I'm not, as I regularly annoy those around me by saying, much of a fan of children.  Much respect owed to those who do have the patience and stamina to raise them, and raise them well (and much internal shouting at those who raise them to be bastards, naturally).

But there are moments.  Such as today, when an audience of small tykes, unprompted and unrehearsed, began to sing the show's main theme song, "Hooray for Mr. Fox", as the opening music for Act 2 was playing.  Nobody was on stage.  None of the cast were singing.  The house lights went down, the music played, and the children sang.  They'd only heard the song once, at the top of the show.  It's not the first time, either.
We've also had children get to their feet during the finale medley, and try to copy our dance moves - tricky for the little blighters, in my case, as I'm not always certain what I'm doing, so copying must be quite a challenge... but they do it, bless 'em.

Still no interest in children of my own, and put me alone in a room with one, and I'd panic... but in large, audience-shaped groups, yes, yes, I think I can admit to liking them. 

Rehearsals complete, time to start inflicting this upon the children of Essex.  First performance tomorrow morning, 9.45am, and by happy coincidence, our first audience is my old primary school.

We've managed a few full runs of the thing in the last day or so, including two full dress runs today.  Really beginning to enjoy it now (will enjoy it even more when I finally get those last few dance steps to be second nature, so I don't furkle them up!)  Good reactions from all those who saw it - although Millie, the daughter of our choreographer, after watching it through once, wanted to see it again, "but without the farmers" - it seems we scared her, and made her cry.  Hope that's not too universal a reaction!

Forty-odd shows to do. Daunting, but also a great feeling, having that run of performances stretching out in ahead of us.  Well aware that I may not feel quite that positive at all points during the run...!

It's going to be a fun show to do - and, I think, a fun show to watch.  I should plug it I daresay, so er...  here's the necessary information.  Let me know if you come along, so I can come and share a drinkie or two in the theatre bar afterwards!

Funny how there's always a point about halfway through rehearsals, usually the first weekend, when the traditional self-doubt asserts itself.  When I'm being swept along in the rolling enthusiasm of rehearsals, in that wonderful supportive, convivial atmosphere, without much chance to take a breath, then it's fine.  But time off provides too much opportunity to think.  Will I ever actually get that harmony right? Is my voice going to be the one that sticks out like a sore thumb? Am I over-acting appallingly? Or worse, am I not doing enough? Am I the weakest link?

Of course, this is healthy:  It's just such fears that make me work to make sure these things don't happen... but it's a bit of a bugger all the same.

Ah, but it's such fun though.  Really, really nice bunch of people I'm working with, and (appropriately) a fantastic atmosphere.  No prima donnas - at least not so far - nobody who's awkward or difficult to work with - and everybody seems to like everybody else.  Amazing.
There. That's the kiss of death suitably placed on that then!  Doubt it though - everybody really does get on, which is very refreshing.

I am, of course, around twice the age of most of the rest of the cast.  Doesn't feel like it though - except in my knees!

I remember sitting at my old house, empty bottle on the hearth, my head propped on my hand, elbow on the arm of the sofa.  Watching nothing.  Despair in control of my every thought.  Catching, out of the corner of my eye, the artery in my wrist gently pulsing away in soft, peripheral-vision focus. So many nights, year in, year out.

There seemed to be nothing whatever for me then, no future of any kind.  Surrounded by the detritus of my life, permanently installed into that one seat as though I'd been surgically grafted to it.

I've come a long, long way since then.  My life has changed for the better in more ways than I can count.
And yet the despair, and the reasons for it, remain.  So long it's been my companion, it has almost become my identity, in and of itself, defining me.  In the (increasingly unlikely) event that the original cause should ever be resolved, I've a nasty feeling the despair will remain anyway, as much a part of me as I was of that old sofa.

Sometimes, like, I imagine, most people just starting in this business, I find myself very despondent and begin to question whether this is really the right path for me.

Evenings like yesterday do much to restore my sense of direction.  I went to see Humble Boy at the Artsdepot in Finchley.

