Pete Ashton's Weblog

Touch wood, but I think we may have crossed a line. Today I made it to Sainsbury's to buy food. And then I made it back.

Still coughing intermittently and snotty but my head is clearer. I think I've got "just a cold" now, which is something I can deal with.

My vocal chords are shot to fuck and the muscles under my ribs are still bruised but at least I can think now.

If this progresses overnight I may well start dealing with the absurd backlog of email and rss feeds, of which there are a lot. Eek.

On the side of the bottle of Benylin I've been chugging from since Tuesday it says "consult your doctor if symptoms persist." And I'm wondering how long "persist" is in symptomatic terms, those being a hacking chesty cough, nose streaming red goo, a sore dizzy head and a complete lack of energy let alone being able to concentrate on anything.

(Actually, the one thing I can do is play Mario Kart, which is kinda odd. It must be using some buried primal part of my brain...)

So I'm thinking maybe I'd better go see the doctor on Monday, just in case, but then Andy informs me he had it for a fortnight. And Alex says she's still got the headaches. What I've got is normal.

See you on the other side...

If you should find yourself faced with a free buffet of food at, say, for the sake of argument, a local council sponsored event, please remember the most important rule of all.

Do not, no matter how tempted you are, no matter how much the devil on your shoulder eggs you on, ever, ever eat the prawn sandwiches.

Trust me. Your arse will not thank you.

The good news is it passed fairly quickly and all is well now but it could so easily have been avoided had I just followed the rule.

I've always had a pretty on-off relationship with Christmas. Sometimes it's great, and sometimes it sucks. Naturally this has a lot to do with my personal frame of mind at the time since life, as they say, is what you make of it. Suffice to say thing year Christmas really fucking sucked big hairy balls. Which isn't to say Christmas itself was bad. I actually had a good 25th all told thanks to friends taking me in and I wouldn't want them to think for one minute they were to so with my general ennui - far from it.

In short, dear reader, after a few months of on and off growling the Black Dog decided to return at some point in mid December with a vengeance. Which, as you can imagine, was really rather annoying since everything was going so well up to then. But that's the nature of the beast - always turning up when you least want him.

(A cautionary note. Starting a course of anti-depressants, specifically the sort that will send your moods swinging all over the place for a fortnight as you brain adjusts to the sudden influx of selective seretonin re-uptake inhibiting chemicals, a week before Christmas while everyone else is all "yay Christmas!" is possibly not the wisest of moves.)

But anyway, I don't want to go on about this. Alongside everything else it's a little known fact that depression is really fucking boring. It's the most tedious, irritating illness I've ever come across and once the cat is out of the bag it's a bitch to put it away again. There it goes, dominating the conversation and colouring perceptions, more mine than anyone else's, and I do find it's a self-perpetuating thing. Above all I really don't want to be depressed. I don't like myself when I'm depressed. I take no comfort from being depressed. After, what is it now, going on 20 years of having this bastard thing jutting into my life at inopportune moments I'm heartily sick of it. I just want to get on and do the things that I do without the black cloud, this heavy weight, that's stopping me.

Which, in a rather dramatic and roundabout way, is why I haven't been posting much recently. Or taking any photos come to that.

Still, at least December is over. Clean slate and all that. And a plan, of sorts, to finally get Created in Birmingham back on track. January shall be a doing month.

Finally, to all those, including family, who I really should have told about this over the last fortnight - yes, I know. I know. Consider this the telling and we can move on from here, okay? And thanks.

Okay, you'll have noticed I've been a little quiet these last couple of weeks, especially after all that noise about running a blog for Birmingham. Well, a spanner was thrown into the works of all that, but it was a really nice spanner. Possibly the nicest spanner I've seen for a while as a matter of fact.

As of today, and for the next three months, I'm a professional blogger. Which even this age when every company that matters has people on staff dedicated to blogging still seems a really weird statement, like being a professional tea drinker. So what does Pete being a professional blogger actually mean?

In short it means I'm getting paid a decent amount of money, enough to support my frugal lifestyle anyway, to write a weblog full time.

The title of the blog is Created in Birmingham and its remit is to survey all the creative activity in the city in blog form, from artists to writers to film makers to designers to musicians... all of them and the organisations and agencies that support them.

Which is why I've been kinda quiet of late as I try to figure out exactly what the hell that involves. I think I've got a handle on it though. Best to read the about page to find out more.

The main thing I want to do, though, is to make sure it's an actual weblog and not just a bunch of articles and interviews dumped online. It's quite different to the sort of blogging I've been doing here - I'm talking to people and relating their ideas in my own voice, something I never do on peteashton.com, and the tone is a little more formal - but I'm keen for it to have a narrative and a personality that runs through it as it develops.

In the meanwhile I will, of course, keep running this blog and I'm very keen to keep the Brum Blog going with the aim of eventually spinning it off onto it's own site in the new year. However, while I get CiB off the ground I'm going to be a little distracted, so bear with me.

So, yeah. Professional blogger!

Howabout that?

Okay, in short I'm still really tired all the time and something really needs to be done about it. I went to the doctor today (which, being Bournville, was a slightly odd experience in some very non-specific ways) and will be having a blood test on Wednesday. While I'm not worried about having a needle stuck into me and a small but significant amount of blood being removed I know that I will turn a shade of pale green, feel faint and have to lie down for a few minutes because that's what always happens to me in these situations, which, in the context of having a blood test to see if it might explain why I'm feeling so weak and tired and dizzy and stuff sounds like it might be a huge clanging clue. But then everything seems like a huge clanging clue at the moment.

It'd be so much easier if my arm had fallen off. Then I could say to the doctor "my arm has fallen off - please sort that out" and he'd go "hmm, I know how to deal with fallen off arms" and would deal with it.

I have a suspicion there's nothing wrong with my blood. I have a suspicion it's something psychological. Because I'm overdue for some more of that shit.

In the meantime I've been off work and watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica. Actually all of Battlestar Galactica, something I was intending on spreading out over the next couple of weeks before the next season starts (Oct 6th - warm up your bittorrent machines!) but when you're not only physically but mentally tired there's little more you can do. Or at least that's my excuse. The fact the BSG stands up as very good sci-fi doesn't help matters.

But I'm going a little stir crazy with all this inaction, so I'm back to work on Monday. We'll see how that goes.

Ostensibly there's nothing really wrong with me. I don't think I'm dying or anything so if you're susceptible to worrying about me please don't. I'm just annoyingly tired.

It occurs to me this is the first time I've used this blog to write something like this for an age. It feels weird.

Nothing serious. Just be aware you may not get much out of me for the next few days.

Some gigs and things I'm going to in the near future.

This Thursday is Jeffrey Lewis at the Jug of Ale, Moseley. The last time I saw him his guitar was about to explode and the History Of Communism had reached the Russian Revolution. Support is from The New York Howl and Will Tattersdill, aka Faceometer, who, as it happens, was supporting Lewis when I saw him in May 05 and I'd been wanting to catch him again ever since.

Next weekend, being September 2nd / 3rd, is the Moseley Folk Festival which sounds terribly tweedy but should, I think, be rather awesome. Most of the acts I don't know (not historically being a folk fan) but those I've recently seen (The Destroyers, Circulus) have impressed no end. Tickets are pricey (£38.50 for the weekend) but what the hell.

Way in the distance on November 9th is The Flaming Lips at the NIA. Tickets are £23.00 and are available here but watch out for the 37.5% booking fee, the buggers. Still, it'll be well worth it.

It's also my intention to check out A Slice Of The Pie, an intriguing gig/club/event thing held at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth on the first Sunday of each month. Here be some photos.

In photography land the Birmingham Flickrmeets group has started stretching its wings with a couple of impromptu meets. On Saturday we're doing a night shoot with tripods around the Brindley Place canals and then next Friday afternoon we'll be shooting the Midlands leg of the Tour of Britain cycle race as it ends in Birmingham.

