Bad grading

Today was meant to be all about R and R. Is that the phrase? Rest and relaxation? It doesn't matter, really, because I didn't do a great deal of it. I used the day instead to do admin, completing yet another application for funding. You'd think I'd be getting good at them by now, but I still find them a nightmare. I got incredibly confused this afternoon trying to crunch numbers. I don't know why I was finding it all so confusing. Nothing seemed to be making sense, until I realised that one of the numbers I'd inputted into the online form hadn't registered properly. It's probably something to do with being so exhausted after so much driving at the end of last week.

Speaking of exhaustion, Nathan returned today from the Edinburgh Yarn Festival where he's been surrounded by giddy, over-excited knitters for the past four days. He seems to have developed some kind of dreadful chest infection whilst up there because he sounds like he's been swallowing pieces of sandpaper. We've been communicating via hand gestures.

We spent the night watching telly, eating pizza and getting to know this year's Eurovision Song Contest entries. We also watched The Voice, and were astonished by how badly the show had been graded - which for the telly un-savvy is the process where an editor uses contrast, curves and saturation to make the colours on the screen either pop, or tie together more appropriately. Editors will usually start from the perspective that anything which looks like it should be white ought to be bright white, and that anything approaching black needs to be pitch black. The result is a very glitzy, shiny, well-defined corporate look. The problem, of course, is that the majority of whites are actually dirty creams, and most blacks are shades of grey, so if you start forcing these extreme hues into polarised boxes, the colours in between can start to look very weird - and this is particularly noticeable when it comes to skin tone. Judge Gavin spent the entire show with bright yellow cheeks, and one of the black girls ended up with a bright green forehead. I don't know why people don't spot these things.