There are some spoilers at the end of this piece. There’s a warning before them in the text.

Warning: I also allow the filmmakers some artistic licence, which may be unpopular, but sue me, I’m a filmmaker.

Five Feet Apart is a fantastic film.

Five Feet Apart is a terrible film.

You’ll love Five Feet Apart.

You’ll hate Five Feet Apart.

But what Five Feet Apart provides is the most accurate on-screen portrayal of cystic fibrosis (CF) that I’ve ever seen. Of course there are little things (and one major thing) that don’t quite ring true, but those are few and far between and some may even be explained away by US/UK experiences. What matters to me is the feel of live with CF and the picture it paints.

It’s important to note, however, that no one can represent the views of experiences of everyone with CF — I am always at pains to say I am not ‘people with CF’, I am a person with the condition. It’s also worth noting in this piece I also don’t represent the views of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust (my employer).

Let’s be clear, at its heart, this movie is a soppy teen romance where two teens fall in love amid seemingly insurmountable obstacles. No spoilers here (I’m confident it’s pretty clear in the trailer!), but if don’t like those kinds of films, you won’t like this one.

Nor will people affected by CF like this if you want it to be a film about CF; it’s not. It’s a film about two teens falling in love amid seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And the biggest obstacle is their different personalities… and the life-shortening condition they live with.

There is a lot this movie can teach you about living with CF, and we’ll come to that later, but what it won’t teach you is anything about and what we have to tackle first is —

Cross-infection

Cross-infection is a major and very real thing. Research has shown that potentially lethal bugs can pass between people with CF and travel remarkable distances. In the UK, the guidelines suggest that no two people should ever be in the same room together for fear of causing each other irreparable damage,

In the film, the characters (mostly) abide by the ‘six feet apart’ rule that’s common — although not ubiquitous — in American CF centres. This would never be allowed in the UK.

That inaccuracy, then, is the biggest hurdle for people to get over when watching the film. For people with CF, we have to let it go, which you really should have done if you’re going to the cinema in the first place! For people without a connection to or knowledge of CF, just be aware it’s much more complicated than the conceit of the film makes it.

Regardless, it’s still a good introduction to some of the more difficult elements of a life with CF and the tortuous nature of the condition that has to be faced, dealt with and accepted.

The way the characters walk the halls with masks on to protect themselves and others from bugs, but take them off to speak to each other is also a little jarring; that’s not the point of the masks, but you have to allow some artistic licence because when we watch a film we learn so much from someone’s face. Having a film where the actors are all hidden away behind masks doesn’t make for compelling drama.

And it’s this level of artistic licence that I think will guide most reactions from people with CF, because you either accept that you have to do some things for the sake of the drama and allow yourself to get swept up in it, or you don’t and and every element that’s not quite right will drive you potty. That’s something most people won’t be able to choose, it will just be an immediate reaction they can’t control.

While we’re on the subject of minor niggles, the way they show the coughing up of sputum is a bit too vomit-like to me.

The biggest challenge — especially for a British audience — is knowing how much inaccuracy is the filmmakers being wrong and how much is the American norm. Things that jump out to us may just be differences in our systems.

With all that out of the way, here’s what you’ll learn from watching Five Feet Apart.

The Cystic Fibrosis Team

Inthe film, Barb plays a critical role that’s a bit of an amalgamation of the multi-disciplinary teams we have here in the UK. She a ward nurse and a nurse specialist, and a little bit of a physio/junior doctor, too.

Regardless, the characters with CF have a special relationship with her that is wholly accurate. All of the specialist CF nurses I’ve had have been incredible people. Deeply caring and understanding, but ready with a swift kick to the rear when you need it.

I’ve known one of the nurse specialists at my hospital in Oxford, Lisa, for more than 18 years now. No visit is the same without seeing her, even if it’s just to say hello. She’s seen me through the best of times and the worst of times and she was the one I first discussed my declining health and road to transplant with — not an easy conversation for anyone.

On the hospital ward in the old Churchill Hospital in Oxford way back in early 2005, I’d just endured a horrible winter of infections, hospitalisations and intravenous antibiotics (where the drugs are pumped into your body through a line in your veins). I’d also been looking at my notes and lung function results and noticed that my peaks and troughs weren’t as far apart as they used to be. Even worse, the intensive treatment for the troughs wasn’t bringing my lung function back up to the level of the previous peaks. I was losing lung function that I wasn’t able to recover.

