Limpy, Lumpy and Shaky

Today Whiplash became part-owner of a poor abandoned little dog who got run over and now only has three legs

also we were visited by a friend who is looking after two dogs, one with tumours on it's face, the other one trembles uncontrollably.

Had supper with Whiplash last night

Dessert was divine


Whiplash is the châtelaine of an apartment block and is currently following the gardening contractors around to see if they actually do anything.

Next week or soon after she and another woman will be helping a friend give birth.

I've made an infusion of clary sage to mist her with once the contractions get going, Lisa's going to massage her face with a blusher brush

There's a soundtrack, when she gets to the last bit she wants to push it out to Led Zeppelin

they visited the birthing suites at the maternity hospital - all the other pregnant women were accompanied by men

We looked a right set of lezzers so I kept mentioning that the father was planning to be there too

Service Will Resume Shortly

Miss Whiplash drew up a schedule with lists and addenda of all the things that needed to be done by the end of today.

Tomorrow I shall sleep for a few days and then I'll go to Portugal to eat and have fun, I'll probably have something to say about that here.

Camping Queen

I'm hoping that I’ll have time to borrow a human this weekend.


Getting home from the Azores three weeks later than planned meant that I’ve had to cram the start of a new building project and catching up with five-weeks worth of office stuff into three and a half days before heading off to work at WOMAD for the weekend.


I love everything about WOMAD festivals except the camping, tents make my face go funny and I can never sleep in the things, however, if I want to do this job I have no choice and I love this job. Miss Whiplash lent me her little red tent for easy popability and I arrived early to pop it up in what seemed to be an advantageous place - near some rather posh-looking tents. I then went off to go and do some preparation for the weekend and came back a few hours later to see that the posh-looking tents have been assigned – I checked the tags on the tents to either side of mine.




I checked them out on Youtube, I don't think it'll be so bad - here’s one of them



BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting some of the music from WOMAD.

Praying To Edna

Miss Whiplash and Girl Wonder have organised our squid-hunting trip. Without them there would be no expedition.

I have talked about Whiplash in previous posts, she is very tall and good at sums and when she is not in trouble with the police she runs our film company with a rod of iron. Miss Whiplash also sings in a band. This weekend she is off to play at Glastonbury and somewhere between handing me the call sheet for the trip and telling me that she had ten packets of Betty Crocker mix at home which had to be turned into hash cakes by the morning she advised me to pray to Goddess Edna, I misheard this before I looked it up, so forever in my mind we will be asking Edna's help in our quest to find a Giant Squid before the end of July.

Accounts of Edna's life vary, she was an Inuit with an abusive father who was desperate to marry her off to the highest bidder. In some accounts, having realised that he'd married her to a 'bird creature' Edna's father tries to rescue her, this involves throwing her into the sea. Other versions have it that the father is so enraged by Edna's refusal to obey him that he throws her into the sea. Either way Edna always tries to rescue herself by climbing into her father's kayak and he chops off her frozen fingers. Edna falls to the depths of the ocean turning into a sea animal as she plummets. Edna's fingers grow into seals and whales and polar bears and Edna becomes the ruler of sea monsters.

the image is one made by my new favourite artist Ningeokuluk Teevee

Getting a Reputation

Bristol gets in the news now and again it’s always interesting to see which bits of information stick.

Miss Whiplash stayed late in the office last night, waiting for one of our cameras to be returned by a French company who had been using it to film bats in Nicaragua.

The camera was delivered by a handsome and underemployed young artist who was delighted to be in Bristol - our city was a holy place for him.

Where can I see ze Banksys?

Whiplash gave him a map and pointed out some of the places where the young man could see some of the artist’s best work. But the man looked concerned

Are zese in any of the bad places?

Whipash was puzzled - what do you mean by bad places?

for example, St Pauls I ‘ear it is full of how you say? ... toxicos

is there anywhere else you’ve been warned about?

yes Southmead are you telling me to go anywhere near Southmead?*

Whats wrong with Southmead?

The Nazis are living there


*The only reason that we know of Southmead is because of its hospital which has an excellent neurosurgery unit.

Chasing John Lynch

We like whiteboards to keep track of what's to be done around the office. They get full of notes about jobs to be done, shopping lists, and about a million unresolved problems.

Next week we will be recording the narration for two of our films, Whiplash and I have been squabbling over who gets to chase John Lynch.

Yes I Understand You Words

Everyone is away filming - Whiplash and I are left in the office to sort out the remaining engineering issues that need to be resolved before the next trip. Glass tubes and lumps of metal are arriving at our offices and we need to tell other people what to do with them, Whiplash listened to a man who arrived with a large box and wrote down what he said to her, I've typed her notes up so we can all know what's happening:




electrical dome comments
2 x 4 ft connector leads with 12 way female one end and 4 way females at the other end

connect spheres to junction box spotex making (cameras have gone to spotex)
box of mashers large and small spring mashers coming tuesday item 2 on scan drainage or disc springs on nautilus draining

plastic mashers – 1 made big for dome electrics, 4 smaller ones for little domes
2 x 5/8 hole optics
2 x 1/2 “ hole electrics

2 optical connector with big one and one each little one

still havent got camera with large enough head so big dax

Kevin back on Tuesday

Be Careful What You Wish For

Within mere days of my last post I became awash with chairage; I snapped up a perfectly decent set of 4 dining chairs to tide me over ... then I walked past a charity shop and saw another set of 4, quite different to the first set, but strangely interesting, so I bought them. All 8 chairs needed new seat covers and this has been my weekend project.

Yesterday I won an ebay auction for some chairs that I loved but thought I couldn't afford, another set of 4 and quite different from any of the others, but I really, really like them. I have just driven for two hours to go and collect them, the man selling them mentioned that he has another 24 just like them ... next week I will open my chair shop.

Meanwhile the production office has been overwhelmed; the Costa Rica cable-riggers didn't manage to get the cable-rigged before they had to go and work elsewhere, another crew had to be scrambled to go out to Costa Rica and finish the job so it is all set up ready for the actual filming to start in a month's time.

We have a new Hot Girl in the office (Miss Whiplash already presides over two less new Hot Girls). The Hot Girls sort out the emergencies and organise all the trips.

The newest Hot Girl prepared a care package for the latest Costa Rican Cable Rigging Cowboys it contains:

Money
Chocolate
Peanuts
Cashews

and a Tic Lasso

High Anxiety

I fought my tendency to pessimism for years - then I realised that living in that state of happy surprise when things aren’t ever quite as disastrous as I expected is probably as good a place to be as any.

Making television programmes demands that an enormous amount of money and energy be invested before any project has the slightest hope of getting off the ground. I am a partner in this particular business but The Director and Miss Whiplash are in charge of most of the buttons - I just peep between my fingers from behind the sofa while they move noughts around on spreadsheets.

Earlier this year our company made a film which was really rather good, we’re up for more prizes and there have been talks about making more programmes. The talking goes on for ages before anyone actually writes a cheque so we have to get on with ordering equipment, booking flights, finding new premises and keeping our fingers crossed.

I try and internalise my predictive gloom which leads to some funny symptoms like the ones where I think I’m having a heart attack or that I've got flu or that I am slowly being paralyzed by worms. I also get those dreams where I discover myself in a state of public disarray, this weeks prize dream involved being at the hairdressers and asking if I had any bald patches, Oh yes Madam said the hairdresser and held up a mirror to show me that not only was the back of my head bald but my brain was exposed and bleeding.

That might explain my grumpiness - an exposed and bleeding brain is not easily accessorized.

The first filming trip for our new set of programmes will be to Sri Lanka, there would be job for me on this one and I really really want to go - naturally I’ve refused to believe it would actually happen, I went along for the innoculations (just in case). Then, yesterday, after a kafkaesque morning at the Sri Lankan Embassy I stood blinking in the sunshine with my hurty arm (from the jabs) and a fistful of officially stamped documents and I woke up to the fact that 1000 people per year die from snake bites in Sri Lanka and I’d better get a move on with my bespoke suit of full-body armour - I’m having special added spikes attached to foil the leopards and crocodiles.

Cake Off

It has been a month of absences and missed birthdays, the crew that set out 5 weeks ago for Costa Rica were stranded in Madrid on the return journey so a filming trip in Spain was scrambled earlier than originally planned now everyone is late and has missed events and each other.



Back together in the production office we know several ways to celebrate – but it always starts with cake. Whiplash set the ball rolling yesterday with a classic carrot cake topped with her Ultimate Frosting Experience. Today I responded with a sticky ginger and lemon cake*. Tomorrow belongs to Cake Boy who has promised us his famous strawberry cream sponge ...


