r A t.

r A t.

Banksy said: 'imagine a world where graffiti wasn't illegal… where standing at a bus stop was never boring… where the street was like a party that everyone was invited to.'

Think of the colours, the freedom, the entertainment. Think of the justice of it. And think of the architects weeping.

There's a whole book in here, I think. But, if I tried to write it, I would use ten times the wordage with none of the succinct wit and wisdom, or eloquently profound and playful illustration of Wall and Peace. ..See? Just look at that sentence.

It's a book that I think Caroline should have on her Important Urban Design Texts shelf at work, next to Jane Jacobs and Fifty amusing skylines (25th edition).

But the fact that Banky's subversive, stenciled rats speak so cleverly has everything to do with context. ..And the fact that my primary adjective there was 'clever' rather than 'funny' or 'bloody-spot-on-mate' makes it obvious I'm a middle class bloke who got the book for Christmas and has subsequently joined the revolution by idly reading it in the bath and thinking it was marvelous, darling. Plus, I used the word 'context'.

But it is about context. Without the mindless street clutter of signage, Banksy's rats would have nowhere to play. Without the boundaries, we have no way to be naughty.

What fun is football on a tiny stretch of grass in a suburban cul-de-sac without the gloriously sanguine No Ball Games sign rooted quietly in one corner? No fun either way for me, but I'm not getting my own point. Or what about Mark and Lard - they were at their funniest when on Radio 1 daytime, precisely because they hated the playlist.

The designer makes effective pieces of visual communication by setting up fields to work in. Invisible grids to break out of and create dynamism. Ah, grids. Don't get me started on grids. The grid is your friend, subversive graphic designer.

Now, the problem with packaging Bansky into a book is that it becomes a bit of a commodity and something to be consumed in the bath, rather than lived with as a piece of the human environment, challenging the human story. But I don't care, because it's brilliant, inspiring stuff. And the fact that my new copy now has slightly damp, wrinkled corners seems to make it slightly better to me.

But this is all something to do with Christmas.

As Banksy also said, when you are the outcast, the thrown-away and the useless of society, the rat is your rolemodel.

What is art, or design, if it communicates nothing? If it speaks for no-one? Yet the very structures we need to speak up and challenge are often the things we need to hang our message off; the very fabric of our environment the canvas of our communication.

That's why, while we're all rightfully trying to use Yuletide as the time to be with whatever family we can pull together around us, and take time off, and think about what matters, I'll also be trying to remember the little baby at the centre of the Christmas story, Jesus.

Now that quaint manger painting, beautifully rendered, covers a brutal, ugly back street reality that is the genius beginning of a real inspiration.

At least to us subversive rats.


Happy Christmas day.
xx

Perky.

Perky.

Q: What do you do when you're thirty-eight and recovering from a rookie's night out with friends? (Don't ask. I'm well aware what the First Step is...)

A: Bay window sequence dance in your underpants to Sebastien Tellier's Divine.

I did the cocktail shaker, the train, the hand jive, the head swoop, the thumbing-a-ride - everything. In the pants. In the window. Tom Cruise style. ..Except, come to think of it, undoubtedly camper.

If there's a better way to feel better about just about anything, I know it not. Doesn't so much do away with the throbbing head and the wobbly tummy as hide them behind a sparkly costume.

Nice. It's been on five times in a row.






..I know.



..I really AM a silly sod.

> 'PLAY' <

Momo Chrimbo.

Momo Chrimbo.

Well, so here we are. December 17 and I've put on some CD called Christmas Crooners, all on my own in a fairly jolly, sunny studio. It's Christmas, and there's not much more I can get done in the next day and a half now.

Though, of course, there's loads to get done.

Anyway, hard to care now - because Christmas has come a little early to Momo. I've finally managed to get four new, mastered mixes up on the re-upholstered Momo:tempo website. At last. At long, bloomin' last, I have something that people can point their iPods at.

Yes, Disfunkshun is out there. Check it out at http://www.momotempo.co.uk

It's alluding to the imminent finish of the whole album, I'm alarmed to say. But more of that in January. Let's not spoil the festive calm with deadlines and productivity.

Time for brandy and a mince pie.





(..Sh**t! Is that the freakin' time?)

Made off.

Made off.

Oh come on.

Come on.

..Mr MADOFF?

At a time of gigantic economic meltdown, a world-revered investment banker has taken unexpected extra billions from the banks through spectacularly simple swindling... and his name is Bernard MADOFF?

What is this, Dickens?

How bad is it all gonna get?

"Roit, mista Neerly-Madoff, heavens to goodness, the Peelers are roit on me tail to meet out some timely come-uppance. But only in fair response to some very hundreds of tiresome, tightly-type-set pages of detailed human reality and suffering, so it is. I so wish I'd thought abaaht the human condition sooner, so I do, and chosen to value me nearest and dearest over the fleeting fancies and phantom charms of the devil's jingle in me purse. Run, sir."

Well, you need a bit of Dickens at Christmas, after all.

Scenes from my life.

Scenes from my life.

1: The typical Momo working week:
Flight of the concordes does the French daydream.

2: The typical Momo weekend:
Top Gear drives the Ferrari Daytona around the Riviera.



>sigh<



..I've been almost fourteen hours at this ruddy Mac.

Forward and back.

Forward and back.

The moon was a striking crescent, low in the sky with a single evening star, as I popped out in the car earlier. Looked almost like a special effect, painted behind the silhouetted December chimney pots and roof lines. For yes, it is now the first day of advent - even if the dusky heavens looked more like an Islamic postcard.

Nearly Christmas.

So where did the year go?

Yesterday wasn't the bright, fresh start to the holiday season that today managed all day. It was a day to stay inside with the lights on again - gloomy and wet and windy. But, as I said chirpily to Jules while we head-downed through the chilly sleet of Petty France the other day, I'm still loving the autumn and winter vibe. Don't know why; it seems to fortify somehow.

Yesterday wasn't really a day to be cheerful, though. Yesterday was Dad's birthday.

He would have been 75. And he would have had a fit at what we'd done to his bedroom by the time dawn broke.

Caroline has made it her mission for him and for Mum - while she enjoys the festive snows of Colorado for a couple of weeks - to sort through his spectacularly time-filled room of memorabilia. Mike and Emma even gave over a whole Saturday to helping us strip walls and cart furniture away across town. It was a kind of fab day working together; Mikey hadn't been back to the flat in quite a while. We fed them too much afterwards to say thankyou.

But the weather, the memories, the date. I should have been some shade of maroon blue this weekend. But I don't really deal with stuff in that formal, respectful way. I mean, do I? With all that's going on as the year ends, I know there's plenty to weight the heart a little. And it is. I miss him. And probably only a bit as much as I'm going to.

But what can you do? If I didn't get on with the creative at hand, I might grind to a halt. Which I'm not sure I can do.

So I thought of Dad and I wondered where the year had gone and I thanked him for leaving the room in such an indecipherably dense state back at the flat. And I pulled on my headphones as the rain lashed against the studio windows and spent the day trying not to fall asleep in order to finish the loud, brass-heavy, entirely inappropriate electro madness of the tunes I'm trying to get mastered - figuring that yesterday was precisely the day for pushing on and trying to get things done and trying to prepare for new things.

And prepare for a big fat, jolly Christmas, surrounded by loved ones for as many days as I can get away with it. It was Dad's favourite, kitsch, colourful, loved-up time of year.

And I figured he'd be pretty pleased that I was too distracted with making music to wallow in loss or dwell on his unhappy birthday last year. That's what I figured. You don't sit still and remember Brian - you get on and do practical stuff, or you grin and whistle.

Which is what I continued to figure as I drove to the little studio out in the New Forest tonight, under the last new moon before Christmas listening to Metrophilia - a distinctly whistly, wistful tune - to drop off the final mixes.

You don't 'che.

You don't 'che.

Just touching base here to basically fill you in on a classic. Made my blood run cold, to be honest, but let's be fair, I can run but I can't hide. Mea culpa.

Turns out I talk in almost total cliche. Who knew?

Little survey on the BBC news site has flagged up, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I only know how to talk in the verbal equivalent of a finger pistol. 110%.

Now, you might say: 'No sh*t, Sherlock'. But - not being funny - the full realisation only dawned on me, actually, as I was ticking off the whole nine yards.

Just back from a meeting in a motorway service station - as is only natural in the stimulating and original life of a freelance creative - I can count a worrying number of them from this little online article that I used IN the meeting.

"Songsheet, pipeline, end-of-play roll-out scenario solutions deliverables." Literally. ..Although the day I DO use the word 'scenario', or - heaven forfend - 'solutions' >gaaakkk< I should have something lethal put in my drink, please.

At the end of the day, we're all only human, I guess.






..Although. Hmm. You'd think the least a bloody allegedly-professional writer could do is a rather cleverer job of writing in cliche - when actually trying to write in cliche.

It's no good just talking the talk... (ohshutup.)

Yes.

Yes.

..we chuffing can, apparently.

Overnight, America got its mojo back.