Lisa came in, as she did every morning I was incarcerated on the ward, for a bit of idle chit chat before her day started ‘properly’1 . I vividly remember saying, “We need to talk about transplant, don’t we?”

That was the start of a near 3-year journey to my new lungs, where she (and the rest of the team) stood solidly beside me, even as I was being introduced to a new team at a new hospital, always making sure I was keeping as well as I could while we waiting for that fateful call.

The second half of Barb in the film (Barb II we’ll call her) for me was and remains my physio, Ali. I’m not sure anyone can understand how important the relationship between a person with CF and their physio is. I know because I’ve had awful physios, good physios, great phyios, and I’ve had Ali. The worst physios come into your room, push you to do your physio and chastise you if you haven’t. The best physios make any session feel like a visit from a friend.

We didn’t have afflovests in my day, and indeed they’re still not usually provided by the NHS in the UK, which meant we had to make do with some form of breathing exercise coupled with ‘physical manipulation’ — either percussion or chest squeezing when you cough and those sorts of things.

This means that when hospitalised you might have two or three 30–60 minute sessions with a physio everyday. That’s a long time to spend with someone. When I was in hospital I would spend more time with Ali than I would with my family.

I was really, really lucky to make such a great friend in Ali because it made physio sessions at least bearable, and sometimes even fun.

The depiction of the relationships between the main characters and Barb felt spot-on to me. Part police officer, part friend, part medical professional, the central importance of that relationship was shown brilliantly and demonstrated a real understanding for what life in the confines of a hospital can be like.

Isolation

When I was a kid, back in the late 80s and early 90s there was no such notion as cross-infection. Everyone thought it best for people with cystic fibrosis to hang out with each other so that we could share our personal experiences and learn that others faced the daily regime of treatments we did, too.

Only in the mid-90’s did we start to discover it wasn’t a good idea. Then we saw it was a bad idea. Then we saw it was a very bad idea. Then we saw that it was potentially fatal. That’s why cross-infection rules are so strict.

That means for people like me we had to work hard to adapt. Rather than hanging out with our mates in hospital, sitting on beds together, sharing war stories and bitching about the junior doctors who didn’t know how to take blood properly, we were now confined to single rooms, closed off from the rest of the ward and unable to even see the other people with CF on the ward. In the beginning, the best we could muster up was sending messages with the ward nurses or physios.

The Internet has been something of a (limited) saviour for people with CF because it suddenly opened up more and more opportunities to connect with each other. We began chatting again, finding new friends online, most commonly in ‘chat rooms’2 and web forums, the quaint forms of interaction that seem almost archaic today.

Then social media came along, making it even easier, followed by FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp etc etc, allowing us to be more connected than we have been in more than 20 years.

But don’t let that fool you.

Speaking from experience from both sides of the coin, nothing but nothing beats being able to sit on a bed, seeing your friend in perfect HD, 3D, human resolution, being able to properly look them in the eye, hug them, whisper about your favourite nurses with them and having friendships just like all the ’normals’ out there in the world.

It’s not just the isolation and separation from your friends with CF that the condition can rob you of, though. Separation from your other circles of friends and family is real, too.

Being in a hospital more than an hour-and-a-half away from my home town means that my friends couldn’t just pop in to see me if they got out of work early or had some time before starting. It made it a mission that’s hard to expect anyone to make. That said, plenty did, and they also did incredible things for me, like joining my then-girlfriend, now-wife one weekend to totally overhaul the second bedroom in our little flat into a study where I could work and earn money as a freelancer from. I didn’t know anything about it until I got home from hospital.

More than just hospital visits, my CF stopped me doing things I would have leapt at doing otherwise. Shortly before I was listed for transplant, a bunch of my best friends went off to Australia for six months, which I was excited to do with them. Thanks to an unplanned, three-month spell in Texas due to a lung that wouldn’t properly inflate (ask me about it another time), I was too unwell to join them. Every email we got from them (this was in the days before WhatsApp and universal WiFi, kids) made me more and more happy for them and sad for me. I ended up reading Bill Bryson’s Down Under to try to at least vicariously experience the same things they did.3

And then there are relationships. Not the generic kind, the intimate kind. Without spoilers, it’s fair to say this comes up a lot in the film and it shows just how hard some of the decision-making can be around what’s fair and what’s not. It’s something I struggled with for a long time.

