Yearly Archives: 2009

I apologise for the lack of updates after my not-too-rubbish start to the year with regular updates etc. I have, however, been somewhat preoccupied over the last couple of weeks with various mentally-busy work-related things, including producing a DVD of a project I worked on last year and completing a First aid course for work at the Grove.

Most excitingly of all, though, is the fact that I’ve been settling in to my new role as Chairman of Live Life Then Give Life, something of which I’m very proud. Our former Chairman, Emma, has felt it necessary to stand down, although she will, thankfully, be staying on as a much-valued trustee. At a meeting two weeks ago, the rest of the board of trustees saw fit to elect me into post as Chairman and I’ve been pretty much rushed off my feet ever since.

I clearly chose precisely the wrong two weeks to step up into the new role, having spent my first week in post working 10-4 on First Aid every day and my second week locked in my home editing suite to cut, design and finalise the DVD for the schools project I worked on with Suze last term. There’s a showing of the vid at the school on Tuesday morning, so it’s the usual deadline-getting-your-butt-into-gear deal as I rush to make sure it all looks tip-top.

Despite the fact that it’s taken me a lot longer than I expected, I’m really proud of the result – it’s going to be a great representation of the project and a great show real for both my work and for Suze’s Catalyst Theatre Arts, the company she runs with her sister, who throw a lot of work my way so it’s nice to be able to give them some marketing material out of it, too.

So it’s not been the best of weeks to try to get to grips with all the extra bits and bobs that go with being a Chairman as opposed to a trustee, but I’ve already seen a whole new side to the charity and what we do. I’m also delighted to see the way our two new trustees have slotted in to the team. The problem with having a team that’s as close-knit as the Live Life Then Give Life team are is that when you introduce new people to the equation it can be difficult for them to find their place and not feel out-of-the-loop or left out. But the current board of trustees have really taken to the new guys and have been working brilliantly with them from Day One, which is such a great feeling not just for me but for eveyone.

Hopefully now things are on a slightly more even keel, I’ll be keeping the updates coming through on a more regular basis. Unless work gets manic again, I guess…

The alarm goes off at a frankly unconscionable 5am and I drag myself up and into the shower. K and I hurriedly dress and K bolts some cereal while I head down with Dazz, scrape the car off and bring it round the front. Strangely, we’re not as overly concerned about getting parking tickets as we were when we parked here to unload last night. Wonder why?

We’re on the road by 6am, heading South as rapidly as we safely can, making good time until we have to make a stop for petrol, delaying us just a touch. We get back to Mum and Dad’s around 8.30, where I drop K as it’s closer to the M1 than our place, then pretty much turn straight around, heading again for fuel (I wasn’t going to fill my whole tank at service-station prices when I knew I could top up in MK for about 5p per litre cheaper), grabbing something for breakfast and a large cup of coffee at the same time.

I get back on the road and fly down the M1 and round the M25 to Surrey to Emily’s place for the Live Life Then Give Life meeting. To my surprise, even after turning off the wrong junction (I blame my crap-covered windscreen, not my memory), I still arrive in plenty of time.

We have a meeting, which all goes very well and we sort everything from the week out, which is a blessing, plus move forward with our planning for the next 12 months or so. I leave around 2.30, dropping Jen at the station before hitting the M1 home and getting in around 4ish after making really good time home – and not even speeding crazily.

I get to Mum and Dad’s and, since I’m earlier than I’d thought, I head upstairs and pass out on the bed for an hour. After my nap I wander downstairs and sit flicking through the paper and the book I bought at Blackwell’s yesterday, which somehow seems a very, very long time ago.

Dad rustles us up some steaks, which are lovely but still have to be disappointly over-cooked due to my strict dietary-controls post-transplant. I have them less-than-well done, which is technically against the rules, but I don’t see the point in steak if you cremate it before eating it. And it’s not blue, or even rare, so that’s OK I figure.

After dinner we head back to the flat, where we veg in front of the telly and catch up on some Sky+’d stuff before calling it a night early, where I hit the pillow and pass out completely.