We've grown so used to the Bush administration's incompetence that we've almost forgotten about the little chap that's still apparently to be found in the White House. But the all-but landslide of Obama's electoral victory lastnight has, at a stroke, put America back where it wants to be: inspiring the world.

Now, stick with all this, because I'm not sure that today's a day to get hung about hyperbole.

I'm not sure it's being silly to feel a lump in the throat about it all, some five hours away at nearest landfall. ..I'm not sure it's OTT to shout OMG! out in the bleedin' street, to be honest - and I'm really not sure that words will cover the genuine significance of the symbolism.

Think about it.

America managed to find a man who was not only intelligent and considerate but inspiring ..AND willing to run for public office. And thin. And then it actually chuffing well voted him in to the highest seat in the land.

Oh, and apparently his skin colour's a novelty. Whatever.

Really. Just feel a little lightness about something groovy having just happened in politics for once. Feel no shame about the sentimentality. Because America just said no to the incompetent, narrow-minded, corrupt, basically hateful attitude of old fashioned right-wing Americanism. By one college vote under an official landslide.

Yes.
Whatever the combined circumstances, it did. And Barrack's retort to his well-wishers that this wasn't so much his victory as everyone's, because it was victory secured with countless counting hands and feet mobilising - that's simply true. For once, the rhetoric is kinetic.
Interesting, though.

In America, they've always proudly said that any idiot can get into the White House.

It seems that both administrations, incumbent and elect, have proved it beyond doubt.





..Bloody get in, Baz.

History.

History.

So here I am. Sitting up with a cup of tea, ages after I should have followed my instincts to bed, watching the waffly overtures of the BBC's coverage of the US election. They keep saying it's an historic evening.

First results are in and they're interviewing Ricky Gervais. Right to the heart of the action.

They're also showing squads of bloggers in Times Square, keeping the online momentum of the evening belting along breathlessly. I wonder what they're all banging on about? The concerns of the chap who's really at the centre of this election - Joe the Blogger? That guy speaks for me, sure.

Oh dear, can I face the tedium and adrenalin mixed? If so, it shows I might have coped with being an airline pilot.

I've even been scribbling in my journal, just to prove I was here on this 'historic night'. Like historians are going to be concerned with what I half-heartedly scrawled in my underpants on the sofa on the night the first black president of the USA wasn't elected.

Actually, a little voice whispered in my idle wonderings, while cynicism bellowed in the background something obvious about America 'buggering it up at the last bloody minute', that maybe - just maybe - Obama will win by a landslide. An actual landslide.

If he does, let's just accept it - it would be historic alright.

A president who understands disco.

Vote.

Vote.

Oh, crikey. Can we really get through this? This last agonising day? Sitting on our hands and wondering.

It's like watching football. Especially from my point of view, as a person who didn't even begin to understand it until he watched an international match - it's all so very real to your adrenalin gland, yet all so practically academic. How will it change my Wednesday either way? Really.

Now, if I was funny or creative, I'd punchline-out with something about the Glenrothes bi-election, and how I've been following it's every move and, oh, is there something happening elsewhere, etc...

But anyway that's on Thursday and I can't be arsed.

I'm just not looking forward to the radio coming on tomorrow morning and, y'know... finding out.

It's academic, you're right. These things are probably more important at local club level, again you're right. And the heroes on the pitch can sometimes turn out to be prize twits without a steadycam running along the touchline beside them. I know. ..I also know the US presidential elections should sooner have a baseball metaphor than a 'soccer' one. I know.

But my point is, we get very excited about England's chances of possibly one day maybe qualifying for an international tournament again, when all they stand the slimmest hope of ultimately winning is a trophy and some sponsorship.

The winner tonight gets to take home the Free World and the keys to our burnt-out, sitting-on-bricks economy.

And I so want that guy to at least have a fighting chance of being able to out-live Sarah Palin's time in the VP's office.

Gore-p.

Gore-p.

Almost-last shot of sharp-tongued Guardian critic Charlie Brooker's gonzo-gore undead mini series, Dead Set:

zombies in soulless shopping centre staring vacantly at zombies in Big Brother house, staring vacantly back out of widescreen tellies in Dixons or similar.

Nice work, mate.

Planks.

Planks.

I do sometimes think the British media would sink itself if left unchecked. Not that I'm sure who is actually doing the checking.

Vital, dynamic and creative this country's press and broadcast media surely are. Even world-leading they tell me - and after all, who can argue with Harry Hill's TV burp? But so many people manning its armada of little ships seem hell-bent on torpedoing the flagship - that big ol' Thames barge, the BBC.

My phrasing there is something that those with Auntie in their periscope cross-hairs would leap on as illustrating the point - who says the Beeb is Great Britain's broadcasting flagship?

They must resent the implication - and see it everywhere, probably.

"While we have to lash together ad revenue as creatively as possible to vigilantly tar the decks against sinking, the good ship HMS BBC simply pumps out her bilges with public finance. A huge, fat, free tax on the tuners-in. ..AND, while we're at it, they can promote cross-platform like no-one else. Bastards. ..Load tubes One and Two."

You can see their point, though they sound like they've been at sea rather too long. A bit like this metaphor.

Any brooding resentment of the corporation isn't helped by the fact that the BBC does seem to have always reflected the British beaurocracy of its day, like a true institution - middle-heavy, inefficient, even miopically self-cultural. ..And quote me on that, as it sounds dead clever, like what a sniping left-wing critic might column. ..Or is it the right-wing critics who really have it in for the liberal toffs at Broadcasting House? I forget.

Anyway, the point bearing down on us very slowly like a lumbering container ship is that I think this is the wrong way to see the Beeb.

---

The 'brandross beast' - which, incidentally, sounds like a new Sherlock Holmes adventure - may have exposed Russel and Jonathan as pratt-liable twits sometimes, but back-of-the-classroom showing off by the two over-confident popular boys is really a matter for the detention hall. Not the Commons.

Make 'em run round the playing field in their pants once or twice, maybe. Make 'em look into the eyes of the sweet old man they've been rude to and see the two softies blub, sure. Warm their backsides. But fire them? Fire everybody?

One of the most risible aspects of one of these essentially pointless squalls on the waters of popular entertainment is, of course, the personalities who suddenly clamour for the mic. The Unfunny.

We've had a parade of distinctly humourless people passing comment on how to make jokes this week. "A-HA," they light up indignantly, like Dr Alan Statham waving a triumphant finger at a resentfully witty medical student, "THIS is the problem with smirking and smiling and strutting about in funny wigs - it's dangerous. It's uncalled-for. It's... it's... funny. ..And this is where funny gets you. Hm? Who's laughing now? Hm?"

I've long thought that comedy is like sex - as soon as you're trying to describe it, you're missing the point. And the word 'responsible' kills it dead.

---

I think the BBC is an institution, alright. A national one. With all its problems, it's a bally British cultural cornerstone. Maybe filled with uptight, lefty nitwits who forget how lucky they are - though I doubt that's more than half true - but a thing to cherrish.

We should hold those who helm the Beeb to high account. Tell them when they get the chance to work there: "This is the bloody BBC, mate. Don't f**k it up." It's a woldwide brand like nothing else we own in the UK - like nothing else in the world, in fact. An idea of altruism. The ultimate service of communication. And it communicates an idea of Britain better than any tourist board campaign or political diplomatic push, by the way.
And radio without adverts? Sport and drama and movies and factual stuff without breaks? Full hours of content, not forty limping minutes? Surely brilliant that they found a way to do this. It matters to a nation's intellectual well-being that it can access some information without being force-fed consumer society values and pressures.

Adverts help sharpen the creative cutting edge. They're fun, put simply - and they help busineses sell things and build our once-comfy economy. Plus, ad breaks can be welcome relief, of course. But, chuff. Too much turns your brain to soup.

No, I think the good ship HMS BBC may need a sharp skipper inspecting her every winch and block, but she should sail on proudly. Let her navigate uniquely - she is a beacon of difference. If she should be challenged, let it not be by mean-minded pirates trying to break her up, but by the sheer creative excellence of her commercial counterparts, willing her to perform her best for the sake of the whole flotilla.
However romantic it may be, I just think there's something about the BBC that somehow sodding matters.

---

Okay, I'll come clean. The boat metaphor was inspired by an actual Thames barge - one I found myself sitting on, right in the heart of London last weekend.

Our essentially gorgeous former neighbour, Mary, introduced us to her very interesting new chap, Iolo, when we popped up for a night - and Iolo lives on an actual Thames barge. Big bloody thing. A snapshot of working waterways history from blunt bows to snub stern - and a fascinating new perspective on the capital. London does not look the same from the river.

Can't tell you how nice it is to meet people who see things differently to you. We seemed to chat constantly for 24hours straight.

Originality keeps us all afloat.

Pep.

Pep.

Hmm.

Have you seen the new Pepsi rebrand?

Not much fizz.

