• 19 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Facilities manager for a wildlife and heritage charity. I lead a small team looking after health & safety, compliance and building maintenance and repairs.

    Ninety percent of my time is spent at the keyboard, but since I am peripatetic and move around the properties that I cover, I have a different, and usually beautiful, view out of the window each day of the week. When I am not sat behind a desk, I will be crawling through an attic or have my head down a sewer or something.

    My time is spent arranging contractors for routine servicing or repair projects, reviewing fire risk assessments and dealing with outstanding actions, writing client briefs for renewable energy projects, chasing people to do workplace inspections, advising on risk assessments, updating our compliance tracker, arranging asbestos surveys, ensuring that everyone who needs training has it up to date, proving to utility companies that their meters are wildly inaccurate and need to be replaced, working out why the biomass boiler/sewage treatment plant/water heater/automatic gate/car park machine/phone system/greywater pump/security alarm/whatever isn’t working and getting it fixed and so on.


  • Recently went to a screening of the 1922 Nosferatu with a live accompanist creating an improvised soundtrack on violin, piano and waterphone - which was not an instrument that I had not encountered before, but evidently features in the score of The Matrix, Aliens and a range of other films. I can certainly see why - it was extremely atmospheric. I had seen Nosferatu a couple of times before - as well as the 1979 Herzog version, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - but this definitely added something new.










  • Way back in the day it used to be Cinema City in Norwich: the only art-house one in the city and where I ‘learnt’ cinema. It was great.

    These days, I live between three small town cinemas in Suffolk, and they are all good in their own ways.

    The Riverside in Woodbridge often has a talk about the film or maybe even an interview with the director or one of the cast etc on stage afterwards. Aldeburgh Cinema is run by a charity, shows a good few NT live events and local films and also has a documentary fest each year, and Leiston Film Theatre is, as they say on their site, the oldest purpose built cinema in the county (110 years now), and had the advantage for a while of being about 150m from our back gate. It is the most commercial of three in terms of programme, but still has some interesting stuff.