After a lovely couple of weeks at home its time to head off again, this time to central Ethiopia to film Hamadryas Baboons for a BBC Natural World film called ‘Baboons, Guns & Me’, about the travails of an Australian primatologist working with this fantastic species. I’m really looking for ward to this, I made a Natural World film about Yellow Baboons in Tanzania nearly 10 years ago which was a great experience. The Hamadryas have a very different, male controlled, social structure to what I’m used to (with primates and at home!) so it’s going to be fascinating and the location looks beautiful. The baboons had gone AWOL 10 days ago which meant that we’d pretty much cancelled the shoot, then they returned, now, at the 11th hour, they have gone again – but we’re going for it anyway. It does feel slightly strange to have your life controlled by the whims of baboons.
Last Sunday Max and I had a grand day out at London Wasps. Witney RFC had been invited to participate in a half time demonstration of tag rugby so we took our U7’s & U8’s down for the day. It was all slightly chaotic, Max scored a try in front of 10,000 people, Wasps were thumped by Northampton Saints, we were thumped by Maidenhead RFC and we got to meet a chap in an enormous wasp costume – it doesn’t get much better than that!
Witney U7's prepare to unleash hell ...
In my time at home I also managed to build myself a Telecaster – which I’d been planning on doing for ages, I’ve previously built two Stratocasters (I’m going to do a section of this website all about my guitar obsession at some stage) but this was my first Tele. Ash body, thin & aged nitrocellulose laquer finish (beautifully done by MJT Aged Finishes), Callham parts and Bare Knuckle pickups – sounds lovely, I still need to do some fine tuning tweaks … but here it is:
