Choons, Chilling and Chester

He looked at me as if to say "bust a move or I'll bust your gut"

We are just over halfway with our stint of north Wales, combining Cath's tour, Dai's tour and some schools work and by some miracle we managed to end up with a day off! We heard about the various charms and attractions that Chester offered, only an hour and a bit away along the A55, so after a lie-in and a leisurely breakfast we pootled across in the VW to see what we could see; cruising to the latest offerings from Soul Survivor and Beth bullock.
In the end, we couldn't see as much of chester as we had liked, because as soon as we reached the park and ride, a dense mist had set in all across the city. We weren't put off though, so we soldiered on into town, stopping off at a few shops in the main shopping centre before breaking into our individual errands around town. Dai opted for the Wifi in starbucks, Cath wanted to have a nose around Jack Wills and I found myself walking around not even looking at the shops, but looking at all the old buildings that there were.

There is an archway halfway down the main shopping street in Chester, which I found could be accessed from the street and forms part of the city wall that encompasses the city centre. I had an hour to kill so I decided to have a quick stroll around and see what cultural tit-bits I could find along the way.

Part of the city wall

As well as learning bits of the history of chester and seeing how the old city has integrated with the demands of 21st Century travel infrastructure (Roads needing widening and turning part of the wall into a footpath over the railway) I found remains of some buildings built by the Romans, including a half-uncovered Amphitheatre near one of the city gates.
The wall is almost continuous around the city centre, breaking only once by the river for a road to go over. At one point the castle, which now accommodates part of the university, looks over the weir almost menacingly. The castle was a royalist stronghold when they were fighting against the parliamentarians and also served as a base for attacks against the Welsh.

I hope some day I can go back to chester when it's sunny and there's no mist, although the mist did lend itself to a sort of victorian london look, making the Abbey and tudor-style shops look quite majestic and timeless.

Five go camping

Dear me, the summer times have flown by!

Cardiff's students have buggered off, so the union's been dead and I there hasn't been much else on locally. 

So, with nothing else to do I decided to go and work at Soul Survivor weeks B and C in Shepton Mallet as a video editor for the Seminar recording team. I was promised a shiny new iMac and fun times, both of which came true! It was like christmas in a field.

Although the office had no windows we were allowed out into the big wide world two or three times a day to eat and pick berries. 

This year was the first year that seminars were being filmed, so we had a whole bunch of new problems to overcome, like a 4Gb record limit on the cameras, cheap tripods that are held together with PVC tape and renders that took 4 hours for every hour of footage!

The team had a team leader, a deputy, editors and camera/sound ops, with some ops having a go at editing. Over the two weeks I got to share the office with these monkeys

Sorry if you're eating...

The office was split up into three sections, audio editing, video editing, and the cinema (with surround sound system) and that is where I lived from 8.30am to 12am every day for two weeks.