heiks

I am currently moving this blog from my .mac site, so posts are from 2006, until I catch up to myself! If you've found this blog, you probably know me. If you don't know me, hello there! I mainly blog about my life in Paris (France) and what is happening in my life as an actor (or actress if you want to be British. Maybe ACTRON is less gender-specific. Shall we try that then?). So, yes, here we all are. Have fun.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

one of life's great ironies


This past weekend, I travelled to London to attend a party. In what can only be described as the Way Things Go, I ended up not going to the very party I had travelled to London for. But never mind - I wasn’t overly upset about it (I could have gone if I had really, really, really wanted to) and I had a very worthwhile weekend without it. And maybe the party would have been a let-down. Who knows? This way, in my mind, it’ll always be a great party that I crossed the Channel for and then didn’t actually go to once I was a 10 min walk away.

The party was the closing night party of the 14th Raindance Film Festival - a festival dedicated to independent film. Whilst living in London I worked for the Festival (the 8th), but this time I came at a friend’s invitation to the party...

I attended a ‘Subversive Screenwriting’ workshop, a panel discussion, three Q&A’s, watched three feature films, and almost two hours worth of short films. I happened to be at the premiere of the winning film, so it meant something to me at the award ceremony and even though I skipped the closing party, we got Fossil watches and sunglasses in a gift bag at the awards. So, see? Even though I didn’t have a cocktail with Dame Judi Dench, Raindance was a very rewarding experience.

And if you don’t want to read a short rant about the world’s crappest underground public transport service, please stop reading now and have a trouble-free day.... byeeeee.

For the rest of you, here it comes: the London -Mind The Gap- Underground is truly a marvel. With tiny, rounded trains, dilapidated tracks, slow service, cancelled trains, gaps between the carriage and the platform and infernal s i g n a l failures, the best thing about it is it’s PA system - at least that is always in use and you get the bad news loudly and clearly. Although they should be warning you to Mind The Crap, as falling through the gap might actually relieve you of your tube-induced transport hell. I’m not suggesting the tube makes suicide look like an attractive alternative, I’m just saying that sliding through the gap could create an interesting diversion. You might find Harry Potter’s platform 9½. But what REALLY gets my goat is that this shitty, shitty service now costs £3 per single trip! They have done away with the Weekend Travel Card and the carnet for 10 trips in Zone 1 for £10 and now all you have is £4.90 for the day, or £3 for each trip. How that can be legal is beyond me. Paris has one of the best subways I’ve ever been on in terms of speed, coverage area and reliability and a single trip costs you roughly 90p, 70p if you buy a pack of 10. And they get you to where you’re going - isn’t that something? Actually, in Paris you’re far better off taking the Metro than trying to get a taxi because 1) there’s never a taxi when you need one and 2) French taxi drivers routinely refuse to take you where you want to go because they don’t understand that the whole and only point of their job is to go where the customer needs to go and not where they can get a good coffee and a fag. But that is a different rant altogether....

[Meanwhile, I’ll just go back to saving the world and talking about important issues, shall I?]

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