Hope that the road is a long one

Loose scribblings from diary on the way to Ithaca. Not got there yet though. Mostly for friends and family.

Easyjet have lived up to their name. The whole process of getting on this flight has been flawlessly simple and friendly. In fact, everything has swept me Ithacawards with remarkable goodwill. When the world smiles at you sometimes it’s hard to tell who started it. It might be me, it might be them. Everyone so far today – the guard at the station, the woman at check in, the Travelex clerk – has made a genuine and unforced connection with me.

I am not good at getting up early in the mornings. My dreams are too lucid and too entertaining and it always feels like a disservice to interrupt them. This morning I popped up from a deep sleep five minutes before my 6.00 alarm was scheduled to frustrate me awake with that jaunty and hideous HTC jingle. And I felt fine, on 4 hours. Just as well considering the flight leaves at 9 and I had not yet packed my bags after a last minute theatre trip last night.

Last night I consider to be the start of my journey to Ithaca, and the beginning of a strange and hopefully ongoing period of goodwill. After an immensely awakening week working with Louis Scheeder on Hamlet, connection, presence and simplicity on stage, I rushed off to Watford Palace Theatre to see the latest play by my wonderful cousin outlaw Charlotte Keatley. In the bar afterwards, which I shouldn’t have gone to considering the early start, I mentioned in passing that I was off to Ithaca. Charlotte lit up – she knows the island well. I now have a bucketful of recommendations – places to stay, places to see, and how to get there. She employs the method of getting around that always serves me well and that I would recommend to anyone that ever travels anywhere ever. Be present, be unafraid, trust strangers, talk to people. This way – usually – you have a wonderful time. And perhaps occasionally you end up locked in a cellar with no arms and legs, but it’s probably worth the risk. This call out to be present and immediate is totally ramified by the work we did on stage with Louis. I am now deeply excited to find out what the universe is going to bring to me this week. I’ll probably blog it relatively frequently as somehow it seems acceptable to do that sort of thing when away from home – and also I am on my own as usual so it’s a pleasant way to pass the time when – like now – one is crammed into an aeroplane seat and everyone around is fast asleep and gurgling.

11.15 am Sat

Poring my way through the entertaining and erudite Cadogan Guide for The Greek Islands by Dana Facaros has helped me crystallise some of my intentions for this trip. It was all such an impulse and I was working so hard on Hamlet last week that I haven’t had the chance to ponder what the hell I think I am supposed to be doing. Ithaca is definitely the destination, but I if I am properly going to look for things that will inspire and generate material for The Odyssey, I might need to go to some of the other Ionian islands – principally the west coast of Corfu. Tenuous or not, Corfu lays a firm claim for being Skiathos the island of the Phaecians. And there are some beaches that people insist are where Odysseus washed up, as well as a disputed site for the Palace of Alcinous. Although part of me howls “It’s a MYTH! It’s a STORY! Stories aren’t REAL!” I think that places that can inspire stories are as important as the stories themselves. Does is matter if there really was a Palace of Alcinous or a beach where Odysseus washed up? Not to me. And there might have been. I am willing to accept any form of myth from any culture. Maybe one of them is true – monkeys and typewriters etc. And great fiction is often steeped in fact.

So stage one of the mission: get to Paleokastritsa by the end of the day. This may not be possible – Patras first, find out ferry times and durations, bend the plan if need be. Also I need to either buy a cheap digital camera or, better, get a charger for the one that I have. My HTC Desire HD phone on a stupidly long 24 month contract from Vodafone not only has a shattered screen but also a battery life of about 6 and a half minutes (6 hours), so there’s no point relying on that for a record. I seem to be using my blog as a to do list. Probably not the best idea, especially considering someone will bash me up and steal my laptop as soon as I arrive in Athens. But this might be the only time I’ll get to think for a good long while.

3.30 PM

I should never wear a hat on a plane. That’s the third one I’ve left in as many planes. Shame – it’s been fished out of the thames three times now and still looks relatively normal. I shall have to get a new one to remind me of Greece. I’m on a bus. Everybody is asleep. Everyone was asleep on the plane, everyone is asleep on the bus. Do they know something I don’t? Or is it me?

Driving on a bus through Athens, having lost 2 hours to the time difference, which might make it harder to get off the mainland by dusk. Still worth trying. The city is ringed by empty barren hills, and looking up into them has got me reflecting on how this country is the cradle of one of the most important ancient civilisations, before the Romans came with their adopted Gods and militant expansionism and decadence.

The sun is shining mercilessly through the windows of the coach and I am ridiculously overdressed. The woman opposite me touched my knee and said “It’s much nicer than England.” She was right. Heading for Kifissos station for the coach to Patras – no idea how long it takes though. I’m looking forward to being able to stop and take stock, but I don’t want to until I’ve put some distance behind me.

4pm

Looks like Corfu might be a little harder to get to than I anticipated and a little more expensive – it of course has the disadvantage of being on the tourist route which is basically shit as it means all the buses from Athens have a 50% idiot tax on them. With that in mind I got a bus to Patras rather than where I was initially directed for Corfu which was still expensive but the guy at the booth was less of a dick so that clinched the deal for me. Thinking about this, Corfu is in a totally different part of the Ionian Islands from Ithaca and perhaps I should rationalise my plan and not be overly ambitious. It’s next to Albania for God’s sake. I’m still in an overcoat, sitting on the sunny side of another bus for the next 2 and a half without water. Being on a mission has its disadvantages.

Everyone around me is asleep again. I am not kidding. I started travelling at 7am, and since then I have been the walking centre of a little pocket of narcolepsy.

19.00

Made it to Patras just in for a spectacular red sunset over the sea. I walked to the end of the pier to watch a boat head off and then noticed how down at heel the whole area seems to be. It’s a ferry port, so they’re never the most salubrious destination, but I was struck by the prevalence of graffiti tags like “Patras will Rise Again.” Infuriatingly, the 20.30 ferry doesn’t run on a Saturday so I have to wait til tomorrow. In an internet café now, trying to work out ferry times for tomorrow and also find a couple of customer reviews for supercheap Patras hotels as there is an abundance of fleapits here and I can handle a walk anyway. The staff here are lovely. The internet here is broken. In fact, I can’t get online at all and nor can any of the other people around me. This whole town seems broken.

19.10

“Hi – sorry to bother you, is the internet working on your laptop at the moment?”

“Oh no – sometimes it crashes – 20, 30 minutes. Sometimes longer. I write now. If it comes back, I will use.”

“Ah ok – maybe I’ll ask them to reboot the router.”

--

“Hi the internet is not working – would you be able to reboot the router?”

“Ahh – no no it is not the router. It is the internet. Sometimes it crashes 20 minutes. Then Boom! It is back.”

----

This is the view from my hotel room - Hotel El Greco.

Double bed, bathroom is across the corridor. Marble floors. 4 or 5 stories.

Saturday Night. I am the only occupant.

Found a hotel. Found some interet. Putting this nonsense out there and then heading in to see if everyone in Patras is still asleep or if someone can make me a cheap stifaki. Then early bed, early rise, explore the town and 12.30 ferry to Ithaki - should be there and ensconsed for late afternoon. Wooo!

Ithaca - by CP Cavafy

Ithaka

The Canon

As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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!!

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!

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

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

"Got it. Beautiful day."

spoken through SpinVox

Reflections in London

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.