June round-up

It's all becoming a blur since I started doing video commissions for the Babelgum website. I work all day at Yahoo!, and either go out and film afterwards, or come home and edit into the wee hours. This process has so far yielded two videos, one about The Great Cake Escape, and another about the London Street Pianos (Anna has a cameo in this one).

In between, I saw an interview with Nick Cave (of the Bad Seeds) at the BFI; completely forgot about and missed an interview with the cast of Torchwood (though I did catch a glimpse of the exquisite Eve Myles afterwards...); attended an interview with author A.S.Byatt at The Guardian headquarters, in which she spoke about Possession, her Booker prize-winning masterpiece, plus I spoke to her afterwards and got her signature on a first edition copy of The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye; submitted my film Cut-out to the London and Venice film fests; dressed up my friend Darren in a Mozart outfit and wandered around City of London at night to play the piano outside outside the Royal Exchange buildings; Anna and I visited The Southerner, a Speights pub near the Royal Courts of Justice that was set up as part of last year's promotion (there was a whole pub shipped from New Zealand by sea, alas this is not it as the Council shut down the original); went to the original Twinings shop on The Strand, opened in 1706 and now the oldest trading premises in the City of Westminster, and bought some Irish Breakfast tea; and last night Anna and I attended a dress up party to celebrate July 4th - US Independence Day...

Update: Just met director Mike Figgis! I was down in Trafalgar Square to film the opening of the new artwork for the "Fourth Plinth", and he was there filming too. Neat! Also filmed Mayor Boris Johnson and artist Anthony Gormley.