Well, hello all. It's been a while I know, and yet a year these days flies by quicker than a bumble bee on an urgent errand. And bees have loomed large on my calendar. Well I say bees, I mean lizards, pine martens etc. Filming Wild Thing I Love You has been a revelation, and an education. I've waded up to my armpits in cold pond water to build a three-bedroomed home for an otter, and swung from a crane high above Cheddar to build an aerial walkway for dormice. These are things you just don't get to do normally. In Northumberland where we building the otter walkway, one story brightened up the grey rainy days no end. As there were dangerous diggers and tractors which a frail TV presenter could easily trip and fall under and become trapped due to their prancing media stupidity, we had to have St John Ambulance personnel on hand the whole time. Talking to them they said the worst time was actually in the summer. The bright yellow colour of their jackets is apparently the exact shade which drives wasps into a frenzy, so most of their work involves 'treating wor selves for bee and wasp stings and that'.

April I was in Los Angeles doing a show at UCLA. The first night did not bode well. There had been huge thunderstorms and torrential rain for days, and rather like our inability to deal with snow, LA was totally unprepared. Mudslides, floods, train wrecks rocked the state of California. But underneath my venue, of course was a deep fissure caused by an earthquake below which ran an underground river. When the water level rose it had nowhere to go except the front 8 rows of my theatre which were underwater during the sound check. The theatre was nearly dry by the end of the first week..I had a cold and the theremin was going loopy with the humidity. It wasn't all damp and depressing though. I got to meet a real Python, Eric Idle who came to my show. What a charming and delightful man he is, and quite hard for me to actually talk in proper sentences as a lifelong Python fan..

Part 2 to follow,
Pax
BB