I feel as though I am at school again, and take refuge in the past.

Monday 8th October

Training as a teacher of Stage Combat involves some fun stuff and some non-fun stuff. The fun stuff, as you might imagine, is the bit where you get to wang swords around, grunt a lot, look kind of cool and get a pretty good aerobic workout. The less fun aspects are the endless hours of drudgery involved in writing up detailed 'Logs' on all the classes I assist at. It's uncomfortably like being back at school, which sensation brings with it all the familiar old feelings of pressure, guilt, frustration, neck and back pain, eyestrain and general sulkiness at not being able to watch telly or jeff around with your mates instead. As I hauled my angst-ridden carcass to the end of my time at school, I promised myself, so miserable had the past seven years' academic toil made me, that I would never put myself through anything like it again. Inevitably I ended up going to University a little over a year later, towards the end of which I promised myself that I would really never put myself through anything like it again. Why then, I find myself asking with uncomfortable regularity, have I undertaken a training course requiring a vast amount of time spent sitting at a computer, when I could instead have been training as a plumber right now? Up and about. On my feet. Making stuff work. Doing stuff (albeit with my hand down a bog pipe). It's a difficult question, and one for which I have no immediate answer. Lets see if one appears.

Amidst this reoccurring train of thought, I managed to finish my class log and learn some lines for the new project I'll be rehearsing next week, and so busy was I that I almost forgot that I had to drive to Amesbury this evening, ready for work tomorrow.

Tuesday 9th October

Time to introduce the second of my part-time jobs. Some years ago, when I hilariously thought that I was going to be an actor, I even more hilariously thought that the way to start being an actor was to work in Theatre In Education - or TIE, as it is known by those who know and those who try to forget. This assumption is of course WRONG. Take heed, any budding young actors who may chance upon these scribblings: working in TIE is a way into working in more TIE

AND

NOTHING

ELSE.

It is not acting, neither is it teaching, and neither of these professions recognise it as being an acceptable foundation for building a career with them. It therefore exists in a curious hinterland all of its own, populated by young people who have 'trained' at minor Drama Schools, or haven't trained at all, but who still think that they can be actors. I was one such deluded clown, and I took the turn into the cul-de-sac of my career with a company called Seagull Theatre Of The Gorge.

Now, having been fairly scathing of TIE, I have to back-pedal a bit and explain that, for as much as it isn't acting or teaching, it does provide a service and sometimes that service can be quite good. Not often, but sometimes. A strange and unloved area of the arts it my be, but within it you will find the bad, the good and occasionally the superb. Seagull, my first and best experience of TIE, belongs to the lattermost category and I undertook two tours with them, lasting a full year of my life. Not long after this, the company closed after 30 years in business, and that, I thought, was the end of an era. By this stage I had long since abandoned any claim to be an actor of any kind and was working wherever I could, largely in shops. Then suddenly one day, an email arrives from Sian, co-director of Seagull, wondering if I would be interested in some work. Seagull is reborn in a cut-down form, and Sian needs a working partner to take reworkings of the old productions out on the road, two days a week. Well, it was a way to escape from the pit of despair that I then called a workplace, so I closed my eyes and leapt back into the Lion cubs' den.

Hence my late night journey last night to the Travelodge at Amesbury. Given that we generally stay away on the evening before a gig, I'm becoming monotonously familiar with Travelodges. Which doesn't take much doing, of course, since they all look exactly the same.

We currently have a rep of four productions, and today's was Grandma's Birthday, my favourite of the lot, partly because it's a reworking of one of the shows I toured with back in the day and partly because it's just really nicely written. I think I'll leave my description of our working day for another time, otherwise Too Much Exposition all at once, which writers tell me isn't good. Suffice to say then, that since I was in the car today and not too far away from home, I was back at a reasonable time and managed to make my own food. Always a luxury.