Dear Diary. This weekend was a 24-hour film competition in Girona. Contestants had 24 hours (actually 27 hours) to write, shoot, direct, and edit a short film. The best film wins €500 and the second-best wins €200. I've entered before and done pretty well: I've managed to win first prize a couple of times.

This year, I entered the competition and I forgot how stressful film-making is. The low point of the day was editing the film while 1-year-old was asking me to show him pictures of Peppa Pig on my laptop. I swore at him, calling him a fucking bastard and stupid cunt. I only did this because a) he's still too little to understand what bastard and cunt mean, so he had no idea what I was saying and b) I was feeling utterly, utterly stressed. The most stressful thing in life is a child trying to get your attention while you're doing a task that requires concentration. It's true. Try it yourself: try to do open-heart surgery while a child bangs on about diamond swords and sand zombies in Minecraft. While you're making a small incision in the patient's heart, the child's asking you questions Pokemon, and you'll sever the main artery instead, spraying you and everyone with massive quantities of blood and killing the patient.

Speaking of blood, once I'd finished the film, the film was still missing something, so on Sunday morning, I shaved my head, glued toilet paper to my face and painted my face red. I looked like my face had been ripped off, leaving behind blood and connective tissue.

You can watch the film here:

I think the film is great. The only problem is now I'll have a shaved head for the next few weeks. I'm practically bald. I look like Natilie Portman in V for Vendetta. I'm going to wear a baseball cap and never take it off.

The film is better than my other films, which look like Vaseline is smeared over the lens on account of how crappy my cameras were. I've always used phone cameras simply because I'm too poor to afford a proper film-making camera. Professional film-making cameras are too expensive. The cheapest professional camera (cameras Netflix creators use) is €1,829. Plus, I'd need at least two lenses (one for close-ups and one for long-distance shots), which cost €2,000 to €3,000 each. So I'd be spending around €6,000 to €10,000 before I'd even started filming anything. I can't afford it. This is an example of a poverty trap, where it is the possession of wealth (in this case, a good camera) that enables people to access lucrative opportunities (in this case, YouTube advertising revenue). And so I'm doomed to keep making low-quality videos that no one will watch just because I can't afford a proper camera. It's sad. My creativity is going to waste.

Except this year, I bought an iPhone 13, which has a Cinematic mode. This mode allows people to film cinema-grade footage (in theory) using just a smartphone. I don't know if that's true but the footage looks better than all my old films. I'm hoping next year I can buy an iPhone 14, which has Cinematic mode in 4K.

On Sunday evening, we went on a ghost walk. A man took us around Girona to supposedly haunted spots, like the catacombs under the cathedral. However, he spoke in Spanish, and my comprehension of Spanish isn't good at the best of times. It was made worse by the fact he spoke too quickly, at twice the speed of a normal person. 5-year-old got bored, so Girlfriend, 1-year-old and 5-year-old left early. I stuck around for another hour. The man had a portable voice recorder on which he played us the voices of ghosts he'd recorded around Girona. They sounded a lot like normal people to me.

Edit one week later: I didn't win the film competition.