Archives: Work

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…

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.

Ok, so I know I’m WAY behind on this at the moment, but I will endeavour to update a few of the days from last week sometime tomorrow or maybe today when I get back from my final shift at the Theatre – yes, I’m leaving.

It’s been a great week and I’ve got through a lot of cool stuff, but right now I’m in a mini-actress crisis for the short I’m shooting over the weekend.  I’ve now had two actresses attach themselves then bow out, through no fault of their own, but it’s left me a little high-and-dry with a shoot scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday.

Did some camera tests on Monday, which was great and I’ll try to blog about later.

The most significant thing is, ironically, something I can’t talk about at the moment, but I have the potential opportunity to produce one of the most exciting projects – no, scratch that, THE most exciting project – that has ever wandered through my vision.

I honestly can’t say anything about it now as I’m in really early negotiations and it could easily (too easily for my liking) all fall apart and not happen, so all I’ll say is that it’s a major documentary on an event of next year.

I promise I’ll be back to fill you in on the last week or so soon.

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.

I was planning on going back over the last two weeks and updating the day-to-day entries of the blog to reflect all that I’ve been up to, but I soon realised that a) I’d be here all day and b) I’m not even sure I can remember exactly when whatever happened to me in the last fortnight happened.

To sum up, if you can’t be bothered to read this entire post, I have started two jobs, started a new screenplay project with a friend, pushed a short film project towards production, acquired another short film script, begun developing a slate of documentaries, watched my brother leave for a tour of duty overseas and won a Charity Times Award with the Life Life Then Give Life team for Campaigning Team of the Year.

So, biggest news first, I guess (apart from the Award, which I’ve obviously already covered), I’ve got a job.  Two, to be precise.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some part time work up to my sixteen-hour-per-week limit to retain my benefits (and beyond which I’d need to work a considerable amount more hours) and noticed an ad in the local paper for a hotel looking for part-time bar staff for lunchtime shifts.  After going over to introduce myself and fill in an application form, I text my old boss at the Theatre in MK to ask for a reference for the bar work, since she was the last person who employed me as bar staff (albeit five years ago).

She replied positively, but then said that if I wanted bar work then they could offer me a job.  Without much fanfare, I went back for a training day a week last Monday and started my first shift of paid work for two-and-a-half years on the next night.

It’s a very bizarre mixture of feelings being back at the Theatre.  On the one hand, it’s pleasantly familiar – I know most of the managerial staff (even if high turnover means the bar staff are all new to me) and also where to find most of the things I need during a shift.  The bars haven’t changed much, apart from some of the stock having changed – Becks to Tuborg, for instance, and the appearance of Magners in the fridges.

At the same time, while it’s a safe and comfortable environment to start back into a working life, it also feels a little like a step backwards.  I’m now back doing what I was doing in 2003, before my work with the Education Department and the Youth Theatres in MK and Northampton and before the experience I gained as a Production Assistant/Youth Theatre Production Manager at the Royal.

I guess the way to look at it is that as long as I have the income I need to pay all of the bills, the Theatre work is only three or four evenings a week, which frees me up to work on my own projects during the day time, for which I have a lot more time free now that K has started at Uni.

Thursday was her official first day and it was a bit of an epic one.  The commute means that we have to be up at 6am to get to the station for 6.45/7ish for the 7.11am train to Euston.  Luckily, looking at her timetable for the term, it seems that she only needs a 6am start two days a week, getting a lie-in on Mondays and Thursdays and having Fridays off.  It is very much an atypical Uni course however, having as it does, a full timetable of lectures and lab time.  Monday mornings and Fridays are all the time she has off, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are all 6-8 hour days.  It’s intimidating for her and it’s going to be tough, but I know she can do it and I’m sure she’ll be fantastic as a Speech Therapist – even if that is four years away right now.