The big one, however, is Artsfest, a weekend of free arts events in central Birmingham on September 8th-10th where the Flickrmeet group have been invited by the organisers to documents the event with press passes and everything. Which is, of course, fucking cool. The photos will be in this group after the event.

And that's about it for now.

Routine, it seems, is an important thing. For the last couple of months I had a routine. Get up at 7.30, go to work, come back around 1.30, do stuff, eat, do some other stuff, bed by midnight. A lot of the stuff involved taking and processing my photographs (Oh, you think?) and judging by the batch of 130 prints that came through yesterday it was a very productive time.

But that job ended on Friday and with it ended my routine. Monday and Tuesday were at chez Higgins digging soil from nine to six. I haven't done any real digging for over a year and the full day was a bit, a teeny bit but still a bit, of a shock, but the biggest fuck to my system was the sudden absence of time as my "evening" shrunk from nine hours to four-ish.

Hence no blogging, no new photos, no nothing other than food and the odd bit of football. And sleep. The sort of glorious sleep you get after a day spent digging.

Happy to say, though, that other than some slightly sore thigh muscles my body coped wonderfully with the digging. I guess two months of window cleaning and sweeping kept me in trim.

Actually, I lie about the no new photos. Gareth kindly developed the black and white film I shot during and after the Flickrmeet and they went up today. I guess 14 out of 38 (yes, 38. Not sure how I managed that) is a pretty good hit ratio but I'm not completely comfortable with them. Bit dark, though that might be down to Gareth's developing. Not that I'm complaining or nuffink, don't get me wrong. The whole film thing is all about moving away from the perfection of digital so the shittier the better really. Be interesting to see how the slide films come out though. (Once I get a around to shooting something with them...)

But anyway, I'm back in the routine of not having a routine and so far I'm not too keen on it. Today was a day off (the beds need to settle before seeding) and I got less done than I would were those hours spread over three days.

It's a strange one. I'm enjoying working for Nat and I like that I could end up in interesting places doing interesting things due to my flexi-status but it's not terribly conducive to the pursuance of my Thing.

When members of the household mentioned that the element in the kettle was going rusty and needed replacing I had a look and declared it okay. I've seen worse and it wasn't flaking, at least not too much. But the water tastes bad, they said, and given their taste-buds haven't been bludgeoned into submission by years of tannin and nicotine abuse who was I to argue. Just make sure it's not one of those stupid round metal ones with the handle over the lid. Those fuckers are bad news.

And lo, a new kettle arrived in the kitchen, which has put a minor kink in my tea making routine. This, I realised, was the true source of my mild resistance. There's the sound - a quiet rumbling like a spaceship cruising overhead. Given that this starts a minute or so after I've switched it on it's rather disconcerting. Then there's the way it sits on the base (cordless was my other insistence) in a very slight but still significantly different way to the old kettle. Neither of these things are problems and I'll adjust to them in time, so much so that if this new kettle were to be replaced in time by the same model as the old one I'd distrust that also, but right now it's all tad discombobulating.

On the plus side, it fills up easily with the lid on and has a really large viewing window. So it's not all bad.

I just went to the bank to pay in a cheque. The cheque was made out to "Pete Ashton" who, as you'll be aware, is me. The nice lady pointed out that the account was in the name of "Peter Ashton", who is also me, and that this was a problem, though not by all accounts a critical one as she was letting it slide this time. In future, she said, I'd need to get all my cheques payable to Peter-with-an-R.

But hang on, I said. I've been using the name "Pete" since about 1995 and it's never been a problem. This information obviously didn't compute and produced an evasive diversionary response as I can't remember her answer, so I asked if I could officially change my account to the name of Pete-without-an-R. Yes, if I brought in ID showing an official name change, such as a passport. But my official name is Peter and, since I'm generally able to be identified by both of the commonly used derivations of my name, I've never really seen the need to chose one over the other. Doesn't Pete = Peter? What else could it mean?

More to the point, if I were to come across a cheque payable to some other Peter Ashton that wouldn't be a problem, but a cheque intended for me using my commonly used moniker is not allowed?

One solution she offered was have a stamp which I could give to people who write me cheques, rather like shops used to do in the dark ages. This, of course, would be really effective since most of the cheques I receive come through the mail.

Whatever, since this hasn't been a problem for eleven years and since she was able to let it slide "this once" it obviously wasn't a big deal, so I smiled the smile of acquiescence and left.

Back in the old BugPowder distro days, before the internet and the rise of PayPal, I used to sell comics by mail order. People would send me cheques for sums ranging from £1.50 to £150+ all of which were made out to "Pete Ashton". I'd usually bank about 10 or so a week into the same account I was using today and never once had a problem. Suddenly this is an issue.

It's kinda odd. I can understand if I was using a pseudonym but isn't Pete a logical and universally understood derivation of Peter? If I go to the deed poll people and ask them to change my name from Peter to Pete won't they just laugh (and charge me a lot of money)?

I'm sure I just got a jobsworth on a post-holiday power-trip but even so...

I've had reactions possibly boarding on the surprising to the news that I might be getting a permanent job, or at any rate have taken the step of applying for one, thus going against the rules of my employment-related life for the last three years. Whilst I don't want to talk about the job for the same reasons most people don't blog about jobs they actually want to keep, I suppose I can say it's a caretaker position doing odd jobs around the place, so it's no different to a lot of the work I've been doing through the agency, and re-emphasise that it's only four hours a day (though with the higher perm payrate it'll be the equivalent of six through the agency) so it's not like I'm giving up one whatever it is I've been doing and selling my soul to The Man. In fact I see this as helping me to do all that stuff. By getting up at the same time every day I'll have more of a structure of my life (I've already surprised a couple of people by being asleep before midnight) and still have 2pm onwards for my many projects. And it has those cushty benefits like holiday pay and the like which are such a novelty to me these days.

I've been doing the job since last Monday (if I get it permanently that'll start in May sometime) and it has involved a bit of an adjustment. Essentially I now have a very large "evening" and I may have overestimated the potential that affords me. While I am only working four hours it's a fairly intensive four hours coupled with a significant bike ride involving hills (6 miles round trip) and yet in my mind I have this massive expanse of time in which I must get things done resulting in me doing essentially 12 hour days and being surprised that I'm knackered at the end of them. A balance will be found and I think it'll be a good one. Already my weekends are for doing things rather than recovering since the recovery happens on Friday.

One idea that might have to be reconsidered is doing other cash-in-hand (yes, I do declare them) jobs during the week. I popped over to Jez and Nat's new house yesterday to help them shift an inordinate number of bricks which the movers had refused to touch and while it was an okay job on it's own, coming after my normal morning (not to mention cycling from Northfield to Moseley) I was fucking knackered afterwards. That leaflet delivery job I did last year (posts here, here, here and here) is coming up again and I'm having to seriously think about whether or not I can do it. Even spread over two weeks it'll still involve 4+ hours of walking a day and that sort of walking has a tendency to hurt (remember a good walking speed is 4mph). I could bring someone else in on the job but they won't be allowed to fuck up of Nat will never speak to me again. We'll see.

Actually, it was interesting seeing Nat's reaction to the news of my potential job. Everyone else has been fairly positive about it but the look on her face was one of sheer horror. Their new house is lovely (and very, very large) but needs a fair amount of work, a significant proportion of which had been earmarked as "Pete can do that." Suddenly I'm slightly less able to, and that's not a good thing. One forgets the intrinsic value of being someone who is invariably available for odd jobs.

