I entered a short film into the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival’s Jagged Globe shorts competition. We went down to the festival last night and watched all the entries, including mine. I didn’t win but it was great to see something like that happening in the UK. The winning film was great (Nich and I actually preferred the runner up though!). Judge and jury and fellow Hull-man Andy Kirkpatrick was entertaining as always and in many ways his intermission chat at the competition was better than his lecture, which we had seen just prior.  My mountain biking mate Vine was amused that Kirkpatrick gave the first prize to his mate Ben! 

The other great thing that Kirkpatrick did was spend ages in his lecture telling us how he couldn’t reveal the name of one of his climbing partners because said climbing partner had requested he wasn’t mentioned. “I’ll refer to him as ‘him'” he said and ploughed on with a reading from his upcoming latest book. The first time he seemingly accidentally said the name, I threw a knowing glance at the wife. Next time I started chuckling to myself, but when he put up a picture of the guy’s face and said his name three times in one sentence I was a bit bemused. I fully expected a gag about it at the end of the lecture but there was nothing. So, Andy – you might want to work on that!

In other news, I’ve been doing the usual work for East Midlands Today, here’s an example – Jeremy Nicholas’ piece about a rocking piano. I make a convincing body double; Jem can’t play the piano.

Also, I helped out my friend Brady Haran with his attempt at recreating the famous Elements Song by Tom Lehrer. That’s the one in which Lehrer sings all the elements in the periodic table to music. A classic. Brady makes videos about science and has created a Periodic Table of Videos with the help of some scientists at the University of Nottingham. Since he’s finished all of them, he thought it would be a great idea to have his scientists singing the song.  He got me in to do the music and help construct the film, which was fun. The result is here…