Unposted Photographs of October 2022 in Chronological Order

 On the first, I left Trafalgar Sqaure in bloom, happy with the city I lived in, and crossed the river to get a better view of it:

 

 In the basement of the Royal Festival Hall, three dancers had found a space outside the toilets:

 

 I've lived in Notting Hill a year now. I finally found the quickest route to the park, but it still feels like I'm finding routes, rather than walks:

 

 Trellick Tower, its green heart still commemorating Grenfell. It always appears in view suddenly, and to the right of where I expect:

 This was the first time I'd revisited the Victoria and Albert Museum since moving up the road:

 

 I suddenly remembered seeing Jennifer Tilly here, and hearing her, and tried to recall the plot of Slipstream:

 Neil and I went to see Big Ben break his News Revue cherry. Their six week run outlasted two Prime Minsters, and Fred Strangebone in a blonde wig turned out to be a very serviceable Keir Starmer. He was the only one to do a silly bio:

 In Tate Britain, I stayed in the box with the racist language for the whole video (I can't find who's this was or what. It was wonderful. Does anyone know?) Others entered the box, and left very possibly because I was in there, but I don't know how better to screen it:

 

 Over the escalators in the tube, adverts are now screened an angle, tampering with my balance over the duration:

 Here, outside the vault of the Ned, it occured to me that on Saturday we should all wear robes:

 

 Then we moved on to Greenwich peninsula, to rehearse the counting of rice:

 Our rice in situ:

 Suddenly, October was beginning to end. I mean, to finish. I caught Ilona's exhibition just as it was being taken down:

 This Flying Tiger model could have got more into the spirit of the season, I felt. I bought nothing:

 On this stage, I saw David dance and speak lines from King Lear. A good block:

 Outside on Regents Street, they were beginning to put up angels:

By this point, my phone had crashed. Everything was harder to record on Badphone, particularly Maxfield Parrish light. Why was it still Summer?

 On this stage, I saw Natasha dance and speak lines from King Lear. I was not expecting that in a production of Henry the Eighth:

 My balance tampered with, I was still happy to have to caught the last matinee, and celebrated with a walk on the beach:

 

 On this stage, I saw my former rice wife Julia cast her own legs as her parents, and her hand as her dog. I'd missed her rumbling, threatening giggle. It got messy:

 

 Rehearsals started for the Love Goddess in Marylebone. Working in daylight suddenly:

 Opposite Alfies Antiques. Everything a walk away:

 And last Saturday, like the first, saw Trafalgar Square in bloom again.

Words we sometimes said in the basement of the Ned

 Notes designed by Susanne Dietz

 

 Yesterday was fun, and crammed, and with Serena and Tom on the chocolate coin exchange and Hannah checking bags (but not opening them –"Very nice, Italian?") a slight shunt reunion, happily. Thank you to Coney for organising The Golden Key, and to Gemma for having me, and to you if you came, and sorry if we were full. When we were trying to find a mood for the bar outside our snug and kennels, I don't think we anticipated how much time would be spent simply queueing, but that's the thing about unknowns. Choas inside the kennels was a lot more welcome, and I was very lucky to be teamed with clowns as kind as my fellow accountants Sachi Kimura and Julia Masli (the word "accountant" has a nicely ecclesiastical ring to it, once you don a robe). It couldn't all be unknowns though, so I wrote a little text for us to say and here it is.

Counting the grains of rice:

This is a new idea.

Each of these is a promise. Not a big promise. Not a particularly important promise. Still, probably more promises than it’s fair to expect any single person to be able to keep. Which is why they’re kept here.

 

Originally, a promise was much bigger, and most people would be unlikely to keep even one. They were about the size of this table, and made of something dangerous like limestone or cows. But one night, there was a storm. And a promise sank to the bottom of the sea – so it wasn’t lost, as the joke goes, it was at the bottom of the sea – and all the islanders had to decide whether or not to still count that as a promise kept. Which they did.

Maybe that’s why we’re underground.

 

Eating a grain:

This won’t be missed. Something will be missed. But no-one will know it was this.

Taking another grain:

And what’s the smallest thing you can promise? What’s worth this?

 

 

 Proving I'd licked a duck by sticking a grain of rice to it was a lot more fun though.

(Redevelopment) Where To Find Us

 The Golden Key is on today! Here are some clues as to where we'll be, and by clues I mean very late research I decided to do on our location while leaving the bath running. That's the Parliament building of New Delhi. I was in New Delhi in 1991 when for some reason our house master pulled strings for us to perform there Václav Havel's absurdist critique of Communism Redevelopment, in which I played a middle-aged architect having a nervous beakdown with talcum powder in his hair because I was sixteen. I think I have a photo...

 

 ... That's me far right. I secretly based my performance on Bette Davis in All About Eve. Ronnie Potel's the idealistic young buck in the middle, secetly in love with my wife. I remember the audience muttering when she gave me a shoulder rub, and I bought my first ever Talking Heads album over there, and my first beer, and saw distant women doing laundry in the Ganges as the sun set behind the Taj Mahal in Agra. None of that's a clue, sorry, just memory's cute stampede. We'll be at the end of Share Mile in the "Maze of Adventures". Come and find us, and once it's all done I'll post where we were in the comments (I might also post the school magazine's review of my Zdenek Bergman!) Here's the clue. Take it away, Nibbling Nuts...

Bigcoin

 "Wow!" indeed, thumbnail. Vic Stefanu takes us on a brief tour of the Micronesian Bankvaults of Yap, whose ancient limestone currency  – (is "ancient currency" an oxyoron?) –gets referenced in Extra Credits' history of paper money, which we've all watched in preparation for The City of London's Golden Key which takes place tomorrow, Saturday.

 

 

 Come along during the day if you can. Its all free, and I've finally found out which route we're at the end of: "Share Mile", details here. I'll be in kennels with the brilliant Julia "Legs" Masli and Sachi "Bums" Kimura, so I'll definitely be having fun and yes, apparently the counting rooms were called kennels. 

 Speaking of fun...

 

 

 I don't know, I didn't want to let his passing go unremarked on here, but can any clip truly contain Robbie Coltrane? I barely had a moment to enjoy Kwasi Kwarteng getting fired before I heard the news. Every time I see him closing that plane door as an unpseaking extra in Flash Gordon I think, and then you go on to do everything. A giant Yappian coin of the acting world. Bye bye, big man.

 

 

one more clip

But Who's Counting

 

 Further facelessness. 

 In the temple-like vault of a former bank stand six-hundred-and-fifty defaced and numbered photographs of the artist Sarah Maple and her child, one defacing for every breastfeed given over a three month period. A lot more than I expected. It's called "Labour Of Love". I don't know if it will still be up on Saturday.

 

 I was down there today to scout the marble counting house I'll be in this weekend as part of Gemma Brockis' contribution to The Golden Key, a massive City of London commission from Coney and Friends, which will see the normally dead-at-weekends Square Mile come alive with activity and riff raff like me, and perhaps you! 

 

   

 

 Specifically, we'll be part of The Maze of Adventures: "Choose wisely, friend," insists the blurb  – a voice from a simpler time perhaps, before the pound found itself battling gravity like Indiana Jones – "as you will not able to see them all..." That isn't much help, sorry, but we'll be there somewhere. I'm not sure if I can give away the vault's exact location, but when I used to do the Ghost Bus Tours we'd get stuck in traffic outside of it for anything up to half an hour and have to vamp about plague pits – Oh, I hadn't thought about them! The City's full of subterranean material, but I think we'll be sticking to counting.