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.