All my blogging seemed so far away. It's because I finished off the day before's blog yesterday. So this is, in fact, yesterday's. And today's.... who knows?
I'm on my way home already, from Nottingham. Hence the internet. That's odd, to be in both a venue and a hotel where wifi is unforthcoming. I had to buy a cup of tea in the hotel last night to get my free hour's internet there. Well, not free, exactly, is it, given that I have to buy something, but the cup of tea was tasty and welcome, and tasty and welcoming was the young man that served it to me. He gave me a lovely compliment that made me blush a bit, but made me smile. It was nice. He was handsome and far too young, and evidently a charmer, but it's nice just the same, and I said thank you.
I also had a gift of an evening. Instead of eating with clients, which I always enjoy, we decided to make the most of the balmy day by going for a walk, and walk we did. Pat and I walked all the way along the canal from Nottingham to Beeston (we reckon that's about four miles) partly just because it was lovely and partly in the hopes of finding some chi-chi gastro-pub that would give us our tea. What we did find was so much better. We walked (just over an hour's worth in all) to Beeston. As Pat put it in the telling then next day 'we walked so far, we reached the seventies'. We did. We landed in a pre-everything Pontins-style 'entertainment centre'. It was ace. There was a scruffily carpeted bar, looked after by an elderly lady with a bandana on her head. The roof was low; the building was a pre-fab. It led to a tiny arcade room with machines in and a toilets labelled 'Buoys' and 'Gulls'. Through the middle, a corridor led to the canalside cafe bit. Pub picnic bench seating all round, full of dogs (use any level of metaphor you like), skin burnt red around tattoos and mountains of fried food. The tattered sign said 'Beeston Marina' in semi-classy Italics, partly peeling off.
Our gammon and chips, with two eggs each - a snip at two 'luxury' dishes for a fiver was delivered with gusto and eaten the same. There was salad cream for our chips and very yellow mustard for the meat. Martin Parr (whose birthday it is today) would have celebrated with a snap for an exhibition. It was mint.
Ours was such a comprehensively fried meal, and so moreish, that we felt compelled to walk the journey back. About three quarters of the way there, my feet and back were cross and tired, but the rest of me was fine. We'd walked into darkness, past a rich sunset, ducks, a heron and some bats. Going to bed was worth it last night. Sleep seemed earnt. All that to excuse my non-blogging? No. Just because.
If I yearn for anything today, I think I yearn to stop yearning. Is it helping? I don't know. Maybe it's just too open (for anybody's liking). What you yearn for nags at your stomach and sometimes gives you shame to chew on. I've felt it during these past few weeks. So I want to do some more acting work, where I do the kind of job I can think of as 'proper'. I now no longer doubt that I'm an actor, but have I done the kind of job that makes me feel like one? Not properly. Not yet. Don't get me wrong - I LOVE the work I'm doing. It feels like play. It pays. It's fun and it's useful. It covers a lot of bases. But I would be lying if I didn't admit to yearning for the opportunity to do films, be in 'proper' plays, use improvisation even more and do more with it, and see what it has done to me as a scripted actor.
And if I'm honest, it's not even about the ego of the work. I don't want to say I've done films and stage plays because I want to preen. That's where the shame comes in. I want to do it partly so I can say I did. So I can hold up my head and say I knew what I wanted to do and I went for it. I can't say that yet, and that's a source of shame. If I ever have children, I want to be able to say that I have had a taste of that, and that I do it still. At the moment, it's not true. Not yet. Not yet.
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