My Brighton Festival so far

2 May: Cheeky Walks book launch at the Blind Tiger Club, with added quiz
6 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Lucky Jim at the Battle of Trafalgar
7 May: Kissing the gunner's daughter outside the Fishing Museum, rainy day, not the best for peering through small holes in bathing machines
8 May: Hangover Square installation at the art school, inc 20 minute reading, go alone!
9 May: 17 Clyde Road PV with Mark Little and Monty Oxy-Moron, the best PV of the festival, always!
10 May In/visible city: multicultural ride on a Big Lemon bus to Falmer and back. http://in-visible-city.com/o_eng.html
12 May: invigilating at 99 Clyde Road Open House
Open day at Brighton National Spiritualist Church, with a talk and 'dem' - always wanted to see what it was like on the inside.
http://www.brightonnationalspiritualistchurch.com/SPIRITFRINGE.html 
13 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
The Return of Adam Acidophilus the Fable Man at the Rock
14 May: Jeremy Deller, Playing Silly Buggers - The Life and Times of Bruce Lacey at the Dome, film followed by a useless Q&A enlivened by Bruce Lacey himself having a go at Deller for cutting things out
15 May: Spymonkey, Oedipussy at the Theatre Royal, post-modern pantomime by a quartet of extremely fit actors, best in show so far
www.spymonkey.co.uk/oedipussy/index.htm
17 May: And No Birds Sing at the Booth Museum, eerie promenade night at the stuffed birds museum with poems and zombie women, based on the life of Lizzie Siddal
18 May: Bootworks (Andy Roberts, no not the Andy Roberts (see below)) Predator at the Basement, the Arnie scifi film re-enacted using toys and members of the audience with great gusto, 2nd best in show so far
19 May: Phoenix Gallery Open Studios
20 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Trumpton comes Alive at the Latest, delightful concert of Trumpton music played by Glen Richardson (vocals), Adrian Oxaal and Stephen Wrigley (guitars) and Tom Arnold (percussion). Some videos wot I made:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFLPFJjXvU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWZE3dXZGA

Plus a few other Open Houses, documented here:
http://artistsopenhouses.tumblr.com/post/23032616783/a-few-half-way-highlights

Still to come:

23 May: Wellsbourne Society at Bom-Banes
24 May: The sound of the wind in the trees at the Nightingale, with live music, starring me (on film)!
27 May: Invigilating at Curt's Open House, 17 Clyde Road
Three Bonzos and a Piano at the Komedia, with the one and only Andy Roberts

Should Brighton and Hove City Council sell off its assets? (From The Argus)

Should Brighton and Hove City Council sell off its assets? (From The Argus) - I get a name check in this, from my letter to the Argus in March.

Pensioners love compos

I recently entered a competition on Twitter to name an exhibition I might have, based on Jeremy Deller's Joy in People. The prize was a load of Deller / David Shrigley goodies from the Hayward Gallery shop.

My spur-of-the-moment entry was:

@southbankcentre No interventions or paradigm shifts here, mate, just my paintings #fantasticfridays

To my surprise I won, and in due course a Jeremy Deller 'Bless this Acid House' poster arrived in a tube, followed by the box of goodies shown above: a catalogue of each exhibition, a set of 25 Shrigley postcards, a Deller mug 'My Booze Hell', and a couple of badges, worth around £70 the lot! Wow! Well worth entering. Now I've heard I've won another Twitter compo, from Silicon Beach Training, for writing this sycophantic blog entry on my Tumblr site.

Pensioners love compos. Not only do they pass the time, but you may win stuff. I'm not as fanatical as some internet compers, but I used to enter quite a few back in the 70s, mainly from the Sun newspaper (don't ask!). My best prize was a gold-plated Levis belt which I still have (any offers?). I also won a signed Roger Daltrey LP, the one with the centaur on the front (long gone!) and many other albums, including John Lennon's Sometime in New York City. If I see one that's easy to enter and I can be bothered, I'll have a go. You never know!

Bristol steam

I wasn't expecting to see any steam on our Clarion Cycling Club weekend in Bath (full report here), as I knew there was a diesel event on at the Avon Valley Railway. We did however spot the diesel, pulling some coaches that included Angela, which amused at least one of our riders, and I did spot a couple of cold steam locos in the shed at Bitton. Imagine my surprise therefore when we arrived at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol for lunch, to see a plume of smoke coming from across the harbour. Last time I was in Bristol, it wasn't running, but today my luck was in. After a great lunch of pea soup and a glass of Bristol Exhibition ale, Jim and I wandered over the bridge just as the train was leaving. In the 20 minutes or so it took to return, we chatted to one of the volunteers who was from Bolton and recognised my Clarion badge. Henbury returned and we got into the guard's van (which had a fire going).