Two things marked this out as a bloody good evening:

1) It's really really good.  A lovely, charming, surprising play, which I previously knew nothing about at all, beautifully produced and acted.  Especially nice to see a good friend in the lead role, and bringing it off with great aplomb.  Thoroughly enjoyable evening's theatre - heartily recommended - go and see it.

2) Met the aforementioned friend afterwards for a quick drink.  We'd spent quite a bit of the summer working together on the Edinburgh Fringe show, and there was a fantastic bond built up between all of us in the cast and crew - and meeting up briefly again yesterday rekindled that.  There's a kind of joy involved in meeting up with people you've had that "shared experience" with, something I've never encountered in any of the other assorted jobs I've done over the years.  This is, indeed, what I should be doing with my life.

Should I go? (or try to - there are two kinds, they say)
It seems like sense, to end the unendurable,
But such "ending" is illusory -
I'd simply gift-wrap my grief, and give it, whole,
To those I love.
So I'll stay.

I am not, by nature, a masochist.  I don't intentionally court pain or distress.  Yet I habitually throw myself into situations which, though enjoyable in their own right, come at a high price - they're followed by long periods of self-obsessed gloom.  What's more, I engage in these things knowing full well what the outcome is likely to be.
The alternative, of course, is probably worse.  Disengagement from anything remotely stimulating. Cocooning myself, hands-on-ears, lalalalalala.

Funny old thing, life.

Idly browsing on Wikipedia, I found myself with an old favourite poem, John Donne's Meditation XVII, replete with delicious quotations and phrases. Skipped from there to Valediction: Forbidding Mourning with its rather, ahem, specific compasses metaphor.  Smiled, and browsed on.  A scant twenty minutes later, a link on another site altogether mentioned that Stephen Fry had a morning slot about language on Radio 4, and posted a listen again link.  I duly listened.  It was about metaphor.  Not really all that special as a programme, so I got on with other things.  While making a cup of tea, drifting from the living room I heard Mr. Fry's silken voice intoning,

How wonderful to find that Keeper of Traken has a commentary by Anthony Ainley, recorded just before his sad demise a few years ago.

How sad that Johnny Byrne, Matthew Waterhouse and Sarah Sutton, are so busy talking about their own participation, that Anthony barely gets two words in.  Would have loved to hear a commentary with Tom and Anthony, but sadly it was never to be.

So what is it? Hmm?  What is it about me?  It's clearly something major, but something so fundamental, that I can't see it myself.

What is it about me, that every person, every single person, I've ever felt a genuine attraction to, has plonked me firmly in "not boyfriend material" box?  Always, I've been the friend, never the lover.  I freely admit I'm hardly an Adonis, but people do, occasionally, tell me they find me attractive.  Which is lovely, but they're never, ever, people that I find attractive. 
Am I, as I've sometimes feared, simply terminally dull?  Do I subconsciously twist the heads off chickens while I talk?  Do I have, unbeknownst to me, the shifty, drooling look of the vaudeville lech? What?

In eighteen months time, I shall be fifty.  Am I really to reach that landmark having never once shared a moment of intimacy with anybody I cared about?

While I was in Edinburgh, I had a kind of half-dream, which I remembered only dimly at the time, and don't remember at all now.
When I awoke from it, though the dream itself faded, it set me off musing, as I dozed and drifted towards full consciousness. I found I was imagining a possible scene for an as-yet-unwritten play.  Just the scene though - no story, no context, not even anything like a character. It seemed a nice scene though.
In due course I got up, and promptly forgot all about it.

Just came back to me, over a week later, so I wrote it down - purely as stage directions, no dialogue (since there was none in the scene I imagined).  I picked a character name out of the air, just to have a handle for the person whose actions I was describing - it could always be changed later.

Then I saved it, and, in naming the file, suddenly found that, entirely by accident, by randomly naming the character, I had also given the play a title, and what's more, a suggestion of a plot.

Rather chuffed.  I've no idea if I'll ever add any more to it, but it's genuinely the first time I've had a proper idea for a play that didn't immediately make me cringe.  Intriguing experience.

