag into a mototaxi and drive ten foot down the street to the docks. I am bombarded by people thrusting water bottles into my face, and am so busy fending them off that I overlook the fact that I need some.

A speedboat is waiting for us, and I am glad to see it is full, as the less fumes per person the better. But I begin to worry I may have booked the wrong holiday. I assumed that the relatively high price tag on the lodge was down to some sort of conservation tax, but there is a clean cut American family on the boat - young parents, two identical children, bible school T-Shirts who I instantly dub Tweedledum and Tweedledee - and they have come all the way from Colorado to sit in front of me.

"Mummy, when am I going to see a piranha?" asks Tweedledee.
"Soon," replies daddy. And yes - every question is asked to mummy and answered by daddy. I used to do that too. Poor fathers.

"Mummy, do piranhas eat fish?" I liked that one, as it met with silence until the guide piped up with "They eat meat."

Not having enough room to jump out of the boat in the hopes they eat me too, I brazen it out as Tweedledum pipes up with the question that has been troubling him since we got on this boat in the Amazon.

"Is Ice Age 2 called The Meltdown?"

So now I know I prefer Tweedledee. (Their real names Dorian and Julian. Is that any better? Perhaps.) Dorian asked at one point what The Picture of Dorian Gray was. His parents didn't know.

The Amazon is teeming with life. Less than ten minutes into the river the boat stops and we watch a pair of river dolphins. These are not a rarety as they are in the Yangtzee. They are easily found and observed.

Later we pick up a man whose boat has broken down and drop him off in the middle of nowhere so he can get help from his village. Right next to where we ground the boat is a shocking green lizard watching us. It is 100 per cent definitely not an Iguana.

"Iguana! Look!" pipes up Julio, our guide.

3 hours later we are at the lodge. After about two hours travel the sightings of boats and people have dwindled. As we enter the Yanayaku we disturb a shoal of fish, and they jump high in the air. One of them narrowly misses my face, and slaps hard into the nose of the man who is sitting at the back of the boat feeding the engine. He laughs.

At the lodge it is close. Hot. We are met with towels and lemonade.

"Does that drink have alcohol in it?" asks Tweedledum.
"Does that drink have alcohol in it?" I ask too. Only one of us is happy with the answer.

Lunch is a platter of jungle foods - (Jungle "spaghetti" insists Luis who serves us. It's a vine, but we are not told its real name. Everything is westernised for the yanks.) I sit next to an English couple who are sharing my guide with me. I know them now to be called John and Liz. I have an individual hut with a double bed - number 11. There is an ensuite bathroom with loo and cold shower and sink, and a balcony at the back with a hammock. And a hornets nest in the roof, above the all round mosquito netting.

In the afternoon Julio takes us on a jungle hike, as he calls it. It is more of a well travelled path round the back of the lodge. A gentle rain begins to fall, but not enough to discourage the mossies. Julio talks constantly this first day. He blends folklore and knowledge with a sense of humour to create a charming - if occasionally flawed - narration. We find a centipede, encouraged out by the rain. It crawls on me. We find "bullet ants". They are very big and look like they would bite like hell. Julio tells us how midday sun kills them in seconds. He is a farmers son from an Amazonian village, so he is very good on pests. I can believe the sun will kill them - they are black and large and probably can't process heat too well. Ants are in great supply - we find a huge leafcutter ant pile, and see them all at work, 2 to a leaf. The big one carries and a wee one sits on the leaf and makes sure there are no wasp eggs on it before it gets taken into the nest. Clever. The leaves aren't food. They are used to grow fungus, which is.

We then find some pygmy marmosets. They live in families on one tree, gradually killing it by boring little holes in every spare inch of the bark to suck out the sap. They are very very little and scamper like squirrels. We also wake up some nocturnal monkeys, and we hear some howler monkeys, but Julio tells us we'd be lucky to find them. Also there is a frog, that does a great job of looking like a dead leaf.

I retreat to my cabin, pleased that there is some wildlife living close to the camp. Since I've been gone they have put kerosene lamps in. I sit and write my diary on a big wooden table in my cabin surrounded by the evening sounds of the jungle - frogs, crickets and night birds. Stunning. After dinner Julio trys to find some caiman, and fails. But I am happy to be on a boat at night out here.

------

Day 2 begins bright and early to go birdwatching. This is Julio's speciality. He is quick to spot and quick to name, and reference to the bumper illustrated book of Peruvian birds shows no inconsistency the first five times so I lie back and trust him. I liked the "ruffliated?" Tiger Crane myself. Odd shape. Julio tells us it roars like a tiger, hence the name. It is also coloured much like a tiger. I do not hear it roar.

Julio does not like being asked questions by me. Usually he responds to my questions with a little laugh. I am not deliberately asking him difficult questions, but I am intensely curious and he is the best knowledge base I have. As the day goes on I begin to realise that Julio is Farmer Giles. Replace the shotgun with a machete, and we're off for a nature walk round the farm.

'That'd be a tree-rat. It eats nuts it do.'
'That'd be a piggy. They can smell truffles. Truffles be chocolates."

His recognition is mostly good. He has anecdotes that are amusing if folkloric. His science is not. He is good at spotting movement. I wish he understood more about habitat. His style is to blunder through the jungle in wellies and if something jumps out he can tell you a story about it. Hunting for caiman is already proving to be difficult at night. Surely there is a type of riverside habitat where they are more likely to be found? Why not focus on that rather than shining the torch on every bit of mud.

There is so much life here that his blundering will always turn things up though, and the mornings walk provides plenty of insects. A couple of hours in, however, he stops dead and his breathing rate speeds up. He then goes totally silent, and we are hacking through pathless forest. He is marking trees and hitting dead ends. His pace speeds up. His shoulders rise. We are lost. I realise I have left my water in the boat. I hope his botany is good enough to find those vines you can drink from, or this is going to be rough.

After what feels like hours we come upon a stream. Julio laughs crazily as his body language resets. "Ah - now guys - these streams are always good if you are lost. You follow the flow of water and it leads you to the water." We all breathe a sigh of relief. And Farmer Giles is back to his old self. We find some cuckoo spit, or the Amazonian equivalent. Cuckoo Spit is what I used to call froghopper larvae as a child. It's definitely the same stuff.

"This is the Spit Beetle. Look - see them in here. They use this for camouflage. Spit Beetle."

Yep. I too would be the only white thing in thousands of miles if I wanted to camouflage myself.

In the afternoon we go fishing. This is fishing in the unskilled manner that would make my godfather Peter Rittmaster spit fire out of his ass. We use bait. I lose two hooks on submerged twigs and catch nothing but a few bait fish and one small piranha. The driver of the boat must be a local fisherman. He pulls out one after another, including a humungous piranha.