• Steve Wright is a twat. This is not news and I've known it for years, but by god, having had to listen to his inane glorification of the stupid for two days it bears repeating.
• Went to see the CBSO on Thursday. Went in blind and it turned out to be Mahler's Symphony No.2 (Resurrection) which was, well, quite stunning. I particularly taken with the indulgence of the piece, employing a full choir who only sung at the climax. Give that the acoustics in Symphony Hall are spot-on throughout the venue and their cheap seats are only a fiver I must make the effort to go more often. That said, it would be nice to be able to stand. It seems unfair that the only person who's able to dance is the conductor. (Dad's review)
• The office block in which I've been working has, unsurprisingly, reaffirmed my belief that such places are just not good. They had a "dress down Friday" (the irony being I'd made a special effort to wear clothes that weren't really scraggy) combined with a St Patrick's theme. The sight of middle aged women in large green foam hats combining the seriousness of their job with the desire to be wacky is just depressing. Also I noted the number of posters about the place for charity fundraising, none of which were directly connected with poverty. Given that the majority of the building deal with debt collection (resulting from other departments in the company pushing loans onto people who really shouldn't have loans) this was not too surprising, like they're trying to balance out the karma without dealing with the root cause.
• This last fortnight I've been feeling like I'm drowning in half-baked ideas and projects, but I made a list of them and it's not actually that bad. Maybe I'll actually get them done now.
• Oddly, or maybe not, I'm been contemplating putting myself forward for medical trials, the logic being as follows: 1) The noise made over the recent TGN1412 thing implies these things don't go wrong very often. 2) At the same time a significant number of people will be put off applying so they'll be looking for guineapigs. 3) I've been known to spend a couple of weeks feeling grotty and not getting anything done so I might as well get paid for it. 4) A couple of grand would free me up for a month or so of book writing. 5) Blog fodder! (Oh, altruism and for the good of mankind and all that too...)
• It's too fucking cold and I'm sick of it. This better break into Spring soon.

I was gifted a chicken the other day. A dead one, wrapped in plastic, so it didn't go against the "no pets" rule for renting the flat. Since I probably wasn't going to eat a whole chicken in one go I roasted it, stripped all the meat off (to be used in other meals over the week) and was left with a plateful of bones and skin. I then stuck these in a pot, added an onion and a carrot along with load of pepper and a bay leaf and gently boiled it for four hours.

Making stock is an oddly satisfying experience, partly because of the sense that you're making use of the parts most would throw away ("I am like the American Indian, using every part of the buffalo") but also for the smell which gets everywhere. I can still smell it now and it's making me hungry.

It's also quite a primal thing. As I was getting things ready to boil Dr Zoop came home and I started to explain what I was up to, only he's a strict vegetarian in the sense that eating animals is not only something he doesn't do but something he doesn't really comprehend (I think - I'm probably misrepresenting him here but you get the idea). It occurred to me that I'd just roasted a small bird, torn the flesh of its bones with my bare hands and was about to boil the remains, which is somewhat different from unwrapping an Oxo cube. I thought it was pretty cool. He thought it mildly gross.

I now have an excessive supply of chicken stock. Those ice-cube bags I recently acquired (as a potential air-con system for the summer - don't ask) are going to come in handy.

I've just completed the annual ritual of deferring my student loan. Back in 1995-1997 I "borrowed" a significant sum of money for University which, incurring interest at a rate close to inflation, is currently about five grand or so (I can't find the statement right now). And I'm never going to pay this back.

This isn't some kind of free-education protest. The moral issues, such as this money would have been a straight grant were I to have got to Uni immediately after school instead of waiting a few years, are kinda irrelevant as the loan is only payable should I earn more than £2011 a month before tax (this is a proportion of the national average wage - about 2/3 I think). Since I have never had, and probably never will have, a job that pays £24,132 a year, the direct debit I set up in 1995 is never going to kick in. Which is why I don't really consider it a debt.

So every year I collect my last three months of payslips, work out the average gross per month (£432 this year), stuff them into the too-small envelope and wait for the inevitable confirmation. It would be nice if they looked through my history and came to the conclusion that it'd be easier just to write this loan off than keep processing my forms, or at least put me on a permanent deferral until I inform them otherwise (as I'd be legally obliged to do should my earnings dramatically increase during the deferral period anyway), but I doubt that's going to happen.

I've heard from many sources (and spread myself) an urban myth that the loan is written off when you reach the age of 50. Since this is only 17 years away for me now I'm starting to wonder if it's true but a cursory look through the literature and websites for the Student Loans Company (or whoever owns my loan these days) doesn't mention it, and why should they?

Anyone got confirmation of this?

[Update: Should have Googled first, as always. This BBC news piece from 2000 says "Loans are cancelled... after 25 years or when borrower reaches 50" which is good enough for me!]

[Update 2: I've been questioned about my perceived poverty lifestyle choice in the comments to this post and have responded.]

On Saturday, having spent the week in Winchester marshaling my mother and stepfather into clearing their house into storage, preparing it for damp-proofing, packing for New Zealand and generally staying sane, I took the day off. Dave C, who I've known since school days, popped over in his car and we went for a drive in the Hampshire countryside. After breaking into the ruins of Bishops Waltham Palace (it was closed for the winter but there was a hole in the hedge) and taking photos we moved onto Wickham for tea, since that village has a lot of tea houses.

Our initial mood was reminiscent of Withnail. As two young men, fresh from committing the crime of trespass, we would indulge in some high-irony by taking tea and perhaps cake amongst the gentiles of rural Hampshire. However, it turned out that we actually wanted tea in the non-ironic sense. We also wanted the soup of the day because we were hungry and liked the idea of it. And while we may have discussed, amongst other things, the notion of writing as spell casting, creating new realities with words, we also took in international politics and did so in a civilised manner.

We then clambered around an old railway bridge like teenagers. After that we visited a church and speculated on the history of the walls, pondering when sections were added and whether it has suffered subsidence.

It's really quite odd being a thirtysomething...

Knackered.

Later...

I'm off to my mum's tomorrow to help her and stepdad pack up the house before their move to New Zealand (which still hasn't really sunk in, truth be told) and given that everything will be in boxes I probably won't be able to get online for a week. This won't be a problem and I'm quite relishing the break but it does mean emails and site maintenance won't be dealt with.

I've also done the blogging equivalent of making sure my cat is fed. Every day Andy will switch on my computer and let NetNewsWire update my feed subscriptions. (Yes, I stopped using Bloglines a while back - it wasn't updating Flickr feeds regularly enough and eventually I just preferred having feeds in a separate app).

So barring any semi-drunken postings in the early hours I'll see you all in a week. Be good.

So I'm sitting on the bus wondering why I'm having trouble writing a fricking blog entry about my weekend in London when it occurs to me that, other than the gig (which I intend to write about separately later) I didn't actually do that much. This could be a damning indictment on my ever-so-exciting life these days that a weekend not really doing much in a different city to the norm is such a radical thing that I feel it must be blogged about at length. I was even contemplating a series of posts.

So here's my weekend in point form.

Friday

Arrived at Marylebone 5pm. Took tube to Whitechapel. Kath isn't home yet so go buy bagels on Brick Lane. Kath comes home, have dinner, Kath goes out on date, I go for walk around City and riverside at night taking photos.

Saturday

Get up around noon. Go to Spitz to help set up gig, pausing to take some photos around Spitalfields. Discover they don't really need my help so go for another walk through City, over Millennium Bridge and into Tate Modern to check the Rachel Whiteread exhibition. Like this a lot, but then I have a thing for cardboard boxes in absurd quantities. Spend about 10 minutes there and go back to gig.

Gig occured. It was great. More later.

Go home, chat with Kath about stuff and she introduces me to the frightening concept of using two points in the Photoshop Curves tool to create an S curve. Brain explodes. Can't sleep due to work shift patterns and got to sleep about 5am.

Sunday

Walk to Angel for Flickrmeet at 12.30. Was meeting Anna but she was late. Thought I spotted the actual meet itself but turned my back at they'd all gone. Give up on Anna and phone Andy Konky Kru, arranging to meet at the British Museum. Anna arrives and locates the Flickrmeet which has decamped to a pub due to the weather. Since Andy is mobile-free can't cancel so set up a proxy meeting with Anna for later.

Meet Andy in the Great Court. Pop over to Gosh!, the comic shop, for an hour or so, discovering that cartoonist John Chandler works there now. Realised I'm terminally out of touch with what's out in comics and could easily spend a grand in there just on graphic novels and reprint volumes.