*follow the link and add ginger wine, more lemon juice/zest and chopped walnuts (worked fine without the apple)

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!

Encouraging The Young

The best coffee in the world is served in the lesbian café close to our office. Last week the Camera Boys came back from the café enthusing about an opportunity they'd seen for earning extra income. Later in the day Whiplash and I went over and checked out the ad;

Sperm Donor Wanted

Single woman, early 40's seeks reliable sperm donor

- No involvement needed/expected

- cash payment made for donation

- genuine advert

On our return Whiplash was scornful

She wants 'reliable sperm' - do you think either of you could produce reliable sperm?





the following day one of the Camera Boys turned up newly shorn in readiness for an imminent filming trip I said

Good hair - it makes you look very youthful

At that moment The Director walked into the room and looked at the Boy

Useful! -It'll take more than a haircut to make him look useful


!

Head Gear

In Bristol the protracted editing frenzy has finally died down, the editor has moved on to edit someone else’s film, Zena is on an Arctic Ice Tiger Wrestling Safari and Cake Boy is attending a cake-eating marathon on a European ski slope.

This leaves just myself, two Camera Boys, Miss Whiplash and The Director in the house/production office.

The two Camera Boys are young and excitable, they went through an excessive hair phase recently. This spring it seems that it is all about hats; Miss Whiplash is getting concerned about the proliferation of electricity and has been acquiring amulets, I do like cacti but the orgone accumulator is quite bulky and the office is getting a bit cluttered so we are looking for other ways to make her feel happy. Buoyed by their recent success in inventing a new lighting system, the Camera Boys are now developing a special hat for her


This has exposed a curious side of Miss Whiplash; a woman fearless in the face of litigation and all known body fluids. When she’s not looking after the production office she is on the road with her fierce band of rockers, wearing animal-print leotards and feather accessories - this is a woman who shoots flames from her fingernails.

Whiplash has suddenly been plunged into a domestic emergency where she is helping to look after a pile of children. Listening to her account of the weekend I was struck by the difference in our sense of the ultimate Nausea-Inducing-Experience. Hardened by 15 years of life with a man who thinks it’s normal to breed cockroaches to feed to his spiders, I was surprised to hear how upset she was by a few head lice,

I’ve had to spend my weekend combing them out – LIVE NITS!!!

followed by
there’s always a turd on the floor in the morning but I can cope with that!

I’d go for nit-combing over turd-between-the-toes any day – am I alone here?

Home Visit

The best thing about my new job is that I don’t do it at weekends. On Friday night after the now familiar supper pantomime, I headed for the station and a train back home to Bristol.

My home contains my husband (The Director) and his film production company, I used to work there too and all through last week, apart from missing my husband, my books and clothes and my own kitchen, I have been dreadfully homesick for my former colleagues, Miss Whiplash, the Camera Boys and all the cake and gossip therein.

I arrived at midnight to find the house full of panic over an impending deadline - a couple of Camera Boys worked with The Director over the weekend to get file transfers completed and another stage of a film production delivered.

Whiplash is stuck in Scotland and has sent a message to say that it is so cold that there is no point in even trying to go out - she might as well stay there, in bed with a friend or two to keep her warm, until the thaw.

There have been changes in my absence, a new Camera Boy was taken on just before Christmas, these were the main reasons that he got the job;

a) We really liked his hair

b) He’s a very sharp dresser

c) He’s so skinny that he pretty much disappears when he turns sideways*

It turns out that Slim Boy makes decent tea and is also rather good at all the digital stuff that needs doing, but an additional bonus is that his sartorial elegance is having an effect on the other boys, some of whom are now experimenting with hair products and interesting hats, it seems they are now spending their days discussing the relative merits of various hair straighteners and having wax vs gel debates.

* fascinating to observe, but also, as the house is rather crowded these days, a body that doesn’t take up much space is quite handy.



Weekend Bake Off
To restore my equilibrium after a week at the Crazy White House I spent the weekend baking and gave myself a gold star for a spiced fig, nut and orange tart invention, I’m pretty sure that it’s the sort of thing that can tolerate variations, so here's what I did;

• get some packets/handfuls of soft dried figs snip off the stalks and put to soak in dark rum and the juice and fine zest of an orange.

next day
• line a standard sized quiche dish with pastry (I added a tablespoonful of sugar to a basic shortcrust recipe) leave in the fridge while you make the filling.

