Gareth Harrison

Yesterday I went to the Upper Derwent Valley in the Peak District with Dave for a bit of a bike ride around the three reservoirs there.

I’d not ridden my bike since my holiday in Anglesey last year, and the last time I did this route was back in 2007 when I did my first ride in 16 years with Jamie Hill.

Anyway, back to yesterday, and we arrived at about 1.15pm and parked up, and set our bikes up before changing into our riding gear.  It was pretty cold, so I’d gone for a layers approach with t-shirt, hoody and coat, and tracksuit bottoms over some cycling shorts.  Dave being the crazy man that he is opted for a Villa top and shorts!

I was really out of practice, but soon got into it, although I do find hills quite difficult.  Obviously I need to build up my strength and stamina, and if I can get rid of some weight over the next year it will really help as well.

There was quite a lot of ice and leftover snow around, which made a few sections quite interesting, but it was a bright, dry day which was good.  Although when we were in the shade it was absolutely freezing!

Dave was a really good bike partner to have, because I know he was riding a lot slower and took more breaks than he normally would do, but he was totally fine about it.  Hopefully the more riding I do, the better I will be with regard to that.

I got a couple of painful muscle twinges nearer the end of the ride, which is a bit concerning, but maybe that’s just down to me not being used to so much exercise!

We actually did 16 miles which is quite a lot really!  And to be honest my legs aren’t aching too much, although I have a really sore arse from my saddle!  Again, I assume that’s something which you don’t notice after a while!

My goal with the whole biking thing is to be able to cycle long distances without too much pain (and to get much fitter in the process!)  Dave’s really keen on doing a Land’s End to John O’Groats ride next year sometime, and I’d really love to be able to join him on that, even though I know it would be the hardest thing I’d ever do!  As part of the build up to it, the plan is to look to do a Coast to Coast ride this year, with about 50 – 60 miles a day for about 4 – 5 days, so it could be achievable for me if I really work for it.  Hopefully me blogging about it might give me more of an incentive to really train for it, so that I can avoid the embarrassment of looking back at this in a couple of years time having not done it!

You can see the photos from the ride here.

Tonight sees two programmes with titles and graphics done by doodledoMOTION on Five in prime time!  First off, ‘Paul Merton In Europe‘ started last Monday night at 9pm, and we did the title sequence for the show (which has had so much work and detail put into it!), as well as the maps which show Paul’s journey across Europe.  It’s the 3rd travel series of ‘Paul Merton In…’ that Tiger Aspect have done following on from his documentaries about China and India, and so far the reaction to this new series seems really positive.

And then the second show for Five we’ve been involved in is also a Tiger programme – ‘Celebrity Quitters‘.  It’s a ten-part reality series that’s going to be on every week-night for the next 2 weeks, and features Linda Robson, John Burton Race, Chloe Madeley, Paul Danan and Derek Acorah as they all try to give up smoking.  We’ve done the titles and graphics for the main show, as well as their online content.

The programme starts at 7.30pm tonight, and to promote the show, Linda Robson, one of the Celebrity Quitters, appeared on BBC’s Breakfast this morning for an interview, where they showed some clips from the series.

It was a good promo for the show, but the best bit was that the main title graphic that we’ve produced appeared on the big screen behind them throughout the whole interview which is really cool!

Back to the beginning of the month, and on New Year’s Day, I went for a walk over at Alderley Edge with a group of Reach guys.

I went there a few years ago with James and Helen for a birthday walk, so I recognised quite a few places we went to.  It was pretty chilly, and we were wandering a bit aimlessly at times, but it was a really nice walk.

Then afterwards we stopped off at a really nice pub in the village called The Merlin for a meal.  It wasn’t that cheap, but the food was great, which kind of made up for it!  There are some photos of the day here.

The only other thing I’ll quickly blog about is the crazy snow we had at the start of the month.  We had a little bit of snow the day after our walk, but then on the Tuesday morning, I woke up to a crazy amount of snow outside!

It was a bit of a nightmare getting into work – luckily I’d parked on the main road rather than in my actual street, otherwise I wouldn’t have been going anywhere!  All the buses had been cancelled, so the only way I could get in was by car, and the drive in took nearly an hour compared to my usual 10 minutes!

