Brian Bolland and Judge Death

Brian Bolland and Judge Death, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

This lunchtime, thanks to an awesome tip-off from a friend with their finger on the pulse, I managed to catch a wonderful talk by Brian Bolland about his career in comics. It was quite desperately endearing to hear him talk about how he'd graduated from St Martin's about thirty years ago, riding the wave of underground comics and found his way into working with Forbidden Planet as they set up, then working on 2000AD as it developed.

It was fascinating to see how his work's moved from how, as a kid he'd been picking up DC comics because he liked dinosaurs, then the underground comics he'd made at art school where he made the most of his one day a week life drawing classes (the wince of shame from everyone in the room was painful at that point) through to working on Judge Dread, then making The Killing Joke with Alan Moore and then doing all sorts of wonderful stuff like Tank Girl before picking up a stylus to make the surreal cover art for Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.

Again, it's given me a lot to think about in terms of my own practice as an artist, and not just for the hasty sketch I've put together to go with this post while it's fresh in my mind, but it sort of reflects some of the things I've been thinking about since the mid-point review and the illustration symposium about how great it's been for me to have spent so much time lately working from my sketchbook but perhaps it's time for me to move out of it and into the world of making a comic book again, using all the stuff I've been learning lately.

With luck, I should have something new ready for Autumn! Thanks for bearing with me, I hope you'll think it's worth the wait when you see it!

The Hung Parliament Party

So, David Cameron's latest line of assault on the Liberal Democrats has been that electoral reform would lead to a perpetually hung parliament, incapable of making decisions and lacking the strength that a government elected under a first past the post system would have.

This is arrogant, racist bullshit.

It's arrogant bullshit because a first past the post system ignores the majority of votes cast, meaning that if you don't happen to live with people who vote the same way as you, your opinion counts for absolutely nothing, so if you want to have a meaningful vote, you have to move out of your home.

Yes, our system means you have a "local" MP who should respond directly to local people and their concerns, but in practice all that seems to happen is that the MP just snaps at you if you question their voting decisions and instead tells you what their party's policy is, which kind of abnegates the supposed benefit of having a local representative if they instead tell you you should buy into their party's beliefs.

That's my experience, anyway. MPs work for their party, while the local taxpayers pay for their nice new wallpaper.

It's racist bullshit because most European democracies have a system where every vote counts and the parliament reflects the votes cast, not the weird patterns of "safe seats" we get in this country which means that we're not necessarily getting the best people into parliament and we're stuck with a system where no-one is willing to say anything about themselves during an election campaign, only slander one another and it's a brutal contest of dirty tricks and personality not policy.

If it works for most of Europe to have a parliament that rules by consensus, which is, after all, what a democracy is, so it's isolationist bullshit to be saying that it's a model that means a government cannot take decisive action. If the last few governments are anything to go by, perhaps the pressure valve of having various voices in parliament who are more directly answerable to the populace would be a damned good thing and we wouldn't have lost our right to protest, our privacy, our right to trial by jury, our right to a presumption of innocence or any of the other fundamental basics of our jurisprudence and democracy that have been stolen without consultation or consent from the electorate.

So, yes, David, to say that you think the first-past-the-post system of ignoring the majority of voters and calling that kind of bollocks a mandate to wrench away social justice to protect private corporate interests is a very honest statement of belief.

Talk all you like about the under-represented homophobic, racist, egocentric, callous and capitalist silent majority, but perhaps bear in mind that there's the muted majority you're directly responsible for slashing the throats of by continuing to tell lies like this. I can't imagine Europeans think a lot of you right now.

Thanks for coming clean about what you meant on this.

Dear BBC re: Graham Norton Banner

Image used taken from Gallifrey News Base


The timing and placement of the banner advert for Graham Norton's show was ill-thought out and ruined the climatic moment of this week's Doctor Who show. I don't see why there should be banner adverts in the show at all; they're distracting and they really detract from the atmosphere of the programme. Please rethink whether or not you do this again - if you're so worried about how many people turn off at the end of Doctor Who, perhaps follow it with something less witless and insipid?

The Long Run

A year ago, I had a rather silly thought that one of the things I'd like to do by the time I'm 40 is to have run a marathon. I'd been inspired by seeing Lucy enjoying her first cigarette in months after completing the London Marathon and thinking about how Sophie ran the marathon as a guide for a deafblind runner and they'd both told me about the scheme where if you're turned down for a place five years in a row, you're guaranteed a place through the ballot scheme.

Awesome, I thought, this means I'll run the marathon when I'm 38 or so and I put my name down and thought nothing more of it and went back to worrying about the surgery on my arm and whether or not I was going to be healed in time to start the MA in Illustration I still couldn't believe I'd been accepted for with my rubbish drawings of Badger and My Tweaker Mum.

Summer slid by in a wonderful blend of stapled elbows, getting used to living in Chiswick and trying to wean myself off the amazing painkillers I was loving a little bit too much while I sorted out getting ADHD assessments done for college (in plenty of time, I thought, but the stupid funding people still took forever).

Then, just in the middle of a postal strike, came an email which I assumed was telling me I hadn't got in on the Marathon, so didn't open it, then I looked when I got home and saw it was an apology saying that my ballot winner magazine was delayed in the post but it would be with me soon. A cold, strange feeling swam through me and I had to have a little sit down.

My first few tries at running were on treadmills at the gym and they were comical, five or ten-minute affairs like the kind of things you see in montages in movies where the determined heroine stares straight ahead and bounces up and down and then falls flat on her face.

My first outdoor run around Ravenscourt Park was no better. I walked to the park, then jogged a bit, walked a lot, jogged a bit, walked a lot, jogged a bit and walked home then spent almost half an hour coughing so much in the shower I thought I was going to be sick. Jonathan was genuinely worried for me, and so was I - I'd thought I was fit, but here was me hacking like it was a month, not years since I'd stopped smoking.

I was shy about running in public, I'd go late or early and never far from home. I'd wear long tracksuit trousers and a windproof jacket - not least because it was a savage winter, but also because it was a savagely cold winter.

I was terrified. I'd started running in October and by December when I did the 6k Santa Run that still felt like it was an incredibly difficult task and I felt really scared by how good everyone else there was and how puny I was compared to the task ahead.

I did what every geek does and I went online and I read.