At dinner we get to eat our catch grilled. They taste great. We go caiman hunting unsuccessfully again - despite seeing their glowing red eyes in the torchlight. The problem is that they find the eyes and then ram raid them in the boat while dangling over the side in the hope of grabbing them before they run like hell. I noticed that all the caiman we saw were in reeds. Why not kill the engine near a load of reeds and use the paddles to get in close? Rather than waste all evening locating them and then scaring the shit out of them.

Back at the lodge John vomits copiously and I hope it wasn't the piranha, which was tasty white meat and I want more. Liz later informs me that he's on malarone, and hates swallowing pills so he's eating them on biscuits. Ugh. I haven't seen a malaria mosquito yet, and I imagine that I won't. But perhaps it's better to be safe.

-------

The third day begins wet, after torrential downpours all night. My hut is totally rainproof thank goodness. In the morning we see many sloths. They are hairy, so they clamber up to the tops of trees to dry out after the rain. My favorite bird today was a Greater Ani, according to our guide. I am more inclined to trust his twitching than anything else, but the book says that it likes the high ground.

Then we go out in a small motor boat and find our plans thwarted. The local villagers have erected a fence preventing us from getting into their favorite lake, as we had been there the night before looking for caiman and they were worried we were stealing their fish. So we find a very small river, totally clogged with weeds. Julio and the driver both lean out the side of the boat and start to hack, swear and paddle their way through. After some time I offer to help. "Hee hee hee," responds Julio - his favorite response to any question I ask. So I grab a paddle.

When we get to the shore some time later, the clouds open and a deluge begins. We slog disconsolately into the jungle, and I stuff my camera down my pants since it's the only dry place left. Most of the land here is cultivated. There is a plantation for watermelons and yukka. Then there is a burnt stretch of lake shore. This is to make an artificial beach, so the river turtles can lay their eggs there, which are then harvested by the villagers who even go so far as to dig pit traps in the hopes of catching the turtles. Who they will eat and then sell the shells in the market at Belen in Iquitos for thoughtless tourists to buy in order to speed the destruction of yet another species. By lunchtime we are so wet that if I didn't have a camera down my pants I'd jump off the boat and swim back to the lodge, notwithstanding piranhas and leeches. I have realised the effect that a large village has had on the local wildlife. Caiman are edible and can be sold dried out to tourists. So they are rare here. Capybara are good eating, so they've all been eaten. Monkeys are stringy so they're okay so far. But large wildlife is not to be found so close to the village. And the lodge wants us back for lunch, so we can't go far enough afield to find anything interesting. And Julio might scare it off in his wellies even if we did.

Canoeing in the afternoon, and ram-raiding caiman with no luck.

-----

There has been an article about Muyuna published in the inflight magazine for LAN Peru, the major carrier. It has been good for business. I can't go birdwatching as there are too many people so I lie in instead. The temperature has plummeted after the rain and I am cold. A good day to go swimming. The boat takes us to the main drag of the Amazon, and we see some shockingly pink dolphins very quickly. These dolphins have been saved by superstition. I'm sure that there's plenty of good eating on a dolphin, but the local legend is that if you attract their attention they may turn into a human and then take the children from your village. So they are abundant as they have not been hunted - and of course there's plenty for them to eat. John and Liz and I all jump into the river, which is warmer than the air and the showers, and filled with very icky sticky mud. YUM.

The village is home to about 200 people. They live in wooden huts much like the ones in our lodge, which must have been built by them. There is one concrete building, which is the school. There are two churches, of course. A catholic church and an evangelical one. In the evangelical church there are pews. The catholics have to stand. Their church is near the prison which is a small brick structure which looks like it would be hell to have to crouch in for the night as the mosquitos home in. I buy a present for Emily whilsy wondering what she would make of all this. I ask about the ayahuasca ceremony, and am roundly discouraged by Julio. It's not a question of IF you vomit, but HOW MUCH. It's a purgative. You hallucinate for 3 hours, vomit and hallucinate for 2 hours, then the diarrhoea starts, and all three continue all night. I decide that maybe I'll save it for next time.

This evening is magical as John, Liz and I go out on a very small canoe upstrean under the clear clear sky and see the southern cross hanging over us through the bats and the trees. Julio funds a caiman and I hold him and feel him breathing and think of how fortunate I am to be out here in the middle of nowhere clutching something that was much the same millions of years ago.

-----

Today was a visit to some hoatzin birds that live nearby. The guide insists that they are prehistoric. As chicks they have talons on their wings, as a defense from their natural predator - the caiman. They use them to climb trees. The adult bird makes a noise like a pig, and eats,, shoots,,,,,, and! leaves..) It has three stomachs like a cow. Odd bird.

Then we go fishing. I clamber out onto a fallen tree, and find the perfect fishing spot. Within moments my wooden rod bends almost to snapping. I try to move with it - tire the beast... It swings left. So do I. My hat hits a branch. It falls. With one hand on my rod, I grab desperately for the hat, causing my glasses to slip. Quick as a flash I snatch them out of the air. They snap in my hands. Half of them falls into the river and sinks out of sight. "My HAT!" I lament as I turn to see it slowly sinking. The driver of the boat grabs his spear and hurls it, but to no avail. I land the fish, and clutching half of my glasses go disconsolately - blindly - back to the lodge. Where they grill my big fish for me.

In the afternoon, we are reminded that it is Peruvian National Day, and Moises the guide tells us that there must be a football match - Muyuna vs the village. Thank goodness I have lenses. I play and for the first time in my life I am on the winning team in a game of football. I sample the palm sugar rum which tastes unutterably foul, and then have a little too much beer.

-----

A little hungover in the morning we go to look for lily pads - Victor Regia ones. They`re the ones that children can stand on. We find them and one of them is in bloom.

On the way back I get stuck in the mud - so much so that I have to be plucked from my boots like a radish, before my boots are retrieved with sticks. Fool that I am. Then it`s back to civilisation.

In the boat I think of how lucky I have been to have spent 6 days in the jungle. It has not been deep jungle, but the lodge struggles to have minimum impact on the environment, and despite the boat fumes I am impressed with how well they did it. The village is prosperous as a result of the lodge and I wish someone would tell them that dropping biscuit wrappers on the floor is not the same as dropping banana skins. The village is carpeted with plastic wrappers. The food at Muyuna is nothing short of spectacular. The service is invisible and brilliant. The only vague misgiving is the fact that - inevitably - the mattresses and pillows have got damp in them.

If I return to the jungle it will not be to Muyuna unless I do it with my children. I want something rougher and more hands on now I have experienced the safe and luxurious version. But for families it`s wonderful. For foodies it`s wonderful. I would recommend it to anyone who has never been to the jungle before.

Back in chaos

2007-07-30T20:57:00.000+01:00

I kept a diary in the jungle which I´ll condense and make palatable and post here once I have a little more time - probably after my arrival in Canada. Today I went to the Laguna Quistacocha, which is a zoo and botanical garden located just outside Iquitos. It put me in mind of Gerald Durrel´s zoo from my childhood in Jersey - eccentric enclosures over a large space, and filled with endangered species. And I finally got my big mammal fix, since there were precious few in the jungle, staying as we were so close to a hungry village full of people.

