Filmshoot

This morning I got up early and headed to Queenstown for a film shoot. I'd been a little bit worried about my role: I was meant to be rehashing the part of an angry French expatriate who got repatriated after he was recorded screaming abuse at some builders. Knowing the internet's inability to transmit irony, I was worried that any video of me calling people animals and threatening them with cutlery was going to be taken literally and I'd have to go work somewhere else.

Fortunately, I didn't have a speaking part at all. I just had to portray rage at a hundred feet, which apparently I'm quite good at, despite thinking that I have a calm and placid demeanour. I also came across as French enough, which confused me, although it's not the first time that's happened in Singapore. Nor the last: this evening I was mistaken again for a Frenchman, although this time by a Dutch woman. Globalisation has such strange effects.

After my fifteen seconds of fame were recorded, I had very little to do. Such is the way of filmshoots: like war, they're boredom punctuated by terror, or at least by the sight of a very fat man walking towards a camera on a dolly. I spent a couple of hours talking to the other people who were there for the shoot, then remembered I'd had no breakfast and went home.

There was nothing I wanted to eat at home, but luckily I had bought a packet of barbecue flavour tortilla chips. Unluckily, I ate the packet of barbecue flavour tortilla chips, which turned out to be utterly disgusting, and after that I had to go back to bed to recover. This is not the glamourous life of the filmstar that I was expecting.

However, all that time spent doing nothing this morning landed me with an invitation to a housewarming in Pasir Ris, at the other end of the island, which was a nice way to finish the day off: we got to meet the aforementioned Dutch woman, and a dog, and eat pizza. Plus I got into a debate about what cycle components you should make with a titanium rod once it's been removed from your leg, which is a useful thing to make up your mind about.

Tomorrow it's BMX racing time, so now I'm off to bed, as you need plenty of rest before riding a small child's bicycle down a wooden ramp.