Running websites made me balk at the terrifying science that so many runners glibly threw around and had made the meat of Sophie's play When to Run, all "Fast-Twitch Muscles" and "Five K at Race Pace!" and I started following marathon training plans and marathon eating plans and marathon thinking plans and I stopped drinking completely and basically turned into one of those horrifying scary straight-edge runners.

I ran with Simon and Lucy through the winter. I honestly don't know what I would have done without them. Simon would keep pushing me, Lucy would give me excellent advice about holding back, and between them I think I gained so much confidence. Simon and I both turned from wobbly winter joggers sliding around on the ice on new year's day in Hyde Park, laughing while we made food-related puns into people who suddenly hit a run one Sunday morning where we went along the canal we just didn't stop and we kept on running and we loved it.

There were strange marker points along the way for me. The first mile was hell, but the first mile is still horrible, but you get through it. Then for the longest time I'd get to about 45 minutes and I'd want to give up because I'd have a stitch or I'd just feel like shit, but now I get to that point a little later and I just keep going and it passes.

Now, I know that after that first hour or so, I'll find my groove and settle into a steady running pace and then after another half hour or hour it'll turn from being something I have to do consciously into something that's almost meditative, where the rhythm of the road under my feet becomes a steady drum while my mind wanders, almost like the fugue you feel when you're in a good place with knitting or when you're watching the defragmentation visualisation on a Windows PC (the only good thing about those damned things, if you ask me), or perhaps the absence seizures that I'm now taking topiramate to stop.

In any case, I know that if I take it steadily through the first hour and don't worry about the niggling pain in my hip or my knee or wherever, and then if I take it gently into the second hour and make sure I keep my shoulders loose and keep drinking lots of water and whatever else they offer me, I know I'll find that blissful, tranquil place where I'm not on that street at that time in that place, I'm just running, floating in that state where all runs blend into one and I just hope I can stay there for as long as possible.

I know that I can't be there forever. There's things that will drag me back out from that zen singularity, that one long run where all races and all practice runs are one (the singularity of the long-distance  runner?) and those things are pain, dehydration and depression. The pain I know I can help to ameliorate if I take the first part of the race as smoothly as possible, but it's the one thing I cannot avoid, so it's the thing that will definitely come and will be the thing I have to overcome. Dehydration will be a horrible challenge tomorrow with the forecast set for a high temperature and a muggy day, so I've got to drink lots today and make sure I arrive hydrated and keep at it through the race, using every drinks station and every gel station I can to keep my energy levels up.

Depression is a strange one, and it's what almost broke me at the Kingston Breakfast Run - the people around me seemed to be so glumly focused on their target time and their goals that there was no joy in the race, no sense of sharing or helping one another, and that felt brutal and cold and I found it so hard to motivate myself through the second lap of the race. It's also the state of mind I was in when I went there that didn't help me, and I know that tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow is the culmination of a long period of hard work and training for me and I'm genuinely excited about it.

When that pain hits me, whether it's that irritating gnaw in my hamstrings I get early on or the jarring pain in my hip late in or the horrible crash of my ankles by the end of a long run or just the burning emptiness of energy by the end of a race, I need to have a barrage of magical things to draw on, not just the jelly babies I'll be snatching from the crowds.

When my hip hurts, I'll think about how far I've come since how helpless I felt when I'd just had surgery on my arm. I couldn't carry my shopping, I couldn't hold a pen, I couldn't dress myself and at the worst points with the trapped nerve in my arm, I couldn't even feed myself. To now be at the stage where although I'll never have full hand strength again, I'm rediscovering ambidexterity, my drawing is better than it's ever been and I'm doing a thousand things that a year ago were impossible every day, then each step where my joints hurt, I'll be able to think about how it's nothing I can't overcome.

When it feels like my hamstrings won't be supple enough to keep snapping back, I'll think about how the race for me is a symbol of survival and recovery, of how every story I've told in comics is true, but I'm still here and that those same legs have kept me going, not running away, but standing through untold horrors and yet I keep running into the wind and swimming into the tide and loving it and never being overwhelmed, never quite giving up, even when all seems hopeless, I've pulled through.

When my ankles feel weak and I feel like there's nothing left in my body to hold me upright, I'll think about the people who support me and who have supported me through all of this, through the training for the race with their inspiration, advice, companionship and kindness and through the horribly difficult times I've had in the last few years and how incredible it's been to feel like the rug was fallen from under my feet when my health failed and my job and my freedom were stolen from me and yet I did not hit the ground because I was caught and held up by the people I love and who love me. So when my ankles feel like they're faltering from the pounding of tens of thousands of paces across twenty-six miles, I will know that for every one of those moments of pain there's been so many times when people have shown me unexpected kindness and overwhelming support and where I should have fallen, I've flown.

So when I have finished the first third of the race in my head, where it's all about logic and holding yourself back with sense and the second third where it's run in my legs and my training will carry me through, the last third will be fuelled, they say, by the heart and what drives you on is the reasons you are running and what the race means to you.

The marathon for me isn't a speed trial, although obviously I'll be delighted if I make a good time. The marathon for me isn't about proving I'm better than other people or even about some arrogant thing of proving how awesome I am, although I'm going to feel incredible about myself when I've finished it.

The marathon for me is about the joy of it, of being a part of something much, much larger than myself and of connecting with a city I've loved all my life and with the people I love and maybe by being able to give a little something back to a charity whose work I believe in.

This time tomorrow, I'll be in that final third of the race and this is the mantra I'll be singing to myself in my head, the song of how far I've come in the last year and the wonder of how many people have been on the road with me along the way.

So, thank you if you've sponsored me and supported Terrence Higgins Trust, but honestly don't worry if you've not been able to; I don't have a minimum I need to raise for them so it isn't like I have to worry about making up the difference or anything like that. What matters far more to me is the wonderful friendship and fun that's been a part of all of this process for me and I just want to be clear that that, and the joy of it is what's made it feel like it's worth doing.

If you want to track my progress tomorrow, there's this thing from Adidas:

http://adidas.com/campaigns/londonmarathon/content/ss09/

My runner number is 4689.

I won't have my phone with me from 9am or so until I finish the race and get out, which will be at about I guess 3pm, so GO ON, HOWARD! texts won't reach me, but if you're in London and if that text alert thing works at all, then a cheer on the route would be amazing, but really, I'm just so excited now I think I'm going to explode anyway. The race starts at 09:45 and I'm hoping to finish in around 4h30 or maybe even a little less, depending on how badly I die.

See you on the other side!