And when I got to the office, I made the mistake of driving into the car park, where I discovered James had already done that and had been stuck there for nearly an hour trying to get back out up the slope!  Then someone had the genius idea of using some carpet tiles to build a track for the car to drive on, so we were eventually able to get out, and so we then parked on a nice flat bit of road on the front!

Luckily it’s pretty much gone now, so life is back to normal!

It’s that funny time between Christmas and New Year when generally nothing really happens – so the ideal time to do a blog update!  And since I last posted a week and a half ago, I’ve actually done quite a lot of stuff in that time!

Last Wednesday night, I went over to Liverpool with John Roberts to see a production of ‘The 39 Steps‘ at the Liverpool Playhouse.  He runs a theatre reviews website called The Public Reviews, so we we got free tickets which was pretty cool!  It was actually a really good show – it’s a comedy and was performed by just 4 actors, who changed roles continuously throughout the play, which surprised me at how well it worked!

The show culminated in fake snow being showered on the audience, and then as we left the theatre, we discovered that there was real snow falling – and I’d have been really impressed if that was part of the show as well!  We’d already had a bit of snow in Manchester a couple of days earlier, but there was none in Liverpool when we arrived.  We got back to the car, and within a few minutes we were driving through a pretty intense blizzard, and the snow really started to build up on the roads.

And by the time we hit the M62, we couldn’t see very far in front of us, and you couldn’t see any road markings at all!  So basically you had to follow the rear lights of the car in front, which at one point meant that we accidentally left the motorway by following the car in front off a sliproad!

Anyway, because of the snow and the likelihood of the roads being a nightmare on Christmas Eve, I decided to wait until the next morning to drive down to Tamworth for Christmas with the family. 

What this did mean was that I was still up in North West that evening, so I went along to a little get-together at Michael & Becci’s for anyone who was still around in Manchester.  There was a nice little crowd there, including Jon & Emma, Andy & Ruth, Yan, and Luke, and it was an enjoyable way to spend Christmas Eve.  I chatted quite a bit with Michael who was telling me all about their future plans, and about their upcoming move to America for 3 months to spend time at IHOP before coming back to Manchester to model something similar here.  It sounds really interesting and exciting, but quite a big thing for them to do!

The next morning I drove down to mum’s and got there around noon.  The motorway was a lot busier than I expected – I guess lots of people had decided to wait until the morning because of the weather.  Even so, I was actually the first there, and everyone else was really late, and they all live really close!

It was great seeing Brandon and Chloe again – I know I say it every time, but every time I see them, they’ve always grown up so much more!

And they’re so much more chatty now – even though half of the time it doesn’t seem to make all that much sense, but bizarrely they seem to understand each other alright!

I last saw them at the beginning of October when we were all out in Turkey, so I suppose with it being two and a half months there’s going to be some serious growing up taking place!

And it especially was nice this Christmas because they obviously got a lot more out of it this year than last.  They were really excited about all their presents (of which there were loads!) and what was really funny was that Chloe would decide which presents should be for her, and Brandon would basically go along with it!

I’ve uploaded the photos I took over Christmas here.

It was a nice weekend, and was quite chilled out really, and good catching up with everyone.  I also managed to fit in a few drinks with Tom on Boxing Day, who was back at his folks’ from the UAE for Christmas which was cool.

One last thing I did whilst I was in Tamworth was going to visit my dad’s grave with my mum and sister – I’d not been to it before, so it felt a bit weird to be honest… I’m just not very good with stuff like that at all.

I drove back home on Sunday night, and then to round it all off, yesterday I travelled to Llandudno to visit Emma who was back from the States for Christmas.

I arrived mid-morning, just as Emma and her mum were dealing with a bit of a crisis!  They’d been out to the supermarket first thing and whilst they were out, all the dogs managed to get into the bedrooms where they found load of chocolate stuff which they then ate.

I knew that chocolate and dogs aren’t supposed to mix, but I didn’t realise how dangerous it can be for them, so Emma’s mum had to arrange a visit to the vet to get some medicine to force the dogs to be sick, which sounds like a really grim job!

Anyway, to escape the chaos, me and Emma drove to Betws-Y-Coed, which is a small village about 20 miles from Llandudno.

We went for a short, slippy, walk by the river before grabbing some lunch at a cafe, then decided to head up to Swallow Falls, which we discovered later is actually 2 miles out of the village, so it ended up being quite a long walk there and back!  The falls were really impressive, although the steps down to the river were really iced up and were pretty lethal!

