When I was in Japan I went to the Studio Ghibli Museum just outside of Tokyo. Sadly pictures were not allowed inside, but I wrote about it in my zine of the trip. I highly recommend the museum, it’s magical. The bookshop was also stocked with Miyazaki’s own favourite books, as well as books related to the studio’s films. I didn’t buy anything, as they were all in Japanese, and it would take me forever to read anything, but I noted down a lot of less well-known books I saw in the shop to compile a reading list (helpfully the copyright tends to list the author’s names in roman text rather than try to make it fit katakana). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to write down the Japanese author’s names in most cases as reading unknown names written in kanji is very tricky. However Miyazaki made a list of classic children’s books (including a lot of the usual suspects like The Secret Garden) elsewhere which also includes some Japanese recommendations.
Moss is slow life
Here’s some photos of details of the Zen moss gardens of Kyoto.
Kyoto I
Here’s some photos of Kyoto. I have split the pictures up into several entries. You can see more photos from Kyoto and other cities in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote. While I was there I also met up with local zinester and researcher Kiyoshi Murakami (村上 潔), who kindly took me to some of his favourite places in the city:
Polly’s reading list
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, based on the folk tale Tam Lin and Eliot’s Four Quartets, is one of my all-time favourite books. The gifts of classic books that the protagonist Polly receives from Tom, the other main character, are an important part of the plot, but not listed anywhere in the novel. I made this reading list of the books for the zine of essays about Diana Wynne Jones that I made.
All Neon Like
Here’s a selection of instagram photos I took in Tokyo. I felt I was giving it short shrift only having one post with a few photos. You can see more in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote.
Tokyo
I took a lot of photos in Japan, and it’s taken me a while to sort through them. I’ll be spreading out the posts over this week to avoid having one giant pile of photos at once. I wrote a zine (available here) about the trip to Japan as well, so I’ll save blog posts for the pictures (which you will be able to find under the Japan category).
These are from Tokyo. I didn’t actually take that many DSLR photos in Tokyo, mostly film and phone photos. You can see the phone pictures on my Instagram account, with all of the neon skyscrapers you’d expect from Tokyo. The gate above is in Taito, an area further out of town where we stayed.
The Best of Fanzine Ynfytyn 1-13
I’ve been doing my zine for around 10 years now. I’ve got a lot of back issues that are no longer in print for various reasons. I didn’t want to reprint the whole issues, but it seemed a shame to have them completely languishing in a folder, so I’ve made a compilation issue with articles from the first 13 issues. 40 pages, 30 articles, 12000 words for £3.50
Hello again
So I haven’t updated here for over a month, and updates have been thin on the ground all year. That’s mainly because I spent most of January and February working in Austria, most of March in Japan without a computer, and have been busy since I returned just over a week ago.
Zines! Zines! Zines!
I return to the UK from Austria for just under a week this weekend, so I’ve re-opened my online shop for zine orders until Tuesday the 7th of March. All orders will be sent out by Weds the 8th of March. The shop then closes again while I’m in Japan, until further notice, so this is your chance. All prices include UK postage. International postage is extra, and automatically calculated by weight.
This Means Nothing To Me
I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teaching work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of planning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for vegetarians) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while political turmoil with dire consequences for many vulnerable people goes on around the world.
Friar hermit stumbles over
I’m in Brno in the Czech Republic for a week before starting work in Austria next week. The Czech Republic is having a much colder winter than usual, with heavy snow. Yesterday we went down to Brno Resevoir, which had unusually frozen over.
Gute Reise
On Thursday I go off to spend 6 weeks in Central Europe. One week in Brno in the Czech Republic, then five weeks in various places in Austria teaching. Then in March, I’m off to Japan for two weeks.
So I will closing the shop from 3pm GMT on Weds the 18th of Jan. If you want zines or ribbons or badges, this is your last chance until April.
Keep it clean
I wouldn’t say I was particularly tidy, but I do like to keep my living environment clean. I spent a few years working in restaurants when I was younger, and a big part of the job was keeping the restaurant and bar as clean and pleasant as possible. Especially at the end of the night, you can’t go home until everything is spotless, so you get used to cleaning things as efficiently as possible, and in a way that makes sure it all looks shiny as well as being hygienic. This has also been useful in making not-so-nice rented places in London a lot more pleasant to live in. (It has also given me the side-effect of finding housework to be an effective hangover cure)
I’ve come to realise lately, a surprising number of people find housework difficult and turn out not to know things about laundry, unblocking drains etc that I thought everyone knew. It still seems a bit patronising for me to write these tips (but also quite militant in my aversion to dirty tea towels and unrinsed washing up), because they’re obvious to me, but I know now they’re not obvious to a lot of people, and New Year seems an appropriate time to write them.
2016 in review
I spent a low-stress and low-key Christmas with my friend Vicky up in Manchester, and have returned to Kent over the New Year to see hometown friends. I’ll be in the UK for a few more weeks (including my birthday), then heading off to Austria for 5 weeks for work, then a further 2 weeks in Japan, meaning I’ll be abroad until April. A variety of factors has meant that I’ve not worked full-time in months, and to be honest I’m itching to go back to work and being busy all the time.
It’s fair (and easy) to say that 2016 was not a good year for me. And the consensus is that it was also a terrible year politically, that has seen fascism and far-right politics on the ascendant. Here is a brief list of my positives and negatives for the year.
I’m going to Japan
This March I’m going to Japan for two weeks with my friend Vicky (also of Pen Fight zine distro), co-inciding with her 30th birthday.
