Experience Nottingham city centre's hidden gems with Light Night 2010. Friday 12 February take to the streets with friends and family and discover a evening of spectacular events and illuminations for everyone to enjoy.

This will be Nottingham's third Light Night event and the city is getting ready to reveal some of the City's hidden gems with its theme of 'Hidden Spaces'.

Most of the events are FREE and look out for special offers in city centre restaurants, cafes and bars – and of course Nottingham Castle is involved too, so I hope to see you there! 

UPDATE: It was indeed a very fun night, all across Nottingham there were light displays, entertainments and music, and up at Nottingham Castle we had lasers, fabulous 'burning trees' and great fireworks dispays every hour – but it was incredibly cold and after a few hours I began to think the Sheriff may be right – living in the Castle is a lot more sensible than living in a forest sometimes!

On the same night as the Nottingham Castle NRSB charity firewalk (see previous entry) we also walked to the Canalhouse pub to attend the opening day of the Nottingham Victoria Cross Memorial Appeal Beer Festival (and try saying that when you’ve had one of the twenty-five excellent real ales that were on sale, let alone several)!

The festival ran from Thursday to Sunday and I went a couple of times, Saturday night was particularly fun as there was live music from the truly marvellous Nimming Ned, if you get a chance to check them out you certainly should,  not only are they top blokes but they do a fabulous song about Robin Hood (and one about The Dogs of War too)! 

In the photo, from left to right are: Dave Green (Nottingham Castle manager); me; Sal Chappell; Dave Chappell and Colin Wilde (Commercial Director of the Castle Rock Brewery). Photo courtesy of Julie from Designcat - thanks yet again!

Great news – the excellent and very dedicated folks at the Nottingham Royal Society for the Blind are holding another Bonfire Night Charity Firewalk at Nottingham Castle on November 5th!

Myself and Maid Marian are going to be helping out and leading the walk as we did last year so if you wanted to come and join in now’s the time – it’s fantastic fun, very empowering and best of all it’s for a great cause!

Last year everyone who took part or watched helped to raise the magnificent sum of over £20,000 for the NRSB and this year we’re hoping to beat that - you can check out the details and sign up to take part here or just buy spectator tickets to come and add to the fun!

There’s also music, a great fireworks display and good food to be had too and honestly, if you’ve never tried it before please do; it’s not painful at all, I promise – see the expression on my face taken at last year’s event? That’s exhilaration, not pain!

And if you fancy making a night of it you can join us afterwards in supporting the opening night of the Victoria Cross Memorial Beer Festival that evening at the Canalhouse pub on Canal Street, Nottingham where they’re hosting a beer festival 5th-8th Nov 2009 to help raise money for the VC memorial fund which aims to have a memorial erected in Nottingham Castle grounds to remember the 20 Nottinghamshire men who have been awarded this medal for bravery. This memorial will ensure permanent recognition and ensure these heroes are never forgotten.

There’ll be 20+ real ales all with a military theme and they’ve teamed up with the comedy festival to have comedians performing Thurs & Fri and live music by the superb Nimming Ned on Sat. There’ll also be selling raffle tickets as a way of raising money with the chance to win some superb prizes (list will be available at a later date, check out the Victoria Cross Memorial Beer Festival Facebook Group for more information).

One great night out, two fabulous causes – see you there!

Wow, now this is good news indeed!

This coming Tuesday there’s a special charity ‘Can’t Stop the Serenity’ screening of Joss Whedon’s excellent sci-fi movie SERENITY in Nottingham, in aid of ‘Equality Now’ .

I love Serenity (and Firefly, the short-lived TV series it was based on)  and watching a great movie and supporting a good cause at the same time has to be a winner!

The Nottingham screening will be held in room A48 of the Sir Clive Granger Building on the University of Nottingham’s University Park Campus, on Tuesday June 16th, starting at 6.30pm (doors open at 6pm). SERENITY will be follow by Joss Whedon’s hit web series ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog’ with a short break in between. Tickets cost £5, all profits go straight to Equality Now! More details HERE!

How cool is this: I have a Star Wars action figure named after me!

Back in the late 80′s I was working at Games Workshop’s Design Studio along with a lot of very talented writers, artists and game designers. One of them was World Famous Game Designer ™ ’Cuddly’ Ken Rolston, who was heading back to the US to write Star Wars roleplaying material for West End Games, so I jokingly asked him to include me in the Star Wars universe and pretty much thought nothing more of it for ages…

But in 1988 Ken’s adventure module Strikeforce: Shantipole appeared and in it was a character called ‘Lt. Pollard’ - a hero of the rebellion, tough and dangerous looking (obviously modelled on me, then.. ). I was very happy and still have my copy.

But even more surprisingly (and wonderfully), the character has reappeared recently in some of Dark Horse’s new Star Wars Rebellion comic series (where he’s now a famous B-Wing fighter pilot and leader of Dagger Squadron) – and Hasbro have made an action figure of him and his B-Wing!   Thanks, Ken!

I spent last night in the wilds of Leicestershire (well, in the back room of a pub in Enderby, technically) with my video camera setup filming Bodgers Mate, a truly excellent folk/ceilidh band who I work with regularly at the Sherwood Center Parcs Robin Hood banquets.

They needed some video clips for some potential bookers in Spain so we had a very pleasant evening with beer, music and a lot of laughter (mainly at my inability to get it right)! Still, after a little trial and error we got some good stuff recorded so I’ll post some of the clips here (and on YouTube) shortly and you can judge for yourself!

In other news: Hopefully I’ve finally got rid of those annoying pop-up adverts that kept appearing too – hurrah!

Time for a change I think - I hope you like the new look! I’ve had some major changes in my life so there’s a new look here as well as changes elsewhere. I still need to update the actual content (which I’ve just ported over from the old site design) and reinstate the Photo Gallery as the link leads nowhere at the moment but it’s a fresh start, and that’s got to be a good thing!

I’ve got lots of new and interesting work coming up soon though, even if the economic downturn has meant some other has dried up a bit – and in the past few days I’ve had the oddest employment I think I’ve ever had… 

Still, let’s save that for another post (quite soon), eh?  

So here's the first entry at new look site, I'm sure it'll undergo further cosmetic changes but for now welcome to the new www.timpollard.com. Older entries to my blog can still be found here.