blog

The Pirate Bay released a fabulously entertaining press release yesterday, containing the memorable claim that “we’ve done what they [Hollywood] did”, meaning circumventing legislation to open up a restricted field to business and the public. Techdirt examined this claim, and found historical evidence for it. About one hundred years ago, Thomas Edison’s “Motion Picture Patents Company” tried to monopolise film equipment production, but Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures refused to bow down, and cinema-goers flocked to the “illegal” movies of Laemmle, and fellow independents.

Read the rest of this entry »

I once saw a boy get run over, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. Telling a friend the story recently, it occurred to me how a written account might be of general interest. Essays can be at their most illuminating when they plainly describe events without analysis. Classic journalism, I guess.

My latest essay then, is the description of the accident I saw, put as objectively as I can. Names have been changed, for the usual reasons.

An essay I wrote on the London Riots was picked up by Sanford Housing Co-operative in their in-house bi-monthly print magazine “The San”. So popular was said essay amongst the readership that they invited me to make a regular contribution.

I present therefore, essay #2: Unfriend Facebook: Why Facebook Is Anything But Your Friend. Written in the light of recent Facebook changes, the essay highlights why these and previous Facebook features are bad for all of us.

I thought I’d expand my tweets about the #LondonRiots into an essay, analysising the root causes of the trouble. Even if I say so myself it’s a great essay, and I really recommend it.

You’ll find it here.

As it’s Valentine’s Day and I have no date, I’m going to treat myself. I’m listening to the eight pieces of music I would take to a desert island. I won’t list them, but I have taken a screenshot of my MP3 player with them loaded & ready you can see here if you want.

Marvellous stuff! It’s such a joy to pick up a book like this, a book so fluid that it feels like it was written in a single sitting. I read it in less that 24 hours. For a book to be simultaneously a great work of literature and a page turner is almost unheard of. Classic novels are, by definition, heavyweight. Their subjects are meaty, and take time to digest. Not ‘The Moon & Sixpence‘ though. It’s subject matter is definitely meaty, but Maugham’s treatment of it makes digesting it as simple as drinking a glass of milk. And this despite the reader knowing well in advance exactly what’s going to happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Antisocialism;
2. Body Terrific, Yes;
3. Casablanca II;

Read the rest of this entry »

I have written before about suffering from Anxiety. It’s not something I’ve often done, because I don’t want to come across as self-indulgent or over-intimate, in what is a public, detached forum. And there are other risks too. On the whole, I decided it was something best not shared with strangers online.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blakes Road, the book I am writing, is the story of a walk I took last year from England’s south coast to London. Specifically from Felpham, near Bognor Regis in West Sussex, to Bunhill Fields, a cemetery in Islington. The distance was something around 70 miles, and it took four days walk, meaning the book is divided into four chapters.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am halfway through the task of illustrating ‘Blakes Road‘, the book I am currently writing. I’m illustrating the book as it is, in part, a paean to William Blake, and Blake illuminated almost every page of his own books, so I feel I should do the same.

Here are a few of them:

1. A field with a wooden signpost in the foreground;
2. The “Shelley’s Fountain” sculpture in Horsham, with a branch of McDonald’s behind it;
3. The Croydon Flyover;