Category: Popular Posts

Inter­view with Sajan Rai

A short inter­view with my friend, illus­trat­or Sajan Rai. I first met Sajan when we were assigned adjoin­ing tables at a zine fair, and he was offer­ing to draw people as sloths for £5. This clearly being a sign that he was the right kind of person, we became friends.

Assor­ted dreams

If I remem­ber my dreams I try to write them down in a note­book, to use for later inspir­a­tion. The one I’ve been using suddenly fell apart yester­day. I tried to stick the pages back in, but the spine was completely disin­teg­rated. I think I’ll just start a new one and copy the old entries over. Here’s some vari­ous bits from it.

90s Veget­ari­an Food

I haven’t eaten meat since the late 90s. Veget­ari­an­ism was on the rise at the time in the UK, but the selec­tion of meat-free products was very poor compared with the current day, and many of them had to be bought in the health food shop.

Sew A Dino­saur (1992)

I was given this book as a gift as a child. I never made anything from it because it’s defin­itely much too diffi­cult for chil­dren, I just admired the projects.

Green­cheeks

Ruth had a dream that you could buy tins of some­thing called “Green­cheeks” that seemed to be tinned Kermit meat. I had to make this a real­ity in Photoshop using a stock can mockup template.

Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania

MONA was one of my main reas­ons for visit­ing Tasmania. It’s basic­ally in an under­ground bunker like a Bond villain’s lair, and requires a boat ride to get to. The owner David Walsh, is the richest man in Tasmania and a very strange char­ac­ter in his own right- he grew up in a rough area of Hobart, and made his fortune by using maths to outsmart the gambling industry, and then spent it on this museum. He’s simul­tan­eously “math­em­at­ic­al geni­us” and “13 year old edgelord”.

I stepped out onto the midway

I meant to do a lot today but ended up napping on the sofa, so I went for an early even­ing walk along the beach to see the sunset and get some fresh air. The funfair was in town but there was almost nobody there on a Saturday night. Surreal.

Some ideas and resources for arguing against common racist comments in the UK

At the time of writ­ing in June 2020, we’re going through a dramat­ic shift in public conscious­ness in many coun­tries about racism, the prob­lems with current soci­ety, and nasty histor­ies that have been brushed over and ignored. A lot of my friends are arguing with family members and acquaint­ances, or discov­er­ing that friends are much less well-informed than they’d hoped. Here’s a resource page of response ideas and links to resources.

How to spot fake Twit­ter accounts and misin­form­a­tion

The main way to keep up to date with what’s happen­ing on the ground with the Black Lives Matter Protests is via social media (and Twit­ter in partic­u­lar).

It’s really confus­ing though, because there are a lot of people and organ­isa­tions acting in bad faith and delib­er­ately making commu­nic­a­tion and fact-check­ing diffi­cult, and using manip­u­la­tion strategies to drown out the real inform­a­tion about what’s happen­ing on the ground.

Tim and the Hidden People

Tim and the Hidden People is a series of children’s school read­ing books from the late 70s/​early 80s that a lot of schools had. They have a strange, bleak folk-horror atmo­sphere, and the illus­tra­tions in the first three collec­tions are a little uncanny valley. Tim is always walk­ing along lonely canal paths with strict instruc­tions to not look over his shoulder and tie the silver string around a partic­u­lar tree or else.

Ichi-go ichi-e

This was my April 2014 piece for Story­board , a writ­ing site with monthly prompts run by a friend. I couldn’t think of a story idea, so I wrote a kind of essay instead.The theme that month was “Ichi-go ichi-e”: a never again moment. I couldn’t think of a story, so I decided to talk a little about ways other writers have handled the theme. I suppose you could call this a casu­al essay. I’m afraid it won’t be closely argued or metic­u­lously foot­noted, and it is quite loosely put togeth­er, but maybe it will give people some good recom­mend­a­tions of things to read

Ink Master Copies

I had a whole folder full of artwork masters, so I decided to stick them into sketch­books this after­noon (these kraft paper folio-sized books are around £6 from Muji). I tend to draw the line artwork by hand with a non-photo blue pencil and posca mark­er, and correct mistakes/​add the colour digit­ally.

Ivan Bilib­in

I thought while stuck at home I’d do regu­lar posts show­ing things I like which other people may not have heard of. Ivan Bilib­in was a Russi­an artist most famous for his lavishly illus­trated books of fairy tales taking inspir­a­tion from Japan­ese wood prints, Russi­an icon paint­ing and Ye Olde Slavon­ic script.

Diana Wynne Jones zine- digit­al edition

A few years back I made a zine with articles about writer Diana Wynne Jones (prob­ably best known for writ­ing Howl’s Moving Castle), and an inter­view I conduc­ted with her before she sadly died. The paper edition is still avail­able here, but for the fore­see­able future I can only send phys­ic­al copies to the UK. So I’ve made a digit­al edition for people to read.