On the way back I realised how much better my spanish is, since I had a conversation with a mototaxi driver that I would previously have thought was a failure of comprehension on my part.

"Do you want a taxi?" He asked.

"How much to Plaza 28th July?" I replied.

"10 soles." (About 1 pound 40)

"That´s too much. I´m taking the bus."

"The bus is 1 soles."

"I know."

"I am 10 soles."

"I know."

"Take me. I am better than the bus."

"You are 10 soles. The bus is 1 soles."

"I am not the bus."

"I want the bus."

"The bus is 1 soles."

"That is why I am taking the bus"

"There are three of you. That is 1 soles each. I am 10 soles for all of you."

"Yes. But the bus is still only 3 soles for all of us."

"I am not the bus. I am 10 soles."

"I know. I am taking the bus. The bus is 1 soles."

"Do not take the bus. Take me. I am 10 soles for all of you."

"Thank you. No. Goodbye."

This is a very typical conversation over here. I would have been convinced that I was missing something and that there was a good reason why he was better than the bus or cheaper than the bus had my Spanish not improved. Of course he was more expensive and noisier than the bus - the things almost deafen passengers. Also I´m very glad I took the bus as it was an experience in itself. There were two drivers who kept swapping jobs with one another. When one of them was driving the other one was hanging out of the window buying fanta and sweeties for both of them. They consumed a vast amount of each. There is no glass in the windows and everyone shouts and jumps on and off as the bus is moving. Halfway through the journey, a politician got on the bus. He stood in the aisle and talked about his party policies. Then he produced with a great flourish from his jacket pocket a massive bag of sweeties. These were then offered for free to all the passengers. Brilliant. Graffiti and sweetie bribes. Peruvian politics never left the playground gang era.

Shanty shanty shanty

2007-07-24T15:01:00.000+01:00

I went for a walk in the Amazon yesterday. There is a floating shanty market but this being the dry season it isn´t floating. All the traders sit at their unfloating stalls and you walk along the ground where the Amazon was. And since the traders are used to it being wet they just hurl all their organic waste into the river that isn´t there. And it festers in the sweltering heat for months. Needless to say, the place is crawling with nasty black headed vultures behaving like pigeons. Until yesterday I had never seen a vulture close up. Now I´ve seen hundreds. Nasty little things. And yet I was so excited to see two condors in the mountains. Odd. I hate seagulls, but would be excited to see an albatross. Why is big allowed to be better?

I have a proof of the counter-argument. In the form of Nathan Chew. Nathan "God in human form" Chew. This morning I rolled out of bed, and was in the process of deciding which cheek to scratch when I got a text message from him with all my credit card details. I leapt from my room and rushed to the Amazon lodge and paid them in full and got my money and passport back. Now I have enough cash to buy water in the lodge, and beer. And do an Ayahuasca ceremony... If I dare. I understand it involves a lot of vomiting.

Salsa and balloons

2007-07-23T03:46:00.000+01:00

All the hammering and sawing was worth it. I got to the party and they had built a bloody great big scaff bandstand with netting and dancefloor and sofas and a whacking great big free bar and cheese and tables overflowing with meat and nary a vegetable in sight. So I started getting those free Pisco Sours down me. What a blimming marvellous night. After about half an hour of standing at the edge of the dancefloor thinking "I really don´t want to have to dance" I got grabbed by Mrs. Kelly who helped me come round to the opinion that I did. And looking at my camera it seems clear to me that that´s all I did for the rest of the night. Apart from drink a whole hell of a lot of alcohol. And eat approximately 3 and a half llamas, one of them raw in carpaccio form. I may have taken something hallucinogenic too, as I remember many many balloons fighting in the air, and one gigantic huge big LORD OF THE BALLOONS who towered over me and filled me with awe at his terrible beauty.

However it worked out the party was a stormer. Best band in Peru - (As in 15 piece orchestra and loads of excellent singers). Superb cooking of the llamas, although some cows slipped in somehow. Mercifully most of the vegetables were weeded out at the expense of letting in a chicken or two. But they´re everywhere here so it´s to be expected. In fact they grow them in the desert. When I was watching the sun go down in the middle of the desert there were X-Files style long white silos in the middle of nowhere. Practising my Spanish, I asked the guide "What the fuck are those??" "Cheekens" he responded. Yep. Cheekens. Farsands of ´em. Out in the desert. Growing. Waiting.

Anyhow. Leila or however she spells it proved a patient Salasasasa teacher and taught me a new move. So now I have 3.

This internet cafe has no photo download facility. Honestly. I come to use the internet in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and they don´t even have a thing to connect my camera up and download photos. So blog is gonna be dry until I get back from the forest I guess.

Coz I am in Iquitos. Land of the motortaxi. I have yet to buy a jungle tour as everyone is too keen that I buy theirs and I don´t trust any of them. Problem is I am English and these guys are used to Americans, so they are spending way to much time explaining how clean their jungle lodges are without realising that I want a bit of dirt. Not too much dirt of course, but I don´t want to go to America in the jungle. I want to pretend that I´m in the rough of the jungle, but without the pissfish and strychnine. I´ll even put up with the pissfish if it´s not my urethra. In fact, here´s a picture of a pissfish so all the boys can wince. It´s barbed and it swims up your wee and gets jammed. Ow.

Anyway right now I´m using a good excuse to not book my Amazon tour. I´m telling them that I´m unable to pay until my new credit card arrives at my house tomorrow. Nothing they can do about that, and it would be a great way of ditching salesmen. I just wish it wasn´t true. I´m looking at the possibility of sleeping on a street filled with mototaxis. They had better let Nathan my flatmate sign for it, not least because he´s taking off work to get the fucker but also because I am properly up shit creek without it. But let´s take it one day at a time. If I get the tour you won´t hear much for a week as I´ll be up the Amazon. If I don´t get the tour you won´t hear much for over a week as someone would have run over me in a mototaxi and then reversed to steal my Tshirt, before feeding me to the crocodiles.

Oh and a mototaxi is a moped rickshaw thing. They´re everywhere here. No roads in. Where the hell do they all come from?

Party Time...

2007-07-21T01:18:00.000+01:00

Despite Harry Potter having come out in Peru this evening - and all the Peruvian bookstores being loaded with English copies - I am suited and booted and about to head off to a party. I´m staying in a lovely flat owned by a spinster friend of Beatriz who is just the sweetest person. She gave me her bed! I had to make up for it by buying her a 20 dollar bunch of flowers. For 20 bucks you get a hell of a bunch of flowers. She then rather perplexingly asked me if I could see her Herpes and then her scotty dog attacked me.

The changing of the guards was a sight in the Plaza Major - lots of soldiers but more interesting were the policeman who were guarding the guards. They all had high calibre rifles which they were clapping against their hands in time with the music and not really paying attention where they were pointing. Apart from one of them who was sending a text to his mum. This country is universally hilarious and terrifying.

