Relief From The Salt Mines

Although it's Good Friday today (and therefore a Bank Holiday), I've still been working. The Triliteral Stageplay Festival is now complete as far as Phase One is concerned, with all of our judges having returned their scores for the shortlisted scripts, and so we held a meeting this afternoon to finalise the selection and to sort out the various directing and casting requirements that the selected plays have thrown up. It wasn't as simple or as straightforward as we'd assumed, but between our diligent Producer (Richie Garton) and our knowledgeable, if flamboyant, Artistic Director (Daniel Hallam), it was all sorted to satisfaction.

It was quite a strange process really – we had decided to use a system where the judges were asked to score each script according to a set of established criteria, and only the top nine plays would then go forward to production in the festival itself. There were some surprises – some scripts did better than we had expected; others not so well. We had already made a commitment that the top-scoring script would be taken and produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August, so it was reassuring that on this level at least, the judges returned a verdict that exactly matched our expectations. The highest scoring play turned out to be the one we liked the best too, so we're delighted to have been given the endorsement to take it up North in the summer. Wooh! Full details will be appearing on the Triliteral website in due course.

And so now I have three days before me where I am not required to turn up at the Salt Mines (nor be beaten by the evil gang-master), and my plan is to spend those three days on myself. Easier said than done, of course, because there are always chores to be carried out, even when I (seem) to have some free time to myself. All this reminds me of the time when I was kidnapped in Colombia by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and was forced into hard labour for the production of cocaine. I was meant to be on holiday, travelling with my history tutor from university, and it was meant to be a sightseeing trip only. We had mistakenly believed that we were travelling in what was (now euphemistically) known as a 'safe haven'. It turned out to be anything but that – our kidnappers had already plotted our insouciant wanderings and had apparently targeted us as potentially rich pickings in their ferocious drugs war.

Their aim (as I understand it) was to use us as a bargaining commodity – they needed money to conduct their battle against the other established drugs-cartel chappies (whoever they were). I was somewhat puzzled by this state of affairs – I'd always assumed that dealing in cocaine would have brought in sufficient cash for these bandits not to need to augment their coffers with the few shillings that kidnapping a worthless Briton like me could bring in, but what do I know about such matters?

I think it was the jungle marches that proved to be the hardest. God knows why these banditos felt the need to walk everywhere – I'm sure they had adequate resources to take a taxi if they'd needed to. But walk they did - endless miles of trekking though sweating, face-slapping foliage; interminable slogging across ravines; wading through swirling black rivers teeming with piranhas; and hacking through snake-infested undergrowth (have you ever seen what happens to a man's flesh after he's been bitten by the notorious fer-de-lance?). For some reason, these guys just loved to keep walking. It probably wouldn't have been quite so bad if Herbert del Orez (my history tutor) hadn't been in a wheelchair – our captors refused to let anyone push him along except myself. Before that sojourn in the jungle, I had weighed twenty stone if I had weighed an ounce, but not by the time we'd finished – who needs a diet when, with a bit of carelessness, you can get kidnapped by FARC?

Anyway, that's all in the past so let's not dwell on such matters. Instead, let's look to the future – how to spend the next three days of freedom, eh? Oh, did I hear a champagne cork popping? Bring it on!