My destructive cycle consisted of meeting someone, spending time with them, getting to know them better, being open about my condition, getting closer and closer to them and then totally self-destructing and ruining the relationship a couple of months after getting serious about things. I’m not even sure I knew I was doing it, but I systematically pushed people away until they stopped trying to come back.

The only reason I ended up getting married to my wife was because she was perceptive enough to see this and simply wouldn’t accept me pushing her away. She took it, she dealt with it and she kept telling me she wasn’t going anywhere. So eventually I stopped pushing and she helped me realise that it’s not my decision whether someone loves me or not, just as it’s not theirs that I love them. Love is love.

But that still didn’t stop me refusing to propose or get married until after I’d proved my transplant had been successful. I was listed for transplant at 23, got together with my wife at 24 and was eventually transplanted at 25. The last thing I wanted was to leave a 24-year-old widow behind, because it felt too unfair.

There are as many different views on this as there are people with CF— and I know and respect many people who have felt the polar opposite to me (including my wife!) — but the point is that what the film captures brilliantly is that relationships (of any kind) are difficult. The are harder than they otherwise could be. They are more complicated. Because CF is incapable of getting out of the way.

Death & Dying

While it may not be easy watching, for me it’s entirely true that when you get to Stella and Will’s stage of CF — what’s commonly called “end-stage” — death looms daily. Whether you choose to acknowledge it, talk about it, mope about it or make jokes about it, the Reaper always feels like he’s tap-tap-tapping away at the glass in your window.

The portrayal of how Stella and Will (and Poe) deal with this looming presence is a fantastic demonstration of how different people with CF are, how there’s no one rule for all of us and how we react to any given situation. Just look at all the people who really, truly hate this film, compared to my delight with it! In life, everyone deals with everything differently and there is no one way that’s better than another. There is only way works for you.

While I hope that helps people with CF, what I’d like to say to you, dear reader, is that there is truth in every one of the reactions you’ll see in this film.

What you don’t see is just how interminable waiting for a transplant is. How boring it is. How frustrating it is. How humbling it is. How much of a daily millstone it can become and so how easy it is to fixate on what may come next.

That’s what this film really teaches you: it’s not healthy to think about death so much, but I’ve been thinking about it since I became aware of my own mortality around 5 or 6 years old. When you know your life is likely to be shorter than everyone around you, it’s natural to focus on it and think dark thoughts, and that’s why we have to develop our own coping strategies to cling onto whatever helps us cope with that knowledge.

For those who want to avoid spoilers, this is the time to start scrolling rapidly, where I’ve made clear the spoilers have ended. Because this brings us finally to the most important part when it comes to the portrayal of CF in the film.

**SPOILER WARNING**

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Losing friends

Watching the final months, weeks and days of people you’ve known and loved caused by the same condition that you know will eventually — transplant or not — kill you, is the exquisite torture of a life with cystic fibrosis.

For everyone with CF who gets to know other people from the community and is ‘lucky’ enough to survive long enough you will eventually reach the point where your friends die.

Several years ago, I remember talking to my grandfather about life in his late-80s. He was healthy, still walking miles every day and completing the Telegraph crossword most days, and had plenty of time to enjoy his six grandchildren. He said to me the hardest part was that he now had no friends. He’d watched them all die, been to all of their funerals, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was too old, he felt, to make new friends.

That’s exactly where I am now. I feel at 36 the same way he felt at 86. At last count (and yes, I do keep count, because I once forgot one of my friends who had died until I was reminded of them and the pain of that moment still lives with me) I had lost 24 friends and been to around half that number of funerals.

And you better believe that that makes you angry. Angry with the world. Angry with whatever higher power you may believe in. Angry with yourself for being happy that it wasn’t you, and angry for the family that it was their child and not your parents’.

It’s terrifying because it’s another one gone and you know you’ll be there one day. It’s terrifying because you know that one day those pews at the front will be reserved for you wife, your husband, your mum, your dad, that the poems will be read by your friends and your cousins, that everything you see happening now is in your future.

So when you see Stella react as she does to Poe’s death, you better believe that that’s 100% authentic. That the rage, the need for destruction, the need to feel something real is all-consuming, even if only for minutes. It’s all true.

