It's not been a good week or so, has it?
Together with a few friends, I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing the master of the kora on the Africa Express tour a decade or so back.
ps - thanks for the latest donations to my fundraising effort, much appreciated.
Saddened to hear about the passing of Martin Phillips of The Chills, one of the really great guitar bands to come out of NZ, or indeed anywhere. I saw them only once, in the mid-90s (I'd hazard a guess at 1995) in either The Melkweg or The Paradiso in Amsterdam. Brilliant, as you'd expect. Wish I still had the t-shirt.
RIP, Martin.
Oh, and while I'm here, I'm still looking for donations for my half-marathon in support of Alzheimer's UK!
https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990
I've posted another modest update over on my Just Giving page for the Cardiff Half Marathon:
https://www.justgiving.com/page/alastair-reynolds-1713971449990
All donations contributed so far have been very gratefully received, but I still hope to keep pushing.
An article in The Guardian this week talked about the positive consequences of "civic engagement", which can be as simple as joining a club.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/23/join-or-die-documentary-review
This got me thinking about the surprising benefits of parkrun, which is the closest I get to any sort of organised sporting activity. Thanks to friendships formed at parkrun, I got to know some of the people involved in one of our community theatre groups. After initially volunteering to help shift scenery, I was eventually bumped up to three speaking parts in a musical, then (as mentioned in the previous post) a relatively substantial part in our recent production of Much Ado About Nothing. Following on from that, five of us were then able to offer our services as background artists for a forthcoming BBC film, "Mr Burton", featuring Toby Jones and Leslie Manville, which should be out next year. And here we are dressed up as 1950s theatre-goers!
From left to right: Gareth and Ella (who are part of our parkrun family), Katie-May, Liam, and (you guessed) me. It was a fun, if occasionally repetitive day, and we'll have to wait and see how much of our presence ends up on the screen. Rather interestingly, although there were only about 30 extras in total, we'll be digitally duplicated to fill a 600 seat theatre! This involved a time-consuming process of moving us around in blocks to fill every seat, going through the same actions each time, and with different camera angles.
This is the second time I've done extra work. The first time was in 1999 when my wife and I, bizarrely enough, ended up playing elements of an angry urban mob for a hostage/siege scenario being depicted as part of a recruiting film for the Royal Navy. Since the film was only ever shown at the RN centre in Portsmouth, I've never seen it.
I have to take a step back from all this exciting stuff now, though, to concentrate on writing. Other than the current novel-in-progress, I've been working on a long short story which is now nearing completion. More on that at some point, I hope.
Al R
