“I guess if you had a straight track and a level grade, and you weren’t hauling no cars behind you, and if you got the fire real hot – I’m talking hotter than the fires of Hell – she might just make 90.”

My dad and I spent another day on the train, and it’s now pretty much finished. The smoke unit isn’t as productive as I’d like – I’m going to see if I can’t get a bigger battery for it – and I’m tempted to paint spokes on all the wheels to stop them looking like something out of the Early Learning Centre, but other than that it’s all pretty bitching.

The mould of the Banshee puppet will be cracked open tomorrow, the backgrounds for James Parkes’ stop motion shots have arrived, leaving just the creatures themselves to be shot, and David Markwick is churning out umbilical cord shots at a steady rate. I’m torn between a strange complacency that the movie is so nearly finished and an almost unbearable frustration that it’s taking so long. I can’t see how it can be finished by Christmas, which is a huge blow to me; I feel like the year’s beaten me.

It’s almost not worth mentioning, but simply for the sake of completeness I should say that I attempted to do a dialogue looping session with the principal cast on Saturday, but was defeated by my knackered Beech Box (thing that connects the mic to the camera). As Lara says, the curse continues…