Posts (page 2)

Some things are described as "Very British": self-deprecating humour, bad teeth, and a tendency to say the wrong thing then dig oneself boofusly into a deeper and deeper conversational hole, in a bumbling yet endearing fashion. Other Very British things include: rain; pubs; fish & chips on the beach in the rain; not doing very much exercise; lying in the road drunk at the weekend (in the rain) or on any night of the week if you're on the Med; a wryly cheery approach to adversity, but not in a heart-hanging-out, over-sharing kind of way.

Crap natural phenomena are Very British. Our fair isle does not do climactical extremes. Our most devastating floods do not wash away entire villages and wipe out swathes of the population; rather, they ruin the carpet and provide newsreel of vicars sailing hilariously in rowing boats to pluck dogs from the top of gateposts. High winds do not kill, destroy and flatten; but they do make your journey up the A556 a real pain in the bum, what with that fallen tree blocking the road.

Last night we experienced a Very British earthquake. People from LA and Japan would have slept through it- in fact, it probably would have sent them to sleep. I dreamed that someone was shaking me. It lasted a few seconds, we woke up, G went looking downstairs to see if we'd be intruded upon by a giant vibrating burglar, and then we went back to sleep (after I'd inexplicably and urgently whispered did you check the kitchen? as if the food processor might have come to life, swelled to ten times its size and set itself to max power, thus causing the house to shake).

In other parts of the world, whole sections of the planet are cracked in two, stretches of road are crumpled and buildings toppled. People build special wobbly buildings to absorb the catastrophic quakes.

The headline on the BBC News website this morning? "Chimneys Topple In Large Tremor"

This does not stop people from appearing in newspapers staring balefully at cameras as they stand next to their fallen-down shelf, or telling reporters that their cupboard doors swung open most alarmingly during the "quake".

My favourite post-earthquake comment, courtesy of the news this morning: "It was hell".

Melodrama = not Very British, dear.

And yet, as one of my colleagues remarked in a dry and Very British way this morning, tomorrow we'll probably be out filming the "survivors" of the Great Quake 2008.

 

This is what I actually logged on to post, but was sidetracked by "ouch, charlie". Which is ten times funnier than this post will be, no doubt, but I can cope.

Theres a lyric in KT Tunstall's song "Suddenly I See". It goes "her face is a map of the world, is a map of the world". Well, my legs are a map of boofus, a map of boofus. There are purple and yellow bruises blooming across my knees, peppered with a few tiny bits of gravel. There is another smear of brusing on one of my shins, and in the middle of that bruise, there is a dark red dot- a puncture wound, not to be dramatic or anything.

The bruised knees came about on Wednesday. I left work and was running for a bus. I decided to change course and dart diagonally across the road to catch it. Unfortunately I miscalculated the angle of the swerve I needed to make, and should have realised that a) running and b) swerving were ill-advised in four-inch stack heels. My right foot tipped to the side and I managed to style it out, just about. But then came the aftershock, which sent me flying faceforwards onto the road. There was no styling that out, as my outstretched hands drove through the mud and my knees crunched onto the tarmac. Life became slow motion as I lifted my cheek from the wet ground to see cars approaching me to the front, and to the left, a man walking past staring at me with a look of total disgust on his face, as if I were a whacked-out crack whore who couldn't quite make it to the pavement before lying face-down, in office clothes, you stupid man, in a drugs-induced haze.

A little while later I made my way somewhat shakily into the restaurant where G and I were planning to eat dinner. I went to the toilets to scrape off some of the mud that was ground into my skin/nails/clothes/new handbag. Whilst there, it was only sensible to, um, pay a visit. Imagine my shock when, fresh from my road-tumbling horror, I discovered too late that the toilet seat was not screwed on at all. No sooner had I perched atop it but it was flying off the toilet and clattering to the floor, almost taking me with it and leaving me thankful that visiting the WC is usually a private affair so no styling out was required. We left without ordering.

The puncture wound/bruise combo was inflicted last night. I was enjoying a pint of Coke and my first ever game of darts in the pub (beginner's luck, or finally a sport I can actually play? I've no idea, but I got a bullseye). You can see where this is going, no? Clearly our friend Tony is not quite such a whizz with "the arrows" as he believes himself to be. During one throw, not only did he fail to score, but managed to bounce the dart off the board, from where it flew through the air and sunk into my leg. This was quite amusing, until I looked down a minute later and saw a perfect trickle of blood running down the black leather of my boot. It looked like a rock album cover, but resulted in me spending Saturday morning in an NHS walk-in centre, wondering if it would have been polite to shave my legs before finding out if my leg was about to explode.

