A Day in a Double Life
So this blogging thing…
… I talk about a whole load of stuff, let’s face it, and a great deal of it is rambling, because I currently lack the time to be concise. But its been pointed out to me that in all the wandering thoughts about books, theatre and stuff, I don’t really ever talk about that thing which is I guess one of the mainstays of the personal blog – what I actually do with my time.
And I suppose the answer is, depends.
Great thing about being a freelance, is that every week tends to be a bit different. There’s not really an average day, in the sense that this week I might be doing nothing except write books, and next week I might do nothing but rigging and focusing, and ne’er shall the two meet.
But, taking as a base-line those weeks when I’m not wholy committed to one or the other, I guess I can say than an ‘average’ day goes something like this…
I’m not exactly a morning person, but oddly enough I find myself unable to function if I get up much past 10 a.m. and have somehow managed to tune my body clock, annoyingly, to wake me up at 7.50 a.m. on the dot. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the stern words I’ve had with my nervous system have failed to fix this problem and so there I am, without fail, every morning, staggering out of bed looking not unlike a chewed back-combed mop. The boiler in my flat is… eccentric… so I tend to dive straight at the shower in order to prevent the eccentricities leaving me with only tepid water (because the only thing worse than a cold shower is a tepid one) and then, tragically and oh yes, it’s usually straight to what my Dad always called the wordface, to chip chip chip away. Breakfast happens on lighting days without fail, because trying to rig without breakfast is a disaster – it tends to be skipped on writing days.
There’s no hard and fast rule about how I write. Except, perhaps, that it tends to be quite fast, once I get going. I like to write in isolation, but recent adventures as a lampie has forced me to acquire the skills of writing in cafes on a laptop, and I can usually manage a few thousand words before the batteries die. (I cannot tell you how much I resent the unwillingness of most coffee shops across the UK to let me use their mains power… if national rail can do it, then why not Cafe Nero? Seethe.) At this time of year you’ll find me writing in at least two jumpers, two pairs of socks, slippers, fingerless gloves and quite often, a hot water bottle. I really, really feel the cold, and my fingers feel it more than anywhere, turning blue at the slightest excuse.
On a good day, writing will see me through until lunch time without a pause, and in the afternoon if I’m having a very good day, I pop out to see friends. My mates are all pretty much of my age group – university friends, school friends, RADA friends – and between them they cover every possible range of working hours. Techies working hours vary the most, but there’s usually a lot of hanging around during the day before a call to work at 5.30ish in the evening. For others, who work the unsociable hours of 9 a.m.-5 p.m. (which tend to be a technician’s down-time) in the evenings when I’m not on call or those few weekends that we all mutually have free are spent in the highly glamorous activities of playing board games, cards, eating ridiculous quantities of food and watching mutually appreciated box sets. On special occasions my absolute favourite social activity is eating Thai food and playing table football – I’m also attempting to convince a few more people to play me at chess, but it’s uphill work. When there were ping pong tables around London this summer, that too made it into one of my top ten things to do with mates, despite, or perhaps, because of my incompetence.
But when my friends are, heaven forfend, leading their own lives, then the afternoon is more writing. I tend to write with music, simply because as a city girl I find complete silence rather unnerving. The best music is, oddly enough, movie soundtracks, as they tend to have just enough merit to not annoy me, but not nearly enough to distract – a sort of amiable white noise with which to type. On a decent day, I’ll wrap up writing at about 5 p.m., either to head off to work at a theatre for the evening or, on some nights, to go to bed. This is a response to the relatively new phenomenon of my life – the over-night turnaround. This is a thing encountered in theatres where shows are being performed in repertory and every three or four nights the stage has to be reset from, say, an all-singing, all-dancing version of Alice in Wonderland the Musical to Three Men In a Box, a sonorous little piece about three men locked in a room talking about incest. Or shows to that effect. Whenever a theatre doesn’t have an audience in, they’re not making money, so it’s important for the men with the money to make sure that every show is turned around as quickly as possible, and if this involves getting in technicians to work overnight, sobeit. An overnight call begins, on average, at 10 p.m. and can go on until 3-4 a.m., depending on how badly it all goes. There’s no really good measure to judge this – sometimes the various jostling departments trying to get their jobs done on stage just click, and a turnaround can happen in a few blissfully easy hours. Sometimes lighting will find itself waiting for stage crew to wait for sound to wait for automation to clear x bit of scenery, and it all stalls like a baby goat in a python’s digestive tract. For these circumstances, the 5 p.m. nap was patently invented.
Trying to sleep during the day is a bizarre thing for someone whose body clock isn’t tuned to do it on a regular basis. When you normally try to sleep in the city, at night, sure there are usually a few background sounds – a car alarm, kids shouting sometimes, very faint distant traffic – but during the day there’s much more of it, and different sounds. The traffic is busier, louder, nearer; the kids are younger, and come with the rattling of prams. There are doors opening and closing still, pipes gurling busily, washing machines running – it just doesn’t feel like the normal environment for sleep. I can usually only manage an hour and a half before my body kicks me back awake with a cry of ‘you have to be kidding me’ at which point I attempt to move at hibernation speed until I’m absolutely forced to get up and go to work. Taking the bus into work at 9 p.m. is another strange experience – you feel that you’re going absolutely the wrong way, and can quite often be the only person on a deck, whooshing past busy pubs and full restaurants full of people just wondering whether it’s time to head to the station in the opposite direction. Once at work, though, adrenaline tends to kick in for at least the first few hours. I tend to lag a little around 1.30 a.m., and pick up again at 2 a.m. with my sort-of-second-wind, if we can call it that. Then by 3 a.m. it’s back home, through streets inhabited only by taxis and delivery trucks, and the odd lesser-spotted night bus. First time I did this return trip, I was surprised by where there were patches of humanity. Streets that I associate with huge bustle and life are deserted, next to no traffic of the kind that doesn’t really slow down for the corners; but there are odd patches of side-street leading to clubs that I hadn’t even noticed existed during the day, around which there are strange gaggles of people showing no sign of either going home, or having much in the way of fun. The urban fox comes into its own at this hour of the night, and is a fairly undisputed king of the inner city streets. My estate is so quiet when I get back that the first act through the front door is to take off my steel-capped boots and pad around on practical tip-toes, it being one of those estates where sound travels ridiculously easy. Sleeping is surprisingly easy – much easier than going to bed directly after a show, when cues and speeches are still floating around your head – but the morning afterwards is always punctuated by my body waking up at 8 a.m. on the dot with a sudden thought of ‘oh god – will the shower be tepid?’
This is, of course, something of an irregular pattern in my life, as is pretty much everything about being self-employed. Three weeks ago I barely wrote a few hundred words a day, and my life was full of fresnels and focus notes and cue numbers – over Christmas I won’t touch a lantern unless something goes seriously, seriously wrong with my plan – hell, I may even ask someone else to handle the light switches, it’s going to be that kind of a holiday – and as a swings-and-roundabouts effect my word count is likely to soar in response. It’s all a bit hard to predict, really. And that’s kinda what makes it so much fun.