As well as starting at MK Theatre, I also went to catch up with my old Education boss at MK, who has now moved to the Grove Theatre in Dunstable, about 20 minutes down the road from me.  Whilst catching up with her, it emerged that she had another Youth Theatre Assistant position opening up to help out with running the Sunday afternoon YT sessions for the eldest two groups of the Grove YT.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance to leap back into the deep end and get my hand in again.  Last Sunday, I enjoyed my first day working with the YT in the first session of term and enjoyed it immensely.  It’s hard work – much harder than the MKYT, actually – but the young people who attend the sessions offer much greater opportunities for rewarding work.

As well as the Grove’s YT, I have also just started work on the school’s project I’m doing with Suze and her newly minted Catalyst Theatre Arts Ltd company.  At the moment, it’s not 100% clear what my role will consist of, as I’m largely there to support the school and do what they need me to do to ensure they make the most of the project.  It’s exciting for me as it’s the first time I’ve worked and been engaged as a “proper” artist, being seen as a practitioner in my own right and not as an assistant or general helper.

Personal project-wise, I’ve now got a producer on board my short film, which will be going into production over a weekend in early November.  We have offers out to cast at the moment and are hopefully of getting a couple of recognisable names, although it largely depends on their schedules, as I’m keen not to push our shoot dates back.

I went to a Screen South roadshow this week, which highlighted the pots of money on offer for short films in the South East of England, but all of them require the director (that’s me) to have a show-reel of stuff they’ve shot before.  This is a bit of a classic Catch-22, but since this film can be shot for next to nothing, I’m hopeful that even though I’ll miss this funding round, the script I’m developing at the moment will be a possibility for the next round.

I’ve also just started writing a feature project along with a friend of mine who’s as keen as me to get writing again.  It’s a low-budget British horror-comedy which we’re hoping will be quite saleable, or at leat easy and cheap for us to make ourselves if that turns out to be the more likely option.

Beyond the fiction stuff I’m working on at the moment, I’m also developing a trio of documentaries.  Two of them are quite immediate and one is longer-term planning.  One, in fact, I’ve already started shooting a video diary for and am currently working on establishing links with the Armed Forces to see if I can take it further.

It’s been a manic two weeks and blogging really took a back-seat to all the other things I was running around doing, but I’m sincerely hoping that having more time in the day to achieve the things I need to will enable me to keep a more day-to-day blog of the things I’m up to.  I’m aware of how great a resource blogs can be to keep tabs on people and gain encouragement for the kind of life it’s possible to lead post-transplant, so I really do hope I can keep it up.  Please keep checking back and feel free to berate me if I’m lax again.

I spent most of this afternoon in a meeting with Emma and Emily, two of my fellow Trustees of Live Life Then Give Life.  I say fellow Trustees, what I actually mean is my superiors – as Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the charity respectively, they’re far more important than me.

Anyhoo, we spent a good few hours pouring over the construction of a firm business plan for the charity, something that Emma has been pushing for us to do for an age, but which all of the Trustees have been unfortunately lax in organising and offering in-put for.  I’ve been one of the worst offenders, knowing how important it is, but never setting aside the time to think about it properly.

Being locked in a room with the girls made us focus properly on the bits of the charity we needed to focus on and work out our strengths and weaknesses, where we’re good and where we can improve.  It also gave us a chance to analyse where we can best fit in with the rest of the transplant charities in the UK at the moment.

Obviously, still being very much in the planning stage (the other three Trustees have to look at and approve our ideas, for starters), I can’t really go into a lot of detail, except to say that I think we have finally identified what we do best of all and are now hoping to commit ourselves to rolling it out as our “thing” which we can use to promote organ donation in this country without treading on the toes of everyone else in the Tx community.

One of the key things we have identified with Live Life Then Give Life is our fantastic standing and relationships with people in the transplant community, both transplant professionals, people affected by transplants and other charities themselves.  Because of this we all saw it as being vital that we strive not to replicate, but to complement other people’s work.

Too often in the charity sector you see organisations compete with each other for the same people’s cash, the same people’s time and the same pots of money and in the end it can be counterr-productive.  Live Life Then Give Life’s core aims are to promote organ donation in the UK, so if working alongside other charities suits a project best, that’s what we’ll do and if we can see that another charity does something better than us, we’re not going to try to replicate their work, but attempt to support them however we can to achieve the same goals that we are.

