In a regional train station, far far away…

“A lovely, creamy latte and a copy of Woman’s Own for the journey,” she thinks, pushing her purple John Rocha bag up her arm.

“Any muffins or pastries with that?” he says, wearing a flame-licked shirt, gel-spiked hair and a tattoo of a Flying V on his wrist.

“Oooh go on then, I’ll ‘av a skinny blueberry muffin…. not gonna make me very skinny though is it!” she laughs into her M&S faux croc purse.

“Umm, just a tea?” he says, shakingly, while counting out the warm change recently divested from his green cords.

“Do you have just normal decaff tea?” she asks, leaning about three metres over the counter to try and read the boxes stacked on the machine, her nose jutting out like an axe, her ethnic beads running along the small box of toffee crisps like a drumroll.

“Can I have a spot more milk?” she breathes across her scarf, her giant painted eyebrows raised like a plaintive drawbridge.

“No sugar,” he scowls, folding his copy of Stanley Gibbons for a fifth time, rendering it unreadable and 30cm wide.

Thank you Eleanor.

I appear to be on a one-woman mission to make every young actor hate me…

I don’t understand the appeal of strip clubs.

Ejaculating orange notes for two foot-smelling, badly-carpeted hours, just to watch a woman in bum floss, out of reach, jiggle around to chart hits. Call me old fashioned, but for less money and less moral eczema couldn’t you just go to a normal club, dance with a stranger and, maybe, if she wants to you, dance against her thigh and, eventually, buy her breakfast?

The power balance between those on stage and those paying to watch the stage is a tricky one, in and out of the strip club. A successful comedian told me on Sunday that she would never date someone who approached her after a gig because the status imbalance is immediately off.

But the dynamic I want to talk about here isn’t about sex. It isn’t even necessarily about power. It’s about fun. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis (it’s okay – he’s too dead to object) fun things are funner than unfun ones. And by gawd is there some unfun theatre out there. Harrowing, poignant, affecting, intriguing, scary and clever, sure. But not fun. Which is all well and good – too much cream makes a diabetic, after all.

However, the kind of unfun play that really gets my goiter is that which is so clearly, so unapologetically, so shamelessly more fun for those on stage than those in the audience. Long plays. Indulgent plays. Plays that are little more than a sexually-charged children’s party game with us, the paying audience, playing the patiently bored parents thinking about what we need to pick up for dinner on the way home and if we’ve paid the council tax….   READ THE REST HERE

That’s right. I dressed up as The King. In my garden. And yes, I will never be as handsome as Presley.

See more at http://goppeldangers.tumblr.com/

This one took about four minutes. But three of them were spent trying to find enough necklaces.

See more at goppeldangers.tumblr.com.

On Saturday me and my rather tall, rather fit, rather well-equipped-with-a-brand-new-bike friend John decided to cycle to Hastings. I was, needless to say, dressed like a lumpy orthopaedic nurse with a semi-ancient bike originally built for a 6′3″ manbloke.

Things were going fine until ‘Royal’ Tunbridge Wells. I say fine – I was most definitely holding John back and starting to worry that it might rain the whole way – but my bike was still rolling. Until, that is, I hit a rather steep hill, threw my bike into a rare and clunking gear and – hey presto! – the entire rear derailleur hanger thing (i’m a little sketchy on the names here) threw itself into my spokes like hari kari.

Which meant walking all the way back to Tunbridge Wells, to a lovely bike shop where a very kind man got the hanger back to roughly the right area. He then said something about ‘not being suitable for the roads’ and ‘really wouldn’t advise cycling this’ and ‘it’s miles too big for you’ but he then followed that up with phrases like ‘I can’t physically stop you’ and ‘please just be careful and don’t change gear.’

I gave him a fiver, a lifetime of gratitude and a hysterical laugh, before once again hitting the road. At this point I noticed that half of my front tyre had leapt off the wheel and was bulging like a hernia. Which meant making John stop, again, letting down my tyre, putting it back together, pumping it up and trying to get further than a mile out of town before something else went wrong.

