Never the Twine shall Meet

And this was Day 2 of my Rope-related performance at Her Royal Highness the Dear Old Queen's Historic Dockyard, although for the duration, Her Royal Highness has been replaced by Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria.

It was up to me to get up and get ready for my lift, and I did exactly that although both parents checked up on me. I hopped out of the door and was gone.

We signed in and got our orders which were the same as yesterday and the littlest actor turned up but he had 2 problems which affected his performance: bright blue trainers and a massive toothache. One was authentically Victorian, but the other, not so much. He left during the day.

We were set up in Sunny Street which is only round the corner form our performance pitch last year. The giant thing behind us represents the Rope-making machine on which we work: and we also get a handcart and hats.

So here is another picture of some rope (section of anchor rope from HMS Victory): a fairly historic item, should be in a museum or something. Oh, it is.

Many other actors are supplied by our theatre and include nurses, suffragettes, royalty, soldiers, prisoners, policemen, Scrooge, vagabonds, musicians, chimney sweeps, a judge, pearly kings, street vendors, beggars, pneumatic-busted whores, and unspecified - such as the middle of the 3 whores hanging out of the pub window: he has quite a big beard for a whore, depends on what takes your fancy I suppose.

Anyway, here we are doing our thing, with me strutting out front manfully, holding it all together, you know the way it is.

We did our performance many many times during the day and in my mind, I was the stand-out performance artist and not enough grateful members of the public stopped to watch us. But the show did indeed go on as we planned: even with only 2 parents and a childminder we faithfully completed our task like true pros.

Because we have a good union (or maybe government rules about under-age performers) we had numerous breaks and absolute packets of snacks and it was all pretty good actually. The bizarre angels-on-segways trumpeted past from time to time and our pictures were taken more times than the Mona Lisa.

We had a few goes at begging: I lose a leg and lie on the ground and we increased our takings to £12. One of my audiences included Erin but I didn't see her or anyone else I knew, too busy acting.

So the parents visited today and appeared on and off throughout: I later learned that they had bought 12 different kinds of cheese. Strange place to buy cheese, you might think, shouldn't they be buying me Xmas presents instead? Perhaps they just haven't told me about those bags hidden in Jof's room.

I also got a letter that gets me a free ticket to the panto and they want me to audition for something else. At the end of the day we all did the massive parade behind a load of Scotsmen in dresses playing dead cats.

I got home and wasn't hungry because of all the sausage rolls and watched Youtube videos to calm down. But hot food made me feel better and I sang carols until bedtime at 10.