friday 30th april
got campari ad, met nikki and found this.

thursday 29th april
my insurance company said there were 79 reported lightning strikes in my postal district. whoah. raphael turned out to be french!



wednesday 28th april
desperate to start relaxing and knowing you're starving and need something good for you when there's no food in the house is a bummer.

i opened the two doors, dumped my bag without turning the light on and locked them again, in the car and off to Salisbury. same again half an hour later but when i flicked the light nothing. back into the hall to trip the fuse switch and they come on. i do my usual getting home routine, and finally come to turning the tv on. up comes a black screen with green '5' in the corner. something is amiss.

the mystery unfolded slowly and over about half an hour. the facts were these: the sky box wouldn't power up, nor would the dvd player. the fridge was okay, and the amp still worked. the tv in the bedroom didn't but the tv in the lounge did. playstation was okay and so was the minidisc. hmm. after checking all the fuses on dead items none were blown. reverse engineering from the sky dish meant it had to be lightning but i couldn't really believe it.

tuesday 27th april
found a blank sign as i walked to work.



monday 26th april
them product designers are a bunch of kids, man.



sunday 25th april
after an hour and a half in the car and two hospitals later reading the sign 'closed due to staff shortages' makes you angry at the government. 'central fucking london, and nobody can give us some pain killers. you've got to be joking!' was the cry. finally, ten minutes after i asked for a doctor, who understood completely and supplied a lump of codeine, laura giggled. off her head, clearly.

saturday 24th april
laura's toothache gets worse as the baja gets better.

wednesday 21st april
chumpy comes over for pre-house hunting leaving his mark on the blackboard. i like it when people leave me messages. steve always leaves his trademark swear word, laura usually says goodbye and i write things like 'marmite' or 'bin bags'. or songs to downloa- er, get.



sunday 18th april
over to harrow in a torrent of water to meet the sonleys. when he's not crawling over everything - although it's mostly jen or pj - he's just in his element dropping whatever you give him off the table. hey, he's allowed. he's only eleven months old. pj gave me an idvd'd dvd containg jurrasic junior (their trip to the natural history museum) and jaws (aquarium) which turned out to be the best thing i've seen since this, on friday.



saturday 17th april
snowboarding at mk was cancelled - money issues and giles' birthday so i washed up, wrote half a letter to the gees and learnt how to make hydraulics. which have will become useful for suspension arms.



friday 16th april
i got home and checked my emails; work's adsl was out and i needed to know what mtv thought. leighton didn't reply but mum had emailed me links to family photos. ben with his grandma and great grandparents. so in fact everyone was at home although maybe not at the same time.



thursday 15th april
txt: having a drink with steve. how new! two pints, five bars due to queues. 'we should have priority vouchers. we're bloody local - we work here!'



wednesday 14 april
old street and finsbury park on the way home.

tuesday 13th april
rich forwarded a brief history of where we work written by his mate i found interesting:

shoreditch open
celebrating tom de paor's victorious award of young architect of the year, a year ago last week, everything seemed to be getting better. looking out of the 1st floor window of the mother bar at 4am i thought, 'once again i am awake and dreaming, in this delirious place even the traffic obeys its own laws, now it is running backwards, now forwards, entirely at the punctuation of the dj.' stumbling headlong into traffic that now ran both ways and 'taxi, taxi, minicab sir?'; onions frying; bouncers; australians; americans! i asked myself, when did this happen? the joke used to be that there were so many models in shoreditch because there was no where to eat. when we first moved here eight years ago, hoxton wasn't even in the rough guide. islington and brick lane existed in print, but shoreditch was an island cut-off from the rest of the city. this bermuda triangle of one-way roads escaping from and speeding past into london had its own atmosphere, and during the festivals held in hoxton square, it even had its own money. shoreditch was a blind spot, unnoticed by the city boys only half a mile away, unnamed, it was unknown, and couldn't be consumed.

