Wednesday 29 January 2014

Plotting and Scheming

January's been a pretty busy month considering all my best intentions to keep lots of time available for completing things on The List. Work wrote off the first week and a half really with 10pm (or later) finishes, and once the time-critical things were done there was a lot of catching up on the day-to-day left over. That said, I still squeezed a fair bit into my free time.

Two weekends of afternoons were spent filming a mini-sitcom for YouTube with the brilliant Paul Richards. Paul and I have always worked on a lot of theatrical projects together but this year with both of us writing solo shows for the fringe we haven't had much need to spend our evenings reading through script drafts and eating spicy chips at our favourite cafe. This little project was great fun and a nice excuse to hang out together. Intended mainly as a way of recording some of Paul's writing, it's a 4 part series of 10-15 minute episodes of a sitcom about characters Emily and Michael who recently broke up but have ended up sharing the long and awkward drive to Bristol to visit new partners. It's unrehearsed and undirected, filmed exclusively on an iPhone which gives it a gritty, claustrophobic atmosphere that works surprisingly well. Hopefully we'll be releasing the episodes in the next month or so and I'll link them here.

It's also been a surprisingly sociable January with a few parties, a Burns night supper in London, and the first 30th birthday shindig of the year which was a great excuse to see some of my favourite people that live too far away to see anywhere near as regularly as I'd like. Chatting to a few people over the last few weeks I've been given a few ideas for 'back up' items for my 30 Before 30 list too - for just in case anything on my list becomes impossible to complete for any reason. They're certainly not cop-out alternatives, but I think it's wise to have a back up or two in case...

Most of all this January I've been comforting myself over my heavy workload and the miserable weather by daydreaming about holidays and planning how to get some more countries on my list. To this end, I've booked time off work in April around the Easter weekend to visit some Eastern European countries - flights are booked to go from London to Sofia (Bulgaria) and back home from Ljubljana (Slovenia). I plan on hopping on some trains in between to visit Belgrade (Serbia), Budapest (Hungary) and Zagreb (Croatia). It's a squeeze for ten days but with a little planning and my friend TripAdvisor I reckon I can squeeze a lot in.

Better get stuck into the guide books I suppose...


                            
    

No comments:

Post a Comment