Hibern­at­ing & clean­ing

I was supposed to be in Austria right now running school work­shops, but obvi­ously that’s not happen­ing. Like many other people right now I’m unem­ployed as my whole industry has stopped exist­ing overnight. Seeing as I’ll be spend­ing a lot of time at home in the fore­see­able future, today seemed like a good time to have a big cleanup of the living room.

Photoshop Digit­al Colour tutori­al

Multiple people have asked me for a tutori­al of how I do colour in Photoshop. A lot of people think my prints are analogue screen-prints, but they’re actu­ally mostly digit­al. I draw the ink lines by hand, but all the colour and texture is created in Photoshop.

Magic Stor­ies From Around the World (1986)

Here is anoth­er scan of a vintage book I have had since I was a child. This is a collec­tion of myths and legends from around the world. It was origin­ally Czech and trans­lated to English, and has a large selec­tion of cent­ral European stor­ies less known in the UK, along with stor­ies from places like the high Arctic and Poly­ne­sia. There are also lovely illus­tra­tions by three prom­in­ent Czech illus­trat­ors.

The Ghost Stor­ies of M.R. James

Around this time of year on the Solstice there are two things I like to do as a person­al tradi­tion- go for a walk to Botany Bay around sunset and read the ghost stor­ies of M.R. James. Includes full text of Whistle My Lad, and links to read the stor­ies and watch the 1970s films for free.

Altern­at­ive London 1969/​70

I found this book in a char­ity shop. It’s a prac­tic­al guide to altern­at­ive living in London from 1969/​70 cover­ing a wide range of topics from rent laws, to sexu­al­ity, drugs and communes to join. This is the first edition, there were yearly updates through­out the 70s.

60s slides: Costi­era Amalf­itana

Here’s some more 60s tour­ism slides from my grand­par­ents’ house (you can see others here). This time from the Amalfi Coast in south­ern Italy, now a UNESCO site. Again I have posted all 36 images. It looked pretty much the same when I was there about 10 years ago, minus the annoy­ing coach party of loud Texans who kept appear­ing every­where you looked and complain­ing there was no Taco Bell and you had to walk places. Further along the coast in Sorrento I bought a very fancy waffle-knit towel that still serves me well for trav­el­ling. The shop assist­ant seemed very confused that I wasn’t buying a whole match­ing set of them like the major­ity of their custom­ers. Afraid I could only afford one small one. 

60s slides of Hercu­laneum

When clear­ing out my grand­par­ents’ house a couple of years ago I found seven pack­ets of these 60s tour­ist slides of vari­ous places around the Medi­ter­ranean. I’ve been scan­ning and restor­ing them. First up, these from Hercu­laneum.

Hercu­laneum is a smal­ler coastal town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the volcano. It’s not as well known, but there are some magni­fi­cent villas there in a simil­ar but smal­ler archae­olo­gic­al park to the one you can visit at Pompeii.

Cadbury’s Novelty Cook­book

I got this late 70s/​early 80s book from a char­ity shop a while ago. A lot of famil­ies in the UK had it when I was a kid I think. I got it out because I prom­ised to make my friend a really ludicrous birth­day cake from inside. The recipes are fine, vari­ous flavoured sponge cakes with butter­cream icing (albeit with gratu­it­ous Cadbury’s product place­ment in every recipe). It’s the choice of cake themes in the book that’s a bit odd …

Lomo­chrome Purple

Shortly before I left London a couple of years ago I got a roll of the Lomo­chrome Purple film, a new formula designed to mimic the surreal colour infrared film you used to be able to buy.

Old Stripy Bum

A couple of months ago I adop­ted a young cat from the local anim­al shel­ter. The profile said he was play­ful and curi­ous, had a miss­ing tail and needed a lot of atten­tion and activ­ity.

Bismuth

Hello from the south­ern hemi­sphere. Here’s some new press shots of my friends’ band Bismuth I took a few weeks ago at the origin­al UK Botany Bay…

Dachau

On my way back from the Tyrol, I stayed in Munich en route to the airport, and visited the Dachau concen­tra­tion camp museum- it was the first Nazi concen­tra­tion camp and served as a template for many of the others…

Schwartz­see

A short train ride or couple of miles walk outside Kitzbühel is the Schwartz­see (“black lake”). It’s full of miner­als washed down from the moun­tains that give it the glassy black effect…

Hahnen­kamm

In July I went to Kitzbühel in Austria for work. I was there to run a work­shop in the local middle school, and the mayor gave me and my three co-work­ers tick­ets for the local ski lift…

Enter the Vortex

So here’s the posters I designed for two gigs I’m help­ing to put on- one in London, the other in Margate. As per the press release “Girl Sweat is the ever-chan­ging garage-noise project fron­ted by the 6ft 5” beast that is ‘Sweat’” along with the fine collec­tion of psych and drone weirdos assembled in support. My brief for the poster was “illuminati/​masons cult shit”. I hope I delivered.

