We move on, during another 5:30 PM sneak at the office, to PART TWO: 2022
Where to begin? You'll have to forgive the fact that my memory isn't great for some things.
This reminds me - November 2021 I worked as a film director for the first time, on the micro-budget film about flying Dinosaurs. I was then supposed to AD on the film that was shot on a a WW2 ship (in December) but instead the Dinosaurs film gave me COVID and I stayed home.
January was slow, apart from the two night scratch show we did for SB (the one-woman-ish play) which was a lot of fun and something quite different to the usual.
Otherwise I think the most impactful thing I did in January and February was work on Ghost Film 2 (not its real title) as the Writer and Director - and also AD, which was not ideal but somehow apparently we made it work without burning everything to the ground. It also meant I got the practice in as a Director, which was fun, and I think I did a pretty good job.
Even though - after editing - the film came out pretty naff. Can't be helped, given the time frame.
March into April was taken over by the Worst of All Bad Productions, for which I was a PA making a measly £1000 for the whole month. 30 days. Incredible that I decided to take it, but I thought that I might end up making some good contacts and that it would be good for me.
It was not. The whole thing crashed and burned and I would never, ever work for them again.
But April 17th - Easter Sunday - became one of the best days of my life (let alone the best day of the year) because after 8 long years of being together, Ry got down on one knee and proposed. That's right - we got engaged!
With a beautiful, gold ruby ring. I wept hard, for about five minutes. Genuinely. On the beach at 9pm with the world and the city looking down on us, when he got down on my knee I said out loud: "Are you joking?" (He was not). I don't remember a lot of his speech but I know it was amazing and instead, I started hyperventilating and then started to cry - and I sank to my knees in the sand so we were both kneeling in the sand -
and I cried so long and so hard that I had to pull back off his shoulder and explain that I was happy, that this was the most amazing and wonderful thing, but that I genuinely could not believe it was happening. It felt like a dream, like a scene from a movie that was happening to someone else at some other time... It was something I had seen before, on screen, and something that I had imagined but never truly believed could happen to a person, let alone to me.
I managed to pull myself together after about five minutes; Ry asked "Is that a yes?" and that made me laugh. Like, yeah, sure I hadn't technically said Yes yet - but surely the explosion of snot and tears and the hyperventilating would have shown that this was the only thing I wanted in the whole world? But I said Yes anyway, because of course I did, and then I asked him what colour it was because it was so dark on the beach where we were that I couldn't see it properly.
After that, we strolled along for about an hour and went to a pub to celebrate. We stole the glasses our drinks came in. We told everyone the next morning - for that night, it was something just for ourselves.
To this day, a year and a half later, I look down at my ring and think it's the most unbelievably beautiful, shiny thing I've ever seen in my life. I find myself staring at it a lot - or holding it up into the sunlight to admire it.
We spent a lot of May wedding planning and the like. I worked on a film-video-game job where I met lots of people that I would now consider friends, and definitely good contacts.
It's difficult to remember exactly what happened over the summer of 2022. Nothing particularly big, after the beginning of the year. Probably lots more small jobs, potentially trips home and maybe one holiday... It's all a bit of a blur.
The biggest things I remember about the end of 2022 were my trip to SA in November - a safari trip unlike anything I have ever experienced, which I am dying to do again at some point in the future - and the fact that we had Christmas with Ry's family. Which was manic, and I got ripped to shreds by the cats, so wasn't exactly the 'restful' Christmas I was hoping it would be... but still, the kids had fun, and that's what counts.
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