Home is where the Art is!

Reading Ben Miller's article in today's Sunday Times about the joys of a shared house when he was a student and starting out in the world of comedy, I'm reminded of my own experiences of mixed domiciles. Throughout my years at drama school in Manchester I lived in a shared house but, mercifully, we all had our own bedsits. So we had a door to close against the world when we needed to, and yet company was call when a shoulder was required for crying on.

 The great thing about that house which stood in what was once the red light district of Manchester, now more fashionably known as West Didsbury village, was that the rent was so low that on completing my training I didn't have to head back to my parents. With a two room £5.95 per week bedsit as my major asset, I could hang onto it all throughout my 16 weeks touring for the Royal Exchange Theatre Company, and then come back to it for our run in Manchester. Indeed it proved a handy haven for other actors less prepared in their accommodation requirements to kip on the floor of.

I think I'm a bit of a homemaker. My preference for digs on jobs has always been a bedsit or a self-contained flat. The one or two experiences I've had living in a room in someone's house have never been positive. As actors we should be incredibly grateful to the people who are willing to open their homes to strange thespians for weeks on end, but I can't help thinking that it is an unnatural practice. With one notable exception in the early 1980s during a stint at Leicester Haymarket, living in someone else's house has never been for me. The retired couple in Cambridge, the potential serial killer in Newcastle, and the rabid nymphomaniac landlady in.....well, that's probably best kept quiet.

The incredible cost of drama school these days, and the cost of living in London drives many young graduates away from the area where they have trained and grown to love, and back to more suburban pastures just at the time when they most probably need to be in London to feel that they are moving forward in their career.  While the bosom of the family home is often to be welcomed, it's not a place that is likely to give you the kickstart you need into looking for, chasing, and pinning down work. Meals appearing on the table lovingly prepared by the alma mater, and washing disappearing from your room to reappear in cupboards freshly ironed and laundered is probably not the best way to get the drive you need to move your career onwards. I suppose I was incredibly lucky that from the moment I left drama school I never had to go back home. The dusky slag heaps of South Yorkshire would have been a very difficult place  from which to run a career.

Staying in London means renting, and most probably sharing, a flat. As a result you have to get out every week to earn the money to pay their rent and to buy food. I've always referred to my weeks out of work as my "Seven interesting ways with a baked potato" weeks. If I wasn't working then it was my choice to starve but, liking my food, I had to get out work. A lot of that work was acting, but the need to learn made me diversify, and it's the diversification that has brought me to where I am today.

And now we are about to move once again. We've been in our current home for almost 10 years. During which time we have become civil partners, something that wasn't legally possible last time we moved, and I've become a writer. Sitting here, in this our third bedroom which has been my office and workplace, I have blogged, I have written one book and most of a second, and I have managed to grab myself a reasonably regular column in "The Stage". So of course, I will miss this place. It's a time to look back over the last 10 years and realise just how much that both myself and my partner have managed to achieve together, and separately during that time. It's a huge amount and I'm immeasurably proud of both of us for doing so.

Mercifully we are not selling this place. We're turning it over into a rental, and hopefully will get a few chances to visit it.  Hopefully not too many if that new boiler holds out. We are moving a little further out-of-town into a flat that we both loved at first sight, and somewhere that is a joy to think about furnishing and equipping for life.  It probably won't be the last time we move, but will certainly be a roof over our heads for the next six to eight years I would have thought, so it's time to take stock.

Thank you to Denham Court which has brought us mainly joy, stability, and a great deal of comfort. We'll miss you, but we're looking forward to life at Highwood. New chapters are always exciting. Full of promise and opportunity. So here's to ours!

And so this is me signing off from Denham Court.