Filming

Well who would have believed it? This is Blog number 550. I don’t know how many good folk read them, probably no more than a handful, but I write them for my pleasure if nothing else, even if I haven’t really anything worthwhile to say. Douglas says one day he is going to edit them. Well, his task just grows bigger and bigger especially if I should reach 600!

I have at last joined Facebook (or have I already mentioned this?) and my list of friends grows and grows. I am quite amazed how many from more than twenty odd years ago have been in touch. It does seem to me though that some people use Facebook purely as a personal bulletin board with comments that are not all that interesting except maybe to a small inner circle.

Filming – Chris and Douglas have been involved in the making of a commercial for INKA, a large supermarket chain. The actual filming round and about our area of the woods took only two days though the two of them were busy a long time beforehand sussing out locations, props, etcetera. Mind you, most of the props in the end came from our house. We were denuded of Victorian knick-knacks, gimcracks asnd gewgaws: plates, bowls, jugs, vases, cutlery, stools, baskets trays, and even garden ornaments. Can’t wait to see the finished result to recognise it all. We even had a cook and his assistant in our kitchen cooking for a unit of thirty people: chicken and sautéed potatoes, bean salad, coleslaw and more. Mind you, they did clean up beautifully when it was all over and after it was all over Chris and Douglas were both totally exhausted. I said I don’t really know how the commercial would have been made without them. Knowing the Greeks it would have been of course but it would have been a different kettle of fish that’s for sure. Douglas is the doyen of production managers but it took every bit of effort to keep the unit on track. Greeks tend to be a little on the haphazard side even when they agree with each other and the director tended to change his mind and want something else with every set-up. He is, in Douglas’s words, too much of a perfectionist but he is a bloody good director as his work on ‘The Island’ only goes to prove. If there was any chance of my writing a screenplay that actually stood a chance of being produced I would be more than happy to leave it in his hands.

The neighbours were agog with all the coming and going and the aftermath is that we have a kitchen and a fridge stuffed with euros worth of food, some of which has already been given away as we will never finish it all. There are melons, apples, oranges, grapes by the kilo, olive oil, about three dozen eggs, and a veritable mountain of cheeses, some in a jar of olive oil.

A short while ago, to follow in the wake of Chris’s commercial, Douglas was roped in to do another and, from what I’ve heard of that, I simply can’t wait to see it.

Retirement? Forget it. In fact Chris has been trying to do far too much (a concert was mooted for November but we insisted he put it off till the New Year) and right now he is going to be booted off to the Athens flat for a well earned rest.