...We are dead. We are dead. (1978, Capricorn 1)

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We start filming next week. It's going to be really really busy but at the same time it will be interesting. The lead actress arrives from China in a couple of hours. On my "Bank Holiday" I am getting the house ready for her stay, flowers in her room, food in the fridge, nice things, which look really nice when you know what is coming, though I doubt that Nick would have said anything to her yet. Next week she will be living as an immigrant. Worse, she will be living as an immigrant who has a documentary crew following her.

Although it's getting really interesting I can't wait to finish. I envy my friends who have done NOTHING this summer. No jobs, no schedules, no worries, just days off, in bed, seeing their friends and having fun. At least when I go back to university I will have half of that life and half of what I have now.

Oh, and my camera phone broke, so now I have no camera phone moments to illustrate my adventures. Instead here is my best friend who has just celebrated his 20th birthday. Long Live Emeka.

... It's definitely very small in here (1988, Rainman)

8-39-74

Long time since my last post. Lots of things have happened. Don't want to type much. A tornado hit the street where I live in Birmingham (though we didn't even realise until we looked up the road). I was given an ultimatum regarding working for nick vs. going back to university, and I met a small man in a service station car park. (F**KING IAN HISLOP!)

... maybe it's cos I'm irish.

6-34-74

So many weird and wonderful events to note. The wonderful Haiping continues to make us laugh. Here you can see him with his milk producing friend.

I dropped my iPod the other day onto the treadmill in the gym, and the moving conveyor belt then catapulted the poor thing behind me. When I picked it up it was working at first but then it totally crashed and a picture of an iPod with a sad face appeared on the screen, along with a web address for the support site. When I went there though it said absolutely nothing about a sad face icon, or told me why when I tried to turn it on the hard disk would go mad and the iPod would shake on the table as if it were dancing. They have opened an apple store in Birmingham and I took it there and the nice man who worked there just exchanged it for a new one straight away. No worries just gave me the new one. While I was there I told him I had been quoted £700 to fix my screen on my laptop (there's a couple of white spots and a big fat dent in the back) and he said if he had the parts he would do it for free and just claim it as a warranty. That he did, and in a ridiculous 23 minutes. The repair is supposed to take over an hour but these guys like doing in by a clock and timing themselves. You gotta love apple geeks. So now I have shiny new iPod and Powerbook (screen). Maybe I will look after these ones a bit more.

The film Madagascar is quite shit. Not funny, not enough clever references and no amazing animation. Dreamworks should stick to Shrek.

Most interesting news ... Yesterday during lunch Jez asked me if what identification I had and then told me I had to go into the city, find a shop that rents metal detectors (he had spoke to them, and they required ID for insurance purposes) and then locate Nick. Quite surreal. Basically Nick was under cover with illegal immigrants, and although you would think they would spot him a mile away he managed to stay in a field surrounded by people all picking spring onions, and lots of respect to the guy because he was doing it, working as if he were one of them. Anyhow he dropped his new engagement ring and later realized and phoned Jez quite upset. So I got in the trusty Volvo and went to find him. The problem is that the farm he was on hires illegal immigrants, and also had four deaths last year so doesn't like to publicize it's location. I had to pretend that a friend had broken down and that he could see the farm and that I was trying to get to him. Even then with their directions I got completely lost and only found my way by following a random lady who said she was driving past it. Took me over an hour and a half to find the bloody farm though it didn't help that I kept telling people it was a strawberry farm and not a spring onion farm. Duh. When I got there I phoned and met Nick and then started to sweep the ground with this metal detector. The people around us became very suspicious ... how on earth could an immigrant get a friend to come out and meet him in a hidden location with a metal detector so quickly. They thought we were part of some sting involving the home office! We didn't have time for their shit though, and just hunted through our own, quite literally, as Nick had been all over the fields including to the next field and behind a bush where he had to take a crap. It was really weird sweeping the metal detector around human feces in a field. And for ages all we found were bits of wire, and old tools, and the odd 20 pence piece. Nick was ready to give up (he had to come to terms with losing it) but it wasn't worth just stopping so we carried on unhopeful. After an hour we were sweeping a huge pile of leaves from the spring onions and it kept beeping. We would move the leaves to look under and the signal would move with them. Therefore whatever it was picking up must have been bundled in with the leaves, and sure enough after about five minutes of separating them Nick pulled out his ring. He was delighted and gave me a hug (!) and kept saying how amazing it was. I'm a hero.