A little while ago, I won a competition I’d entered at a food fair run by Japan Centre food halls.The top prize was two flights to Osaka courtesy of Air France KLM, five nights stay at the Hyatt hotel in Kyoto (way, way out of my normal budget), and a free tour of the Gekkeikan Sake Brewery. The runners up got free sake. I’ve entered this kind of competition before, but only ever won the free booze at best, so I was astonished to hear that I was the winner, and didn’t quite believe it was real until the whole trip was firmly booked yesterday. So a big thank you to Kim at Japan Centre (and also for the delicious free lunch at the company’s restaurant when I collected the prize).
Defeating the To Read pile
I’ve spent most of this afternoon sorting out my books, and making a pile of the unread ones. It turns out I have 84 unread books. Over the next six weeks it looks like I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands, unless a new job or a large chunk of money magically presents itself, so I’ll try to get through a good chunk of these.
Here is a list of the books, arranged alphabetically by author:
Fanzine Ynfytyn 24
I’ve got a new zine out. This one’s probably only of interest to those with a uterus. About getting a Mirena coil when you already have endocrine/autoimmune problems and have to take Prednisone.
Colouring Book
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been drawing artwork for a colouring book zine, and here it is. It’s an A5 colouring book with 15 different images to colour and comes with a free packet of crayons. Postage is free within the UK, and calculated by weight for the rest of the world.
Well that was depressing
So Donald Trump just about won the US election, continuing the exhausting and depressing downwards trajectory of 2016, and the continual rise of the far right to power. Brexit and the election of Trump show how good the Right are at times of economic hardship in convincing people their problems are caused by foreigners and the Other, rather than that they’re living in a system designd to make the rich become richer, and keep a permanent pool of people desperate for work to drive down wages and conditions. Saying “oh it won’t make much difference” after events like Brexit or Trump winning is something you can only say if you and everyone you know and care about don’t fall under the categories of people such as POC, Muslims, women, poor people or immigrants whose lives are about to become so much more difficult. People always think “oh that doesn’t mean my friend/wife/neighbour/workmate, they’re talking about those weird threatening strangers, not those nice people I know”. It does mean those nice people you know.
Brown paper packages tied up with string
I’ve also coloured a few of the colouring book pages in Photoshop, mostly for my own amusement.
To create this effect of being printed on brown paper:
Charity shop finds
I haven’t found as many good charity shop items lately as over the summer, but there’s been the odd few things. I got this vase for £2, which I’ve planted an aloe vera in, for my own plant version of Sideshow Bob.
Triffids in search of a new home
I’ve got a large number of cacti and succulents, some of which I’ve had for years (and have their own offshoot children growing in separate pots now). By the end of the summer, some of them were looking a bit sad, and were in serious need of repotting. I collected a load of Hornsea ware and other vintage pottery for £1-3 a time over the summer, and then had a big repotting session outside, just before the weather started turning cold.
Colour me in
Lately I’ve been drawing much more, and writing a lot less. I’ve been preparing artwork for a colouring book, which I need to get finished by the 12th of November, to have ready in print for the Rose Tinted Zine Spectacular in Brighton on the 19th of November. So there’s been a lot of 8 hour drawing sessions and high levels of caffeine consumption.
A bit part in your life.
So it’s October now. The last few weeks I’ve been bouncing back and forth between Kent and Sussex. Job-hunting is boring and tedious, and has pushed back moving house. All my things are packed up in boxes, ready to go, but the going isn’t happening yet. I’ve also had tonisilitis for the last week, which is finally clearing up. I’ve got too many of my own projects I need to finish. So not the most fun of times, but hopefully it won’t drag on forever.
Here’s some interesting odds and ends:
Torbole
After Malcesine, Limone sul Garda and Riva del Garda, I present to you Torbole. I went to Torbole just because the boat from Riva del Garda to Malcesine stopped there along the way, and I’d never been there before. It was a weird little place. Like Riva, it used to be in Austria until 1918. Everyone except the staff of the restaurants seemed to be German, and really into intensely staring at you in the street. The light and the way the water looked along the harbour front was beautiful though, and I spent most of the hour before the boat back sitting on a bench soaking it in. I don’t think this is a real place, I think it’s a screen from one of those new-age computer games from the 90s like Myst.
The risograph lives again (after a fashion)
About five years ago I did two risograph prints, one based on Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock, and the other on Euripides’ Bacchae. Each print was an edition of 50, and I sold all of them a long a time ago (except for a couple of copies I kept for myself). Now I have a giclée printer though, I have resurrected them as a new edition. This time they’re printed on Canson Infinity rag museum paper, which is an acid free and archival watercolour paper for fine art digital printing.
Riva del Garda
So far I’ve shown you Malcesine and Limone sul Garda. I also took the boat to Riva del Garda at the northern end of the lake (which is also in a different province- Trentino). It was raining all day, so I figured I might as well go to the colder, rainy end of the lake and visit the museum, and save the outdoorsy stuff on the southern end like archaeological sites for a sunny day.
Limone sul Garda
Now I’m heading over to Limone sul Garda on the other side of the lake. I didn’t spend much money while I was in Italy, but a hefty chunk of the (tiny) budget went on ferry tickets. Boats constantly criss-cross the lake to all the towns, and it’s the most scenic way to see the area. If you’re in a hurry, you can take the bus on land, but I was on holiday, so by definition, not in a hurry.
Fanzine Ynfytyn 26
This one is about the experience of growing up holidaying in a caravan at French campsites. A typical holiday for British people, but probably weird and exotic for those from further away. Available for £2 from my shop (includes UK postage- international extra)
Fanzine Ynfytyn 23.5
I have two new zines available this month. This is a mini zine I made for the 24 hour zine project, which runs every July. You have to write and layout 24 pages within 24 hours. No pre-preparation is allowed. It’s a fun challenge. Available from my shop for £1 (including UK postage).