I like the idea of turning the blue-red wave into a smile - positive story, confident playfulness. Sounds nice on paper. . Just doesn't look nice on paper. Not to me, somehow. Looks like a student had a worthy go at it - a bit limp for the real world. Yet all at a mind-bending $1.5Billion roll-out. In the, ah, real world.

It's about execution. Which really comes down to exec caution, I suspect.

I was chatting with Gel over coffee in the Cali this morning, about how recession can claim some good agencies and businesses through really unfortunate timing, but also sometimes through their own lack of proper ideas when it counts. You have to have an idea. Everything is fed by the idea - the message you're strategising with.

Now, here is an idea that's falling down in the execution. And I'll just bet that the artroom guys went through eye-crossing variants on the classic logo to arrive at this boardroom-friendly compromise. They have my sympathy. But the end result - does it add to the brand or detract from it?

As a flat graphic - the core reduction of the brand's key memory-jogger, the logo - it kind of reduces it for me. Tries to add some pep, but takes away from the integrity of the simple classic mark.

I remember when they radically rebranded in the early nineties. One friend at art college memorably said it looked like "Pepsi from Back to the future". Kind of space age. Bold.

This one is just a bit... flat.

Now, if it was me. Yeah.

Daft Russian Constructivist, cold war graphics at spikey angles. Nice. All red and white and black. ..No, forget why. Forget the fizz focus groups. Just aim for the post-communist market. Bold move. New opportunities. If Coca Cola is the US dream, flip the appeal. Yeah.

Bear with me.

..Pepski.

No sex.

No sex.

Not tonight. Not on Channel Four, anyway.

If you missed The Sex Education Show which had been running on Tuesday nights at 8.00pm for six weeks, you'll have missed some scary pictures of STDs, some scarier stories from teenage Britain and some downright punch-drunk bravery in the face of a relentlessly frightening series of indignities foist on the plucky lads of Long Ashton football club.

Was there nothing these brave boys wouldn't step up to do?

I can't even bring myself to list the activities Anna Richardson put them through. Admittedly, I can imagine it would be hard to say No to such a jolly nice lady - but really. After girth confessions, fertility pots, infection swabs and sexual history memoirs, you'd think these Bristol tommies would just stay down. Leave it. Let the bell ring and be done with it. But no.

"Foreskin hygiene, gentlemen - an impromtu inspection with our nice lady doctor specialist here. Who's for it?"

Dunkirk spirit, lads. It was for the country. Makes my bottom lip quiver.

..Eeew. Leave it.

Anyway.

Well-earned night off tonight for the old chaps.

Drama.

Drama.

The Southwark Playhouse is a proper London thing.

It's a kind of post-industrial cupboard space under the tube line, tucked behind an old pub on the corner opposite a shining shard of South Bank offices. Arriving there to meet chums Jules and Angela on Wednesday night, I had no idea what we were about to watch.

How to disappear completely and never be found is the kind of metro theatre that simple shire folk like me imagine everyone in the capital goes to see regularly. Tiny venue, five players, energetic monologues and lots of metaphysical angst over modern city life. "You'll like this" Angela smirked, "it's about a brand manager losing his marbles."

It was, and I did. As I have. Too much of the absurd ad-speak dialogue between wide-boy protagonist Charlie and his cartoon clients and colleagues made some kind of sense. Not just to me with my (patently faux) brand consultant's hat on - I think to everyone. We all understand a degree of brandspeak; the issues of impression and idea and perceived value. And, though I've ended up having many serious conversations about it with clients because I think it's about helping people communicate more effectively... really. Doesn't take much to make the real thing sound like a finger-pistoling parody. A bit like Sarah Pallin. Except she uses shot guns.

We all laughed knowingly at the well-trodden themes of work pressures and self worth and public transport in 21st century London. After all, who isn't lost property? Who doesn't feel the ringing in their ears behind everything? The constant eye-twitching throb. "There's a blue sky over me, but the fear is on me" Carl from Underworld drones on their new album as I type. The intermittent grumble of underground carriages passing overhead just added to the performance as I sat there, also simply pondering how the fevering players each remembered so much script. The art of the ack-tor, darling.

It was the gala evening show, and as I sat in the intimate audience and watched the spotlit ideas unfold, grateful for an impromptu seat, I reflected on the shared pains of metro life and the coke-addled pressures of managing ideas - brands - at the expense of managing your own. ..Though chiefly, of course, I reflected on going back to sunny Bournemouth after just one night playing the metro life and feeling the coke-addled pressures of managing blah blah... I live by the seaside and I've never not been VERY grateful.

---

At the after-show reception, I found myself being remarkably restrained. Or perhaps even adult.

I didn't stop conversation with my friends mid-sentence with the words "screw you - there's a bloke off the telly". Nope, not me. I didn't even stop the conversation at the end of a paragraph with some lie about needing the loo. No. instead, I just kept talking to my friends ..and didn't run over to character acting star Andy Serkis to cover him in enthusiastic spittle with my Gollum impression. I didn't do it.

We'd all blagged tickets to this version of writer Fin Kennedy's play because of Julian's friend Kath, who's been a stalwart trustee of the Southwark Playhouse for years. The guys have mentioned trying to catch a production there a few times. I'd written some music for Kath's partner Steve some years back for his London Wall photographic exhibition - culminating in whistly Momo favorite, Metrophilia - and I keep trying to make it to one of their creative social events, often without success. Since Jules finds it hard to out-compliment Kath and Steve after fourteen years of mutual lovelyness, it's always nice to see them all together. Kath's energy at all she does is something Julian has long admired.

"I did well meeting them when I first came to London" he said quietly over a champers flute. I smiled. "Yes, you did." I paused, pursing respectfully - then chin-chinned: " So did they".

As we queued for complimentary scampi and chips, I added in a trying-to-seem-offhand voice: "Like the play pretty much spelled out, we need eachother, mate" ..also successfully not adding, in a bubbly blather, "- so let's hug it up, big boy. C'mon. No, no - c'mon..."

For various reasons, anyway, it turns out that Jules is on teasing terms with Andy.

"So," he apparently grinned at the Lord Of The Rings legend, "the new Tin Tin movie you're shooting - had to do much doggy method prep to play Snowy?"

Mr Serkis obviously knows Jules alright, as he merely shook his head - without saying: "you know it's Captain Haddock...".

I missed all this of course, as I was faithfully chatting up Angela.

---

I came home after a subsequent morning trying to frame a brief with Jules for a mutual client - a brief with no parameters, goals or current information, all of which we had to try to commission a PR guy with - to find a little drama had taken place back home.

The new porch guys have taken away our desperately tumble-down old porch. We're porchless. The house looks like its being demolished, with the sun-tan marks of absence on the exposed brickwork. Poor thing.

It's disappeared completely, never to be found. Thankfully.

Town and country birds.

Town and country birds.
I seem to have spotted a number of interesting specimens recently.

Putting them eagerly into my enthusiasts scrapbook I notice a subsequently intriguing cross-breeding of influences forming. Here then, without any in-the-field sketches, sadly, is a short list of birds that have caught my eye.

---

Bird #1

Helena.

Lovely girl. Risen to fame from nowhere, to become every politico-financial analyst's go-to gal. Everyone says we're going to her, apparently. Inevitable, they say.

Yes indeed, Ms Handcart is very popular right now.

So, amid the shrieking hair-pulling, the goggle-eyed blaspheming, the chicken gizzards-reading and mindless fax paper-throwing-around going on in most important office buildings and newsrooms at the moment, we've been looking for a little escape.

---
Bird #2
Andrea.

Another nice lass. Bit artificial.

Geek partner in crime, Chris, bought me - or perhaps the group - a desperately pleasing birthday gift this week. A box set of Star Trek. The original series, with Captain Kirk and pals - but super-geekily remastered with NEW special effects, so the Enterprise doesn't look quite as grainy and wobbly. I love the jobs some people find for themselves in uncertain times.

We've watched too many of them already, naturally. Not least because I spent much of yesterday feeling a bit crook.

We took ourselves out to the forest for a Sunday afternoon stroll and found a balmy summer warmth in the middle of October and squadrons of families in pratty safety helmets riding push-bikes very slowly along very very safe flat gravel paths through the trees.

The New Forest being more Walt Disney than Disney, with twinkling, babbling brooks and mossy carpets of green under dappled silver birch woods and golden autumn leaves flickering gently down through sun beams like confetti, we found a suspiciously stage-managed looking grassy clearing to lie down in. Had to shoo away the unicorns and little purring-winged fairy Kylies but it was okay. We slept under the clear blue sky and watched lazy vapour trails high above for a while, before stopping at a leafy evening pub in one of the many pretty villages on the wending drive home.

..Naah, it was okay.

Though I'd left the Mac up to do some work when we got home, by the time all that lovelyness had had a go at clearing my head and somehow failed, all I could face doing was watching another episode or two of daft, forty-year-old sci fi. Which strangely seemed to do the trick, eventually.