I'm happy to report that the leg is still in tact, I have not been struck down with tetanus, the sun is shining, and I plan very much not to injure myself further before the week is out.

This video was linked from a v famous blog (hell, she doesn't need another link), so I am absolutely copying, BUT, it's probably the funniest thing I have ever seen. You know when something is so funny that you laugh really loudly, on your own, sitting at the computer in front of the window and not caring that the whole street has a profile view of you laughing on your own like a mentalist? That's how funny I found it. Watch!

As people log onto their PCs, the news is rippling around the office...

THEY'VE BLOCKED FACEBOOK!

The swines... let it not be true. We're clinging to the hope that it might be a technical hitch, and spluttering things like "but we have to research people for our programmes!" and "but we're CREATIVE, we have to... chat...with our...friends" (this one doesn't quite stand up).

First the branded diaries, then Facebook... next, our very souls.

UPDATE: Feverish refreshing proved that it was indeed a facebook issue. Speaking of issues, it seems I have some with drama.

In my line of work making current affairs TV, I find myself having all kinds of conversations with all kinds of people as part of my job. It's a strange, parasitical position to be in: I spend my days calling people who are expert in their field of work, taking up their time which they should be spending working in said field, in order to leech their knowledge. There are skills involved in my job of course- technical skills and directing and the like- but essentially the main area of expertise is sucking expertise from others. It's a skill, no doubt, but an odd one.

Yesterday, for instance, I was a complete novice when it came to the property market. Today, well, I can rabbit vaguely about credit crunches and interest rates and negative equity and the like, and confidently doom-say the inevitable fact that we will have to live in a two-bed terrace until we die. Or will we? Various more-expertly endowed brainboxes and "real life people" will demonstrate each side of the argument in my latest five-minute film.

In the span of a month I can learn from scratch about such random topics as the legality of cosmetic dentistry, who are the richest pets in the world and how much money do the bitches they have, why allotments are so popular, and how many people are on the organ donor list. And I'll sort of know what I'm talking about, kind of, ish. 

This is excellent for pub quizzes, for supplying anecdotes in the pub, and for trumping boys' knowledge of trivia, er, in the pub. It's great, therefore, for everything to do with the pub. Which is maybe why journalists are such a drink-sodden bunch.

But sometimes I wonder what it must be like to know almost everything about one thing. I have frightfully clever friends with masters degrees, PHDs and the like, in such specific areas as a particular strain of the flu virus, or a period in prison history. These are the people who will get called by parasites like me, to suck out their knowledge. In fact, calls have been made by my very colleagues to one of my friends and my sister in the name of research (though the latter was working in a press office at the time- another ephemeral occupation in which one perches on the shoulders of knowledge rather than actually possessing it).

I have had the odd daydream about how it would be for someone to phone me up and ask if I would appear on a show to talk about my authoritative grasp of... well... something. This is where pop (or rather, the media), eats itself: very rarely is the news news (I can't think of a situation in which I'd be required to appear as an Expert Assistant Producer, to expound upon such skills as knowledge-sucking, emotional manilupation and working out whether to kiss on both cheeks). In more elaborate versions of this daydream, it is some time in the future- and yet, miraculously, I'm still young- and I have become an expert gardener/horticulturalist (but one who wears a bra, thank you very much, Charlie Dimmock), and am asked to appear on a programme to talk about, say, compost. I imagine I would be very flattered, and to this end, can't understand, for the sake of their own egos, why experts aren't generally more keen to be on television.

No point to this entry, other than that I have had it up to the eyeballs with the house price crash for today, but my street dance class (very close to my office) is not until 7pm, so I need to fill some time, and all the people with actual knowledge have left work for the day. So my brain is an empty vacuum, with no host-experts to feed off.

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently when I was a surly, pale teenager with hair covering half of my face, I once huffed to my green-fingered mother "it's inevitable, I'm going to end up actually liking gardening".

