Well I woke up this morning to the incredible images and news of the explosion of an oil depot near Hemel Hempstead. Thankfully it seems that they were few causalities which is absolutely amazing given the scale of the blast. It apparently happened at 6:03am this morning, local residents have had windows blown out and even structural damage to their homes.

Of course your first thought is “Is this a terrorist attack?”, but fortunately it seems to have just been a spectacular accident. From the images on tv it seems as if parts of London are now under the plume, but looking out of my window in South London it looks like the skies are clear, so I guess the cloud is quite narrow.

I just read the sad news that comedy legend Richard Pryor passed away at Encino hospital near Los Angeles due to a heart attack. I grew up really enjoying Pryor’s films, even “Brewsters Millions” which Pryor himself didn’t really like. I loved the very un-PC “See No Evil, Hear No Evil”, but I think my favourite performance was in “Superman III”. I remember feeling really sad for his character as well as laughing out loud.

Pryor famously battled with alcohol and other drugs for many years, but I think on balance, history will remember him as simply a great comic and comic actor. So long Richard.

BBC Obituary

So today is the last ever day. The 159 left Marble Arch this lunchtime on it’s final journey. The Routemaster bus was actually discontinued in 1968 but has been refitted and repaired ever since. The 159 and several other Routemaster buses are being decommissioned just down the road from me in Brixton, in fact they are expected to start arriving at the depot in the next few minutes.

I’m very glad that I moved to London just before this happened, and I’m told that many of them are being sold on for other uses, so I guess we’ll see them again.

UPDATE: I’m reliably informed by me friend George that the routemaster buses will still run on a couple of services, one of which is specially created as a kind of moving museum. Hooray!

So I got a bit fed-up with the green and black design for my site. It’s partly due to looking at it so much and getting bored, and also to the fact that it was over-complex in terms of how I made it and had too many bugs to bother fixing. So, I’m making a new design right now and consequently the site may be funky, inconsistent, and at times broken. So bear with me. I think it’s looking better already though.

Now I don’t mean to be mean, but what is it with all this mourning for George Best? If you hadn’t heard (which I find an utterly implausible possibility for any U.K. resident) George Best died last week. Well boo hoo.

Look, please don’t misunderstand me, it’s sad for his family and friends and everything, but why on earth am I supposed to care? There’s been wall-to-wall coverage of this pathetic old wife-beating boozer’s demise on the news, even a live broadcast of his funeral on the BBC, and I just find it completely ludicrous if not offensive. He was a football player for gods sake. He wasn’t a diplomat, a charity worker, a teacher, or even a good role model. He was a once-good kicker of balls who pissed his life up against the wall and got through more livers than I’ve had hot-dinners.

Excuse the rhyming, I always get that way when I’m angry. Maybe next they’ll install a webcam in is coffin so we can all watch the final stages of his decomposition that began way back when in the 80’s. But I guess with all that alcohol in his system he may conceivably never rot. Pickled for all eternity, like Lenin, only hairier.

I’m feeling pretty lacklustre today, but with no good reason. Or at least no reason that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s strange how one day, which is much like the last, can have such a different feeling. If I was more spiritual in my world-view then I’d probably look to the moon or my biorhythms to explain it. I have a plan though. A series of activities and actions to lift myself up and it starts with a word. That word is “mandible”, it’s my favourite word in the English language and I’m saying it to myself right now. Mandible. Mandible. Mandible. Already I can feel a tightening of the muscles around my mouth, and as if my magic a smile appears. It’s a grey day today, but mandible is helping me to see it differently. Outside my window a huge tree is throwing away it’s leaves and for a moment they look like butterflies, in the distance birds fly and it’s hard to tell where the leaves end and the birds begin. I’ve found myself dreaming of painting in recent weeks, it’s odd as I haven’t painted anything at all for years, save the odd interior wall of course, but that doesn’t really count, although it can have a Zen-like charm. My friend George says to “just do it then”, and I know he’s right. So why can’t I?