Behemoth Lives!

Margate is currently host­ing a vari­ety of art events related to T.S.Eliot (who wrote the Waste­land here almost a century ago), includ­ing a week­end dedic­ated to cats over East­er. I created this print based on Bulgakov’s the Master and Margar­ita, and a giant painted banner version of it to hang up at the show. It was a bit last minute, but I got it all done on time. The show is on at the Viking Gallery off North­down Rd over the long East­er week­end and until the 7th of April.

Very Friendly

Here’s some photo­graphs I took of my friends’ band Very Friendly. For a while we had inten­ded to take some promo shots with a miser­able day at the beach theme, and then the beach was suddenly covered in thick snow, so this happened over a lunch break. Harry even­tu­ally got warm again. Even­tu­ally.

Prim­or­di­al Soup

Here’s a gig poster I drew recently. I was given free reign to do whatever I wanted, and it turns out what I wanted was to do a fake cyan­o­type of pondscum. Face­book event for the show here.

New print- Sheep Skull

So here’s a new illus­tra­tion I did. It’s actu­ally based on a draw­ing I did when I was 17 that I found while sort­ing out some paper­work recently. You can buy mono­chrome and colour prints for £3-£30 over on the shop.

Düssel­dorf

I spent most of August in Germany, teach­ing some school work­shops and going to Docu­menta art fair along the way. My first assign­ment was in rural Nordrhein-West­falen. The agency has a tend­ency to book you on flights at brutal times early on a Sunday, so instead I booked my own flight to Cologne on a Friday even­ing, and claimed it back off them. I have been to Cologne loads of times, and my colleagues were flying into Düssel­dorf, which I had never visited. So I decided to stay in Düssel­dorf, do a bit of sight­see­ing, and then meet up with the others before head­ing to the Sauer­land.

They only want you when you’re seven­teen

I made this playl­ist a while back, and the post has been languish­ing in the drafts for a while, so I thought I’d finish it off for the end of the year. It’s all songs I liked when I was 17, which was in 2002

Cloudrat & Moloch

A couple of years ago my friend Steve Larder’s band Moloch did a split LP and tour with Amer­ic­an grind­core band Cloudrat. I found the uned­ited photos the other day, and finally sorted them out. Enjoy.

I’m Curi­ous To Know Exactly How You Are

I had to put a Hüsker Dü song in this list, as they are one of my all-time favour­ite bands, but it was hard to decide which one. In the end I went for a really obvi­ous choice- the first song of theirs I got into.

Hobot­nica

And to round off my stuff from Croa­tia, here’s some sketch­book notes from Zadar museum and Trogir. Hobot­nica (pronounced hobot­nitsa) is Croa­tian for octopus. It’s a good word.

Marjan

If you keep walk­ing out of Split you end up on the Marjan penin­sula. The first time I visited I made the mistake of climb­ing up to the peak in 35c heat. After that I sens­ibly took the coast road.

Split

Here’s some photos from my trip to Croa­tia this summer. It was a real last minute thing, I suddenly had a week free in a packed summer of teach­ing engage­ments and still didn’t actu­ally live anywhere yet, so I bought a cheap flight to Croa­tia and did some sight­see­ing.

Ponder this to get near­er to noth­ing

When I wrote the 50 Things About Me entry a little while ago, I star­ted creat­ing a playl­ist of 50 favour­ite songs. It got unwieldy and didn’t flow well though, so I gave up. Instead I’ll write a little bit every so often about songs from the list.

The Van Pelt are not famous or well-known outside a small niche. The sing­er­/song-writer  Chris Leo’s broth­er Ted Leo is much more well-known, and bass play­er Toko Yasuda has had success over the years play­ing with Enon, Blonde Redhead and St Vincent, but they never hit the big time. Instead they released two quietly treas­ured albums in the mid-90s (Sultans of Senti­ment and Steal­ing From Our Favour­ite Thieves) and then disban­ded- they’ve released a collec­tion of sessions that were inten­ded for a third album (Imagin­ary Third) and done the odd reunion tour (I was lucky enough to catch one in London-it was a very special even­ing) but I’m guess­ing only a small selec­tion of my read­ers will know them.

Topi­ary

I used to work at Hamp­ton Court. This is a mark­er draw­ing of some of the trees in the gardens there. I earnt a pittance, worked every single week­end for six months, and wore a terrible poly­es­ter uniform. I got very used to being surroun­ded by incred­ible splend­our though, and spent quite a lot of happy hours mind­ing the maze, sitting in a shed read­ing long Russi­an books, listen­ing to whatever mellow music wouldn’t annoy tour­ists (lots of Elli­ot Smith, Fleet­wood Mac, Tortoise and Grandaddy), and making up lies about the maze to tour­ists. (I wrote about being in charge of the maze in issue 22 of my zine). I also used to get a good amount of free glasses of Pimms too from jugs that were left over from the outside bar.

