A country mouse!

I love trains. Trains are always taking you somewhere new, somewhere exciting, or they are taking you home to a safe and familiar place. You get to see hidden places. The small fields, the coppiced woods and slow rivers flash by. You wish you could stop a while, to feel cold grass beneath your feet, to hear the cuckoo high in the tree or the smell of a recent bonfire. It flashes by in an instant and as you travel further the landscape becomes unfamiliar, alien, exciting. The built up areas have their own dark history. The abandoned warehouses, their eyes put out long ago by bored children, suffer the further insult of bright graffiti. The houses that line the tracks are black, like rotten teeth. There is a flash of one bright house whose owners have decided that stone cladding is preferable to the fate of their neighbours. Fighting a never ending battle against uniformity and decay it looks out of place, out of time. It is a wonderful journey. So much history crammed into 90 minutes of travel! Into a deep dark cutting reminding me of Dickens sublime ghost story, The Signalman. ‘Hullo down there!….’Beware!’ Out into bright sunlit fields, deer grazing in the middle of a green sea and then again slowing and eventually stopping near some sidings, the tools and equipment needed to keep the line running, interspersed with skinny rabbits skipping around the rubbish.

Finally into Liverpool Street station. Where it was once gloriously Victorian, all glazed tiles and crippled pigeons, it’s now bright white, neon lit kiosks replacing the brown panelling and smoke stains. Progress? It’s easier to navigate, easier to get to where you’re going but there is no charm, none at all. If you look upward though you can still see the amazing cast iron vaulted ceilings and the façade of the once famous Great Eastern Hotel.

The rehearsal room is a glorious run down live music venue. All anaglypta wallpaper and sticky floors. This place reminds me of my time in London in the mid 80s. It is cramped, dark and smells of stale beer and sweat, it’s beautiful! The students from The London Film School are all so wonderfully young, probably 10 years younger than my eldest child! What a life they have in from of them.

I’m nervous.Do they think I’m a seasoned actor, a professional? Again my self doubt rears it’s ugly head to nibble away at my confidence.I’m frantically reading through the script, worrying about my lines, convincing myself that everyone else is word perfect. I’m sure I’ll be ok once we start but god I’m feeling so old at this moment!

Rehearsal was brilliant. Very relaxed and informal and I remembered most of my lines. Shooting is next week and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into the role of slimy art dealer Keanan Chambers! Rehearsal went so well in fact that I have three hours to kill at Liverpool Street station. I’m absolutely melting away and my white shirt has turned grey with sweat and grime of the city. I console myself with a very expensive pasty and a coffee, content to watch all the passengers rush past. They seem to be a whirlwind of furrowed brows and too much luggage, worried they are lost or trying to find their loved ones. I will be so glad when we are mask free. Are people smiling at you? Are their lips turned down, silently mouthing obscenities? How I miss peoples faces! The station announcer is busy and surprisingly clear and the moving billboards are telling me to invest in Bitcoin or to buy my groceries from Weezy. A homeless young man uses the water fountain, his ribs showing clearly beneath his torn vest. Police escort him out. Where will he go I wonder? How did it come to this? Another young man, pale and obviously stoned slumps down to sleep for a while. When he eventually arises from his stupor his little stash of skunk falls to the floor and is kicked this way and that. He will be unhappy when it’s time to skin up!

So I wait. Another 2 hours in this interminable heat. Another 2 hours watching all these strangers walk on through. I’m finally home. Too tired to write an account of my return but it’s simply a reverse of the journey there! I soon fell asleep all ready for a zoom audition in the morning!