“I’m sort of expecting to look round and see your bike, like, on fire or something,” said John once we’d got pedalling again.

And so there I was, with no gears, a possibly explosive front tyre, sticking breaks and more squeaks and clunks than a Miles Davis album, for the fortysomething miles to the seaside. Still, at least I found Nigel Farage’s house:

The rest of the journey was beautiful. We spent about 10 miles of it on a converted train track called the Acorn Way, which was glorious, before slipping onto the winding back roads that eventually led to the sea. Here is John, on the Acorn Way, clearly having the time of his young life

What with all my dicking around, we didn’t actually get to Hastings until the evening, but there was still time for one exceedingly dangerous, short-lived attempt at a swim in the sea:

Sadly, the pebble beach and huge waves meant that, rather than a refreshing dip, I was instead treated to a full-in-the-face, kick-in-the-balls, my-god-I-can’t-stand-up aquatic assault which was about as attractive to watch as it was pleasant to endure:

So, after bravely running the hell out of the sea and back to my bike, we went for fish and chips and a lovely refreshing pint. Because we are pure lad.

It was nice. You should do it.

Last night I bought 99p worth of wheat puffs from an international supermarket on the Lea Bridge Road. Then I bought £1.29 of popping corn. As the corn popped I poured the puffs onto little sheets of cling film and sellotaped them into the shape of a thatched cottage.

To try and cover up my evidently brown hair I then sellotaped a clingfilmed roll of popcorn over my forehead, put on more pearly eyeshadow than my poor skin has ever known, tucked a yellow duster into my bra and – hey presto – I was Andy Warhol’s famous 1985 polaroid of Dolly Parton.

To see all more Goppeldangers, visit goppeldangers.tumblr.com.

Oh, and here are some lovely outtakes for you to cradle and treasure…

Here’s my latest IdeasTap theatre column. Nice illustration isn’t it?

The likelihood of me getting married is just a nudge below Michael Gove getting his tits pierced.

Were I to slide my arse down the luge of matrimony into the inevitable wedgie of married life, however, I can’t imagine that I’d choose to do so in a theatre. The last thing my cynical and fickle heart needs is to start making love promises in a house of lies. Because, let’s be honest, theatre is a viper’s nest of pretence, secrecy, illusion and doubt.

I mean, can you really imagine standing on the same spot that Othello proclaimed that, “to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved,” and say “I do, till death us do part?” Or to hit the same mark as the scheming, sculpting Evelyn Ann Thompson in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things to claim that you will love, honour and obey? Of course not. And yet many people do.

The revenue gained from space hire in theatres is an increasingly large and important way for arts organisations to keep their buildings open. Like a snouting, snuffling pig being sectioned up for bacon, sausages and pork, every venue worth its ice cream will compartmentalise its nooks, crannies and underused appendages to try and gain a little more income. And fair play to them. It certainly beats astronomical ticket prices…. CONTINUE READING

Here’s an article I wrote for Vice about all the lovely Hasidim in my neighbourhood and their giant cars…

Two types of people drive big cars in Upper Clapton; drug dealers and Hasidic jews.

While the former tend to have large, raised, black Chryslers and Cayennes, the latter are usually seen revving and clunking around the streets of North London in patched and pitted motorwhales called things like Space Wagons, Espaces and Space Cruisers. Space, it would seem, is the final frontier in Jewish transport.

North East London, you see, is not a community; it is a marble run of parallel communities, sliding alongside each other apparently unseen or, at least, unregarded. Young black teenagers are shot in London Fields, while young white professionals play ping pong less than 200 metres away; West African evangelist churches gather in industrial estates, while Polish families shop at the cash and carry next door; Turkish grocers play pool in social clubs while illegal Vietnamese immigrants sell pirated DVDs beside their vegetable racks. But of all the satellite communities, orbiting around the E5 and N16 postcodes, possibly the most remote, the most insular, but most readily identifiable, are the Hasidic jews. And their juggernaut cars.