Though there is a total other experience I had that day at the same time and place, and that was seeing this field. There are hundreds of illegal immigrants, and tens of white minibuses just in the middle of no-where. They pick onions from the early morning, around about 6am, until 6pm in the evening. They are paid just £3.75 for a box of spring onion bunches. There are 100 bunches in a box, though these are larger than they end up in your supermarket. The small bunches that you buy cost you 50p each. So even if the bunches stayed as big as they are first picked that's £50 a box. More than a 1000% mark up on the original labour. Nick only managed 2 boxes that whole day but the Chinese will be able to do 10-12 so they earn about £40 a day or simply £3.75 an hour. They get no drinking water. They have no working toilet, instead they just crap in the next field. They work in the heat all day long. I'm glad I had that metal detector as it meant I could look straight at the floor. It made me feel so sad when I looked up at the people around me. It's disgusting when you hear of this happening abroad, but knowing that there isn't even "fair-trade" on our own doorstep is shocking. And no-one knows that the spring onions they eat from Tesco were picked in Birmingham by people who are paid such a crappy wage and treated so poorly. I am glad I am involved in this film. After finding Nick's ring we both went back to the Chinese gangmasters house, which was full of Chinese people just wandering around, as one group came in from work and went to bed (many mattresses on the floor) the others got up and went to work. They ate with their hands, no plates, knives or forks. They spoke no English, and sat on garden furniture. I won't forget this.

I am now on my train back to London, and Nick has given me Monday off so I have a long weekend. Hopefully Rachel won't note this and she'll pay me anyway. Alison starts her new job on Monday at the houses of parliament so I would like to go for a drink with her then but I don't know if she will want to. My brother passed his driving test so some celebrations are due this weekend. And on Tuesday I get to go out with the DOP searching for locations. The guy is a real pro so I should learn a lot from him. I'm going to start my new book now, I finished the last one by Morgan Spurlock about McDonalds and I;m counting the days until I next feel the urge to go in there.

... prayers with families of those injured yesterday.

I don't usually talk about the news in my posts but some pretty news worthy things have happened. Two days ago we won the olympic bid, so they're coming to London! Then yesterday the big men were going to announce the fate of Africa in the G8 summit, but were halted when terrorists attacked London with bombs on busses and trains! 4 bombs in all (though we were told 7 for quite some time) killing 40+ people and injuring hundreds. Al Qaeda have admitted to it. Happening in 4 prime places in London everyone knows someone who was there or nearly there or who had a dog nearby, but thankfully no one I know was hurt by the incident.

I got the first news of the event by txt from my girlfriend just saying "turn on the news, they have evacuated the tube because of power surges". Then in true Speed style my mum sent me a txt simply saying "BOMB on bus in London". After that the news got worse and worse for hours. The minute I heard about bombs I cancelled my hotel weekend with my girlfriend in Kings Cross and decided to just stay safe at my parents house as normal, or possibly end up stuck in Birmingham for the weekend. Everything seems to have died down so I will attempt to get home but the tube is still out of action.

I was touched by how well the police and paramedics took to the scene, even a bus was taken off service to take people to hospital (the same type of bus that was blown up moments before). And all the londoners stayed fairly calm, no mass panic or hysteria, but instead orderly evacuation. We were so ready for it I think that everyone knew exactly what to do. Saying that I have just been into the high street here in Kings Heath, in Birmingham, and we were shopping for stuff in WH Smiths, when we were evacuated because of a possible bomb in a kids bag. Any other day they would have just handed it into the customer service desk but because 200 miles away there has been bombs on the mass transit system in the capital city, they consider it a possibility that the terrorists may also be trying to bomb newsagents in high streets. Not only that but there is a massive indian communtiy here, surely it wouldn't be very effective if they killed that many muslims. This mass paranoia is exactly what the terrorists want.

Got to be thankful for all the people who checked up on me despite the fact I was so far away. News travels very quickly, and I had checks from friends in New Zealand and China by text message and emails from random people in the states who I have been talking to regarding the film we are making.

I will end with the stupidest comment i heard yesterday and possibly all week ... "Do you think if Paris had won the Olympics it wouldn't be us who got bombed" copyright Jo the idiot co-ordinator who I work with 2005.