The alarm arouses us both at 7am and we roll somewhat lazily out of bed, showering, dressing and packing an over-night bag to take with us.

I run K down to the hospital for an acupuncture appointment and head back to the flat to collect the bits and pieces we’d realised we’d forgotten on the way down there, most notably the iPod, which would have lead to some 5 hours of driving forcing Radio 1 on us.

I get back to the hosp just as K is coming out – impeccable timing – and we head straight off for Oxford. We get there surprisingly quickly after a near-miss with a mini-coach which decided to pull across my path while I was trundling along the country road at 60. We park up at St Giles and walk down the freezing cold street round the corner to Blackwells, the awesome pre-Borders Borders at the heart of the student world of the town. K’s never been there, so I delighted in showing her the wonderful underground cavern that disappears beneath the house-front of the shop on the main street.

We spend half-an-hour wandering aimlessly around and I grow slightly disappointed at the absence of a lot of the books that got me excited last time, although knowing how much I could have spent if they were all still there, it’s probably a good thing they weren’t. On our way out, we head up a staircase that I’ve never ventured up and we find ourselves in a whole new part of the shop with modern fiction (classed as anything from 1950-odd) and a brimming children’s section.

K finds a whole load of her new-favourite Jasper Fforde books – a necessary since I’d been nice and picked some up for her without realising they were an official series and so needed to come in a specific order. Order restored to her collection and a bizarre comedy book bought for our host this evening, we departed across the street so I could wander through their Art & Film shop, where I am torn between two books and end up getting one which will hopefully positively impact the production levels of the Live Life Then Give Life docs that we’re shooting through the year.

We wander back to the car through the positively freezing winter’s air and pick up a copy of the Big Issue from a poor guy who looks like he’s on the verge of frostbite but still has a cheery smile on his face and is genuinely grateful when we pick one up. We’d passed him on the way in to the town, but not had change and I think he recognised it as the classic excuse for not buying – he seemed really surprised that we’d actually gone back and got one.

We headed up to the Nuffield to get my bone-density scan done, just a precautionary scan to keep a check on how my calcium levels are doing and how brittle my bones may be as it’s pretty common with CF to develop osteoporosis and can be exacerbated by some of the transplant drugs I’m on.

Post-scan we head across the road (and round the corner a bit) to the Churchill to catch up with my CF team, who now I don’t have my port in anymore, I have little reason to see apart from the odd check-up or annual review. It’s great to see them all and catch up with the gossip including flicking through the slideshow of one of the physio’s weddings which was being planned when I was last incarcerated in the Churchill – it seems like such a long time ago now, it really is like another life.

Catch-up out of the way, we leave them to treat the patients who need them more than me and get on the road up to Bradford. The motorways are pretty clear, barring a little bit of late-afternoon traffic around Sheffield and we hit the M62/606 around 5ish, then whack the Sat-Nav on and hunt out Dazz’s place of work, where we drive straight past him in the street. The man collected, we head over to Shipley to his new flat and commence the warming of said homestead both literally (given the chill-factor) and metaphorically (it being a new pad).

We chill and chat and eat and watch DVDs and generally have a giggle, while I spend half-an-hour sorting some Live Life stuff for tomorrow in the middle of it. Dazz has also brought all his retro gaming North with him, which includes an ancient Game Gear with Lemmings on it, which keeps us all entertained for a large part of the evening as the conversations are punctuated with outbursts of swearing at misbehaving creatures hurling themselves to their deaths.

Around midnight, we all decide to call it a night and then spend an hour trying desperately to inflate Dazz’s new air-bed, which has to stand in for the sofa-bed which is due to arrive next week.

Eventually we flop into bed around 1am and near-enough pass out.

I wake up at some point in the morning, fairly late if I remember rightly, seeing as I’ll be hardly getting any sleep over the next few days, and I lounge around for what’s left of the morning before a friend pops over from to fill me in on her current term at uni. It sounds spectacularly unimpressive and, since she’s doing a film course and is both talented and passionate, I do my best to convince her without saying it explicitly that she should jack it in and come work with me. (OK, maybe saying it straight-out…).