To the Brentford and Isleworth Conservative Party

Please stop sending me campaign material for the upcoming election. No-one in my household will be voting for the Conservatives and you're sending through about three to five items a week, which is really wasteful and in itself has proved how shallow your commitment to environmental issues is. The paper used is bleached and glossy; that seems really irresponsible.

Please don't put anything further through my letterbox and do not contact my household to campaign for the election. We will not be voting for you, so save your time and the environment.

And their ominous automated response?

"Thank you for contacting the Conservative Party. Someone will be in touch soon."

If I get another mailshot with my name on it, I'm pulling data protection on them because I specifically requested in my last letter to the central party that they stopped contacting me by post. This is to try to stop them putting flyers through my door, which perhaps is less straightforward.

God help anyone who knocks on our door when I'm in.

A Reply from Conservative HQ and My Response

I got this email through from the Conservatives after my little rant about the amount of spam. They do not address my points about the surveillance state, nor about civil liberties, nor about the use of so much paper for campaign materials, nor my request for BSL or other minority language versions of their publicity materials. In fact, you might notice they don't actually say anything here.


Dear Mr Hardiman,

I am replying on behalf of David Cameron to thank you for your email. We do take on board your concerns.

You mention gay equality. David is also absolutely clear that embracing gay equality is in the Conservative Party’s true one-nation tradition. It is neither a temporary phenomenon, nor an agenda which should be reversed. David Cameron has made clear that there is no room in the Conservative Party for any form of discrimination or homophobia. Our focus today, as a Party and in the country, is on working to build a stronger, fairer and more responsible society, and making sure that people are treated equally, as part of one nation, is at the heart of that.

On your point about our literature, free copies of our manifesto are available on request in the following alternative formats:

- Braille
- Easy Read
- Audio
- Large Print

This isn’t some election it would be nice to win. It’s an election that for the sake of our country – for the sake of our broken economy, our broken society and our damaged politics – we’ve got to win. And if we all pull together then this country can have great hope for the future.

The choice is clear: five more years of Gordon Brown or change with the Conservatives. I do hope you will feel able to find out more about our policies and our approach to government by taking a look at our websitewww.conservatives.com, and that you will join us as we seek to change our country for the better.

Yours sincerely,

Nicola Sheldon

David Cameron’s Correspondence Unit
Conservative Campaign Headquarters
David.Cameron@Conservatives.com

David Cameron and the Shadow Cabinet would like to stay in touch with you. Sign up here to receive exclusive e-mail updates: www.conservatives.com/signup/


Here's my reply:


Dear Nicola and David,

I'm disappointed to see that you do not offer campaign materials in British Sign Language or other common community languages in my area. Do you not think that the 60,000 BSL users deserve a chance to receive information, or is it that there are no sign language users in your team?

On gay rights, it's interesting that you say protecting gay rights is central to your policy when it's only a couple of weeks since a Tory was saying that he felt some businesses should be allowed to refuse gay people on the grounds of their faith. The issue of people using religious convictions as a way of justifying prejudicial values or behaviours is one I would like to see addressed. Also, Conservative links with homophobic groups abroad are deeply troubling.

Also, you describe the election as though there are only two possibilities to vote for. This is blinkered and untrue. I also would like to hear what the Conservatives would like to do to end the current electoral system whereby the majority of votes count for nothing, where if someone wins with 36% of votes cast, that's 64% of voters whose voices are utterly silenced by the current system and yet it's still one we seek to claim is the best possible option for every country in the world and assume it will bring freedom.

I do not believe that the current system is representative of the views of British people and I do not feel that MPs are mindful that we as the public are their employers, because it seems that the majority of MPs follow the party line rather than continually consult with local people and reflect their views. My interactions with my MPs (a mixture of from different parties over the years) have generally involved them defending the party line against my views, rather than looking to reflect and represent my views within parliament which does not seem to be the right way around.

What will the Conservatives do to repeal every law that has been passed which ignores an assumption of innocence, like the use of ASBOs or the Digital Economy Bill, or the use of detention without trial for suspects in terrorist cases or the wildly inappropriate use of new anti-terror legislation, for instance to claw back money from Iceland, accusing another nation of being a terrorist against Britain?

Also, you didn't answer my points about:

The sustainability issues of using so much paper in the campaign.
The surveillance state.
The use of the electoral roll to send unsolicited promotional material and how you treat personal data that you're keeping in order to campaign.
The lack of clarity about how exactly Britain is 'Broken".

Please can you address these in addition to the points above?

I'm assuming it's okay for me to talk about this correspondence in my blog as this will draw more attention to your policies.

Many thanks

Howard Hardiman

Cardinal Doesn't Want To Force A Gag

Cardinal Bertone links pedophilia to homosexuality

"We don't want to force a gag..." said the Cardinal.

 I wonder if he's started using this NOT WORKSAFE site for his theological research if that's the kind of Freudian slip he's making when he's talking about childen?

Seriously, though, Cardinal, fuck right off. Call me a sinner if you must, and call all of my kind an abomination and an affront to your faith if you will, but don't you dare try to blame me for the abuse of children by members of your order and don't use that to deflect from the amount of energy spent protecting the people who carried out these crimes.

Maybe go and look up a few of your own ideals, like the idea of judge not lest ye be judged yourself or the really rather lovely notion of repentance?

As I understand it, if you wish to repent for your sins before God, you do not try to blame others for the harm you have caused or have allowed to happen. Instead you accept responsibility with humility and you acknowledge that man is weak and fallible, but repentance does not end with wearing your guilt as a millstone of pain and anguish but as a catalyst for positive change and should lead you to a point where you feel neither guilt nor shame because you have made amends, but to remain bound to worldly guilt is death. (2 Corinthians 7-10)

The way for the Catholic Church to work its way out of this, bluntly, is to practice what it should be teaching. I think there might well be things about the gay scene that might be lacking in Christian morality, but really, brother, pay attention to the log in your own eye before trying to pluck the speck from ours, because it's making you turn a blind eye to the systematic abuse of children and, honestly, I think that should be something you might want to make more of a priority than telling us that us being gay makes your priests fuck children and makes you lie to protect them over the children who they've abused.

Once you've got all that sorted, then perhaps we can properly get to war over what you lot think I'm doing wrong, but until then, no matter how unholy you say I am, you endorse the systematic sexual abuse of children which is, by international law, a crime against humanity, so really, get your own frail glass house in order before you start throwing stones at our glittering palace of vice.

