Monday, May 28th, 2007
I have had the pleasure to walk, drive, bus and train through some lovely parts of England over the last couple of days. Specifically in the Cotswolds! mmmm and it just struck me how beautiful Britain looks doused in a soft rainy mist. Lucky that, doesn’t look set to ease up for a while 
Not ideal conditions for camping in a field for a long weekend, but hey I’ll find a positive spin for it somehow. This weekend coming sees in the start of the festival season for me. The sunrise festival (www.sunrisecelebration.com) looks set to be a great event! Some fantastic bands will be playing (Dreadzone!!!!), cabaret stages, workshops, and a generally great vibe 
Plus together with about 25 fantastic fire-performers we will be co-ordinating 3 days of processions, shows and supervised practice/show-off areas for fire-spinners.
What a great start to the season!! As long as the weather gives us a few openings, we’ll be out there shaking our stuff
Friday, May 25th, 2007
Roll on July 1st!
Britain’s public areas (most importantly the public houses!) become completely smoke-free! hooray!
I was reminded again the other day why this is such a good thing when I was trying to watch the champion’s league final in a pub… yes, ok I could make out the images on the screens, but the smoky haze in the area was attacking me on all fronts!
The acrid smell, breathing difficulty, watering eyes and general uncomfortable closeness of the air and inadequate filtering qualities of my jumper sleeve over my nose and mouth forced me before long to pop outside for a quick “breathing break”!! jeez!
It’s just so wrong!
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
I like to think I have some control over the direction my life goes in. I don’t believe in a completely inexorable destiny. However, I still sometimes have to sit back and say “take me where you will!”. So various factors have drawn me back to Bristol and it seems I’ll now be staying there (more or less, bearing in mind I’m always travelling around with my work….) over the summer.
Well, great! I am currently on a path that allows me to express myself artistically, manage exciting projects and be thoroughly silly and outrageous with a bunch of like-minded people.
I will be staying at “Chimaera Central” over the summer, a house with 3 other Chimaera members (Chimaera being a Britsol-based fire crew that I am part of: www.chimaeracircus.co.uk), so I’m very happy with this - it means we’ll inspire each other to work harder, create
routines, market the group etc…
Chimaera is a really exciting group to be a part of at the moment. The current big project is ‘The Secret Garden’, which is a theatrical fireshow based on weird and wonderful things one finds in a secret garden (sshhhhh). It includes four-point stilt monsters, juggling techno moles, acro bugs, centipedes, ants and bouncing stilt-grasshoppers, fire-fan-butterflies, and all linked together by a wacky gardener character, who has flaming tools - a fire-wheelbarrow, fire-watering-can etc…
It’s a huge project, which we (our crew of roughly 15 people) have been working on since it’s conception in September! It is now at an exciting and scary stage, where the first gigs are looming! All the routines are written and in the process of being rehearsed, but there’s still a way to go before we’ll be satisfied with it!! The first main show is on the ‘Fire and Dance stage’ at Glastonbury Festival, which is just 7 weeks away now! wooo!
Other than that I am busy sticking myself with needles - oh my! Currently planning an
d constructing a brightly-coloured fruity stilts costume 
so tomorrow’s mission is to buy lots of colourful, shiny, fruity, sparkly things and plaster them all over myself with pritt-stick. Then stop doing that cause it’s silly, and sew myself a fantastermical bright and lovely stilts costume to exibit myself in over the summer! hoorah!