I am totally stressed out this week. My parents are coming to visit me, the flat is a mess, the allotment chaos and I am so far behind with everything I need to and want to do. I got a press pass to the Edinburgh International Film festival, but unfortunately could not really use it that much so far, as all the press screenings are during the day. I am at the moment doing some work experience and am expected to be there most of the time from 9-6, which I am not really used to anymore. I am looking forward to uni starting again, so I can destress a little bit from all the crazy summer.

Some weeks ago, I got a cheap video on special offer: The Bourne Supremacy. Anyways, as it was a thriller I got quite hooked after seeing it this week. The DVD of the first in series: The Bourne Identity, was on special offer, so I got it, too. But as it was published as a book by Robert Ludlum before, I went into the library and borrowed as many of the series I could find. But the book and the films have hardly any resemblance to each other! Whilst the books are set sometime in the 70ies or even 80ies, in the cold war and have the hero rooting in the Vietnam war and fighting Chinese and Russian super terrorists and assassins, the films offer no explanations whatsoever and the plot is totally different.

I am a bit ill this week with a weird type of summer flu. The Filmhouse sent Indymedia 10 tickets for free for the community festival experience, for the film: “Who needs sleep?” which is about labour rights and trade unions (or their absence) in the film and movie industry. The Russian language student will leave tonight and the French has first moved away into student accomodation and then got rapidly sent back home today as she went a bit overboard with her teenage freedom. We even got paid the telephone bill in total, which we did not really expect anymore, but her dad stepped in and sorted finally the stuff out.

This week has been very exciting. I had an interview yesterday for a part time job. The fun thing about it was that they used an electronic pre-screening test via an interactive website, and I was second best. The French language student has run up a phone bill of about £80 in the last 2 weeks, dialling premium call numbers for example for about 2-3 hours in the middle of the night at about 2am to a French mobile. This call alone cost £15! We tried to get BT blocking the numbers, but BT was pretty crap, always saying that it would take 7 days for the service to work, and then not even starting it until you put in the code number they gave me.

“I speak to cover the mouth of silence, said Umberto Ak’abad.?” exclaims Max, the Indian alcoholic refugee, reflecting on the forty years of civil war in Guatemala. He stars in the theatre play “Mouth of Silence?”, which was brought to the North Edinburgh Art Centre at start of July by the Birds of Paradise theatre company. It features a refugee family returning back home, reflecting about their personal situation from different angles and discussing ways to deal with the past. “No one listens to the voices of the past.?” claims the victim Maria, who talks via sign language. The play is fully signed, not everything is translated into English.