Anna turns up and we go to the pub for a bit. Turns out Ade Brown has a spare ticket for a Jeffrey Lewis gig on Monday which Anna's also going to so make more proxy plans to go. Go back to Kath's flat, forgoing my strict walking rule and taking the bus as it's raining and I'm getting tired.

Monday

Got up and felt a bit lousy. Wondered what I would do before meeting Anna at seven or whenever our proxy meeting might happen. Realised I wasn't going to arrange to meet anyone else and was about to spend the next few hours moping around the cold empty house so decided I wanted to go home. I was missing Birmingham. I was missing my flat. Thought this somehow significant.

Got bus to Marylebone, got on train, felt a strange sense of rightness about arriving in Birmingham, got home about 6pm. Spent next 36 hours in Photoshop.

And that, dear friends, was my exciting weekend in London. As you can tell, it was mainly spent taking photos and I really should just let them speak for themselves, so here they are (first 26 in this set).

I've been thinking about my big project for this year and it's reached the point where I need to get it down before it morphs into something even more stupid and unattainable. So here it is.

I'm going to write a book.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm actually going to publish a book - just that the "book" model seems like the best structure to work with. Chapters, a vague narrative structure, a fair amount of depth, that sort of thing. And if at the end of it someone wants to turn it into a proper book then that'll be a nice bonus.

The book is going to be a travel guide to the Birmingham Outer Circle bus route, which is why it has to be a book because anything smaller will just be interminably dull. The basic format I'm planning on is as follows:

• Travelogue: accounts of visiting sections of the route from a personal perspective. Think Iain Sinclair, but only a little bit. They key here is "personal".
• Photographs: looking more at the quirky details than grand panoramas (partly because there's not much grand on the route).
• History: this is where it turns into something bigger. I intend to research each section of the route and discover how these areas came to be. This will involve going to the central library and diving headlong into the murky world of local history, but I know a couple of people who already swim there so at the very least I'll have a guide.
• Maps: Every good travel book has maps but I'll be looking at interesting ways of using them. An obvious thing will be to GeoTag the photos so they can be mapped around the route. It'd be interesting to do that with the words as well, not just have them reference a map but have that work the other way. There's also the fact that the route is circular without a beginning or end so maybe he book should be too. That kind of stuff (most of which isn't really book-like, but whatever.)

The plan to actually achieve this is fairly simple. The route will be dictated by where the Number 11 bus goes. I'll chop this up into 20 or so manageable sections (the route is 27 miles long) basing each one around a specific landmark, such as Bearwood High Street or Winson Green Prison. I'll then spend a day at each section taking photos and notes, followed by research, followed by a return visit. I'll then write a draft chapter for the blog, fully expecting feedback to fill it out. Then when it's all over I'll do a few trips around the entire route to give it some continuity and structure and edit it all into a "book".

After that, who the hell knows. Maybe it'll get published and I'll be able to retire on the earnings. Maybe I'll just move to onto something else. Whatever happens, it should keep me nice and busy for the next 10 months, and that's the important thing. I've been faffing around too much recently and need some kind of long term thing.

I'll be looking to start this sometime in March when the weather improves and have all the field work done before October when the weather gets shit again.

Wish me luck...

Full credit for the seeds of this project must go to Diamond Geezer, without whom, etc.

Feeling much better now, thanks for asking, though it was a bit of a nightmare. I think I must have gotten a wee cold there for a bit, thanks no doubt to cycling in the freezing air, but whatever, it had passed by Sunday morning and other than my thumb still being sore (partly related to a sprained wrist ten years ago) everything seems to be in working order.

A slightly disturbing side effect of being knackered and possibly having a cold was my dreams got rather odd. My friends often appear in them but never in a notable way - just as people passing through. This last week though I've been murdering the male ones or getting involved in terribly messy marriages with the females, which was most disconcerting to say the least. It then occurred to me I'd been reading a lot of Gilbert Hendandez's Palomar stories (specifically Poinson River) before bedtime which, amongst other things, have a fair chunk of violent deaths and complicated romances, so that's okay then.

Saturday was mostly spent in my dressing gown watching Spaced with a brief interlude to go shopping (not in my dressing gown, though I expect to do that at some point) with Andy and Alex so we could share a cab home, where I was reminded of how long some people, especially couples it seems, can spend in a supermarket. Me, I'm done in minutes. Them, they spend forever, doing what I have no idea. Still, it did give me a chance to think about varying my diet for the first time in months so I plumped for spag bol as something I hadn't had for a while, could be done very simply if necessary and has room for variation and mutation, specifically into chili. (I later proceeded to pour half the spag into the sink, but we won't dwell on that.) The taxi back from the supermarket took bloody forever to arrive, despite me tempting bad karma by ordering a second one under a different name in the hopes that one of them would get to us before the night was out, which I wouldn't normally do but 5-10 minutes is 5-10 minutes, by golly, and on the way home I repeatedly told myself that while I could have cycled there and shopped twice and still have time to construct a replica Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks I probably wouldn't have bothered in the first place and so it was worth it really. And then it was back to Spaced for the rest of the second series, this time fully dressed, only for Andy to discover the DVDs have a "Homag-o-meter" extra which points out all the references as it runs through, so we'll be watching them again then. But that's no bad thing. I kept thinking I spotted Buffy references only to realise they were things Xander said so they were probably references to something else to begin with. This po-mo entertainment world can be so complicated sometimes...

Sunday was a relatively early start (bearing in mind I'd been getting to bed at five and up at one for work this last week) for my first pseudo-commercial (in that I was paid with lunch) photo shoot for An Untitled Musical Project about which I shall write more later, but for now here's the initial selection taken in the wilds of Selly Oak.

Then after pouring over the photos for a few hours Andy and Alex announced they were going to watch a movie, which seemed like a good idea, so I joined them for Bubble Boy, a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal in his pre-hearthrob days which was surprisingly brilliant. Surprisingly because it should have been fucking awful being a by-the-numbers teen comedy road trip type film with a wacky cast of D-list actors more normally employed in animation voiceovers of the non-Pixar variety. But like Sky High (another film that should have been shit but became my favourite film of last year) it had enough absurd moments of milk-through-the-nose hilarity and slapstick and enough self-awareness of it's innate stupidity to drag it round the back of the film quality spectrum and jettison it onto the hallowed platform of films that are so far beyond "so bad it's good" as to be genius.

Or maybe Andy and I are just entering some kind of post-Empire senility where the years of po-faced pseudo movie-criticism have taken their toll, the hero directors of our youth being revealed as the workman-like practitioners they always were forcing us to revel in sub-Disney comedies. Though Alex liked it too and she's like a drama student and shit. Ah, whatever...

Had an iffy couple of weeks, truth be told. Nothing specific and I'm tempted to just put it down to January and that combination of dreary weather and the niggling feeling, however much you try and rationalise it away, that one should be taking a step back and taking stock of where one sits in the universe which doesn't necessarily paint a pretty picture. Oh, and a singularly massive lack of employment from the agency didn't help, especially as I'd earmarked January as a bank-balance filling month. I'm used to being on standby for work but morning after morning of waiting for the call and then finding myself at a loose end when it doesn't come gets a little dispiriting. Yes, there are plenty of things I could be doing but the drive to do them just isn't there. So very little to report, hence the blog quietness.

I did finally get some work on Friday which should be permanent for the next few weeks, working at a courier depot humping parcels in and out of vans and trucks every evening which, as you might know by now, is pretty much my perfect job. I haven't had a box humping job for what seems like ages and it's great, like a workout only you get paid. Unfortunately it's on the other side of the city but I'm coming to terms with the fact that there's very little industrial work in Bournville (despite living right next to the blimmin' Cadbury factory!). The shift does mean all the gigs I was planing on going to this month have been knocked on the head but, while a bit of a pisser, it's not the end of the world, especially as I'm going to be around for whatever passes for daylight at this time of year. Once my fitness levels build up again (the car park didn't do me any favours in that department) I'll probably start cycling there too, weather permitting, which should get me ready for the Outer Circle Flickr Bike Tour, especially as I suspect it's going to need a number of goes to cover properly.

