Shaken and Stirred

It seems that for the photographs on all of the Festival events, I will have to make do with pictures of the empty stage. It seems that performers don't like it when in mid-flow, some fat bald bloke jumps out of his seat and shouts 'CHEESE!".

Last night, I had the red carpet treatment for the first (And probably the only) public performance of my piece "Much Ado About Pansies". This took place at the Stahl Theatre in Oundle.

If truth be told, there were no paparazzi and no red carpet. I didn't even get a limo to drive me to the doors. The screaming fans had obviously been told the wrong date. So all in all, the new posh frock was a complete waste of money.

Shakespeare Unleashed was not.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. The director, singers and actors had obviously worked hard to make sure that they did justice to the words and music. The performances were superb.

Special mention must go to Heather Diggle who did a marvellous job delivering my piece with such impeccable timing that she managed to draw out the laughs from the packed auditorium.

All of the pieces were delivered well. I was particularly impressed by Greg Wilkinson who despite only being in the Fifth Form at Oundle School produced a series of excellent presentations. None more so than his performance of "Mine" by Hilary Spiers, which was a first rate piece written for the event.

I left the event with a real spring in my step. It was a good night. OK, so it was a bit uncomfortable in having to stand up and face the audience when they asked the writers to take a bow, but the memory of watching Heather take my piece and make it look so good will live with me for a lifetime.

Meritorious Practitioner of Murphy's Law

Somewhere in the string of blogs that I read (and sometimes comment upon) is a discussion that a group of us should get together and write our own wikipedia entry.

As everyone knows, it is terribly bad form to write your own entry on wikipedia, but if I did, then 'Meritorious Practitioner of Murphy's Law' is probably how I would describe myself.

Yesterday, was the day of my presentation at the Oundle Festival of Literature on the art of the blog.

Throughout my life, I have been plagued by what is called the 'live demonstration' - which is why I spent so long making sure that I would be able to access all the sites I needed, because part of the two hour slot was supposed to be a session to allow the participants to start up their own blogs. The mystical Murphy stalks me, so I know that I need to make sure I cover off all eventualities.

One of the classmates couldn't access their email, but I had prepared for that. I made sure we could get to gmail and they could set up an email account.

I had made sure we could get to all of the sites we needed to get to (well, except for one, the food pornographer site which was banned as porn - which it ain't).

This time, I thought I had Murphy licked. All the computers had been tested, all the access checked, my presentation loaded, the projector work - I had every base covered and Murphy would be frozen out of the equation and forced to go to the Literary Treasure Hunt.

WRONG!

Sadly, there was just one thing I couldn't have predicted or prepared for. Someone at Multiply decided that 8:00 am EST was a great time for site maintenance! So when we sat down at 1:00 pm GMT we were greeted with a message, albeit a polite message, that the Multiply was unavailable!

The little pixies at Multiply weren't going to hurry their maintenance either (see Note 1). So in the end we were forced to abandon the setting up of new blogs and the poor people (who had actually paid for the privilege) were forced to listen to me spout.

Thankfully, I had a lot of material and there were a lot of really good questions from the floor (some of which I could answer!) which allowed the session to last the full two hours.

I think it went well. I hope it went well. I guess the real test is to see who does their homework and what new blogs for the festival get connected to my festival Multiply blog.

Note 1 : This is because computer maintenance on overtime has to follow a set for. Management notice when you start work and hence qualify for overtime payments, when the computers go unavailable. The know when you finish the overtime, because the computers come back on.

Computer technicians aren't daft. They come in, switch the computers off, then go and fetch themselves a coffee and a doughnut while raking in payment at time and a half.

Back to School

The date for my foray into presenting at the Oundle Festival of Literature is getting ever closer. As you know, I am doing a session on the blog on the 7th March at the St Peter Scott maths building at Oundle School.

With every passing day I am becoming more nervous, but today the nerves were that little bit worse because I had to go back to school. It is totally irrational, but whenever I walk into a school for whatever reason, I get nerves. Today was no exception.

Still, I steeled myself and approached the venue for the first time to sort out a few of the logistics.

It was probably a good idea to have had this little scouting raid as we did find a few issues with the access rights on the computers. According to the school's firewall, Multiply is a dating and relationships site and is therefore blocked. Hopefully we can get that sorted out, otherwise it will be a very short talk!

As Oundle School is not your average comprehensive, the facilities look good. There are certainly enough computers to go round and the room is light and airy. So, everything looks good - although I hope that I can rearrange the furniture a bit!

For those of you who may not know where the Sir Peter Scott building is, it is on the corner of Glapthorn Road and Milton road. I took the photograph above to help you get your bearings and because it enabled me to get a photograph from an angle I wouldn't normally get to see.