Yesterday found me, aged 27, filled with the kind of glee which almost prompted me to call my boyfriend, mobile clutched in muddy paw, to hee-haw over-excitedly about the inaugral voyage of the Good Ship Compost. The only reason I didn't was because I was too busy grabbing handfuls of the stuff and sniffing it, thinking "miracles! It has no odour! We have made this fine, rich soil from kitchen waste!".

Composting is one of those things that you do because you ought to, and because it fills you with the middle-class glow of eco smugness. Our compost bin is somewhat outlandish in size, especially compared to the size of our little yarden, and the fact that there is but one flowerbed, and everything else is in pots. Feh. Details.

We've been dutifully filling our compost bin from our compartmentalised kitchen bin (one section for compost, one for dry recyclables, and one for general waste. My god, it's so Woodcraft, I can barely take it, but the worst thing is, it is actually true) for over a year now.  And yesterday, after my first bout of gardening for 2008- shamefacedly weeding my neglected bed and repairing the damage done by those pesky squirrels to my bulb containers- I dared to wonder whether the time might have come to spread some of that organic goodness onto the soil to nourish it in preparation for all the gardening (woo!) to come this year. With baited breath I slid open the magic door, and there they were: layers of actual soil which had been made from our discarded fruit and veg peelings.

I am not just over-dramatising for the sake of bloggy goodness; I did actually feel filled with happiness and excitement as I spread the muck around. It felt like I was, indeed, spreading love. Where is the love? Asked the Black Eyed Peas. I can tell them. It is in my garden.

A few top tips from a composting ingenue:
1. Crush up your eggshells before you put them in the compost bin. This is something that G has said we should do in the past, but I thought it was just the OCD playing up and ignored him. Now, painfully, I admit he was right. The whole eggshells which remain intact even after a year or so aren't really a problem- you can crush them in a jiffy- but for those who prefer their fermented waste matter to be aesthetically pleasing, crushing them will avoid the "pebble dash eggshell look" in the resulting compost.
2. Snip up twigs and other gnarly waste matter (ew). Again, they're not a huge problem, but it does make digging out the soft, squelchy compost a little harder when you have to extract large branches from it first. Sadly I had already dumped a load of  twiggy lavender cuttings on top of the compost bin yesterday, before I  foraged into its bottom (what is wrong with me today?) and developed these tips. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't plunged back into the bin to cut the twigs post-humously. What can I say, I'm out of control.
3. Don't put stones in there. Admittedly, there were stones only in the very first layer of compost. It's as though you can actually age-date my progress as a mindful gardener by the layers of my compost. The first layer was peppered with bits of broken terracotta, twigs and even a bit of plastic packaging. Clearly the dream of actually harvesting this compost seemd, at the outset, as far off as the dream of me one day scoring a permanent contract at work (compost has been forthcoming; staff job not so much).

Other than that, it's insanely gratifying for something which is essentially nothing more than putting the rubbish out.

Finally, a sample of my internal monologue whilst spreading compost:
Tra la la, earth to earth, ashes to ashes. Mother nature, ommmmm...
This is good sh*t
Good sh*t. Compost. Hee
Ooh. Must blog that.
Wait. Compost is not sh*t. It's vegetable matter.
Sh*t.

ps Forgive the heavy-handed asterixing. Have been overcome with sudden blushing awareness that members of my family read my blog. And they know full well that I never, ever swear.

Sergeant Bokker, reporting for duty.

There are two reasons for my absence of late, if you're interested:

1. January at work was like an incredibly demanding child with ADHD: exhausting, unpredictable, but I sort of loved it.  To explain: usually I produce two five minute VTs- the pre-recorded reports which slot into a live studio show- every four weeks. This includes one week to plan both films, two weeks to shoot and prepare for the edit, then one week in the edit. To produce just ten minutes of TV in a month sounds like a breeze... but believe me it's pretty hardcore (the schedule, not the content. I don't work for that type of show). There are four of us Directing APs, or Assistant Producers (though essentially we produce and direct the films ourselves, under the wise watch of a mother/father goose producer, to make sure we don't make a film which consists solely of people lipsynching to I Will Survive, or film everything upside down and in night vision, or slander the royal family.. oh, wait). Our "cycles" are staggered, and at any one time, one of us lucky little monkeys gets to make one film a week for three weeks. This is what I have referred to as "news duties" in previous posts. The films are supposed to be topical and reactive, and best of all, the whole thing has to be planned, scripted, shot, edited and usually broadcast within five days. Hence the work dreads to end them all at the beginning of January. But you know, this month might have literally ended the work dreads. I realised that I could actually do it and my head would not explode. Yes! She Who Desires Routine, She Who Doesn't Believe In All The Drama, has discovered an inner pressure junkie. And it's screaming to get out, like, yesterday, make it happen, Bokker! Get the story! There have been some very long days, and one you-couldn't-make-it-up moment when, with transmission looming and the VT finished by the skin of our teeth, my producer and I grabbed the finished tape, jumped in my car to whizz it up to the studio where it would be fed down the line to the live show (my producer barking "drive like Gene hunt!"), only to find that that my car wouldn't start. We were both secretly pleased at this final dramatic twist, I could tell. I'm fairly exhausted, but now have a week off (A WEEK OFF!) to restore myself. It's all gravy, baby.