 

Jim was going to see SS Great Britain so he and I bought return tickets (£2). I discovered however that the route to Create was longer and more interesting, so upgraded (another £2), and on the next run by the river was joined by Angela and Anne who'd been strolling along the docks.

 

Henbury never actually faced forward on any part of the journey, because there were no turning loops and it was paramount to have good visibility because of tourists wandering across the line. The other loco was away for repairs.

 

London Road is finished and will be an eyesore for years (From The Argus)

London Road is finished and will be an eyesore for years (From The Argus) Selma Montford replies to my letter (never published on the Argus website) suggesting the council sells King's House and relocates to the old Co-op building. It ran along the lines:

Does the Council really need to be in such a desirable prime location as King's House on Hove seafront? Why not sell it off for luxury apartments and move the offices to somewhere like the old Co-op building on London Road, with its imposing Neo-Classical facade, and help regenerate the area? Kill two birds with one stone: make money to offset our council tax rises and bring badly needed jobs to the 'gateway to Brighton'.

Today's letter answers Selma Montford's objections to my idea.
http://www.theargus.co.uk/yourargus/letters/9646506.Develop_King_s_House_as_flats/

Norfolk steam gala at Sheringham

Spent a very enjoyable weekend in Sheringham for the North Norfolk Railway Steam Gala. The journey up on Saturday was long but interesting. The computer told me to take the Jubilee Line from London Bridge to Stratford, which meant I saw some of the Olympics construction, including Anish Kapoor's tower, but also meant a half-hour wait on a platform with no buffet. The two-hour journey went through Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich and crossed a few estuaries. At Norwich I changed onto the Bittern Line train for an hour's trip to Sheringham, via Cromer and an enormous field full of photovoltaic panels near North Walsham.



The line ends at Sheringham, but the other side of the road it continues as the Poppy Line, and I could see steam. Closer inspection (I didn't need a platform ticket) revealed a double header of the mighty 92203, named Black Prince by its owner David Shepherd, and a Micky (Black 5) from ELR Bury: No. 45337! What a noise when they set off for Holt! Magnificent. Also in the station was LNER J15 7564 and 4936 Kinlet Hall. I must confess it's a bit odd to see a GWR engine so far east! After a cappuccino, I set off for my digs, Camberley House, up Cliff Road. The name of the street was a bit of a give-away... yes, it was a bit of a schlep up one of Norfolk's only hills. Bags dumped, I walked down to the prom and along to the harbour and a pint of Woodforde's Nog at the Camra Best Pub in Norfolk, the Windham Arms (on Wyndham Street!). The Robin Hood, up the road had a more limited selection of ales (I had a pint of Abbot) but the three-bean chilli was surprisingly good, with the accompanying veg cooked perfectly.



After a great veggie beakfast (including the best poached egg in North Norfolk) on a glorious Sunday morning, I breezed down to the station and caught the 9.46 to Holt, pulled by the J15 7564, built in 1912 at Stratford. On the way back, being pulled by Kinlet Hall, I alighted at Weybourne and waited for the beautifully restored B12 8572, hauling the 1924 LNER Quad-Art set that once carried commuters from King's Cross to the suburbs. Quad-Art? It's a four-carriage set with each carriage sharing a bogey with the next, making the whole train much lighter. I took the Black Prince train back to Holt, where it was left and we came back with Kinlet Hall. At Holt is a 2-10-0 Dub-Dee 90775, out of service. After a cappuccino and toasted teacake break, I caught Black Prince again back to Holt and returned to Sheringham with the 5MT 45337. Also on duty was a GWR tank 5619, which I kept missing. The bummer of the day was the on-off switch of my Flip Ultra II breaking, so no videos!



On the way back to the B&B I called in to the Lobster for a pint of Woodforde's Wherry, thence to the Windham Arms for some Elmtree Dark Horse stout. Monday morning, after another great breakfast, headed back the way I came, except to Liverpool Street (at Norwich you can get a train to either Liverpool Lime Street or Liverpool Street London, which could be confusing to a foreign visitor!), tube to the being refurbished Farrington and back over the river to bonny Brighton.

More photos on Flickr.

Things they don't tell you about getting old

You may not know, but I'm a terrible hypochondriac. Anything remotely worrying or out of the ordinary in the health department sends my anxiety levels sky high, resulting in tense neck and shoulders and then headaches, making me feel a whole lot worse. Yes, we all know that as we get older, we're more likely to get ill, and then eventually die. But I'm not ready for that yet. After spending most of my youth in hospitals, I've managed to avoid them in my adulthood. I think in a way I fear any cures more than the ailments itself. So, it was with trepidation that I visited my doc on Tuesday - the first appointment I could get after experiencing a surprise big black floater in my right eye, followed by flashing lights on the very edge of my vision, especially in dim light, the previous Friday afternoon.