Lima time

2007-07-20T00:58:00.000+01:00

It is pitch black and outside the window there is the sound of desperate hammering and sawing. The Peruvian workers are building a scaffold block for the party tomorrow. They have ensured Beatriz that they will hammer very very quietly throughout the night. Like little hammering mices.

I just got out of a taxi. The taxi driver drove 20 minutes in the wrong direction before stopping a policeman by driving in front of him and asking for directions. He then called his girlfriend to confirm we were going the right way, before gleefully announcing that he was infertile.

This morning a taxi driver reversed 400 yards in a race with another taxi driver who was also reversing. He then almost killed Jack and I twice in his excitement to try out his english. Of particular concern for him was whether or not english girls would like him, because english girls are nice. I told him that I´m sure there might be some english girls who liked him. This pleased him, and he was curious to know if they would give him a blow job. Or perhaps a fucky? I told him it would depend on the girl, but that he might need to work on his small talk. This was enough for him, and he retreated into happy dreams of english girls, to the exclusion of all else including traffic.

Somehow I made it in one piece.

Rocks and sand

2007-07-19T16:00:00.000+01:00

Back to Cuszco, and nobody knows where we`re going next. Lawrence is sick and Charlotte is tired and the teachers are still on strike so that rules out Arequipa. Ayacucha is 25 hours away by bus. After much wrangling Lawrence and Charlotte book a flight back to Lima, leaving Jack and I and Louis, Augustus Joss and James to work out where we can feasibly go. One trip to the bus station later and we`re all off to Ica, for the town of Huacachina. Happy I know where I`m going I head on up to Saksaywaman, the oh so hilariously named Inca fortress just outside Cuszco. It was raining a bit, but I took a few photos of rocks. They`re massive, and just stacked on top of each other. Clever lot the Incas, apart from that lack of writing thing.

Then it`s a luxury overnight bus trip. Utterly terrifying. I was in front at the top and ended up having to close the window so I didn`t panic every time the driver overtook on a blind corner with a precipitous drop. But we arrived in Ica unscathed.

Ica is full of fat taxi drivers who pull your clothes. Jack and I got into one of their taxis with two guys we met on the bus and headed for Huacachina. The taxi driver kept trying to tell us he`d take us on a tour of the town of Ica, which is about as appealing as an offer of a glass full of shit. But we smiled and nodded and got the hell out of his cab at El Huacachinero - our hostel. LUXURY! Swimming pool, hammocks, beds with pillows, a shower that works, and the sand dune comes right to the bedroom door. The town itself is tiny - just a cluster of buildings clinging on in the middle of the desert, clustered round a stinky lagoon.

First things first we went out on dune buggies, where a Peruvian driver has access to a precision vehicle and a huge tract of desert. Brilliantly terrifying - I was glad that Health and Safety hasn`t made it as far as Peru, as it was highly dangerous and all the more fun for that. And punctuated with stops to strap on broken sandboards and limp down great big dunes standing on the things. After that it was time to do some lazing by the pool, with occasional breaks to walk up a dune and run down the other side. Or to eat food. Or to get up to date with this blog. YAY.

Trekking on the Ritz

2007-07-18T20:29:00.000+01:00

"Where the hell is my backpack?"

"It`s on one of the mules."

"oh"

So I packed light and got a good backpack so I wouldn`t die on the trek. And then they go and load it on a mule. God Damn it! I only have three T-shirts and a pair of shorts. Still nice to know I get to travel light.

Day one was pretty relaxing. 20k into the mountains and the only shit bit was that we set off so late that it was dark by the time the stragglers arrived in the campsite. This first campsite came as a surprise. It had a bar and a shower. I was beginning to get the impression that it might have a swimming pool somewhere. This, I really began to understand, was not going to be a Trek so much as a manicure on a mountainside. The Union Jack that was erected at the top of the first peak we reached - despite the fact that much of the party was Scottish or French - brought home to me the fact that this was going to be one of those quests for lost colonialism. Take that, I thought to the bitter old witch I had met on the train to Macchu Picchu. The British empire still at least thinks it rules the world.

I stuffed about 27 coca leaves into my mouth with some baking soda and retched for 2 minutes before they stopped tasting utterly foul. Then I chewed them hard until they were a pulp and stuffed them into the corner of my cheek which went completely numb. "These things have no effect at all. What a waste of 9 pee," I thought as I sprinted down the mountainside to the river, leaping over obstacles and howling at the birds. Clearly it`s just a placebo, I said to myself as I overtook all the guides but one, who I collared, embraced and chewed his ear off about how beautiful the mountains were and how big the world is and how lucky we all are to be alive.

Day two was a little more trek like. I got down into a valley and crossed a pretty sturdy rope bridge, before starting a day long climb. Slog slog slog slog slog. Pant pant pant pant pant. Gorgeous but dusty. Halfway through I tried some more coca. Nope. Not much help. Mostly driven by the fact that it was stunning I got to the rest point and met some very engaging American lesbians who were travelling with another American girl and her Senegalise Italianate Rastafarian boyfriend. Of course they had guitars and bongos and a saxaphone of sorts, so Jack got out his guitar which had been providing endless entertainment and we all had a sing along. Their guitar was right handed. This was a good thing, as Jacks is left handed therefore nobody can play it but him. We had a good jam before we all were called for luch. Mealtimes on the trek were a hilarious affair, with everyone being forced to wash their hands before sitting at a really very long table and passing bowls up and down. Since almost everyone had been to or were still at boarding schools this was a very familiar ritual, and the food was surprisingly good considering it had to be made up of the lightest things possible, although bulked up with local produce - eggs from the condor proof hens, who have slippery red plastic on their backs, etc etc.

Most of us made it to the campsite on top of the mountain okay although a few ended up on mules. More jamming in the evening before realising that camping on the side of the mountain is stupid as you slip out of the bottom of the tent. I had put myself in an empty tent which was a relief as I was meant to have been sharing with Jack and Lawrence who slid down the hill, tore a hole with their feet in their tent and got eaten alive by spiders and flies. I just fell off my groundmat and froze to death.

Day three was just a hop , a skip and a jump to Choquequirao, which was stunning. Mostly buried still in cloudforest, and with some of the restoration work having been done with CONCRETE (I kid you not) the city is vast and still being uncovered. Some locals still come up and sacrifice things there - and as I discovered, the muleteers from our trek sacrificed a rooster from our campsite. Okay I cursed it when it woke me up, but that`s extreme. Either way, Choquequirao was a sight to be seen, and I fear it won`t be for long. Roads are being mooted and there were sickeningly awful blue arrows embedded in the floor to try and ferry people round it the right way. Alix de Cazotte and I got a little fed up of being herded like the mules and so we abandoned the group and pretty swiftly found a stunning view that we would otherwise have missed. Then we found a little pathway up into the Cloud Forest and wandered far enough to satisfy our sense of rebellion before heading back down to join the group who had found the most absurd place yet to have lunch, right on the side of a hill. I thought it was a good time to have my first cup of tea, so I sipped tea on the mountainside and it was jolly nice.

