It’s very difficult to feel stressed or panicky about anything on a day as beautiful as this. I’ve spent the morning making scones for my girlfriend and there is a fox cub, about the size of a slipper, curled up asleep in my back garden. Life, as long as I remember to step back and actually look at it, is great.

This sense is increased by the fact that Barrington has arranged us a speed boat trip for next week to go and have tea on a barge moored on the Thames a few yards away from where we’re going to be shooting the climax of our film “Hallo Panda”.

We’re looking to end the film with a loving nod to “The Shawshank Redemption”, but with a panda. When we wrote in the script that Panda crawls out of a tunnel on the banks of the Thames and stands, arms aloft, roaring his freedom in the rain and is then next seen disappearing up the river in a Chinese Junk, both Chris and I thought it was rather funny and wouldn’t really be all that hard to achieve. All we needed was a boat and a hole. Well and a panda but that was taken for granted.

Since the project got greenlit and we started trying to fit the script to the budget the end of the film has looked, for a long time, like a stretch too far. Already we’ve got a zoo, a talking bear, a moth laboratory, a night club and lap dancing boutique – the boat and the sewage outlet just seemed like an extravagance. Except of course, neither is since both are vital to making the film end in a funny and interesting way as opposed to just sort of peter out.

For a couple of months we told ourselves that we could make a pipe for him to crawl out of. We could make it fit the shot using an optical illusion, we could, erm, we could… I can say now that back then it all sounded pretty hollow, though I’ll admit that I was happily insisting that it’d work fine with the best. Neither could we find ourselves a boat, or at least not one that looked like the sort of boat we wanted, the sort of boat a panda would stow away on if he wanted to escape back to China.

Then Barrington gets in touch with the guy who owns the Thames (or something) and after a quick chat he points out that what we need is a “mouse hole”, one of the over spill tunnels that line the length of the Thames.

Brilliantly there just happens to be a mouse hole we can use exactly opposite the stretch of the river we were already intending to shoot our late night romantic conversation between the panda keeper and the moth expert.

Brilliantly when we get down there we see the perfect boat moored in the middle of the river a short distance from the hole.

It’s like the whole world read the script and adjusted itself to suit us.

Or at least it will feel that way until we step onto the boat and the owner says that of course we can use it, his going rate is ten grand a minute… fingers crossed.