Check out the photos here.

Well it’s been quite a busy weekend – on Friday I was over in Liverpool shooting a live music video for thebandwithnoname and LZ7. They’ve done a joint track and need some kind of promo video to go with it, so I organised a 9 camera set-up at the monthly ‘Space’ event. I dragged Dave Bateman and Bruce from The Message along to operate cameras, and then used a few guys from the event itself, so I’m going to have a lot of footage to go through! The only downside of it really was that the stage was tiny, and it was really cramped with effectively 2 bands on there at the same time, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Then on Sunday, I went over to Rob’s in Ramsbottom (because he’d lent me some cameras for Friday’s shoot and I had to return them) and we ended up having a bit of an impromptu barbeque which was pretty cool.

We tried to get Rob’s reclaimed gas barbeque working, but even though we could hear gas coming out from somewhere, it just wouldn’t light. Eventually we gave up, thus averting an explosive disaster(!), and used some disposable ones instead! Clare made burgers from fresh minced beef and onions, which I’ve never done before, and they tasted really good. Next time I have a barbeque, I think I’ll give the frozen ones a miss and make my own!

I got home late Sunday night and watched the season finale of ‘Fringe’ on Sky+, and wow… it was excellent! A pretty major plot twist, and quite an unexpected ending! Won’t say much more if people haven’t seen it yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to the next series!

On to Monday, and with it being yet another Bank Holiday, a group of us headed over to Formby beach again.

The weather wasn’t too bad – we had a few spits of rain later on, but the rest of the time was okay, and I even caught the sun a little bit! We did the usual beach volleyball, which again was really very funny! And there were also a couple of excellent sand sculptures produced by Tom and Chris which had to be seen to be believed!

There are some photos of all our beach shenanigans here.

Then in the evening, we went back to Phil’s because Ralph was house-sitting there, and after a false start with a slightly inappropriate film starring Russell Brand(!), we ended up watching a quirky little film called ‘Son of Rambow‘ which I thought was really good, and was something I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise.

Other news – I mentioned last month about doing the graphics for 2 documentaries about Fawlty Towers, and they’ve both now gone out on G.O.L.D. The pre-publicity for the programmes generated a lot of interest in the press, There’s a video on the BBC News website which shows the amount of press at the launch!

For the first of the shows – ‘Fawlty Towers Re-Opened’ – we produced the opening titles, but for the second 2-hour show on the 17th – ‘Fawlty Exclusive: Basil’s Best Bits’ we provided opening titles, episode guides, interview backgrounds, as well as other in-programme graphics.

I thought they were really well put together shows, and had some great behind-the-scenes stuff as well as obviously a load of hilarious clips. And on top of that, they were voiced by none other than Stephen Fry!

Well, another bank holiday yesterday – it only seems a few weeks since the last one!!

I went for a walk in the afternoon with some guys from Reach – we drove over to the Peak District and parked up by Derwent Reservoir, just off the Snake Pass. It’s actually where I went with Jamie a couple of years ago for my first bike ride in 16 years(!), and I’ve realised it’s certainly a lot quicker to go round on 2 wheels rather than walking!

We only did about 4 miles – we got quite a bit round one side of the reservoir, but soon realised that it would take us ages to get round the next one and back down to the car! So after examining if there was anywhere else where we could cross, we turned around and walked back pretty much the way we came.

The weather was pretty rubbish – it rained a bit – but it was just really nice to do something different. Not been out for a walk for quite a while… we used to do them a lot more regularly, and I guess I miss it a bit. But this was good and hopefully I’ll get to do it again.

Something I’m not sure that I’ll be doing again too soon is what I did next! It was John Cieszynski’s birthday on Friday, so last night he had a murder mystery party!

Now, I’ve never been to one before, and it’s never been something I’ve been in a rush to try, but since it was for John’s birthday I decided I should go. The big problem for me was that it’s all taken very seriously! Basically from when it starts, you’re supposed to then stay in character for 3 hours until all the different elements are solved! Add into that the fact that there were 27 people there in character – most of whom I didn’t even know in real life(!) – and it becomes my biggest nightmare!!

