thursday 31st january
...yadda yadda yadda...

wednesday 30th january
getting a bit bored of january now. i need more time, which probably means more light. it's all so dark and grey and windy and soaking. i want spring to come, for people to get fruity, to drive home without headlights or windscreen wipers. it's all too mundane and depressing.

tuesday 29th january
i never remember dreams, only a thing or an image or a song word or something and today i faintly recall a rune. doughnut on top of a cross was my project today in lightwave. eight hours making a virtual model of some spiritual object that stands for... whatever; i don't know. but now i'm curious.



monday 28th january
got in to work, sat down with large latte and toasted emmental cheese croissant, opened outlook, collected mail consisting of a stag event question and an invite to say goodbye to brad. looks like we're not out of the woods yet. i can't help thinking about how much change is happening around me to friends and family. is everyone settling down or starting up? preferably the former and i hope they'd be quick about it. all this movement is upheaval to me, too, and i feel buffeted and tired.

sunday 27th january
i tell you, if anyone does that arm-guage ymca thing around me again there'll be bruises.



saturday 26th january
well, what can i say? probably more passion, laughs nerves and devotion than i have ever seen in one day before. the highlights being paul admitting he's almost in tears just moments before his bride arrived, jen looking like a princess in her royal blue fairytale cape, the vicar who should have been on the fast show, the sweepstake on the length of the best man's speech, confetti disappearing in the swirling gale blowing outside, driving the mg, five people congratulating me on the reading,"jennifer... you, i love," when the kindling reference hit me, the organiser of the sweepstake winning 53 quid, mambo no.5 with becky and the "two honks for lizzie!" horn. i mean really, need i say more? yeah, nice one, folks!



friday 25th january
"all right, rick, it's mark. where are you?"
"hiya. just coming into carlisle. be there in fifteen minutes -"
"me too."
"wha - are you on the same train? why didn't you say?"
"aah, i had to get my head down and work on my reading for tomorrow. i'm done now, so where are you?"
"about two carriages up from the buffet."
"right, see you on the platform."



that's how peejay and jen's wedding weekend started for me. too worried to be sad today, and after a shocking but understandably early retirement of the best man and the fifteen year old's father waiting to collect here at god knows what time of the morning. jen said "'bye! see you tomorrow" after kissing her fiancé for the last time. a touching scene i caught heaven only knows how. timmy on good form and some of the most precious minutes spent with peejay and timmy ever. all that was missing was stu. at the end of the night, peej saw us to the door, i came back in and hugged him. when i spell-checked this the first alternative for peejay was 'piggery'!



thursday 24th january
the little prince, winnie the pooh, dr seuss, calvin and hobbes. comics on the web or research? this helped:



wednesday 23rd january
began to learn lightwave.

tuesday 22nd january
today's to do list:

send icons.
suit to dry cleaners,
wash clothes,
recharge minidisc player,
recharge camera batteries,
write reading,
get hair cut,
return dvds,
design wedding invites,
buy card, shaving foam, toothpaste, deodorant,
get dinner on.

monday 21st january



sunday 20th january
today i wrote the reading i shall give next saturday at paul and jen's wedding, wrote to my grandparents and designed some wedding invitations for my sister. now i'm doing this. two weddings, a letter and a website. does anyone else do their homework on sunday night?

saturday 19th january
the garage down the road from us has a new tyre pump. it used to be this rusty old thing that was constantly out of order, which made having a puncture a real pain. but this new one - wow. just drive up to it, choose the pressure with the digital up-and-down buttons, push it on the valve and presto! if it's too low it pumps it up. then beeps. if it's too high it lets air out. then beeps. my god, we even have a tyre pump that beeps. things really are looking up. < sigh >

friday 18th january
the end of an era.
what made me sad: stu and lou, beans, toast and woogie leaving london. brad's visa arrived yesterday so he's definitely off to australia. i'm happy for them all, true, but nobody else leaves, okay? i have now officially had enough of saying goodbye to people i love. it feels like we're going to stop making good memories.
what cheered me up: funky playing guitar through down the phone to me. there are plenty left!



