Things are picking up pretty fast now, as I move further and further towards the world of work.  Today I went down to Bletchley train station to do a location scout for the short film I’m shooting in just 2 weeks’ time.  It’s unbelievably exciting to be actually preparing to do something for real that I’ve been imagining myself doing all through my time on the list and before, when I was too ill to consider actually getting on and doing it.

Now, more than ever, I’m aware that filmmaking is 100% what I want to do and to earn money doing it is my ultimate goal.  The next few weeks are going to be a kind of make-or-break time for me when I will discover whether I am actually capable enough to pull it off, or if I’m going to have to revue my plans and options and consider a change of direction.

The scout was really exciting as it really drove home the fact that is is definitely happening now.  It’ll be a real challenge and it’s already pushing me creatively more than I’ve been pushed before, but I’m absolutely loving it and thriving on the freedom to make decisions based on what I want to achieve, rather than aiming for the results someone else is going for.

I can’t wait to get shooting and turn out a really top-notch little film.  Here’s hoping it can meet my expectations and provide a launching pad into the career I’ve wanted to follow since I was in my teens.

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I got myself up to check my emails, which have been neglected in the flurry of activity that included a double-shift at the Theatre today, and received a piece of news I’ve been dreading for a while.

An old friend of mine from the CF community lost her fight after a huge battle tonight.  She’d been in intensive care under sedation for a while and tonight she could no longer keep up the battle.

For reasons I found hard to fathom and now even harder to accept, her death has hit me so much harder than I ever thought it would.

Earlier this year, she gave birth to a son she’s wanted all of her life – a life which even ignoring CF has been tempestuous to say the least.  When she announced she was pregnant, I was really, really angry.  Discounting the numerous and serious risks posed to any mother with CF bearing a child, I felt it was a supremely selfish action to fulfill her own ideals without considering whether or not it was in the best interests of a child who could be left without a mother.

Hearing of her death tonight, all I’ve been able to think about is that I’ve not spoken to her in over a year, such was the strength of my feeling.

But you know what?  Who am I to judge?  Who am I to say whether someone should do the things they want to do, whether it’s irresponsible, inadvisable or selfish?  It’s not my place to suggest any of those things and it’s even more upsetting that I’ve let it cause such a rift.

I never even expressed my feelings to her – I never told her my opinions.  Why?  I honestly don’t know.  I guess I didn’t want to seem judgemental or to upset her, but surely I should have taken that as a warning sign that my “opinions” were unjustified and, frankly, just plain wrong.

“Life is for living” is the motto of another good friend of mine and we should all be living the life we want to live.  If I’ve learned one thing from my struggles over the last few years, it’s that the cliché of precious life encouraging a “live for the day” attitude is absolutely true.

I can’t explain the depth of regret I feel for not reaching out to T since the birth of her son, for not dropping the grudge or whatever you wish to call it.  For not making the effort to see if she needed my support, or even simply sending my congratulations.

Parenthood for PWCF is a very emotive subject and I’m all too aware that this post may well upset a few people.  But it’s something I feel a desperate need to explain, as it’s made me realise how wrong I have been and how incorrect it is of me to stand in judgement of the way other people live their lives.  I’ve always prided myself on being open, honest and – ironically – non-judgmental, but T’s death has shown me how I gloss over the cracks I don’t wish to see.

In a way, I feel I deserve the ire that’s bound to come my way – it would be, I suppose, a form of catharsis, helping me cement the knowledge that I should have kept a closer check on myself and remind me for the future that nothing is worth losing a friendship over and certainly not something that’s based on “opinions” or “feelings”.

Tor, I wish I could have said all of this to you.  I wish I could have sat down with you, laughed and giggled again, met E and L and told you how sorry I was that I let this get in the way.  I wish I could take back the last 18 months and keep in touch, share your joy in motherhood and see your smiling face again.

All I hope now is that, somewhere, you can read this and hear my prayers and find it in yourself to offer me forgiveness.  When I come up there to join you, the first round’s on me.

No, b*llocks to that – they’re all on me.

Breath easy, angel, smile down on us all.