As for the ennui I'm reluctant to blog a bunch of moaning but at the same time it's probably useful to get this shit out in the open so it's revealed as the pointless niggling it really is, so stand by for that.

In the last few years my immediate family all moved to within a hundred or so miles of each other for the first time since 1979 which was great but as I mentioned, ooh, this time last year it feels a little odd as I'm not used to them potentially being in the same place. Thankfully for my irrational side the natural order is asserting itself. My brother-in-law went freelance last year taking a three month job in Amsterdam and my sister and the kids have joined him, living in an apartment overlooking a canal opposite the zoo. They may stay there, they may not and while somewhat drastic it's not actually that surprising for them to revert to nomadity. And then over Xmas my mum officially announced that she and my step-dad are moving to New Zealand for a year in March. Meanwhile my dad, who moved here permanently a while back after 20-odd years in Texas, is doing loads of consultancy work around the world so I never really know where he is. Of course the net means it doesn't really matter where they are but it does feel like something close to situation normal again.

Meanwhile I'm pretty sure I'm not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. It's going to take something pretty drastic to get me out of this flat...

I'm getting one of those backlogs of things I think are going to take lots of time to write about but probably aren't but even though I rationally know this I keep putting off writing about them and they mount up, so here's a summary of the last few days for you to skim.

Friday. What happened on Friday? Oh yeah, my bike, which I've had for a little over a year now, got its first puncture last week and I fixed it but it didn't hold so I bought a new inner tube but when I put the wheel back on it wouldn't sit properly and eventually, after much faffing and tea, I notice a ballbearing had gone missing somehow from the spindle-wotsit and of course I have no spares because I've never had to fix this bike to this desgree and the nearest bike shop is a bike ride away and the bike has no wheel, and it's 4pm and I need to cycle later on tonight, so a brisk walk to Halfords (pausing briefly to take a photo) where they don't have my ballbearing in stock but after a few seconds pleading if they might have one in a jar of random bits out back the chap finds a spare set which he lets me have gratis and once again the staff of Halfords Selly Oak win my admiration and thanks.

And then, having fixed the bike to a satisfactory level, and noted the similarity between how a bike when fixed will never be quite as good as a new bike in the same way a JPEG when tweaked can never be corrected back to its original quality, followed by my noting how tediously geeky that comparison is, and having had some food, it was off to the Jug for the Misty's Big Adventure Xmas gig which was superb and wonderful and which I shall write about in full later. This was followed by a Balti in Moseley village with Shaun and Kats which was satisfactory but we really should have gone to Ladypool Rd and it was stupid of me not to.

The Balti meant I got home late and having lots of photos couldn't resist checking them and uploading a few so I got to bed about 2am, rising at 7.30 to go to the car park, deciding that I couldn't face the horror of the bus so I cycled, what with the bike being all fixed and everything, and it took 45 minutes to get to Solihull, quicker than the bus, arriving slightly exhausted but in a much better mood than usual. The car park was busy, as expected, but rather tedious with nothing exciting to report - lots of lost tickets and a few issues with the barrier - but I made a couple of quid from abandoned trollies that people couldn't be arsed to wheel back and that always brightens the day. One advantage of the car park is it's above a supermarket so I was able to pick up a couple of bottles of wine and some brandy butter for Xmas, except I left the brandy butter in the fridge so won't be able to enjoy it until New Years Day, but it'll be worth it.

And then another 45 minute ride home to be greeted by a reasonably full living room of people getting ready to set off to Doug and Sara's pre-Xmas party/gathering/thing, so a quick shower and snack-food dinner (we have a tremendous collection of snack-food right now) I joined the throng for a very enjoyable few hours of beer, nibbles and chats.

Xmas Day and I was awoken at 9am-ish with the offer of tea which seemed like a good enough reason to get up. We did the Xmas morning stuff, mooching around the living room watching Aardman animations videotaped on Xmas days past, until it was time for the Andy's to go to their respective Xmas day venues. Matt turned up for a bit and we set off on our bikes to his and Marv's place for the rest of the day. Dinner was meatballs in sauce, which seemed a bit wrong at first but worked out perfectly, followed by the Xmas pudding I'd made a few weeks previously from Jez's recipe and it was also perfect. Then we went for a walk around the parks of Kings Heath which are much nicer than I was expecting having only seen them from the road. And then we watched Doctor Who which was, as you'll probably be aware, bloody fantastic, so much better than TV at that time deserved to be, and bodes wonderfully for the 2nd series. And then we drank wine and beer and played a driving game on the Playstation, opting not to bother with the actual game but to just play a version where you have to drive into an intersection and crash as spectacularly as possible, which we did again and again until midnight-ish by which stage I decided I was far too drunk to cycle home, given the trouble I was having walking to the garden for a smoke, so I crashed on the sofabed.

Boxing day started with fried chipolatas and scrambled eggs after which I figured I'd better head off else I never would, and I had this vague idea I might get some stuff done, but was distracted by the 24 season 3 box set sitting in the living room so I worked through eight episodes before Andy and Celeste got back when I had to stop as they were only 2 episodes in, but Celeste had a Bruce Springsteen DVD where he performs and dissects his songs on stage so we watched that and it was very enjoyable. After that I figured I might as well crack on with 24 for a bit before bed so I did, getting through another 12 episodes by 5am. Ouchy. But very good stuff. Utterly bonkers and over the top, which is how I like my US TV.

Tuesday I got up very late in the afternoon, finished off 24, finally sorted and uploaded the photos from the Misty's gig, watched Doctor Who again thanks to BitTorrent and quite possibly enjoyed it even more (and for the record I never cared for Doctor Who ever at all) and, um, here we are.

Wednesday... Looks kinda frosty out there...

Oddly enough I'm feeling really Christmassy for the first time in years. Must be all this Bournville malarkey...

As usual I got a few hand made cards from comics people which are always a pleasure (and thanks! (also thanks to the other card senders!)), but Andy Luke's emailed Xmas comic took the biscuit by a long mile and so I must share. Ye fucking gods, man, you are skirting the edges of sanity with aplomb!

Have a good one.

I was trying to remember when I last did a real zine and without digging them all out I think it was around 1998, so today was rather momentous as I printed out and stapled (with my dusty but trusty long-armed stapler) the very rough draft of the GDFAF zine in all it's 44 page glory. Mainly this was so I could check the layouts I'd done on the computer actually worked on paper but I was also getting impatient and wanted to hold it in my hands, no matter how unfinished (and in the case of the last seven pages unwritten) it was.

As expected, the whole experience is kinda strange. Firstly it's interesting how web-based my design thinking is these days. I've structured the reviews as one long flow of text rather than making each post an individual item, which works because that's how they were presented in the first place. Originally I tried breaking them up but it just felt wrong. I've also inserted the photos in the same manner as the posts with each band having a photo at the point where they're talked about. Again, this works but it does mean the layout of each page isn't consistent and is probably something I'd have avoided back in the day.

Another weird thing has been going back to DTP. Back in the 90s the most advanced I got was using WordPerfect to lay out the text in columns leaving spaces for the images which would be stuck on with glue later. Now I'm using the Apple Pages package for the whole thing and producing a PDF (using the excellent CocoaBooklet to paginate everything properly). Again, it's really strange coming at this from a web design perspective. The whole concept of objects not flowing with the text is really odd along with the fact that inserting or deleting a sentence will mess up all manner of things further down the document. And there are some limitations to Pages that I can't find a way around (not helped by Pages being a fucking stupid name for a program when it comes to Google...). In fact, unless I'm just doing it all horribly wrongly I'd say Pages is not a robust DTP package by any stretch of the imagination. It's very user friendly but that's probably its downfall. But I also suspect a lot of this is me really wanting to just print out the text and break out the glue.