Tuesday the 13th
No posts for a week. I stayed with my dad for most of last week to go to a family wedding, took my laptop with me to do some work while I was there, but then stupidly forgot to bring the power cord with me. Here’s a relaxing video. I actually really don’t enjoy those “relaxing” videos of people whispering or crinkling things, they don’t relax me at all (and some of them are definitely aiming more at “attractive woman pays attention to you” than soothing sounds), but I like this one. Best enjoyed with headphones.
I’ve got it on, your favorite tee, it never looked as good on you as it looks on me
Talking of 90s revival, I realised that the clothes I was wearing yesterday were something I could easily have been wearing 20 years ago. This isn’t the actual shirt I had as a teenager (that one, like all of them, inexplicably had a German flag on the arm), but it’s pretty much the same. I got this one from an army surplus store at some point in my 20s for £4, but by mistake they gave me two, so it essentially cost me £2. I recently saw some identical shirts in Topshop for about £40. Sometimes it pays to be a loser who never throws anything away. Until about five years ago I actually did have a top I’d been wearing since the early 90s. It was a burgundy and black ribbed thing that seemed to be made of near-indestructible material.
Malcesine, Lago di Garda
At the end of May I went on a last-minute trip to Italy by myself. I had given up my tenancy in London, because I was fed up of paying a small fortune to a landlord who was unwilling to fix the serious leak in the ceiling that was probably going to bring the plaster down sometime soon, and a relative asked me to house-sit. The house-sitting date then changed, but it turned out to be cheaper for me to visit friends in Yorkshire, and then go on holiday for a week than it was to extend my tenancy, which shows how ridiculous the prices are in London now. As it was a last minute thing, I had to go on my own. I don’t mind travelling solo though, I used to do it regularly for work, and travelling alone is better than going on holiday with someone who doesn’t want to do any of the same things as you. (In my case, wandering aimlessly for hours and hours, taking hundreds of photographs and eating a lot). I also got to re-read The Name of the Rose in peace.
Forgotten late 90s Indie Pop
A little while ago, there was a thing on Twitter where people used the #indieamnesty tag to tell funny or embarrassing stories about their involvement with the whole Landfill Indie and Nu Rave thing in the mid 2000s (there’s also a surprisingly intelligent and self-perceptive interview with Johnny Borrell (!!) here). As the Guardian article I’ve linked to said, “Indie amnesty brings together thousands of relatively banal anecdotes about unglamorous people doing slightly idiotic things into something quite majestic” and most of the people were writing about being foolish and easily impressed in their teenage years.
Bienvenue à Lassay-les-Châteaux
My mother lives in a small town in Northern France called Lassay-les-Châteaux. For a few years she’s had a holiday caravan in a park nearby, and at Christmas she bought a house in the town. The English version of wikipedia has practically nothing to say about Lassay-les-Châteaux other than showing photos of two of the three local castles- one in the town centre, the other two just outside. (The town’s name also sounds like it means “leave the castles” in French). The French entry doesn’t tell you much more, except that a lot of people were guillotined there in the Revolution, the local mayor doesn’t belong to a political party (after a long line of right-wingers), and that Victor Hugo visited once. It’s just not a place where things happen. If you want the quiet life, you can find it in Lassay.
Vegan Nanaimo Bars
I was watching a BBC series recently about the history of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and it gave me a hankering for Nanaimo bars. I used to have a co-worker from Manitoba, who would make this typical Canadian treat from time to time, and bring it in. Those were good work days. It’s something in between a millionaire’s shortbread and a cheesecake, requires no baking, and is totally delicious. As well as the standard vanilla filling, mint or coffee variations are also common.
Godless heathenry
The next issue of Being Editors will be about C.S.Lewis and Phillip Pullman. As a sneak preview, and to give contributors an idea of what my own religious (or more to the point, non-religious) background is, here is the article I wrote which leads in to another about why That Hideous Strength is a guilty pleasure- if you’d like to contribute, find out more here
That Hideous Strength has always been a weird guilty pleasure. I’m not a Christian, never have been, and didn’t grow up in a religious environment. People enjoy the Narnia books because they’re good children’s books and written with charm and wit, and they don’t Jesus you too hard (except for the last one). That Hideous Strength is nothing like that, the plot is weirdly cobbled together, and it’s full of railing against every single one of C.S.Lewis’ personal bugbears as a sexist old Christian university don of the 1950s, and he doesn’t bother to hide it. The relentless sexism, homophobia and evangelising makes me want to throw the book against the wall as the godless hell-bound pinko lefty I am, but it’s just so gleefully bizarre that I actually quite enjoy it and have re-read it countless times.
Low stress travel on the cheap
I love to travel, but I don’t have much money. Although long-haul flights and luxury holidays are out of my reach at the moment I’ve managed to see a fair bit of the world for not very much, and perhaps my budget limitations have meant that I’ve seen some interesting places I might have otherwise missed out on.
I find online budget travel tips not that great though. They seem to swing from “save money by only eating ityereal bars and sleeping on trains on your trip” to “cram in thirty museums in one day with this special ticket” to “get this special Air Miles credit card only available in Florida, and book your flights at 3am on Thursdays Alaska time”. I want to eat nice food from the cuisine of the country in question; sleep in a clean, safe and comfortable hotel room in a convenient location; and get a chance to explore and see things properly, not treating sights like a tick list to complete as quickly as possible. I don’t want to be cold, hungry, exhausted, or put myself in danger; this is supposed to be fun. I just don’t have a lot of money to spend.
