Alone In An Hotel Room...

It's Monday night, and I'm in an hotel room, alone but for Siegfried serenading Brunhilde on my ipod. The window is open to the gentle comings and goings of evening traffic on Alton's high street and English flowers (I still can't distinguish flowers in this country, so anything not a rose or a pansy simply remains English) nod in a window box beside me.

The hotel is a local stopping house for business people; the carpet to the bar is well-worn, and the mattress springs complain of their aches. And yet, it is entirely glamorous in my eyes. I want nothing more than this; a room of my own before a car arrives early tomorrow morning to bear me off to a day's work on a film set. That the hotel isn't Claridges and the car will most likely be some form of Vauxhall product matters not even in the smallest way. The simple satisfaction of this is marvellous.

Somewhere along the wandering lane that is my acting career, I realised that I don't ache for red carpets and my name in neon. I almost certainly started out in that mood, wanting gowns and flashing cameras as much as any other girl raised on Drew Barrymore and Barbies. But now I find I simply want to do good work that somewhere, somehow, makes a difference to some stranger's world. I have no wish to meet this person, or hear from them what a difference I made. I've had that experience; as an ex-soap actress, I've been accosted by members of the viewing public, and it makes for a deeply uneasy trip to the toilets in the mall. No, I just want to go to bed each day knowing that I have a place and a purpose in this tangled web of a world.

Of course, if at some point, that web happens to involve Clarridges and a gleaming Bentley, these bedsprings will be happily left to complain under someone else.