Up at 6am this morning to get K to her Uni train for her long day – 9am lecture start and solid work through until 4 – pretty epic, really.  Still, if one will choose the hardest working course outside of Law and Medicine, what do you expect?  What I expect is, of course, huge backlash from every single student who reads this blog telling me that they’re course is just as hard-working as any other.  I won’t believe them, though.  Especially the Media students…

Back home I managed to get through quite a bit of stuff, looking into a couple of new business opportunities which may help me in setting up the company I most want to run as well as getting through some Live Life stuff which has been sitting on my desk for a while.

Around 10ish I gave in and took myself off to bed for an hour as I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then got myself up to head in to the flicks to catch Burn After Reading, the new Cohen brothers film.

I must confess I’m not exactly a Cohen brothers fan.  Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing apart, I tend to find their films a little too quirky and impenetrable for my tastes, however much I want to like them desperately.  No Country For Old Men is a case in point, where the majority of the movie had me gripped and was really well put together, but the last act just left me cold.  It wasn’t even as if I could pinpoint what they were trying to do and addmire it, as I frequently can and do with films I don’t like but see the merit in.  I was just baffled.

Burn After Reading is more my kind of thing.  It’s got the Cohen quirks, but at a much more restrained level and features a fantastic cast doing some of their best work in a long time.  Not just George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, either – J K Simmons knocks his ever-so-brief role out of the park and hits all the right comic notes and the rest of the cast are equally impeccable.

The plot is cleverly convoluted without getting beyond the audience.  The confusions and mix-ups that make a good thriller are in place, as is the almost trademark high-violence of the Cohens, albeit somewhat restrained from some of the rest of their pieces.  Pitt really lets himself go and looks like he’s having a wail of a time, but then I’ve been a fan of his for years, since the days before he was BRAD PITT or Mr. Jolie.

With the up-coming Changling, I think both Mr and Mrs Pitt are coming back to show that they have the talent to raise themselves above the kind of tabloid-fodder which has caused or reflected many a career misstep.  I’m always excited to see either of them work and when they come up with a cracker – as in the case of Fight Club, Se7en or Legends of the Fall for Pitt, Gia or Girl, Interrupted for Jolie – it always really pleases me.

If you’re a Cohen fan, there’s much to admire and it’s definitely a “Cohen” film, but if they’re not your cup of tea, don’t necessarily let that put you off – this is a far more “mainstream”-feeling movie with a more accessible structure, plot and storyline than much of what has come before.

Back home after the flick I caught up with a friend who I’ve not seen properly for far too long, which is always nice, although we could only squeeze in a quick hour before I had to grab K from the train, change hurriedly and pick Dad up for a trip to see MK Dons courtesy of Clydesdale Bank.

It was the first time I’d been to Stadium:MK and I have to say I was mightily impressed.  It’s a lovely stadium and the pitch was immaculate.  The game was pretty good, too – entertaining and interesting to watch the way the Dons play under Di Matteo, although with the final score resting at 2-1 to Stockport after an own goal in the last minute, it could have been a better result.

It was interesting to reflect on the power of team support, though.  As a Saints (Southampton) fan, whenever I go to a game, I get incredibly involved and tend to scream and shout with the rest of them.  If we lose, I’m always in a bad mood for most of the rest of the day.  On the other hand, watching the Dons, who I follow and support as a local team, I wasn’t overly bothered by the result.  It was a strrange feeling of under-whelmedness, I guess, which I found intriguing.  Maybe if I watch more games (which, incidentally, I’d love to do) I would have more of an investment in the club and their results, but as it was last night was just a really fun, if slightly chilly, night out.

I can’t believe my body sometimes.  Or maybe my brain.  One or the other, it doesn’t really matter because I’m just as cross with both of them for waking me up at 5am this morning.

Mondays are supposed to be my “lie ins”, with K not starting Uni ’til 11am meaning we don’t have to be up until 8.30am, as opposed to the usual 6am.  But this morning something inside me decided it wanted to be up and about at 5.  Five o’clock in the bloody morning!