Patchwork quilt- a work in progress
For the past six months I have been hand-sewing a new patchwork quilt for my bed to replace the worn out one my nan made for me when I was a teenager. I’m still no-where near finished, but I’ve done the bulk of the work. These photos are from my Instagram account over the past few months, so they’re not as sharp as if I’d taken DSLR photos of the work.
Recent charity shop finds
The good thing about spending the summer in a small town full of old people is that there are a lot of charity shops and jumble sales, they often have good stock, don’t overprice and there aren’t a lot of other people looking for the same things as me (which is more likely to happen in a big city).
Mont St Michel
I went to Mont St Michel last week for the first time in years. It’s a medieval abbey on an island on the border between Normandy and Brittany, about an hour’s drive from my mum’s house in France. We went there a few times when I was a kid, and the last time I was there was in the late 90s on a school trip. It has dramatically changed since then.
There was something a bit seedy and cynical about the place in the 90s despite the spectacular town itself. Buses and cars drove over the causeway to the island, and parked in a decrepit carpark on the shore, which had a tendency to flood. As you made your way up through the snaking medieval street to the abbey at the top of the peak, there were endless shops selling cheap replica hunting knives, saucy postcards and boxes of firecrackers. It must have been a nightmare for teachers supervising school groups.
Microbe et Gasoil
I saw this recent Michel Gondry the other day. The Science of Sleep is one of my favourite films. Microbe et Gasoil is a lot more naturalistic than a lot of his other films, but it still has a lot of the same little touches. Two misfit 14 year old boys decide to build their own car. When it turns out to not be road legal, they turn it into a shed on wheels and go on a very slow road-trip round rural France, in the spirit of a Jacques Tati film. Lots of fun.
This must be the place
The past few weeks haven’t really given me time for blogging. I’ve been helping with house-clearances, writing a proposal for some freelance work I really wanted but didn’t get, and undergoing major dental work. I now have the next 10 weeks house-sitting in a small town at least an hour’s travel from anyone I know.
Should a word have two meanings?
My three top new albums this year have all been by female solo artists, two of whom are Welsh, Cate le Bon’s Crab Day, Gwenno’s Y Dydd Olaf (the Last Day) and Artangels by Grimes. Crab Day is well worth checking out, combining influences from spooky 70s folk, Fleetwood Mac and Devo.
Where I’ve been
I haven’t written here for a while. Life has been very busy, and apart from a holiday to Italy, generally stressful and a little depressing, and I’ve very rarely had access to the internet other than on my phone, which doesn’t encourage updating a blog (although I’ve got lots of things I’d like to put on here). On a personal level, I moved out of London at the end of April. I was supposed to go down to Sussex to take care of my mum’s new flat until the Autumn. She inherited some money before Christmas, and moved house and bought a holiday cottage in France with it. The plan was she’d have some things done to the new flat and then spend the whole summer in France sorting out the holiday cottage how she wanted. “Some things” turned into “rip out all the electrics because they turned out to be illegal and unsafe, have all the walls replastered and replace the kitchen and bathroom”. Coupled with a builder with a very elastic sense of time, it’s only just being finished at the end of this week. That means I’ve been living out of a suitcase since April. I’ve been to Italy and Sheffield in that time (very nice), visited relatives (very stressful) and spent a very claustrophobic two weeks in a caravan in France with my mum where we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything because there was a fuel strike and then floods (I didn’t murder her).
Two new zines
I’ve got two new zines out- Fanzine Ynfytyn 23 & 25 (21 and 24 are still in the works). If you’re new to my zine, and are curious about the name, the explanation is here. Both zines are £2 including UK postage (international postage extra), available here.
Roll up, roll up
I’ve been very busy this week. On Wednesday I moved all my stuff out of London and into storage until the end of May, and visited my dad, then took the train up to Sheffield to see friends and table at the Sheffield Zine Fest. I had a great time, but I was exhausted and fell asleep at 7pm on Saturday! I’m going back to Yorkshire this weekend for a friend’s wedding, and then Italy the following week (ridiculously, it was cheaper to go on holiday to Lake Garda, hardly the cheapest region of Italy, than it was to extend my tenancy a week in London. Let that one sink in… ). When I come back towards the end of May, I’ll then go to Sussex to house-sit for the summer.
Here I am.
My life has been both turbulent and boring at the same time lately, and I haven’t been writing here, as I haven’t had the energy. I have been suffering with health problems, dealing with family illness, and trying to keep my head above water in a London that is increasingly unaffordable and inhospitable. (And to make things even worse, this weekend a hometown friend died at a horribly young age. RIP Louise).
Every morning there are mountains to climb
I haven’t posted here for nearly a month now. Family illness, upcoming major life changes, unsuccessful job hunts and other stressful things have taken up my time. I’ve had a lot of ideas for posts to make here, but neither the time nor energy to write them. Not a lot of fun happening round this way lately. I got to see Grimes play live though recently, which was something, at least. Here are some interesting links to share.
15 fun ways to learn languages better
15 fun and effective ways to brush up on your foreign language skills.
Øresund Rundt
My daytrip round the Øresund in Denmark and Sweden.
Frimaire, Nivose & Pluviose
I haven’t updated here in a while. I worked long hours throughout January and also moved house. I’ve also now officially deferred my course until next year. I missed too much of the school year when I was ill. I’ll have a little while off, and then look for some work to tide me over. In between all that I turned 31. Ancient, really. I’ll have a bit more time on my hands over the next couple of weeks, so I’d better make use of it. Here’s some links of interesting bits and bobs to tide you over.