To be fair, pretty much everyone else seemed to like it, and maybe if I was doing it with a much smaller amount of people, and if I actually knew them well to start with, I might find it okay. But it really wasn’t my kind of thing, and luckily my role wasn’t an important character so it didn’t matter that I kept a low profile!

John seemed to really enjoy it though, which is what’s important… next time though, I’ll suggest to him a night out at the pub!

Well it’s been a pretty busy few days… I was in the office for most of the Easter Weekend trying to get some graphics work finished for this show we’re doing for Tiger Aspect. It’s basically a couple of documentaries about Fawlty Towers for G.O.L.D. (very similar to ‘The Vicar of Dibley‘ and ‘Blackadder‘ ones we’ve worked on previously), and we’ve been working on titles, stings, episode guides and interview backgrounds.

But I did manage to get a few hours off on Monday to go to the beach! I was in the office preparing another time-consuming render, when I got a text from Dave saying that a group was heading off to the beach for the afternoon, so I decided to go to that instead and carry on with the graphics later!

We set off to Formby in a few cars, and it was all fine until we actually got near our destination – it appeared that everyone else in the North West were heading there as well! Rather than spending the whole afternoon waiting to get into the car park, we eventually managed to park up on a housing estate and then took a short walk back towards the beach.

We eventually found a bit of the beach that wasn’t full of people, and also didn’t have bits of brick sticking out of the sand – not ideal for playing sports! I didn’t bother with the game of American Football, since I have no idea at all how the game works!!

But later on, we played beach volleyball with a proper net that Dan had just bought from Decathlon (he was taking it seriously!) I was pretty crap at it, but it was good fun!

There are some photos from the afternoon here. All in all, it was a good Bank Holiday Monday, even if I had to be in work for part of it!

It’s been a weekend of parties – but there was quite a difference between the two!

Last week was Brandon and Chloe’s first birthday – I can’t believe they’re a year old already! It’s gone so fast, but then at the same time it’s like you can’t remember what it was like before them! I went down to Tamworth on Friday to see them (their actual birthday was the Thursday), and then on the Saturday afternoon, it was time for their party!

It was a new type of party for me really – when the main guests are all under 2 years old! The twins looked really cute – Brandon had a Superman costume, and Chloe had a pink ballet tutu!

They’ve really got their own personalities now, and it’s amazing seeing them growing up. I reckon they’ll be walking soon – they keep trying to stand up, and move around using furniture as support!

All the kids seemed to have fun, and there weren’t too many tears, although at that age, you can’t really explain to them about sharing toys and stuff! There are photos of the fun here.

Anyway, after their party, I drove down to Bristol for another one! Ali and Julie were having a joint late birthday party – but this one had a theme… 80s cheese!

I really struggled to come up with a costume for it. The night before I still didn’t have anything, but a trip to Asda found a rock star wig and inflatable guitar!

So on the Saturday I bought the most horrific t-shirt (a nice skull, sword and snake design!) and a head-band, and created my 80s rocker look! It turned out alright, but I think it’s a lot easier for girls to put costumes together for something like that!

Anyway, nearly everyone made a pretty good effort, and it was a real reminder of how bad the fashion was in the 80s! Ali and Julie back-combed their hair which was an interesting look, and there were some great wigs making an appearance!

Then yesterday afternoon, I went into the centre of Bristol to get lunch with Ali, then we took a ferry down the river back to her house which was really cool! You don’t get anything like that in Manchester! Check out the pics of the party and our afternoon in Bristol here.

Well just got back from my first proper break in 5 years! A few of us spent New Year in a cottage on Anglesey – I went over there on the 27th and got back yesterday lunchtime.

It was great weather all week – pretty cold, but dry and mostly sunny, and our cottage couldn’t have been any closer to the sea! You just had to walk out of the garden gate, and within a few metres you were on the beach! I took my bike with me (which to my shame I haven’t ridden since I went out on it 2 years ago with Jamie!) and got on it twice, which is a good start for me(!) although where we were was very hilly, so probably not ideal for someone who hasn’t ridden for so long!

Altogether across the week there we 9 of us – me, Ajay, Rob, Clare, Tabitha, Steve, Leah, Dave and Danny, although me and Ajay were the only ones who stayed the whole week – the majority left on Thursday lunchtime.

Throughout our time on Anglesey, as well as exploring the area around our cottage, I got to visit quite a few places really – South Stack lighthouse (where the group photo to the right was taken), Holyhead, Red Wharf Bay, the Breakwater Country Park, and Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch!