So.  Been here in Edinburgh for a few days now - we came up on the 23rd by train - Virgin's West Coast Route, as luck would have it, on the day when the East Coast Route was virtually dead, due to a derailment. Very easy journey as it turned out.
We're staying in a really lovely apartment in Coates Place, just five minutes from Haymarket station. The place is simply enormous - there are nine of us staying here, most of us in moderate comfort (one person on an airbed).  It's all high ceilings and deep plaster mouldings, offset with very very modern fittings and appliances. I get the impression we're among the first people to stay here since a major refurbishment and redecoration:  There's still a smell of paint in the air, and everything's remarkably clean.  The living room is big enough for a full-sized rehearsal space, while still allowing the director and stage manager to recline on a comfy leather sofa whilst watching us.

I've always loved Edinburgh, though my visits have been few and sporadic, and I can see already, after only three days, that I'm going to be leaving the place even more in love with it. Just the most wonderful atmosphere - and the festival itself is still nearly a week away!

I've lost something.  In the last few days.  Something intangible.  I don't even know for certain what it is, but it's gone.
I'm not who I was at the beginning of the week.

Very well, yes I do have an idea what it might be, but that's based entirely on a neurosis.  Time will tell, one way or the other.
And if it's not that, what then?  If the neurosis proves false, as neuroses should, will this sensation of something missing vanish too?

By a happy accident, I was reminded recently of Jeff Wayne's iconic War of the Worlds album, and realised with some amusement that it had probably been something like twenty years since I'd heard it in its entirety.  So I bought it, and refreshed my memory.  Wonderful - I was back in the workshop at the Queen's in 1980, building scenery.  A nostalgic sniffle, as is my wont.  Lovely.

Then I tried to remember some of the other music we used to play at the time, while putting together the set for The Last Enemy...  Oh yes, that's right, there was a copy of Best of Vangelis - so I grabbed a copy of that from the iTunes store...  and got a shock.

"To The Unknown Man"
I don't think I've ever played a piece of music that's proved quite so evocative of such a specific moment in my life.  I was transported back 28 years, probably the last time I heard it. I could smell the size boiling in its bucket, the sawdust, the latex glue, the disinfectant in the loo.  I could taste the lunchtime sandwich from the Queen's café bar.
I was just 20. I was inhabiting a whole new wonderful world I'd never imagined I could be a part of. I had friends, I had purpose.
I was in love. I had my whole life before me in all its glittering possibilities.

All those wonderful, naive, hopeful, wide-eyed possibilities.  Such a long time ago. So thoroughly forgotten.

I carry some fairly bulky baggage.  No surprise, that, everybody does; but I had no idea I was still carrying anything so old, so utterly unresolved, still so raw after all this time.  I'd just put it all away in a drawer in some dusty room in my head, and simply stopped going there.  Today, all unsuspecting, I peeked inside, and quite literally collapsed under the flood of old emotions that came pouring out.  I thought, in my foolishness, that I'd dealt with all that - I could comfortably talk about it, examine what I thought I felt about those years, convince myself that my cynicism was all that was left of such thoughts.  Confronted unexpectedly with a glimpse of the actual feelings and experiences of the time however, it's clear quite what monstrous arrogance that attitude was.

Cathartic, I guess.  I'll keep it on loop until the shaking stops.

So, I'm currently in rehearsals for Tapestry of Fear, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2nd-9th August (previews 31st & 1st) at Underbelly's Baby Belly 2.
Ok, that's the plug done with.

Hooray, of course. Work is always good, it's a fun play, a great cast, it's all going to be a fantastic experience, and it effectively translates into a three week working holiday in lovely Edinburgh, a good part of it during the Fringe.

But Lachesis always had a nasty sense of humour.  In the months between Counterfeit Skin and my being cast for Tapestry of Fear, there seemed to be a major paucity of jobs about that I could realistically apply for.  Yes, "apply for everything" of course, but I don't think even my towering characterization skills quite run to convincing portrayals of teenagers, nor would it be a terribly sensible thing to put myself up for the part of a Bangladeshi grandmother.  And so on.