New Years 2015
I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ve never been much of one for NYE, and my options for tonight included spending lots of money I don’t have, or spending at least an hour crossing town. As I’m not drinking at the moment, feeling kind of quiet and tired lately, and totally broke until Monday, I’m happy to stay in. My preferred NYE social options are either going to a pub within quick reach of home, or going to a friends house/hosting them anyway. The problem with London is that everyone is so spread out with long journey times or awkward journeys if you’re not going via central, and transport is often such a horrible experience on NYE that it can become a bit of a mission to do even that.
“Solar on the Rise- summer, summer, summer” (Winter 2015 playlist)
Book reviews: the birds and the bees and T.H. White
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve arranged the book reviews in groups loosely on the same theme. Here’s the first set. More to come.
H is for Hawk Helen Macdonald
The Bees Laline Paull
The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1) T.H White
The Witch in the Wood (The Once and Future King, #2) T.H White
The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3) T.H White
The Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King, #4) T.H White
The Book of Merlyn (The Once and Future King, #5) T.H White
Roll on 2016
I’m at my dad’s place for a couple of days over Christmas, I’m not feeling at all festive this year though, and it seems a lot of other people aren’t either. When I was growing up, they nearly always showed Watership Down on TV at some point over Christmas. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now it seems an odd and slightly depressing choice of film to repeat every year. So here’s the trailer as my half-hearted attempt at being festive.
Enjoy your Londons
In 2015 I’ve worked long hours in the day job (+ spending the spare time I did have in the summer helping to make DIY Space for London a reality) and not had much time for creative projects. It’s been good for my CV, and my material standard of living has improved, but I’ve not always had the time or energy to devote to doing much in the way of creative work or taking as much advantage of all the interesting things London has to offer as I could do or would have liked. I now have plenty of time and not much money until January, so now seems the time to try to figure out how to get a better work-life balance without going broke (always a challenge in an expensive city like London). It’s a month early to do New Year’s Resolutions, but why let a calendar stop me. I always feel much happier and focused with a to do list to work on. Here’s my goals.
That cat’s something I can’t explain
I don’t currently have any pets. Landlords in London who allow cats or dogs are a rare breed. My housemate has a tropical aquarium, and I don’t fancy getting hamsters or mice, and don’t have space for rats. So no pets other than fish for us.
Odds and Ends
Here’s some nice things I’ve found lately. Starting with this stop-motion cooking video by PES Studios.
Long time no see
I haven’t updated my blog since August. Since July I’ve moved house, worked in Cambridge teaching a summer camp, then worked long hours to help make DIY Space for London a reality (it worked, it worked!), and enrolled on a teaching course a few weeks ago. The first few weeks of the course crammed a lot of classes into a short period of time before we started our first placement, so I didn’t really have time to update. I also wanted to take my full name off my blog, to keep it out of the grubby mitts of the kids (I was teaching before in places where the students called me by my first name, at British state schools I’m Ms F- if it were up to me, I’d stay on first name terms) and move it to its own site, with a new layout. All this takes time and energy, of which I had neither. Some of the images and formatting on older posts may be a little wobbly until I’ve gone through everything thoroughly. They don’t always automatically import very well.
Actual Crimes
Last week I took some promo shots of my friends Kirsty and Aaron’s band Actual Crimes. They recently became a two piece after the departure of Lenny for a job in the US, but are hopefully becoming a three piece again in the near future. No expense was spared for this photo shoot, we bravely walked five minutes down the road to a brightly painted garage door, and devoted ourselves to posing for ooh, at least half an hour.
General wandering round Copenhagen
About 6 weeks ago I went on a short break to Denmark and Sweden. It shows how busy I’ve been lately that it’s taken me so long to post these. I unexpectedly had some extra holiday days I had to use up quickly before the end of my work contract, and none of my friends were free to travel on the specific weekend I had to use them, so I went by myself. I saw cheap flights to Copenhagen, and booked them on a whim, on the grounds that I’d never been to Denmark before, and it was also easy to visit Sweden from Copenhagen. I also have a danish friend Sanne I used to work with in London, so I arranged to meet up with her while I was there and drink some Mikkeller beer at normal prices (rather than the exorbitant prices they charge in the UK). (Good luck with the PhD viva Sanne!). I liked Denmark a lot, although I’m not sure if I’d want to live there. They seem very set in their ways. In fact it reminded me a lot of Austria, but with sea rather than mountains.
Goodbye N17, Hello SE13
I’ve been really busy the last month. I moved from one end of London to the other, finished one job and did another short-term one, all in the space of a few weeks. When I’ve been at a computer in my spare time I’ve mostly been doing admin for DIY Space for London.
Danmark & Sverige
Tomorrow I’m going on holiday to Copenhagen for 5 days, somewhere I’ve never been before. I’ve visited Iceland, Finland and Estonia before, the outliers in the Nordic group of countries, and all in the winter, but I’ve never visited the core three Scandinavian countries in their famous long-dayed summers (although I’ve been in the Highlands of Scotland in the summer before, which is very similar). Copenhagen is within a short train ride of Malmö in Sweden (in fact Scania used to be in Denmark at one time), so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and visit Sweden too. As well as Copenhagen, I’m going to try to visit Roskilde, the Louisiana Art Museum and Elsinore, which are all nearby. (I’m not going to Legoland because it’s at the other end of the country, and I’ve been to the UK one loads for work anyway).
Triffids
I’ve built up a collection of cacti and other succulents over the last year or so. They’re desert plants from the Americas and southern Africa which store water in their bodies, so they don’t need a lot of looking after, and they have a huge range of dramatic shapes, which explains why they’re such popular house plants. They’re also cheap to buy- mine all came from the supermarket, Wilco or IKEA and cost £2-4 each- and can live a long time if kept in the right conditions. (Opuntia cacti also produce delicious prickly pears and nopales pads for cooking). My current room has a large windowsill which gets some fierce sunshine around lunchtime, and is next to a radiator which dries up the air throughout the winter, which is the ideal conditions for growing them. I used to be into growing orchids and indoor herbs as well, but they just don’t thrive in the conditions here.
