write this down...

So, this happened.

It's on the weaker side of my body, on the leg that's lost about 10-15% muscle, just above the ankle that is losing flexibility.  I wanted a permanent reminder of what's possible.

There might come a time when I can't run at all, never mind run a marathon... but I hope that even if that happens, I can still find some inspiration from this quotation.

You'll notice that it's all properly punctuated.  I made the tattooist stop after he'd started just to do a final double-check that everything was right and proper.  26.2 might be forever, but so is a tattoo... so best to get it right, eh?

run run run run run run run away....

I'll just leave this here, shall I?

This is C's Christmas present.  It took a little while to get everything organised, but we eventually had the photo-shoot on Easter Sunday afternoon, an hour or so after we had completed a 22-mile run (which I hope might explain why my leap might look slightly arthritic, if not why my growl looks slightly apologetic, certainly in comparison with my wife's mighty battle cry....)

Nottingham artist, Video Mat AKA White Dolemite has done an absolutely bang-up job with this, I'm sure you'll agree.  The Leftlion kickstarter was worth investing in anyway to help a great magazine go monthly, but I think that this perk was a real winner - it's completely unique.  When we get the print, it will certainly be getting properly framed and then taking pride of place in our living room.  Possibly scaring away prospective burglars.   She does, after all, now have swords in the house.

Just look at that face....would you take the chance?  Would you?  I wouldn't.  In fact, you'll notice how I'm right behind her.  Very dangerous.  You go first.

life is a cabaret....

As I might have mentioned before, I'm a proud patron of a wonderful burlesque cabaret show in Soho.  Produced by a dear friend of mine, Cabaret Roulette usually takes place once a month on a Wednesday night in the middle of Soho.  As a result, it's not very often that I can make it down to watch a show as it simply isn't practical.... but we made it down for the first birthday celebration last November, and on Wednesday last week, I was there to watch the second birthday show, featuring highlights from the show's second season.

It was brilliant.  Partly it is brilliant because it features some incredible talent who really seem to have their creative appetites whetted by a format that forces them to create something new specifically for the show with only a couple of months notice.  Mostly though, I think it is brilliant because I love seeing my friend totally in her element and with all these fantastically talented people buzzing around her in a show that she created and has made work.  I'm so proud of her.

You get all sorts of acts here: this month we had a mime, a singer of comic songs (and you can listen to Laurence Owen's brilliant take on the empowerment of Disney's women here, and you really should), a clown, performance dance and  - of course - a variety of burlesque acts, obviously including some classic nipple tassel swirling.

Frankly, what better way to spend a midweek evening?

[more photos from the night are here....by Rhinoa's Photography]

Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure that most of those barmen are gay... not that you'd know it from their faces there.  She hasn't even started pouring the carton of orange juice over herself yet, either.....

It's a great show, and I'm so proud to have a tiny role in making it happen.

lovely day...

This piece of graffiti appeared in an underpass on my route to work a couple of weeks ago.  Nottingham Council have a zero tolerance for this sort of thing, so I imagine that it will be painted over before too long, just as they painted over the mural of the Bender-like robot that was in the same underpass a few months ago.

It seems a bit of a shame, to be honest.  I cycle past this twice a day, and every single time it makes me smile.

It's the kiss that makes it, but the whole thing has a pleasing symmetry to go with its cheerful message.

This clearly isn't a spontaneous bit of vandalism; this involved planning, care and no little skill.  There are apparently other versions of this dotted elsewhere around the city.

That makes me happy.

....but, you know, go ahead and paint it over, Nottingham Council.  Those concrete fly-overs are much better in their natural shade of grey.

This is still my favourite piece of Nottingham graffiti though... from a bridge just around the corner from that underpass, from a couple of years ago.

Painting over that was just a crime.

but it's still, still life....

Do you remember back in the day when the purpose of a weblog was to share links to other interesting websites?  Yeah?  Well, tonight we're going to go old school.  So let's get the atmosphere all 2004: how about a playlist?  "Milkshake" by Kelis, "Hey Ya!" by Outkast, "These Words" by Natasha Bedingfield, maybe? "Mad World" by Gary Jules? "All This Time" by Michelle MacManus? "F*ck It (I Don't Want You Back)" by Eamon?

Enough?  Yeah.  Probably.

I bought my first iPod sometime around here and downloaded my first song too.  Good times.

Anyway.  Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.  Where are those links?

The first is to the story of a self-proclaimed ‘anarchist philatelist', Angus McDonagh. Angus is a 64 year old man from Somerset who started making his own stamps, all featuring his own image and a number of made up currencies, and then using them to send letter as far afield as Australia.  Apparently, after sending more than 100 letters using these stamps, only one was ever returned as not being legal (which seems astonishing when you look at some of the rather outlandish designs).  He says that he used to send cheques to the Royal Mail to compensate them for lost revenue, but they were never cashed.  Don't look too far down into the comments (and I deliberately ignored the link to the Daily Mail story on the subject)... you don't have to get too far before the first rather self-important "but other people are having to pay for this man's stupidity" remarks.  Better to instead focus on the off-beam creativity that led to the idea in the first place.  You can buy a book that documents all of the stamps, if you like.

The second story is, in its own way, even more remarkable.  This is the story of the strange old man from Kyjov in the Czech Republic who made his own cameras out of cardboard tubes, dressmaker's elastic and lenses he had ground himself from plastic discs using toothpaste.