The rest of the trek, so as not to bore you too much, was the same as the first half but the other way round. But I was noticeably more able to breathe in the altitude which can only be a good thing. I arrived back in Cuszco feeling fit and healthy. Hurrah! And I made it back to Cachora in the first group which pleased me even if it was just coincidence as nobody was really that interested in racing. Such a huge trek and so many people, it would take me forever to go into explanations of all of them. There were French families and then there was the French family who were English and there were Australians who weren´t or were they and lots of Barclays and even some Mathers.

It was an amazing trek. We covered only 62 Kilometres but it was usually very steep and with the range of ages and experiences it was pretty impressive the way that nobody got hurt beyond one vicious spider bite to Hugo as a reward for taking a shortcut, and a stack of nasty blisters.

Politics and Coca

2007-07-18T20:03:00.000+01:00

Finally the time for the trek had come. 43 people from many different nationalities, age groups, and walks of life gathered together and loaded onto buses to take us to the small town that would form the launching point of the journey to Choquequirao - the town of Cachora. This was an eye opener - certainly the poorest place I had yet seen in Peru, the majority of the houses are made from Adobe, which is basically mud mixed with straw. Not really built to last. Here´s a pit for mixing it up.

On the way in, I learned a thing or two about Peruvian politics. Rather than party political broadcasts or question time, it seems that elections are decided by who can spraypaint the nearest house with the biggest name. Some of the more enterprising candidates had helicoptered off to the nearest mountainside armed with gigantic lawnmowers and quite literally carved their slogans into the mountain. Brilliant.

Also the Peruvians seem to know how to strike. Currently the teachers union is on strike. The powers that be are threatening the status quo by introducing exams for all the teachers. This is because the standard of education in Peru is incredibly low compared to all other South American countries. The problem is that the teachers don´t want to take exams that they know they are going to fail and their livelihood is threatened. So they are up in arms. But rather than waving banners and shouting slogans and being ignored by their supposedly democratic government despite marching in their millions, they set off rockslides. Yes - massive huge great big whacking rockslides. Huge big boulders all over the roads. Now I have already explained that people in Peru drive like lunatics. They have already killed a busload of people this way, and they have raised merry hell with the transport system. Even if the rocks get cleared they are put back into place by crowds of gleeful children who are glad to be away from school because their teachers are so awful. Thankfully we set off early enough in the coaches to Cachura to avoid the worst of it, although there were some trees felled on the road and a couple of times the driver had to get out and hump rocks, while having insults and sticks hurled at them by the local kids.

The whole of the town of Cachora had been mobilised when we arrived. There were about 40 mules and 30 Peruvians attached to them as well as 5 guides all milling around vaguely in shock at the humungous gringo windfall that had blown their way. I went for a little wander and found a small shop that sold coca leaves. Good for altitude sickness I am told. One of the guides spotted me and made me go back into the shop and buy some baking soda as well. Apparently they don`t have any effect unless you catalyse them with the soda so that was nearly a waste of 9 pence. Phew.

I swear that the white powder there is baking soda. The leaves themselves are all pretty brown and unappetising looking. I wasn´t sure I wanted to try chewing them but virtually everyone was getting some including my brother Rupert and he ought to know...

Burgers and puppets and thieves - oh my!

2007-07-18T16:49:00.000+01:00

Back to Cuszco, and I remember that my sister in law Beatriz told us all that temperatures in the mountains where we will be trekking have been plunging to minus 20. And all I brought is a selection of T-Shirts. So it`s off to the shops for me, and thankfully Lawrence has a good friend called Jack who has arrived on the scene and knows Cuszco pretty well. We all jump into a taxi and head off to the poor part of town where we reckon we can haggle a decent coat. Once again the God of coats is kind to me, and while Jack is buying himself an unbelievably hideous full-body orange jumpsuit and a wife-beater, I found myself a good oiled fleecy jacket, and paid 35 soles for it. Just over a fiver. And that was still too much.

Then everyone went back to the Plaza del Armas where they have recently built a Bembos. This is a Peruvian answer to McDonalds, and sent Lawrence into paroxysms of excitement. I opted not to go, and this turned out to be the biggest mistake of the holiday. While I was vaguely wondering where to go and get a sandwich a small child nicked my wallet. And then probably went off singing to his be-mittened old singing mentor for some cold cherries and custard and pease pudding and saveloys. Leaving me totally dependent on my friends until my bank gets it´s finger out and sends me my new card.

UGH.

Gay Incas?

2007-07-17T17:46:00.000+01:00

On the train to Macchu Picchu I met a loathsome American woman who barked at me all the way about "This Fucking country! All this fucking walking! They´re so backwards they make you dump your toilet paper in the bins!" She was about 3 foot tall and shrivelled and spent the whole time we were talking trying to croak and laugh at the same time. The overall effect was like being washed with nails. When I mentioned to her that I had been perplexed by the water going down the plughole the wrong way she either roared with laughter or her pacemaker exploded loudly up her throat. She then turned her attention to the British Empire and how it was OVER and now it was time for the Chinese, and that America was OVER. We finally found some common ground over a hatred of Bush, and departed friends, although I´m sure she told the next person she met how I had tried to assault her or something.

Macchu Picchu itself was stunning although much easier to get to than I had hoped. I was expecting to have to hike for a couple of hours, but a bus dropped us off right outside the site. So of course it was overrun with tourists. On the way up I was struck by the number of gay pride flags there were - on the buildings, on the buses, on top of the mountains. The rainbow was everywhere. It was only when I mentioned this to my Nephew Lawrence that I realised I was a total idiot and that it was the Inca flag. But it´s identical, so very confusing. Our guide spoke faster than any man I have ever met and most of the time made no sense at all. He showed us many rocks, all of which he insisted were the most important rock in the whole site. Then after a brief but torrid romance with the words June the twenty first, which he must have said 15 times in the space of a minute, he left us in the queue for Wayna Picchu which is the large sharks fin mountain at the back of the site. My first bit of proper hiking. They only let 400 people up so Lawrence and Charlotte kindly waited behind while we confused the guard into allowing two more than he thought up there. Louis - (another nephew) - and his mates Augustus, Joss and James and I slogged up it in the blistering heat for some amazing views of the cloud forest and the Sun Gate and the site itself. The problem with altitude is that you get really out of breath quickly as the damn oxygen is just too heavy, so I was puffing and panting like anything and just glad that the guys I was with were as knackered as I was most of the time. Here`s me on the summit.

The odd thing is I never realised how recently the Incas were around - they only really started during The Wars of the Roses, and got wiped out while Shakespeare was writing. In that time they built some pretty impressive edifices and without using mortar - they just hewed massive boulders into just the right shape and stacked them. Amazing that they stood the test of time.

To Cuszco... AND BEYOND!

