Category: Articles

50/50 Share in Proceeds for Northern Lass and Southern Lad Able to Match Mouth Noises to Written Symbols

Red Roger Red Hat's White House
The colour of Roger Red-hat’s hat is not a trick question but with no mention of his face, I coloured that red too – thinking outside the box, you see, means sometimes colouring outside the lines. On the next page, my teacher used my pencil to write in large letters that Roger lives in a white house then watched as I traced over each letter with my red felt-tip pen. Pleased, she moved on to another child in the class and left me to draw Roger’s house. Once satisfied, I put down my pencil and picked up my red crayon. As Pollock described it, ‘When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.’ There is no hesitation in those crayon strokes, just the determination of a willful boy with none of the doubt that would come to define him as a man. While I am incredibly fortunate to have this piece as a testament to an innocence once truly free, there does remain, however, one nagging concern with regard to the difficulty Red headed Roger Red-hat’s wife would have faced whenever looking for him in that red house. In retrospect, my mother clearly wasn’t hitting me hard or often enough.

How’s your reading? Does it give you headaches? Perhaps you need glasses. Do your lips move? Doesn’t matter, because I need a couple of people who can match the noises coming out of their mouths with the corresponding symbols on the pages of a book, just like back when books were thrilling accounts of all manner of adventures  which people in coloured hats were having. Continue reading “50/50 Share in Proceeds for Northern Lass and Southern Lad Able to Match Mouth Noises to Written Symbols” →

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Lithuanians and Other Bogeymen (2009)

lith flash

While desperately searching various drives for my old short stories but finding only corrupted files I came across an old project report, (Back in 2009, Vilmantė, Sölvi, Dina and I produced a heartwarming wee Choose Your Own Adventure style Flash game about villains of the week, those dastardly Lithuanians, and that’s why there’s no such thing as racism anymore.)

It made me smile to remember a time when the knee-jerk armchair generals and vicious bigots of this country were all up in arms about ‘swarms’ from the east rather than the south-east.

The rhetoric may be saccharine and naive but I thought I’d share the report regardless. I’ve stripped most if not all of the business/marketing guff since I didn’t write it anyway; besides, no one visits this blog flushed with expectation for Target Group Analysis and User Scenarios, right?

If nothing else, it shows that you can get away with using colourful language like the S, F and N-words whilst trying to make some sort of sense of this shitty fucking world full of C-words. Continue reading “Lithuanians and Other Bogeymen (2009)” →

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A Belated Eulogy for the Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth

Prince Charles called this "a mildewed lump of elephant droppings"; but then should we really value architectural review from a man who allowed his parents to murder his beautiful wife?
Prince Charles called this “a mildewed lump of elephant droppings”; but should we really value the architectural review of a man who allowed his family to murder his wife?

UPDATE: Tricorn: Controversy in Concrete – incorporating records, inspirations and materials – is running at Portsmouth City Museum between 15th March and 29th June 2014. Even though I bet they’ll have free wine at the opening, I can’t get down there for it, but these pictures and more will be.

It’s been more than eight years now since Portsmouth tore down the Tricorn Centre: that Brutalist monstrosity despised by many but to me as much a part of the city’s dark soul as the Historic Dockyard; pebbled seafront with its promenade, piers and castle; and getting punched in the face outside a nightclub for making eye contact.

I took these few meagre, poorly descriptive images back in 1996 but by then the thirty year old concrete was mouldy and crumbling, held together by rust, rats and Laser Quest. Continue reading “A Belated Eulogy for the Tricorn Centre, Portsmouth” →

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Vikings, Lego and Bacon (2005)

Back in the day – when I still regarded Journalism as attainable a vocation as Astronaut or Ghostbuster – I met a beautiful girl who, rather than take me to bed, distracted me by introducing me to her father. He was the editor of the soon to be defunct second local paper of a small Danish island and was keen to get the low-down on what the foreigners really thought of the place.

He asked me to write a piece for the final edition but back on the mainland my flat was burgled; I lost the draft and missed the deadline. A month or so later the Police arrested a junkie who still had my laptop – he couldn’t get past the BIOS password so hadn’t been able to sell it. The HD was undamaged but my mojo was, so here, for posterities sake if anything, is the untouched snap-shot I was working on:

Old Norse poetry spoke of Samsø. Your island was said to hold the long awaited bay of love or longing where one could find shelter and tranquility. 

Back home, people are always asking me: ‘Why do you keep going back to Denmark?’ Continue reading “Vikings, Lego and Bacon (2005)” →

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Five Minutes Before the Miracle

David Rickerby has spent the last seven months sleeping on a park bench in Denmark. For money he collects cans and bottles from the street.

They say it was the coldest winter in 19 years.

 

Saturday April 22, 2006

“I’m doing this because it’s the best option for me right now, there’s nothing else, there’s no other choice, the only other choice, what’s that? Going back to England?” David makes a disgusted expression, “Not in this lifetime.”

I’ve joined him on his rounds, an eight kilometre meander around the centre of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark.

He is English, forty years old, somewhat short-tempered and weary but not as unkempt in appearance as you might imagine yourself becoming in such circumstances. Continue reading “Five Minutes Before the Miracle” →

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