Full House

Everyone is here; Miss Whiplash swept back from her Scottish sailing holiday, the film crew returned ready roasted from Arizona, there's a New Boy. And the kit is also back.

I live in the same house as the production company and it’s suddenly very crowded here. I have just got some ply cut to fit over the bed in the spare room to make more space to unpack, clean and repack the cases (ready for next week's trip), my other jobs include getting cross with insurance companies, transcribing the interviews done with the scientists, chasing people for receipts ... and buying food.

The food thing is mainly because Barney the Tall Teenager is also back. Last month he started digitising a pile of tapes that needed processing, a job he started with gusto, but then he got bored and petered out.

I’ve finally caught up with him and twisted his arm with an extra bribe of limitless nice food and a financial bonus if he gets the job done by Wednesday. He has taken me at my word - the first thing he does when he arrives in the morning is check out the fridge and get breakfast. Today already he has consumed some yogurts, 2 boxes of cream cakes and a plateful of pasta, sausages and peppers that would have fed an army.

In order to get the job done in time I want him to work on this evening, so that means more cakes, and a promise of cow pie if he’s still here at 8.

The Point Of It All...

Barney has been in the office helping out for a few days, I’ve known him since he was very young, he’s now 18 and has become awfully tall and spotty, I have my suspicions that aliens visited him a couple of years ago and exchanged his brains for bits of fluff and mice.

He finished with ‘school and stuff’ over a year ago but hasn’t been able to get more work than the odd shift at a local bar. We talk about what he could do with his life, I make encouraging noises about the things he’s good at, he makes polite noises back.

Finally, frustrated at my lack of perception he puts the nub of his problem more clearly

I just want to get some money.
(with that uplift at the end, like it’s a question)

Icky Stuff

13th May
I’m quite hardened to the sort of stuff that might make some people leap up on stools and scream. This project is, in effect, an anti-squeam boot camp. Last weekend Barney came in thoroughly grumpy from a failed fishing session, he’d taken a box of maggots out of the insect fridge to use as bait, on his return he stuck the half-full box of maggots in the food fridge … and it wasn’t properly closed … and during the course of the evening the box was knocked over … I discovered this the next morning…

For the cockroaches we made a sort of Barbie Doll House set in a three-sided box, this had to look like a corner of a kitchen with tiled sides and formica base, accessorised with a chopping board, a knife and food items. Before we let any cockroaches loose we had to devise security:

A large wooden box was lined with thick black plastic and filled with water (a sort of square paddling pool), there was a platform island in the middle of it, here we placed the set and then we airlifted in the cockroaches, any actors wanting to leave the set were thus slowed down by the moat.


Cockroaches are my final frontier, I don’t like touching them if I can help it, but all the other stuff; flies, ants, snails I’ve got terribly fond of. How can you not love creatures like this?




One of the programmes we are making looks at the human desire to destroy insect life and the quantities of products on sale to that end. We can’t show real brands so we have thought up some product names Bug-R-Off, Zap'em Dead, Flies Undone, Ultimate Doom etc., then we printed out labels and used them in our shed set.

All Quiet On The Home Front

The household has suddenly become smaller again, I took Ms Whiplash (our Production Manager) and one of the Camera Boys to the airport yesterday and dropped Spider Man at the railway station a short while ago. This evening The Director and his son Barney are down at the lake seeing who is the least competent at fishing.


Meanwhile I’m sewing a net curtain into a big shroud that will fit over a wooden frame the size of a shower cubicle. The whole thing will sit outside with Cabbage White butterfly pupae in it and some cabbage plants that I’ve been growing in pots (they are looking a bit stunted), we’re hoping the pupae will hatch, then lay their eggs on the cabbages (and we’ll try and film that).

Testosterone Surge

1st April
Barney, The Director’s son arrived at the weekend and is going to stay and work with us for a while, Spider Man has come back to continue logging and will stay over for the week, Félix is also here today setting up the tanks for the underwater creatures.

A couple of weeks ago I posted some notes about the existing housemates
it ony seems fair to do the same for the new boys:

Barney:
just got some very fancy sunglasses and won’t take them off – he probably sleeps wearing them, he never wears a jacket, in fact he generally dresses in a very impractical manner, he makes a great Pavlova - towering edifices that take an entire afternoon to construct.


Spider Man:
Rarely speaks, when he takes breaks from the computer he goes outside and swishes a big net around, then he examines what he’s caught and makes notes in the book he always carries with him, his favourite food is aubergine, he’s a bit rubbish at jam-making, he gave me a jar of his tomato jam – I wanted to taste it but I couldn’t find an implement strong enough to slice a piece out of the jar so, insane with curiosity, I had to just lick the surface of it.

Félix:
collects wild food, invited me for supper and served nettle soup (pretty good actually, sprinkled with ground sesame and salt), he lives with his mother, he runs a seed bank, one evening last week he turned up with a compartmentalised box hung on a strap round his neck from which he dispensed seeds for my vegetable garden. The tomato seeds are stuck on sheets of kitchen roll with the variety written on the paper.

Miss Whiplash isn’t coming until next week, by which time the odour of smelly socks might have become overwhelming and we’ll have to run off together and set up our own salon