That's all, princess Pope. That's all.

Dear Ann Keen

Thank you for the flyer through the door today. As my partner is dyslexic, please can you in future send all material to JONOTRON in a larger print format on an off-white paper stock with a clearer font? Also, more detail and clarity about your pledges and what they mean in real terms would be generally useful for us both.

As a general question, can you let me know how you are reaching different communities with your campaign information - I know many local voters with disabilities who would need to receive information in BSL or other formats, or for whom English isn't their first language, but there's no information about how they should request this from you.

I am concerned that you are sending a lot of promotional material at the moment and I understand that the paper is mixed stock but can you assure me that there are local facilities to recycle the glossy flyers we are receiving and that the paper isn't bleached and that the ink used is responsibly sourced? I'd hate to think that the election campaign was having an adverse environmental impact.

Also, can you address some of the concerns we have about the Labour Party's stance on refusing proportional representation? As it stands, the majority of votes cast in the borough count for nothing in parliament in a first past the post system, which discourages people from voting for the party that best represents their views and encourages tactical voting, which isn't exactly democratic.

If you consider this system to be fair, can you let me know how we can ensure that our voices are fairly represented in parliament when in the previous term it seemed that your voting record held very closely
to the party line - was this a reflection of the majority of local voices or simply that the largest group of votes that were cast were for the Labour party and therefore the party policies were followed?

How often will you be having local surgeries and is the intent of these to defend Labour policies against the public or the act as a channel by which the local voting population can actively inform what happens in parliament?

If I vote by my beliefs, I will not be voting for the Labour party because my politics are not reflected in infringements of civil liberties or in the enduring aggression overseas which in my view amounts to cultural imperialism when it hinges on an assumption that democracy will heal the world and yet we do not have democracy here, but an elected oligarchy operating under a non-constitutional monarchy. None of which is to say I'm against the monarchy or the House of Lords as a system for preventing the Commons from becoming too caught up in a need to respond to media pressure, but I do think we lack the moral high ground when it comes to enforcing democracy by supporting Americans who use cluster bombs and depleted uranium warheads in order to encourage people that a voting system is the way
forward.

While there is no main political party that accurately represents my beliefs, I would like to be reassured that should you be reappointed there will be regular and open forums for us to discuss and debate
matters of policy affecting my country locally and nationally and that we can remember that whether or not I vote for you, should you win, you will be working for me and that I should retain a sense that I am
your employer.

If you can reassure me on the above points, I will be most pleased.

Best of luck in the forthcoming election, for what it's worth I sincerely hope we do not have a Conservative government undoing the advances in some areas of social policy that we've seen under Labour, but I really hope that a new government, whoever forms it, can restore some of the basic freedoms that have been lost in the last few years.

Yours,

Howard Hardiman

Mood Running

What a good weekend. Friday night was catching up on Caprica and being generally thrilled by existential television with complex and persuasive arguments about the meaning of sentience and humanity, all the while curled up on the sofa stuffing our faces with the Marks and Spencers chocolate covered cornflakes that we'd got because Jonathan had vouchers. I think the writers of Caprica missed a trick there with not quite realising that we already understood morality and humanity and it was crunchy and sweet and good.

Saturday was an attack on Forbidden Planet, which I rarely visit these days, but every now and again I remember that they really do have more graphic novels for sale than less weird places, so I picked up Kick-Ass, Johnny Boo: Twinkle Power (only £3 in the sale shelves!), Fables: The Dark Ages and Faker by Carey and Jock, which was another bargain bin punt.

Jonathan and I then loafed around in Soho Square with some of the many people who seemed to be in town for the sunshine and Johnny Boo's Twinkle Power got a reading; it's really probably not exactly meant for a tattooed, politically-engaged and academically erudite man in his mid thirties who just got back from monstrous sex parties in Berlin, but maybe I'm a bit of a pushover when it comes to cuteness in comics. It's probably meant for someone aged three, but it was just what I wanted.

Kick-Ass was an on-the-tube read, solid story, well-told, no great surprises in it, though, you can spot the twists and traitors a mile off and because most of the dialogue is throwaway the plot hooks kind of clang, but again, it's forgivable because it's just a big old silly sentimental story about growing up and learning that you have to wear a gimp suit and hit strangers with batons sometimes while a little girl beheads people all around you if you're to stand any hope of being a man in this crazy world. Not sure I'll rush to see the film.

X-Men Second Coming looks like yet another regurgitation of tired, tired, tired storylines to force you to buy fifty comics that go nowhere just to find out a few tiny bits of metaplot. I wish they'd stop with this; it's what ruined Young Avengers for me; it's what stopped me reading X-Factor and it's what stopped me buying Uncanny X-Men and Astonishing X-Men.

Stories, by definition, have a beginning, a middle and an ending, but these just sprawl in knots of stupid continuity and assumptions that you'll know who some robot is or some man with a pink hand is because of something that happened in a different title four years ago. Who probably died anyway. A million times already.

I wonder if now that Disney own Marvel any of this will change? I did have quite a long talk with Jonathan about how the iPad might change comics, too. Death of the two-page spread. Alas!

On Saturday evening, Jonathan and I went down to see Adrian Lourie, who did some photos with us, and they came through very flatteringly (like the one above) and we had another lazy night in because I had to get up at half past five on Sunday morning and not to go to some after-hours sex party or anything, but to get to Kingston for a 16 mile race!

The Kingston Breakfast Run is the last big race I'm doing before the marathon in a fortnight and, after the Finchley 20 mile road race a fortnight ago, is all part of winding down so I'm rested and reassured that I'm fit and prepared for the marathon itself. The race was a bit weird, in Finchley, everyone was really perky and happy and would chat while we ran but for this everyone seemed to just have their heads down and ignored each other or, worse, were quite abrupt with slower runners - I got told off when I had to step aside to get a stone out of my shoe.

That kind of thing really breaks your spirit, I think, and even though I did far better than I'd expected and finished in 2h21, I felt like I'd run a much worse race than at Finchley just because I enjoyed the second lap so little. After about 9 miles, I just kind of lost my nerve and started feeling like it was a bit pointless and I was desperately looking around for things to enjoy about the experience. I wasn't tired, I wasn't in too much pain, but by mile 11, I had exhausted my repertoire of amusing games and couldn't even pretend I was running the Middle-Earth Marathon any more and imagine myself bouncing past people, hissing, "Stupid fat hobbitses!" at them, so I kind of slowed and let people pass me and instead just looked at the sky and my feet and got a bit bored and disheartened all the way until I was back in Kingston and close to the end and there were finally some people cheering runners on and a little bit more of a buzz.