Today is the introduction for tomorrow. I’m going to be meeting up with my good friend Patrick Wray who I haven’t seen for several months. Patrick is an uplifting presence, and we’ve done a lot of work together in the past and intend to pick up again this weekend during his stay with me. Another friend will be joining us on Saturday, Gerry King, and between the two of them you can’t help but be uplifted and inspired. I’m looking forward to a weekend of adventure and creativity, some of the results of which may find themselves posted here.

I’m now free of any work and I need to put together my portfolio and CV in order to start looking for some more, but I’m never really that interested in looking back at old projects and find it difficult to summon the will to complete it. However I think it’s half-finished state is one of the things that is casting a shadow over my day and I know I have to get it done in order to move on with more exciting projects. I think I’ll distract myself with another cup of tea first. I’ve been drinking too much coffee recently and I think tea might be my saviour. I’ll watch the kettle boil, and see how I feel.

So winter is finally here, as my good friend and collaborator Patrick Wray would say “Mother nature’s icy claw” has begun it’s chilling embrace. I know I’m walking straight into a cultural stereotype by talking about the weather, but like all good Englishmen I find it almost endlessly fascinating. Is it just me or do there seem to be too many leaves still on the trees? I’m not complaining, it just strikes me as a little odd. I always seem to be surprised by the onset of winter, and I have a disease that I just can’t seem to shake off. It’s nothing biological, more a behavioural malady. Whenever it begins to get cold all the clothes I buy are only suitable for the summer. Then when the temperature starts to rise again I begin to fetishize coats and scarves. I can’t tell if I’m just very slow to react, or incredibly well prepared, like those people who buy all their Christmas presents in the January sales. Either way, I’m cold.

I finally feel settled in my not-so-new home, in fact I really like Brixton. It’s a real pleasure to walk through the market and move between the walls of sound emanating from the different stalls. It’s taken a while, but I’m a bit of a homebody you see. If I was of a more mystical persuasion I’d ascribe this tendency to my star-sign being Cancer. We Cancarians are supposed to be stay-in types, and also have a tendency to horde. It’s funny the things we believe, especially when like me you don’t subscribe to any religion. I often find myself inventing little superstitions of my own, while simultaneously flouting the rules of more established ones. One such ‘rule’ is my belief that if I say out-loud “I haven’t been ill for a while”, I will become ill within the week. Do you think it counts if I write it down? Hope not. Anyway here’s an image to prove how happy our little family is in our new home, look at those smiles! By the way, I’m the one in the v-neck whose head looks far too big for his body.

I’m beginning to look forward to Christmas at last. If I’m honest I’d been kinda dreading it. I like the festive season, but I usually make the trip home to see my family for the day itself, and although it’s lovely to spend time with them, it can be a bit boring. I come from a very small village in Oxfordshire you see, and as I don’t drive it makes getting about a bit tricky. All of my friends who will likely be in the area live in other villages or towns nearby, and of course no buses run on Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve and Boxing Day are difficult. So I end up being rather stuck and just eating too much. This mild depression was lifted however when I saw some Christmas lights through the window of a flat near where I live. They were cheap and tacky, but they reminded me how great Christmas can be, and I imagined all the fun that family will have. I hope they have kids in that flat, and I hope it snows for them.

A note on the development of this site. I’m at last getting around to adding content to all those pretty menu options on the left. Currently I’m working on filling in the portfolio section, and the gallery is working ok on non-msie browsers. I’m quite pleased with the gallery actually. It’s totally over-the-top, and a massive waste of bandwidth, but it’s fun. There’s still a fair bit to do, but I’m getting there!

Well I should sign off, it’s quite late and I should be in bed. I’ve been waiting for the trailer for “Brokeback Mountain” to download but it aint happening. Oh well, I’ll have to be content with the promo images for now.