When Stella says, “He was my best friends and I never even hugged him,” you can trust that nearly ever single person with cystic fibrosis has had the same thought, at the same moment, in their own lives.

Because life just isn’t fair. But for people with CF — and all those affected by it — it’s just that little bit more unfair.

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***SPOILERS OVER***

Five Feet Apart might not be 100% accurate when it comes to life with cystic fibrosis, but it is 100% faithful to how it feels to have cystic fibrosis. And that, to me, is what I’d love everyone to experience.

[1] It took me a really long time to recognise that these visits were the ‘proper’ start of her day, and that spending time with everyone on the ward was a critical part of what she did, helping us all feel a little be less lonely.

[2] I was unable to type ‘chat rooms’ without quotation marks because it just feels so wonderfully dated!

[3] I met and became friends with Bill a couple of years later and was delighted to be able to tell him the difference his book had made to me at such a tough time.

1. It took me a really long time to recognise that these visits were the ‘proper’ start of her day, and that spending time with everyone on the ward was a critical part of what she did, helping us all feel a little be less lonely. [↩]
2. I was unable to type ‘chat rooms’ without quotation marks because it just feels so wonderfully dated! [↩]
3. I met and became friends with Bill a couple of years later and was delighted to be able to tell him the difference his book had made to me at such a tough time. [↩]

This weekend, I caught up on the BBC’s awesome BTS doc on COME FLY WITH ME, the new series from LITTLE BRITAIN creators Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

One thought from an interview with Matt Lucas really struck me. Inevitably, there was a question about how you follow up a series as successful as LB was1. Lucas commented, on topping LB:

Can we do something as big as that? No. Can we do something better than that? Certainly.

And there’s the rub: whatever we’re setting out to create, the aim should never be about creating something bigger, simply creating something better.

Striving for size and reach will bring pressures and compromises; striving for quality will not only better ensure excellence, but also come with its own–much wider–rewards and may end up being both bigger and better.

1. and love it or hate it, you can’t deny its success [↩]

Sky Atlantic, the brilliant new HBO-inspired channel from Sky, is currently running a number of great, classic shows from the beginning. Last night, I caught up with the Pilot and first few eps of ER, a show I used to adore but only started watching from around Season 4 or 5.

The pilot isn’t anything all that special: there isn’t much in the way of plot; it’s just a random collection of traumatic events and an introduction to the characters. I’ve seen many better pilots in my time.

What’s easy to forget some 17 years on from that first airing is just how revolutionary and innovative E.R. was at the time.

Never before had a medical drama been shot in such a kinetic, absorbing style. Never before had a show allowed its characters to speak “normally”, without qualifying what “O2 sats” or “insanelylongmedicallynamedthingy” was. Never before had a show stretched its character’s personal arcs across more than a few episodes before nicely tying them up.

Now TV can’t get enough of the verité style; the best shows all worry more about the characters than the events; our favourite shows stretch character arcs and storylines across entire seasons1, without wrapping things up nicely at the end of each episode.

It’s easy when we look back at our old favourites2 to see them in the same light we see things now. But if we’re going to continue to innovate, it’s vital that we don’t forget what innovation looked like in the first place.

Remembering how someone set about doing things differently can inspire us new creative heights, allowing us to see how people looked at things from new angles and created something fresh, exciting and–ultimately–hugely influential.

What innovations did your favourite films and shows introduce? How did they change the landscape and inspire other creators to go further?

1. or even longer in some cases (LOST) [↩]
2. be they TV shows, films or any other artistic or creative endeavour [↩]

Ben Craig, a Scottish director who made his short film MODERN TIMES for a budget of tea and sandwiches, has been taking some heat on his Vimeo page for the definition of “no budget” given the very nice Sony EX3 he shot it on and the studio space he used for a flick that’s now gathering some major buzz from Hollywood agents and execs1.

The truth is that Craig shot the entire film using equipment and a studio borrowed from a photographer when it was free at the weekends. He then set about doing all the visual effects himself, learning the software as he went.

The bitterness of the commenters is hard to fathom2. If we as filmmakers want to make the projects we’re passionate about, we need first to focus on building a contacts book of creative collaborators – a network of mutually beneficial relationships.