• purée or chop the marinated figs and blend with the rum/orange liquor

• get a big handful (or two) of roasted nuts, walnuts are good, I combined these with some almonds and hazels, chop them and add to the fig mix

• stir in 2 eggs, a couple of tablespoons of honey, a grating of lemon zest, a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and ground cloves and a pinch of salt.

• taste the mixture and adjust for sweetness/spiciness/citricity, when you think it's lovely enough pour into the pastry-lined dish.

• cook in a moderate oven ( 180 degrees centigrade) for 30-40 mins. The top should start cracking but if you poke it, it should still be soft

• put tart to cool

• melt a bar of good dark chocolate with a tablespoon each of cream and butter and some more orange zest (if you fancy it) mix well and spread this on top of the tart.

• When you can wait no longer, eat tart.

Interview Tragi-Comedies

I have been in the production office helping Miss Whiplash choose a new helpmate. We’ve been through this process many times; we place an ad, discard the many slovenly, illiterate emails masquerading as applications, a short-list is drawn up, appointments made and we wait to see what will appear before us.

These were our favourites:

1) The man who appeared to be auditioning for a part in 'Oliver'
Cap at a jaunty angle, he took up a stagey pose on the doorstep and launched into a prepared speech.

2) The candidate who chuckled away as he said
I go crazy if I have to write stuff, I manage to do the title and then I go aaaarrrgghhh (waves hands aloft makes horror face) and then I tell my girlfriend what I want to say and she does it for me.

3) The young man who glossed over the reason for the early termination of his previous contract
Whiplash pressed him: Was there an accident Julian?

Julian: N-no, no (long pause before adding quietly) not really

4) The man who completely disregarded Lovelock Style Rule No 475*
Shades, wacky bandana, multiple piercings and the bottom part of a ZZ Top beard

5) The shouty man
when asked what his responsibilities were in his current job, treated us to a 15-minute rant about his work colleagues

We have taken on someone who appeals to us very much but I’ve completed a survey on who we’ve worked well with over the years and next time I’m just going to write this advert:

Help wanted: All applicants should be able to make tea and deal with rubbish bins. Women should be fierce, men should be nerds with strange hobbies - funny hair a bonus in all cases.

*Lovelock was a friend and style guru, wearer of orange Paul Smith suits, man bags and highly polished footwear, he passed on many pearls of wisdom, rule No 475 pertains to headwear

Never have more than 2 crazy things happening on your head at once; big hair, big glasses – fine, but ditch the wierdy beard

A Tale of Two Dining Tables

I returned to Bristol earlier than planned last week, just in time to see a bed being removed from the top bedroom which is becoming a second editing suite, the first editing suite was whirring with the business of getting footage prepared for the new editor.

At the bottom of the house a Camera Boy has been busy operating knurling machines and drills, metal shavings crunch underfoot in the the kitchen and the dining table has many tools on it. Carpets and furniture are glittery with the shine of metallic dust - Christmas simply isn't Christmas without it.

In the middle section of the house, The Director was surrounded by women and cake and was getting flummoxed, he’s spent the last several weeks in cars with boys and cameras and has forgotten how women carry on; Zena was in doing lion research, Mrs Moneypenny was getting the government-related paperwork in order and Miss Whiplash was unveiling her current collection of winter clothing. Last year it was floor-sweeping, furry filmstar cloaks, this season she’s channelling her inner intrepid-reporter via cream flak jackets and fur-lined underwear.


On Monday The Director flew to America to talk to people in the offices of National Discovery and I went back to The Smoke...

Last night I was engaged to give a cookery class at a private house in Hampstead, the idea being that I prepare tapas for the hostess and her guests while talking about what I’m doing, they join in with the making if they want, then everyone gets to eat the food - somewhere along the line the original intention was lost.

I arrived and was shown by a maid to the vast kitchen/dining room fitted with a big shiny cooker, double-sized double sinks and impressive granite work tops completely obscured by gadgets; 2 juicers, a breadmaker, a microwave, remote control units, toys, little bottles of condiments, jams, medicines and a footspa, there is not a handspace of work surface visible.