Blogs -vs- zines
People who don’t make or read them much themselves sometimes ask me why I still make zines, even though the internet exists, and the world is becoming more and more digitally-focused, and I have this blog. In short, the answer is for the same reason I still have hundreds of records and books, and develop black and white film at home, even though I have an ipod, spotify subscription, e-reader and two digital cameras, and I’m far from a luddite: I feel the physical medium offers me something that I don’t get from the digital version.
Manchester: Northwest Zinefest 2015
Last weekend I went up to Manchester to do a stall and run a Zine 101 workshop at the first Northwest Zinefest. I had the luxury of a day off work, and enough money to take the train rather than coach, and stay at a bed and breakfast. The last time I was in Manchester was well over a decade ago, and it was nice to have a whole weekend rather than rush to and from the event.
On Light Festival
A few weeks ago, University College London held a light-themed street festival, with stalls run by the different university departments with demonstrations and free activities. My friend Mel was there to win a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest cyanotype print (she’s already the holder of the record, which she did as part of an arts festival in India earlier this year, but she wanted to beat her previous record).
Fanzine Ynfytyn
My zine, Fanzine Ynfytyn, is named after a song by Welsh language post-punk band Datblygu (“Develop”). The name could be construed as either “Fanzine Idiot”, “Idiot Fanzine” or “Idiot’s Fanzine”. People either look at the name with bafflement, go “uh, is it Welsh in some way?” or are pleased because they know the song (those people get a free copy). In some ways I regret giving it a name that so many people struggle to pronounce or understand, but I’m on issue 22 now, so they’ll just have to get used to it. When I started it, I only expected to give a few copies to some friends who were already familiar with the song, so it wasn’t really a concern (I also had a mini collage zine called “Pobble Eh Come?” like a really mis-spelt version of the soap opera). Seeing as one of those people was a fellow language student penfriend who I had a running joke with of us mangling Welsh and German together to make one überbendigedich language, I wasn’t too worried about the palatability of the name. I was never expecting to get to issue 22, and have sold or traded hundreds of copies of some of the back issues and have them in libraries and academic collections. I was surprised I got to more than a couple of issues to be honest.
If it ain’t bracken, don’t fix it.
I refuse to apologise for that pun, you’ll just have to suffer. Here is a photo I took of myself recently in my dad’s garden. I can’t remember the last time I had a new photo of myself bar a few awkward phone snaps when I’ve been out. Perhaps you could say I was communing with nature when I took this photo, but I was sat on a plastic bag to avoid sitting in anything nasty hidden underneath the plants, so I don’t think I was that in touch with nature. Luckily we don’t have poison ivy or dangerous snakes in this country, I was more worried about the milder perils of stinging nettles or fox droppings. I was also a little limited with angles and framing, because sticking a wide-angle lens in your face is rarely flattering, but I couldn’t get the distance to use my portrait lens because I didn’t have a tripod with me.
Chellah, Morocco
Here’s an interesting place just outside Rabat in Morocco. Chellah was a Roman city, which later became a necropolis for the tombs of marabouts, wandering Sufi holy men, who often take on the role of saints after death. I took these pictures over a decade ago, when digital cameras weren’t as good as today, so apologies for any burnt out highlights or other optical issues- the rest of the photos can be seen here.
Morocco
Here’s some photos from a trip to Morocco I’ve dug out of the archives from when I first got a digital camera in 2004 (you can see the whole album here). I was in between my first and second years of university, and bought a cheap digital camera from Aldi, it was surprisingly decent though, and it’s hard to take bad photos in Morocco because the light is so clear and the colours are so vibrant. Most of these pictures are from Rabat or Essaouira.
DIY Space for London is go!
For quite a while now, I’ve been part of the DIY Space for London co-op, working to open a non-profit, co-operatively run accessible music, art and general creativity & activism venue in London along the lines of Wharf Chambers in Leeds. Operating in London has raised its own unique challenges. Most projects of this nature in other places can find a building and have trouble raising the money. We had the opposite problem- we had an incredible amount of goodwill, and people kept giving us money, but we had trouble spending it. London is in the middle of an uncontrollable property boom, and we had immense trouble finding anywhere suitable. Places went immediately, had residential neighbours or plans to build flats in unsuitable places that would immediately result in noise complaints, had legal issues or wanted ridiculously huge deposits.
Sleater-Kinney
A few weeks ago I went to see Sleater-Kinney, one of my favourite bands, at the Roundhouse. They had been on hiatus since 2006, with the members working on other projects like Portlandia in the meantime, so I was pleased and surprised when they announced a new album and tour. The last time they had played in the UK was when I was doing my finals, so I’d had to give it a miss. I’d seen them before at Reading Festival, but I never really count short afternoon festival sets at massive outdoor festivals like Reading as really seeing a band properly, because you’re basically watching them on a tv screen standing at the other end of a field (one of the many reasons I don’t go to them any more). I don’t think I have ever been to such a big gig as the Roundhouse one where I just constantly ran into so many people I know and like, it was almost too much, there was someone new to say hello to every time I turned around . The band themselves were superb, and played for an hour and half. I don’t think you could ask for more, really.
Northwest Zinefest 2015
I’ll be tabling and running a zinemaking 101 workshop at the inaugural Northwest Zinefest in Manchester on the 29th of May at the Star and Garter, and having a nice mini-break in MCR and seeing friends. Check out the Facebook event and the website.