By asking first “What can I do for them,” before “What can they do for me,” we can not only start relationships on a positive footing, but also potentially open doors to exciting opportunities that will never come the way of those filmmakers who spend their time bemoaning the fact that they don’t have the resources that people like Ben Craig or Gareth Edwards3 had.

Sometimes selflessness and generosity is the best way of being selfish and getting what you want. I guess that’s what they call Karma.

1. as per yesterday’s Hollywood Reporter blog piece here [↩]
2. although sadly all too common [↩]
3. the director of the similarly home-made (effects-wise) MONSTERS [↩]

My body decides that 6.30am is a good wake up time this morning and, as the room is freezing and the wind is rattling the door, any chance I have of convincing myself to go back to sleep is thrown out of the window, so I get up, close the window over lest the same fate should befall the lovely K1 and head downstairs.

I make myself a cup of tea with the penultimate tea-bag in the house2 and sit down to catch up on emails, news and blogs from the last two days since I’ve been out of the office for most of them. I promptly let my tea go cold and debate whether to walk to the shops but a) it looks freezing outside and b) I’m digging too far into the news blogs to leave my laptop.

By late-morning I’m all caught up on everything I’ve missed and have worked my way through two scripts that were in my To Read pile. I fire off an email of feedback to the writer/director of one of them, but promise myself a second read of the other, since it’s being pitched to me as a possible new producing project and I think it needs a more careful evaluation.3.

K eventually rouses herself and announces (shock of all shocks) that she actually had a good night’s sleep and feels rested and happy – not a common thing for K of a morning. She also informs me that we’re popping next door at 2 to give Wee C4 his delayed Christmas present that various events colluded to prevent us handing over pre-Christmas (or even pre-New Year).

Back from that we take a stroll down the road and pick up some tea and milk, then K hits the sofa to dig into some statistics homework while I clean up the kitchen, including mopping the floor from Thursday’s jumping cider incident (it’s been a bit sticky since).

That done, I head upstairs and have a chill out in the bath, followed by some relaxation, then make a few phone calls that I needed to catch up on, including chasing up a commission that came my way yesterday.

Phone calls finished, I try (and fail) to wrap my head around K’s statistics stuff to see if I can be of any help, but drawing a blank on that I instead fall back on my dinner-cooking talents and rustle up some griddled pork and accompaniments.

After dinner, K hits the sofa again and I head up to the office to check messages and update the blog. When K’s brain has exhausted itself and her mind is a whirl of statistical mess we play a quick game of Bananagrams before heading to the movie room and throwing in the original BBC STATE OF PLAY series, which K’s never seen. I realise I’ve forgotten just how much I love this show as we get through two hour-long eps back-to-back and could quite easily have stayed up and got through all 6 in one straight marathon, but I’m keen for K to rest up before Uni starts on Monday, so I drag us both to bed for sleep.

1. although that’s hardly likely as she sleeps like the dead once she’s nodded off [↩]
2. naturally leaving the other for K the tea monster [↩]
3. the first of the scripts is another project i’ve been producing that’s been slowly working through numerous drafts over the last few months [↩]
4. the neighbour’s 3-year-old [↩]

I tweeted a link to this video earlier, but it’s such a great summation of why we filmmakers do what we do that I felt I had to post it up on here.

This captures all of the endlessly changing feelings we all go through as we battle to bring our baby to the screen. Enjoy! And, if you like it, do the guys a favour and vote for them, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNNEwFqQCB8

Well this is just a whole big bunch of brilliant:

Not sure about the 3D, though. The rest of the Marvel universe have managed to be all kinds of awesome without needing a 3rd dimension, so I’m sure Thor can, too.

I caught Gareth Edwards’ new, much-lauded flick, MONSTERS, at the cinema yesterday and was mighty impressed.

It’s by no means perfect – some of the characterisation is a little rushed, while some of the more minor characters are almost ignored as “featured extras” and a couple of the action sequences don’t pack the punch they maybe could have, fear-wise – but I really, really enjoyed it.

The best thing I can say about it is that I loved it for the movie it is, irrespective of the budget and visual effects work that went into it.

A great film is a great film and I’m always slightly disappointed when I come out of a flick and think, “That was great, for the budget they had.”

I’m really hoping Gareth Edwards is snapped up to write a “Rebel Without A Crew”-style book about the making of this film; I think it would be hugely inspiring to all those filmmakers with the talents to do what he’s done but without the balls to go out and do it.