Still, it meant I managed to be at least a little productive today, although I’ve managed to have one of those days where I look back over what I’ve done and realised all the things I wanted to get done and haven’t, which is mildly frustrating.

Still, I managed to fit in all of my necessary admin stuff and bill payments (although I’ve still got a mini-pile of post to go through) and get through a veritable mountain of ironing.  I can’t stand ironing, it’s the worst chore in the world, by far, and I’m also absolutely rubbish at it.  Actually, it might be the fact that I’m rubbish at it that makes me dislike it so much because it seems like so much work for so little effect.

Once I’d got all my housey bits done, I took myself off to the flicks to catch City of Ember which is not as bad a film as I thought it was going to be, although it’s a bit slow in the build-up and with a few bizarre plot strands which don’t entirely make sense.

Then it was off to Costco for our monthly stock-up on essentials and bits and pieces which we go through at such a rate as to make it cheaper to buy in bulk.  That said, I think we’d buy a lot more from there if we had more space for storage.  It’s a weird dilemma walking around the warehouse working out whether a) it’s cheaper to get it in bulk, b) you’ve got enough cash-flow to cover the up-front costs of something you might not buy for another 2 weeks and c) you’ve got enough space at home in the kitchen/in the cupboard/under the bed to find a home for it all once you get back.

Of course my days never run completely smoothly and I did have to make a minor detour back home to collect my Costco card which I’d handily filtered out of my wallet at some clever clean-up stage a couple of months ago.

From there it was to the Supermarket to get the more regular weekly groceries that are either uneconomical or too perishable to buy monthly in bulk, then round to the station to collect K and back home to start the somewhat lengthy process of packing up all the meat into dinner-size portions to chuck in the freezer until further notice.

After quickly checking emails and sorting out my plans for the week, it’s time to cook and get dinner ready, then to wash up and finally some time to hit the sofa and chill.

The best news of the day came in an email this morning, though, to let me know that I’ve won a place at a prestigious documentary pitching day at Channel 4 next Monday.  20 of us have been selected to appear in front of a panel of industry professionals and pitch our ideas to them for feedback and possible further work.  It’s really, really exciting and could potentially open a lot of doors for me at this stage in my break-out.

More of that and other new projects coming soon, so stay tuned.

This week has been really hard going.  I think the early mornings getting K off to uni have really caught up with me and helped me to realise that I’ve been taking on too much at once and that I need to be careful and be more aware of the balance between working hard and doing what I want to be doing and giving myself enough time to rest and recuperate from the exertions I’m putting myself through.

Interestingly, it feels like it’s been a hard week, but actually I’ve rested myself more this week than I have for a long time.  Monday was the first day “off” I’ve had in two weeks – the first day I’ve had nothing in my diary to do and could just veg out on the sofa and not do very much.  It was bliss, but like most times when you’ve been going flat-out for a while as soon as I stopped I started to feel it.

So although I’ve done less this week than the last couple of months, I’ve actually felt worse for it as my body caught on to the fact that I was in slow-down and took the time it needed to re-boot itself and re-set itself to factory settings so I don’t start next week already way behind on my sleep and energy levels.

I remember way back before my transplant writing on here about finding the right balance between doing things and saving some energy and I’m kind of back in that situation again now.  Although I have more energy than I used to have (inexpressibly more), I still only have a finite amount.  I need to remember that although my reseres are higher, empty is still empty whether you’re a 7-stone CF-ridden weakling or an Olympic athlete – there’s no going on when the body’s at the bottom of the red zone.

So here’s to a New Year’s resolution a few months in advance – I will do my best to maintain a healthy balance between work, play and rest; attempt at all times to ensure I have enough in my tank to handle what I have taken on; and not take on things that I know are likely to drop me into an avoidable red zone.

And I’ll try to blog more.

Today’s been a bit of an epic day, but quite good, too.  As well as being massively frustrating and trying.  A mix of everything, then, I guess.

It all began at 6am this morning, rolling out of bed to run K down to the train to set her off for her day at uni, followed by a quick (way too quick) nap back at home before wrenching myself from the covers a second time to head down to the station myself and get down to London for a photoshoot for an article being written about Emily and I.  It was actually the quickest and easiest photoshoot I think I’ve ever done, which was nice.  We were in and out in 15 minutes and on our way again.