I overheard someone say to someone else in one of the few rare moments of conversation:

"You're a mood runner, I can see that; your pace is all over the place."

Firstly, it seemed like quite a spiteful bit of feedback to give someone in the middle of a race when it wasn't solicited but I also realised it applied to me; I've not really found my ideal pace for long-distance running and if I feel like I'm enjoying myself, I keep up with everyone, otherwise, I trail back and sort of give up.

I did think this made me a rubbish person but I realise that a rubbish sportsperson isn't a rubbish person, I'm not in it to compete, I'm in it to enjoy myself, so if it's no fun, there's no point in my book. I was just so very glad that one of the waiters from Balans ran with me a lot of the way on the first loop and that made a huge difference, as did him waiting around at the end to see me cross the finish line and say well done. Without that familiar face, it'd have been quite an alienating and lonely experience, I think.

Jonathan met me in Kingston just after then; I'd finished in less time than I'd expected so he just missed me finishing because public transport is rubbish, but I was so glad to be able to snooze on his shoulder on the bus home. We had lunch with my Dad and Vicky and then spent the evening watching Clash of the Titans in Hammersmith (not as bad as I'd feared) and the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs at home (aah) and I think I had a pretty damned near perfect day.

It's strange, I looked up the race results this morning and did the maths and realised that 16 miles in 2h20 is a lot faster than 20 miles in 3h14 but Finchley was a better race for me just because it was more fun. I'm an idiot for beating myself up for losing my spirit in the second half of the run yesterday, I was faster than I've been, so if I was trying to measure myself in some crude performance terms, I did well and that's the end of it; no matter that a lot of the other runners - most, in fact, did better - I did well for myself and so that's fine.

Now, I've got to get ready for my mid-point review tomorrow. Fear!

Dear Ann Keen

Dear Ann Keen,

I am deeply disappointed to read that you voted to pass the Digital Economy Bill so close to the election when such a clumsy and poorly conceived piece of legislation would be obfuscated by the announcement of the date of the election. With the supposed debate revealing the shocking lack of understanding by MPs of how even basic elements of modern technology when the minister for Digital Britain thinks that an IP address is an Intellectual Property address (see: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/minister-for-digital.html for more) I'm utterly appalled that you put your name to this vote.

I fail to see how it does anything but persecute ordinary people and illustrate how the government has become a lapdog at the beck and call of big businesses when media corporations can demand that people suffer the censure of disconnection with the burden of proof falling on the individual. What happened to the basic tenet of a presumption of innocence as a fundamental of British jurisprudence? In the modern age digital disconnection puts many people at extreme risk of losing their jobs and of falling into horrific financial disarray if they do their banking digitally rather than on paper and yet you believe that the suspicion without any proof that someone might have made a mix tape for their friend is sufficient to withdraw the ability to communicate, to do their banking, to pay their bills, to look for jobs, or to find information?

I'm disgusted, frankly. Is that really a rational and proportionate response to kids wanting to listen to music or watch a film without the half hour of copyright nagging-screens and adverts you're forced to endure if you buy it, or if you want an electronic copy of media you already own in physical media and therefore have the right in law to own in other formats?

When only one in twenty MPs were in attendance at the vote I applaud that you were making the effort to go to work, but really, this does smack of subterfuge and I sincerely hope it fails to remain law and some kind of rational debate can be made possible.


Yours with sincere regret,

Howard Hardiman

An Open Letter to David Cameron

Dear David,

I just got back from a wonderful trip to Berlin to find five items of post that had been delivered to me from the Conservative Party and another leaflet that had been shoved through the letter box of the flat I live in (so someone had gone to the trouble of not just using the letter box used for post but had gone to every door in the building, like a fast food delivery service flier might). Now, I'm prepared to admit a little bit of campaigning is fair game, but please, really, stop.

Surely you can see the irony in you sending me so many letters telling me that you've changed your stance on environmental issues when the paper stock you've used for the letters is bleached and the leaflets are glossy and therefore harder to recycle?

Surely you can see that I might be a soupçon sceptical about your claim to promote the sanctity of an Englishman's home from invasion by invading my private space with unsolicited junk mail on this preposterous scale?

Surely you heard the howl of laughter your letter received which said I should vote for you because you oppose a Big Brother state, yet you send letters to me by name when I have not made any request whatsoever to receive any of your albeit hilarious dogma?

And really, you should know better than to be trying to pull a fast one by whining how appallingly broken this country is when all of these letters have arrived in perfect time to synchronise with your well-scripted campaign speeches. Surely our postal service that's so crippled by union action wouldn't be the best way to reach a population so utterly disenfranchised.

I'm disappointed to see that there's no option on any of the letters you've sent to request any of the information in other languages, especially when I live in the Borough of Hounslow where there will be many voters who might benefit from being able to read your missives in their own language. I also notice there was no mention of how I can obtain an audio, large-print version or a Braille version for partially-sighted friends or a sign language version for Deaf friends or a plain English version for friends who are dyslexic or have learning difficulties.

Oh, or am I to infer from this that what you're really canvassing for is the vote of the English-Speaking, non-disabled people of my area? As you've very ably demonstrated you're quite clearly not bothered about making sure you're protecting the rights of gay, lesbian bisexual or transgendered people, I suspect perhaps this might just be the case.

So, please, David or one of your drones, either write to me personally when I write to you and answer some of the criticisms I've set out above - and not just in terms of "Oh, but Labour...", or remove me immediately from your database and try to regain a little bit of eco-credibility and save a few trees.

Yours sincerely,

Howard Hardiman

Berlin Darkroom Silhouette Identification Guide

Click here for a handy guide to strange dark shapes you're likely to see approaching you in dark corners of Berlin's seedy gay underworld. Jonathan and I hope you'll find it useful if you're not quite sure what to wear to Snax or to any of the other gay clubs in Berlin.

Yesterday, we woke up deliciously and lazily late and called on the awesome guidebook that is a confused and plaintive status update on Facebook to get some advice on where to go for the day and got some cracking tips, so we eventually wrestled ourselves out of the apartment and onto the u-bahn over to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and walked the short stretch across to Rosenthaler Platz rather than faff around with changing lines. Following a recommendation, we went to Transit on Rosenthaler Straße, which had really great Vietnamese food and I had that moment where I realised I've been in a country for a couple of days because I ordered in German without thinking and was happily translating back and forth between the waitress and Jonathan while we were there.