2007-07-17T17:23:00.000+01:00

So got up in the morning and staggered back to the airport and flew to Cuszco, dosing up on altitude sickness pills so I wasn`t yakking all over my shoes for the first couple of days. At Cuszco airport we had to run the gamut of taxi drivers and eventually managed to get a lift to Urubamba - a little Andean mountain town convenient for the Inca Trail and Macchu Picchu, which I wanted to get to before the trek. This involved my first long road trip. At the time of writing I am inured to the terror of Peruvian driving having been in too many long bus journeys. But on that day it was utterly terrifying. The man in the cab had a happy smiling face on his rearview mirror, perhaps with the idea of filling us with comfort. I made a Peruvian highway code.

1. Honk at dogs. Stop for pigs.
2. All cars are your enemy.
3. If possible, only overtake enemies on corners.
4. The enemy side of the road is the best side to drive on. Do this unless they force you to move.
5. Only change your beams to full when an enemy car is coming the other way.
6. If you cannot overtake, attempt to lock bumpers with your enemy.
7. You aren´t honking enough. Do it more.
8. Play Dire Straits on the radio. (This is also true in aeroplanes, although The Thompson Twins will do in a pinch.)
9. Never ever ever let an enemy overtake you unless on the inside.

Here is a piccy of our nice taxi. Note the car in front trailing twigs onto the road. These twigs are not being transported. They are being used to make it harder for enemy cars to overtake.

Urubamba is a very typical Andean town, and I took loads of snaps of things like walls and people dressed in the Peruvian standards. If France was like Peru then everyone in France would cycle around with berets, moustaches and strings of garlic. The people outside the towns wear the stereotypical clothes - really bright colours, Alpaca, hats - you know the stuff.

I started to get to know the people we would be trekking with. So many people. I had no idea. 43 people. Yowza.

Getting to Peru

2007-07-16T20:47:00.000+01:00

Well I thought it would be better to just post on my blog and let people follow if they have any inclination. Also I can use this as a sort of diary, since otherwise the madness will be forgotten which will be a shame.

Anyhow, I woke up in the morning on the day I was meant to be going to Peru after staying up far too late with Nathan. Of course Addison Lee weren´t answering the phone as usual. They are clearly getting too popular for their own good. The people on the phone are sarcastic bastards half the time when (if) you do get through. So I hiked my stupidly fat rucksack onto my virgin shoulders and struggled off down the grey road towards Victoria station. Hiking practise, I thought. Never too late.

Five minutes later I was on a bus. Much better idea.

Then a budget airline to Toronto, which left half an hour late. This worried me as I had a connection to make. All worries were shortly afterwards rendered meaningless by the sad fact that the plane was filled with hyperactive teenage girls with carefully filed elbows. Bruised and deafened I emerged some hours later in Toronto. I was tired, but everything was made better by the lovely rollercoaster ride that they gave me for free in Toronto airport. I took a photo.

This corner is called "Crazy Tower Fork"

The Rollercoaster is free and runs regularly. One of the coolest things about it is that you get a countdown to the next one IN SECONDS. SECONDS I tell you. No leaves on the line here, eh? I asked one of the local women to take a photo of me on the coaster but she just hooted at me like an owl. So I made friends with a gay japanese guy living in New York, and together we found the place to check in, after much confusion over which side of the escalator we were supposed to stand on.

So having left London a couple of days after a major terrorist attack, and having had absolutely no trouble whatsoever getting through customs I then had to hang around for ages and ages while some jobsworth twat tried to stop me getting on the plane because a corner of my passport was slightly loose. But I made it with seconds to spare.

My companion on the second leg was a woman from the Las Casas family, who lives in Toronto now married to a Pole, but who was born in the mountains some distance from Lima. Her mother was dying and she was going to have to take a 22 hour busride up the mountains to sit by her bedside. My heart went out to her. She distracted herself and me by trying to work out which mystic number I represented. This mostly involved making rings around letters and numbers fairly randomly before nodding in a satisfied manner and telling me that I was mostly 3 but with a strong 5 and 7. And not enough 4. Which means that I´m chaotic and need to work on my work ethic. At this point I started to wonder if she´d been following me around, so I went to sleep and woke up shortly before we landed in Lima.

Lima caused me to panic by taking FOREVER to wheel out my bag. When it eventually came I was convinced that whoever was supposed to be meeting me had gone, and that I was going to get beaten up, mugged and sold into sex slavery in Columbia. Thankfully my nephew Lawrence was there to meet me complete with funky long hair and lovely girlfriend Charlotte. We bundled into a taxi. This was my first experience of Peruvian driving. Pretty good in retrospect. We only had two near misses and both were pedestrians. We were briefly held up by a car that had managed to flip onto its nose on a dual carriageway. But we made it to the gorgeous house of my sister in law´s parents late at night but with all my luggage intact. I got inside, drank about eight litres of water, crawled into bed and passed out. Long haul sucks. Cusco was beckoning with just a short flight - wooo.

Not going to let it go a whole year

2006-09-17T15:26:00.000+01:00

Come on Al. What's the point of having a blog if you don't update it? Clearly because my life is so full and spangly that I have no need to constantly let my energy get sucked into a horrible computer keyboard. Clearly.

I'm in Darlings of Chelsea. It is a shop selling leather sofas on Fulham high Street. Nobody ever comes in, so I had a Laura Lee and this young Oxbridge director called Titus come in and we rehearsed a reading that I've got for the Hampstead theatre on Monday. It felt quite subversive and bohemian to be secretly rehearsing drama downstairs in a sofa showroom. The play is pretty good, but I'd be a fool if I imagined that they would say - "hey let's produce it! And keep the cast the same!" So I guess I'm doing it for the love again. One day someone will pay me for doing my job as opposed to having to do things like work in a sofa warehouse and secretly act instead of selling sofas, or drive stupid ad-bikes and secretly learn speeches on park benches all afternoon. If my parents were still alive they would be saying - "When are you going to get a proper job and give up on this pipe dream you're chasing?" so I guess in some senses it's a relief they aren't... Yeah I miss them and could do with the unconditional love since I get precious little of that from anyone else, but in the end I would only end up getting more pissed off by having to explain repeatedly that I do feel as if I am building SOMETHING and I know that I am getting better and better all the time just through sheer weight of experience and learning from people around me.

The play I'm reading is about someone who loses her dad in a car crash, and has never had a good relationship with him. Puts me in mind of the fact that dad and I never really cleared up our issues before he died. Not that there was anything serious about them beyond the fact that I was a dirty teenager with a stated ambition to piss his career up the wall and be an actor. Man Harrow School fees are something like 20 thousand a term. I'll probably never earn enough to refund the school fees in my entire professional life at the rate I'm going.

