White Van Woman

Funny the way things work out; my diary says that I am abroad working at a glamorous international music event - the Icelandic volcano has put paid to that idea and, unbelievably, my would-be employers have decided to go ahead with their festivities without me.

Meanwhile the film office has been smoking with activity; the film crew got stuck in Madrid on their way back from Costa Rica. Miss Whiplash and I spent the weekend pacing around her desk and pointing fingers in the air as we hatched cunning plan after cunning plan. With typical brilliance Whiplash managed to fix a new filming schedule so that the crew can be occupied filming ants in Barcelona while awaiting rescue...

I have just collected a van huge enough to accommodate fifty hundred cases of filming equipment and some passengers. In the morning I will board a ferry for a 24-hour journey to Santander, I will then drive my great white leviathan towards the Mediterranean where I hope to find shining faces waiting for me.

Actually their faces might be shining, but from the reports we’ve been getting I expect the rest of their bodies to be quite nasty; someone has a fungal infection, one of the Camera Boys has a swollen leg and everyone is itchy from insect bites. The outright winner of the horrible disease competition though, is The Director with the many parasites that are currently burrowing around in his skin, this is much more impressive than last year’s return from Costa Rica when he played host to just a single botfly, then, we tried to entice the botfly out of his arm by strapping something fatty over it's airhole, the point being that it will burrow up into the new food, in search of air and thus get out of its human host*. The top picture shows my purchases for this purpose from the Italian delicatessen down the road, I bought a lovely bit of speck but it wasn’t bendy enough and the pork fat turned out to be easier to fit.


Gruesome body events are an occupational hazard for film crews and is the stuff of many a pub anecdote, we know someone who hatched spiders out of his forehead while trying to edit his footage and there is a very well known cameraman who used to remove his trousers at the drop of a hat to show the hole in his leg made by a hippo.

* Youtube has some very gross footage of botfly removal – don’t go there!