me with woogie. she loved every minute of it.

thursday 17th january
"i love it when you knock me up in the mornings, brad" and "wow! she's sexy. she looks just like a man!" were not a good start to the day but at least it was homorous.

soaked, visa, dinner, mortgages, moaning and observations with brad about affording property in london. we reckoned you probably have to be a white male vegetarian with a girlfriend or wife, 60k a year, no debts and a huge inheritance. and we weren't joking.

this morning we were in a traffic queue, two doors behind a silver mg with it's roof up. as we caterpillared forward slowly in no real rush to get to work we passed two policemen chatting on the side of the road. one of them spotted the drivers walked over and pulled the mg into a side road. out stepped two well dressed black guys, clearly city boys on their way to work. we were less than a five minutes from bank. they wore expensively tailored suits and were more than gracious as they searched every inch of his car, bags and boot. so i can't even afford to buy a flat in the city where two black guys are incapable of driving their sports car down the road without being searched. and now i'm wondering whether i even want to.

australia, anybody?

wednesday 16th january
move along now. nothing to see here.

tuesday 15th january
angry as hell today. the mood is right for high fidelity (the film) this evening and chips on the way as i'm writing this.

monday 14th january
catching worms and a trip to ealing. home with unfinished programming. grey needs to be fuller.

sunday 13th january
tricky. tricky-tricky-tricky tricky!(you see? another playlist cue...)

saturday 12th january
cleaning and tidying and general sorting-yourself-out-for-the-week stuff today, and if you remember the story on the ninth about this you'll now get understand what i mean:



friday 11th january
how was i today? i was feeling sad because two of the people i have lived with and around since ii came to london eleven years ago are leaving. stu and lou have bought a house in york, where he's from, and are taking beans and toast and woogie with them. as a result of thinking about missing them i turned up at their leaving drinks down and decided not to put a happy face on it and just explain why. i sat next to the fire and i talked and jen listened and she talked and i listened and after a while we laughed. the evening then turned to a mad, loud, rampant stroll down the king's road with food and laughs and antics. two of which being stu posing for the pissed-up london suit cliché and the now infamous louisiana hot sauce baby woman! i'm not joking, either - look:



thinking about putting a playlist of stuff on here too. maybe on the right?

thursday 10th january
as i lay in bed last night unsuccessfully trying to fall asleep (again) i was thinking about yesterday's entry and where it came from. it was made in an almost unconscious five minutes. we had a placement student, my 'austrian chum' (pronounced with an antoine-decaunnian accent) anja,who was learning flash actionscript. she created a beautiful set of jiggling rectangles which reminded me of something i drew a long time ago, when i was a b.a. student at the london college of printing. i was thinking about spatial relationships at the time and almost ten years later i've returned to it. i'm thinking of opening the investigation, this time on screen. anyway, here's where it all started, on watercolour paper would you believe:



after work b-boy and i visited the new snowdome in chatham, built in an ex-submarine workshop of all places. the initial excitement soon turned to utter hilarity when we saw that the slope was about as long as a lolly stick and the 'snow' looked like repurposed slush puppy. the changing rooms were a fenced-off area of concrete, the toilets were of the jesus-you-should- have-seen-them variety. we won't be going back and all the way home we were laughing our heads off, wondering what funky would say about it having been there during the afternoon. worst of all was the amount of dirt on lbc. probably the muckiest he's ever been...



that banksy is just bananas, ha ha.



wednesday 9th january


and again.

tuesday 8th january
it didn't get me yesterday but it sure as hell did today. boy was i late in to work!

monday 7th january
'start as you mean to go on,' my mother always said on my first day back at school.

thinking about it, there are lots of factors that contribute to today's resonance. yesterday afternoon, the train drivers, cheese, mostly though...