So the plan is coming together and the potential for Live Life Then Give Life as a charity is huge.  I can’t wait to be part of it.

This week we have been rudely invaded by the real world.  After 10 months of existing in a perfect little post-transplant bubble, the time has come to look at things that people out in the big wide beyond have to spend time looking at.

With K off to uni in 3 weeks and counting, she is, naturally, going to have to give up work.  The full-time commitment of the course, coupled with the 3-hour daily commute is going to sap every last bit of energy she has, making weekends a time for rest and recovery and not for the usual kind of student money-making that normally earns the bookworms a crust.

So it falls on me to start winning the bread for the house hold.  It’s a very strange position to be in, seeing as I haven’t been in paid employment since I left Northampton Theatres in April 2005, nearly three-and-a-half years ago.

One thing I’ve learned from friend-of-the-blog Emily is that returning straight into a ful-time job post-transplant is a bit of a no-no.  Although I now have more energy than I think I’ve ever had in my life (barring, maybe, my early years), that doesn’t automatically equate to being able to put up with the stamina required for a full-time job and the stresses and strains that go along with that.

Instead, I’m going to be looking for something smaller and more part-time, but then I hit the thorny issue of benefits.

At the moment, I’m still covered by incapacity benefits because I’ve been under doctor’s orders not to work.  The idea of incap is that in order to help you return to work, you are allowed to do a certain number of hours of paid work per week without incurring penalties on your benefits.  The trouble with incap is that once you pass the 16-hours-per-week threshold, you lose everything – there is no middle ground.

And it’s not just the incap that you lose.  Incap comes tied in with an entitlement to various other benefits including Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit, which basically means my rent and council tax are paid for me as my income isn’t high enough to cover them.

So, all-in-all, the loss of benefit will cost us in the region of £800 per month.  That’s an enormous gap to try to cover between working 16 hours per week on benefits and finding the rest of the money once you cross that line.  In effect, it means that you are forced to jump rom 16 hours per-week all the way up to a full-time 30-40 hour week with no middle ground and no safety net, beyond returning to incapacity benefit.

It sounds easy enough to try out full-time work and use the Incap as a fall-back option if you can’t cope, but that’s forgetting the psychological impact of going back to “illness”.  Everyone I know post-transplant has faught an incredible battle to get themselves back on their feat and rebuild new lives in the wake of a truly life-changing blessing.  What all that effort means, however, is that none of us want to return to the perception of “illness” that dogged us for years both before and initially post-transplant.

So the search for so-called “gainful” employment begins.  Where am I going to end up, who knows?  As long as it pays the bills, I have to be happy with it, but I would much rather have an opportunity to do the things I want to do with writing, filmmaking and educating than have to sit in a call-centre 37-hours a week.  Hopefully, the 16 hours I need to start off with will enable me to carry on with my personal projects and find a way to make them pay.

Watch this space!

I hadn’t actually realised it’s been nearly a week since my last post.  In fact, I was just sitting at my desk doing work-y things when it occurred to me that I hadn’t done anything for a bit and wondering when it was that I did.  Anyway, if you haven’t read the Duck Race entry, do it now then go and sponsor a duck then come back here.  I promise I’ll still be here.

I’ve had one of those weird weeks where I can’t remember what on earth I’ve been doing other than the fact that I seem to remember being quite busy.

My main occupation over the last two days (that’s Monday and Tuesday) has been attending Business Link’s free courses on how to start your own business.  They come in 3 flavours, as well as a general introduction session that I did late last month.  So on Monday afternoon I did a three-hour session on planning a business, writing a business plan and doing market research to be able to justify the idea in the first place, swiftly followed by a three hour evening session on Marketing and Sales, which was unbelievably helpful and taught me a huge amount of stuff I didn’t know before and has really helped me with some techniques and strategies to follow should I decide to go down this route.

Then after a day of rest and brain-recovery, I did another three hours on Tuesday night on Managing Money – all the financial aspects of running a business including book-keeping, tax and national insurance and other important financy-things.