... 12 weeks to go

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After sneaking into Live 8 I realized that I really miss having a decent camera. The one I used when I went traveling was completely dead, and my mobile phone had too many limitations (like the fact it was a real mission to get photos onto my computer). £150 set me up with a great new camera that does what the old one does but is smaller, newer, and cooler. Not only that but Blogger now lets me upload photos much easier than before so on the right you will see one of my first efforts. From left to right, myself, Alex, and Vito, standing on Alex's tiny balcony, 13 floors up in the Euston area of town.

Other than that I went to see War of the Worlds at the cinema which was quite good, and I'm now stuck back in Birmingham which is quite crap. It's raining (although that's not specific to Birmingham) and the novelty has definitely worn off. Yesterday I had to drive my new production vehicle, the big blue van, to get it modified so that I could legally drive it. At 20 I can't take more than 8 passengers, so to get the insurance I have to remove 4 of the 12 seats. How bizarre.

I miss home, I miss being warm, I miss doing nothing, I miss my girlfriend. But not all that bad because I only have 12 weeks to go. (NB that's longer than the dirty shagging big brother housemates have to stay in their house).

... make poverty history

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Show your support for the end of poverty in Africa by going to www.live8.com and signing their petition. It will happen. Oh and if I hear one more stupid pop star say "Today we are going to change history" I swear I will buy a gun and hunt them down. Without a time machine they can not possible change history. Instead what they could say is "Today we are going to MAKE history", as the concert will surely be remembered. Also, if they were going to change history doing it today would be pointless, why not just go back far enough to stop things before they got bad. Idiots.

... I got into Live 8!

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Yes, I shit you not, I managed to sneak my way into Live 8! Today I had to go into London to get an iPod for my brothers birthday, and planned to go watch the gig on one of the big screens somewhere in London. However, when I got to Trafalgar it was full of homos taking part in gay pride instead! The same in Leicester Square! So I met up with Alex and he said someone he knew had managed to get in, so ever the optimists we thought we would give it a go. I had a map from the Sun newspaper showing everything including all the toilets, food stalls, etc. The set up at the park consisted of a perimeter fence patrolled by guards and police, followed by a 6ft high metal railing fence, then a 10ft high wooden fence. Once past all these you were then only in the staff area behind all the food stalls and would surely be spotted. We saw one half drunk guy covered in blood who said he had run at the fence and got grabbed and beaten by the cops so decided this wasn't really our option. We did half a lap around and decided our best bet was to go through the underground car park that is on Park Lane and hope for a fire exit into the park. We had to sneak past a cop on the entrance to the car park while she was destracted, work our way through rat runs, through the car park, and then avoid the security guards and hope for an exit. Eventually we found one but when we came up it had only taken us inside the first perimeter fence. We just sat there thinking what to do, with a view of one of the big screens, so at least we had got somewhere. Then for no reason this securit guard came up to us, and randomly said "They'll let you in if you try now"!! So we walked up to the next fence, where a guy just checked our bags, and then we walked straight in!! Got in as Travis were playing so we had missed the first 10 acts, but stayed for the second ten and then had to leave before the finale to get the last train home (it ran over by 2 and a half hours!). The Killers were cool, and Sting, but the best entertainer was Robbie who pretty much had the whole crowd going. It will be cool to tell my kids that the concert that changed the world I was at, and my girlfriend was at, and I managed to get in by sneaking through a car park! I rock!

... Going home now

5 - 32 - 70

I'm on my way home from Birmingham, gonna stop off for some Tapas with my girlfriend on the way, but then going straight to bed. I'm really tired. Using the gym everyday has made my body fitter, but it is a strain and I think I'm starting to smell from all the sweating despite many showers. My diet is fairly messed up as well, we had dinner last night at midnight which can not be healthy. Will try and force myself to eat all meals before 9pm next week. Shouldn't be too long and Nick and Gina will go to China so I can have a few relaxing days.

This weekend is Live 8, Bob Geldofs latest save the world concert, and it will do really well but is likely to have lots of stupid pop acts playing. Alison won tickets so she is going which means I won't see her this saturday, but I might try and watch the concert myself in Trafalgar Square. Nick told me today that his son is actually filming there! On stage! I offered myself as a no-pay assistant but doubt it can happen. Barney lives a really cool life. He has nothing to worry about.