And then there's the photos themselves. My zines were usually about comics so the artwork was easy to get down to stark black and white for photocopying but my gig photos tend towards large patches of colour, usually red, so I have concerns about the zine being populated by black rectangles. Some experimenting did reveal the Halftone Pattern filter in Photoshop which is pretty crude but seems to do the job, though I'm not overly happy with seeing my lovely hi-res photos reduced to the resolution of a cameraphone. But then I am going for that photocopied zine aesthetic...

The weirdest thing, though, is how long it is. 15,000 words doesn't seem that much when you're scrolling in a browser but spread over 35 pages it's most impressive. I look at it and think "I wrote that".

I may have gotten my zine bug back.

I am unwell. Which is not much of a surprise really, but still kinda annoying. Why, I wonder to myself, am I unable to do a project like GDFAF without suffering afterwards? On Sunday I was feeling more euphoric than I've felt in months but come Monday I'm knackered, weak-kneed, thick-headed and have the most aggressive chesty cough. All very tedious.

So I'm mostly sleeping, watching all 12 hours of LotR and slowly editing the GDFAF posts for the zine. Any new content will have to wait.

00:45

Get home from Actress and Bishop to empty flat. Put on washing including combats and jumper which are suffering from 14 gigs worth of sweat and smoke.

01:15

Andy and Alex come home. Chat for a bit.

01:45

Put out washing to dry

05:00

Finish writing and post up GDFAF #14. Feel a bit of a headache coming on plus a sense of adrenalin drop now it's all over.

06:00

Photos uploaded to Flickr and I'm feeling knackered. Go to bed.

06:30

Can't sleep. Realise headache is because I got up a couple of hours before the gig and had a couple of pints to celebrate. In other words I am having that kind of mini-hangover people get in the afternoon after a mid-morning drink.

07:00

Get up. Have sandwich and take some paracetamol. Decide to stay up and potter around before having a snooze later on.

08:30

Andy gets up. Chat.

10:00

Empty veg scrapings and teabags in compost heap. Discover my DIY compost heap has fallen over. Disconcerted but not too worried as have ordered a proper compost bin. Notice new fence has been put up which explains it all. Pick up spilled compost by hand which isn't a problem as it's all frozen.

11:00

Have "supper" - pesto and pasta. Realise I've pretty much run out of food after the fortnight.

12:30

Feeling a little tired. Check with flatmate that he's not planning on using the living room and crash out on the sofa, the idea being it'll be easier to get up from than my bed. Set alarm on mobile for 15:30.

13:00

Kept awake by the Saturday afternoon performance of the Bournville Carillon playing Greensleeves.

13:30

Just as starting to doze off, woken by mobile ringing, which I've left on other side of room to force me to get up. Sister calling to check I'm coming to Banbury this evening to see her play in the Banbury Symphony Orchestra. "Did I wake you?" Mum will have my ticket for tonight's performance. Tell her I'm getting in about seven.

14:00

Alex phones for Andy. Go get Andy.

15:30

Alarm goes off. Reset for 16:00

16:00

Alarm goes off. Don't reset. Also don't actually get off sofa.

17:00

Andy wakes up me. Realise I have one hour until my train to Banbury leaves from central Birmingham.

17:20

Showered and changed, but having had no tea or food, I'm on my bike. Buy ticket from Bournville station to avoid queues but cycle on into town.

17:45

Cycling up Hurst St I realise I've missed the train from Moor St but can get the one from New St.

17:53

Virgin train pulls into to New St. Platform. Conductor assistant bloke thing points me to the far end of the train to put my bike.

17:54

Door for compartment for bikes is locked. Put bike in "vestibule".

17:55

Am informed by lady (in a very nice red motorcycle jacket as it happens) that I can't leave bike there. Will have to take it to other end of train.

17:56

Am shouted at for cycling on platform. Fair enough realy.

17:57

Bike is on train. I'm on train. Sit down.

18:03

Train leaves.

18:20

Decide this day is fucking insane and therefore good blog fodder. Start thinking of a post with time stamps and short pithy descriptions of what's happened.

18:40

Fall asleep for a few minutes.

19:05

Arrive in Banbury. Carry bike out of station (lot of stairs) and cycle to church.

19:07

Look for cafe to get tea and food but being a small town everything is shut except the pubs.

19:10

Banbury has a major shortage of iron railings around the Horse Fair area.

19:20

Find the sole cycle parking bars in the area and lock up. Roll fag.

19.25

Meet mum outside church. Ask people at desk if they have any tea. No, but there will be refreshments during the interval. Any tea? No, but there will be soft drinks. Coke? No, orange juice.

19:30

Concert starts. Very nice. Nearly fall asleep during first piece but manage to stay awake.

20:30

Interval. Orange juice kinda does the job. Stay awake during second half thanks to some loud Tchaikovsky. Getting very hungry.

21:15

Concert ends. Back to sister's house for tea and pizza.

22:00

Am asked if seeing my sister playing violin has made me want to break out the trombone for the first time in over a decade. Confess I'm thinking about it, but mainly to see what it sounds like when amped through Andy's guitar effects pedals.

22:40

Feeling much better after tea and pizza, leave sister's to catch last train. Am offered a lift by friends of hers who have a big car but decline as it'll be quicker for me to cycle.

22:44

Arrive at station. That was quick. Wait for train. Start getting cold.

23:04

Train to Birmingham pulls in. No cycle compartment and no big luggage areas to put bike. Rest bike against door and check each station to make sure it isn't on the platform side. Train isn't heated. Get colder.

00:14

Arrive at Birmingham Moor St. It's very very cold indeed. Start cycling but don't warm up. In fact my legs get colder, which is very strange.

00:45

Get home having cycled through a substantial amount of frost. Lock up. Make tea. Have sandwich. Warm up. Check computer.

01:30

Go to bed.

05:30

Wake up after only four hours sleep. Hmm...

06:30

Decide to get up and see how the day progresses. At least I'm back on relatively normal time now.

08:00

Have massive fry-up breakfast using the remains of my food.

08.45

Start dealing with the massive backlog of email from the fortnight.

09:30

Start writing this post. Have to check in seven year old HTML book for how to do definition lists.

09:57

Finish writing this post. Decide this sort of post probably shouldn't become a regular feature.

The GDFAF Day Off was spent indoors watching a DVD.

The Living Room, compared to other rooms in the house, is quite comfortable and cozy, but unlike The Bedroom it's not designed for sleeping in. With a capacity of about 40 it's a good place for a small party or gathering and while it only has seating for eight there's plenty of floor space if you want to slum it. The sofas are very nice, soft but with a firmness that helps the back. Of note is the very strange wall paper on one wall which looks like it was made of the skin of a furry beast but in fact is some bizarre flocking experiment gone horribly wrong. Also of note is the quarter hourly chimes of the Bournville Carillon which, until you get used to them, can be rather disconcerting. There's also a drum kit and a smattering of guitars should you desire an impromptu jam session and a rather absurd quantity of books, but we weren't here for such things.

We were here to watch a DVD which given the paucity of such things in this establishment was a bit a challenge but we settled on working through the four disk edition of Lord of the Rings : The Return of the King, specifically the Appendices. I'd actually seen these before in a different living room and from a different box of DVDs but, given the nature of digital duplication, the performance was pretty identical (if slightly smaller). I was struck by how the audio/visual entertainment system in this Living Room was similar in layout to the small gig in that all the machines used to create the entertainment were on show with many cables visible.

I broke my "no drinking at gigs" rule by having many cups of tea during the performance but thanks to the episodic nature of the RotK appendices we were able to pause for toilet breaks with no major disruption. The informal nature of the event allowed for a fair bit of discussion about the amazing level of detail and passion that went into the production and statements such as "this sort of thing should be the normal way of working" were heard. There was also much laughter at the absurdness of Sean Astin, as is to be expected.

By approximately 2am, and having endured one and a half disks worth of extras (I didn't keep a track of how long this took) we decided to call it a night before getting to the endless back slapping and "we're fucking marvelous, aren't we" moments, but over all it was enjoyable stuff.