In my defence (if it is one), I would love to work with her and I really don’t see any value in degrees in Film anyway, but she knows that already so it’s hardly a clincher. I think she’ll stick it out, which is probably the grown-up, sensible thing to do, so I’m not too disappointed.

As she leaves, I head out with her and jump in my car across Keynes to meet Dad in a pub half-way between him and me for a spot of lunch and friendly (free) legal advice. In fact, considering he paid for lunch, I think it must be the first time a lawyer has technically paid to be able to dispense advice. Families, eh? They turn everything on it’s head.

Once we’re done, I head back home and chill with K for a while, then jump on my email to catch up with things and square away the few bits and pieces of LLTGL stuff I need to deal with, since I won’t be back at my desk before the meeting on Saturday.

That dealt with, I sort out some dinner for us both and we eat and chill in front of the TV to some Sky+’d something or other and then hit the sack relatively early, although we end up reading and talking until nearly midnight. Given the few days I’ve got coming up, I should have slept earlier, but it’s fun when you get chatty in bed, so I tend to be terribly ill-disciplined about it.

I tried my hardest to get up early today, but instead succeeded only in rolling out of bed at 8, which gave me enough time to sort myself out and have breakfast before heading over to the Grove for a bit of new term training ahead of the re-jigged Youth Theatre turn.

I have to say I was somewhat surprised to find that there was a new Youth Theatre leader their, who will be taking the Tuesday night sessions that I’m also working from now on, in addition to my Sunday sessions from last term. I was disappointed to find out at a meeting of the leaders, although I suppose Christmas is a hard time to contact people about things.

We nevertheless had a really productive day, going over all the do’s and don’ts and whys and wherefores of leading Youth Theatre sessions, as well as a little role-play (natch) and then some hard-core term-planning in the afternoon.

We didn’t get as much done in the afternoon as I think The Boss wanted us to, but it was important for us to take the time to feel each other out and put ideas forward. It was hard, though, because having never worked with two of the people there, you don’t really know where your boundaries are in discussing ideas and having disagreements, so it was a little “eggshells” for most of the session, although we did manage to hammer out a general direction for it all.

While I’m at the Theatre, K’s having a terrible day back home, due to some careless editing in the local rag which leaves her incredibly upset. I head home as soon as I can to pick her up from her ‘rents, where she’s escaped to in order to hide from the world (her avoidance method of choice).

I pick her up and we head home, where I rustle up some grub and we eat before veg’ing out on the sofa in front of some Sky+ TV before heading to bed around 10ish.

My alarm wakes me just after 7am, so I tell it to go away for a while and eventually rouse myself around 7.30ish, where upon I take my Monday morning tablet (the weekly not-so-nice one) and head into work.

The great thing about being a freelancer and working for yourself is that “going back to work” entails turning the computer on and checking emails. It’s a hard life.

I sit at my desk and I rapidly fly through 6 pages of my new script and, today’s quota reached, I put it away for now – silly as it sounds, it’s important not to over-stretch yourself when writing. Meet your quota, whatever you set for yourself, but if it’s not flowing, don’t force it just to get more pages done.

With that out the way, I get on with catching up on the world outside by checking my usual list of industry websites to get the skinny on all the Christmas/New Year deals and rumours.

Once I’m all caught up, I hit my Live Life Then Give Life email account and immediately log in to sad news. Luckily, no one has died (as this is the kind of sad news we get all too often at LLTGL), but I can’t really go into detail about it at the moment as it’s still being resolved.

Once I’m caught up on the not-as-many emails as I’d expected, I set about the rest of my day, although it’s now so long ago, I’m struggling to remember what I did, so suffice it to say I was busy for nearly all of the day on various bits and pieces of work-related gumf.

Today is the first day in a long, long time that I can remember not having to set an alarm or otherwise being awake before a sensible hour and it’s wonderfully delightful. I rouse around 10.30am and roll out of bed, leaving K to doze a bit while I catch up on the blog.

