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Paul Hayes said Peacehaven is “the world’s first post-modern board game”. I’d go further.

Peacehaven is not a board game, it’s a bored game. It’s a combination of board games and black comedy. Think “League Of Gentlemen” meets “Balderdash“. Wherever possible, it usurps the rules of a traditional board game. There are no dice. Players try not to lose points, rather than gain them. More fun is had on other player’s turns. There is no “end”. Because Peacehaven is a dreary, dead-end town, and just keeping body and soul together is ambitious enough.

Come play “Peacehaven - The Bored Game” tonight, Wed 7 Mar 2012, at @buildbrighton. All are welcome.

1. Art school - visited the school, designed by Charles Rennie Mactintosh, Glasgow’s greatest architect;
2. Ballads - unaccompanied singers, mostly middle-aged women, performing beautiful traditional Celtic numbers at the Celtic Connections festival;
3. Car Park - heard the hilarious story ‘I’ve never been to a car park’, told by a man from a tiny Highland village;

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Next Tuesday I have been asked to give a short talk about my book Swindon Orbital at the Postmodern Gallery in Swindon. As we are in the midst of an election, here’s how I have decided to pitch it:

Although Swindon has grown a hundredfold in the past 200 years immigration remains a hot topic, particularly at election time.

Drawing on research conducted for his book Swindon Orbital, author Richard Willis will use Swindon’s history of migrations to argue that immigration is a force for good. If you are interested in politics, history and/or literature you should enjoy the discussion.

The talk is free. Here’s the flyer for the event. If you are in Swindon on Tuesday 4th May please do come along.

Brighton punches above its weight in all aspects of culture except one: history. We have venues for music, galleries for art, cinemas for film, theatre for plays, groups for geeks, workshops for writers - the list goes on and on - but nothing for history. The Catalyst Club caters for it a little perhaps, but it doesn’t have a historical remit, it just happens that the subjects discussed there inevitably involve events from the past, which isn’t strictly history.

I’d like to go somewhere where I could hear someone telling me something interesting about a historical subject new or largely unknown to me. I was put off history at school by a bad teacher, but recently I’ve realised its import. It touches everything. It doesn’t matter what one does, the more history one knows, the better placed one is in one’s field.

So two alternatives present themselves to me. Either someone tells me about an existing historical lectureship group in Brighton (comments box below), or perhaps I could start one? I know from FlashBrighton how simple such groups are to organise; a venue, a few emails, and they run themselves.

What do you think?

on the morning of monday 12th october 2009 i was invited down to the bbc’s brighton studios to take part in a live radio interview with bbc radio wiltshire’s mark o’donnell about about the book ‘swindon orbital‘. afterwards the whole show was released on the bbc’s iplayer and i ripped out the 10 minute section containing the interview for myself.

if you would like to hear it, you can find it here.

i’ve been in swindon promoting my book ‘swindon orbital‘ that i accidentally wrote earlier this year and published in traditional form just a few weeks ago. i have only a short time online now, so i’m going to be super-brief and write more later. i’ve had an astonishing time in swindon, achieving more than i thought possible, and i will share this with you at the first opportunity.

for now let me just just link to the pdf of the newspaper article that jaine blackman - features editor of swindon’s local newspaper the evening advertiser - wrote and published in last friday’s edition. it was greater and more positive coverage than i ever hoped for and i was and am truly flattered, thank you jaine.

i’ve finally finished my essay ’swindon orbital’, which has taken 4 months to complete. for me it’s a major piece of work and  i’m happy with it, with some reservations (which i think is healthy). i’ll keep this short post because the essay itself is what’s worth reading. if you’ve not heard about it before and would like to know more, start off here.

once completed, friend and fellow writer james burt suggested it should be published in actual book and promoted in swindon, so i did. details of its promotion - including a bbc radio interview and a newspaper article - can be found here. if you’d like to purchase a printed version of the book contact me directly here (copies cost £5), and if you’d just like to download the pdf, you can find it here.

if you do read it, please come back here and add your feedback. i’d like to know what you think.

last weekend i attended barcamplondon6. generally i like to cover a historical topic at barcamp and i planned to talk about william blake, having spent much of the preceding week reading his biography. i didn’t get enough time to prepare anything though and so had to go back to one of my old presentations as back-up. i let the attendees choose which they’d prefer and they opted for ‘the history of the right angle’, a session i first gave at barcampbrighton3.

masonic symbol showing calipers and set square; courtesy of flickr user tim ellis

i’ve been planning on blogging about this topic for some time and dusting off the old presentation has given me the impetus to do so. the slide format i used won’t transfer well onto the ‘net so i’m going to rewrite it a series of blogposts, starting with this one.

continued here…

last weekend i visited arundel with e and her parents. arundel is a lovely little market town on a hill in west sussex, home to the duke of norfolk and a well-preserved norman castle since 1068. today it has a beautifully twee little town centre:

amongst other shops in this photograph one can see a butcher, a grocer’s shop and a bookshop. i was enjoying my stroll around these expensive, specialists stores - admiring the cheeses on offer in the grocer’s window - when it struck me that the only sense in which this place was any more ‘real’ than some virtual version of it - one recreated in second life, say - was that it was a physical location. the england i grew up in and know is all about suburbs, supermarkets, fast food shops, television, blue collar jobs, computer games, motorways, petrol stations, nhs hospitals, prefabricated school buildings, etc, etc. the chocolate box, pastoral & staunchly tory view of england that arundel suggests is just a tourist backdrop. a pretty one, sure, but as unrealistic a backdrop as any scene i’ve seen at the movies or in some computer generated environment.

today is the 3rd of march, 2009, meaning the date is 3.3.9, being square root day (3 x 3 = 9); a facetious geek holiday. i’ve got work today so i can’t ‘celebrate’ it properly but i’ll make sure i have a good square meal tonight and raise my glass to that universal cultural symbol: the square.

take a look around you: they’re everywhere, rectangles, cubes and squares, in every ancient and modern culture all around the world and throughout history; ‘really important. take a few minutes today to show your appreciation for this fundamental cultural symbol.

here’s to the square!