We managed to get out and about most days, and in the evenings either played games like Pictionary and Taboo, watched DVDs (when I decided that ‘Juno’ is an amazing film… conversely, ‘Family Business’ is one of the worst I’ve seen!) or played on Rob’s Wii! I’ve never had a go on one before, and it’s really addictive. It’s really intuitive to use, and I probably spent far too long playing Mario Kart and Wii Bowling, but at least I wasn’t as bad as Rob, who was playing ‘Wii Sea Bass Fishing’ complete with a special fishing rod controller… when the real sea was about 10 metres away!!

New Year’s Eve was a Taboo and Jenga-fest, which got pretty intense at times, and I managed to knock the tower down a couple of times, but when it happened there was genuinely no other brick to move! We were hardcore Jenga players! When it came to seeing in the New Year, all the others went down to the beach, but I decided to see it in on my own – not really a big fan of it all to be honest, so ended up going on Facebook instead on my mobile phone… sad I know!

All in all, I wouldn’t mind doing it again next year. It was a really nice break from work (which certainly was needed!), and it was a good crowd, although when you go away with people you know from work, it can be hard to turn off from those kind of conversations! I think we got a pretty good balance though, and it was nice to do something different. Not sure I want to go back to work tomorrow!

I’ve got 4 photo albums of the holiday here, here, here and here!

After six months of us moving into our office, we’ve finally (almost) finished sorting it! I say ‘almost’ because we’ve still got a few little jobs to sort with the edit suite like some internal skirting boards, and some shelves that need putting up, but now we’ve got some pictures up on the wall, it feels like a really nice place to work in.

Also, we’ve just launched the proper version of our website – www.doodledomotion.co.uk. There’d just been a single page there before now, but I think the new one looks great. Our biggest challenge with it is to make sure we find the time to update the blog, and keep our portfolio up-to-date! Also, due to some music and copyright restrictions, we can’t put examples of everything we do up there, but hopefully we’ll be able to get a good range of the kind of stuff we do.

Work’s been a little bit less hectic over the last few weeks, though there’s enough to keep us occupied. Drama Trails really took its toll – I ended up doing 63 days in a row which wasn’t ideal! Not had a chance yet to have a proper break, but it’s been nice to get my weekends back!

A couple of Sundays ago I went down to Reading to catch up with some old uni mates – Ali, George, Hazel, and Helen & her new blokey! It was really nice day (although the train journey down was a bit of a rubbish one – an hour late to start with, then decided to terminate at Birmingham rather than Reading!)

We went for a pub lunch, then for a nice walk alongside the canal, and it was a really sunny day which definitely helped! Then in the evening I went to Bristol to kip over at Ali’s house, then back up to Stockport on a very overcrowded train on the Monday. You can check out the photos from the day here.

As per the title really! Although I can’t deny that I really had a great time! It’s just that after getting back at 3am, then grabbing a few hours sleep on the floor, I feel like I should really have gone through all this 10 years ago – though I’m not saying I wouldn’t be up for it again! It came about from going with James to the end-of-year art show at Manchester Met, which had its private viewing on Friday night. I’ve been a couple of times before, and it’s a really good place to get some inspiration, and also to see potential artists who we could maybe get to do some work for us in the future.

So we spent a couple of hours at the show with James’ mum, as well as his aunt and uncle, and then I kind of gatecrashed a family meal at Felicinis on Oxford Road – a really nice Italian restaurant that had just enough English food to ensure I got a good meal!

So after that, we headed over to Greenroom to meet up with some of the other guys who work on the course that James teaches on, then when we got chucked out of there made our way over to Sub Space which was absolutely packed and really hot and sweaty! But the music in there was really funky, and it was just a very good atmosphere, and whereas normally I’d feel a bit out of place being somewhere like that, I totally enjoyed it. I’ve never really got into going out clubbing and stuff – even at uni – but I’m kind of realising that if I’m in the right mind for it, I can actually have a good time.

Also, this weekend saw a programme I’ve recently been working on go out on The History Channel – I’d edited a documentary on the Vulcan bomber which was being featured because of it being the 25th anniversary of the Falklands war. It was quite weird watching it because I edited it to a guide voiceover, and this was a first time I’d seen it in this version, so it did seem like I was watching a different programme! I thought the show turned out well though, and I’m sure it will get repeated many times over the coming months!