I head to the loo and to make coffee and discover that K’s been awake for over an hour and has been sat in bed reading, having heard the typing and thought I was busy writing proper stuff (rather than a pointless blog). I feel bad, as we could have had a nice lie in together, so I head to the kitchen, make us a tea and a coffee and then grab K’s laptop from the living room and we settle into the bed to watch the ITV-Catchup of Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor re-do.

It’s actually pretty similar to the old one and just as entertaining, although I’m annoyed that they’ve dropped the flight-simulator round from it in favour of an extended obstacle course. I still can’t do most of the tasks – at least the mental ones you can do from the sofa. I’m sure I’d rock at the ones you can’t try from home.

Once we’ve watched that and a couple of other bits and pieces, we drag ourselves out of bed and get showered and dressed to pop over to Mum & Dad’s to catch the football – Saints playing Man Utd on Setanta.

Sadly, it’s not the world’s most legendary game. An upset was never really on the cards, but we acquitted ourselves well given the fact that we had a man contentiously (although, I argued rightly) sent off and a penalty that really, truly wasn’t given against us, too. 3-0 is by no means an embarrassment to the kids who make up the modern Saints team, but it’s still disappointing.

After the footie we hang around for a dinner party with some of the ‘rents friends, which is really nice as I’ve not seen many of them for quite a while.

While Mum’s getting ready to serve, we get a call from Tim, which brightens everyone’s mood, then we sit down to eat and by the end of the meal (and the wine) the discussion is getting deeper and deeper into the politics of Afghanistan, America, the UK and the Taliban and everyone’s inter-relationships with Pakistan and other places.

I feel a bit out of my depth, as I often do in political discussions, but I still wade in with my opinions, mostly gleaned from things I’ve heard through other people, particularly my bro. It’s interesting how people’s views can differ so vastly and it just served to highlight the fact that none of us really know what’s going on over there.

We head off about 9.30, on the hunt for an early night. We drop one of Mum’s friends home on our way past, drive through a massive flood which seemed entirely out of keeping with the current amounts of rainfall, then get home, jump into comfy clothes and sit in front of The Recruit on TV for a while, until I’m too tired to stay awake and I call it a night.

Still awake at 6.30am, I decide it’s not worth sleeping, at least until I’ve taken my Tac, which I’ll need to grab in a couple of hours as it’ll just make me feel worse, so I pootle around the house doing not very much and watching Rocky Balboa still.

K wakes up about 10.30 and joins me in the living room, where I’m busy working on a short film script I’m hoping to put into preproduction next week for a mid-Feb shoot. K showers and has breakfast while I work on her computer (I couldn’t be bothered to move through to the study to work on mine, plus I’m enjoying having the TV on in the background while I work), then I trade the computer for the bathroom and relax in a deep, hot bath to try to revive myself.

We head out about 12 and pop to the shops to grab some flowers for our hosts for lunch and pick up a Christmas pressie package from the Post Office depot in Bletchley, before heading over to Li’l R’s for lunch with him and the fam.

We have a gorgeous lunch of slow-cooked beef which just comes apart at the touch of a fork and truly melts in the mouth, before enjoying a 2-course desert. After lunch we watch the most random comedy sketch in the world which has us all in hoots of laughter. The family have just been to Sweden and apparently this ancient 50’s or 60’s comedy sketch is traditional viewing over Christmas for almost all of Scandinavia. I’m amazed we have never seen it here and am determined to track it down.

I say “track it down” but it only takes a perfunctory YouTube search to come up with this – absolute genius. While we’re on YouTube, we are also shown a few other gems of random content, including this masterful Harry Potter homage/fantasy/mickey-take.

We get up from the sofas and head back to the dining room where we play a game of Humbugs, the most embarrassing game in the history of the world (even more so than Charades) and then Boggle while we wait eagerly for the anouncement of the new Doctor to replace David Tennant.

We sit and spend the majority of the programme trying to second-guess it, ut we’ll all entirely wrong. Matt Smith is a shock at first, looking slightly “individual” as he does, but listening to the interview and remembering his performance in Party Animals, a favourite show of mine that I sadly missed a lot of and has never returned, I think he could be an inspired choice.