The moment I was cast, however, the floodgates opened, and the casting sites and publications seemed filled with parts for slightly overweight, middle-aged bald men.  Many were even offering attractive, realistic pay.  Woo.  And every one of these parts has been either auditioning or performing or filming during the exact weeks that I'll be in Edinburgh.  Every single one.
It's always going to be like that of course, and it does make me laugh rather than cry, but it really is quite impressive!

Really, they don't happen, Big Things, no matter how much we want them to.

For example, there's the Big Thing that I've been hoping for ever since The Great Hormone Revolution of 1972. That's never happened. Came close-ish a few times, perhaps, and maybe even very close once, I like to tell myself, but it's remained stubbornly elusive. The effects of long-term hope are of course deeply damaging, and easily spotted by even the most casual observer.

So I should take that as a cautionary tale, and learn from it. There's stuff in my life now that contains vague, tantalising possibilities of Big Things. I must not fixate on those possibilities, must not hope too hard. Dream, by all means, but I mustn't rely on the Big Things coming - concentrate on the here and now, enjoy the things that come my way, and expect nothing.   Otherwise my finances are likely to end up as distressed as the emotional bankruptcy caused by the Other Big Thing.

Why do I do that?  Why is it that, when somebody I work with compliments me on what I'm doing, my first, automatic, almost unthinking reaction, is to inwardly assume that they're being sarcastic?  I behave as I should, of course: I smile, I thank them, I do the modesty thing, but all the time I'm thinking, "are they actually taking the piss? Is this their way of telling me I'm rubbish?" 
Why can't I, instead, allow myself to take their words at face value?

It used to happen when I worked behind a desk, and it still happens now that I'm pursuing my new path.  Of course, there have been jobs I've done in the past, that I genuinely was rubbish at. I knew it, my employers knew it.  Maybe that's where it springs from...  although generally in those jobs, the folks in charge left me in little doubt as to my lack of ability!

A few years back, while I was still living in the house of filth, I stumbled across a series (or rather a "miniseries", as such things are called across the Atlantic, for all that its twelve solid episodes) called "From The Earth To The Moon" - made by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, on the back of the Apollo 13 film.  At the time, I thought it very well made. And promptly forgot about it. Spotted the DVD set on Amazon recently, and bought it.

Granted it's a bit "gung-ho America saving the world from communism" in places, but curiously I've found it rather beautiful. I remember well the last years of the 1960s, and the attention we, as awestruck kids, paid to the Apollo program. For us, of course, it wasn't Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman, but Patrick Moore and James Burke, but the excitement, the tension, the wonder, the wonder, are the same. What's more, the series puts a far more human face on to the clean-cut American jocks that rode the biggest firework the world has ever seen. With only a moderate amount of starstripey cliché and mawkishness, too, which is impressive.

Thus far, I've only reached Apollo 9, first Earth-orbit rendezvous with the LEM, and the first two-man spacewalk. I find myself feeling odd sadness for people like Rusty Sweickhart, who never flew in space again (his own words in the episode suggesting it was his bout of space-sickness that would ground him).  And I find myself very aware of those people who maintain that the moon landings were faked...  and, in a most peculiar (and vaguely inappropriate) way, I want to say, "of course man landed on the moon - I was there".  Well.  I was there watching the telly, anyway.  They went.  Of course they went. Of course they went.  I watched them do it.  It was the defining moment of my generation.

I remember, as I'm sure millions of others do also, my father taking me outside, around 9pm on the night of 20th July 1969, and standing there with me in silence, gazing up at the moon. Still gives me a most extraordinary thrill up my spine to think of it.  To have been alive at the point in time when mankind first stepped on to another heavenly body, and to have watched it happen. To have lived in times of wonder and glory.

"Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenseless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine, and plague. ...  And now, here they are, out among the stars"

Yes, I'm a corny, sentimental old sod. Yes.

Davros:   Rather nicely done, I thought, yes.
Unexpected regeneration cliffhanger:  Yes indeed, liked that very much.
Torchwood, Martha (who's forgotten how to act again), Sarah Jane (yay):  Yes, ok, I'll buy that, made me smile.
Stolen planets in perfect balance (one of them Callufrax Minorr, a nice touch): Nod to the past, reasonably subtly done, yes.
but
Harriet Jones, former prime minister: A weak joke the first time, weaker still now, worse with the Dalek providing the punchline.
Harriet Jones, technical genius behind the subnet?  What? WHAT?
The Dalek "message" being just "Exterminate" over and over...  really, Russell, you can do better.

