Up again around 8am – second lie-in in a row! – and ran K down to nursery before popping in to see a friend who’s right at the end of her pregnancy and trying desperately not to let Baby come along yet. She was feeling awful today and really struggling, but she’s almost full term and there shouldn’t be any issues, which is something I tried to reassure her of.

I ran home quickly before popping down to the nursery to film an interview with K and the nursery manager for her course, which she then has to come home and edit into something coherent for her tutor to observe her clinical practice. Or something.

Had a look around the nursery, too, which is absolutely lovely. It’s a private nursery just down the road from where we live and it’s so beautifully set out with so many stimuli for the children. I dropped in on the babies (3-18 months) who were all unbelievably cute and gorgeous. The nursery itself is a large private house that’s been converted for use and the back garden is jam-packed with awesome play equipment which really let’s the kids throw themselves around and have fun.

Popped home again (lots of popping today, clearly) for half-an-hour before going back to collect K and coming home to polish up the multi-media stuff for the Royal’s scratch performance tonight, when I’ll finally get chance to see the whole piece as one and work a little on the timing of the various elements.

The majority of the afternoon was spent between Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, making logos and composites in the former and editing together a montage of war footage in the latter, all of which went pretty quickly and easily, to my surprise. I wasn’t sure I’d get it all done for the rehearsal/performance tonight, but in the end I did it fairly comfortably, which I was really chuffed with.

Headed to Northampton and dropped K at her appointment, then went on to catch up with a couple of friends I’ve not seen in ages. Suze, who I’ve worked with extensively for nearly 8 years, gave me some really good ideas of how to try to engage the Youth Theatre groups we’ve been struggling with recently, which I’m hoping I’ll be able to put into practice over the next term to try to pull the young people into the sessions and get them to engage.

After a quick coffee and catch-up, I moved on to the scratch performance, which started a little late but was hugely useful in working out how and when my pieces can slot in most unobtrusively, in order to best support the work that the group are doing on the stage.

Late start meant late finish again, getting away from the Royal around 9pm, which was quite a bit later than I’d wanted to get out, then picked K up from her bro’s house where she was babysitting while our niece was out with them for her birthday meal. I did get to see J, though, to wish her a happy birthday, which was really nice because I wasn’t expecting to see her.

Dinner, then, was incredibly late, getting home as we did around 11pm, which then meant I wasn’t getting to sleep until well after midnight as I was wide awake from the food. Ho hum. At least I get a proper lie-in, veg-out session tomorrow morning. Bliss.