Oddly Harrow is in the news right now - Mr. Braham's daughter got stabbed to death by Alan Jaggs' son. Freaky as I remember them both. Jaggs' son was just a cute little kid. Braham's daughter was older but still not old enough to be in my radar as a person. Just a kid. So these two kids I knew of and had exchanged brief words with - one of them is already dead. And the little lad was found naked, screaming and repeatedly stabbing himself. And is now in a coma. Harrow must be going nuts trying to keep the press out of it. The place is such an island. In atmosphere it reminds me of Stratford Upon Avon when all the shows have been running for some months and everyone is falling in and out of love and hate because they're so disgustingly bored with the fact that they live in a tiny little village full of ducks and Americans. It's a melting pot for craziness. I was totally off my rocker for the whole five years that I was there - it inspired me to be vastly prolific and creative, and also totally other-worldly. I noticed that it's stated clain is that "we make gentlemen rather than scholars." So they actually actively try to make people who think they are terribly important but know fuck all. Great. I imagine both of the teachers will end up leaving. Can you imagine the tension in the staff room? Braham was art and Jaggs was Design Technology. So Design Technology killed art. God it doesn't bear thinking about.

Shame I don't have the crazy Tarot widget or I'd drop in a tarot of the day. I shall have to try again and start updating this more than once a year.

It's useful to learn about myself that I just can't do something regularly. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Why this blog aint gonna work

2005-10-06T09:21:00.000+01:00

I only ever write this blog when I'm pissed off. When I'm busy I can never be bothered to make and entries. So I'm building up this picture of a disaffected Al. Which is wrong.

I'm off to rehearsal in a sec. Hurrah.

Todays Tarot : The hierophant (reversed). The crazy widget thing tells me that that means "From the officiousness, first understanding of the partner." Oh yes.

I'm off to Huddersfield next week to provide the voice of Stanley the Snail for a range of children's toys.

Hurrah

Tarot of the Day 1

2005-09-21T19:33:00.000+01:00

Todays crazy japanese Tarot card is The Devil (reversed). According to the interpretation is "It is shot from the yoke, but it is dangerous to voice desire."

Not sure what to make of that.

The devil reversed is to do with inability to make decisions, and looking to get something for nothing. It's a weak but aggressive card - manipulative. It says to me "Do some work"

I met up with Charlie Mayer, Leon Davies and a man called Tim in the O bar in Soho last night for a very serious talk about a new theatre company that they want to set up. I've thrown in my lot with them and we will have a pilot somewhere in central London on 7th December. Very high minded ensemble based stuff - really really fucking interesting and I feel lucky to have been asked.

The Spirits have caught on

2005-09-20T16:40:00.000+01:00

Yesterday as I sat in front of my computer in my pants at 4.00 in the afternoon, I downloaded a program called Konfabulator. It is very very cool. I got it because it has a widget that automatically finds pictures for the music you are playing in itunes. It has many other widgets and one of them is a very shoddy Japanese Tarot reader. So I downloaded it. I like tarot - I have a few decks and if I get stoned I might offer to read your tarot from time to time - usually with reference to a book for the minor arcana some of which still baffle me.

So the Japanese tarot spirits gave me The Sun, Reversed. This means "To having no stamina leads in laziness make". Well that about sums it up. So I asked the magic eight ball widget if I should go to the gym. It said Yes. Then about three minutes later I got a call from my gym saying I could come in on Friday and have a free session with a personal trainer. No more widgets for me then. I'm going to be an adonis. After all I'm single again!! Let's get jiggy.

Nothing Nothing Nothing

2005-09-15T17:28:00.000+01:00

Life is quiet and I'm bored. Well I'm buying a house. And writing shed loads of letters. When I break it down I'm fairly busy but I'm not busy doing the things I want to do. I have a face pack on. A Face Pack!?! I inherited some special Erno Laszlo Sea Mud stuff from mum. So i've slapped some on. Because I want to have nice skin. Because I still believe that someone is going to give me a job soon. Gah.

Off to a party tonight. Lovely Kaitlyn from Twelfth Night has to go back to Canada because her visa has expired. A shame.

The face pack is probably also because I'm single so I want to look sexy. Who knows who might be at the party. But I have nowhere to bring anyone back to living as I am in a room containing enough to fill a house.

Seeing a place opposite Catford Station tomorrow for the third time. Could be good. But can I bear to live so far away?

Faceprint Global Solutions can kiss my jacksie

2005-09-03T11:47:00.000+01:00

What kind of Arse puts an incredibly long advert for some shite company as a comment on one of my blogs?? Is there a way of deleting it. It's utterly pointless and has only inspired me to paint "Wanker" on the door of their office if they have one and I find it.

Crazy Tour of Doom

2005-09-03T11:44:00.004+01:00

I should have done this years ago, but now is as good a time as any. There was a blog in this space written in rage. It concerned a number of people. A young theatre director, who has since gone on to surpass himself in professionalism and dedication. I said some things about him that I should not have said, but in the spirit of purity I chose to keep these things up. "They're in the past," I thought. I recently worked with a lovely young actor called Tom who was giving his time for free to help an old collaborator of mine direct some young actors in Huis Clos. He and I were in the same boat, apart from the fact that I got to go on stage while he just had to make us look pretty.

This blog post in it's original form, of all the things I have ever written, has done me more damage than anything else, ever, in almost 10 years of work. I find it amazing that something written in anger and then signed can do such damage. Four years ago, a producer I had only just met professionally was warned about me on the strength of it. "I'm told he's a snake in the grass" said one older actor who knew the director of the project about which I was blogging. Thankfully the producer trusted me and passed the information on to me - saying "What happened?". I was gobsmacked that there was a campaign on, but chose to keep the blog up. Allegedly the same man later commented that he didn't see what all the fuss was about.

What was the post about? It was about a young director, a young company, and a disastrous tour. I was employed to replace an actor who I dare not name. If you want to know why I won't name him I refer you to the comments posted below, and to the distance in time between them, and the time of night they were posted. Occasionally, evidently, he gets off his tits and googles himself. Then he raves on and on to this blog. Hopefully this edit will remove that problem too. The man is not particularly well. And mildly intimidating, but that's by design so not a concern. In retrospect, I was cruel. And I told the young director as much by email when he found the blog - also removing his name from it and generally softening it up. But it galls me to edit the past. The past is the past, surely? Not so for some though. And refer to the PJ comments below if you don't believe it to be so.

Since this blog I have NEVER directly blogged about work, or people I am working with. I learnt my lesson. Sure I'll blog about subjects and ideas that come up in the course of work, or the show in general, but never again have I named names. Which makes it difficult to maintain the blog as when I am not on holiday I tend to be working. I may rectify that as well - I just underestimated the ability of people to get drunk and google themselves, but to be honest I normally just love my work and the people I am working with. I imagine I won't rage blog again - and if I do, I'll take a leaf from Wordsworth. He may have been an old prig, but "emotion recollected in tranquility" is a good starting point for writing, like the man said. I went for the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." And stopped there.

Why am I removing it at long last?