Here we go.  A week into rehearsals and, in traditional fashion, I've hit my usual paranoia, doubting myself, certain I've tried the patience of my fellow cast members, and so on and so forth.  The regularity with which this always afflicts me would be quite funny, if it wasn't so annoying and debilitating.

What is it about the human psyche, that makes it so much easier to latch on to your own solitary low self-opinion, than all the nice things other people have ever said about you?

Screen. Green pencil sharpener, tupperware box, old phone. Diary. Journal.
Keyboard
Edge of desk.
Me.
Chair.

Bookcase, side-desk.
Paints, evidence of lack of artistic ability (relief, actually). Newspaper, desk light, wigblock, phone.
Laptop.
Me.
Chair.

Scanner, router, wifithingy.
Printer.
Turntable.
Pot of paperclips, broken camera.
Mug, highlighters.
Mouse, keyboard.
Edge of desk.
Me.
Chair.

Nothing.

...whether anybody actually reads this rubbish.

Can it really be so long?  Just a shade over four years ago.  We sat, amid candles, wine and cheese, on that disreputable velour sofa of mine, framed by (I can think of no better term) the squalor of my old house.  We watched Julianne, Anthony and Giancarlo in their beautiful, dark wonderful gavotte.  I cried (of course).

It's been four years since I last watched it.  Incredible.  Why did I leave it so long?  How did I leave it so long?  It was bad enough that I waited three years to see it in the first place, but to wait a further four to see it again?  Awful.

Silly thing is, it was an act of desperation.  After a day of increasing dark, I needed something to occupy the evening.  Something safe.  Two crates of borrowable choice in the lockup (including this, of course - how daft is that!), but it was closed for the day, so Tesco was my rescuer.  There on the shelf. £5.  Odd that such a thing should be "safe", but there it is, I never could explain how these things work... but of course, it's perfect. The perfect, exact-fitting, cockinthehole antidote to all that ails me tonight.

Vide cor meum still rips me to pieces, of course, but that's unlikely to change.

As if there weren't already enough reasons to feel optimistic about the future of a certain well-known revived sci-fi television series, when the producer's mantle passes to its new bearer...



It's hard to explain why, but this picture makes me really happy.
What's not to like about a man who possesses such a filing system?

Just home from shooting a short film down in Bournemouth, in which I play the character of Santa.  I'd better not go into too much detail about it before it's completed and actually 'out there' as it were, but suffice it to say it's satirical, surreal, and very funny.  A very talented team, too, which usually makes for a nice working atmosphere.  There were no flaps, no strops; just everybody getting on with what they had to do.
And hospitable:  The producer and director both gave up their beds so that I, and another cast-member, could have somewhere to sleep while we were filming. There was food, there were snacks, there was beer.

Yesterday was my shooting day (they have two more including today).  It began at around 7.30, at a small private tennis club, where two of us spent several hours running around showing just how bad our tennis skills were, as we attempted to produce a convincing rally for the camera.  Must have been good exercise; my legs still ache today!

So. The Edinburgh Fringe show, which I'm itching to get to grips with, but can't.  I liked very much the glimpse of script that I saw at the audition, but that was over three weeks ago.  It's been more than a week since I heard I'd got the part, and it's quite an effort of will to keep the enthusiasm for it alive, without something tangible to look at.  I have the tantalising evidence of the rehearsal schedule, so I know when I'll be doing things, but not yet what. Please, Mr. Postman, bring me a script tomorrow...

At the same time as all this, it turns out Counterfeit Skin is being revived. Hooray!  Except that its performance dates coincide exactly with the period when I'll be in Edinburgh, so I can't be involved.  Quite a sad and poignant moment this morning, seeing the job advert for Leo pop up on CastingCallPro.

