June 8, 2007
I am in the middle of moving here.
maybe a move will get me back into blogging properly again…
I think for a while it has been hard to blog.
Partly work overload (i.e. a change of priorities I suppose) and partly not feeling able to write in that semi-academic semi personal way that I have customarily used for the blog.
Personal stuff has been, well, too personal, and I have not felt able to give it a lighthearted jaunty feel!!
But summer’s coming and I am moving round the block, solet’s hope that helps 
)
December 30, 2006
So Christmas is over and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.
TT and I went to the outlaws and then came back only slightly scathed and then soaked ourselves in alcohol in the privacy of our own home.
Today I discovered that you can get Banksy stencils on ebay; and even Banksy repros especially shipped in from Hong Kong. (I wish I was joking.)
And in the meantime, having bought the kiddly wigglies a keyboard for Christmas, TT and I are fighting each other to have a turn … learning to play Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas is like performing brain surgery at the moment. (TT is particularly bad). And somehow Miles has managed to work out how to play ‘Imagine’ using both hands and chords. (I can see we will need to ban him for a while.)
December 24, 2006
It’s nearly Christmas!!
We are so glad that we made the last minute decision not to go to NYC over Christmas (as previously planned) since apparently we would have spent days in the airport this week, rather than going where we wanted to.
Went to Liverpool yesterday to shop with Sam the Man and got a few last minute bits and bobs including the book of the website ‘PostSecret’. Howemad is that? To buy a book of a website. Anyway I did.
But I have to go now … as TT is standing by the door with his coat on ready to drive to the outlaws …. oh well.
Happy Christmas and see you in a few days.
December 19, 2006
The fridge may seem as if it is just an appliance to keep your stuff cold; but actually in many homes the fridge is the place where domestic acts are played out, displayed and negotiated. The fridge door is a text where multimodal communicative acts take place and is an expression of life in a partcular household.
I am not just talking about the way we leave food stains on the handle, or where milk seeps out and round the rubber seal. I am talkng about magnetic poetry; I am talking about postcards blu-tacked on the sides; I am talking about post-it notes as reminders; and I am talking about the way members of households use fridge doors as boards for creative expression.
The fridge door in my house changes over time; we all seem to contribute to the changes. And the things around and on the fridge seem part of the display….
We improvise around the fridge. The latest addition is the ‘grape text’. I discovered it this morning when I came downstairs to make breakfast; it was the trace of my nocturnal daughter who was clearly in a good mood last night, feeling frivolous, when the rest of us were in bed, wanting to make us laugh while we were up and about in the day and in her absence (when she slept till 2p.m.)
The grape text is surrounded by other people’s jokes, and holiday mementoes. I know we are not alone as there is a flickr group here showing that other people do this stuff too.
December 15, 2006
Guess I better order some books from
Amazon then.
(Photo taken in Nice last year though a shop window at night.)
I have to start doing stuff like putting up decorations and that means moving furniture and going down the cellar to get the tree etc.
In the meantime our roof continues to leak even though we just paid 300 quid to get it fixed.
Poor ol’ TT is getting mad tryng to fix it … (I am hiding).
Rosa is lying on the sofa feeling ill and I am thinking that illness is not so much a breach in everyday life as part of an ongoing narrative. When she was first ill (eleven years ago) she saw it as an intrrruption in her life; an assault on what she had in mind. I saw it as a robbery. Now she sees this as a part of herself, a story about a girl who became ill and now makes sense of it through a different type of story which does not have the same staging posts as everyone else. Her peers have so far marked out their lives through grades in school, passing exams (or not) and going to university.Her posts are more like ‘the bad summer’; ‘the winter where I did go shopping’; this one is a winter where things went downhill again.
But in the meantime, we mark out the moment with a tinsel tree and decorations.
And we have a bucket on our bed to catch the rain.
December 5, 2006
for a few days with TT. It was a wonderful break and the SUN SHONE. Twas really warm. It is a really good idea to save up some holiday every year to go away late October or November (not in half term) and go somewhere warm. It is a real tonic.
Barcelona? Well there are some very interesting photos to be had .. the tourist run is good, with all the Gaudi architecture everywhere; some excellent art galleries (not as good as Berlin) and some graffitti - but it has been mainly messed up by scrawlers.
By far the best thing was people watching and the weather.
As for my thinking … I have been thinking about NARRATIVES and IDENTITIES. On Flickr we tell stories within our photos, through our photostreams and we show how we want to structure the narratives by the sets we make and the tags we choose. We also weave narratives across the groups we belong to - this is what I think can be called ‘distributed narrative’ (Walker.)
November 22, 2006
is where I went at the weekend.
An installation bt Anthony Gormley called ‘Another Place’.
It was VERY windy.
I took this photo for Guy:
He likes prints.
November 17, 2006
Sadly it is yet again the time of year when the British Nation is force fed 1970s style crap entertainment in a bid to get them to cough up dough for ‘Children in Need’.
The idea is to induce an overwhelming sense of pity and to foster the idea that children (soon to be adults) can only survive if other people are kind enough.
Hear it from disability nation.
And I am pretty much loving the piss on pity approach on these T shirts. It is definitely worth browsing through this site.
The BBC tv programme Children in Need has been running annually for 24 years. That is a heartsinking number of crap tv programmes the nation has had to endure. Its mascot is a teddy bear, ‘Pudsey’ which has a patch over one eye. (Poor Pudsey has a bad eye.)
Pudsey’s time is definitely up.
Thanks to Zombizi for the links. (He has been making bad situations worse, since 1963).
And finally … doesn’t this woman know that you can get loyalty points if you use your own bags in Tesco now?
November 12, 2006
Just trying to keep up with litrate, I am blogging from the train - the London to Doncaster at 14.10.
The trip here took in an exhibition at The Barbican, The Photographers Gallery, The National Portrait and the V and A exhibition of twilight photography I really liked the di corcia stuff the best.
Really really good all of these - and in addtion to that saw Lucinda Williams at Shepherd’s Bush.
Just fabulous. What a great break it has been - and managed to see some good stuff to photograph as we made our way between exhibitions. How lucky am I?
November 5, 2006
TT is not happy as he is holed up in FINLAND where he claims it is pitch black and very cold.
Maybe it USED to be called Funland, but they had to change it.
TT has two vouchers to go to the bar. But it is closed.
How crap is that?
He has rearranged his hotel room and taken pictures but cannot upload them to Flickr as there is no Internet access.
But I have found that when he gets back he can upload pictures to the hotel website here.
Can’t be all bad; he will be able to show the shots he took where he was rearranging his room.
Here he is, holding his electronic tagging device. (Silly old twit)