The kitchen is dominated by a massive table, covered with a cloth and decorated all along a wide central section with 6 big vases of flowers, dry fruits stuck on tall stalks, swirls of feathers, glittery pine cones and trails of beads and sequins leaving not quite enough margin around the edge of the table for the 14 place settings already laid out - there’s nowhere to put any food.


My breathless client had forgotten about it being a cookery demonstration. She talked very fast about all the dogs and children that needing taking to vets and flute lessons...

Are you ok to just carry on? Juanita can show you where everything is and help you peel things. I’ve got no idea how many people I’ve invited but they’ll be here in a couple of hours, I should be here just before and we’ll have a little champagne – will the food be done by then?

God's Gifts

Light Man had spent the morning mending holes in the roof and would shortly be going out to re-hang the front gate that has been lurking behind the bins since it fell away from it’s pillar a couple of years ago. We’d stopped for lunch and during the pear and hazelnut tart* we discovered that we had all listened to the same Radio 4 programme that informed us about Kate Winslet’s need to wear a merkin while filming The Reader.


That prompted lots of hair/wig-related stories, including a declaration by Miss Whiplash:

That is one area I don’t have to worry about, I spend my life controlling hair everywhere else on my body but my lady garden is naturally neat – I like to think of it as God’s way of giving me a little treat.


*top tart tip – pound together some fresh thyme with sugar, put a spoonful of thyme-y sugar in your pastry and in the cream when you whip it up, thyme + pears = yum!

bearded couple image found here

Passing Time

I’m back in the production office for a few days. Until recently it's been a hornet's nest of frantic activity here, all the parts of the filming team finally got off to Africa a week ago but then there were inevitably extra lorryloads of hard drives and cables to be sent out and lots of argy bargy about camp charges and filming fees, but Miss Whiplash sorted it all out and now it’s all gone a bit tum-ti-tum here - on the upside we finally have a chance to catch up with all the online horoscopes, Facebook and Guitar Hero.

When we’ve had enough of these activities, Miss Whiplash, the Youngest Camera Boy and myself entertain ourselves, and any passing guests, with tea parties and lunchtime events. Today a lovely man came and made the kitchen lights work - to celebrate we invited him to join us for lunch. YCB won several gold medals with his splendid stuffed peppers.

Light Man told us about his other job as a DJ;
I used to do toasting - but then I got shy.




I noticed a trendy new clothes shop today so I went in to investigate, I had a question to ask the sales assistant who was Welsh and very camp - I had to wait while he finished telling his colleague about someone he’d met at a party the previous night:
... well he made me really cross, I wanted to kill him and stab him and burn him.

Awards and Eye Sores

Stills from must-see movie Casus Kiran


Highlights of the week:

Saturday: Invite friends for supper, at the end there is rice pudding with coconut milk, cardamom, and baked pears, there’s a long curl of lemon zest in the pudding and toasted almonds on the top, it instantly wins a Dish of the Week Gold Star, hail self as genius then accidentally poke same self in eye with wooden spoon.


Sunday: Woke with head cold, the eye is swollen and gummy-looking. Total disaster as must look totally gorgeous in exactly three days time.


Monday: Whiplash is back (Cheers from the gallery!) her rash has cleared up and she has discovered a local source of custard tarts baked by Portuguese person, they go exceedingly well with coffee from lesbian café.

Eye looking a bit better

Tuesday: Go to London and stay in friend’s cream-carpetted apartment - she is away. Scared of spoiling immaculateness so confine self to kitchen. Have boiled egg for tea while holding a cold wet flannel on eye. Check an email that is already sent as tender for cooking work, note that I make claims to have catered large pubic events

Wednesday: Eye looking good, set off for interview, wearing chic outfit and proper grown-up make up. Get caught short while approaching Westbourne Grove so nip into the local designer gorgeous public lavatory.

Try to wash hands but soap dispenser nozzle blocked, push harder on soap lever, suddenly soap becomes unblocked, resultant jet of liquid ricochets off my open palms into eyes, rinse energetically, there are no towels. Emerge looking like I’ve been in a fight.

Thursday: Bristol and a gig: Andy White, is very good, here's one of his videos




Friday: Film and dance event in converted church, a spinach and peanut butter wrap served during interval wins Interesting Food of the Week Award.