Captain Kirk is wedded to his spaceship, they keep telling us. It's ultimately going to prove to be a giant, alien-chick-porking fib, of course, but you can't blame him. The 23rd century is incredibly neo-sixties. In What are little girls made of, when apparent robotics genius, Dr Roger Korby, innocently tells former flame, nurse Christine Chappel, that he's not tinkered in android love with allegedly feelingless but conspicuously girl-shaped artifical companion, Andrea, you can see Mrs Roddenberry's boof-blonde character none-the-less thinking: "so why'd you give her QUITE so much eye-lash upholstery and heaving cleavage?"

Did find myself humming Everybody ought to have a maid from A funny thing happened on the way to the forum afterwards.

---
Bird #3

Jane.

Now she's a girl who's been on my mind a lot this year.

There was a telling moment on The Daily Show last week. A moving one, I thought. "I'm getting a little tired of certain Republicans telling me that small towns are the only places in America with values" said Jon Stuart, with restraint. "Do you know what New York is? It's ten small towns all piled on top of one another in the same building."

The battle for America's evolving identity does seem to pit town against country - small towns are real America, cities are slick, corporate engines of evil.

Well, it's hard not to scowl at Wall Street right now. And systemic corporate culture is no mere gloss to the American political system. But Jon's heart-felt jab made me think of one author and her seminal book - which is, in truth, a kind of love letter to the city.

Jane Jacobs was no trained city planner or architect. Just a regular Mom, perhaps not so dissimilarly qualified to Sarah Pallin. But, ingeniously using her eyes to look at stuff, she ended up collecting up what she saw into a book of recommendations to planners and people-space designers in the late fifties - The death and life of great American cities. It shook the establishment.

It was required reading on Caroline's urban design course. Except I found myself reading it on holiday in Italy - after Caroline had completed the course, and before she'd read it herself. As we bobbed in the Med, I found myself telling her with great authority about numbers of eyes on streets and the importance of mixed usage.

The main thing to have struck me, beyond the specific, embarrassingly No Shit, Sherlock observations she makes, critisising architects' science fiction daydreams that have little bearing on what people really do in their spaces, is what a love letter to the city it really is. How much the city can support not only life-giving diversity but humanising community. She writes with passion and inspiration. Even pride.

Thinking of all these different ladies here, I guess my point is that when you've escaped for a bit, there are real problems to go back and face. You have to find access to a space that effectively recharges you somewhere - so you can deal with real human being stuff more effectively. Find a little fortified courage to see things as they really are, not how we imagine them to be.

Far away from the stage-managed beauty of the countryside - refreshing and life-affirming as it is - the sharp end of modern human politics may find many of its answers in the city, the solutions to some real human challenges of living side-by-side.

That's Jane's Star Trek future. Once we've all stopped throwing ourselves around at odd camera angles and the financial deck feels a little firmer under feet, I think many American politicians would do well to consult her sooner than Ms Pallin and Helena.

Might stop a lot of us twitching.

---
Bird Appendix

Peregrine falcons.
Did you see the photos of the nesting pair on the Houses of Parliament this weekend?

What they doing there, then?

Sink.

Sink.

So, when we got in from circuits last night, there was a blinking blue light at the end of our street. Some sort of accident, cordoned off with stripey police tape and surrounded by emergency services.

We turned on the telly and there was Jon Snow talking with the controlled animation of a journalist helming a big story.

Then we felt a lurch as the house tipped suddenly sideways, pans clanging against the boiler on the swinging hanger and plates sliding across the work tops as we continued to put dinner together.

So this is a banking crisis.

A chuffing, sodding, frightening, arsing-great big one, apparently.

..Oh well, eh.

---

Yes, the accident was the British - and basically the global - banking system and the blue lights turned out to be metaphorical. ..Although we have had a surprising number of police incidents in our quiet little street over the years (..and they never tell you what's going on...).

They're yabbering on the wire this morning (by which I mean Radio 4, but that sounds WAY less dramatic) that the effective nationalisation of the UK banks announced lastnight is a seismic moment for western business. And it is. ..NATIONALISING the BANKS? The government becoming a major stakeholder in Natwest, Lloyds TSB, HSBC? Owning and controlling the FREE market economy?

Hang on, though. Does this mean, ironically, that in this time of evaporating investments, and governments around the world having to promise ordinary people like me that they'll guarantee a lump of their savings, should the banks just, oh I dunno, lose them, I have just become a major investor for the first time in my life?

As a UK taxpayer, can I go to the AGMs of all the banks now? Eat the free sarnies?

If I can, can I also ask them where exactly ALL THE CHUFFING MONEY'S GOING! Down a sink, or something?

Well, it is, kind of. Value is relative, isn't it; if no-one wants to buy your thing, it becomes worthless. And if banks are too nervous to lend things to each other in case they inherit a worthless thing from an unscrupulous chain of indifferent lending, then the money system grinds to a halt, because no-one can get the petty cash they need to buy things, lubricate things and keep things moving.

Yeah.

So.

..I'm trying to figure out the best way to work in the word 'plunger' here.

Twenties.

Twenties.

So here I am. Thirty-eight today, my passport tells me. As does the entire technical support staff of Facebook, apparently. Can't wait to see what they've all whipped 'round to get me. Those guys. ..Ooh, let's see - now, they know how much I love old funk records... or big books of poster design... or Parisian café culture, er... or sharp shirts - ooh! - or Berlin inter-war, realist cinema or... Dr Who, so it should be easy for them to choose something good...

Actually, I talk of German silent cinema but we did, in fact, spend most of yesterday in the twenties. In celebration of me taking a significant diary-date step nearer the end of my thirties. Hmm. Anyway - Joe May's syruppy gorgeous Asphalt, 1928, followed by Deutsch directorial legend Fritz Lang's M, 1931. Films so closely linked by time, place and production people, yet so different in dialogue - not simply because one's a late silent movie and one's an early talkie.

Won't bore you here, but you should see M in particular - launched the career of Peter Lorre with a quietly startling kangaroo court scene. ..Which you now can't help thinking is because a kangaroo's is a bloody odd costume to put a paedofile protagonist in - in any film. But you're just being silly. So stop it.

Anyway - again - here I am. Apparently older. Apparently almost none-the-wiser.

If you'd like to know, Caroline bought me a nice big book of graphic-type stuff, in a little-veiled attempt to make me stop using bloody arrows in everything I design. To little avail, perhaps, as I found a fair few in it. I'm also sitting here in a birthday shirt, of course, listening to another birthday CD - John Coltrane. Helpful stuff to write to, as I continue with the sumptuous come-to-bed copywriting for Halo's catalogue this afternoon, because I usually employ the clink of Martini glasses, a swinging walk and a wry wink whenever I'm making advances to my poor, beleaguered wife. So I, at least, am in the mood.

Other than that, I'm ignoring the screams of bankers and investment managers echoing from around the world and looking forward to a little mexican dinner at Coriander's tonight with Mater and m'lady. Whether we're facing a second Great Depression or not, I shall aim to stay chirpy in all things - because it seems clear to me that it's all good. It's all good.

However old I'm supposed to be.

Bed.

Bed.

I'm having a bleak, north European moment.

Y'know, the kind of style-life moment that, ah - how do I put it? - uncamouflaged tossers enjoy. People who still buy the Guardian to leave it lying around under a casual Penguin classic, and who feign interest in the US presidential race and who wish they could more easily afford a newer Audi and who have just rediscovered the idea of department store shopping, lingering around the leather Man Bag island. Y'know. People like me.

To be fair, I rediscovered the idea of department store shopping because TJ have recently pulled some all-nighters fitting new branding to every floor of Beales. With a little glow of pride, I stroked the neat, sans serif vinyl lettering and followed their clear signposting to the men's luggage department...

Right now it's raining hard against the studio window and the jelly lamps are pooling low, luminous warmth on the desks while I audition some new, stylishly bleak jazz album. The very cool and also stylishly bleak album cover is sitting beside me, teasing my designer's eye. And I'm sitting here typing a pointless string of thoughts that no one is likely to read, by way of enjoying sitting in this thinly metro atmosphere for ten minutes. And by way of putting off some homework.

I think I first heard one of these pieces on FIP. A station that I usually listen to in the rain, harking back to our last visit to the French capital when it piscened it down all weekend. Leucocyte, by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, is a kind of sparing, jazz noodle with faint echos of Boards of Canada. Faint. And the artwork on the cover is a black and white linear repeat of the title in cascading deconstructions of Helvetica. Like a neat Letraset accident.

Yum.

Of course, sonic noodling about like this might create an atmosphere in which you can begin to consider yourself somehow… what's the word? ..sophisticated, that's it… while simultaneously numbing the thought of people in your home town having to sleep out in this shite Autumn evening. But it can all of a sudden make you throw a shoe at the CD player and want to turn on some ruddy lights. I mean, I'll be in an insomnial stupor before tea time at this rate.

It's good though.

---

The homework I'm putting off is a planning application. You heard me. For signage for a client. ..WHAT a pain in the elevations. I'm having to do drawings of the site and show how we're fixing the lights to the wall. Like I'd have the first clue.

