Slept until 7:00, which was great, except it made me pushed for time – we had a 9:00 call, earlier than usual because we were putting THE ZOO up in two days! So I didn’t even get breakfast, but that was fine, because I wasn’t hungry. (I will whine later about having to travel without my Magic Medication for weight loss, but the last shot hadn’t quite worn off yet.)

We started with company greetings and singing and then started blocking the show. Since Grinder doesn’t come in until the last 10 minutes, I made a little nest in the corner of the rehearsal room and started marking up Pinafore orchestral parts.

BTW, it was endlessly amusing to me that my character shares a name with a popular gay hookup app. For the ZOO rehearsal performance period, I changed my FB profile pic to this.

Although Grindr is used in the UK, some of the locals had never heard of it. Tyler and I spent some time in the pub at some point discussing what a British “Grindr” might be called. “Twiddly Bits” and “Spotted Dick” were suggested, but the winner was “Bangers and Mash”.

At lunchtime, I made an announcement that I was going to the motor store to get CPAP water and did anyone else need it, and ended up getting it for three other people. At the store:

ME: could I get four of the little bottles?

STORE LADY: you could just get the big bottle.

ME: no, because it’s going to four different people

They only had 3 little bottles, so I ended up buying a big bottle anyway, which I kept for myself.

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After lunch, we eventually got to my scenes. My buddies Martin and Paul were the ‘slappers’ – it’s actually part of the plot that Grinder has a blister (a mustard plaster) on his back, and he gets back-slapped jovially, which hurts (ha ha ha). Martin and Paul were also the leaders in the “boos” I got during curtain call. Thanks, guys. That’s what I get for playing the villain. BTW, Andrew had instructed me to play Grinder as a cross between a stuffy Victorian gentleman and Snidely Whiplash. I did my best.

We blocked the show all the way through to the curtain call, which was great! Plotting then to spend the next day running the show over and over (which we did).

I didn’t have any evening plans, and no one reached out to me directly (which was fine, I could have asked, and this was before someone cleverly created a Whatsapp group chat specifically for things like ‘where are we drinking tonight’?). So I went back to the house and installed the new mouse and decided to try the clothes washer. I randomly picked a setting called “Cotton plus 40” and the cycle took THREE AND A HALF HOURS. Whut? Well, Brad explained it to me later – European washing machines are often not connected to the house’s hot water, they have to heat the water themselves. So that setting means the temperature. A little experimenting showed that “Cotton plus 20” was only an hour and half, I could live with that. There was also an ‘express’ 15 minutes, which I assume was just cold water. The dryer took about an hour. These were small machines, but for me it was fine.

I went out around 7:00, thinking to go to one of the Italian restaurants on the top of the hill, but they were both closed (Monday). So I went to a Thai restaurant I’d not tried before, Barwan. They were kind of funky and informal and also served things like burgers, but I got two appetizers – fried calamari and vegetable skewers, both really good. I deliberately got the veggies because it’s easy to just not get veggies by default when you’re traveling, and these didn’t have a lot of green veggies, just like one piece of broccoli per skewer, but there were onions and peppers and also tomatoes, which I removed. And a class of Rose pinot grigio, which is a thing there and which is quite tasty.

Went home and had some cookies and explored my TV options. I was able to wirelessly connect my laptop to the TV (although for some reason, I had to set it up again every time rather than just saying, ‘remember this TV? project to it’). But it wouldn’t let me watch Gilded Age in the UK, dammit, which meant I was going to have to scroll past acres of spoilery commentary for the next couple of weeks. I watched a Ballard instead, and then did some reading. Went to bed at a reasonable hour.