We left Arboga during another hail shower, clattering away as massive empty goods trains roared through the station. "Captain Crunch!" exclaimed my colleague B, an expression of surprise she's never employed before or since. This is what touring does to your brain, mangles it. Only earlier, over breakfast, I'd deployed the word 'bush' as a sound effect for something appearing out of nowhere.
Sala promised to be bigger and more cosmopolitan than Arboga on the map. A shopping centre! Arts museums! A nearby silver mine that does tours! A positive haven of urban culture!
Maps lie. A lady at the art museum was delighted to learn we were actors, and offered us free seats at the rabbit skinning activity in the craft rooms that morning. The shopping centre had about six shops in it, not including the Sibylla restaurant. As we waited for the bus to the silver mine, a helpful local girl told us the history of the bus stop over the last five years, how the bus used to stop at a layby in the park behind us. "I used to do acting," she said, "but now I have to look after the hens on the farm." Wise choice.
More rain, more hail. The silver mine was freezing cold, although quite interesting. Twenty miles of tunnels chipped out of the rock by hand over hundreds of years, most of those pre-dynamite. Stopped me feeling sorry for myself, at any rate. Poor me, having to stay in a hotel and eat burgers and gulasch at the local hipster restaurants. Not like those lucky miners two hundred years ago, climbing into the dark, clutching burning torches in their teeth so they had two hands for the ladder, before spending twelve hours a day chipping at a burnt rock face with a rusty spike. Those were the days.
Even on the way home, when our train got cancelled and we got diverted via bus back to Västerås so we could wait three hours for a new one, it wasn't exactly hard labour. Free food courtesy of SJ didn't stop me moaning bitterly as I sipped my banana split frapino and listened to Tori Amos on free wifi all the way home. Well, the grass is always greener.
0130, it was back to the real business, changing C's nappy after a shrieking nightmare and being affectionately punched in the ear for half an hour as she settled back to sleep. Oddly, it felt like relaxing, breathing out after a long week. I'm already hungry for my next away fixture, flying off to exotic Sussex for a day-long voice job. No hotels there, mind, just lots of flights and connections. Hail too, I expect. Bring it on.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Saturday, April 29, 2017
North of the Wall 1/2
I was away this week, travelling up to the Northeast of Sweden with GEST and Offline, the show we devised. A proper tour of the provinces, playing in a pair of small towns around the Västerås region. Hence the nerdy Game of Thrones reference - yes, I've been touring Westeross. Geek pride.
Arboga is even a medieval town (actually medieaval, according to the tourist guide. The extra vowel makes it extra authentic). The bridge in the middle of town has a huge bronze telescope fixed on the brutally jagged rock in the river nearby, on which merchants wrecked their ship and were obliged to found a town in order to survive. They did a good job of it, at least. Six hundred or so years later, it's all still there. Narrow streets full of little crooked houses, crumbling brickwork and imposing wooden doors, a church with a witch's hat steeple and a strange surfeit of podiatry shops.
We were performing in a downstairs room at the library, a nice concrete 70s building full of distressed wood and violent orange and brown fixtures. Our show is a short detective thriller about a missing boy (we play police), and the room we were in felt like a 70s police station briefing room. It just lacked a greasy haze of cigarette smoke and masculine corruption.
The town felt empty. Not that Gothenburg is massive or anything, it's about the size of Coventry I think, but Arboga's streets seemed perpetually deserted and eerily quiet. The massive Konditories on the main square stretched on through two or three buildings each, one like a Georgian mansion, the other like a 1940s tea room in the Lake District. Possibly the entire Lake District, it really was massive. Locals stared at us surreptitiously, presumably wondering if we were about to order the finest wines known to humanity in plummy tones. Miss Blennerhasset would have been alarmed.
Strange being away on tour again, living out of a suitcase in the latest in a long series of adequate hotels. My colleague B had no running water in hers. I had a bed as soft as a damp victoria sponge, from which I watched the sun rise after a sleepless night. I sing the night-night songs to the girls over Skype, I watch Netflix over patchy wifi, I eat too much breakfast at the buffet to compensate for the lack of sleep. I forget to pack the shampoo I bought to replace the shampoo I should have taken with me from home. Touring is tiring. It feels like it ought to be fun, a working holiday almost, and instead there is the conflict between laziness and protestant work guilt, that although I should be pleased to be doing my job, I'd perhaps rather be at home with comfortable pillows and less cash.
Lots of picturesque woods around Arboga. I was looking forward to walking through them in our afternoon off. It hailed heavily, enough to hurt even under the cover of the pines, and I retreated to the featureless safety of the hotel.
Three more days until home.
Arboga is even a medieval town (actually medieaval, according to the tourist guide. The extra vowel makes it extra authentic). The bridge in the middle of town has a huge bronze telescope fixed on the brutally jagged rock in the river nearby, on which merchants wrecked their ship and were obliged to found a town in order to survive. They did a good job of it, at least. Six hundred or so years later, it's all still there. Narrow streets full of little crooked houses, crumbling brickwork and imposing wooden doors, a church with a witch's hat steeple and a strange surfeit of podiatry shops.
We were performing in a downstairs room at the library, a nice concrete 70s building full of distressed wood and violent orange and brown fixtures. Our show is a short detective thriller about a missing boy (we play police), and the room we were in felt like a 70s police station briefing room. It just lacked a greasy haze of cigarette smoke and masculine corruption.
The town felt empty. Not that Gothenburg is massive or anything, it's about the size of Coventry I think, but Arboga's streets seemed perpetually deserted and eerily quiet. The massive Konditories on the main square stretched on through two or three buildings each, one like a Georgian mansion, the other like a 1940s tea room in the Lake District. Possibly the entire Lake District, it really was massive. Locals stared at us surreptitiously, presumably wondering if we were about to order the finest wines known to humanity in plummy tones. Miss Blennerhasset would have been alarmed.
Strange being away on tour again, living out of a suitcase in the latest in a long series of adequate hotels. My colleague B had no running water in hers. I had a bed as soft as a damp victoria sponge, from which I watched the sun rise after a sleepless night. I sing the night-night songs to the girls over Skype, I watch Netflix over patchy wifi, I eat too much breakfast at the buffet to compensate for the lack of sleep. I forget to pack the shampoo I bought to replace the shampoo I should have taken with me from home. Touring is tiring. It feels like it ought to be fun, a working holiday almost, and instead there is the conflict between laziness and protestant work guilt, that although I should be pleased to be doing my job, I'd perhaps rather be at home with comfortable pillows and less cash.
Lots of picturesque woods around Arboga. I was looking forward to walking through them in our afternoon off. It hailed heavily, enough to hurt even under the cover of the pines, and I retreated to the featureless safety of the hotel.
Three more days until home.
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