I may, if I get it done in a while, do some more work too. I mean, why not? We're planning a John & Yoko-style bed-in all day tomorrow, to make the most of the gloriously lashing-shite weather with some old movies and a pre-emptive celebration of my birthday. I'll be, they tell me, thirty-eight. ..I mean, come on… so why not get some practical stuff out of the way now? Did I have some other socially explosive plans for my Saturday night?

Tomorrow's plan's an appropriate one, actually. When I haven't been stealing moments to embelish and over-work the branding for Momo's new album - in favour of finishing any actual music, it seems - this week, I've been writing words to get people into bed.

Long-time design chums, Halo, periodically invite me over to politely laugh at my jokes and give me briefs to write flamboyant nonsense. This time it's for a client of theirs that's a bedroom furniture specialist, for whom they're finishing a sharp new sales catalogue. I'm doing the sharp verbal intros.

Of course, I didn't like to say that I've been married for a hundred Earth Years and haven't had to concoct successful words to get people into the bedroom since before I was old enough to really manage it.

Hmm.

Anyway, some of the gang are in Brighton tonight, seeing one half of panto-gothic, vaudeville darlings The Dresden Dolls. I look forward to the Facebook pics. It means that much-loved, much-handed-around Harris mascot, Alice, is curled up in the cosy warmth of the evening's low, studio lighting, in her bed, just at my feet. And she's giving me those big, seductive eyes.

The ones that say: please turn off this bloody arthouse noise and make a fuss of me. Or get on with your homework.

Think I need a lie down.

Crunch.

Crunch.

Autumn. It's here. Breathe it in.

I'll be boring and say this again - it's long been my favorite time of year. Crisp, cold and bright or damp, grey and gloomy, it's the back-to-school season; the time of fresh starts. New blazers and pencil cases. And every year I seem to welcome it a little bit more.

But then, that may be because it's been a long while since we had anything other than a damp, vague summer that we were, by the end, keen to wave goodbye to in favour of a season that knows its mind.

"Hi, I'm Autumn. Changeable and chilly is what I do. That I know. You thought I was wan and reflective? Jeepers, get with the programme, you ass. No more. I've had it with poetry and bitter/sweet memories. Sheesh. That guy was a loser. What a bum guy he was at a party. Chuh. Turns out, with all the other seasons drifting about like lazy students, questioning who they 'really are', now I'M the most definite time of the year. Yeah, that's right, Summer - I get as much sunshine as you now. And yeah, Winter - I get the chilly freshness without the suicidal anticlimax of January. And hey, Spring - bite me. Daffodils are up NOW, you sad, dufus. Go figure. ..Now, who wants fireworks and baked potatoes and a big fat holiday season to look forward to...?" >cheers.<

Of course, if Summer and Winter ever wake up again, Autumn will get its ass kicked and be made to take off the baseball cap and sunnies. But I'll still prefer the definiteness of its changeable character.

---

I heard an interview with John Prescott on Today this morning. Gave James Naughtie a knock around. Jim sounded half exasperated, half amused, in that calming way of his.

Makes you think.

Where have all the definite politicians gone? All the Spitting Image characatures? All the party animals who say things like: "Oh, for God's sake, Jim..." and: "Pull your finger out and stop whining, everyone..."

I miss those guys.

I miss the guys who always looked like they had definite opinions and knew what they stood for, even if that could change in the middle of an interview. Where are all the loudly incredulous politicians with do-able accents? Nick Clegg, apparently LibDem leader, may have employed a Music Hall Funny Walk-type strutting to deliver his rousing 'We're heading to Government' speech here in Bournemouth, but that's not the same thing as being a real inspiration to Fluck and Law.

This is why, dare I say it, Sarah Pallin across the waters, is an ideal political leader - she has a costume and she has a funny voice. Caroline and I could both 'do' her in ten seconds. Genius.

But don't get me started on American politics. Current obsessions The West Wing, The Daily Show and Channel Four News are all blurring into one. I have no idea what's real and what isn't any more. Rather like the global banking community.

I'm confused, but I think it all has something to do with looking for change.

Money.

Money.

It's a gas.

A gas bag.

A big, fat, flammable bag of >BANG!< To say nothing of Crash - and only a dollop of dollar.

Too much bank for your buck.

Bad luck.

It's fall, that's all.

Feel the sheaves under your feet go

crunch.



Time for lunch.

I'm hungry. I'm famished. I'm ready

for a takeaway takeover. Taccos? Take cover

- remember, they're only thin flimsy shells.

But they fill up so well. With rich healthy smells.

So tempting and bulging and easy to undulge

without the niceties of cutlery. Just grab and eat

and feel the chille's heat.

And let the juice run down your hands and inside your cuffs.

Get stuffed.

Chew the meat and eat those greens.



Let's spend and be seen and chow down while the sun's high.

Let's order it all - everything off the sky blue lunch van.

I'll tell you now, I'm a meat and two veg man.


Don't hedge or hold back. Attack your pangs

with those conspicuous fangs.

Or how about sea food? Slippery, ugly, bulging and salty.

We can trawl for it all - net assets.

Campari and calamari? Maybe I have a yen for squid.



But, ah.

..Lend us a couple of quid.

Born slippy.

Born slippy.

Have you ever been to a festival?

I don't mean, have you visited Christmas. Or, have you observed Ramadan this year. Or bought a new sari for Diwali. Who hasn't. And I don't even mean, have you stayed in a tent pitched so close to someone else's that their beery exhalations will drive you mad enough by 3.00am to start you focusing on the 140BPM earthworks of the dance tent in the next field as a calming distraction. No.

I mean - have you really done a festival? A music festival. Have you, put bluntly, been mudded?

It's all very well saying you've had the courage to face a light drizzle to hear Coldplay and contemplate the meaning of suffering and brotherhood. Middle class thirty-somethings ensure everything's lightly drizzled while they contemplate how to cope with the family, albeit from the halogen, underlit warmth of their kitchens.

No, lightweight, I'm calling you out. You say you love music? Then prove it, Dave the rave. Prove it like we did this weekend - get your ass to Bestival next year. And abandon all hope of hygiene. Yeeaaahh. Whoop whoop.

----

All I can say is, the mud was flying. And sticking. And clodding. And splatting and splooting and glooping and plopping and slopping over everything thing everywhere. Like the red weed from The war of the worlds. Only brown. And wet.

Now, I've stayed under the modern equivalent of canvas countless times. Owned, errected poorly and damaged various tents over the years, and am quite happy to sleep at a funny angle with a randomly orthopedic earthlump under my intercostal wotnots; this, and the hopeless opacity of the tent material ensures you're up with the crows, stretching your arms manfully in front of the zipper flaps saying patently out-of-character things like: "Jeepers, I love this time of day. Just breathe it in... Ahhhhh. Who needs running water, eh? The trappings of modern life are just that, don't you think, hmm?"

After which it's usually custom to carefully step across a mile or so of dewy cowpats to look for a loo and a laté.

Having said all that, and adding the fact that I've found myself at various weekends away at events of some kind or another, it did seem odd to me, as we pulled my reasonably nice Audi thing off a reasonably good road surface into a reasonably abysmal field of shite, that I've never really, actually, properly been to a real popular music convention. Somehow.

The line up of acts was superb, put simply. The weather, however, was basically hideous.

It rained. Oh, Dive Boy, did it rain. But with the added hilarity, festival pundits, of high winds. As prepared as I felt for another weekend in the tent, I had not really - let's be honest here - thought about it at all.

I had not, for example, considered the possibility that the car would be anywhere other than ambling distance from the tent. Or, as it turned out, a clear country mile from the tent, up a tall hill spewing rivers of sludge. Or that it might be peeing down and shouting air sideways as we carried our many many bags of thirty-something creature comforts - linen-tinted duck down duvets, flower-studded flip-flops and beige casual slacks - this clear country mile from the gale-torn, cack-whisped peaks down the steeply sloping rivers of sludge. All to then try and erect our needlessly-complicated tent - or, as we preferred to think of it, our essential shelter in the weather-shredded, God-forsaken middle of nowhere.

I really thought, for one moment, we might not be able to stay there in that field. Even after carrying some much down there already, blistered, wet and fevered. I'm no particular lightweight with camping really, but the tent did look like it might simply never find the courage to stand up as Julian, Angella, Caroline and I looked at the forlorn shape flapping on the soggy turf.

We were like a trudging river of refugees from the routed and still-uncomprehending country of Jamieolivestan. Forlornly clinging to our chrome pepper grinders, mud-splat plastering our symetrical-smooth cuticle work. IPods helplessly screeching Viva La Vida from dangling headphones.

Me especially, now I think of it, because I was - to all intents and purposes - wearing a suit and a series of dress shirts all weekend.