Of course, I did a Google search, but as with almost any symptoms, the bottom line is always get checked out by your doctor! Could be anything. What I didn't want it to be was a detached retina. A friend, Stephen R, had told me on the trip back from Holyhead last year of his brother who got that and had to have emergency treatment in Liverpool, involving lasers and needles in the eye. Not nice! When I told the doc my symptoms, he immediately wrote me a note for the eye hospital A&E - yes, they have their own. So after charging up the mobile and packing some dark glasses (I knew they would dilate my pupil) I set off on the bus. He recommended getting there around 2pm.

Brighton's eye hospital is an Art Deco building (the foundation stone says 1933) and the ED is down some stairs. I showed the triage nurse my note and she directed me to sit down in a transit waiting area. Eventually I was summoned by another desk person to give some details, next of kin etc and then directed to another area of seating. After a while I was called by a rather laconic and brusk male nurse who put three lots of drops in my eyes and told me to save my story for the doctor. After another wait, me and an elderly lady from Newick with ingrowing eyelashes were led to a bench in a corrider opposite a rack of leaflets from the RNIB. She went in to see the doc and I waited again, later joined by another couple of women. Apparently there was an emergency involving a young lad, who needed a brain scan.

So I got to see the doc who took a good look in my eye and said (not in so many words) that it was posterior vitreous detachment. He could see that big black floater fluttering round like a moth, but said that it would either sink or my brain would get used to it eventually. Although the symptoms do incude the flashing lights as the vitreous tugs on the retina, he seemed to think it was an ocular migraine. Hmm, not so sure, I've been getting them for a week now, but as I said only in dim light, when I get up in the morning and in the evening.

Anyhow, the good news is that it wasn't retinal detachment, so no lasers and needles. But... I now have to live with this black moth fluttering around inside my eye... and being short-sighted, I was always going to be more prone to it. We are lucky in Brighton to have an eye hospital and yes, I know the dear old NHS is stretched but I can't help feeing the whole visit could have been made more pleasant and reassuring (I'm a big fan of Holby City and Casualty, y'know). Not being aware of the modus operandi and procedure does make you feel a little bit you are wasting their time and cluttering up their department (although there was a wall chart aimed at kids which went some way to explaining the sequence of events). And it was an eye opener to see people worse off than you (the lady from Newick had already had several operations and only had one good eye). Here's to life's little surprises, and let's hope it'll be a while before I have to enter a hospital again.

Here's a bit of weirdness: the other morning I was having a shave and when I reached for the towel a moth flew out. I thought it had come from my eye, but it was a real one and the floater is still there buzzing around.

If you've read this far, thanks for indulging me. I find writing about these things quite therapeutic. Got a train-spotting weekend in store in Sheringham, so come back and read my write-up.

Why are Open Houses on in May?

Delving about in my ephemera, for my last post about the Two Fringes, I came across a couple of brochures of alternative Open House events. Around the time of the split from the Festival and then the Fringe, some AOHers, notably from the Fiveways trail, proposed moving the Open Houses Festival away from the 'umbrella' of the May Festival to other parts of the year.

This was trialed by a Council-backed (City of Culture/Where Else Campaign) initiative called Manifest, which took place in October 2002, for three weekends. Various talks/workshops/exhibitions/open houses took place, from Portslade to Rottingdean. But it never happened again.

Then, of course, came the Christmas Open Houses, still going strong. In its first year, 2003, there were just 16 venues; last year there were 65. The brochures are designed by AOH's Chris Lord, with woodcut illustrations on the cover by Judy Stevens, always on the theme of The Twelve days of Christmas. We look forward to its 13th year to see how she will illustrate that one!

In 2006, 11 Open Houses had a July opening for two weekends, as part of the Celebrating Age festival, featuring more mature artists, i.e. those over 50! The participating venues (I was in Jackie Jones' house at 51 Upper Lewes Road) were not impressed by the level of publicity it got, attendances were poor and it was never repeated. The consensus is that May is best!

Incidentally, almost all these events had websites, now gone to the great digital graveyard in the sky...

When Brighton had two Fringes

A recent Twitter exchange with the new Fringe Director @JulianCaddy, who by all accounts is a breath of fresh air, jogged my memory about the origins of the Fringe. Unlike Edinburgh's Fringe, which started the same time as the International Festival in 1947 and has since grown bigger than its posher rival, the current Brighton Fringe was created by Festival Director at the time Nick Dodds. Under Gavin Henderson, the Festival embraced all of May's cultural events, including also the Artists' Open Houses. Henderson was also responsible for using Brighton artists and makers to design the covers of the brochures. Under his successor, Christopher Barron, the miscellaneous events and artists houses were grouped at the back of the festival brochure under the heading of Umbrella. My collection only goes back to 1997, so earlier than that I don't know.

