Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.
I am about to post this letter to my MP, the representative for Brighton Kemptown Des Turner. I would encourage you all to write similar letters to your MPs.
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Dear Mr. Turner,
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.
until today, this blog has been dedicated to the right angle and all its various causes & effects. whilst this still strongly remains a interest of mine it has, to my mind, become so deeply associated with this blog that i have found it hard to write anything else here, meaning that a plethora of what-would-have-been interesting posts have gone unwritten over the course of the last summer, and this blog has stagnated as a result.
i started the year seeing myself as a visual artist with an interest in the right angle but i seem to have changed into a writer with a broader set of interests instead. this was, i feel i should point out, unplanned but has happened and does seem to be continuing and strengthening, and it is only right that this blog reflect that.
so, whilst i plan to continue writing about right angles - as in the case of my ongoing and yet uncompleted history of the right angle - i am going to untether the sails and let this blog sail in the direction that it’s captain seems to be heading in: textwards.
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.
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!
as well as the work i produce and discuss here i also have a commercial life too. i’m a freelance flash & flex developer and maintain a professional blog on just that subject over at richtextformat.co.uk. the subjects discussed on these two blogs occasionally overlap and this is certainly the case with a presentation i witnessed last week given by jonathan harris at brighton’s annual ‘flash on the beach‘ conference. it turned out to be a very controversial lecture and everyone seems to want to give their impression of it, including me.
i permanently have to reassess my relationship with the net, what it gives to and takes away from me. a case in point is my friend rosie sherry. rosie’s a friend of mine, as i found out when i came across her profile on upcoming. if you scroll down the page you’ll eventually come across an ‘rtf’ in her list of friends. that’s me, or my upcoming profile anyway.
i have never met rosie sherry, i have never chatted to her online and i’ve only been in the same room as her once. i don’t know what she does for a living, where she lives or in fact anything about her. to be honest i don’t think i could even pick her out of a police identity parade.
nevertheless, as i discovered, she’s a friend of mine. and the internet continues to be a daily education.
there have been a few times over the past few years when i come on here and apologised about being busy and not being able to update as often as i would have liked to. i have again been idiotically busy these last few weeks but i have to say for once not with tiresome domestic or business matters. true, i have been working evenings and weekends for my present client, but i’ve also been tramping through london’s abandoned dockyards, building impromptu beach sculpture, dreaming up a truly genius idea for public artwork and creating my first truly awesome piece of generative art. not bad for a damp february! i also built an art-game late last year that i haven’t had the chance to release yet!
i’ve been desperate to blog about it all but really just haven’t had any time. i mean, it’s nearly midnight now and i’ve done nowt but code and sleep for days, weeks. i’ve been doing the high-pressure freelance paying gigs so solidly for the past 6 months that it’s beginning to affect my health and so next week, when my present contract finishes, i’m hoping to get away for a few days of r&r and document all this. just a simple room in a b&b in some anonymous town somewhere. yeah, just me… and my mac… and a wifi connection… and a box of k-nex, my sketchbook, camera, stop-motion animation software, a duffle bag of science, art, software & mathematics textbooks and my favourite faber-castell drawing pens! :)
at least that’s what i have just read on the bbc website. i was surprised to find that this brought tears to my eyes. i have only once before shed tears for a ‘celebrity’ and that was for the unexpectedly early demise of the equally wonderful john peel.
so, i just want to say: thank you jamie for all the bloody marvellous books you have given us.