Apparently, he would wander around his hometown taking mostly surreptitious pictures of women.  He was a well known figure about town, and perhaps because of his tramp-like appearance and the cobbled together nature of his equipment, no one really took him seriously and lots of people humoured him as he pointed his cardboard tubes at them to 'take a picture'.  Turns out he was quite good.

In a way his pictures are a bit creepy: lots are taken of women at the local bathing pool, some taken through a wire fence and many with their subject presumably completely unaware.  Some of the photos are extraordinary, though, and Miroslav Tichý has won awards and been exhibited in places like Zurich, Seville and Paris. The photos are blotched and gritty from dust in the camera and imperfections in the developing process, but they are also very striking.

Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichý's photographs in 2006, describes them thus:

"They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realize that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichy managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichy but his photographs are different. A woman's tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious"

Tichý himself described his primitive methods more simply: "First of all, you have to have a bad camera", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."

Fascinating.

Anyway.  As you were.

what are we doing here if romance isn't dead?

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly".
—Banksy

As I walked to work after dropping my car off at the garage the other day, I saw some graffiti on the subway that took me underneath the Clifton flyover.  I quite like graffiti.  It can be childish, poorly spelt and with apostrophes missing all over the place.... of course it can.   But done well, it can be witty, defiant and an all-round enhancement to otherwise oppressive and downright ugly functional concrete architecture.

The message above is on a tunnel underneath the ringroad from one industrial estate to another.  I don't know how well-travelled it is, but there isn't anything residential for miles around.  Probably the biggest source of pedestrian traffic through here are the people on their way to the five-a-side football pitches.  I don't wish to cast any aspersions, but I rather fear that the average clientele of Powerleague aren't all that fussed by the politics of over-population.

Still.  I like it.  It's well drawn and it's got a message.  It's maybe not the best way to bring about a radical change in the global population, but it's better than staring at a concrete wall.

This particular bridge has form: this was up here in 2006.

Graffiti that references both Juvenal ('Quis custodiet ipsos custodes') and Alan Moore?  What's not to like about that?  Am I dreaming a similarity in the handwriting there?

My favourite piece of graffiti here was quite different through:

That's funny, for sure - especially as it must have been seen by thousands and thousands of rush-hour commuters in their cars - but it's also a beautifully drawn momento mori; time's winged chariot is drawing near... why shouldn't his chariot be a tricycle?

The council paints this stuff over.  Well, I suppose they must prefer beige paint over concrete to graffiti of any kind, no matter how interesting.  Now, I'm no art critic, but..... this isn't just brainless tagging, is it?  But what do I know?  Maybe the council have their own in-house Brian Sewell to pass judgement on each according to their own merits?  Well, you can see what they're thinking: one day someone will tag one of these characterless concrete carbuncles and totally ruin it.

graffiti bridge.....

My normal route to work involves taking an exit off the big Nottingham ring road and driving down to a complicated looking roundabout underneath the Dunkirk flyover. Well, it's not really very complicated, but it has a lot of roads sweeping away to various places above it on towering concrete pillars, and it looked so forbidding on a map that when I first moved to Nottingham I actually lived on the other side of town purely to avoid having to drive around it. Anyway, as soon as I released that it wasn't so bad really, I soon moved to the nicer side of town and decided it was probably best never to mention this marvellous piece of decision making to anyone. So keep it to yourselves, eh?

Anyway, as I trundled down the sliproad towards the roundabout and the start of my Monday morning in the office, I saw something interesting on the pillar directly in front of me at the traffic lights: some graffiti....



We've had people tagging down here before (this, for example), and if you look at that pillar carefully, you can see that the council have made it their business to put some sort of special paint on the bottom couple of metres so as to better deter vandals. It's been there unchallenged for a couple of years, but it looks as though it's only now that someone has decided to put this magic paint to the test.

It doesn't look as though it's up to the task. Even better, though, we look to have gained a quality piece of work too:



I suppose that the person who did this was actually committing a crime, but you can't tell me that this hasn't enhanced this dingy, damp, concrete filled piece of roadway. If Banksy has achieved anything, it's surely been to show to the world that street art like this can be so much more than just mindless vandalism.

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly".
—Banksy

Banksy's work is widely celebrated, of course: it's funny, it's playful and it's also often bitingly satirical. Go and have a look at some of the stuff that Banksy painted in New Orleans during his recent trip there... there are some pretty powerful statements in there. He might not like to be called one, but he's a proper artist.

This isn't a Banksy, although it looks to be very much from the Banksy school of stencil art (as much as I know anything about it). I really like it, and I rushed to get a photo of it before the council come and efficiently (but humourlessly) paint over it. It's funny -- Death on a tricycle, what's not to like? -- but it's also as true a momento mori as you are likely to see, and it reminds me of "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell. In the poem, Marvell hails the beauty of his love and tries to convince her that she should go to bed with him because life is short and death is never very far away. "Had we but world enough, and time," he says, then he would be more than happy to spend an eternity cataloguing her many virtues,

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity".

So, he concludes, in what must be one of the most optimistic chat-up lines of all time, you should sleep with me immediately, just in case you should die before you get round to it:

"Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run".

Or, to paraphrase: "Get your knickers off, love, and Carpe Diem"

Metaphysical poetry on a Monday. Too much.....?

Well, you can't outrun death, so you might as well enjoy the life you have.

It made me smile, anyway, and I need all the smiles I can get on a Monday morning.