On the way back home I managed to buy lunch before rushing for the train, which then left 15 minutes late and I realised I’d left the drink I bought in Smiths, meaning I couldn’t eat any of my lunch on the train as I had nothing to take my creon with.  Brilliant.

Getting back to MK fifteen minutes before I was due to start work, I then had to rush home and change before racing across town to the Theatre to work a double shift on the bars for the matinee and evening performances of Carousel.

I arrived on the bars upstairs to discover that all hell had broken loose after the production company belated informed us that Leslie Garrett would not be performing today and they had decided (under considerable pressure from an unimpressed star who was shocked to hear that they’d not been honest with the audience beforehand) that all the customers would get a free cup of coffee and slice of cake for the matinee and a free drink of their choice for the evening performance.

Wednesday matinees are affectionately known in the business as “Grey Days” after the fairly narrow demographic of the audience who were considerably unimpressed with the change in the cast and weren’t afraid to voice their displeasure.  Combined with a terribly worded voucher they had been given from the prod co, they descended on the bars, which had no cake, only to be turned away and sent to the VIP lounge where everything had been laid out.

The problem with being on the bars in a Theatre is that, very frequently, you are the first point of contact for members of the audience, which means that any and all mistakes made by either the Theatre, the production company or anyone else involved with the show inevitably end up being your fault.  They customers latch on to the first person connected with the Theatre and feel free to let loose.  I wouldn’t mind so much if there was something we could actually do about it, or if it was a mistake that we had made, but it very, very rarely is.  Usually it’s the limits of our powers to turn around and apologise and I suppose if the customer wants to vent then we have to take it, but it’s not fun.

Luckily the evening performance went much more cheerily, mostly because the slightly younger audience were much more appreciative of the free booze and programmes they received.  In fact, the vast majority of them didn’t seem overly concerned with the cast change, which meant that for all intents and purposes, they just got a bonus free drink as part of their night out.

The problem with all of the audience being given free drink vouchers, though, is that they then like to use them.  With the house around 85-90% full, you would normally expect to serve 40-50% of those people drinks.  With free drink vouchers, you’re suddenly serving 100% of the audience drinks, plus the extras that they might wish to pay for.  It was hard work. Combined with the fact that they they had earlier in the week cut the interval down from 20 minutes to 15 because the show was running so long (3 hours in total, not including the break), so we had to cram out 40% more drinks in 25% less time than usual.

Suffice it to say that by the end of the night we all felt like we’d be consistently hit over the head with a large hammer very, very hard.  Exhausted and ready for home we were at least kindly acknowledged by the management who allowed us all a drink to take away with us – muchly appreciate by us all.

After three nights and sleeping incredibly poorly, the day did at least serve to put me back on track with decent, deep sleep, so it can’t all be bad.

A couple of weeks agao I started a new writing project with a friend – S of S&S form this blog – launching from an idea written by her other half (erm… S from S&S from this blog…) back in his college days, which is now so long ago we’re all starting to feel a little too old for our liking.

The original script, scribbled out in a school exercise book, has the seeds of a great story in the comedy-horror genre made famous by Shaun of the Dead but plied equally well by recent Brit successes like The Cottage.

We’ve spent the last month or so between the two of us, with input from SB (I suppose the second initial will have to come into it now, since they’re becoming two separate people…) to make sure we weren’t veering too far away from his original intentions, have been hashing out a more detailed and sustainable plot-line and making the characters more rounded to help us create the right level of comedy.

It’s quite a tough project because the premise is pretty ludicrous, but the idea is cracking, which means that it’s really important to get all the “other” elements of the script right so that the audience feels able to buy in to the main idea running through it.  If the comedy is too outlandish, the audience won’t want to go with us, so it’s important that we keep it a close character comedy with just a single, slighty crazy comic element in the middle of the mix.