So, in summary:  A play I'd so love to do again, but can't, because of another play, for which I've yet to see a script.

It's fine, of course, that's just the way life is, but it's deeply frustrating.

I'd reached a pretty low ebb today.  A series of unsatisfactory auditions, where either I wasn't pleased with my own work, or everything had seemed ok, but then I'd heard nothing.  Add to that, a stack of applications that had gone nowhere, and a growing suspicion that maybe I was just being grossly arrogant in thinking I had any future in this line of work.  Even auditions that had gone well were now subject to fine scrutiny as to what I'd done wrong, what I should have done better, etc., etc...

And then an email arrives.  From an audition a couple of weeks ago, which I thought had gone well, but which I'd pretty much given up on by now.  I'm going to the Edinburgh Fringe. 

Just like that, the world changes, self-belief returns, and I can accept the possibility that maybe I can do this after all.

Extraordinary thing, the mind.  I never cease to be amazed at my own capacity for irrational emotional reactions.

A small thing occurred today.  A very small thing, which in and of itself, means nothing whatever.  It bears a passing (though very tenuous) similarity to a much larger, more significant, more painful thing that happened many years ago.  Now, I know perfectly well that it isn't the same at all, and yet there's a massive emotional reaction.  I watched it start, knowing it was starting, knowing it wasn't in any way an appropriate response, but quite unable to prevent it happening.

Now, some considerable time later, my rational mind is still watching this all going on, still fully aware that it's a completely phantom emotion, inappropriate, out of all proportion, and unrelated to real events... but equally without a clue how to switch off this constant layer of unruly angst that permeates everything.  The only thing guaranteed to kill it, is an external event, out of my control - which is a problem in itself, because the absence of that event, the waiting for it, becomes bound up in the existing emotional gordian knot.  I have, somehow, to force myself not to want that event, not to attribute huge significance to it, not to think, "everything will be fine when that happens"; because to do so would be to reinforce, amplify, legitimize the problem.

None of this is especially ground-breaking of course - I've no doubt it's very familiar to pretty much anyone who's likely to read this:  Everybody has their own little pot of neuroses, and their own ways of working round them.  It does fascinate me though, that two such conflicting ideas can co-exist in this way:  That I can be rational enough to sit here at the keyboard and make a stab at describing what the irrational, emotional part of my head is up to, yet not sufficiently in control to stop it.  Fascinating.

Tourists in Edinburgh have the worst peripheral vision I've ever encountered.  Even worse than tourists in London; even worse than people in Tesco on pension day.

Edinburgh people themselves, of course, are lovely.  Even the staff in the Travelodge I stayed in, were excellent.  Surprisingly so - I've stayed in a lot of Travelodges, and this one, though a bit abraded in places, has some of the best staff I've seen in one.  The breakfast was jolly nice too, which is certainly not always the case!

On the Royal Mile:  Gorgeous, gentle-faced, smiling young man playing the ropiest-sounding guitar I've ever heard... but the way he was playing it was so full of joy that I almost wanted to dance down the street.

Further along the Royal Mile:  Coming towards me were two students, one Cheguevara t-shirt, the other the ubiquitous tweed jacket, skinny jeans and slightly-too-small trilby.  Under their arms, each carried a good-sized red flag.  Freshly made, by the look of them.  As they passed me, a snippet of conversation, in the plummiest Etonian, "...well yes, because you see, that's the trouble with the white working class..."

Maybe I'm just being a bit sensitive, but this seems a bit off, frankly.

I get a message through a casting website, out of the blue, from a student film-maker, telling me they'd looked at my CV and thought they'd approach me.  There's an exchange of emails, including the script, which I like, and I say so.  They ask if I'm ok with the fact that there's no cash involved.  I say that's fine.

There is a pause for a couple of days.

Then I get an email telling me the role's been cast, and thanking me for my "interest in the film".  Er, excuse me? You approached me, remember?

I feel like shouting email obscenities.  But I shall not.  However, young film-maker, might I suggest that if you're going to approach people like that, you make very sure you want to use them first, rather than gaining their interest and then shitting upon them?  Thank you, this has been a public information broadcast.