Dodds, however, wanted to split off the 'non-programmed' events (i.e. not taking place in the Dome complex) into an Edinburgh-like fringe. There were lots of heated meetings about it, main opposition coming from the AOHers. As a compromise, the 2002 festival brochure (the one with the jelly bean cover) included a bound-in supplement called Brighton Festival Open.

But also in 2002, some bright sparks - Helen Medland and Jeff Hemmings - started up the Brighton Fringe! This was described in their intro as the fifth ever Fringe 'after an enforced sabbatical last year'. This is where my memory fails me. I do remember seeing Fringe brochures from the 1960s in a small exhibition at North Star Studios once, but I think they related to the Open Studios that preceded the Open Houses.

In 2003 there was another Brighton Fringe ('the sixth real Brighton Fringe Festival'). But 2003 also saw the publication of a brochure by the new Brighton Festival Fringe, with the first 13 pages devoted to the Open Houses!

So for one year only, Brighton had two Fringes! What happened to Brighton Fringe you may ask? I don't know, but I believe pressure was put on them by the official festival. There was also the question of funding. The first 'official' Fringe was funded by the main festival, who were in turn funded by the Arts Council and Brighton Council. AOH stayed with the Fringe for a few years, before deciding to break off and produce a brochure of their own in 2005, but that's another story. And that's a cue for me to sort out my ephemera collection.

Edward Burra in Chichester

I really am still in two minds about Edward Burra. There's a Burra in Bury art gallery called 'News of the World', I have fond memories of seeing it as I was growing up, but I always assumed he was American, what with the unusual name and his best known pictures being of jazz-age Harlem. What I also didn't realise was that he worked almost excusively in watercolour.

So I set off to Pallant House in Chichester on half-price tuesday to see more. As ever they put on a fine exhibition, and I loved the first room of art deco sailors and showgirls from French ports, and in the corridor before you even get in is a fabulous and rare oil painting, and all in that flattened perspective with vibrant Léger-style shading of arms and legs. How did he achieve that depth of colour with watercolour? I squinted close up and all I could deduce was that he was using very dry paint, perhaps pounced like Maxfield Parrish. When I got home I googled about his technique - more later!

Anyway, after that first room with its smallish pictures, plus his photo album of tiny contact prints, we get to the Spanish war and some huge paintings that I thought were horrible. And I was pretty much disappointed from then in - everything he did I could think of someone who'd done it better. The early inter-war stuff you could compare with George Grosz and William Roberts (also featured in a Pallant House exhibition, 2007). The spanish paintings remind you of Dali, and put Burra in that sad category of English Surrealist. His Sussex paintings are not even in the same league as Ravilious. I find his pictures on the cusp of ugliness, with those big lumbering forms looming up in the foreground and the hideous lips on everyone. But I still can't help being fascinated.

The technique to achieve this intense tempera-type finish, I found out from a Guardian review, was as follows:

He came to prefer watercolour to oil, partly because it was physically easier to handle for a man who, perforce, painted sitting down [he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, as well as other ailments]. Though he seems to have had a good idea of where he was going from the start, he did not make preliminary sketches. He started at the bottom right-hand corner, and in his 20s and 30s, drew a compartment, or section, in light pencil (he later dispensed with this). Then, using a rather small brush laden with paint lightly moistened with spit, he completed the entire section before moving on to the next, achieving a suave, velvety surface of intensely saturated colour.

Do go and see it, though. It's on until 19 February.

How authors go mad

I was planning a Moan on this subject, but someone beat me to it: How authors go mad

Fred through the ages

With my 65th birthday looming I thought I'd compile a slideshow of photos of me through the ages!

Daily Moan #19: Upgrading the computer

Another New year and it's back to having a good old moan! Now I must preface this moan with the statement that I love Apple and Apple products, and believe that Jony Ive should be knighted. I bought my first ever Mac Plus back in June 1989 and even before that, way back in the early 80s, I got my company - IPC Science and Technology Press - to buy an Apple ][e with a bank of four floppy drives, just to put conference delegate lists into alphabetical order. But...

BUT...

I hate upgrading. I dread it. I avoid it like the plague until I get dragged into doing it for the sake of a new gadget. It happened when I got my first iPod. I brought it home all excited and unpacked it, only to find my OS wasn't up-to-date enough. So I upgraded, and of course nothing worked - it took days to get the internet, printers and everything back working again. Stressful!