There's something really satisfying for me about that, but I can't quite grasp why it always takes me a couple of days in a country before I'm able to do even simple things in the language. I think a lot of it's to do with needing reassurance that people will say what you expect them to say or something like that, as though I'm worried that I'll say "Hallo, wie geht's?" to someone and they'll reply with something like "I'm so excited about a new theory I have which relates the philosophy of low-temperature physics to the craft of embroidery!"

Actually, I'd probably manage okay with that, but what I struggle with is things like when people ask which of several different options I'd like with my food and I'm not sure which one's which. I think we might have ordered a kid's meal more than once while we've been here, but hey.

I also have the tiny anxiety that all the German I did learn was picked up from listening to my ex boyfriend speak to his posh Austrian parents on the phone or from porn films and I don't really have any range for dealing with social situations between being adorably formal and shouting sexual obscenities at people, so I sometimes worry that when I'm asking for the bill I might actually be saying I'm about to cum all over their face.

There was a time when I was in a quaint village in Austria at a vaguely pagan thing that marked the change of seasons with the burning of an effigy on a bonfire and someone asked me how old I was and the only words that would appear in my head in German were "Go fuck yourself" and I still don't know if that's what I actually wanted to say to them or just some evil impish spirit having a laugh before the rite was over. I kind of mumbled and said I didn't understand and they laughed at me, so perhaps I should have gone with my impish instincts.

Still, if I have said I was about to cum on any waiters, they've happily accepted the tip, which seems to be Berlin all over.

"Tzalen, bitte!"

"On me, not in me."

I also suspect that "tzalen" is Austrian and Swiss, because each time I've said it, people have then said "Die Rechnung?" to me, so perhaps I should start asking for that, but to me that means a receipt.

After we'd not disgraced ourselves on the faces on anyone at Transit, we realised we'd left the map behind so we'd only got a vague cached overview from my phone, which worked surprisingly well when you factor in the compass in the 3Gs and it meant we could wander around looking like a pair of twats with a tricorder waving my phone around to work out what might possibly be in which direction and then headed down towards Mitte with the intention of hitting some serious culture and getting some museums and galleries in.

Then, we looked up and saw the Dom. No, not some kind of leather daddy, although there were plenty of those pretty much everywhere we went, but the cathedral, and then we saw that there was a sky above the iPhone and we saw that it was blue and we thought we'd be stupid to hide indoors when, frankly, loafing around in the sun sounded delicious.

So, that's exactly what we did and spent a good hour or two lazing out in the sun in the lustgarten, which wasn't a bareback leather club but was a square surrounded by the cathedral and the museum of antiquities (we figured the British Museum was full of much juicier plunder) and we just sat there watching the cutest little Yorkshire Terrier running around chasing pigeons and tourists and bolting about in frantic circles.

Then there was this strange lot who were advertising their show, which seems to involve clanking around dressed like Barbarella Hari Krishnas and not being sure whether you're meant to be singing in English or German, but certainly never in tune. It was a tiny bit embarrassing when they finished and no-one at all applauded them for their efforts apart from maybe three claps in total. They left a little crestfallen and everyone giggled and went back to being rude to the beggars who'd come up and say "You speak English? German?" and lo and behold we'd reply in Swedish before immediately going back to having a conversation in English, knowing full well that they could hear us and that we were probably going to hell but that everyone else was doing the same thing.

By way of penitence, then, we went to the Brandenburg Gate and then to the Holocaust Memorial, which seemed to be the best playground that Berlin has to offer, where loads of people were playing hide and seek and, cringe-inducingly, people were playing some game like cops and robbers with their kids, hiding behind the blocks then bursting out and then pretending to shoot each other, but to be fair, the memorial itself doesn't quite seem to have the gravitas of the Rachel Whiteread sculpture in Vienna which acts as their Holocaust Memorial, but that one has someone stood over it with a rifle to make sure you're not going to be a dick while you're there.

I don't know that it works on a conceptual level either, there's paths that end in emergency exits (from chambers beneath) and there are blocks that have ventilation grills on the top of them, which just seems to me to be in a tiny bit of poor taste. It's a beautiful thing to take photographs of, but there are a so many things that don't work for me - first the vents and emergency exits put a sense of narratives that clash with what they're trying to remind us of, the blocks themselves lend themselves to games of hide-and-seek and climbing and escape and that's not really what you're trying to evoke, but perhaps the thing I found most difficult was the signs up telling you that they'd built this memorial to the holocaust with thousands of routes through it with the possibility to lose yourself in the depths of a grey landscape, but only thirteen straight paths are accessible by wheelchair. When you think about the experiences of disabled people during the period this is meant to be talking about, you'd really have hoped you'd want to prove that a memorial to the people who had been killed, sterilised or experimented on would at least not be itself inaccessible to one major group of people affected by the holocaust.

Anyway, it doesn't work, but the whole city is a cicatrix of battle scars from war, and I can only imagine what it must be like to grow up in a city so dominated by memorials to the people killed during your grandparents' lives but not to the lives lost from your grandparents' generation.

We then decided we'd try the Berlin gay scene, but realised I had nothing fetishy to wear, so hit Gear, which apparently is the Gucci of the gay leather outfitters here, but I've got a nose for a bargain and found a pair of cheap combats almost identical to a pair on a different rail they had in the window for €159. I really don't quite see how that's justified, but anyway. Bargain hunting for the win, but I kind of put my foot in it with the assistant.

"Hi, these combats say they're medium, but what size is that?"

"Their sizes run quite large."

"Oh, because Germans are fat?" (WHY DID I SAY THAT?)

"They're American sizes, actually."

I wound up wearing a small.

"They fit you better than I thought they would," said the assistant, reassuring me that Germans can be bitchy when you try hard enough, but also making me realise that I needed to go for a run.

One quick purchase, a panic attack about holiday hips and a 6k run later and we went for dinner and, just in case you're doubting me about how saturated this place is with guys wearing fetish gear, check out this photo of Jonathan I took which "accidentally" caught a guy in rubber wandering around in an Italian restaurant. There were condoms on the floor. Seriously.

The food was terrible, but oh my was it entertaining. I can only guess the chefs were too busy being baffled by their clientele. Or buggered by them, I honestly don't know.

