Back at the Ranch

My voice work in Sweden continues apace, despite being away. I have pickups to do from my last two jobs.

This is tricky. There is no sound studio at the theatre, although they lend me a good portable mic and cables. I wander round the mezzanine levels in my lunch hour, doing sound checks. The first pickups I have to do are of a wounded viking bandaging himself, which is why I can be found crouching in corners near the lifts, hunched over the mic and moaning softly.

Very well heated, the theatre. Lots of air conditioning. Plenty of odd whirrs and bonks from the pipes. Lots of strange clunking noises from the tech team building or dismantling sets.  Occasional sounds of actors warming up, as of distant whalesong. The mic is excellent, it can pick all of this up no bother.

After several failed attempts, the swedish studios send me advice. I need to pad the walls in whatever room I'm recording in. Use a blanket or mattress, they suggest. Get a sound shield for the mic so your plosives are muffled. Improvise. We need this material, urgently.

Improv I can do. I gather extra supplies from the theatre and get to work.

The theatre is too loud, my new digs are quiet but very echoey (tall ceilings and plaster walls are a bad combo acoustically, it seems). The smallest room in the house is, well, it's the smallest room in the house, if you get me.

Which is why 2200 hrs most nights this last week have found me sealing myself into the toilet by jamming my duvet into the door cracks, then balancing the mic amongst the shelved books no English toilet should be without. If I jam a bunch of loo roll into the cistern to stop it dripping, then squat on the lav and read into the mic through a coat hanger with a pair of old nylons stretched over it, the sound quality is apparently 'quite good'. At least this is now a pharmaceutical manual, I'm not lurking in the water closet and screaming like a stuck saxon. Not for work, anyway.

Another day, another dollar.

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Meanwhile, at home, F has learnt to crawl.

She doesn't quite pick her feet up, so as she goes forward, her babygro sort of stays put. And she runs out of steam quite fast, but where she used to immediately lie face down and scream for assistance, she now has a short rest, musters her energy and starts again. Two or three times, anyway, then she feels she's made the effort and someone ought to come and help her out. A trainer, maybe, do some stretching.

I get to skype fairly often, confusing conversations where I'm placed on the floor via iPad and then picked up and shaken cheerfully. Or replaced with Facebook, F has worked out how to do that somehow.

But it's not the same as being home, not even close. And I can't help but feel that she's more interested in the iPad than the daddy inside it, although she does coo and wave at me for the first couple of minutes of our chats.

V is coping amazingly, despite work/babysitting timetable clashes and woes. I've been so busy I haven't had much time to get maudlin, although the rest of the cast have kindly stopped asking me if I'm missing my family. Apparently I tend to smile wanly and then gaze into the middle distance with a mournful expression for the next ten minutes. It holds up rehearsals.

Thousands of people every day work away from their families. It can be done. It is not the end of the world. If it's not too thespy to hurl some Samuel Beckett around, I'm very much at the 'I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' stage of this trip. Krappy, in other words.

Hi Diddle Di Dee

It's up to you, really, to decide which of the following moments from my last three weeks was the most glamorous.

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Rehearsals started about ten minutes after I arrived in Keswick. Dad gave me and my sister a lift down to Keswick, we arrived at ten to ten and I declared myself present at the box office. Before I could even say goodbye to my sister, our stage manager appeared, pounced on me and whisked me off to the rehearsal room. I've never been attacked by a trapdoor spider, but extrapolating from this experience leads me to sympathize with the prey. 

At least this was a friendly spider. Rather than the more traditional 'hang you up and drain your internal organs' treatment, I got tea and a welcome pack. The draining of actorly juices could happen at leisure over the next few weeks of work, there was no rush. 

-

There's no heating in my digs. Well, okay, that's not fair, there is heating. It's just switched off. It's switched off at night. It's also switched off during the day, when everyone is out. 

It is switched on for an hour or two in the morning and an hour or two in the evening, because that's when people are in. Not me, of course, I'm out from 0930 to 2130 right now. This enables me to skip all the heated hours and make the most of the cool, damp ones instead, like some form of large hairy slug. 

Like most Keswick houses, this one's made of green slate. Green slate is a bugger to heat, apparently. So much of a bugger that it's clearly cheaper not to try. The current energy prices aren't helping, I expect. Bastard big six. 

