Fraught and wet

While Wales has been living up to its reputation for rain I have been wading through stress for the last seven days. My main ADSL link was down all week - good job I was able to reconfigure my kit to use my back-up ADSL! My mobile phone broke too. Add to that the horror of the discovery that Thomson had taken over My Travel and Airtours and that the only two flights to Rhodes from my local airport were night flights. OK - there are worse things in this world but we have been flying to Rhodes from Cardiff for years and arriving soon after lunch or by tea-time. Who in their right mind wants to arrive in a resort at 1.00 am? I have written to Thomson and accused them of treating residents of Wales as second-class citizens. So, not wanting to fly at night I came up with a master plan to use airmiles and money and to fly Olympic Airlines to Rhodes via Athens - using the break on the return journey to spend a day in Athens. The idea of being able to take a ten or twelve day break was looking rather appealing. The next fly in the ointment was the discovery that our professional house sitter had got himself a dog and would only accept seven day sits from now on. We have to have a sitter because we have a Boarding Cattery on the premises and someone has to be here at all times when the staff are not. Now we have to interview another sitter who will sit for more than a week. I expect it will all work out.

Talking of Airmiles, I was thumbing through their January mini-brochure when I thought to myself.. "Someone has taken a photo just like one I took in Venice". Then, as I focused a little more, I realised that it WAS my photograph. It's the one used in my "Venice" blog. I have a vague memory of submitting it for a competition so that must be how they got it - they did credit me as the photographer though. A few days later, while surfing to the Olympic Airlines site, I had the same experience. A rotating gif showed three photos one of which was a photo I had taken of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

My friend, Ian Britton has the photo on his site at http://www.freefoto.com/ so I assumed that all three photos were from his site and called him. Anyone can use the low resolution photos free of charge as long as they credit the site. Within 48 hours Olympic had changed the pictures.

It was a relatively quiet week in the voice-over studio - just as well really as all the stress might have tipped me over the edge. A smattering of radio commercials, phone messages and some sports training material. I had a very interesting email from a European studio complimenting me on the speed and quality of my responses to them and my demo and looking forward to working with me. What they failed to say and what I had to read between the lines was that I hadn't got the job I had demo'd for them. One nice moment was a call for technical help from my friend and colleague, voice-over Duncan Wells who had almost died following a particularly nasty accident with a marine flare. It was good to hear from him and good to know that he is getting back in the sadddle - even if we will be competing for the same voice jobs!