----

We probably spent one out of the three days walking up and down that sodding, sodden hill. Carrying stuff. Heavy stuff. In particular, we were tasked with sneaking in our gas bottle because we were told at the rain-lashed trestle table at the grand entrance that we weren't allowed them on site. Or the boot-ful of french vino.
For someone relatively new to the natural comforts of camping, it's worth noting that Angella endured her basic training with dignity. And over the last two decades we seem to have spent so many weekends with Julian in our underpants or in sleeping bags, working out how to transport alcohol creatively or how to put together a ridiculous costume of some kind, there was never any possibility of us joining the streams of dislocated grumblers leaving early. This is what we do. And yes, it includes painting our faces blue if that's what's needed.

Of course, we'd started the weekend at his Mum's very nice crash pad in Cowes, over a distinctly civilised new world red in a fresh restaurant tucked in a cosy corner of the port. Much more the setting we're used to together, really and it in no way prepared us for the hardiness ahead. But wherever we are, we're usually laughing. Even if Angella says she only pretends to know what Julian and I in particular are really on about...

And, once eventually set up and worn out, we did have a reasonable campsite home. ..Riven with spewling mud off the hill in the distance, grant you, but somewhere to make a cup of tea. Which was good, because we'd have quickly been crippled victims of Credit Crunch Britain if we'd relied on buying refreshment...

----

Yes, Bestival is not cheap. Yes, the weather was a few steps beyond helpful. And yes, it all meant we moved around the festival like some medieval victims of pergatory, stuck in endless, oozing undulations of our own folly. But, quite apart from being a great excuse to watch good friends try not to fall face first in uncoagulated crap, it really was a terrific line-up of acts.

I've never had such a concentrated choice of cool on a menu before. From So Hot RIght Now, Hot Chip, to entertaining old-timers who still take it all a little too seriously, like The Human League and Gary Newman - we had a blast. Ahh, Nick. Nick the keyboard player with The Human League - how you stole it for us, with your headbanded, grimmace-faced guitar keyboard solos. Class entertainment; who knew where they were or weren't drawing the line - we just belted out Don't you want me so hard, we were photographed by The Times.

Pendulum buff-diffed their way through a typically energetic, cool set on the Friday night and Grace Jones made a surprise appearance on the Saturday evening. Which, can I say, was a remarkably great set - costume change with wind machine (as if she'd need it if she'd stepped beyond the skirt of the stage) every single song, and a right cool vibe to the tunes. Nice surprise.

We stayed up to see, of all people, the Stereo MCs - but after an hour of waiting in the Big Top, encroaching middle age got the better of us and we slooped and slipped back to bed. Shame. Similarly, we didn't even kid ourselves about staying out for 808State or Aphex Twin, at 3.00am or some silly such - but jeepers, how good to have caught all these guys if we had. Legends.

In truth, the abysmal mud probably stopped us reaching half the bands or DJ sets I'd hoped to see. Laurent Garnier, Gilles Peterson... ah, lots. Shame. Most sadly of all for me and the Cazster, we actually did hold out to see Maccers do her thing in the Bollywood tent, but it was more like a crazed rave with a Total Recall theme - freaks choking for air, covered in sweat. We just couldn't get in. Big shame. Whoop droop.

Our big Bestival tip was something else, however. The polka tent.

Yep, the polka tent. For the five insane minutes we were bootslapping in there, we took the place. And came out grinning and refreshed. Kind of like a musical pallette-clearer. Excellent. The polka tent.

But, grey skies, mud, mud and mud aside, the real winning part of the weekend musically was probably Sunday night.

The skies cleared. The rain dried up. The wind eased off. Stars began to twinkle over the Thirty Thousand Freaks Under The Sea, gathered faithfully at the edge of the main stage that evening. How prophetic that fancy dress theme had been. And how much effort people resiliated in their costumes, when it meteologically came to it. Captain Birdseye and his ten fish fingers were a crowd pleaser for me, but the clam heads did something for me to. And the array of fish heads, sea monsters, mermaids in wellies and bedraggle-tenticled octopi was heartening. There must have been something of a Dr Zoidberg convention on site too; sales of red latex gloves were obviously booming.

It was a hoot. It was a jolly, well-mannered giggle. Everyone was polite and festival minded. Painted, stuck-on or unrecognisably diving-belled or yellow-submarined, there was a muted happy vibe still bubbling under the grey skies until the Sunday evening weather eased. Neon fish bobbed over the sea of bobbing heads towards the front and giant smiley balloons tugged on behind. Julian found himself in an argument with a starfish that swore blind he was a banana.

As we scooched up onto the patio of the cafe above the main arena floor, to have seen George Clinton and Parliament live right then would have been epic enough. Two hours of these legendary (which means I thought they were dead) funksters taking over the stage and grooving to their own P-Funkadelia was simply a joy. Some girl gave me a glowy wrist band, I was grooving so much to We want the funk. I think she felt I needed all the credibility help I could get, stood there in my pinstripe jacket and evening shirt. Utterly mud-whacked. Bless her kindness on an old man.

But to segue that into Underworld, and to finish our festival experience with Born Slippy... As we shouted and raved and watched Chinese lanterns take delicately to the dusky sky, we felt our time together had been, in the end, very sure footed.

..But it was sooooooo good to get back to the sweet comfort of Julian's Mum's power shower.

----

Moving the car across the 'car-park', I nearly cried. I've never wanted a four-by-four so much before. But the knowing smiles on everyone we passed as I drove my pebble-dashed Audi through Southbourne on that tranquil, sunny Monday morning kind of prolonged the Bestival feel good for a couple of hours.

Fish.

Fish.

Breathe. Only one more daft weekend to weather before we reach the open waters of a clearer diary. I think. But this last one's proper daft. Daft with knobs on. Or barnacles.

Bestival.

Never been before. In fact, I'm not sure I've been to a festival with so much cool concentrated in one place, having never broken in to Glasto. Will they let me in?

The fancy dress theme this year is '20,000 freaks under the sea'.

Needless to say, I'm thinking the following:

1: I've only got two days or so to do a costume. Sh*t. Will think about it later.

2: I'm losing another day and a half from the schedule, to say nothing of a catch-up weekend. Sh*t. What the hell do I do for a costume?

3: George Clinton and PARLIAMENT?!! Sh*t! ..How do I find time to do a costume?

There's a fair deal of stressy swearing in there, I'll grant you. And if you know me at all, you'll know there's also a number 4: How do I get my new track played loudly by a top-name DJ? ..and do I really want to be dressed as a giant fish when I approach them?

Ah, professional challenges.

I'm in the middle of the creative for a hefty rebrand at the moment, besides the usual string of jobs, so I don't think my fish costume will be all that. But, thankfully, I have creative help on that project at least - Julian is a mercifully inventive and amusing person to be going with, even if he and Angella are even busier than we are.

Hmm...

"Hello my good festival gate keeper. Four passes... Hmm? ..Why, they may look like Somerfield baked bean boxes to you, my dear chap, but look more closely and you'll see that these tassels are obviously the tenticuli of the fearsome box jellyfi.. 'parkanywhereontheleft', right.

Help me. I'm sinking.

Goggles.

Goggles.

I'm sitting in the roomy bay window of Chris and Laura's flat. It's a jammy flat. A Lucky We Know Them flat. As Ian and Fiona's place is to outdoor hot tubs, so this place is to air displays - handy.

Right now, an RAF Lynx helicopter is twisting itself over the end of the pier, while a Gazelle, a Scout and some French thing are aviation pole-dancing further along the bay. It's been a weekend of plane porn. Sea Vixen's flashing their undercarriages and all manner of other filthy things. Bournemouth is at a drooling standstill.

..On a packed beachfront yesterday afternoon, we saw a slope-shouldered individual being trudged by police through the thonged throng in cuffs, looking sort of post-furtive. Not sure if that was to do with the planes or not.

I first kind of knew it would be yet another tricky weekend to get anything done at home at precisely 10.00am on Thursday, when I heard the first crackling screech of aero thrust - a Typhoon skidding around the sky over the cliffs, opening the Bournemouth Air Show with a flashy display of vectored oomph. I kept throwing myself at windows around the house like a rabid dog. Googling eyes pressed twitchingly against the smeered glass. Of course, a real plane bore should know that the odd flash of shapely wing between the houses is probably more exciting than a sensible seat at Farnborough, but still. By Friday lunchtime I wasn't going to be anywhere but with Chris and Laura on the deck at Aruba, bags of overnight things ready to go back to their cliff-top home for the weekend.

Yeah. I totally love planes. Get it from my mother. She's sitting on the little balcony with everyone else as I type.

----

It's turned into a stunning last day of summer today. Unexpected smell of suncream and the glitter of countless boats out in the bay. It's like another festival here. Town below us is heaving.

It's the umpteenth time I've blown up the airbed or cleaned my teeth in someone else's sink lately, and it won't be the last. My productivity is taking a pounding. I am being moved from one arsing about assignment to another, seemingly without ability to resist. Why? Why does this keep happening? What's wrong with me? As I swashbuckle the studio's schedule of pressing proper work, I'm beginning to tear my hair out in clumps at not being able to clear things.