The same thing happened when I got the iPad 2. I was perfectly happy with OS 10.4 but it insisted I needed 10.5. So I borrowed a copy (the only alternative was to buy an expensive box set) and again it was traumatic, mainly because a program I'd been using for years, Adobe Streamline, which was working fine in 'classic' mode, was no longer happening. Ah well, I thought, I am almost retired and should I need to trace line drawings, I could learn Freehand's built-in trace tools. But then, just before Christmas, my trusty iMac died!

OK, I'd had seven years productive use from it (bought May 2005). It was the last of the PowerPC iMacs, the white one before they stuck a camera in. I'd woken it from sleep and everything was frozen. I restarted it from the power button, it chimed but never got past the blue screen. Hmm, what to do. I had the iPad so I was on Facebook and Gmail, but I couldn't work. I'd rigged up an old 12in Powerbook G4 (bought to handle Channel 4's dreadful content-management system, for which my iMac was too up to date) as a distraction-free writing machine for NaNoWriMo, so I could use that. I'd been thinking of buying a new iMac for a while, so I took the plunge and ordered one from the Apple Store, where I get an NUJ discount. The old iMac went to the menders. I was hoping it could be repaired so I could get at Filemaker Pro and my invoices etc.

When the new iMac arrived, I transferred all my life from an external hard drive (using Time Machine). My neighbours had already been caught out with the new Firewire 800 plug so I borrowed their £20+ cable to transfer everything from the hard drive into the new computer. So far so good, but I'd been reading up and was aware that Lion didn't support PowerPC apps. My plan was to get the old one mended and strip it down as a work computer, but as it worked out the logic board was gone and it was an uneconomic repair. Luckily Mick Swabey had an old iMac like mine but with smaller screen on sale for £85! So he swopped the internal hard drives for me and I was back in business, but with two computers on the go.

Now I've been using Freehand since the beginning, but that was no longer supported on the new computer. I had archives going back years and my new giclee prints had all been created using Freehand. I'm too old to learn Illustrator! Luckily, Photoshop CS3 still worked, but I didn't even attempt to connect my old scanner to it. All my records - invoices, addresses, etc were on FileMaker Pro - I could have bought an upgrade, but why should I when it was working fine on the old computer? Upgrading is not only stressful, it can be expensive too. So to do my Xmas cards I began transferring my contact info to Address Book - I didn't try printing labels, I still have that bridge to cross.

I'd also bought a Time Capsule, which I thought was just a glorified hard drive, but it is also a router. I couldn't get it to work as just a hard drive, so took my Netgear router out of the loop and everything was sweet as a nut, just like Apple products usually are - all working straight out of the box. I noticed it had a USB port to attach a printer, but after trying to get the old HP 990c printer to work on the network, discovered it too was no longer supported! Ah well.

Anyway, on New Year's Eve I went up to the 100 Club in London to see my favourite band David Devant and his Spirit Wife, and as usual I took my Flip video recorder to document the event. Back home, I put a couple of videos on YouTube and set about compiling the DVD. My trusty copy of iMovie HD was working and I started importing the Flip files and typing in the song titles. When it was all done, I clicked Share to power up iDVD then discovered my iDVD wouldn't work. OK, so I'd download an upgrade, only there isn't one! What! Yes, that's right, iDVD is no longer supported by Apple. So how the blazes can I make a DVD? The only solution was to start again on the old computer, transferring the Flip files by USB memory stick (the iMovie project file is 17 gigs, I could have used my old external drive to transfer it over but I don't have the right Firewire cable!). There may well be way of doing it via Time Capsule, but it's done now... or rather it's in the process of doing it!

Of course my PC friends will be killing themselves laughing at all this. I thought Macs never broke, they'll taunt. The upshot is that I have a beautiful, fast, state-of-the-art iMac with a crisp high-res screen, but it does little more than my iPad already does. My workhorse is an old 17in G5 iMac running all my favourite programs on Leopard. If only my iMac had died earlier when they were still sending out Macs with Snow Leopard, I would have been OK (for a year or two). Guess which computer I'm writing this on? The old one of course.

Up North again

Doing the NaNoWriMo in November made me a bit behind with my blog, but I did it! 50,000 words in less than 30 days! What I discovered about fiction, as opposed to non-fiction is that you can make things up! According to Julia Crouch I'll have to wait until January before I look at it again.

Just before November I made another trip to Bury for my Brother-in-Law's 60th birthday celebrations, and to take in the East Lancs Railway Autumn Steam Gala. I travelled up on the Saturday, so only had Sunday to enjoy the trains. The big disappointment was that 71000 Duke of Gloucester was stuck somewhere and wouldn't be on (but he'd be back the following weekend, hoorah!).