it all started yesterday in the small time between dropping steve off and my flatmate, paul, coming home. with only an hour to myself before work the next day i did what i do best to help me relax - i burnt a minidisc, track marked and labeled it. at the same time i formatted the lyrics for the cheese section, changing the wrong words, adding the quiet spoken bits. it's the album i've probably heard the most times so why it hadn't been done either on disc or on the web remains a mystery. you always know it's the first working monday of a new year as course the south western train drivers called a strike over nothing i know about. this is the reason why my entire journey to work was gridlocked. i didn't get out of second.

i only sing in the car when i'm happy; when i'm in a bad mood i whistle. (i don't know why. it's uncontrollable and involuntary.) on the way home, expecting the worst, traffic-wise, and still buzzing from actually doing something constructive with my day (organising trains for iffa and peejay's wedding, redesigning onedotzero's dvd slipcase and packaging, arranging mortgage meetings, buying cds and answering phones, etc,) instead of slobbing around in front of the tv or ps2 i slipped the disc in, reckoning i would still be in the car when as it jumped back to the start again. luckily i wasn't. as i left about a million people wedged on london bridge i flipped onto 'galaxy' for a while before 'fait accompli'.

by the time i was at oval it was loud. i was singing the individual words i learnt yesterday a little louder than the others, impressing myself with worthless knowledge, happy to be moving. i was home earlier than anticipated and - ironically - too soon. there was more singing to be done. the park, turn engine off, head unit out, lock on, get out, close door, open rear door, get bag, coat, hat, close door, press button, wait for light to fade, routine is second nature and i barely noticed doing it. the short walk to the flat was filled with the 'you'd better believe it' and 'hey hey' of blindfold which wobbled unchecked into the dreamy 'could you love me?' ending. i only remembered the woman who looked at me strangely after i passed her. as a memory.
but, you should have seen me - i was resonating my ass off!

sunday 6th january
mostly cleared up after last night. and this morning.

saturday 5th january
as we queued for our food we flipped through copies of 'hello!' and 'tv quick' placed perfectly for time-wasting as you inch forward. we soon got bored and started to secretly make fun of the guy in front's leather jacket. with it's amount of stickers and patches it looked more like a bad scrap book than something even remotely fashionable. the child in front of him was buying some yogurts but didn't have enough pocket money to pay for them. he went quiet. his cheeks turned red. leather jacket guy put them on his bill and the kid helped him pack his bags by way of thanking him. we felt sorry for the kid and guilty as hell for laughing at the scrapbook. when someone in london offers any kind of courtesy it's almost unheard of and shockingly pleasant.and there we were, laughing on the other side of our faces.

'...fifty. long left three. caution. jump. into hairpin right...' needless to say, we ignore 'caution' and see what we can do whilst i make sure my favourite clothes are ready to wear for work on monday.

friday 4th january
so why do north america and south america have 'america' in their names - i mean, there is no america in the latter, and canada is in the former. does anybody know or am i being stupid? these are the kind of thoughts i have whilst washing the dishes.

just about the only constructive thing i've done so far this year is fill the rice jar.

thursday 3rd january
saw two flats in holloway. both were skips. and it was absolutely freezing outside.

wednesday 2nd january
saw a flat today in crouch end that i very nearly bought. it had a lounge the size of a church, a study area set on a mezzanine level which was approachable by stepladder and an inset archway that would have been transformed into my bedouin camp. shame the kitchen was a bit small damnit.

tuesday 1st january
as the year flipped over we all breathed a sigh of relief. a new month means nothing and a new year should be no different. so why does it? the importance we infuse it with, the self-imposed pressure to have a good time and be happy and sociable just helps you feel better at midnight and more so when it's after. and just how glad am i that last year is over? very. although it means nothing, of course.

'i often forget how privileged i am to have a view like that from my kitchen window' realised al as he stood over the sink staring out at the fields behind his house all crunchy and frozen. i leant past him, craning my neck to get his perspective and couldn't help agreeing. i grabbed my camera to brave the cold. within a few minutes and without walking more than twenty yards i snapped the essence of winter in cambridgeshire.




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