Almost every tall, rounded, space-hogging car in Clapton is driven by a man in white shirt, smart black coat and kippah, with ringlets and sensible black shoes. White stockings are, it seems, optional. But why do the Hasidic dads of North London love these unfashionable, unfeasible motors? Is it their inconspicuous antiquity? Is it their laughable acceleration uphill? Is it the fact that you could fit all the members of Funkadelic inside and still have room in the boot for snacks?

Talking of boots, just what do Hasids keep in the back of their car? What music do they listen to on long journeys? Did they pay more for a specific colour of car? What’s in the glove box? Once these questions enter your mind, they’ll itch like a cheap wig under a polyester headscarf.

Which is why I decided to clamber, awkwardly, determinedly and publically, over those invisible, sliding social barriers to do that most uncommon and unrecommended thing; ask…

The row of shops on which I conduct most of the conversations gives an interesting impression of Hasid priorities; there is a balloon shop, a wine merchant, a bakers, a shoe shop selling footwear so sensible that you might mistake it for car parts, a Hasid taxi firm, a toy shop and a grocers. Taken as a whole, they point towards a life of quiet, domestic, but frequent, celebration. The pharmacy, on the other hand, is run by Muslims.

“Of course, you would wonder that,” says the owner of a dark blue Mitsubishi, when I ask why I see so many Jewish men driving people carriers in Clapton. “But, the answer is simple; we have big cars because we have big families.” Of course.

We all have excuses for why we don’t talk to our neighbours and the misheld belief that the Hasid community of North London is inherently unfriendly, secretive, protective, even aggressive, is a common one. It is also, in my experience, entirely unjustified. Of all the men I approached, the majority were happy to talk – albeit briefly – and those who weren’t apologized politely, usually blaming a lack of time or the need to be somewhere else. I’m not sure I would be so polite if a stranger stopped me in the street to ask why so many short-haired women in their twenties ride drop-handled bikes.

The man in the Mitsubishi – a born and bred Highbury resident – was, like my father, a builder. But whereas my father conducted his business out of a hideous white fiesta, full of rotting apple cores, tobacco packets, sawdust and lose tools, this car was bare, but for a child’s seat in the back.

Another man, a locksmith, explained that he needed a large car to run his business and transport the tools of his trade. As he opened the boot I was met with a collection of boxes as neat and pleasingly-stacked as a Le Corbusier drawing. Of course, he wouldn’t let me photograph them, but more out of professional security than a squeamishness about being captured on camera. When I asked him what his car said about him he chuckled, looked me full in the face and drawled, “It says that I can’t afford a better car.”

Perhaps, however, the greatest response came from a man driving a frankly obscene lilac behemoth called a Hyundai Trajet. “A car is a hidden palace,” he explained. Amazing. And just what does this king of the road listen to while he’s sitting in his hidden palace? “I listen to a lot of audiobooks with my children.” Does he, as my family did, spend hours battling against the physical agony of traffic boredom by listening to Matilda? Or George’s Marvellous Medicine? “Yes, we do listen to Roald Dahl stories. But mainly a lot of Jewish stuff.” It’s the “stuff” that makes it.

On a side street I see one Hasidic man shuffling between a large redbrick 1930s house and the passenger seat of his standard-issue, navy blue, puckered Renault Espace. He’s carrying a blue mannequin head in one hand and a fistful of wigs in the other. Both doors are, sadly, closed by the time I catch up to him.

As I wander back through the quiet, sunny streets of Clapton, stepping between Honda Shuttles, mountainous Subarus, dun-coloured Space Wagons and enough Toyota Space Cruisers to cross The Red Sea, I see middle-aged Jewish men wearing headsets, shuttling children home from school, tuning the radio, failing to indicate, eating sandwiches, crunching their gears and smoking out of the driver’s window. Acting, in short, like every other frustrated, encapsulated London driver on these clogged and narrow roads.

“Driving in London is a nightmare,” says the man with the Blue Mitsubishi. “And it’s just getting worse and worse. But we don’t have any choice; we live here.”

We live here. That, I suppose, is the whole point. He lives here and so do I. And for the first time in years, we crossed an invisible social boundary to tell each other so.