The ELR seems to be running out of locos so it was a pretty humdrum selection, the star of which was 49395 - the so-called Super-D. The only other big loco on was a Mickey, 45231 The Sherwood Forester. The rest were industrial tanks: Peckett and Sons 1370 May in Yates Duxbury paper mill livery, Manchester Ship Canal 32 Gothenburg in the guise of Thomas the Tank Engine, and WD132 Sapper.



On the Tuesday I took the tram to Manchester to see the Ford Madox Brown exhibition at the Manchester (City) Art Gallery. As you may know I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphs and as Brown was a honorary member, and Rossetti's teacher, it was a must. Although I've seen all his major works before : Work, Manfred on the Jungfrau, and The last of England - there were lots of studies and sketches to see, including the drawings for his Manchester Town Hall murals. His faces always worry me though, they look so sinister some of them. If the later ones look a bit unfinished its because he suffered a stroke and had to finish them using his left hand!

On Wednesday my niece took me out to Bolton, where we stopped by at Fred Dibnah's house, now a heritage centre - there are tours but you have to book in advance. After fish and chips at Russells we looked at the magnificent Victorian market hall, now a shopping mall, and other architectural gems.



On Thursday I chose the day with the worst weather to take the Cumbrian Round Robin rail journey: train from Bolton to Carlisle, then back down the coast through Workington, Whitehaven, Sellafield, Barrow-in-Furness and Carnforth. Unfortunately the train north I was on caught fire (engine under central carriage) near Shap summit and I missed my connection, so it was dark as I reached Morecambe Bay. If I did it again, I'd only go up as far as Barrow, or maybe Sellafield if you like weird places. Whitehaven looked reasonably nice; but Workington was a wasteland. Ulverston, between Barrow and Carnforth, had a very impressive station with clock tower.



Friday was spent on Bury market buying Northern food, including black peas and black puddings. Saturday I took my Bruv-in-law on the steam trains while my sister's gaff was being decked out ready for the party. We drove to Ramsbottom and did a round trip, pulled by 45231 The Sherwood Forester. At Heywood we observed a party of VIPs, including the Mayor of Rochdale, inspect the train. On Sunday, the Duke was back in action, so I spent the day in a comfy carriage behind that most magnificent loco.

NaNoWriMo and my Hon Degree

In case you've been wondering where I've been, I've had my head down writing a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo and you'll be glad to know that I'm just over half-way through. It's all Julia Crouch's fault - she did it three years ago and the result was her published novel Cuckoo, with another two on the way. I'm not sure there's a publishable novel in me, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and easier than growing a moustache.

After my trip Up North, the second this year, which I have yet to blog, I travelled up to Guildford, along with thousands of others, to receive an honorary degree. No it wasn't for my outstanding contribution to social media, it was a B Univ given to all and sundry who spent time at Battersea, before the college became an University and moved to Guildford. It would have made more sense if they'd given it to those who just got an external London degree, but I did get a Surrey degree, and now I have two!

I met Chris Chelu (who took the photo), Tina, Groovy Rob Thomasson, and Wal - who missed the boat on a ticket for the ceremony so came as my guest - long with Maurice Valoir, Chris Taper, Phil Garel-Jones, Pete Baylis - and Sir David Varney! Plus many others. I shook hands with HRH the Duke of Kent and we had a slap-up reception with canapes and wine after.

Book Review: How to Design Websites by Alan Pipes | HOW Interactive Design

Book Review: How to Design Websites by Alan Pipes | HOW Interactive Design: first review of my latest book - only 3 stars though.

Warhol at Bexhill and a robot invasion!

You heard it here first, my next print will be of the De La Warr (pronounced Delaware) Pavilion in Bexhill. I popped over there last Thursday to take some snaps. It's been done so well before, particuarly by People will always need plates, that I need to find a new angle. Thankfully my friend Dave from Exeter sent me an old book about the DLWP with exactly the view I needed but I had to check out the angles for myself. Unfortunately there was turf laying going on around the east of the building so I couldn't get ideal photos, but they will be good enough.

Now I'm not a big Warhol fan - if you've seen one you've seen them all - but thought I'd take a look seeing as I was there - and it was free. And was pleasantly surprised. Up next to the cafe, where I had a £9 meal deal of soup (parsnip and apple), chips and cappuccino, was a room full of late stuff: small ads for hamburgers, boots and Repent! blown up large in black and white, all on cow wallpaper. Downstairs, were early drawings, then the usual multicoloured screenprints - Mao, electric chair, Marilyn, flowers, Brillo boxes etc etc. Then finally stitched photos and polaroid self portraits. Well worth a visit.