2. I couldn't post last week without mentioning that The "Lucky Bastard" G had been sent to New York for work for a few days. And I didn't want to mention it because, scaredy-cat that I am, I was loathe to reveal that he was away and I was (shudder) alone. Who knows who could be reading? Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, magically deposed from Perfume? That scary nightie woman in the Facebook chain letter who will lie under my bed as in the photo, and come and steal my soul if I don't forward the message to five people? A common-garden stalker? Just another example of the extremes of my neuroses. But there it is.
G's return from New York brought , amongst other lovely gifts: some Timberlands (which I have hankered after for over a decade, and this time they actually fit me!), enough Big Red to burn the top layer of skin off my tongue, and some  rather moreish little things called Reeces Pieces- the tiny  m&m style ones, not the big dollopy ones. Though at first finding them so crack-like that I made G hide them from me, I've since realised that a few go a long way (ie: nearly made self sick). I love eating American "candy", purely because it fulfils a childhood dream of being Ramona the Pest.

Anyway. Excuses over. Must try harder.

The End.

I fancied myself as something of a trooper at the start of this week, as I prepared to face all the things likely to freak me out on one intensive location shoot. It took me over a year to even look at the sea after H died. When I finally found myself standing on a beach in Ireland, I stood before it and chucked pebbles into the waves in a petulant fashion. Later I dashed in, and out again, at great speed, in Bournemouth. For months I would flick the TV channel quickly if "Coast" was on.  Eventually I swam, hesitantly, in the Med (because it has no tides).

When I heard that we'd been commissioned to make a film about the lifeboats, I bagsied the task immediately. I didn't want someone else to make it and not really care, just another deadline to tick off. But this Wednesday, my stomach was churning. What the hell was I doing? Why did I think I could make a film about the dangers of the sea, let alone set sail into the inky black? I didn't feel like a trooper any longer.

But to my surprise I found the whole experience uplifting. I was as safe as houses on the lifeboat. The moment the boat jumped on a swell, two pairs of burly hands would grab my lifejacket and anchor me to the deck. The men were jolly, down-to-earth and just incredibly decent people. The air was thick with sea salt and innuendo, but I'm terribly slow when it comes to double entendre, so most of the filth went over my head (which I made the mistake of saying, inviting another gale of "over her head" cracks). My heart was warmed by the thought of these yellow-wellied heroes, ready to charge to the rescue around Britain's shores.

I confess that this rosy glow has settled over the experience with hindsight. During the launch itself, I didn't freak out even remotely, not even when they carried out a rescue training exercise using a resus dummy. But my stomach was churning in quite another fashion. My hardy comrade, who was carrying out the filming while I attempted to yell directions over the January wind, soon found herself dangling over the side of the boat, too polite to vomit. I was already queasy by this point (though obviously the crew insisted the sea was "like a millpond"), but once I was atop the boat with the coxswain, and staring down the viewfinder of the camera, it was all I could do to stop myself hurling across the dashboard (is it called a dashboard on a boat?). Not only did I feel sick, but I lost all sense of direction as well as some of my motor skills. I'd look at the camera to find I'd accidentally changed the shutter speed and was seeing the world in slow motion, or the front had fallen off the pag light, or the microphone was rolling around on the deck, unheeded. Frequently I had to turn the camera off and simply stare at the horizon; keeping my balance and holding my stomach was multi-tasking enough for me. Once I'd scraped together enough non-slow-motion material, we had to give up all together, and my colleague and I, in as many words as we could muster, thanked the crew and politely declined their offer to head to the pub, staggered to the car and back to our hotel.

