April 2020

This was a nice month after a terrifying and strange month. I think I will look back fondly on this month. I started getting up early and going for a walk with my mum every morning, and began a third(?) incarnation of Coach to 5K. We alternated cooking each other delicious things for dinner, and the weather meant that evenings after work felt long and luxurious. The blossom emerged overhead then descended underfoot. We drank a lot of negronis, and I went to a virtual club night after which I was very hungover.

I’ve was more productive than I have been in a long time: editing a backlog of film on my work monitor; cataloguing the entirety of my 35mm from age 16 to 22; getting a grip on my finances and finally digging into some external hard-drives I’d been too scared to look at. But I also found motivating myself during working hours a real challenge, and realised how much of my job satisfaction is reliant on interaction with the people I work with. I made no further decisions about what I’m going to do when I leave my job in September, as planning anything beyond the next meal seems like a waste of time. And I missed everyone and everything outside of the square mile of my mum’s home.

top film: Stranger by the Lake (L'Inconnu du lac), whose brilliant female DoP has shot many of the best French films of the last few years. It also has an amazing poster.

top book: Salt Slow, Julia Armfield - a weird contemporary short story collection which had moments of absolutely perfect feminist body horror.

top theatre: had a crack at the Schaubuhne’s Orlando… but if I’m honest I have minimal interest in digital theatre right now

top art: my own drawing of a still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire for my football team’s weekly drawing class