I’ve been following the story recently of the shooting of two female police officers in Bradford. Sadly one of the officers who was shot, Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, died in the incident. Of course this is horrific, Pc Beshenivsky was a mother of five and one cannot help but dwell on the fact that five children will now grow up without their mother. However, as disturbing as the incident itself is the reaction by the police force and the media. Let me explain…

The coverage of the shooting has been massive. On one hand this is a good thing, gun crime is still a shocking incident in the UK despite its increase in recent years and the interest in this story bears witness to that, on the flipside though, why does this murder deserve so much more coverage than the murder of a civilian? The reactions it has elicited from the police is quite extraordinary. Former Met Police chief Lord Stevens has gone as far as to call for the death penalty for people who murder police officers. We in the UK do not have the death penalty for any crime, correctly in my opinion, but if we were to ‘bring back hanging’ why would we introduce it to punish the murderers of police officers and not the murderers of civilians? I deplore the statement of Lord Stevens and believe it is the height of irresponsibility.

What I also find very cynical is how certain opportunistic groups inside and outside of the police force are using this tragedy in an attempt to advance their own case for the routine arming of our police. This must not be allowed to happen. It would be a betrayal of hundreds of years of tradition, and of some of our most dearly held beliefs about the nature of our nation. I believe we are living in an era of terrifying reactionism. This incident when placed alongside the ‘anti-terror’ legislation and ID card bill starts to paint a picture of a government, and a public, whose decision making process is based increasingly on the politics of fear and anger.

I just wanted to share with my (three?) readers a fabulous musical recommendation courtesy of my good friend and house-mate Peter Baker. Peter has a very wide and varied musical taste, as well as being a musician/singer/songwriter himself, check out his track on the Bjork covers album ‘Army Of Me’.

The recommendation of which I write is ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’ by Joanna Newsom. It’s an absolutely beautiful collection of songs that are hard to describe. For me it’s something like a mix of Kristen Hersh, Isobel Campbell and, well I don’t know what really. All I know is that it makes me feel happy and sad at the same time, an uplifting melancholy that I’m a real sucker for.

Well it’s the Conservative Party (known here in the UK as Tories) Conference this week and all the prospective candidates for the leadership contest are plumping themselves up and showing off their feathers. Today was the turn of Satan David Davis and Dr Liam Fox (Dr. Fox? Seriously?). They’re both of the right-wing persuasion even for tories. Mr Davis is a big supporter of bringing back the death penalty (because it works so well in the US), of reversing the equalisation of the age of consent for gay people, and eating babies. Dr Fox is a big Europe-basher and would like nothing more than to pull the UK out of the EU, Dr Fox would also introduce compulsory organ donation to further his evil experiments into human-dog hybrids.

To learn more use the handy evil-o-meter I’ve made for you, or alternatively see what auntie beeb has to say about it all.

BBC Contender Round-Up

Just an ever so quick post this morning to say two things. Firstly I haven’t posted in an age, what a slacker! That’s because I’ve moved to old London town and have been a bit busy. Over the next few days I hope get my act together and start posting like a MUD player on speed, rather than the chess player on ketamine that I’ve been recently.

The second reason I’m posting is to implore my mac using friends to download Camino from the Mozilla Foundation. Camino is a Mozilla based web browser just like the now well known Firefox. However anyone whose used Firefox on Mac OS X will know that it’s not quite mac-like, it feels a bit clunky and slow. Camino however is made specifically for Mac and it’s a fantastic, powerful, and elegant web browser. If you’re on a Mac check it out, if you’re not, drool.

Camino - Mozilla power, Mac style.

mmmmm… men’s chocolate!

These arrived via my kind friend George who returned from Sydney via Tokyo recently.

I’m not quite sure what qualifies them to be named “men’s chocolate”, but they are quite nice. My flatmate Peter is telling me that google say’s that these man chocs come in other flavours too, including giant.

Someone send me some!