I know. It's largely my own fault. And there's usually something tasty being served at wherever I end up, not to mention some good chums on hand, so it's hardly a convincing tale of woe, I can see that. Like a cheerleader pouting at the injustice of spots. It's not interesting. ..But here in my head, and in bed at night while my heart does something latin as I try to sleep, I'd dearly like to tick the events all off the list and get some space to think. And give my little bod some space to de-stress.

..Sorry?

I've no TIME to live in the now, you unhelpful bastard.

Actually, it's been a like this ever since we got back in July; "Hi, lovely to see you. Lovely. ..Of course, you know I'm supposed to be somewhere else..." Bed, I think. Writing lists. Working out how to charge people for meetings and be surly when I get there, while still keeping the actual work.

..Yeah, so all a bit mad. Blah. Whatever. In each case, with all the things that have happened this year, we kind of had to be wherever we found ourselves. We've had a whole year of not seeing many people. And just as it seems I should be with Mum, gawping at aircraft this afternoon, so I wouldn't have been anywhere else in the middle of my stupid schedule last weekend than with Sarah in the middle of a muddy field.

----

If you've heard of Soul Survivor, you'll know it's a kind of big church event for young people. But surprisingly groovy apparently, despite that description. Momentum is a more recent addition to the event, being a week tacked on to the other three that's aimed at a slightly older audience - young twenties. You know, that confident, cool, thin time of life.

If you've not had any real experience of church life or faith communities, this would seem a bit odd. Instead of waving their arms at a series of bands, the people who go to any one of the very many events like this throughout the UK year wave their arms at Jesus. Or at the worship band, depending on your point of view.

This is nothing I can claim as weird to me. Not officially. I've spent years exploring faith - at my own, limping kind of pace. Finding myself going to church as a teenager - the last thing I'd imagined I'd ever need at such a time of life - I found myself also going to a number of things like Soul Survivor. Though way less groovy. Really. And these events did a lot to help me frame a pretty positive view of life at a formative time, if I'm going to over-simplify it. They also did a lot to teach me about church culture and how conservative it fundamentally is on mass, despite the issues of freedom it explores.

So I understand these odd environments. And I can see that SS is a straight-talking, positive thing of its kind; I know how I benefited from the certainties I felt in the early days of my own journey. Yet going back to something like this after so many years was, I confess, a really weird feeling. It wasn't my environment. By the time I left, I was fair pining for some kitsch lounge music and Channel Four News. But I hadn't gone there for me.

On the one hand, it was an opportunity that I was grateful for to simply meet people. Talk around issues I care about - art and creativity. Hear where others find themselves and try to encourage. I'm not sure I'd get tired of debating this stuff - it matters too much. Art is about, famously, new ways of seeing. And I met some interesting people who added to the way I see things.

But, if I had an actual job over the five whole nights I was with Sarah at this particular church event, other than pretend curator, I consider it was really to be with my great creative mate.

It was a privilege. I'd have been nowhere else. And as Mark joined us and we all hung out some more, then found ourselves clearing up an art gallery together on the last morning, I just thought how strangely great it was to be on another random project with them. Normal. Despite how un-normal so many things really were.

As person after person approached us in the Art Shed and asked us about how to explore art and faith - how to ask questions and challenge life, while trying to build a safe community around some answers - I watched Sarah working with them, sharing her own experiences, and I should say honestly, I felt pretty moved. I felt pride in her and Mark. How much they've grown their creative outlook. And their family.

To create comfort when you don't have all the answers; to help people find a place to fit in when they don't try to look like everyone else - these are the marks of experience. Even wisdom. And these are the people you want around you to learn from. These are the people who help you find new ways of seeing.

This is the job of the artist. And, I think, the person of faith.

----

Sitting here now, the balmy afternoon is waning and we're all a little dopey. Mum is sitting beside me, gazing out to sea as the flotilla of little boats head west to Poole for the evening. I guess restaurants will be starting to warm up around the town.

Watching the Red Arrows at lunchtime and the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight later on, I was grateful to be watching these moving examples of teamwork with some of the gang.

And grateful too that Chris had vainly tempted me to buy a new pair of trendy-ass, wraparound sunnies. I couldn't have seen half as clearly without them.

Mo-mentum.

Mo-mentum.

So, this Momo job. Yeah. ..Not a real job. I'm working in a tent for the weekend.

It's part of the zany joy of being an independent, of course; I can do odd things as part of the schedule. But I'm going to miss my Apple cinema display. And my flush toilet.

It's a thing. A festival-type, young person thing. I think. It's called Momentum. ..I think. And it's somewhere near Shepton Mallet. But I should really find out sort of where before I leave with the mobile Momo domo later this avo.

I'll be helping to promote the Art Shed on site for a few days over the bank holiday. It's a chance to encourage creativity and the debates around it. These are conversations I don't tire of having - and it's always nice to meet folk. In truth, I have no idea what to expect from the coming few days, other than mud, the smell of paling grass under canvas and hours of cursing as I try to remember how to set up our needlessly large tent. ..I thought about being efficient and cute and just taking the little two-person thing, but then I thought: 'HOW many nights? Sod all that crawling around - I'm thirty-seven and a company chuffing director... do you know who I am?'

I have these stern talks with myself sometimes. It comes from having no team to answer me back. Besides, I need the practice putting up the needlessly-large tent before Bestival in two weeks, when people will be staying with us and therefore watching us put it up.

Glancing at the long list of things to tick off over the next ten days, the thought of spending half of that time on a battered 12" G4 Powerbook isn't thrilling my hopes for productivity. But I'm taking the layout pad and the iPod and a pile of files and plan to become the Art Shed's artist in residence - having people sit infront of my easel with nervous vanity while I scritch scratch away in florid swoops, only to swivel the board with a 'ta-daah' and see their disappointment at my sketches for an electronics distributor's new logo system. At which point I'll say something clever, like: 'Art is about new ways of seeing - it's more about the journey, the thinking, than the realisation.' And while they're leaving, I'll call something pithy after them, like: 'And brands are built on behaviours, mate..' and then I'll get on again. Or go get the team another round of coffees.

But you know? Randomness. Creativity needs a bit of this, doesn't it? FInding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned can be the space where the spark hits. Or something. I have a quiet wondering about that for this weekend.

..Although, in my experience, finding yourself somewhere you hadn't planned means you're going to get to know the drinks machine in Frankfurt airport really well while you wait for the flight to re-connect you to your bags. Or it means peeing in a bush by the M4. Or it means wondering woozily what all machines these nice strangers are plugging into you do...

Of course, the pertinent reason for going to this random thing this weekend is simply that Sarah asked me to. And all schedule challenges aside, I can can't think of a more appropriate time to spend a while with this particular creative mate. I'm not sure there's anywhere I'd rather be.

Besides, I usually come away from time with her and Mark feeling an extra creative momentum. And that's my real job.

Drum riser.

Drum riser.

After so long in a variety of sealed human cattle devices, the week before last, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise that I caught something. Kids and germs and fatigue and blah. Or bleugh. But I haven't had a cold in over 18 months and the first ickoo tickoo in the back of my froaty on Thursday did seem odd. Especially in August. Then it moved beyond odd to proper, raging Man Cold. So, as you can imagine, I'm lucky to be alive.

I soldiered bravely on through Friday, but fairly unproductively by tea time, and then just wiped out on Saturday. Sunday I managed to do some washing up, I recall. But spaced out like I was doped after an operation.

The boring yet vaguely stressful point here is that I started Monday morning with a stupid list of things to get through creatively. Once again, I somehow survived meetings and deadlines but by being grouchy and short-tempered. Little tip for those of you thinking of going into business for yourself: don't do this. Polite is profitable.

Still, as I prep for another ruddy day out of the studio, unable to eat into the work in front of me, I do at least have the very happy memory of sitting in a little studio in Poole lastnight, watching Mark A through the booth window bash the skins for all he was worth. His brow-beaded grins as we laid down some drum tracks for The Golden Age was infectious and uplifting after a sad, stressy, uncreative time. And, oh man, hearing him kick off to the d&b section of Disfunkshun was a golden little moment. Buff-diff, baby. Mark's hard-working enthusiasm is a lift.

A drum riser, if you will.

It's this stuff that keeps me sane. Keeps me going. It's the stuff I creatively day-dream about. And the last few weeks, I seem to have been listening to the mixes more and more.

---

I've not written about Wednesday because, truth be, I didn't feel able to do it justice. And I didn't feel sure I was fully there, looking at photos of my friend and trying to understand that - in our part of space and time - this was all we had of him now. Just three weeks before, I'd hugged him goodbye in a very casual way. Sure we'd get more time.

I couldn't take in the full emotion of the tracks he'd been listening to in his last months. But Pearl Jam's I'm still alive never seemed more meaningful.

I couldn't take in the significance of the snapshots of life, slideshowing past us from Jon's casual portfolio. But the simple views of the river, the shoreline, the mountains, never seemed so important to capture. To hold on to.

I couldn't process the sense of loss that each testimony tried to tackle. But seeing how many people were in Russel Park Baptist that afternoon in Bedford, and seeing the surreal mixture of laughter, colour and stunned incomprehension, I felt a little humbled by the effect Jon had quietly had on everyone.