London, you get to keep me (for a while)
For the past few months I’ve been weighing up whether to stay in London or to leave. I’ve lived here since 2011. In that time I’ve been a part-time postgrad (and finished the course), done an interesting but mostly not well-paid assortment of jobs, and lived in an assortment of sublets and property guardianships. Since the end of 2013 I’ve lived in a property guardianship that’s unusually cheap, but not at all homely, but far too cheap to give up needlessly.
Slide film photographs of Whitstable
I used to do a lot of photography, but I don’t do half as much now, which is a bit of a pity. My flickr account (which I started in 2007) has 376 albums and 4976 photos. I thought I’d do some regular posts with photos from some of the older albums. I’ll tag them as “from the archives”, especially as a lot of them are from well before I started this blog, or moved it from blogger to wordpress. Here are some photos from a trip to Whitstable in January 2008. It was my birthday, and I went on a trip to the coast with my friend Bryony and our then boyfriends. I had this Kodak slide duplication film I’d got in a giant bag of expired film I’d got for 50p per roll a few years earlier, and kept in the freezer. I’m not sure if it was taken with a Lomo LCA or an Olympus XA2. I had both at the time. I still have them in a box under the bed, but they’re both slightly broken, because I got them very, very cheaply second-hand (I think they were both about £15). I should get round to fixing them at some point. I think they’re fixable. These pictures were cross processed in C41, and then scanned. The pictures on my flickr account are a little small by modern standards, but screens were smaller then, and storage space on Flickr limited. I still have the negatives filed away, anyway.
Sheffield Zine Fest 2015
I went up to Sheffield again a few weeks ago for the zinefest, organised by my friends Bettie and Chella, and staying at Rebecca’s with Tukru. I think there must be something around Sheffield in the Spring that I’m horribly allergic to. Whenever I go up in March or April I have some kind of horrible reaction, yet when I’ve been up in the Autumn, no problem. Once when the bus went past Chesterfield, a nearby town, my whole face puffed up like a hamster and no amount of anti-histamines would deflate it, and was that way the whole weekend, spontaneously deflating again once I was clear of Derbyshire on the way home. I had no hamster face this time, but sinus pain and a nasty rash on my shoulders and nausea. Perhaps I’m allergic to steel. Nowhere else in the region seems to give me this problem. (It’s also sad because the zinefest venue has a slide, and I’ve never been able to go on it in any of the years I’ve been, it not being a good idea when you’re pukey or suffering from balance problems due to a giant swollen face and glands.)
Two new zines
I had two never-before-seen zines to bring with me to the Sheffield Zine Fest (photos of the festival coming later in the week). Issue 22 was new, whereas issue 14 has a bit of a history. I made no. 14 a few years ago, mislaid the pages, found them again last year and finished some bits off, made a few copies, mislaid them again moving house and then found them again recently. Now they’re safe in a folder with all my other master copies, scanned to a pdf, and available to print whenever I want.
Sheffield Zine Fest this Saturday
This weekend I’m going up to Yorkshire to run a table and workshop at the Sheffield Zine Fest (Facebook event here) and see friends. I’ll have lots of issues of zines from both myself and Charlotte Richardson Andrews and some other goodies, and I’ll be running a workshop on getting started with zine-making (and my good pal Tukru will be running a hands-on minizine session).
Wandering along the canal
I often like to get some fresh air in my lunch break by walking along the canal near my work. There’s not a lot there, just some houseboats and a small lock, and a lot of lunchtime joggers and the odd person eating sandwiches on a sunny day. I’m a big fan of canals, and I think I’ve walked along pretty much the whole length of this one at various points.
En train de flâner. Aucun train-train.
Here’s some more photos from Paris (again taken with a Pentax ME super and expired Poundland film with a strange red cast), from my general wandering around. Wandering is one of my favourite things to do. In French it’s flâner, and someone who wanders around a city, observing things and casually exploring is a flâneur or a flâneuse, much celebrated in literature. I did a lot of that on my recent trip, both because I was on such a tight budget, and also because I was on my own, so I was free to spend my time as I liked. I’m in the middle of writing a new zine about the trip. Hopefully I’ll have it finished by the Sheffield Zine Fest next weekend.
Penguin Little Black Classics
I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stories, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment reading. There are 80 different ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In picking the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hopefully I’ll discover something I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.
Save Waterloo Library
I made these posters to help a friend campaign to stop Waterloo Library being closed down and sold off (there is definitely no resemblance intended to a certain range of paperback books . . ). Lambeth council is making devastating cuts to their libraries after having their budget cut. This government have been slowly and deliberately destroying every public service they can, if it doesn’t make their rich business friends richer, they don’t care. Libraries are incredibly important, and the poorer the area the more vital they are. Even with my family, who did have books at home, there is no way I would have the education I have now if I hadn’t have been constantly reading books from the public library growing up.
Jardin de Luxembourg
Here’s some more film photos from the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris. (Luxembourg is one of those words I always have to look up the spelling of, otherwise I’m tempted to insert all kinds of extra vowels).
Canal St-Martin
Here’s some more pictures of Paris, this time of the Canal Sainte-Martin, once again taken with an old Pentax ME Super from the 70s. The film was expired and from Poundland, and went through the x-ray machine at the airport, which resulted in it having a red cast. I colour corrected it out where I could, but the pictures don’t quite reflect the aqua green water as I saw it. I also took some b&w pictures of the same area, which I’ve developed but not yet scanned.
Your suspicions I’m confirming, as you find them all quite true
1) Continental Shelf- Viet Cong
One off the radio at work. I’m not that fussed about the whole album, but I really like this single.
2) Kingdom of Heaven (Is Within You) – The 13th Floor Elevators
From the True Detective soundtrack. The seedy side of the late 60s. It really fitted the show well.
