If you go down to the woods today

There used to be a tradition in our family that every christmas day, after indulging in far too much turkey and spuds, we would take a leisurely walk across the common, collecting bits of firewood so that once we got back to the house we could make a fire and toast some crumpets and let the adults have a good snooze in front of the flickering flames while we, the children played with our latest shiny toys. 

This all stopped when it was discovered that the house had subsidence and the whole front wall of the house was trying to lie down in the front garden. Apparently someone decided to build the houses so they straddled a perimeter ditch that was filled in with sand, which has a tendency to shift over time.

We were relocated for the greater part of a year to another house while the house was underpinned, which also allowed us to completely redecorate the whole house in the absence of any inhabitants. Part of this plan involved taking out the fireplace, leaving a hole in the wall, which was to eventually be filled with another fireplace.

Fourteen years later and the fireplace still hasn't arrived to take its rightful place (Due to the fact that no fireplace has been ordered) At the moment the hole is covered up with some of my sisters artwork, which is held up by our VHS and DVD collection.

Hopefully by next christmas we will have a new fireplace, so we can toast crumpets again, that would make my christmas!

Home is where the heat is.

There are many advantages to going back to your parents house every so often, free food, a new set of hand-me-down boots to keep my feet dry, and most of all, a nice warm house that you don't have to pay bills for. There is something really cosy, authentic and solid about a parental house that so far i have been unable to emulate in any of my past few houses.
There are always little oddities that only the inhabitants know about, like the starlings that nest above the boys bedroom window, knowing to pull the front door as you unlock it, or the procedure to light the ageing grill without filling the kitchen with gas.

Home, there's no place like it.

We always tend to leave things to the last minute in our house, which was why when I arrived home on the 23rd I found the front room pretty much the same as when I last visited some time in November. My sister and I started putting up the decorations before her phone buzzed and she escaped into town for a social engagement, leaving me to do the manly job of getting the tree in, making sure it's in a waterproof pot, covering up said pot and eventually decorating it. The parents have opted to buy a tree that still has its roots so that we could potentially use it for the next couple of years christmases, that will remain to be seen!

As I was perusing the back room for anything I owned so I could help with Operation RescueThe Table From Crap, I found a hefty book, the size of which only one type book tends reach.
This King James bible was the Lewzey family bible, though apparently none of my parents family were very religious i think it was just the done thing.

If the roman numerals inside the cover relate to the books print date and not the first print or commission date, then it is over 140 years old! (The date inside was M.DCCC.LX.VI if you want to work out the date for yourselves.)
It's funny that this version of the bible has gone from such a substantial size to being a bunch of 0s and 1s on my phone that barely takes up the same space as a song!

A very Merry Christmas to everyone who humours me in what I write on this blog. Enjoy yourselves at this time of sharing and loving and don't forget the event that kicked off this whole celebration: Jesus being born over 2000 years ago to an unassuming couple, as a gift from God to mankind.

Cli-clunk, Whrrrrrrr

Thanks to the wonders of modern digital photograph, merely a week after finishing Little Match Girl and performing at Alchemi, photographs have arrived on my virtual desk of the two events.

As LMG was my first proper foray into theatre lighting (using all my own design and programming) i feel particularly proud that nothing went monstrously wrong and i even enjoyed the experience! Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's my dissertation.

LMG in a dream world

Drunk old crone

Cast singing the main theme song

LMG being wrongly accused

Tart singing about poor people enjoying a drink

LMG threatening a rich man for not giving her any money

If you've made it this far, well done! Usually after sifting through a bunch of photos of theatre I tend to blank anything else that happens after them and i imagine others may do likewise.

December'd Alchemi happened to fall on the evening of the church christmas play, which allowed us to tart up the room with lots of expensive things. If it pleases the court, may I present Exhibit A:

Photo by Ceri Herbert

I didn't have the foresight to take a before picture to go with this after one, but the church itself looks VERY different from the picture above.

Theatre, dahling?

Two weeks of almost solid theatre work and it's over! I've acted in three different capacities on three different plays, but surprisingly I'm not worn out by it all! 

The first production was "The Tentmaker" with Going Public Theatre Company, where I was a one-man technical team, squeezing every last drop of performance potential out of Microsoft Powerpoint to try and make it all appear as professional as possible.

The second was a week-long run of "The little matchstick girl" with Pukka productions where I was lampie. Once we had got past the halfway mark, I had refined all my lighting cues, and the actors managed to remember all their lines and cues, making the whole thing very enjoyable and fluid. On the last day of performance we had a matinee, but none of the windows in the church-cum-theatre were blacked out, which meant scene transitions were visible to everyone in the audience, but they all went off without a hitch!

The third and final production was a play based on the nativity story at temple baptist church. Having a bunch of current and ex-glamorgan technical students, the christmas play is always a very technical effort, with lighting, staging and video all being squeezed into a little space. For this I helped program the lights, made a few of the videos and played in the band during the performance. It was probably the most haphazard and sketchily-prepared of all the productions but from where I was stood it all seemed to go as well as a typical church christmas play goes, with kids not knowing how to hold toy sheep, forgotten lines and some managing to turn off their microphones before going on stage!

To help round off the week, the techs kept the christmas play rig up so we could use it in the evening for the second of our Alchemi events. After giving one of the non-technical helpers a crash course in intelligent lighting for events, I hopped up on stage with the rest of the band and played our little hearts out with modern twists on christmas songs and modern worship songs. There was a talk by Hedd, talking about what our "nightmare before christmas" might be. hopefully there will be some photos coming up soon of the matchstick girl, christmas play and alchemi, ill put them up when they appear.

For now though, here is the title video that was played just before the talk to help people get into the right frame of mind for the challenging talk that followed. (Soundtrack by BRIGHTLIGHTS)

There's no business like it

Time is running out before the start of Pukka production's next play "The Little Matchstick Girl". I've been at the venue spending the last two days getting all the lighting infrastructure in place, being told that a sparky would be along to connect us up with 63/3 mains on the first day. 

I went in today hoping that the sparky would turn up mid-afternoon so that I could start focusing lights and making sure all my patching is right. Nothing.

I'm going back tomorrow mid-afternoon in the hope that he has visited in the morning so I can start preparing for the tech rehearsal tomorrow evening. If he doesn't show, no tech rehearsal!

I'm going a bit panorama crazy recently so here's one from yesterday when the truss was empty and the fixtures were on the floor waiting to be rigged. The original file was 86MB, I wasn't going to wait all night for it to upload, so it'll have to be this lo-res version instead.