It makes me want to shut myself away for six months and learn the ins and outs of AfterEffects so I can do the same thing.

Not like that.

After a fun night of snowballing on Monday, Tuesday started slowing me down a little with a scary kind of feeling that I had something brewing. As it turns out, I did, but it was only a cold.

It feels quite good to sit here at a keyboard and type “only” a cold – as one of my friends put it in a text on Thursday, a simple cold used to be a serious issue to me. It would have me worried, K worried, my parents worried. And we’d ride it out and get in touch with my team at Oxford and sort out some antibiotics to treat the inevitable chest-infection that would have followed.

Now, having a cold means I feel a bit rubbish for a couple of days. I love colds like that.

Still, it does have its drawbacks. Since developing my cold on Tuesday night, I appear to have returned to a previous life as a hardcore insomniac. Since Tuesday night into Wednesday, I’ve been sleeping appallingly. Indeed, I sit in the lounge writing this now at nearly 4am and I’m still not feeling anywhere near tired enough for sleep. But during the day I’m becoming Zombie-fied.

This week has been a fortuitous week to be stuck with insomnia, however, since the snow has meant any work I did have lined up has been cancelled and, as of Thursday, we’ve been properly snowed in. I say “properly” but that’s not 100% accurate. What I mean is that we can’t drive anywhere, which, in Milton Keynes, the city modelled on American-style grid-road systems, is a bit of an obstacle.

Yesterday I did manage a wander down to the shops at the bottom of the road, which is somewhere in the region of a mile’s walk, and discovered that traipsing through snow is incredibly hard work. Coupled with the cold, it left me exhausted. I was certain that it was going to help me sleep better in the evening, but no dice. Another hour of lying in bed tossing and turning lead to me getting up and staying up until I finally all-but-passed-out in the late-early morning hours.

So now I’m sat back in the lounge watching 4am tick ever closer, ploughing through more of the extras on the new Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Box Set I picked up from the now-defunct Zavvi in CMK and charging myself up with the drive and passion to go out and make at least one of the short film scripts I have lying on my desk just waiting to be tackled.

I just need to find a cast…

After over a week of editing, re-cutting, designing and burning DVDs I finally finish the Creative Partnerships project I’ve been working on for the best part of 4 months now (not constantly, you understand…), spending almost all of Monday printing and sticking DVD labels onto the discs. Note to self: must get DVD-printer.

I’m immensely proud of the DVD, even if it’s not what the original intention was at the start of the project. Due to the nature of drama projects and the unpredictability of working with 5- and 6-year-old children, the whole project changed and shape-shifted into something entirely different. I’d love to put it up here to show people but since, technically, it’s not mine to show and also – more importantly – given the fact that it’s got minors in whose parents haven’t consented to internet exploitation, I can’t. You’ll just have to imagine it being brilliant or come over to my place and watch it.

It’s been an interesting test for me to make my first own-steam short documentary that I’d have to piece together into a coherent whole for other people to see and take home. Up to now all my filmmaking has been for Live Life then Give Life which is great and brilliant experience, but it’s a very simple, single-camera interview set-up which doesn’t take a huge amount of skill. So to be responsible for something from opening image to final cut is really something special.

What made it all the more worth it was the reaction of the kids when we screened it for them in their classroom. They all loved it and were even air-guitaring along to the montage soundtrack and pointing each other out all the way through it, which was lovely to see. From what I gathered the staff liked it, too, which is always nice.

After the school meet and an evaluation Mocha with Suze, I got back to the office to discover a message from a media-man from a very well known film company looking to partner with LLTGL on a DVD campaign coming up shortly. I can’t go into too much detail as it’s still being discussed, but it is potentially a very exciting development for LLTGL.

In what’s turning out to be a great week for LLTGL, we have also had an offer of a major advertising deal which we need to address but could see us putting the word out to over 700,000 at one time if all the pieces fall into place. We’ll see.

To top it all off, it would be remiss of me not to plug the LLTGL Valentine’s Day Cake Bake, which we’re holding to raise some funds to continue all the work we’ve been doing and expand our operations in line with our current business plan. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you want to help us out and you’re a fan of cake (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) then head straight here to find out about it. Or you can find us on Facebook, too.