The most important thing about him, I think, is that he’s going to be happy to risk things and take his own line with it, not try to follow anyone else’s footsteps. It must be incredibly hard to join a series like this after two powerful and individual performances like Tennant’s and Christopher Eccleston’s, but I think Matt Smith my have the right angle on it to make it his own.

That said, I do think he’s going to end up being a Marmite doctor – you’ll either love him or hate him.

We head off after the prog and get home to chill out for the evening, trying to put on Ben Shepard’s new Krypton Factor, but our Sky+ went screwy so we don’t have it. We fall back on the Top Gear Vietnam special, which gives us a good, pre-bed giggle, after which we hit the sack early and cuddle and chat until 10ish, when we both break out a book (how exciting) although I only get a few pages through before my eyes start closing, hardly surprising given I’ve only had an hour’s sleep from the last 36 hours.

We rouse ourselves from slumber around half-10 and wake ourselves up, throw on some clothes and head out to the flicks to catch Inkheart, which is now in its last week in cinemas, if the frequency of timings are anything to go by (which is usually is).

It’s a great little film, I guessing far-underrated from it’s lack of fanfare, but if I’d seen it earlier I’d be encouraging everyone I could to go see it. Technically it’s a kids film, but is much more entertaining than any of the Harry Potters and has a cast to rival the series, too, with Brendan Fraser taking the lead in a not-rubbish kids film for once, joined and backed up by an unbelievable array of top talent including Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent, Paul Bettany and the always-immaculately brilliant Andy Serkis, who deserves to be much more well-known than is.

The tale is a classic modern fairytale of “Silvertongues” – people who, when they read words from books aloud make the characters and images from the page come to life in the real world.

It’s proper fairytale stuff, too, all adventure and danger, scares and baddies you could almost boo at, but all pulled off with a deft touch which steers the cast away from the usual, over-the-top ham into more natural but enjoyable performances.

It’s also pitched perfectly for all audiences – there’s mystery and suspense for the girls, monsters and adventure for the boys and there’s enough of everything in there, artfully pulled off, to keep any adults in it with their kids or even – as in our case – on their own. It’s a true Christmas cracker and I wish I’d seen it earlier so that a) I could see it again and b) tell everyone to go and see it.

When we get out of the flick, I take K over to my ‘rents to peep out the photo collections still strewn on the table and we go through various packets of photos, me filling K in on all the cute little-me stories as well as the really-grumpy me stories and pics.

Mum and Dad get home from golf and tell me I have boxes upstairs from the loft to go through, so K and I hit the upstairs study-cum-storeroom and settle into box-exploring, which doesn’t take very long as we rapidly discover that all my boxes have obviously been gone-through when I moved out and I’d cleared the house of all my rubbish, chuck the keepers up in the loft in the very boxes that have just been retrieved. We move a bit of stuff between boxes and empty one that’s falling apart before calling it a day and heading home.

We get back and for the first time since Christmas Eve I jump on my computer and check up email. Disappointingly, there’s nothing remotely interesting there at all, so I’m through it very quickly.

I head into the kitchen and wash up some mugs as well as rinsing our steamer through so I can use it. I get on with cooking a proper, home-cooked meal for the first time in a good couple of weeks, prepping some roasties and chicken, then chopping veg up. I cook it all up and serve to a tired but appreciative K.

I wash up and we settle onto the sofa to watch The Wizard of Oz, a film I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of. I’m carrying another wapping headache, though and after less than an hour I can’t deal with it any more and have to call it quits.

We hit the sack and I fall asleep in a hurry, but forget as I do so that falling asleep before 10pm means I always wake up around 11-12 and can’t sleep again, which is exactly what I do.

I get up and chuck some random late-night TV on while I sit and update my blog from Christmas most of the night, then throw on Rocky Balboa when I’m done, watching through the extras before putting the feature on.

New Year’s Day starts with an alarm call at 8.30 before I decide that actually I don’t really need to do what I was planning on doing, so I turn it off and sleep again.

I wake for real around 11 and grab some grub and take my tac before showering and dressing. I’ve got a cracking headache, which is a little weird as I’m fairly sure I didn’t drink that much.

