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As Mr Gary Wilson has pointed out somewhere on this blog, one of our mates is getting married. Soon too! I haven’t written about it yet because that person has not written about it on their blog, though maybe they are just not boasting or something.

Anyway I am quite excited about it as it is not just one wedding but three in a way, although I am only going to Parts 1 and 3. Part 2 is a quiet family affair. I am also excited about it because it is a wedding like I have not been to before. There is apparently no disco or a band!

Anyway, watch this space as if I see this person, I will be able to speak to them and ask them if I can reveal who it is. I bet the suspense is killing you!

Hoorah! The week before last, we wrapped filming on “Laurence & Jackie’s Northern Exposure“. All six episodes are now in the can, and the first two are edited and ready to go. I’m going to be spending up to the end of August editing programmes 4 and 6, while another producer does 3 and 5.

I’m glad and sad that filming has finished. It was very hard work (there were double the amount of people out filming that you can see in the picture above) and long days. So I feel like I’ll get my life back a bit. On the other hand though, it was good fun. Most of the time.

We’ve found a lot of things I didn’t know you could see and do in Northern Ireland, so it’s opened my eyes a bit - hopefully people that watch the show will tune in and be encouraged to go out and some of the things featured themselves.

Laurence & Jackie’s Northern Exposure starts on Friday July 25th on BBC One Northern Ireland at 9pm. It’s repeated on Sundays at 6pm. If you live outside Northern Ireland but want to catch the show, you should be able to do so on the iPlayer, channel 973 on Sky Digital, or channel 863 on Virgin Media.

It would be funny if the guy wasn’t so pervy scary looking!

From Back Up LOL

You know I love my breakfast food, and anything that is toasted that has ham and cheese in it.

Recently when we were out filming we stopped off at a place called “The Picnic Deli” in Killyleagh. They have an amazing choice of breakfast food. I tried the ham and cheese on French toast with dijon mustard. It was quite the breakfast experience - delicious although filling and probably full of an amazing amount of calories.

I have decided to create a catgeory for ham’n'cheese so you can follow my quest for the best ham and cheese toasted sandwich in Northern Ireland - you can find all the related posts by clicking on Departments above so you can see which I rate highly. I would give this one four out of five stars. It was just a bit too filling for me!

If you are passing by Killyleagh, which is in County Down, you should definitely pop into the Picnic Deli. They have a wide range of other delicious sounding breakfast snacks, and what’s more, every one of their waitresses is extremely attractive!

Whizzgo has launched a green car-sharing scheme in Belfast. Basically you sign up for a £50 a year fee, and then you can go online and book a car for the hour, couple of hours, a day, a weekend etc. This quite intrigued me as I don’t have a car. I’ve avoided getting one because I live close to town anyway, and also they do pollute! But I do sometimes miss having one - particularly when I need to go food shopping and so on.

So I had a good look at Whizzgo’s rates to see if I could make it add up to being worthwhile for me. The fact that one of their cars in Belfast is parked right outside my house makes it doubly tempting.

It’s £50 a year, and then £5.15 an hour every time you book it, or £37 a day. That includes fuel, and up to 30 miles of travel. I did a quick calculation of how much it would cost me in a year just to use it on supermarket shopping trips.

£50 + (12 journeys * 2 hours * £5.15) = £173.60

Now at the moment I walk up to Sainsbury’s (about a 45 minute walk) which isn’t bad exercise, and get a taxi back which costs about £7.00. So taxis for a year shopping come to £84. That means Whizzgo probably isn’t worth it for me, so I’m not going to bother at the moment. It would probably be different if I had family over here I had to go and visit, but I don’t.

You can find out more about Whizzgo in Belfast here.

Best lyrics of the year go to Scouting For Girls with Heartbeat….

Every time that we meet, I skip a heartbeat.
Give me an evening, or give me a night.
I’ll show you the time, of your life.
I’ll walk you home safe, from the dark.
I’ll give you my jacket, I’ll give you my heart.
But she won’t come dancing tonight, She’s having the time of her life.

They seem written for me. I reckon worst lyrics of the year so far go to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” which is actually a good song….

However that was because I thought the lyrics said

I kissed a girl, I loved the taste of her cherry chop stick

When actually what it says is

I kissed a girl, I loved the taste of her cherry chap stick

So I’ll let her off. I was intrigued as to what a cherry chopstick was though.

23 DVDs full of Columbo goodness for £30? Perfect for hungover days!

Google today launched Lively which is a like a Second Life type world where you can create your own avatars, rooms and chat with your friends. Details of how to actually get started with it seem pretty skimpy at the moment, but one cool feature is that you can apparently watch Youtube videos in a virtual room with your friends.

I never got into the Second Life thing, but what’s different about Lively is that once you download the software on to your PC (PC only at the moment Grrrrr) you can access your room from Facebook, your site, and other places on the web. Which seems like quite a good idea. Maybe when it’s a Mac download I’ll give it a shot.

Full story here from BBC News Online. How on earth did she not feel it?!!

As I haven’t posted in so long, there are a couple of other things that have happened recently….

• my sister Ailse, graduated last week from St. Andrews with a 2:1 degree - well done Ailse! (And check out the three random weirdos gate-crashing the pic above)
• my Dad got awarded an MBE in the recent honours list, so hopefully we will all be off to Buckingham Palace soon to see him collect that!
• I’m going to become an uncle for the first time, as my other sister is expecting…. I still haven’t quite got used to the idea of there being another family member
• and finally, after having debt since I left university (and I’m talking about a LOT of debt run up whilst I was either living it up in London or trying to survive on no money after taking a paycut to join the BBC), I am now completely, 100% debt free. Which is great. Here’s hoping the housing market will take a massive crash, and I’m excited about buying my own place sometime next year