My friend Hanna Berrigan recently directed Huis Clos. I had just got back from Thailand having finished some filming which I am not blogging for reasons which will become apparent, beyond in the vaguest terms, and partly because i have signed an NDA. But it was fun, working with a director I have admired all my life, a male actor I never dared to believe I'd be in a shot with, and an actress I fell in love with the first time I saw her on film. A small part, but in a film the subject matter of which I really deeply connect with and think is massively important. So I was feeling pretty flush and when she asked me to play a tiny part for her, I said of course as my assisting at The Finborough didn't start right away. I know Hanna as a director well enough to understand that even in a tiny part she will push me out of my comfort zone and I'll learn something. And the time commitment was low and flexible so I could work it around my money jobs. On the gig was a young actor called Tom - he was clearly very professional, personable and able, and had agreed to operate the show for his friends, who were self-producing. I very quickly warmed to him, and it didn't take long to realise that we both knew the man who produced the crazy tour of doom. And in discussion with him, I came to realise that he has learnt from the mistakes that made me so angry in the first place. Tom had been employed by him as an actor, and came to respect and love him as a worker and enabler in this industry. He has made it a priority to pay his actors as well as possible, rather than sinking the extra cash from gaining audience into production. This is a huge relief to me, as I saw a man capable of going one of two ways. And he went the right way. He seems a good practitioner, and - based on my conversations with Tom - someone I would recommend. Now. Not then. But now.

Words are more powerful than I thought. I would never have taken this post down if I had not constantly been snagged back to it. I hate revising the past. Such is life. If you read this, mister AW, I would like to tell you that I am seriously proud of what you have achieved since last we met, and wish you the best of luck in the future. From what I understand you are well loved, and run a good company. You need to know that there was never any animosity between us, and if this blog came as a surprise when it first was published it is because it was a rage blog. I got home and could not pay my electricity bill, owing to money I had expected from you not coming forth. It is the equivalent of the drunken evening where your best friend punches you. Sadly it has constantly - and I suspect indelibly - affected any friendship we had. You were my friend on tour. I enjoyed travelling with you, and sought your company on the long journeys. I wrote this blog once, many years ago. Then I forgot about it. Completely. The only reminders I have had have been comments made, your email some years ago when I removed your name, and the idiotic ramblings of a complete stranger. Now it is prevalent in my mind again, since a man I like and respect and have done since the very start of my career has referred to it negatively. And I am fed up of taking flak for something I wrote in anger once many many years ago. So it's gone. I hope I never do this again. It feels like revisionism. We must be honest to who we are as much as to who we were, or how can we pretend to be artists? Pfft

Did I get my bag back?

2005-02-18T22:26:00.000Z

Last night at around half past eleven I got a call from the Chandos. The man on the phone told me that he had found my bag!! In order to confirm that it was mine HE started listing the contents to ME. It reminded me of Frank Oz at the start of the Blues Brothers - "One propylactic ... soiled". He had clearly had a good rummage - "Yeah - and there's ... some sort of script here..." *rustle rustle*

The script is for a show at The Old Red Lion. I have no idea when the show is, but once I work it out I'll post it here in some sort of attractive advert format. It's written by this very sweet parochial middle class woman in her sixties, who turns into a slavering demented psycopath the moment she puts pen to paper. She wouldn't say boo to a goose and keeps on trying to buy me sandwiches in real life, and then has me running around behaving like a retard and swearing more than Tarantino when he burns himself on the oven. Bless her.

But yes - the bag is returned. I would give you a photo but I don't have a camera. So that's a pretty useless sentiment.

Why is the time on this stupid site set to PST? There must be a way I can make it GMT so I don't have to change it everytime I post.

Social experiment

2005-02-18T06:30:00.000Z

I have lost my bag. Quite literally it contains a torn magazine and a chocolate bar. I left it in The Chandos pub in St. Martin's Lane - upstairs. Nice pub. Good leather sofas and odd beers and soft drinks that you can't normally get. I have just phoned them. It has been an hour since I left it there and what I'm wondering is - has someone nicked it? This sorry saggy bag with an ancient white chocolate and berry bar that I bought reduced in a motorway caff before christmas and never quite had the guts to put in my mouth. And a torn PC magazine from about three months ago.

I brought it out in order to put my wallet and phone into it in order not to stretch the pockets on my jeans - a new concern and one that is more my girlfriends than my own. My wallet and my mobile phone are safely in my pocket. Bad habits are really useful sometimes. Who cares about stretching my pockets - at least I haven't lost my wallet and my phone.

Incidentally the staff at the Chandos are superb. The barman was this big Aussie guy who seemed a bit of a brute but the guy I just spoke to on the phone was really helpful and he took my mobile number and is going to call me back if he rescues my bag. If not I don't relish telling my Harriet how I lost it. Ah well.

I was meeting up with a chap called Geoff tonight - I don't know him terribly well but he is joint best man with me at my mate Dan's wedding. Organising parties - all very serious.

Oh god and I discovered today that one of my ex girlfriends got married. Not only that but she only went and bloody married the guy I used to live next door to at school. Lovely guy - tall and blond and polite and all the things I'm not. Dammit. I didn't introduce them though - they met at scottish dancing. She kept on trying to get me to come with her and I really didn't fancy it. Ah well, That's life. Dammit.

Ad sales suck

2005-02-18T01:15:00.000Z

I've never even seen one of these things before but as far as I know I'm expected to put down all the things that are going on in my head. I also understand that blogs are always deeply political which I'm sure is nonsense but that's the flavour they've been given. Partly to do with the fact that the only blogger I've ever heard of is Salaam Pax or so I think his name was - the Baghdad Blogger. I did a play with this crazy greek / not really greek at all director called Tassos Stevens which involved Salaam Pax mixed with oscar acceptance speeches and journalists writing from warzones all thrown together under the title After The Last Days of Mankind. It's a homage to a play that was created by throwing together transcripts taken from WWII from both sides detailing human responses to tragedies and war in general. The original play lasted three days. Our one thankfully came in at considerably less - more like half an hour. Anyhow, ad sales suck. This is what I have come to tell you all about. I'm selling advertising space in a men's lifestyle magazine. I'm not even being paid for it - I'm doing it as it helps me to develop a thicker skin so I can put up with more rejections from shite commercials that I don't really want to do anyhow. I get commission on any sales I make, but what i have discovered is that the Media Buyers in this country are all endemic racists. Drum is a superb publication with a hell of a lot of promise, but nobody is prepared to trust it - I come across an endless instinctive lack of trust. People expecting to be conned. I am told that there was a previous mag called untold that took the money for six months worth of ads and then did a runner. But as far as I can tell these people are just not willing to give money to a black mens lifestyle mag and not one of them can come up with an adequate reason why not. "This sort of publication is not really in our brief" they tell me and they are putting ads in Arena and GQ. Sod them all. I feel a little better exposing them all for the nasty smug bastards that they are. I'm sure something will turn around soon. But in the meantime Media Buyers are all swine. So now I'm going to click a button and see what happens with this rant. And I'll come back and throw more crap at the walls if it doesn't just delete it and send me to whitescreen hell.