Today we had our second full-on writing day together.  Both of us had completed short sections of 7-10 pages each and we got our heads together to see how they were working alongside each other and that we were flowing down the same lines according to the plan we’d drawn up.  It’s all looking really good and we spent a bit of time going over the action and dialogue of the sequences we’ve written and seeing if and how it affects the stuff we’re going on to do next.

We’ve come away nicely re-energised for the next stint of writing and have given ourselves another two weeks to get the next pieces written up before we meet again to see how we’re progressing.  If we can keep the pace we’re on at the moment, we should have a completed first draft by the end of November, which would be really, really cool.

Interestingly, just the process of writing with someone else and bouncing ideas around has taught me a huge amount about how to better develop characters and story-arcs, something I think that some of my writing has lacked in the past.  It’s also seemed to click my brain back into “writer’s mode” and set me off thinking about a whole load of other projects I’d like to get cracking on.  I’m not about to try writing two first drafts at the same time, but with ideas fermenting in my head, I think this could be quite a fertile time for my creativity, which is a really nice feeling.

It’s been an absolutely manic last couple of weeks, I literally haven’t had more than about an hour to myself in a single day since, well, actually, I honestly couldn’t tell you without looking back through my diary.

Suffice to say it’s been extremely hectic, but pretty good, too, I have to say.

Last weekend was spent with the Live Life Then Give Life gang, hashing out our plans for the next couple of years.  It’s a bizarre feeling to be mapping out plans that I actually believe I have a chance of being part of.  I’ve been so used to limiting my planning no further ahead than the next few weeks or couple of months, but now I find myself looking further and further into the future.  I have often helped people plan for things in the future – I’ve certainly helped Emma and Emily with it before, as I also did with K’s uni application – but I never really joined in with the expectation that I’d ever be a part of it.

Now things are looking brighter and brighter and my horizons are stretching further and further away.  It has just occurred to me that for the first time ever, I think, I’ve stopped worrying about whether or not I’m going to be around for things.  My cousin is just 6 weeks away from the birth of his first child and this time last year and for a good while before that, just the news of the pregnancy would have set me off wondering whether I’d ever get to see Baby P or not.  Sitting on the sofa tapping away now, I realise that the thought of not being around hadn’t even occurred to me up until now.  I guess this is what “normal” life is like!

Anyway, that’s the last couple of weeks.  Today was different again, being as I was engaged to speak at two different events in one day, both for the CF Trust.

First off, was back in an old haunt – the Mermaid Theatre (sorry, Conference and Events Centre) in Puddle Dock near Blackfriars, the very same Mermaid that supplied the venue for the enormously successful Laughter for Life event way back in February/March last year (for some reason I can never remember when it was without looking it up).

The event was a Parents and Carers conference that the Trust had laid on, this time for parents of teenagers following their enormously successful Under-12s conference previously.  I was engaged to speak, rather oddly for me, with my dad, which threw up all sorts of weirdness around having to “plan” what we were going to say.  Anyone who’s ever been to see me speak knows that generally, I just stand up and ramble for 10-15 minutes, but this time it was a joint presentation with Dad on teenage rebellion which was to last 30 minutes.  Nightmare.

Actually, it all went rather well.  The planing process was interesting in and of itself, sitting talking to Mum and Dad about how they dealt with the various ways I found to do myself a mischief back in the glory days of the 1990s.  I clearly put them through a great deal of angst through my teens, even though I don’t consider myself to have been a massively rebellious teenager (I’ve certainly come across many more people with CF who were far worse).

The speech went fantastically, though – we worked very well together as a team and managed to both entertain and inform the attendees, who seemed to spend most of the half-hour slot nodding in tacit agreement with everything Dad said about my various misdemeanors and rebellions.  Glad it helped.

Once that was over and we’d done a quick Q&A panel with the afternoon’s other speakers and spent some time chatting individually to some parents who came up to address specific points with us, it was then time to dith the grey one and for K and I to hop back in the car and head North up the M11 to Bishop Stortford, or there abouts.

One of the regional fundraising managers for the Trust had helped put on a ball for a couple with a teenage daughter with CF and had asked me to come and speak.  The very same Trust-lady who’d had me along to the Press Ball in Ipswich earlier in the summer, in fact.

