Day 101: Just when you think you're out...

The sun is a blinding white gash in the clear blue canvas of sky. No wind blows. Down here on the ground is a swimming pool. The surface of the water is pristine, calm. Terracotta tiles surrounding the pool gleam in the sunlight. Beside the pool is a villa, the faint noise of a television set drifting through the open patio doors. Nothing else save a potted palm tree, and a man.

The man is Ray Winstone. He lies, out of the shadow of the palm tree, sizzling in the midday heat. His belly is a hot plate. Sweat dribbles down his forehead. He grins. He is at peace.

The noise from the television grows louder. Too loud. Suddenly, the set crashes through the villa's window's glass and into the pool, shorting and zapping, sloshing water all over Ray Winstone's reclining body.

A figure appears framed in the broken window, hidden in shadow. The figure steps through the window, expensive polished shoes crunching on shards of glass. A tailored suit leg. Crisp shirt. Neat tie. Hardened face. It is Michael Caine.

Caine:
Ray!

Winstone:
Oh, no. No no no. Michael. No.

Caine:
Raaaaay.

Winstone:
No way. I'm done. I'm out. This is not happening.

Caine:
It bloody is happening, my son.

Winstone:
Look around you, Michael. Can't you see? I've got a pool. I've got a pool boy. Where's 'e gone? I've got a palm tree. A bloody palm tree, Michael. This is retirement.

Caine:
No it's not.

Winstone:
I'm retired.

Caine:
You're not.

Winstone:
Yes I am.

Caine:
You're facking facking not. Not not not. Facking. Facking not. If you are facking retired you better facking un-facking retire yourself right facking now. Facking right facking now. You 'ear me?

Winstone:
I'm not doing it.

Caine:
Just hear me out.

Winstone:
No, Michael. I'm well out of it.

Caine:
I'm putting together a film.

Winstone:
I don't make films no more, Michael.

Caine:
You never let me talk. Are you going to let me talk? Are you going to... No. Facking do not talk! I am going to talk. You are going to listen. You facking listen. You facking... Are you listening? No do not respond! I do not want you to respond. OK? Say "OK, Michael." Say "OK, Michael." Say it.

Winstone:
OK, Mi--

Caine:
--FACKING DO NOT FACKING TALK. I FACKING TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK. YOU DO NOT TALK. YOU FACKING DO NOT TALK. FACKING LISTEN.

Winstone:
...

Caine:
Good. Right. Where was I? You get me so flustered. So. I am putting together a film. One last film. One last big one. Guns, gangsters, getaway vans. Right? I'm in it. Broadbent is in it. Facking Gambon is in it. But we need one more man. We need one more man, Ray. You're that man, Ray. You're that man.

Winstone:
I can't do it, Michael. I just can't do it. That's all there is to it. I can't. I'm retired. Films about jewel heists, shootouts, that stuff is behind me.

Caine:
THAT STUFF IS IN FRONT OF YOU.

Winstone:
Look at my palm tree, Michael. Look at that goddamned beautiful palm tree. Look at it leaning in the sun. Going nowhere. Content to lean. That's me now. That's Ray Winstone now.

Caine:
FACKING NO FACKING NO FACKING NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO. NO. FACKING NO FACKING NO. FACKING FACKING NO. FACKING. NO. FACKING. FACKING NO.

Winstone:
Are you done?

Caine:
You're not done. You're not done. I'm putting together a film. Broadbent is in it. Gambon is in it. I am in it. And you, Ray, you are in it. One more time. You're in it. One more time, Ray. Just this one last time. This one last film about one last score. It's a deal, Ray. It's a done deal. You're in it. You're coming with me. You're coming, Ray. So pack your bag. Pack your bag you fat facking slag, because the plane is waiting, and we have a film to make. Now COME ON.

King of Thieves is coming to a theatre near you in late 2018.

Day 100: Friends with bicycles

I'm in Amici & Bici, a coffee shop on London Road. I'm by myself. This is a big deal.

