Marathon

     About five years ago I met a talented harmonica player in Dordogne on a working holiday with some woodworking friends from Bristol. His name is Kristof and he invited me to participate in a 1500km canoe trip through Mongolia the following year, to film it and then play guitar to his harmonica around the campfire in the evenings. 

    He organized these survival marathons drawing globally for his victims. I thought hard and not so much about my age but more my lack of physical fitness as at the time I was in very slow recovery from a serious bout of paralysing depression. Two years earlier I was doing well to spend two hours per day out of bed as I had lost the will to live and there were no hospital beds when I 'fell down' so it took many many years to stand up again. I also feared I would get bored canoeing over such a long stretch.

      I have just completed a similar marathon of primarily mental endurance (the complete opposite of the deeply depressive state) and also physical endurance in that since October I have been working mostly on average fourteen hours per days on a film project called 'Furniture Today Part Three'. It took a long time getting started, had no support of funding, nor did anybody ask me to do it, most people in Britain are tuned into furniture yesterday and I had no proper 'business plan' or strategy to sell the film other than a confidence that the story I was telling would one day be heard (seen). 

       Curiously at school, whilst not much good at academic stuff I always came first or a close second at cross country running and the distance was something like 20 miles as it was an outward bound type progressive school. The film has been made single handed breaking all the rules as it is a team based profession. I'm also self-taught as six UK film schools turned me down as being too old at the age of 43.

        Computer software crashes, glitches, etc meant I probably spent at least five days on every running minute of the film. The documentary is 70 minutes long and will have its premiere screening at the University of Bath on the evening of Thursday 15 March 2012. A 200-seater lecture theatre has been booked and improvised jazz music will be played by a legendary rock guitarist to welcome people as they sit down. I am pleased with the film. It is my best shot. 

        I therefore extend my invitation to you, my reader as there might be one seat left. Visit my website www.furnituretodayuk.com for details. My You Tube channel WOODOMAIN includes videos of the film trailer, how it was made and also a short one including the harmonica player Kristof.