Radio Gaga

16th September
Last week we had ever more brilliant ideas about fast things we should film with the Speedy Camera.
We could pile up those old tv’s and explode them
Too dangerous
OK lets fill that rain barrel with milk and drop things in it
like what?
A person - someone could jump in the barrel naked - from up there
and so on…

Our brilliance was edited and I charged around finding props for the filming. A side effect of all this creativity is that the camerawork is eating up computer disk space so I’ve also been buying terabytes by the carload.

Then a fire in the Channel Tunnel last week mucked up all the pretty travel arrangements I’d made for people and kit coming and going over the weekend. (we had to give the camera back – big sighs all round) and I had to go to the UK, retrieve a car and drive it back to France.

In the Lovely House I can get a local radio station that consists of someone reading out small ads, Mimi in Marciac would like to swap a dog for a brown sofa, sort of thing, it involves streams of phone numbers and is mesmerising, so probably not ideal for driving along to. However, I did fancy a bit of company for the epic drive back here. I set the radio to ‘search’ but it discovered only a series of ‘pop’ stations. French pop comes from a bin labelled Merde and makes me want to shoot myself. The CD player was broken, so I finally I settled on a 'phone-out’ programme where, between records, a DJ makes a series of calls to recalcitrant fonctionnaires on behalf of listeners who are having problems with insurance claims and legal issues. I would never have listened to an English equivalent of this (is there an English equivalent?) but I find this kind of thing compelling in other countries.