A magi­cian calls

Anoth­er old sketch­book page I scanned in. This one is from a couple of years ago. I was teach­ing on a resid­en­tial course for teen­agers. It was in an old nunnery in the middle of nowhere, so the staff organ­ised a lot of even­ing activ­it­ies and film show­ings to keep them amused. One night a magi­cian came to do a show, and I made these notes.

Ljubljana Bien­ni­al

This summer I had to chance to go to both Docu­menta in Kassel and the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al of Graph­ic Arts. Here’s my photos from one of the Ljubljana Bien­ni­al exhib­i­tions that allowed photos. The theme of this Bien­ni­al was this poem by Slov­e­ni­an writer Jure Deleta.

(((O Boards of Sunnada O)))

Anyway, in July Sunn O))) toured the UK, and I couldn’t go because I was commit­ted to work­ing long hours on this resid­en­tial course I was teach­ing, and I felt pretty sad about it. So I used It Took The Night to Believe as the prompt for that week’s creat­ive writ­ing activ­ity for my students. The previ­ous week I’d used the video for Reach for the Dead by Boards of Canada (both pieces of music gave good results in the student’s writ­ing) . While setting up the activ­ity I acci­dent­ally set off both songs at once, and discovered they actu­ally sound amaz­ing togeth­er. So enjoy. For best results, start the Boards of Canada song first.

Ema

An import­ant aspect of Japan­ese shrines and temples are ema plaques (the name 絵馬 liter­ally means “picture horse”). These are small wooden signs with a picture on one side. You write a wish on it and hang it up (or take it home as a souven­ir). Each site has its own design, so I made a collec­tion of photos of differ­ent ones I saw in Japan. They are origin­ally a Shinto tradi­tion, but can also be found at Buddhist temples. At bigger sites you can find messages writ­ten in a lot of differ­ent languages.

Nara Garden

While we were in Nara we also visited a tradi­tion­al Japan­ese tea garden. Unfor­tu­nately the tea house was shut, and it was rain­ing, but it was still a lovely garden.

Indi­ana Jones and the Temple of Deer

Our final stop in Japan before flying home from Osaka was Nara. In the 700s it was the capit­al of Japan, at the time when Buddhism really became estab­lished in Japan. Nowadays as well as Buddhism, it’s known for the tame deer who live in the forest park surround­ing the temples and shrines. We stayed in a hostel in the forest. It seemed a short walk from the train station, but we ended up walk­ing along dark forest paths drag­ging cases seem­ingly forever, with deer star­ing at us accus­ingly like some­thing out of Prin­cess Mononoke. (The hostel turned out to be a pretty weird place too).

Craft as radic­al?

I’ve split the article up into four sections- my criti­cisms of radic­al spaces and scenes I’ve known, of the fash­ion industry, and of the current commer­cial craft reviv­al, and then at the end explain­ing the ways I think doing textile crafts can be radic­al. In writ­ing the article, I was specific­ally think­ing of crafts such as sewing and knit­ting, both because they are things I do, and also because they are stereo­typ­ic­ally done by women and often dismissed as silly and frivol­ous, but a lot of the points can apply to any handi­craft. As well as deal­ing with the topic of crafts, it’s really more of a kind of wander round my thoughts about “radic­al”. The section on crafts is actu­ally the shortest, but I’ve used it as the over­all fram­ing device. I’ll prob­ably manage to piss off both the cliquey punx and the craft blog­ger people with this, but never mind.

Okun­oshi­ma- Rabbit Island

While I was in Japan we visited the island of Okun­oshi­ma. In the Second World War it was a top secret chem­ic­al weapons plant, but now is a nature reserve famous for its free-ranging tame rabbits, who are prob­ably the descend­ants of the lab rabbits.

Naoshi­ma

Naoshi­ma is tiny idyll­ic island in the Seto Inland sea devoted to modern art. The open­ing of the Benesse modern art museum (owned by the same organ­isa­tion as Berlitz language schools) revived the island’s fortunes, although it’s still a small and quiet place with only a few villages and a lot of old people.

Kyoto Shrines and Temples

Kyoto is famous for its Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, many of which are UNESCO world herit­age sites. There are so many in the city that even though I spent a whole day walk­ing round differ­ent sites, I only saw a small percent­age of them. People place stones on these Shinto torii gates for good luck. You can also see my photos of ema good luck plaques here.

Kyoto II

Here’s some more 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. Kyoto is famous for its cherry blos­som, but sadly we were there a couple of weeks earli­er than it comes out in full bloom. You did see the odd bud here and there though.

Miyazaki’s Read­ing List

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.