just beyond the city walls, medieval shoreditch and southwark were lawless and taxless places where actors, chancers and whores thrived. by the mid-1990s only poor people lived together here, and only culture separated those who'd been to university from their grandparent's generation of working class council tenants. roy porter describes a lost condition in ‘london: a social history’ of ‘rich and poor living in decent reciprocity such as used to be the case in 19th century shoreditch and southwark’ (london, 1994, p. 475). he cited notting hill as a contemporary example of the 'decent reciprocity' that he considered crucial to london's character as a city of opposites and contradictions. but london mutates so fast that it leaves any historian gasping for breath. when i arrived in 1996, the warehouse we lived and worked in had been almost empty for a decade. a bakers to our left, a research chemist, a photographer, graphic designers opposite, and jezza beside us; we were free and invisible, a new class of people, clever, vulgar, educated proles and effete outsiders, artist wannabes and dreamers. our parent's generation had fled inner city squalor, but we found refuge in it. our loft was so cold that the pub became our living room. good pubs are hardly there, like a vortex in the conscious eye of the city, a backwater where you can regain your strength, and the barley mow became a refuge from the bricklayers arms - white west london dreads, 'record bag lost, contact tristan', etc. - a bolt-hole for all at scp, and the rest of us in the design industry, sick to our back teeth with the ubiquitous diesel-at-the-weekend vibes. walking in to a rudely white-painted barley mow last month, 'vot kunt', claudia demanded in her best dresden scouse, 'did zis?' 'art', the professional philosopher simon critchely claims, 'is very little, almost nothing.' and the art of pub design is an exemplary lesson in not fucking something up. keep the lighting low to concentrate attention on the beer and on your companions. the fruity will jingle like blackpool in this gloom and boozers will appear tragic and interesting, the pool table becomes an altar, and everybody thinks they look good. with the addition of the beer goggles, they usually do.

the nice little earner opposite our warehouse on oarsman road had what claimed to be half of arthur dayley’s jaguar, clamped to the wall above the bar. reeling from the effects of the last recession, the landlady marie nervously welcomed us in 1996 as portents of doom, ‘dis ent islington - wot ever you bin told - its de east end wot starts ere', she reminded us as two chinese bakers took to each other with pool cues. two years later, the earner was bought by a city lawyer and my first job was to design his new offices in clerkenwell. things began to get even weirder. after an article in tattler, charlie wright’s international bar on pitfield street became briefly fashionable. it has since been passed over by the beautiful and thankfully remains the same; but one evening after the earner, we were outraged to discover a line of beautiful posh women queuing outside charlie wright's. and i remember thinking, what on earth are you lot doing here? and then the influx began, and once again shoreditch reassumed its ambivalent character. nostalgia and regret become a retrospective manifesto disguising sentiment as rebellion. instead, perhaps psycho-geography can work in reverse as psycho-history: hoxton was always heading this way, falling back into bad habits, flattering the thieves and fooling the weak.
- patrick lynch

monday 12th april
gardening day whilst lea did the kitchen. parent stuff, nearly. and, separately: yeah, talk. later :trust me, they're from big families. more calories than coka-cola.

sunday 11th april
broken baja, stroppy me.

saturday 10th april
camden for spare parts and leaving turines in spare parts shops.

friday 9th april
a stroll around lincoln deleted my assumptions of it being a grimey northern town, helped obviously by the gorgeous weather. summer's coming and the days feeling longer.



thursday 8th april
an hour to do 3 miles is exactly what you don't need after the month of work i've had. but it's the night before a double-backed bank holiday and we're on the a1 so who am i trying to kid?

wednesday 7th april
the view from my seat at work has been interesting lately. i'm watching scaffolding going up and secretly wished i'd timelapsed them on the webcam. i build stuff on a screen, they build stuff in the air.



tuesday 6th april
quiet night. so this.

okay, catch up time. last month was all of this: six ten and one sixteen second animations for sony's e3 show in california in order. arena, arena, battle, battle, quest, quest, rhythm, adrenalin, lifestyle. (play not included) and before that a 30 second tv spot for kerrang and two of the one for the box.

monday 5th april
rainbow! rainbow! rainbow! i cried as we turned into sainsbury's. i can feel the happiness coming bac as this chunk of work nears the deadline. soon it will be done and i shall wonder what to do for a while.


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