Live Event, Regent's Park, 3am

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 London's possibly at its politest at 3am. Last night, Regent's Park's Outer Circle was almost entirely silent apart from a soothing chewing, ten feet up in the air. The night was humid enough to blur the top of the Telecom Tower, and the heat had brought out the giraffes. I kept very still by the railings. I'm not sure I was seen. Zebra butts were also visible, in the sodium light from the NHS hearts recently installed on the giraffe house, but the giraffes themselves were lit like dancers now, completely silhouetted now, renewing their strangeness wonderfully. I could have been looking at the Loch Ness Monster. 

 I was glad I hadn't brought my camera, you know, my phone, and then I wondered why. I was definitely feeling that the fact I couldn't record this sight made the moment of my experiencing it more important, and by "important" I maybe just mean "something to which there is no satisfactory alternative". This was a wonder – rather than an opportunity to record a wonder – and would remain a wonder only for as long as I decided to stay and find it wonderful. This is how I used to live of course, before carrying a camera. I started thinking then about the idea of wonders, and monsters again, and how we're not scared of fire, and for how much of humanity's existence Science simply meant not being scared of fire. I'd resumed walking by that point. Giraffes suited the hour. They always seem very polite. Look at their antlers.

I'm afraid there will be no blog this evening as I've gone an entire day without noticing or thinking anything.

I did not "Learn More" either. I don't know what Jude Law's fucking problem is, frankly. 

 I did get my hair cut yesterday though. I took public transport for the first time since the pandemic started, to Forest Hill. It was the same when I first moved out of Brixton: it's normally a good two years or more after I leave a place before I'll change where I spend over a tenner for a haircut. Just in case anyone wants to know my secret. The place looked very pretty and the trains were air-conditioned.

  I hadn't had this barber before. He was chatty. He had some theories about Covid: "You know, I think they just want to control the people..." I couldn't hang around for further hints though because there was a queue and also I had to get back to self-tape an audition for Boring Middle Management Male/Female, which is why I'd had my hair shortened in the first place. To be in the background.



 I'm a bit worried the barber left too much on the top. That it looks a little alt right. I'd expected something spikier, like Jude Law, but I had this same worry the last time I came here I now remember. At least I went on the tube and had a haircut and everything's back to normal now and I'm twenty-six again.

Nightwalk, August the Twelfth

 The door was open so it seems I could, if I had wanted to, buy flowers at two o'clock in the morning. Back in the flat, Act Five of Richard the Second was slowly uploading - I don't still go for night walks on purpose, I'm just very late getting my steps in. There were quite a few other people out yesterday night, maybe waiting for the city to cool down. Blasts of hot air from the buildings along Gloucester Place, although I think they were simply blasting whatever air was there, and it just happened to be hot. Apart from that there was no wind. It barely felt like going outdoors. It felt like stepping out of the changing rooms. I could smell chlorine all over Mayfair. I think I've only known nights this warm before in Kuwait, when Nigel and I would bob on our backs in the Persian Gulf, a crisp packet clutched to our tummies providing just enough buoyancy to keep us from having to swim. The walls around Buckingham Palace are surprisingly low I noticed. There's an overhanging tree right next to a lampost, right next to a bus shelter on... (goes to look for the name of the road linking Hyde Park Corner to the Royal Mews)... the A302. A guard seemed to be sleeping against an arch. All the windows were closed. My phone always dies before I make it back so I count the remaining steps on my fingers.

Days, Hours, Minutes and Richard the Seconds

 

 In yesterday's post Henry the Sixth imagined himself measuring out his life as a shepherd. Today Richard the Second imagines himself as an actual clock. We're back at Act Five. I tried to differentiate this a little more from the previous run by having Richard lose his voice in prison, but it made him even harder to understand so that's not what you'll see. You will see a lot of sweat, so apologies, particularly for one specific drop which threatens to upstage me for possibly two whole scenes. I thought it might help something or other if I left it hanging on the end of my nose unwiped. Help what? Empathy? Realism? Continuity? Who knows, these are shot on the fly. Also it might sound like I'm doing an Alec Guinness impression, but that's unintentional and ultimately okay surely. I'm sure he would have made a great Richard.

 Thought so - Shakespeare's always been very good to the wonky looking and fey. I'm getting maybe a little too used to editing footage of myself gulping, sighing and giving wry, sideways looks however, so it will be good to move onto something more rambunctious, which Henry the Fourth is certainly supposed to be. Here are some questions to accompany your viewing of Act Five in the meantime, should you so wish: Is York's discovery of Aumerle's plot actually directly responsible for Richard's death? Should I have read some Holinshed before embarking on this? Should I have read some Ovid too while we're at it? I'm supposed to be a Shakespeare enthusiast so why have I never gone anywhere near his two massive influences? Should I stop using a sepia filter? Orson Welles said people shot in colour just look like meat, so maybe not? Oh, and is it the groom who's playing the music in prison? Here is a playlist of the "Formal" (better) Run in its entirety. And here's the final act:

Einstein on the Molehill

 This is the Shepherd Gate Clock at Greenwich. Note the twenty-four hours. Wired to the "Shepherd Electric Impulse Clock" within, entrusted with cabling standardised time not just nationwide but eventually as far as Massachusetts thanks to the transatlantic cable, it was the first clock ever to directly show Greenwich Mean Time to the public, and is one of Louise Devoy's contributions to this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars. Actual Greenwich astronomer Ed Bloomer presents its sequel - the atomic clock, while psychologist Steve Taylor brings along a book he wrote and a child's safety seat for some reason, and the excellent Helen Czerski refuses to be fazed. I was asked if there was any good bit of Shakespeare relating to Time I could read, and immediately thought of this...

... but instead suggested something I've always loved but never performed from Henry the Sixth Part Three - an uncharasteristically trance-like meditation on routine from, as Helen perfectly summarises, "a slightly depressed king on a hill who just can't tell if he's a bit useless". Yes! Another one! Centering on another kind of shepherd's clock, it's one of the most sustainedly simple things Shakespeare wrote - one of the reasons I love it, and you can hear me read it at 2:50. Then Helen asked me to read the closing words to Einsteins' fourth paper on General Relativity, (28:30), and I really enjoyed that too. It's been far too long since I last performed words nobody's meant to understand. *

"You need to know how big your clock is."

Mirror, Mirror On The Floor

 This is one of Paul Hogarth's covers for the Penguin editions, the ones we'd read in school. Not all his covers were as on the nose as this. While Richard the Second doesn't really cut it as a saint I think this run's is a better loser than the First Run's. I didn't want him to be showing Bolingbroke up this time so much as showing him the ropes, showing him round the sausage factory, guiding Bolingbroke's hands over the levers. (I only realised while editing that the "Norfolk" mentioned, who died in Venice, is Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk banished in Act One. I wonder what he died of.) Here's Act Four again. At one point I say "off my hand" instead of "off my head" but what are you gonna do...

Jesus As A Dick

 The dream of the 1390's is alive in Portland. And Act Three of Richard the Second (the Second) will be posted below as soon as it's uploaded. I don't think I'd be giving this run nearly as much old-school, Look-At-Me welly if I hadn't tried the first run without, so I'm glad I did both, but I'm definitely prefering this one – this play makes so much more sense to me as a musical. Let a set piece be a set piece. If Richard is actually messianic, his surrender makes perfect sense: Flint Castle is his Gethsemane, and who doesn't want to play that? A world's emerging, a blazingly strange, Golden-Age-of-Hollywood/Military-Dictatorship hybrid that, for all I know, is exactly what Elizabethan England was actually like. It would be good if I had longer fingers.