I get an electric blanket for my bed to make up for the fact I won't be at home when the radiator is on. It works. It works really well. The lowest setting makes me sweat like a pig. When I turn it off, the sweat all slowly freezes under the duvet. I'm an actor-flavoured sweatsicle by morning. 

Rehearsals are fairly sweaty and intense, it's a movement-heavy show in which I play a wildly enthusiastic seven-year-old. 'Sweat' seems to be one of the themes for the show so far, in fact. There's nothing nicer than getting back after a long sweaty rehearsal and climbing into a deep, hot bath. I know this because I can't. There's no bath at my digs, which are also on the wrong side of town. The icy rain I trudge through for half an hour every night is the closest I get to one. 

At least there's a shower. It's cleaner than the rain water, although not really any warmer. 

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Two weeks into rehearsals. My voice is feeling the strain of singing and shouting all day, I'm getting pretty hoarse. An old chum of mine is sending me helpful emails about the time she developed nodules on her vocal folds and needed an operation. I should eat plenty of salmon and almonds, apparently. And turmeric. That sounds quite nice. Nicer than an operation, certainly.

My landlady is very helpful and friendly. She may have yak genes, she seems immune to cold. She's also a little fussy - she stands next to me in the kitchen, talking at high speed about the hiking she'll be doing all day, and joins in with my cooking. By, for example, chucking half the water out of the pan I've just filled because you don't need that much to boil eggs, for goodness' sake, and oh! the autumn colours in Keswick, oh, the colours James. 

Well appointed though the kitchen is, and she's stressed I'm welcome to use it (as long as you use the mats, I can't bear crumbs), I'm not here for long enough to cook. I'm on a diet of tuna mayo sandwiches and hard boiled eggs, easy on the water. I don't mind that at all, it's healthy and cheering. But after a week of it, I certainly wouldn't mind some almond and turmeric salmon to go. 

I'm not sure I feel entirely at home here. I don't feel much at all, really, I'm too numb with cold. After hanging up my laundry and going out for the day, I come back to discover she's (helpfully) spread it out to dry on radiators all round the house, a shirt here, some socks there. Not the underwear. I never touch underwear, she later tells me. Never have, I've been saying it for years. They should make a play, call it 'I don't touch underwear'. You could be in it. 

Well intentioned though she doubtless was, she's gone out as well, so the radiators have all turned themselves off. I ladle my cold, damp clothes into my suitcase and move to another flat. 

- 

My voice is getting pretty hoarse. Too long since I last worked this much, too long since I did any vocal warm-ups regularly. I'm drinking hot water with lemon, ginger and honey all day. It's not enough. Time to add garlic as well. 

This kind of remedy is much discussed in the Green Room during tea breaks. Which throat sweets to avoid, what vitamin supplements are cheap in town this week, how thixotropic is your manuka honey, all that kind of thing. Okay, not the last one, I made that up. But we do talk about manuka honey a lot. Mostly about why on earth would you pay forty quid for a jar of it. 

My new throat medicine tastes like 75% of a good chicken noodle soup. It just needs the meat and noodles. Everybody says so, because they can all smell it. Not just in the Green Room, which is redolent with the steam and spice of a handful of different Dr. Theatre Brews. Also in the rehearsal room, where garlic has quickly become the dominant note. 

At least my voice gets some extra rest, if only because people veer away from me outside of the obligatory bits in rehearsal. No conversation is good conversation. 

-

I'm ramping up the drama for all of this of course (hello, I'm an actor) - it's not quite this dreary or relentless. The company is excellent, the show is great fun to work on (if exhausting) and I do like Keswick, lonely and dreich though it can be. But I'm definitely feeling the distance.

Roll on January, I want to say, although it feels ungrateful to my current employers. Even if I love my job, and this is a good one, make no mistake, being away from home is taking a toll.

Author's Note

I'm away at the moment, living over in the UK while I work at Theatre By The Lake in Keswick. We're doing Swallows and Amazons for Christmas, a musical version with songs by Neil Hannon (of the Divine Comedy) - please come and see it if you're in the vicinity!

That means a short hiatus for this blog, while I try and learn all the lines/songs/glockenspiel parts I need. Not a total hiatus, or I wouldn't be posting this. Being away from home and F for the first time is a new and strange experience, one which I'll try and write about in due course. For now, though, a short pause will ensue. 