One very good night's sleep, one day spent flinging my reporter fully-clothed from a 4m high platform into an icy pool complete with crashing waves and lightning to give him a taste of the training, one loooong day spent editing the five hours of footage down to five minutes, and I'm left with one fully-formed item about the RNLI. If it inspires just a few people to make a donation, it's a job well done.
 

A lot of the time my job is nothing short of ridiculous. Frequently, I blink to my senses during filming and have a surreal "what?" moment. Like  when I'm on a farm, and a rat runs across my foot, pursued by a dog, pursued by a man, like some kind of demented Wacky Races, and when I'm watching the footage back I can hear myself dry-heaving just out of shot as the dog finally sinks his teeth in. Or when a runner in the edit suite tells me that he's created exactly the chalkboard/chalk sound effect that I desperately need, using a piece of wood and "something I found on the floor". Or like last week, when suddenly I was struck with the question: "how, exactly, did I get to this moment in which I am making an esteemed veteran  former political correspondent run up and down, up and down the steps outside a local shopping centre?". The programme I work on occupies the lighter side of current affairs. Quite often it floats away. Oh but I love it. Don't sack me!  (Sadly the redundance at my place of work has not yet ended, and I don't yet whether I shall go to the ball of employment or, raggedy-clothed, sweep the floors of destitution).

But sometimes I end up working on a story which weighs more and means more. A story which I can't whip into an amusing froth of puns and knowing pieces-to-camera. One which makes me crash akwardly from snarky to serious in the space of one blog post.

This week I'm honoured and slightly scared to be making a short piece about the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Though my sister was far, far away when she drowned at sea, since her death I've been in awe of the people in this country who go out in the worst of conditions to rescue those in trouble. I know, we know, how easy it is for this to happen. My sister was only wading; she was a strong swimmer; it was a safe beach, a swimming beach. There was a rip tide. That's what happened. A freak occurence.  Every season, all around our shores, people are swimming or fishing or sailing, or sometimes just walking along the shoreline in the wind, and these things happen. To any one of us, these things can happen.

Did you know that 95% of people who work for the RNLI don't get paid? They risk their lives, and they get up the middle of the night, get in a boat and sail into storms to save people. They might die, but they still do it.

I'm going out in a lifeboat filming tomorrow, but my family mustn't worry because surely it's the safest place to be in the sea? And by golly, my risk assessment is as long as my arm.  In fact, what I'm most worried about is that I'll be too busy flinging my arms around the volunteers' knees and kissing their feet, to do any directing. Seriously, I'm also worried that I won't do this film justice, that deadlines will make me rush it or I won't get what I need from  the filming, or the execs won't like it. I cannot, will not make a mess of this. I'm doing it for my sister after all.

Who, by the way, will be looking down tomorrow and laughing so hard she doubles over, when she sees me wearing waterproof trousers, an oversized all-weather jacket, wellies and one of those fisherman's hats. Booferama. 

 

I've got major work dreads, like a normal Sunday multiplied by, well, two weeks. And a whole new year. Work dreads x 2008. It's only made worse by what lies in wait for me this week: one project which wasn't tied up before Christmas, to be edited in haste tomorrow; plus, for one month, I'm on what you could call "news duties". This means that I'm churning out one topical item per week for the endlessly greedy beast of a television programme I work on. I have to find a current story, script it, film it and edit it within one week. Every week throughout Jan. Ah well. I'm not, as I often remind myself, working down a coal mine. Though I am supposed to be catching up with some paperwork right now, to soften the blow tomorrow morning. Hence the sudden blogging itch. I will go and do the bloody paperwork, but one more thing before I do.

I've experienced something this week which reminds me what a geek I am, to the core. I'm very rarely ill during work hours/days. My body just won't allow it- see, geek. I was clobbered with a stinker of a cold this week, starting on Thursday and gathering apace until today, when lo! Just in time for my first day of work, my cold has abated. Thing is, I would have no qualms about taking time off work if I would only be ill during work time. In fact, I'm secretly hoping that I'll feel worse tomorrow morning, so I can escape the news duties nightmare at least for a couple of days. But I predict that the rivers of mucus will cease flowing over the boulders of my swollen glands before the night is over. And it'll be off to work I go.

Like I said, snot fair.