..I can't process all this now. In the stupid schedule roller-coaster, I felt again like I was doing a lightning costume change and trying to hastily get into character as we drove up the M3. I felt this way for Dad's funeral. For David's. The people we've lost this year. The way we've needed eachother. The inability to ever take in their absence properly. I couldn't function in our current life if I didn't turn them all over to God fairly swiftly. Whatever it means for quiet moments in the future, right now it means the same message on each mental memory tree: 'See you soon, mate.'

I wish I could measure the thing. The losses I've witnessed in my average life over the last four years. Have I ever understood my cousin Melanie's death a few years ago? What her mum went through nursing her? The palsied loss written across the faces of her friends from Switzerland as they looked down at the wreathes outside the cemetery chapel?

How can I? How can I sum up whole lives? How can we understand the absence of our friends and family? We simply can't.

We have to close it off and pretend. Or we have to surrender to it and be washed away for a time. Or we have to pray - pray as someone who trusts, bizarrely - and get on. Certain we're on the same road. We just have a slightly different time frame to work in. I'm not sure how much we get to choose each of these options, with each individual grief.

Once again, looking around the room that day, I just wanted to hug the good number of people I seemed to know there and tell them thanks for being there. For Sarah, for Gill, for Wes, for Mark. For the bloke on the perifery, me.

We have such little time to enjoy eachother. Such little time to make eachother laugh. Make eachother see things differently. Inspire eachother to be creative.

Jon, mate - see you soon. And thanks for getting so many good people together last week.

Going to keep daydreaming about uplifting rhythms until we're next at the same party, if you don't mind, mate. It's a tiny fore-taste of then. Got a strong feeling it is.

Love you, man.

AZERTY.

AZERTY.

We're back. I realise I've been away a week. Post, phones, mails - all piled. I've learned that my trip to the Netherlands has won me a job. And that the French have their own computer keyboards. Did you know?

Half the keys in the wrong place. Types like drunk arse in English. Requires shifts where you weren't expecting them.

So staying in touch with home online has meant a fair few words coming out a bit wrong on Rachel's dad's laptop. But, after a year, it was good to see her and Jamie. The two girls are impish, gorgeous french-looking children that, watching them run around the wide, light beach of Criel Sur Mer, made me think of an idylic 70s childhood. A happy young family. Looked after by quietly bonkers-lovely parents.

But I'm feeling the ache of so long away from the family here in Bournemouth. Not that we could do much but feel it all, had we been here. But, y'know. Our friend is gone. And our friends are hurting.

And swapping hats so bloody much when you just want to be in one place, focusing on the one real thing on your mind is, it turns out, not ideal for clear-headedness.

Still. Here's the positive. We're back tonight, for what it's worth. We're joining a large group of friends running up the motorway to Bedford tomorrow, to be together and to celebrate Jon and each other; to celebrate how Mark and Sarah are facing the road ahead.

And Caroline and I have a shit-load of French booze in when we all get back.

Loss.

Loss.

The last few days have been weird. Distant as we've been from the bedside, it's coloured everything.

I'm sitting in an office in Eindhoven, somewhere on an industrial estate on a changeable Thursday afternoon, killing time before a flight back to the UK and a train ride to a ferry bound for France. And this doesn't help the weird.

I enjoy meeting people. And I enjoy discovering that Momo can help them in some way - working for yourself as a creative is a firmly cool lifestyle, even if many of the professional challenges are far from arty farty. I hope today's meeting and my madcap Presentation On A Train turns into a good little project for the studio and some helpful results for the people I've met.

But it's the people I've lost that are on my mind. Losing a friend and seeing friends lose loved ones is no respecter of the To Do list. Sitting so far from the studio, knowing I won't be back in it until the middle of next week and knowing some clients are jumping up and down about it just adds to the distance I feel about it. I just want to walk away from the schedule altogether. Do the things I most care about.

What I want to do is find a way to fill the hole that Jon has left in his family.

And, much as I love words and pictures, I need to find a way to spend more of my time making musical creative. Making tunes. Before the time or the energy for making a joyful noise is lost.

Juxtapose.

Juxtapose.

Back from a trip to the midlands at the weekend, ahead of a week of travel and transport, I'm thinking of the word juxtapose. How randomly different things rub together to create something new. Some new effect.

Sounds academic. But the effects I've felt over the last few days haven't been intellectual, I've just felt them churning around inside.

I've come home from seeing a particular group of friends while having others on my mind hour by hour. And thinking so much of those in Bedford this weekend, while looking around the table at a family of friends that, like Mark and Sarah, also goes back to the beginning of our adult lives, I just wanted to tell them how much I loved them. How much I think we need eachother. How much I wanted to run around the garden with them in daft hats because of the many different pressures represented by all of us in Ian and Fiona's welcoming big home. And elsewhere.

Thinking back over the last twelve months, we've had to be emotionally pragmatic a fair bit. Managing our feelings on the same list of Things To Do as all the other practical challenges, as best we can. It makes the list a tricky juxtaposition of things to internalise - some brain-taxing, some physical exertion, some seismic emotional moments. It's been a lumpy gut-bag of objects to carry around. But you have to just push on and get through the list. Find a point on the horizon and make for it, hoping there'll be a small grassy spot to sit down and empty out a few things. See how they fit together. See what they make.

Part of that emotional pragmatism is, I think, an uncomfortable need to quickly change your emotional dress for different moments - even if you find a dark suit hanging from one hand, and a Robin Hood costume in the other.
You have to be where you have to be. Where you're needed. Doing what's needed.

----

Driving up from Santa Maria to Rome, as June rolled towards its end, we had finally survived the narrow-lane, close-fendered circus of Campagnia's motorway system to emerge onto the rather more cared-for traffic arteries under the Italian capital's wider influence. Three lanes. Tarmac. A few road signs. A couple of hours in, our journey had left the layby rubbish mountains of Naples and the views of Vesuvius and was cruising towards the end of our time alone, the giving back of our big-assed hire car and the big hugging of my mother at Rome airport.

It was a sunny day and the roads were clear. We had the usual dreamy Brazilian swing lulling us along as we thought about two and a half weeks of emotional recuperation slipping behind us. We were sad but grateful, contemplating the road ahead.

Then, in a calm single moment, in the haze of the afternoon warmth as the motorway slid underneath us, the car's windscreen became a panoramic cinema screen.

We happened to be in the middle lane in that moment. We had overtaken a car on the inside lane, and a Punto or similar had just overtaken us on the outside. We were approaching a large, articulated lorry, a couple of car lengths ahead of us.

It simply swerved into the two fast lanes. Like a muscle jerk. The cab pulled hard left in a blink and turned the whole length of the trailer across the motorway, tipping it over gracefully in the shimmering heat.

As the cab smashed the concrete centre wall and spilled rubble and glass across the other carriageway, momentum turned it's lumbering line like clock hands on an axis, dragging the truck's front backwards along the jagged break, tearing open a fuel drum and bringing it to rest almost pointing at us. All in a slow-motion moment. As the car in the outside lane was swallowed by it.

As I leaned on the break pedal and pulled to the inside, I simply thought: "Okay, our plans our changing today. Today, we're pulling some people out of some wreckage."

The fuel drum was spouting diesel in great glugs onto the tarmac. The other car had embedded itself under the trailer of the lorry as it had flattened on its side. Cars behind us were pulling up.

Adrenalin is a funny thing. It can make you do superhuman things when you need to. And it can make you see things very calmly. The chap in the flattened car dragged himself through the post-box window and jogged across towards us, hands bleeding from the effort. As we approached him, I looked at the cab. Someone had run from it across the other carriageway, alive. Motorists had already swarmed from their cars around the cab, pulling at the windsheild.

I spoke no Italian. Someone approached me as I stood in the road and made it clear that I could do nothing, that the police would not want us in the way. Traffic began to drive around us, streaming past the huge wreckage.

The car driver seemed oddly calm. We gave him our water. We gestured and wished we had more of the language. People joined us. I realised our car was simply in the way. We could do nothing.

So we drove on.

And we met mum at the airport. And we got on with our weekend in Rome together, helping Mum have a good time. Doing what was needed in each moment, as best we could. Grateful we had not been on the choked roads in the south when the lorry in front of us turned over.

----
Six weeks on, there was much to celebrate around the table this weekend. An imminent birth, an engagement, an anniversary. And twenty years since many of us first met. Twenty years. And still we feel a need for eachother's company. Even being prepared to weather eachother's kids to get it... And loving how the family has grown. It's never sat far away in my mind from everyone else in our family - people we've known even longer in some cases, people we see more often, people we've been through defining experiences with.

In all the different ways we connect with different enduring friendships, I marvel at how it feels to be able to turn to someone who's known you through many different chapters and is still prepared to turn to you. Sometimes.

And I also wonder how some of us will cope with the next chapter. How our different experiences will collide and create. How we will be able to help eachother. What we will be able to see together.

What we will survive together.