Other stuff… I caught up with Jamie a couple of weeks ago when I went for a barbeque at his with Dean and Sean. It was quite an impromptu thing… I’d been round at James’ doing some work when he gave me a call to see if I was doing anything, so I went straight to his from there, because unsurprisingly I didn’t have any other plans! The food was slightly charred, but it was okay and filled me up! I hadn’t seen Jamie for quite a while – he’s got back into his climbing again which means he’s away from Manchester a lot more. It’s great for him ‘cos he’s really into it, but for me it’s a bit of a shame because I’d enjoyed the couple of times we’d been out riding together and was hoping to be able to do a lot more of it, but I know it’s going to be really difficult to find any time that we can. My bike’s been sitting idle since February, and there’s no-one else I can really go with, and I’m not overly keen on just going out riding on my own.

Finally, I mentioned in a earlier blog about some potentially exciting developments work-wise. Well, there’s still a lot to be finalised, but it looks like things are moving forward. I’ll post more information about it when things are more definite. But in the meantime, we’re currently busy working on titles and stings for a 7-part BBC2 documentary which is going out on Saturday nights from July. It’s probably the biggest job we’ve worked on to be honest, but hopefully it’s a good sign of things to come!

Been pretty busy the last few weeks – last week I had a meeting with some guys from Liverpool council about some work that me and James should hopefully be doing for them soon, and also had a lot to do on trying to get the latest Preview DVD finished (am pretty close now, and managed to get the bits they needed for New York in time!)

Also, on Saturday I was asked to film thebandwithnoname’s launch for their new album and it was a really good gig. I listened properly to their new stuff on my iPod during the Reach weekend, and it really is an excellent album. Anyway, for the gig I was down at the front of the stage, and we also had a fixed camera at the back of the venue so hopefully I should be able to produce a decent edit of it… I just need to try and find some time to do it now!

Obviously one of the reasons that it’s been a bit busier these last two weeks is that James & Helen are on holiday in Australia at the moment so it’s been a bit more intense… and I’m not at all jealous that they’re on such an amazing holiday at the moment! Though I heard from James by email yesterday and they had their campervan broken into this week, and had a few bits and pieces stolen, including his iPod and his phone, so that’s not great. Hopefully the rest of their time out there will be amazing and will wipe out the crap stuff!

Quite a bit’s happened in the last few weeks, so I thought I’d better do a quick catch up and write about some of them… I’m manically busy with Preview stuff at the moment – got to try and get it all done for Monday because they need it for a presentation in New York, so that should be fun!

In my last post I mentioned that I had a ‘possibly interesting weekend ahead’… well I ended up in Wales at Cefn Lea for the Reach weekend away, which I suppose was interesting in a way! The last time I went on it was back in 2004, and there were quite a few people there who I hadn’t seen for ages, which was quite strange, but I guess in a way, I am glad I went on it, though it was pretty tough at times. I’m not sure what I was really expecting from it all, but maybe that’s something I need to reflect on over the coming weeks.

One cool thing about the weekend was that I managed to catch up with Russ (from uni and who I used to share a house with in Birmingham) on the Saturday night – he lives a few miles from Cefn Lea so popped over to say ‘hello’. We had a really good chat, and I can’t believe it’s about 3 years since we last met!

I may write some more about the Reach stuff in the future because I know I’ve been a bit vague – (or I may not!) – but I think I’ll leave it there or the moment, except to say that I’ve put the photos that I took here.

Then last Friday, I met up with Jamie who just wanted to get out of the city for the evening so we planned to go for a walk in the evening up by Kinder reservoir in Hayfield. But we got stuck in traffic going into Glossop and by the time we parked up the car to walk up to the reservoir it was already pitch black! We’d taken torches because we’d expected it to get dark whilst we were walking, but I wasn’t expecting there to be no light from the start! We did an hour walk, up to Kinder reservoir, where we could see a big house lit up on Kinder Scout (Jamie reckoned they were just showing off ‘cos they’d really gone over the top with the floodlights!), then we headed off west over some moorland to get ourselves heading back towards the village. It was great actually – being out in the middle of no-where (without even a phone signal!) and seeing the countryside only lit by the moon and stars was cool.

