Am I An Actress or Do I Make Muffs?

Despite swapping an unfriendly incompetent agent for an approachable organised one, I don’t seem to have any auditions. I’ve tried getting new photos, reglossing the CV, putting calling cards in phone boxes, and nothing seems to work. Not that I’m overly upset about this. I mean, I’ve only cried about it 3 times in as many months. I’ve got my ambitions set on one particular job only, the casting for which is imminent, and after which point I will change my life completely, and think of something else to do. There speaks an addict.

However, instead of working towards playing this particular Dickens character, I seem to have become her. I spend all day in my own personal sweat-shop, making muffs, stitching words, and hoping, hoping that someone will buy something. In the meantime of any money coming in, I cross my fingers every time I use public transport that my Oyster card will still work.

This Saturday I made a discovery. I found myself in a ‘house sale’ in the wilds of West London, where media folk out posh each other. I can’t really explain how I got here. I only know that for some reason, without ever opening my mouth in agreement to the idea, I felt morally obliged to be there. The set up was that a woman (probably an ex actress/casting director/bored wife and mother) wanted to sell some of her home made tutt from home, and thought that it would be good to get other people to do the same. Here’s what I discovered: I HATE WEST LONDON and all who perpetuate the vile uptight, let’s competitively relax with alternative therapies off the Kings Road and send our kids (who are called Liberty and Flip Flop) to expensive schools, and network at the school gates with an intensity you wouldn’t believe lifestyle.

I find myself setting up my muff stall in a room where a dotty old lady is setting up her fairy grotto. She sells these home made pipe cleaner dolls for £50 each, and she does a roaring trade, befriending every little girl in sight. She has them running around for her, writing lists of fairy names, and begging them to visit her in her ‘fairy factory’. She’s really quite shrewd. She has a ledger into which each fairy is named and numbered, and ‘every day at 6 o’clock all the fairies everywhere – some are in Hollywood, others in London – they tap their wings and tell each other their news on the fairy line, so they won’t be lonely.’ This goes down a storm, along with the fact that her daughter is a very successful casting director. It’s funny how many times I am given this piece of information. I quite like the fairy lady.

The day goes downhill as West London mummy 1 arrives to sell her wares from the sofa to my right, and West London mummy 2 installs herself on the sofa to my left. Never have I met two more unfriendly people. Fairy lady and myself are totally ignored, and as friends of WLM1 and 2 arrive and start buying the most hideous items, I look on in horror and can’t help thinking they’re all cunts. I quickly realise that all the identikit mummies in their dress down Saturday uniform of tight jeans and UGG boots are all obliged to buy off their friends. They do not glance in my direction. It’s almost as if they know they’re not allowed. I sit and hand-embroider my labels all day, becoming steadily more invisible. I really am Little Dorrit.

Key moments are the repeated exclamation – ‘No darling, not at all, just pay me at the school gates,’ and a moment later on as I’m packing up. I’d phoned Mr Beaten to rescue me from the hell hole, having sold no muffs at all. It was 3 o clock and I couldn’t face the idea of staying till 8 when the sale officially closed. My hostess, obviously feeling guilty about getting me along in the first place, came to admire my work, and seizing on the fact that it’s all hand embroidered, says (of WLM2, who is just there) ‘Oh, Jocasta teaches embroidery at Chelsea!’ at which point WLM2 picks up a muff and I start babbling – ‘I’m just a novice really….my grandmother was an embroidery designer, shop in Berwick street…etc’ and the more I talk, the more she says nothing, looks stern, and eventually puts the muff down. What a cow! Even if she thought it was shit, she should have had something polite to say, like ‘it’s lovely/charming’. She could see that I’d sold nothing, and that she had sold hundreds of hideous purple chenille scarves, so it’s not as if I was any threat at all. I had a big rash where my moustache once was for god’s sake, and a yellow spot in the corner of my mouth. The only reason I can think of for this cold treatment, is that she thought I was too young, and therefore contemptuous.

I wonder if my own North London clique comes across in the same way as the West Londoners did to me? Is it just the snobby London world which excludes the outsider? I like to think that actually West London is the absolute worst place on earth, populated with insecure, soon to be out of a job media scum. But that’s just me.