Not gate-crashing a funeral
I actually attended this funeral/memorial for children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones over 2 years ago. I had meant to write about it for a long time, but I didn’t want to write anything without having the programme of speakers from the event to hand, and it stubbornly disappeared until recently when I had a big clear out of papers (and faded with some print rubbed off after 2 years), so here it is.
Andre Thomkins
When I was in Liechtenstein, I went to the Modern Art museum there. I was really impressed with the quality of the museum, especially in such a small country. They had a special exhibition about Swiss artist André Thomkins (whose estate had donated his works to the museum). I hadn’t come across him before, but I really enjoyed what I saw (and his large array of German puns), especially the short film where he was talking and demonstrating how he made marbled paintings by floating lacquer on top of water, something he started experimenting with after washing a brush he’d been painting furniture with.
Graveyard/ghost town double exposures
While I was in Paris I visited the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, and took a lot of photos both monochrome and colour, which I will post later. One roll, however, turned out to be half-used already and I ended up with double exposures. It turned out I’d already taken photos of a place called Domfront in Normandy with it. Domfront is a bit of a ghost town, which made me laugh to get double exposures of a literal graveyard over a figurative one.
Montmartre Photos
I wandered up from near the Opera (where the hotel was) through back streets up to the top of the hill, where the church is. I think it’s a much better route. You see lots of interesting tucked-away things, and avoid crowds and having to climb lots of steps.
Fanzine Ynftyn 14- jo, freilich, die gnädige Frau Magister Emma ist nach Österreich gekommen
I used to go to Austria quite a lot to run workshops in schools, travelling from school to school each week. I started writing this zine after my first trip to Vienna in 2010, didn’t finish it, and then finished it off a couple of years later. I made a few copies at the time, but then mislaid the pages again when moving house, so barely anyone has read it. I recently found them again, and scanned them, so people can order it now!
A baker’s dozen of books
1) Operation Mincemeat- Ben Macintyre
2) The Pyramid- Ismail Kadare
3) The Mirror Maker- Primo Levi
4) The Third Miss Symons- F.M. Mayor
5) The Making of the British Landscape- Francis Pryor
6) The Years of Rice and Salt- Kim Stanley Robinson
7) The Moving Toyshop- Edmund Crispin
8) Travels with a Typewriter- Michael Frayn
9) Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads- Kirk Demarais
10) How to Build a Girl- Caitlin Moran
11) Fannie’s Last Supper- Chris Kimball
12) The Gallery of Regrettable Food- James Lileks
13) A Winter Book- Tove Jansson
Gigs of 2014
I was really broke for most of 2014. I didn’t get to go to many bigger gigs, but I did go to a lot of smaller ones. I made this playlist of songs each by a band I saw last year. It’s not an exhaustive list, I just picked songs I liked by bands I had a good time seeing, which were also available on Spotify and worked together on a playlist. If you are outside the UK I don’t know if all of them will play, due to a lot of them being bands of people I know putting their records out on small labels or themselves. Hopefully they will.
2015
So now it’s 2015, the year of the future. I expect a fax to pop out of somewhere unexpected any minute now. I had a very sedate and teetotal Christmas and New Year due to injuring my shoulder and then coming down with a bad case of the flu that lingered on forever. I wanted to get a few creative projects finished over the Christmas break, but that put a spanner in the works. Already this year I have started a new job, been to Paris for a few days and turned 30.
Professor Knatschke
My university library had a massive stack of printing industry annuals from the 1890s through to the 20s. I always enjoyed looking through them because the illustrations and articles they chose to showcase new printing technologies were often really odd, and were good to photocopy for collages and zines. Next to them on the shelf was a strange little book called Professor Knatschke. It’s a comedy book written and illustrated in 1912 by Alsatian satirist Jean-Jacques Waltz, aka Hansi, about a clueless German professor and his daughter’s trip to Paris, mocking both the French and the Germans (but mostly the Germans) in a more innocent pre-WW1 pre-Nazi era. I always really liked the illustrations (and Elsa K’s obsession with making gifts embroidered with “inspiring” mottoes) , and now it’s available free online as a copyright-free ebook.
Slugs. Ugh.
I forgot to post this before. My friend Tukru does a freebie Halloween themed zine every year for her zine distro. She needed some extra pages and asked me to draw a monster, so I cobbled this together and scanned it in about 45 minutes. I hate slugs. Horrible things. In my final year of uni, I lived in a house which had seemed fine when viewed in the summer, but come winter turned out to have a real damp problem, and a slug problem in the kitchen
Malevich
Recently I went to the Malevich exhibition at the Tate Modern. I was vaguely aware of him as an avant-garde Russian artist (turns out more Polish-Ukrainian) and his black square paintings which caused such a fuss, but I didn’t know much else about him. I’m glad I went to the exhibition.
Liechtenstein
In other old photos I’ve dug out recently, here’s some photos of Liechtenstein from last summer. I’m currently writing a zine about that trip, so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here.
Liechtenstein is a very weird place. It’s one of the smallest countries in Europe, and is essentially a small Swiss town that is a separate country by historical accident, and now stays a separate country because they have a nice income from being a corporate tax haven. The entire country has one high school. I was working at a school just across the border in Austria, and there were a fair few students from Liechtenstein at the school. The capital Vaduz has a small parliament building, an impressive castle, a small museum like that of any small town, a really big and impressive modern art museum, a big post office that does a roaring trade in souvenir stamps and a town square with some expensive cafes and assorted useful shops. There’s, Schaan, a suburban town where most people live, a couple of other villages and a big supermarket, some lovely mountains and that’s the whole country really. I saw pretty much most of it in an afternoon, which you can’t say for most countries.