Berlin

Berlin Blind Dating | Cute But Sad
(Click to see more)

So, once Jonathan had woken up from a well-deserved lie-in and we’d had a quick look at the map, we wandered out of the apartment with the plan that we’d find breakfast, buy essentials for the flat, then come back to make a plan for the day.

We then discovered that we live right next to the zoo, thought it would be nice to have brunch then go and see that, so went walking to see about finding somewhere with food to get us ready for a bit of animal craziness, only we hadn’t planned for that in our look at the map and we got a bit turned about and wound up just wandering aimlessly and being distracted by churches that we were sure Altaïr, Ezio and most certainly Jonathan could climb (I’d hold the bag and smile generously) and then we passed desperately posh-looking cafés on verandas outside literary institutes where we suddenly felt under-dressed and thought we might find a short cut back to the zoo and kind of did because we then found ourselves, somehow, in the area where even the pharmacy sells leather and bondage gear in its windows for all the gay boys of the district.

Actually, it’s not just that district; this city is possibly the gayest place I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some pretty gay places in my time. I’d have thought I’d have been a bit put off by that, but I’m really taken in by it (and I don’t mean up to the elbow scar, despite orgies being more common than chewing gum here) but there’s something about there being so many gay men and women here that makes me realise how my sense of the normality of gay life in London is nothing compared to how up front it all is here.

Yes, there’s a big leather party happening this weekend, but everywhere you go, day or night, there’s guys in full fetish gear, having their lunch in a diner, wandering around a gallery, having a poignant moment by the Wall. It’s surreal and quite liberating; I can understand why to so many guys coming here is like being a kid in a candy store; it would be so easy to disappear into that vortex of hitherto repressed opportunity here and emerge the other side of that wormhole with nipples stretched by gravity wells of dark matter and to have forgotten everything in the world that doesn’t have a gayromeo profile or a hanky code designation.

It’s probably a perfectly wonderful way to live, too, so I’m sort of wondering why I’m being quite so cynical about it when it actually sounds like it must be quite amazing so it’s probably something about me that I’m frightened or uncertain of about it all rather than that there’s something flawed in it necessarily. I just can’t see myself wanting to disappear into those darkrooms where everything’s a drug-fulled, carnal cavalcade of danger, disease and the deletion of self in desire. Perhaps it’s the rampant ego or inquisitiveness of being an artist that stops me from wanting that loss of control or perhaps I see it and I want it so badly I don’t know if I’d be able to know when to stop and I know I tend to push myself to extremes in everything, so if I was going to get into that, I’d want to be the best drug addicted sex pig I could be and, frankly, I don’t know that there’s room in my schedule for that right this minute.

Still, it’s really, really beautiful to see it all around here; I really like seeing people who are passionate and engaged in what they do in life, so it’s really exciting to see all this, in the same way as it’s a thrill to see people at comics conventions getting excited about dinosaurs.

Anyway, we then worked out that after walking for three hours, everywhere we had been turned out to be within a couple of miles of each other and we’d been meandering in a really nice aimless path that eventually led us back to where we’d started, via a wurst stand. For our shame, we popped back into the American diner for milkshakes and pancakes just so we could get online to look at a map, which was when we realised how far we’d walked in order to cover so little distance and that if we’d taken one different turn we’d have realised that everywhere joined up around a central point we’d been dancing around all day.

That’s kind of the point of being in a new city, though, so it’s hardly like we minded.

We eventually picked up milk and breakfast stuff for the flat and flaked out for a little while before setting off again to walk across the city to meet Frauke, a friend of Lizz’s who’d very kindly said she’d meet us. On the way, we had a bit more of a plan for where to go and we walked through the Tiergarten, had a nose at the Sony Centre, the Berlin Wall, the Topography of Terror, Checkpoint Charlie and then even managed to find the comics shop in Kreuzberg before finding her at the station there.

Frauke is lovely, she took us to a wonderful (and wonderfully cheap!) Turkish restaurant where she told us about her work on film festivals and some really interesting performances she’s been involved in about bringing comics to life, she told us loads about the Berlin arts scene and about what it’s like to live here rather than just visit, then we went along to a bar where Jonathan and I tried not to be too weirded out by people smoking before she had to head back to get ready to see her family for Easter.

Things like that really delight me and make me a little bit ashamed that I’m not more generous with my time in London when people are coming from abroad because the kindness she showed to us in giving us help with simple things like buying a week’s travelcard and talking to us about basic things in the city has made such a difference to the experience we’ll have here and going for dinner and a drink with her has shown us a bit of the city we’d totally have missed if we’d stuck to the obvious tourist options and just kept going to bars in Schönberg and kept wandering aimlessly, so I really hope I can keep up a little bit of good karma beyond just giving her some comics and seeing her when we’re all in Toronto; I really should resolve to do more to help people visiting London.

Of course, after that, we just had to go and have a look at what was happening on the gay scene; it was just too tempting not to have a look – there was a shop that had posters in the window telling you what was happening each night and apparently last night had a Fuck and Fist party going on, but we thought perhaps we were over-dressed for that, so we went to a bar and it was heaving, or maybe creaking, with guys in head-to-toe leather.

What was funny was being the man with the longest hair in the whole bar there and my hair really, really isn’t that long, but it said something about how identikit a lot of the looks that were being rocked there were. It was funny, but after about an hour of people-watching, we figured that unless we were going to be doing what they were doing, it was probably fairer that we headed home for the night.

I love being an outsider in a city, you made such wild assumptions about a place and the people based on such a narrow set of experiences. I’m not going to say that Berlin is like this or that, but what we’ve seen has been quite crazy and wild and exciting and enticing, from the Russian with his sausage TV show to the looped porn in the bar (much the same thing) to the drunk kids wanting to play Frisbee with us at midday when we were lost and when we didn’t, one started shouting something in German about how his friend (who was about thirteen) was pissed and couldn’t throw for shit anyway.

That kind of thing makes a city really quite appealing, so let’s see what we find today.

Also, I love having excuses to get Jonathan to take photos, he gets really good pictures of buildings and places, so I’m going to designate him the camera operator for the week.

Berlin, 08:40

Berlin Sketchbook | Cute But Sad

Berlin (click for larger image)

Thursday 1^st April, 2010.