I sit and chill for a while with K, then head off to the cinema to catch both parts of Steven Soderbergh’s new 2-part Che Guevara biopic.

It’s an amazing, epic, 4-hour film with a 15 minute intermission in the middle. The cast is all great although it is doubtful whether anyone will notice anything beyond Benecio Del Toro masterful incarnation as the Argentinian.

My only gripe is with the second part of the film which is, ironically, the part I enjoyed the most of the two, when there is a little more “star” casting, including Joaquim de Almeida and Franke Potente, neither of whom anyone else may have heard of, but they really dragged me out of a picture which has cast largely unknowns to people the Guerilla world. The worst of all, though, is a completely incongruous and potentially ruinous cameo from Matt Damon.

I know Steven Soderbergh and his love fro slipping his friends into his films and often it makes no difference, or actually serves to emphasise the comedy of a moment or simpy provide an amusing distraction. In a film as grounded and reality-based as this, however, it does nothing to serve the story and only helps to completely remove the viewer from the experience by forcing them to wonder if that really is Matt Damon playing a Spanish-speaking German priest. Silly and pointless.

Still, as a whole the two pics are utterly remarkable, even more notable for the speed with which is was shot and released, in time for the 50th Anniversary of the sucessful Cuban revolution that saw Castro’s rise to power.

Part One deals with that revolution itself, the initial beginnings through to the near-mythical battle of Santa Clara when power was finally rested from the Batista Government.

Part Two deals with Che’s failure to repeat the victory when he tried to take the revolution into Latin America via Bolivia, where he would eventually meet his untimely (or extremely timely, depending on your view, I suppose) death.

The first part cuts brilliantly between a “modern day” interview in New York on the eve of Che’s speech to the UN about the revolution in 1964, looking back on his view of the events in the revolution, meaning that Che himself sets his own story in context as we watch the flashbacks to the revolution itself. It seemed a little hackneyed to me – an over-used storytelling device designed to showcase the fact that Soderbergh can distinguish two ears with different camera work and visual styles, something we already know he can do masterfully from Traffic. As the film wears on, though, and as we edged into territory I didn’t have knowledge of, having a narrator, albeit a potentially biased one, really helped solidify the impact of what the revolutionaries were trying to do and what their philosophy was.

The second part is much more linear in structure, covering just his time in Bolivia from his arrival and assimilation into the just-beginning revolutionary movement, to the start of the failed revolution itself and his journey from there to his death in 1967. It’s a more coherent “war” film that shows much more clearly the dangers that Che and his men faced as members of a revolution doomed to fail largely thanks to the interference of the US Government to prevent any further anti-American dictators seizing power and turning against them as Cuba had.

I love Steven Soderbergh’s films and I’d sit through pretty much anything he does (except, maybe, Ocean’s 12 again), and I’m aware that my bias may well colour my judgement on this one, but I still think it’s a remarkable piece of contemporary filmmaking which stands a very good chance of becoming a defining portrait of one of the greatest legends (and urban legends) of the modern age.

After the flick I drop a friend off at theirs before heading to Kati’s Bro 2.2’s open house party, where I find all the gusts huddled round the Wii in the living room. I’m not there for long before I’m whisked outside by new Nephew to see his new bike – a 125cc scrambler that he’s immensely proud of and which we sit in the cold and tinker with for half-an-hour or so before saving our freezing butts and succumbing to the Wii.

I still have a huge headache, which is concerning me, as it seems like more than a hangover which, when I do get them, usually last no longer than an hour or however long it takes me to rehydrate myself. When we leave Bro’s I discover that K’s not feeling good either, so we wonder if it’s something we’ve eaten as opposed to the drink (K definitely didn’t drink a lot) or maybe just exhaustion from all that we’ve been getting up to.

We swing by KFC on the way home to grab some food as we’ve not got anything in, then head home and crash out on the sofa. I make a few phone calls to pass on my bro’s thanks to everyone for his Chrimbo pressies, then we settle in front of the 2-hour special Jonathan Creek, a show we both used to be addicted to as kids, only to find that it wasn’t near as good as it used to be (always the way) before calling it a night.