Friday, February 29, 2008

Passion Première: Travel Diary VI

Charlotte, NC, 5.13pm: Back in the USA. It's the first time I have arrived since our Green Cards arrived and it was a lot of fun joining the US Citizens / Permanent Resident Aliens line and, for the first time, not having my retina scanned and fingerprints taken.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I overslept this morning. I didn't go to bed until late because I was buzzing so much from the evening's events. Nevertheless, I still made it easily to Gatwick, but not with enough time to spare to put another entry in the travel diary. The flight was a whopping 9 hours, which gave plenty of time for sleeping, reading The Guardian and Doctor Who magazine, and watching the kind of crappy films that one only ever watches on flights, this time the second half of Licence to Wed, which I had begun on the way over, Nanny Diaries and Mr Woodcock, all three pretty terrible.

Now I'm back in the same spot in Charlotte, again drinking Sam Adams, where I was 48 hours ago. I think it was a bit barmy to fly over specially for this event, but I am delighted that I did it. I am unlikely ever to have another opportunity like this, and I am really thrilled to have been able to enjoy it while it lasted. I am actually very proud of my involvement with The Passion. It is a superb drama and I hope that it will be talked about for years to come. And it is a rare thing in an academic's life to have the kind of luck I have had in being invited onto this production, and I am pretty sure I will look back on it in years to come as a fantastic opportunity.

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