Tuesday Bits and Stepdad Memories

 

Tuesday December 15th 2020

I didn’t get in from work until about half past eight, into bed around ten in the morning, and slept past my midday alarm!

I’ll not say when I woke up, as that’s embarrassing, but then again I do work five night shifts a week, so obviously I’m used to that after about four years with no day shifts - I’m still worried about the two day shifts on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day!

So, I woke up late, and had very little preparation time before a six o’clock show recording, all about Christmas Films. 

I started the zoom call at about ten to six, and it started with just myself and Ethan from Cineflek, until he apologised for having to go half an hour into the call.

I asked Ethan some questions about his show that I may use for a future show with him.

Twenty minutes into the call both Adam & Craig from Adam & Craig’s Guilty Pleasure Cinema joined the conversation...

I asked them a few questions about their show that I though I could use for a later show, but then at a little after seven, my laptop switched itself off for no reason, and I was having trouble getting it to start zoom from a reboot.

With that in mind I started a zoom call on my phone, and did the show that way, with Adam & Craig, as well as super Dave from Decibolic!

Relatively quickly after 54 minutes, we were done.  I know that I could possibly use some of the shed loads of chat from the pre-trouble stuff to build post-show banter, and perhaps insert within the show itself.

I started on the previous week’s recording with Gill & Dave to create a whole show from what’s there, which I have three hours of initial footage to build it from!

There’s some great edits here and there, even from before Gill joined in, but I think that I am managing to somehow make it seem natural and flawless!

There was some viewing, with us first of all catching up with one of two episodes of Gogglebox that we hadn’t seen yet.  I’m not quite sure what else we watched, as I fell asleep.  I know that after the falling asleep we watched some Masterchef US on Amazon Crime, I’m sorry I mean Amazon Prime - I hate that you have the service, but a lot of what you want to watch you have to pay even more for!

I moved my car from a car park at around half past six in the morning, went to bed at about eight o’clock...

Wednesday Decembrrr the 16th 2020

We woke up at 12:30...

John Dean: My stepdad John Dean would have been 70 today.  It’s still hard to think about the fact that he’s no longer with us. 

We didn’t always get on, especially from when he first showed up in 1981, when I was ten years old.

You know how it is - the stereotypical Stepdad to stepson relationship. He wasn’t my dad, but then over time I realised that every single person is an individual! 

You don’t know that at that age though do you...  When I was 20 years old we bonded.  For some reason I was able to rely on John to back me up with the meetings with my solicitor about events from school.

To have gone with a direct family member would have been difficult, because in some ways you don’t really want them with you when you’re discussing things like that, but with John I was with someone who was sort of related to a degree, but not by blood if that makes sense.

From there our relationship and friendship grew over the years.

The fact that we both said nice things to each other as the last words spoken between us means that I always look back happily.

John said that he was proud of me growing into “a great guy”, and that he did love me. I said the same to him, and apologised for how I had been when I was younger.  He said that he understood it from his own history as he was adopted.

I’ll leave this blog right there as it’s a bit long already.

Take care and stay safe.