08:40

As always, the apartment wasn’t quite the way it had been pictured in the advert we’d booked it from on the website, but it’s fine. It’s a one-room flat on the eighth floor, with a view of blocky rooftops and satellite dishes and, if you look to the West, glamorous hotels. It’s tempting to pretend to be some kind of architectural psychometrist and imagine some kind of narrative about the people who lived here before it was bought up to be used as a tourist flat.

The journey was, as journeys are, desperately long at the time and then instantly forgotten. As always, we balked at how much we had to spend to get to the airport, which was almost what we spent on the flights, then spent even more money on unsatisfying food in a restaurant we probably wouldn’t have been to otherwise and then went book shopping for our holiday reads.

Jonathan picked up Wicked and The Art of Concentration. I’d passed on my copy of Wicked ages ago and he’d meant to read it, so it seemed like a good call to pick up another copy and it was such a surprise to see his cousin’s book in the bookshop ahead of the launch that we picked it up so we’d be able to talk to her about it when we next saw her.

My books were The Heretic’s Daughter and The Solitude of Prime Numbers, both of which I’d heard good things about, although I did consider picking up Kafka’s The Trial but thought that perhaps it wasn’t holiday material. Besides which, for some bizarre reason, WH Smiths at the airport didn’t have any Herman Hesse, which would have been my first choice for philosophical novels, although I’m not sure if there’s any I’ve yet to read from him. I was also a bit surprised that they didn’t have anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who I was almost willing to give another try to after I’d been really dismissive of after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was thinking about that which reminded me of The Solitude of Prime Numbers, so I settled for that.

I’m so glad I did; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s loss is my serendipitous gain. Paolo Giordano’s novel is a gloriously understated and introspected chronicle of the caustic consequences of moments in the lives that ripple through their teenage years and echo through their adult lives. It’s a brilliantly perceptive tale of how damaged people look for other damaged people, as though their scars might be the jigsaw parts that make them whole.

I devoured the book; the translation from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside is lucid and effortless. I opened the book when I sat down on the plane and I closed it, with a contented sigh, halfway along the u-bahn from the airport to the city centre. The ending itself is so elegant that I can’t speak of it for fear of breaking the carefully woven spell.

However, the one thing that did cause me to stumble with the book was the typesetting. As early in as page 15, there was a space missing between a full stop and a capital T and later in the book, the missing space seems to have reappeared.

I know it’s utterly pedantic of me to mention this but it seems to be coming up in a lot of books I’m reading at the moment and I’m wondering if it’s because they’re relying on spell-checking rather than human proof-reading or if it’s because they’re not re-checking the whole document after amending points earlier on in it, but it really jars in a novel where the language flows so effortlessly otherwise and I know how embarrassed I am about knowing there’s a similar typo in one of the dinosaur postcards I just made, but I’ll amend that on the next set I get printed and we’ll never speak of it again.

Would it be wrong of me to email Black Swan to point it out to them?

Anyway, a travelogue through vague allusions to the contents of books and the typesetting therein isn’t much of a record of me being in Berlin, so perhaps I shouldn’t just ramble about that stuff and instead I should tell you about something else.

In contrast to it costing about £30 to get us to the airport in London, it cost us €5.60 to get from the airport to town in Berlin, with the journey time being about the same. The U-Bahn is juddering and has a surprisingly abrupt braking speed, but let’s not start to anthropomorphise and say that everything in Berlin’s the same way, all slamming doors and swift brakes, ja?

We had to pick up the key for the apartment from a hotel a little distance from here from a surly Russian man who was watching a TV programme about cutting sausages at 10:30 at night. He wasn’t too pleased about us arriving after the reception hours closed at ten, but what could we do?

“I’m sorry you had to stay behind because our flight was delayed. Easyjet are rubbish, but at least you got my email, eh?”

“There’s a twenty-five euro charge for cleaning at the end of the stay, please sign here.”

“Err, okay.”

Well, perhaps the brakes are a little abrupt.

The taxi driver who took us to the apartment was friendly and relatively chatty, which I think was to distract us from taking us the long way round on a pretty short journey.

The apartment’s perfunctory, a decent enough sized room with a bed that seems designed to make it as difficult as possible to be a couple on holiday – two single mattresses and two single quilts on a very squeaky double bed frame, and no door between that room and the kitchenette with the noisy fridge buzzing through the night.

Still, it’s cheap and it’s hardly like you go on holiday to spend all your time in the apartment, is it?

One lesson learned, though, is that we didn’t check that there would be an internet connection here and so we had a little panic when we first got in while I was unpacking, Jonathan was hacking to see if anyone was kind enough to have left a default password set up so we could get a map loaded onto our phones.

Tiny oversight there, whoops!

A closet full of clothes and strange discoveries – instead of a Gideon’s Bible, there’s a airport copy of A Thousand Distant Suns, which, sadly, I’ve already read (it’s brilliant, I will steal it and pass it on to someone else) a grubby towel with suspicious marks on it and a rogue fingerless mitten in cheap yarn.

I don’t think I’ll be bored enough to pull the mitten apart to make it into something else while I’m here, though, but that might be fun to leave a forgotten item as a different item by the time we leave.

It was midnight by the time we’d abandoned attempts at wifi piracy and ventured out to see if there was any way of finding food, only to discover we are staying about two minutes’ walk from where Jonathan stayed the last time he was here, so he could take us by the kind of circuitous route only a tourist knows to a late-night American diner where he ate enchiladas and I had vegetarian pasta and ginger ale and – thank god – they had wifi.

So, we loaded up maps and checked emails and then thought it might be funny to see who was on Grindr and, oh my, yes, Berlin seems to have some characters who have iPhones. Once I’d waded through some rather peculiar photos and considered changing my plans from going to the zoo to seeing an altogether different kind of bestiary, I was quickly interrogating people about places to go and things to do. Mostly their recommendations seemed to revolve around cruise bars and bear clubs and things like that, though, which isn’t quite what I was after.

Perhaps I’ll have another look at Lonely Planet and see what’s what with art galleries, rather than rely on the arse galleries that using Grindr in Berlin at one in the morning seemed to throw at me. However, there’s some kind of modern magic about the fact we could just turn up in a new city and within a couple of hours there were people offering to meet up with us, some wanting me to put my delicate artist hands in them right up to where my surgery scar might disappear, but also offers to show us cool places and interesting stuff in the city, which speaks volumes about the people of the city and the pride they take in this place.

Anyway, now my little bear is awake and I think it’s time we went and explored this crazy city a little bit, so I’ll catch up with you later!