Finale

Currently each week lasts a month. There are periods of intense activity and days washed up on the shore, gasping and winded with sand in my pants. On the one day I made it to the actual shore, I ended up staggering about in quicksand up to my shins and had to wash my shoes, my clothes and myself after a short but frenetic wrestle back to firm ground. It’s taken forty years for the warnings from the Public Information films of the Seventies to finally pay off. At last, an encounter with quicksand. Who knows when I will finally tangle with a rogue combine harvester?

The few days I do nothing feel wasted and lazy. When I start berating myself I have to forcibly remind myself that the day before I spent two hours feeding lengths of birchwood ply through the lounge window. Will I ever understand that there is no such thing as a normal day in which all the activities are nicely parcelled out like exams on a school timetable?

Almost certainly not.

On the days we are back at the boat, London does its best to beguile us to stay. Oscar and I went to a theatre pub in Islington last Friday to see a friend of a friend’s play. On the way home we walked down the High Street, eating birthday cake flavoured ice cream, ticking off places that we’ve been going to and making memories in since he was tiny. It was all beautiful and a tiny bit sad.

I went to the V&A East with a friend to see the museum of the future, but NOW! It was a lot of fun and there were some stunning things to see. Also, I look forward to the day when there is a lot less brown furniture on show. I’d say 20% of it is awesome and 80% of it is brown.

I was going to fill in a feedback form to that effect, but this one was so perfect I didn’t think I could add to it.

I pinched a day alone and started with a visit to the RA Summer Exhibition. I thought it would be crowded and hot. It was neither of those things, which was a delight. It is very painterly this year and I love that. Having said that, I came across this gorgeous, Caravaggioesque photograph and thought: ‘I know that place.’ Of course I do. It’s Dungeness beach taken from inside Derek Jarman’s cottage.

While I was looking at it, two women joined me and one said to the other, ‘It’s that artist’s place. What’s his name?’ When they couldn’t remember, I said; ‘It’s Derek Jarman,’ which started a conversation in which I told them that after two decades of pilgrimage, I was finally moving there. One of the women said: ‘You’ve made your dream come true. If we had a drink, we could drink to that.’

When I was unpacking what I am still struggling to call my studio space, even though it is my studio space, because impostor syndrome, I decided to pin up my own work on the walls. I wrestled with this because impostor syndrome plus showing off. But I did it anyway. The work above is a collage I made about three years ago. I had completely forgotten about it, and then, when I read the words I had pasted onto it, I cried. It says: ‘I dream of building a world by the sea, where you can taste the green of the water, and the world begins again with every tide.’ It came true, but with added quicksand, which is how you know it’s real and not a dream.

I visited the 150 Years of Liberty exhibition, which was beautiful and had this amazing patchwork tent. I also spent a long time at the Frederic Malle counter, talking to the patient and extremely knowledgeable saleswoman. I went to revisit the L’Eau D’Hiver fragrance in the hope that I wouldn’t like it as much as I did when I first smelled it. Sadly, I like it just as much and now I must wait for a big birthday/anniversary/windfall to buy some.

I took myself to the Jenny Saville exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and it was absolutely stunning. Her early work in particular can be clearly compared to Lucian Freud’s portraits, but for me, there is a lightness of touch here that lifts it, head and shoulders above Freud’s. Her ability to create depth without heaviness, the interplay of light and shade, the raw beauty and human connection was really moving. I was properly awed.

We said we would leave the boat after Oscar’s time at college is up. He performed his last play on Thursday night. We are spending the weekend packing up the last bits of the boat and the cat and heading off to Kent for real on Sunday. Even though we will be visiting every week for one reason and another, this is actually it now. We are all very sad, even though it is for the very best of reasons for all of us.

Oscar finished on a high, playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. It was a fantastic performance. I know this not because I have seen a lot of theatre in my time (I have) but because Jason, who detests all theatre and Shakespeare doubly so, sat through the entire thing and cried at the end. I feel like this should go on Oscar’s CV as the best endorsement an actor can get. He passed the Jason Wheatley theatre test with flying colours.

Two years ago, when he started this journey we knew we had rolled the dice on an enormous gamble. He didn’t want to be here in every sense of the word. He couldn’t see a future because he could barely get through this moment or the next.

College gave him a future, not just as an actor, but more importantly as himself. It slowly worked its magic on him and gave him permission to come back to life again.

Let’s be realistic here. Being an actor is hard work and for every one that makes it to the red carpet there are hundreds who don’t. We don’t know whether Oscar’s name will be in lights one day but that doesn’t matter.

Now, even though it is the end of one way of living with him, I can take comfort in knowing that once, when I had almost lost hope, our son came back to us after being so very far away, and that’s worth an infinite number of red carpets.