4th picture meme

I spent some time this morning (finally) sorting out some of my hundreds of digital photos. I've a really nasty habit of downloading straight to my laptop and then not sorting (ok, this I don't feel bad about 'cos who actually sorts their pics these days right?) or backing up (this I feel very, very bad about) the pics at all.

I really should know better as last year I suffered the excruciating annoyance and sadness of losing batches of pics when my previous laptop got stolen....

I started with all the pics taken in 2009 so far - the last 6 months of 2008 still patiently await my attention - and backed them all up to the very fancy home server which we have especially for this purpose. We've got 8 years worth of photos on this server (and yes, ok, not all of them are backed up to DVD yet either...), and I had to fight not to get side-tracked and browse old albums.

But the process reminded me of this meme - posting the 4th picture from the 4th folder on your computer - so I thought I'd play along. Imagine my happy surprise on discovering that this is the picture!

Yup, that's me and 3 Tibetan monks (one of whom seems to be flashing his balls, please don't look too closely), on a mountainside in about 35 degree heat (Celsius y'all). 

What were we doing there? I was hoping you might ask.

I was working as Wardrobe Assistant on a shoot for Ariel Washing Powder. We were supposed to be in Tibet but were actually high up in the mountains of the Western Cape. In December. The actors were dying in those genuine heavy yak wool monkish robes and one of my main tasks was to keep wash clothes cold in buckets of ice to mop them down with between takes.

There are many stories to tell about this shoot; it was pretty bizarre from beginning to end - both the actual job and the other goings on in our lives at the same time - but I didn't realise how far the oddity of it all would extend until a month or so later, when I was in England on holiday.

I met, and stayed with, some distant cousins whom I'd not met before. My cousin's husband worked for one of the premium post-production studios in London. Watching telly at theirs one night this commercial came on, whereupon we both piped up: "I worked on this ad'. And then stared at each other in amazement.

Turns out I had worked on the shoot - in searing heat on a barren mountainside in the South African summer, and he had colour graded the final product, in a busy studio off Carnaby Street in freezing London. So weird.