In the meantime, thanks very much for reading! The webpage I've set this up on informs me there are around seventy or so of you reading, which is very cheering. Although I may need to discount the twenty or so regular hits I seem to get from Russia. I don't think I know that many Russians, although I'm quite prepared to be a sleeper hit in Siberia if it comes to it. Still, hits from a botnet are still hits, count your chickens while ye may. 

In the self-interests of self-promotion, please do let me know if you're enjoying this through whatever social media methods you prefer to employ. Like on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, run naked through the town shouting my name - it's all good. I'll be awfully grateful.

Moving - 3/3

0815, Monday morning.

Moving day. We didn't set alarms, relying foolishly on F's regular wake ups to get us up on time. But the clocks went back yesterday, and no amount of explaining this prevented her getting up dead on her previous schedule.

So we've been up since four. A quick feed, a quick play, then we all lie on the mattress in the bedroom together and try and get what sleep we can. The bed has been taken apart, ready to be removed. F thinks this is interesting, so she doesn't want to sleep much.

She wants to kick me in the face affectionately for two hours instead. At one point, she grabs my beard with both hands and yanks herself over to me so she can give me a big kiss. In my heart of hearts, I know how sweet this is. Sweet, sweet pain.

When V realises it's past eight, and that the removal men might already be coming up the stairs, and that we're all lying around in various states of undress with packing still undone, things start moving fairly quickly.

She goes into overdrive, packing with a kind of focussed, furious speed that reminds me of early Jackie Chan movies. I've just finished shovelling porridge into F when the removal guys arrive. Three of them, two tall gangly guys and a shorter, stouter, older one who's already wheezing coming up two floors, even though they took the lift. It's like the two-and-a-half stooges.

- You've got a lot of stuff for a small flat, the tallest and most gangly one says. It's the tone of voice mechanics use for the parts of the engine that need to be ordered from abroad.

The original plan was to let them into the house, then retire to a decent cafe and eat a langorous breakfast. Instead, I'm bouncing F (who seems delighted that someone is taking all the pesky boxes out of her house at last) around while V blurs from room to room, stuffing boxes and swearing at intense velocity.

Breakfast is cancelled for now. Swiftly, I am dismissed from the flat. This is a sensible thing, because F needs to be out of the way and someone has to go with her. But because I'm exhausted and hungry, I take offense, and stomp round the city centre in a huff, muttering nonsense into my beard about being sidelined. Any wise man would be delighted to get out of the final, awful stress of packing. I am no such thing.

Appropriately, it's pouring with heavy, dismal rain. Eventually, I calm down and head over to the new flat, where I am supposed to await developments. Here, I find there is no functioning bathroom, as the firm we rent from are renovating it in a hurry. According to the offical terms, we aren't supposed to move in for another five days, but we've got an early deal because otherwise I'd have to go and work in the UK about five minutes after the furniture arrives.

As I sit on the cold and barren floor, F immediately fills her nappy with something indescribable, and laughs merrily into my face as I deal with it.

Many, many hours later (well, okay, about four. But it feels like a lot longer, mostly because we end up doing lots of plodding around in the rain while the removal guys finish up), we're in.

And despite my temper tantrums, it's been relatively painless. There are some new holes in the back of the liquor cabinet we weren't quite expecting, but, as the saying goes, you can't make an omlette without punching holes in your Billy Bookshelf. V and I are friends again, i.e. bickering cheerfully.

Most importantly, F is entirely delighted with her new house.

It's got windows! With views of trees! And big silver handles you can hold on to while Daddy keeps you steady on the window ledge! And long hallways that you can really use to get some proper momentum in your baby stroller!  And all the boxes are here now too!

Of all of us, F has used the stress of moving most productively. She's started talking, saying 'titta!' to get our attention where it's needed (Swedish for 'look!' as opposed to 'breasts!', although the two can therefore occasionally be used synonymously). She has started standing up by herself, although this is still a short-lived state of affairs that requires attentive ground crew close at hand.

But most triumphantly of all, she has started feeding herself with a spoon. The correct end of it, and everything.

We have moved to a bigger house. The future has attractive views of an artillery fort, and is all the brighter for it.