The Living Room is a good place to go when you're feeling a little tired and want to chill out in a place that doesn't have a computer in it yet is not The Kitchen or The Outdoors. It somehow facilitates conversation well in a manner quite distinct from a motorbike ride and thanks to the judicious use of radiators and curtains remains fairly toasty into the early hours.

I think I'll definitely be returning to The Living Room again in the future.

Next week has been figured out. If you want to join me check the Upcoming.org page. I think Acoustic Ladyland on Tuesday could be the killer gig, but who can really tell.

I'm taking a night off. After nine nights on the trot I'm bordering on extreme exhaustion and I still have next week to get through. On the one hand I could push myself for the perverse glory of having completed the marathon but I risk not being in a fit state to actually write about the experience and that strikes me as more important.

So I'm going to extend the fortnight by one day, finishing on Friday 18th. Tonight will be spent on the sofa with a DVD. My apologies.

On the stairs, queuing for tonight's gig, I heard those fateful words, "are you Pete Ashton?" I'd been spotted in public by one of my readers and yet me tell you, it's a rather odd experience. I've had the "are you..." question before but usually I knew the person asking and it was at some event or other where I was expecting that sort of thing to happen. This was the first time a perfect stranger had announced to my face that they were a reader of my blog and, dare I say it, a "fan." Darren (at least I think that's his name - cringing apologies if I'm wrong!) had stumbled across this site about six months ago while Googling for Misty's Big Adventure and had stuck around following the blog and podcasts. He asked how the GDFAF week was going and we chatted for a bit about how odd the whole chatting for a bit was.

Suddenly I remembered I was standing with my mate Steve who had recently been asking me about this sort of thing - the fact that there are people out there who know about me but I have no idea who they are, famous for fifteen people and all that. You might remember Steve as the guy who recorded a couple of tracks in our living room which I played in Pete Radio 18 in September. So I said to Darren, you remember that guy who did those songs in the living room? Yes, said Darren, enthusing mildly about how he'd enjoyed that. Well, I said pointing at Steve. This is him.

I think Steve understands where I'm coming from now.

Oddly enough I had another "are you..." moment during the gig from Andy Pryke but this was expected as we've been failing miserably to meet for a while now. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it happens a lot more now I'm reviewing so many Birmingham gigs because Andy and I, we fucking own the Birmingham music scene when it comes to Google. Check it out: Distophia, Klopeks, Misty's Big Adventure (I'll give Andy that one...) and so on.

I'd love to say this was premeditated but like all the best global domination plans it's was completely unintentional. Be interesting to see how it all develops.

(Oh, and Darren, sorry for turning you into content like that!)

After three days getting up a 6am to catch a bus to Erdington to lug boxes around for eight hours before traveling all the way back to Bournville, I was, well, shattered would be a word for it. The job itself wasn't that bad - I quite like lugging boxes as a form of exercise, though the guy I was working with was a miserable bastard with a black heart so that was kinda exhausting. He wasn't a bad man, in fact he was pretty generous and his back heart was in the right place, but he was bitter and twisted and he liked me so I was stuck with him and his moanings, which made me all moany and complainy which is never good, especially when my defenses were weakened by the number 11 bus. So we shall speak of it no more.

On Wednesday night, having decided enough was enough and that I wouldn't be going back, I returned home to a big Amazon box. It was finally here. Once my tax rebate cheque cleared I'd ordered a Fuji Finepix S7000 from Amazon which had caused my bank to go into spasms as it was the largest sum I'd spent on my card since neolithic times which then led to my first experience of phone banking ("I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... I'm phoning India and this isn't a problem... Christ alive, I'm phoning India!") to unfreeze everything, and here it was, all lovely and new and with a respectably large instruction manual which was digested with glee all evening, the bad vibes of the week to date suddenly banished.

This morning I'd arranged to meet Andy and Alex at a local cafe for breakfast at ten but the knackerdness of the past few days had caught up with me and I was woken at ten by Alex's text telling me they'd be a little late so I rushed down to the Last Chance Cafe in Stirchley on what was an uncommonly warm October morning. The greasy spoon was suitably greasy and full of men in hi-viz jackets. I'm at work, my sleepy brain said, and I ordered the Full English and waited. No sign of Andy and Alex. I ate my breakfast (not bad but nothing to write home about) in the slightly bizarre cafe (rockabilly theme with random kitsch on the walls in such magnitude it transcended mere kitsch and came out the other side) with still no sign. Breakfast finished I phoned Alex. They were in a different cafe on Bournville lane that I'd never noticed was there despite the massive "Cafe" painted on the wall. So I trundled over there for another cup of tea and to show off my camera. "Have you given her a name?" asked Alex. "I don't think it's a girl" said Andy as the somewhat phallic lens extended. For future reference their breakfast was judged better than mine.

We then wandered up to the deli on Linden Road and I continued up to Cotteridge to loop around back down through Stirchley to try out the camera. I'd noticed a load of interestingly crap shops from the top deck of the bus and they were indeed interesting even at ground level. By the time I got back to base I'd taken over 100 photos, 26 of which you can see here.

All of them were taken on automatic with no fiddling about. I did play with the zoom a fair bit because, hell, I've never had a zoom before. Zoom rocks the fucking bollocks! I was a bit concerned about camera shake but they all came out crystal clear, most astonishingly this leaf which was taken from about three metres away. I'm not sure I can give an honest review of the S7000 because my experience has been like moving from an 100cc moped to a Ducatti but I'm incredibly impressed with the handling and control it gives, not to mention the quality of the shots. It's also worth noting that while most of my photos with the old digicam have been carefully tweaked in Photoshop these hardly needed anything.

But what of the Nikon, you might be asking. Well, I got my first batch of slides developed and scanned about half of them in using a dedicated slide scanner and I'm not overly impressed. Yes, I know it takes time to get the manual exposure right, yes, I know I shouldn't be overly critical of my first attempts, and yes, I know it's a wonderful piece of kit with great potential, but it seems like a backward step with far too much hassle involved. Once I get some time I'll have a hack at the photos in Photoshop to see if any are worth making public and once I've had a play with the manual controls on the S7000 (yes, it does fully manual exposure and focus) I may return to film just to see. But right now digital rules. Enormous potentials have opened up and I'm keen to explore them.

(In case you're wondering, the camera is a joint family combi birthday/Xmas present so thankyou mia famiglia!)

Andy Zoop runs our garden. It's not that large - a patch of lawn surrounded by beds - but it's nice to sit in and provides us with many herbs. It's also something of a wildlife garden to encourage insects and the like. In fact Andy's gardening technique mainly involves looking at the plants. In contrast my gardening technique involves violently ripping things out of the earth. And so since we're now in early autumn my special skills come into play, which is handy as I really like this sort of thing and it's been a while since anyone's paid me to do it.

Once I'd cut back a good third of the greenery I noticed the massive pile of brambles and branches and realised I fundamental flaw in my plan. The garden, being small, doesn't have a dumping ground. I asked Andy about this and he had a solution - a patch of earth that, due to its position out of the sun, resolutely refused to grow anything. I caught up with his thinking - compost heap.

One of the few regrets I had on moving from Kingstanding was leaving my compost bin behind. I'd gotten into the habit of saving all the organic kitchen material and it seemed really weird to just be dumping it in the normal bin. So this was certainly a good thing. Part of my soul has returned. I shall turn rotten plants into fertile soil.

Rather than buying a big plastic bin I'm going for the DIY approach. It will take a while as I'm also going for the no-money approach, raiding the many skips that decorate suburbia. Here's where we're currently at:

I started by staking a circle in the ground with random pieces of wood and bamboo canes. I then lined the inside of this with cardboard and filled it with the cuttings. Next I surrounded the cardboard with a piece of carpet underlay from a skip and tied it tight with string. The lid was made from a kitchen cabinet door with more carped nailed to the underside. This carpet will keep everything warm over the winter. Ventilation will come from the base (where I deliberately put all the thicker brambles) and the rear which is protected from the elements by the fence and not so thickly lined. The next stage is to line the outside with plastic, again for warmth but also to keep the rain off (damp is good, but not too damp). Large sheets of plastic are somewhat hard to come by but like I said, lots of skips in this area.