I get incredible anxiety, thumping and leaden in my chest, whenever I'm alone and I walk past a coffee shop or bar I haven't been in before and I think about going in. It's weird. I get suddenly terrified that I'm not going to know the Procedure - that over the threshold in the darkened recesses of this strange new territory will be a coffee shop or bar unlike any other coffee shop or bar I have yet visited, with an esoteric ordering policy - that like I'll stumble in all awkward and sweaty, glancing left and right shiftily like a cartoon burglar, and I won't know that here you're supposed to post your drinks request into a slit between the floorboards, or whisper it to the cat painting in the corner, or just go round the counter and help yourself to that carrot cake sitting in its case there - and everyone will see me doing the Wrong Thing and tut and shake their heads and hound me back out of the door with their stony piercing glares of judgement.

I mean, I know that's insane. I know it is. But in that split-second as I'm walking past on my way down the street and I see a new place I could go in, I always have that lightning thought - What if there's a Procedure? What if I don't know the Procedure? And that zap of fear sends me puttering on my way past the new place and into somewhere old, and safe, and... Starbucks.

I don't get this anxiety when I'm with other people. When I have a friend with me I get a frisson of excitement out of not knowing What Happens at a place. I make a joke out of it with the server, even purposefully push the uncertainty into mild social transgression to see what will happen, to try to chip away at delineated order and routine and structure to find the real beating realm of chaos beneath. Cashiers get so bored. Why not be a bit silly with them and remind both you and them that we're strange funny human beings, not robots stuck in an endless loop of propriety protocols?

Except suddenly when I'm by myself all my confidence in that game falls away beneath me, and I'm left stood in a spotlight at the counter twisting my coattails feeling weird and twitchy and on some icky, repulsive way, seen.

So I don't go in new places. I usually chicken out without even being consciously aware of what I'm doing. I just get a pang of social anxiety and before I know what's happened I've quickened my pace and walked on by, and often the whole decision doesn't even reach my top layer of thought except as the last wispy ends of tentacles going all the way down that up here only stir up a vague sense of cowardice and regret, feelings that I don't dive down to analyse but merely let swirl with all the other turbid waters, sloshing around, spilling over the edges of my brain.

So but today I churned this all up as I strode into town, passing a string of coffee shops that looked delightful in the distance but that one after another I hurried past rather than entering. I thought about what exactly it was I was doing - avoiding a New Place in case I didn't know the Procedure, and I thought how stupid this is. Not even wrong or pathetic, just stupid. Not facing that fear of the unknown is worse in the long term than facing it. I've had a lifetime of avoiding things that trigger my social anxiety, and it hasn't worked. Running away isn't better.

... All of which is to say at half one in the afternoon today I find myself in a bright and airy cafe called Amici & Bici, by myself, waddling sheepishly up to the counter.

And you know what? The Procedure is not immediately apparent. I can't tell whether it's counter or table service. It actually is kind of confusing. There's no cast-iron rules in this country, borrowing from so many cultures as we do. So I stand at the counter, and wait to see if the woman tells me to take a seat. She doesn't, so I order coffee and cheesecake, pay at the till, and go to sit down. On each of the tables is a pot of flowers, and in each pot is a little note saying:

"Amici & Bici. Please place your order at the bar."

I smile reading this. None of us know what we're doing. We're all muddling through.

And I drink my coffee, eat my cake, and continue on into town. It's not like any of this is a major step for me. The rest of my day goes as it would have done, filled with minor frustrations and failures, all of the usual stuff. But I did go into that coffee shop. However tiny and silly that is, it's better than walking past. It's something.

Day 99: Spaghetti

Quick one tonight. Still feeling pretty low, but trying to see that as natural, as just the way of things. Fran's friend Genna was over today, the three of us ate veggie sausages for breakfast and watched Netflix, then Genna and I talked about game design and filmmaking while Fran showered, and afterwards we walked Mish in Meersbrook Park, sat atop the hill looking down at the city arrayed below, then we went home and Fran and Genna coloured a page from one of those adult colouring books (though Buffy the Vampire Slayer-themed, so "adult" there is a relative term), and I went upstairs to write/sneakily play Switch. After Genna got a taxi to the station Fran and I sat downstairs and watched The Good Place, and I played Switch, and we ate spaghetti, and the sun went down and the sky turned a deep sapphire blue and the dog rested his head in Fran's lap and I collected mushrooms from under trees in Zelda and everything was at peace.

Fran is brushing her teeth now, taking Mish down the street. We're going to watch something in bed, get a nice early night.