What surprised me the most about the whole thing was that I actually really enjoyed being in a learning environment again – being taught things, learning things, using my brain to try to grasp things I’d not fully understood before.  It really was great fun and really, really helpful.

As a side note, any of you who think you’d like to start a business or similar, I can thoroughly recommend Business Link and their services and courses.  Everything they do is 100% free and you can do the open workshops like I did as well as talking to a Business Link Adviser, who are all bona-fide business people who really know what they’re doing.  I’ve been really impressed by them and would definitely use them again.

Beyond my courses the only other thing of note I think I’ve done is attend a show produced by my old MKT boss at the Grove Theatre in Dunstable.

I’m not one for hyperbole – ok, I am, but I’m not one for giving undue praise, so it should be noted that the Grove’s Wizard of Oz is without doubt the best Youth Theatre production I’ve ever seen.  It was utterly remarkable and even more so for the fact that it was put together as part of a two-week summer school.  That’s just 2 weeks spent working with a professional director that got the kids involved up to a standard superior to some professional productions I’ve seen (no names mentioned, Yellow Wallpaper).

I was thrilled that TJ invited me to come and see it and gobsmacked at the standard of performance from the entire cast, but particularly by the four leads, who blew me away with their voices and their physicality.  I really can’t congratulate the cast or the guys at the Grove for such a spectacular show.

I’ve got a busy weekend of fun coming up this weekend and I promise to blog in full detail about the whole thing on Monday, provided I don’t forget again…

I figured I’ve taken enough time off fitness and exercise since my admission with CMV, so I’m back on the treadmill and all the other torture devices at the gym in a bid to make sure that all the weight I’m currently putting on goes on in the right ways, not just around my stomach and face as seems to be the case at the moment.

I surprised myself at how little of my aerobic capacity I had actually lost, I did a lot better on the bike and rower than I thought I was going to and then fitted in a really good upper-body resistance workout, which I’ll be aiming to do twice a week and also a twice-weekly lower-body work out on the day after the uppers. That’ll be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday so I have 2 days rest between weights sessions for specific areas and then the weekend off.

I actually really enjoyed the session today and I hope that I’ll quickly pick up the gym-addiction that I had started to develop before my incarceration.

I also did a second Untouched photo-shoot with a friend from the Theatre today, which went really well – he’s very photogenic and we came away with some good shots and some fun ones, too. I’m really liking the look of the natural light and the challenge of getting the shot I need right there and then. I’m also getting more and more used to the intricate settings of my camera – learning how to use things I’ve always had on automatic before, but which now enable me to better control the image, which is vital when I can’t play with it after the fact.

Also chatted to J, the model, about setting up some Theatre/Film projects in the not-too-distant future: he’s like me, looking to occupy himself and to experiment with things in a small environment, but he’s on the acting side and I’m on the behind-the-camera side, which is quite a useful combination. I also think he may be as driven as I am, which will definitely help us spur ourselves along.

This afternoon I met with two of the old MK Youth Theatre who have set up their own project called In Vitro for their own production company, Thrust Theatre Company, which I’m incredibly impressed with. They’re very on-the-ball when it comes to the money side of things, having worked out a completely balanced budget and ways to raise the money quickly and easily. Budgeting is one of the hardest things to learn and get right when you don’t know a lot about production in theatre, so I’m really pleased that they’ve paid it so much attention and not just gone in blind with the hope they can put on a play somewhere.

The play itself, written by one of them and to be directed by the other, is also very good. It’s very “issue based”, but that’s no bad thing for a young people’s theatre group aiming at a certain market, and they have things to say on the issues which need to be listened to by some of the adult population in this country.

They’ve asked me to be involved, which I’d very much like to be – I’ll be going along to most of the rehearsals and being a sounding-board for their ideas and helping them through the process in any way they need, sort of like a mentor, I guess, which is a little scary as I’m sure I’m not old enough to be a mentor to anyone.

Still, it’s another project, another little bit of variety in my life and it’s something else to be interested in and excited about. Can’t wait.