See also, Wikipedia on Composting.

I was once accused by Mardou of "blogging my dinner" when I took this photo which I found a rather odd accusation as I don't think I ever had before. Okay, maybe once or twice but it's not an obsession or anything. But one should always try to live up to people's opinions of you because it helps those people feel comfortable in the knowledge that the world is as they assumed. So in that spirit, I present my adventures in ratatouille.

It began during a visit to my sisters where, during a spot of gardening she presented me with two enormous courgettes which I managed to squeeze into my bag without damaging. Since I generally have no more than two recipes on the go at any given time, and since neither of them currently involve courgettes, I was at something of a loss. I'd intend to cook something with them but the dissonance involved in firstly deciding what and then ensuring I had the ingredients to do so was just too much. Eventually, with the patient help and advice of Andy and Alex, we plumped for a ratatouille as something that was piss easy to make, cheap and potentially freezable. I made a list of what was needed and, about a week later, managed to actually buy the stuff. Today I made it.

I started with this:

and ended up with this:

You can see all the stages of this grand adventure in this photoset. Outside of the whole cooking thing I was quite taken with the photographic potential of vegetables. Something to investigate.

Anyway, it was a success. At least I think it was. I don't really like ratatouille that much.

Went for a walk with the F2 today. I texted my camera-geek chum Lewis about it and he nerded out big time which was satisfying to see, so after a quick lesson in the kitchen, putting all the somewhat abstract stuff I'd been reading about into context, Lauren, Lewis and I set off down the canal into town. This was different in a number of ways - firstly I'd never walked down that canal - I've cycled it loads but it's a very different experience on foot. I'm going to have to train myself to cycle to a place and then walk around, or just start doing more walking. (The only downside was I had to get the bus home, but I did capture a nice cloud shot on the way).

More important was taking photos with someone else who's also looking at things in that photography way - another first and very enlightening. By the time we reached the centre we were both looking at Birmingham with fresh eyes, or at least I was. Maybe Lewis is just one of those people who sees stuff, I dunno. But it was good and bodes well for this Flickr Birmingham outing I'm trying to rustle together - essentially getting a bunch of local photographers to meet at a certain point at a certain time to stroll around taking photos. Non-Flickerites are welcome of course.

But the really weird thing is I've taken 20-odd photos and I have no fecking idea how they've come out. I want to plug the F2 into the Mac but oddly enough there isn't a USB port on the side. Apparently the film needs to be "developed" or something and that can't happen until I've used up all the shots. It's all very arcane.

It's stating the bleeding obvious but taking photos with an SLR is very different to a compact automatic. It's a bit like learning to drive in that there are a number of stages (focus, aperture, light metre, exposure...) which slow you right down until they become second nature. Eventually the camera will become an extension of my hand but right now it's very slow, meaning I messed up a couple of shots that would have been perfect with the compact. That said I did notice that the slowing down meant I took more time over the composition, which is a good thing. Right now though I can see both cameras having advantages and whatever the outcome of this trial run I think I'll still keep a pocket automatic to hand.

Since it was a camera kinda day we dawdled in Jessops for a while where we bumped into Matt and Marv who were buying a digicam. Some people might be weirded out by the coincidence, but I say when the coincidences stop, that's when I start worrying.

The reason Shaun felt justified in driving 150 miles to the Misty's gig last night was that he had a meeting in Birmingham on Tuesday so could fit it in, just about. And so I discovered that he's actually good friends with Kathy, another of the Bonfire Radio podcasters. Turns out they work together. And she's going to this meeting in Birmingham too. So we met up in the Tap and Spile, it being the only decent pub near their hotel.

I guess you'd call it a Podmeet.

It's a bit like a Blogmeet in that you sit in a pub and talk about all manner of shit, occasionally veering into podcasting but no really, truth be told. No-one passing would be any the wiser but sitting at that table were the creators of Stroka Sounds, Cold Citrus and Pete Radio all being all cutting edge and that. It was cool, if slightly odd in that way when you meet people who've been reading your blog for a while.

I dunno if there's ever been a Podmeet before. Probably, but if not then this was the first, if three people counts. Apparently their company will be sending them to Birmingham again for more meetings so maybe we should try and drag Dubber and Spoons and other podcasters along. It'd be, like, well wicked and that.

Or maybe I'll just meet them in the pub and we'll talk shit. Because I'm glad to say, having never met them before despite syndicating their shows, Shaun and Kathy are good people.

It's my birthday on Monday, though I won't be making a fuss. Thirty three might be a cool number (except I won't be a "long player" until next January) but age wise it's nothing special. I did have the "have you thought about what you want for your birthday?" conversation with mum though which I find kinda amusing as I used to ask her the same thing when I was a kid and she never knew. These days I have no idea - things I want are far too expensive and I have no need for ephemerous trinklets - but we did agree on some kind of camera fund to replace my aging digicam with something more professional. Anyway, during this chat I joked that I wasn't planning on doing anything special this year - that can wait until I'm 40, which was greeting with a few seconds of silence followed by the whimper along the lines of "my son will be forty one day..." I guess that would be kinda scary, especially if your son is likely to still be living like a 20-something slacker.

That said, there are a few things I'll be doing this next week or so which could be construed as "going out" and "celebrating" my continued existence. Chum Matt is going out for drinks to mark his birthday on Thursday at the Prince of Wales in Moseley and I shall be joining him. Then on Saturday 24th Misty's Big Adventure are playing at the Jug of Ale, also in Moseley. They're also playing on Sunday and I shall be attending both gigs, but I'm treating Saturday as the "party" one with Sunday for photos.

Regarding flatmate-related gigs, Plinth - that's the band with both Andys in it - have a gig on Thursday 29th at Bar Academy while Andy Zoop's other band, Una Corda, have two gigs coming up, one on the 27th at Scrufy Murphys and another on October 7th at the Jug. It's said that the latter, supporting the delightfully named Church of Misery, should be the better of the two so I'll definitely be at that one if not both.

All this makes me realise I forgot to include my Upcoming.org listings in this new redesign. Better rectify that...

Una Corda have an EP out, Proper Position For Floating [1881], which is rather top. You can hear a track on their myspace page and I'll play a track from it in the next podcast. Also, Misty's new Album, The Black Hole, came out last week and it's also rather top, getting some quite hefty rotation on iTunes right now.

In other news...

• Went to stay with sister and the kids for 36 hours to help out while bro-in-law is away on a course. Not much to report - it's just a hectic world of busy over there. We did go swimming though, which was cool. Weightless babies are magic.


• Finally took the plunge and started the British small press comics entry on Wikipedia. It's in no way perfect and needs work, but that's kinda the point. Anyway, you try condensing 30 years of non-heirarchical, decentralised DIY activity into one page and see how you do.


• Went back to the Agency on Monday to re-register for temp work. That rent-thing needs to be paid and to be frank I wouldn't mind going back into the labour force for a little while. I was hoping for something involving lifting and lugging but they've placed me in an office starting Monday for a week or so.


• It's suddenly rather cold, isn't it...

Today Alex decided she wanted to buy a bike and Lewis decided to come over for a visit so we all went to Selly Oak Cycles to buy one. It's a weird little shop with five or so sad looking bikes chained up by the desk with a dark workshop stained with decades of grease stretching to the back. So different to the bright emporiums of cycling joy you usually get and a tad discombobulating.

Alex was after a bike for bimbling about the place, going to the shops, that kind of thing. And it had to be cheap for budgetary reasons but also because there's a significant chance of it being stolen in Selly Oak. A small-ish blue bike caught Alex's attention and after a bit of thought, but not too much, we were on our way home with something not quite resembling