While in Bexhill I cycled along to the museum (formerly the Egerton Park Shelter Hall, built in 1903) to see the original model of the pav. It cost £2 to get in and I had a quick whizz round the fossils and stuffed animals (and the more interesting cars and transport-related items downstairs) before taking some illegal snaps of the model, which includes a circular swimming pool, nude statues and a jetty with diving boards, none of which were ever built.



On Friday night I got the bus to Hove Museum for the opening of Robot Invasion! - Chris McEwan's collection of robots, space toys and artwork. (NB Whilst Googling Hove museum I found a website called Fred's Days Out!) The robots are all in boxes, uncaptioned but themed - with all the Robbys in one box; all the K-9s in another. Next door are ray guns and some of Chris's artwork. There are also videos of the robots in action. It's on until 21 February 2012 so go and see it. After they chucked us out I wandered up to the Poet's Corner pub to watch Lucky Jim and enjoy a couple of pints of Harvey's Old.

Four bloggings and a funeral... err website

Many years ago (April 2004 to be precise), I joined the Brighton and Hove Section of the Clarion Cycling Club and rather foolishly suggested they have a website, and guess who foolishly volunteered? So I produced a simple conventional website and updated it every fortnight, when our Captain would sent out the Circular outlining the next ride and including a report of the last ride. As people started buying digital cameras and sending me pictures, I set up a Flickr site so I wouldn't have to choose and process the photos for the website. Every other week I would update the website and manually archive the old ride reports and other sundry items.

The most important items were always the details of the forthcoming ride and the report of the last one. I was kicking myself, therefore, that I hadn't set it up as a blog! So, in January 2011 I bit the bullet and recreated the website as a Wordpress blog. The old website remains in cyberspace, as an archive. To move all the old posts into the blog would have been far too onerous.

Since then, in my semi-retirement, I've been helping various friends and acquaintances to get a web presence, if at all possible using blogs. Blogs can be easier than websites: they're easier to update, and you don't need to worry about hosting, ftp and all that jazz. So many times I've met people who have had a website designed for them by a friend-of-a-friend's daughter's boyfriend, only for them to disappear on a gap year when you need a telephone number changing. You are restricted in how you can customise them however. Just like you can't go to Primark and ask for a frock with different coloured buttons to the one on sale, so you have to put up with what the template offers. If you have exact specifications, you'll need a bespoke website and you'll have to pay someone if and when it needs updating.

The first guineapig was Hilary Ormesher who runs the trendy shop Appendage, in the North Laine. Initially we chose a Wordpress blog, but when the logo she'd had done didn't work as a banner, we switched to Blogger, which allowed any depth of banner. The hardest part of designing blogs, I've found is choosing the right template. Wordpress templates usually require an exact header size, eg 900 x 200 px. When Hilary first came round for a tutorial, she didn't know what a mouse was, but now (with the help of her son) she's happily doing updates and uploading images. I'm hands off now, which suits me - and the client.

I've also set up a blog for glass jewellery designer Annie McCabe. This too is a Wordpress blog but it was only when we'd uploaded a few postings that we discovered that the template we'd chosen (MistyLook) only displayed summaries - with no images - when a catagory or tag was selected, the basis for making the menu work. That was no good at all for something so visual, so we switched to Clean Home. (In case you've come across this problem, here is a list of ones that do and don't.) I also discovered that it is difficult to place images side by side, unless you invoke the complicated 'gallery' option. But there's often a way round these hurdles.

The fourth blog I set up recently was for my singing group, this time in Blogger. I'd sorted out and updated the static website of my singing teacher Udita and used that as the basis for the blog. Here the blog format is not ideal, as chronological postings like videos and audio files will appear scattered about the place. When we have a domain, I may well point it at the About page, and change the Home page (the actual blog part) to News.

Finally, a friend of a friend in London, wanted me to sort out her website, The White Chair. For some mysterious reason I've yet to fathom, she couldn't upload it to the host. She didn't even have the original html files, so I recreated the website, based on an InDesign file. Thankfully it was pretty simple, with few images and it's not the sort of site to need updating very often. It's for a funeral celebrant!

By the way, if you fancy having a go at designing your own blog or website, there's a brilliant book just out called How to design websites. It does exactly what it says on the cover.

It's raining men - Magritte at Tate Liverpool

René Magritte was my first favourite artist (after a brief flirtation with Douanier Rousseau, thanks to my inspirational school art teacher Mr Barker) so I thought I knew everything about him, and I confess I nearly didn't bother to go to the Tate Liverpool exhibition, but I'm so glad I did. Not only did it reacquaint me with an old friend but confirmed that he is still one of my all-time favourites. I suppose the Surrealists (along with M C Escher) would appeal to a lad interested in both art and science, but Magritte's imagery has become so commonplace - on album covers, parodied in cartoons etc - that it's tempting to take him for granted. And although Dali was slicker with the painting technique, when it came to ideas, Magritte was the Daddy.

