A Few Little Treats

When we were on holiday in the summer, I expressed a wish that I could have an acting job to keep me busy and inspired. Before starting the regular autumn season of corporate conferences, I was fortunate to have three. They've been great fun and varied, allowing me to work with some old friends and make new ones. All three productions will end up being shown within about two weeks of each other. Now it's back to the world of corporate conferences. Rehearsals have heightened, filming is taking place, videos and presentations are being prepared, and on a day-to-day basis, the emails I have to answer yes or no to fill my inbox. So it's a great treat this week to have Brayden's mum over from Canada. I arranged a little scheme with her so she could be here for his birthday at the end of the month. She's an absolute delight, and having lunch with your prospective mother-in-law is good fun, if not a little daunting. I'm fortunate that autumn brings familiar work. Even if sometimes the familiarity is a little challenging, it's great to be back with a team of people who I trust implicitly and who are the best in their field. Add a few new faces each year and hopefully produce quality results. These days, we all need something to support our acting work, and I've been fortunate that the corporate sector has done that for me for quite a while. However, these alternate jobs are not something one can pick up casually. They need an investment of time and interest, and the times I turned down acting work to complete corporate assignments in my 40s are now paying dividends 20 years later. Investment is necessary in any business but doesn't always mean money. An investment of time to acquire a skill or enhance an ability may reap untold rewards. It's also something that can support one's first passion. This work has allowed me the freedom to choose acting jobs and given me an income that has given me stability and has not diminished the thrill of returning to stand in front of the camera. Getting that balance right is critical. It's not easy, but it helps make everything more fulfilling when it works.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changing Times

Image
One of the things about life as an actor that's always fascinated me is that things can change overnight. When people used to tell us that it was a very insecure profession and that we really ought to get a proper job, we could say that there was always the possibility the phone would ring tomorrow. However, if you were a plumber, my favourite analogy, or an office worker, relocating yourself would suddenly be much more complicated if you were out of work. As people who don't have a routine, we may value a bit of steadiness, but change is good. I spent the last two weeks having an adventure, driving around Iceland with my partner, something I've always considered doing. Everything changed daily; the landscape, from mountains to lava scapes to waterfalls to icebergs, was brilliant and magnificent beyond belief. Every night, the hotel changed, never unpacking our cases properly but just opening them to take out the things we needed and moving on the next day. I think if t
Read more

New Year, New Start, New Dishwasher

Image
I couldn't have wished for a better festive season.We had happy and full days on the boat. Nice meals, nice food, nice company. Wonderful presents and all shared with the most wonderful person. A visit to see "Sunset Boulevard"-a fantastically rewarding reinterpretation with an absolutely off the scale, star performance from Nicole Scherzinger. A fabulous evening in the theatre on Broadway to see the penultimate night of "Some like It Hot”. Followed by a beautiful four-day weekend in New York with lots of walking, plenty of visiting galleries and museums, iceskating in Central Park and shopping. No sooner had we got off the plane on the 2nd of January than I hit the ground running. Staging a conference for a major client which took up all my time and meant that January, and its associated depressive blues, crept up on me unaware. Or rather, they manifested themselves in a series of domestic appliances that decided to give up the ghost and not join in with 2024.
Read more

Christmas comes but once......

Image
What a difference a day makes? That’s what the song says, and it’s the time of year when we start to think what a difference has 365 days made? For me, it’s considerable. This time last year, I faced the prospect of my first Christmas as a single man with no family. And it was not nice. I was saved by two dear, fabulous friends who took me into their home in France and gave me a beautiful, intimate and joyous Christmas. The journey from there has been full of surprises. Lots of travel for business and fun. Dogging with huskies in northern Norway; a week of shows and museums and shopping in the Big Apple; and a fabulous two-week single-handed odyssey of a trip around the land of the rising sun. Japan was the most stunning trip and the desire to return is great. Add a week in the sun on the Amalfi Coast and I have indeed been lucky. Work has been varied and fun. Letting the world see the results of a year's filming in 2022 as The Full Monty dropped on Disney. Directing events in Ibi
Read more