The night was amazing – you’d have been hard pressed to find any hint of a credit crunch among the 150-strong crowd, who managed to raise by way of pledges and auction bids a total of £43,000.  Phenominal.

I was, to be honest, pretty diappointed with my speech.  The afternoon had taken so much planing I’d frankly neglected the evening’s event and didn’t allow myself sufficient time on the night to prepare myself properly and go over what I wanted to say and do.  That being said, I still received the usual praise from the people I spoke to, but I wasn’t pleased with myself for it.  Must do better next time, that’s how I’ve marked my report.

Still, it’s been a great day and I’ve enjoyed both events greatly.  The CF Trust has offered me so much advice and support for so long and through such tough times that it’s really important to me to continue to do whatever I can to help them and to offer, if I can, some crumbs of comfort or advice to people who may be struggling now.

Someone suggested this weekend that maybe I should think about getting myself on the after-dinner speaking circuit, which got me thinking.  If I was touring the country being paid for my time and talking to groups of business people for inspiration and the like, would I be as good at it as I am at the moment?  Is it the drive to inform and the will to get people to pledge ever-important donations for the work of the Trust or the transplant community that makes the speeches and talks what they are?  Would paid-for talks be able to engender the same passion and commitment?  I honestly don’t know.  Mind you, it can’t hurt to try…

From a song lyrics website, in reply to a question about where the lead singer of The Feeling comes from:

“‘He’s from England… United Kingdom to be exact.”

So far this week has been pretty tiring, although I’m actually enjoying it quite a lot.

On top of my usual Sunday session at the Grove Youth Theatre, I went along and did the Tuesday night session, too, as I’m unavailable this weekend as I’m away with Live Life Then Give Life for a weekend of planning and other fun stuff (more on that next week).

Working with the younger groups was certainly challenging, as they’re all from very different backgrounds to the kids who went to the MK Theatre Youth Theatre.  But there’s still something energising about working with youngsters who still have that energy and vitality, not to mention still clinging on to their imaginations in the face of all their school teachers and (often) parents trying to drum it out of them.

There’s nothing sadder to me in modern society than how early children start to lose their imaginations.  Many of us could (and do) jump to blame the whole thing on Xboxes, Wiis, PlayStations and all the rest, but in truth it’s just as much the fault of parents and teachers as it is the computer games and TV industries.

Children who are creative, who day-dream and enjoy their own little fantasy worlds are seen as being behind other children and somehow inferior.  It is celebrated when a child can focus and concentrate on a Maths problem for half-an-hour, but derided if they spend the same half-hour lost in a world of their own creation.

Theatre is the one art form that can really help to encourage, develop and nuture an imagination.  Not only in performing and “play-acting”, but also simply by being part of an audience.  The magic of Theatre is often lost on the majority of the population now – that sense of amazement and wonder which casts a spell over young people seems to ebb away as we grow.  At the pantomimes every year, the adults go along because they want to recapture a little bit of that spirit, but we all know that we only boo the baddie because we know that’s what we’re supposed to do.  For the children, though, they put their whole heart and soul into it – they really mean it when they boo, it’s not simply customary.

It shouldn’t just be every Christmas that children can explore their theatrical imaginations though and it’s not just pantomimes that can engage them.  The beauty of taking children to the theatre is that they are often the least critical audience who will take up a seat in any auditorium.  If they see characters that they know and/or love and can engage with (not always in a physical/vocal sense), they get completely lost in the performance.

More than that, though, theatrical shows give children a chance to develop their imaginations as they can’t present everything that a child may see on TV.  Take something like Noddy or Lazy Town Live – it’s impossible to recreate the look of the TV show, but you can recreate the feel of the show and it up to their imaginations to complete the illusion.

If you find yourself feeling cynical about the rubbish that’s churned out on TV (for old and young alike) or you see you child drifting into dream-less oblivion, pick yourselves  up some tickets to go and see a show and even if you can’t bear the show, watch your little one’s face instead.  I guarantee it’ll be a picture.