The exhibition on the 4th floor of the Tate is themed - bowler hats in one room, blue skies and clouds in another - and I really don't mind that, it gives you pause to compare and contrast, and see how an idea developed. There's one room with just two paintings in it - two almost identical versions of 'The flavour of tears' - the bird-leaf one, showing that like William Holman Hunt and other Victorian painters he did often paint the same image over again. What came as a surprise were the paintings from his garish comicbook-inspired 'Vache' period, with which he invented Pop Art - in 1948, his non-surreal commercial work, including some beautiful Art Deco posters, and his very rude erotic drawings for Georges Battaile's Documents, in a darkened room behind black curtains with a notice outside warning punters that they may find these pictures 'challenging'.

It's a big exhibition, and also includes film and photographs, along with sketches, notes and Banksy-like sculptures (a painting of cheese under a cheese dome, nudes on bottles). Once again, the postcards were disappointing - on show is the English version of 'This is not a pipe' but the postcard on sale is the French one, not in the exhibition. The £20 catalogue is good value too, but strangely organised A to Z. It's on until 16 October and cost me £8.50 to get in. You can get a C2 Cumfybus from Lime Street station to the new Museum of Liverpool (not yet fully open) nearby. The rest of the Tate was a pleasure to whizz round with guest-curated rooms full of treasures - and there's a nice friendly cafe overlooking Albert Dock.



I was Up North for my favourite niece's 40th birthday celebrations, but I took time off too to visit the East Lancs Railway for a round trip to Rawtenstall (via Ramsbottom, where Steve Cropper was playing the festival there) and to Heywood and back. The ELR is currently short on steam locos and I was pulled by a Austerity tank (WD 132 Sapper) and 'Thomas' (Manchester Ship Canal 32 Gothenburg) double-header through the rainy Lancashire countryside. A pint of Black Witch in the Trackside bar after was most welcome. Hope they have some bigger locos on for the Autumn Steam event in October.

Another extremity conquered: Portland Bill (and Lulworth Cove)

I wasn't expecting to visit any extremities during my holiday to Dorset, just some interesting rock formations, but when my college friend Rick arrived en route for Devon, a lift to Weymouth and beyond was a welcome possibility.

We were staying in Ivy Cottage, West Lulworth - the same self-catering gang as the Isle of Wight last year and Purbeck the year before that. The nearest station was Wool and the bus service (the Damory 103 and the green community 104) was rather limited, but I could get back from Weymouth ok. When we got to to Weymouth however, we decided to go look at Chesil Beach, and then just kept on to Portland and up and up, and way way south to the two lighthouses at Portland Bill. It was blowing a gale (the remains of Hurricane Katia?), the waves were huge and the foghorn was blowing so we didn't hang about. A brief stop at Chesil Beach to pick up a pebble - and it was far too windy to get over the ridge - then back to Weymouth for fish and chips. The Old Harbour had a big banner proclaiming it was endorsed by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Fish Fight, so I went for the mackerel. Not a good idea - the fillets were really too thin to deep fry and I got mainly batter. What they should have done was offer coley or pollock as an alternative to cod and haddock. Said goodbye to Rick and after a quick walk round the deserted seafront got the train to Wool and the bus back to the cottage.



What else did we get up to? Sunday: arrived by cab and had a quick walk down to the Cove. Monday: managed to get the new bus timetable but had to spend 2 hours in Wool (in the Black Bear!) before I could get back. My turn to cook and Rick arrived from Hull. Tuesday: above trip to the extremity. Wednesday: bus to Dorchester, a not very interesting place, but it had supermarkets! Thursday: bus to Durdle Door caravan park, then a walk to the sea to see the arch and back east over a big hill with white cobbled path, apparently one of the busiest footpaths in Britain. After a pint of Badger in the Lulworth Cove Inn to recover, went to look at Stair Hole. Friday: bus to Bovington Tank Museum. It was a long walk to the new museum from where the bus dropped me, had a look at the hundreds of tanks in there, and a bowl of soup in the cafe. Then it was back to Wool and another spell in the pub waiting for the connecting bus. Tip: if you want to see tanks in action, go on a Wednesday.



Saturday was a relatively quiet day down at Lulworth Cove, where I could have done some sketching had I been bothered. Watched Roundhill Rob ascend the eastern headland, while on the other one people played extreme golf. Then it was a lazy bus ride to the church and a stroll back to the cottage. Sunday we got a lift to the station with Steve and it was a long rail journey home via Clapham Junction. Back at London Road, there was a street party going on...

More photos on Flickr.