This is alright, isn't it? This is how people live. I'm trying, trying to see that this is so.

Day 98: To the front door

Eee, enough of that. Time to stop wallowing. I've showered. Clipped my nails. Trimmed my pubes. I've cleaned my bathroom. Put towels to wash. Edited some photos. Replied to messages.

I've just been fatigued, is all, and depression has swept in, as it always does when I don't have the resources to fight it. It's no big deal. It's what will happen from time to time. But I've been doing well. These 98 days, I've been doing well. Not as well as some people, or even most people, perhaps, but better than I was doing.

Look at it like running. I want to be a marathon runner, but I'm overweight and out of shape and my ankles are weak. I've spent years going to a couch rather than a coach.

But for 98 days now I've forced myself up and out of the door, run round the block, sometimes further. Sometimes much further, and I've been up all night pushing myself, then felt burnt out afterwards. Maybe it's good to push myself as hard as I can, but I think I crashed after the finish line of 90 days, and for the last week I've been back on that couch - still going at least out of the door and down to the front gate and back every day, but no more than that. And I've been feeling like there's this elastic around my waist that ties me to the couch, and the harder I run, the more I eventually get twanged back to the couch, and the more it hurts.

Well bollocks to that. Beliefs stay true for precisely as long as you believe them. Beliefs that you've held about yourself for many years are, yes, difficult and scary to overturn. They become part of your sense of identity. Losing them can feel like losing yourself. Like going all the way over a cliff into nothingness. There's always subconscious resistance to changing long-held beliefs about yourself.

But it can be done. And it's what I need to do. I don't have elastic round me. I'm not cursed to stay depressed and weak forever. I'm not inherently and inevitably broken.

I've been doing well. And I got tired.

I don't need to judge myself against marathon runners. I don't need to judge myself against my next-door neighbour who runs five miles a day. I don't need to judge myself against anyone at all.

I just need to do as much of what is difficult for me as I am able to do. And to carry on doing that day after day after day. If I can't run five miles then run one. If I can't run one mile then run to the postbox. If I can't run to the postbox then drag myself on my hands and knees to the front door, crawl over the threshold, breathe down the fresh empty air, and crawl back inside.

Darkness can be fought. It can always be fought. Even if just with the strength left in one fingernail. Do not stop. Everything is right where it should be.

Day 97: Moons

In work for 8am this morning for a delivery that didn't turn up till nearly 10. Busy lunch with theatre matinee. Spent all afternoon taking pictures for social media, staying an hour after my shift to get them done, then feeling at the end that I'd done a bad job. Don't like anything that comes out of me right now.

Got the bus home, tried to stay awake, fell asleep in my clothes face down on my bed, woke up at 11, ate cheese sandwiches, drank a cup of tea, watched rubbish on YouTube. Kept starting stuff and getting a few seconds in and closing it again. Restless and antsy, yet lethargic and drained at the same time. Pick up a book to try to do something worthwhile, can't make it through two sentences before flinging it down. Put on an easy video, but despise it within seconds. Nothing works. Passing time hurts. But don't want to sleep, either.

Ended up making evening disappear with Always Sunny on Netflix while playing Mario on my Switch in portable mode in my hands. Got about thirty power moons but already can't remember a single one.

But feel a bit better now. Will try to sleep.

Being depressed sucks.

Day 96: Soup

Another day with nothing to write, no words in my head. Stayed in bed till 1, saw Mike, did washing, ate soup and bread for tea (all I had energy to make)... I don't know. I've been snoozing. I'm up for work in three hours.

I'll see how I am tomorrow.

Day 95: Frayed

Just in now from a long, long shift, the kind of shift we in the trade like to call a piece of goddamned shit, and my feet are throbbing and my hamstrings are tight and I feel like my day off tomorrow is going to be utterly wasted, yet again, just recovering from work. Really down about this crap at the moment.

Yeah, I've got nothing tonight. Nothing doing. My brain is frayed. It's frazzled. It's taut, stretched, strained, torn.

Ahh, to hell with it. 2:30am and I'm wrecked. I'm not staying up trying to find something to write. I don't have anything to write. Fuck it.

I'll try to sleep. See what tomorrow brings.

See ya.