My Kingdom for a Cable.

So how’s my holiday time been?

Not very holiday like to be honest.  I’ve ended up working more than not, and in hindsight should have seen that coming and postponed it till next week, but such is life.

I’ll reclaim some time back in the coming weeks no doubt.

Despite the intrusion of work into most of my days off so far, I did manage to fit in one of my regular games of golf.  I play regularly, once or twice a year without fail, and on Friday my Dad took me up to his club for 18 holes.

As expected for someone who plays as often as I do, it was a mixed bag of good bad and embarrassing, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the constant buzz in my pocket of work emails arriving on my phone!

I have tomorrow off too, so I’m without the usual Sunday syndrome of woe, which is nice.

As I mentioned last week, we stumbled across all our old “home movies” from our holidays to Florida.  We’ve been watching them throughout the week with a mix of nostalgia, wonderment at the speed of the passing years and bewilderment at how Louise’s hair reacts to the Floridian climate.

We’ve seen ourselves age, and watched our regular Disney friends again which was lovely.  Be warned Jakki and Margaret, you and your families may well make the final edit.

For this is what Emily is to do with her summer off now that she has finally done her last exam.  Luckily, my brother has a big posh shiny Mac with all the fancy dan editing stuff on it, so we’re “borrowing” that to make something that may be interesting, and a memento of our journey into insolvency.

Luckily, Emily has been using this kit for four years in her studies so I don’t have to learn how to.  So with all the tapes watched, our thoughts turned to getting the footage off the camcorder and onto the Mac so Emily can work her magic.

Of course, the footage is on old style mini DV tapes, and despite both myself and my brother raiding our respective “cable collections” neither of us had the required one.

We’ve tried all sorts of cables, connectors, intermediary devices and a whole lot of googling to come to the conclusion that we need to give Amazon some more money for the only cable in existence that we do not possess.  Amazon would do well to understand this process of exchanging money by the way…still no book funds from the buggers.

Compare this faff to the adverts you see from Microsoft and Apple, where someone records something, and then vaguely waves their camera device in the vicinity of the computer and in about four keystrokes it turns into a film epic that James Cameron would be proud of.  Sequences may have been shortened?  I should cocoa, by about three weeks.

Anyway, once this cable finds it way to our house Emily will be off and running, and can produce her masterpiece.  As she spends most of her free time watching other folks Disney videos on You Tube, she intends to give something back by having her own channel where these shall be posted.

Don’t worry, as soon as there is something to see I shall have you know, several times, until you are sick of heating about it…sorry, more sick of hearing about it.

Speaking of great films, we watched Django Unchained last night.  I know we are late to the game, but we really enjoyed it.  It was superbly made of course, with some great acting, but the thing that really made it stand out to me was that it had a great story.  That may sound obvious, but that isn’t always the case.  An island of quality in a sea of nonsense like Made in Chelsea and TOWIE that infects and invades our TV all too often.

I bet Tarantino didn’t have to wait three days for a cable to arrive from Amazon so that he could edit his film though.

Anyway, to save Quentin a job when he buys the rights to my book, this week Jakki kindly provided a cast list for him as we’d been watching us all boogie boarding at Vero.  Feel free to let me know who you’d see playing who too!!

Steve (Jakki’s husband) – Bruce Willis for obvious folically related reasons

Jakki – Halle Berry

Aodhan –  Tom Cruise standing on a very tall box 

Niamh –  Scarlett Johansson as she’s blond and Niamh likes the Avengers

Louise –  Jennifer Lopez as she can sing and act

Emily –  Anne Hathaway as she’s a Disney girl and was in Les Miserables

Rebecca – Kourtney Kardashian as she’s glam and has a boyfriend 

Lastly Jakki claims I need three actors – Dwayne the Rock Johnson / Jason Statham and Simon Pegg.  I would have said more Alan Carr or the bloke who played Reg Holdsworth but there you go.  I am often called “The Rock”.  It sounds like that anyway.

I’d add to that list….

My Dad – Alan Alda

My Mum – Brenda Blethyn

Margaret – Julie Walters

Kathryn – Kirsten Dunst

Michael – Nicholas Hoult

Over to you.

Till the next time……