As Jason Bourne hits 95kph on the M10 from Sheremetyevo Airport to Central Moscow, I’m on the back seat of his VW Passat wondering if I’ll reach my destination in one piece. This is stunt driving like I’ve never known in a city that already feels familiar. Under heavy skies, wide highways are fringed with tower blocks, toothstumps in the mouth of the Moscow suburbs, all the more prominent on this vast, flat terrain. This is cityscape on a scale hard to fathom, in spite of the taxi driver’s efforts to compress time and space as he swerves and weaves across lanes onto the M9, the main drag into town. Any faster and I’ll either be dead or by some process of divine will and magic, find myself back on the M8 and home in time for dinner.
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Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is so lovely and accessible whereas mine may be perceived as a bit too leftfield/arty/whatever.

It’s odd for me to be in this place, not least because ten years ago, I pretty much swept the board at the 2000 BAFTA New Talent Awards with my first feature film, One Life Stand. Truth is, I’m just pleased that my peers, especially in the new media field, deemed my efforts worthy enough to be counted. The result will be announced on the 19th March but either way I’ll celebrate whoever wins because any recognition for the work we do - too often un/low paid - is still worth doing because you can’t do it unless you love it, which makes us all privileged.

Today is a momentous one. After two years and countless trips – since if I’m honest it took far more than the 33 listed here – finally I’m launching The Devil’s Plantation website. For anyone reading, especially those who subscribe to this blog, I want you to be the first to see it. Naturally I’m quite nervous from several angles – whether the site actually works, or if anyone will look at it and if they do, will they get it? Looking at the webstats for this blog, I’m delighted by the number of people who’ve visited, even if some of the search terms used tell me some visitors are more interested in say, dogging at Gleniffer Braes or Murder in Carmyle than in the Secret Geometry of Glasgow.
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