We made our way back down towards the village, and the original plan was to get a meal in the pub there, but they’d just stopped serving food which was a bit annoying! So we grabbed a pint and crisps before heading back here for takeaway (which was a bit grim – Jamie’s kebab was particularly rough!) Had a great night though – I’d love to do more stuff like that… it can get so boring just working all the time – although I usually end up feeling knackered after going anywhere with Jamie!! He’s much more active than me!

And finally, last weekend was both James’ and Helen’s birthdays, and I went along to a pub meal they arranged on Sunday afternoon in Didsbury. The plan changed twice because it’s quite difficult to find somewhere to eat for so many on a Sunday lunchtime! But we ended up at the Old Cock Inn and it was actually a pretty nice pub – I always had the impression that it was a bit of a smoky old-man’s pub, but I think they must have done it up recently, because I’d definitely go there again.

There were about 15 of us there altogether, and again it was nice spending time with some of the guys I don’t see all that often really. I took some photos on my phone and they’re now here.

Thought I’d better do an update for February considering it’s the last day of the month!

Anyway, I’ve been really busy with work, and a lot of my time has been taken up with working on ‘The Soul Shutter‘ (notice there’s a ‘The‘ there now… I only discovered that after doing the opening titles!) I think I’ve now finished with all the CG work – there’s a meeting that Hamish and Rob are going to on Thursday to get feedback, but to be honest, I don’t really have any more time to work on it, and I’ve already put hours more work into it than I originally thought I’d have to. It’s fine because it does look really good, but they’re getting a really good deal!

Went for another bike ride with Jamie on Sunday afternoon which was good. We rode along the Longdendale Trail which is a route that goes runs alongside 5 reservoirs and follows the old Manchester to Sheffield railway line, and in all we did 14 miles there and back! I really enjoy going out on the bike, though I need to get some proper cycling shorts to wear under my trackie bottoms because I got quite sore from the saddle! It’s cool spending time with Jamie as well ‘cos we don’t get to catch up that often.

At the beginning of February, me and James went down to London for a couple of days to attend this year’s Video Forum event which was really good. Got to go to a few good production seminars, and saw loads of kit I’d like to buy! Did actually spend a bit of cash buying a better head for my tripod and a remote zoom unit for my camera which should be useful.

We stayed in a Travelodge in the city centre, and the room wasn’t the greatest! It had a double and single bed with probably the worst mattresses in the world (I went for the single because it seemed slightly better!), only 3 of the 5 lightbulbs worked, and the walls and ceiling were covered in Artex which game the room a distinctly 70s feel! In the evening we went out for a meal at a restaurant in Kings Cross, and I had my first lager (a couple of bottles of Peroni on James’ recommendation), and it was very good! It’s kind of weird because obviously I’ve never really drank alcohol, but this year I’ve decided to start to do so (responsibly of course!)… my reasons for not drinking before have always been about not wanting to lose control, but I came to the conclusion that at end of the day, whether I get myself into that situation is of my own making, and by having a drink every so often doesn’t mean that I have to give up any control of myself! Though the next night we met up for a meal with Cathy and Frank and I had a pint and a coffee with a double Baileys in it(!) so it may look as though I’ve become a hardened drinker all of the sudden, but I was able to still walk in a straight line afterwards!!

It was back in November 2005 that I blogged about buying myself a mountain bike… well I’m kind of embarrassed to say that today was the first time I’ve actually ridden it!!

I went with Jamie into the Peaks, and we did a ride around Ladybower, Derwent and Howden reservoirs. It was about 15 miles in all, which is quite intense when you’ve not been on a bike for 16 years! I was quite apprehensive to start with – the longer I’ve waited to do it, the more I’ve convinced myself that I wouldn’t be able to ride any more!

We started off on a reasonably quiet road and I was soon able to ride without wobbling too much, and then quite soon we went onto a track around the valley which was pretty muddy and rocky in places, but generally wasn’t too much of a nightmare. It took me a while to get used to the gears again… it’s crazy because before I got a car, I used to cycle everywhere, but I suppose it was nearly half a lifetime ago!

Definitely plan to do it again soon, although I am starting to feel the after effects of it all now… my legs are aching and it’s painful when I sit down!

I drank alcohol this evening and the world didn’t end…

Goldeneye was fun too!