Littleport Station Road EA mooring to Swan On The River mooring
Early morning start for me today, catching the 8:12am train to Kings Cross with my white card model and overnight bag. Due to the heat that was already building my train had speed restrictions on much of the line in towards Ely where there was a backlog of trains, but thankfully we got moving soon enough and I actually arrived in Golders Green for my meeting bang on time.
Today had originally been a meeting for myself Abi, the Director and Gemma, the Production Manager to look at the white card model and for me to hand over drawings to be priced up. However we were also joined by Suzette, Producer from Chippy, Lily, the Choreographer and Maryna Costume Designer. We had four hours to work our way through the show with the aim of a common direction for the production.
Maryna comes from an Opera and Ballet background, she also has not grown up with all that is panto. So quite a lot of time was taken up looking at her wonderful drawings and then explaining about the audiences expectations for the characters. Thankfully there was just about enough time to also go through my model scene by scene, but sadly a few tricky props got forgotten about which really should have been discussed. There can always be phone calls to sort those out though.
Meanwhile back on Oleanna, Mick and Tilly pushed off and headed back upstream to the Swan on the River. Here he managed to get a mooring outside the pub and in the afternoon he met up with Mick and Andy who at one time used to work for Philips and then all three of them worked in the Telecoms Department at Lloyds Bank, most probably in one of those buildings Mick pointed out to us along the Thames on Monday. They had a couple of hours sat in the pub garden reminiscing about old times.
After my meeting I then relived the experience of transporting a model on London transport! It’s amazing how protective you become over a model you’ve spent hours working on. I headed out to Hackney to my brothers.
It was very nice having a catch up on their latest holiday and seeing how much Josh has grown both height and maturity wise. In the evening we all went out for a Turkish meal at Scoffs, it’s worth a visit if you end up mooring on the River Lee near Hackney Marshes. We shared a platter intended for two between the four of us with a portion of Haloumi and chips extra, there was plenty of food at a reasonable price.
0 locks, 0.621371 miles, 1 wind, 1 train, 3 tubes, 1 bus, 1 model approved, 2 hours drinking with old mates, 1 vast platter of kebabs, 1 pleasant evening with family, 33C, 3 pillows to choose from, 0 shore leave!
