Life

Off The Grid

the middle of nowhere[click image to enlarge it] [A dirt track in Wales exactly seventy-five miles from the nearest Starbucks. POOTERGEEK is laden with three cameras, several lens bags, and a tripod. He is trying to open the gate to a field full of sheep by pressing a London Transport Oyster card against the hinge […]

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Character Development

Dismissing David Cameron and his gang as “toffs” is feeble, but I’ve noticed a few commentators refining that line lately. The Spectator blog points at Trevor Kavanagh, Political Editor of The Sun—there’s a job—claiming that the workrate of the Cameroonies compares unfavourably with that of either the Blairites or Brownites (as recounted by Alastair Campbell), […]

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Ball Lighting

A couple of weeks back I attended one of the two “reasonably smart” evening occasions that PooterGeekers kindly invited me to in response to my appeal so that I could test out some wacky lighting techniques. This was photographing various Latin American performers at a Cambridge college ball. I’m sure you’ll agree such a setting […]

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Einstürzende Neubauten

In The Ipcress File, Michael Caine plays Harry Palmer, a British intelligence operative. He is deprived of sleep and exposed to loud repetitive noises by enemy agents trying to break his will, erase his memory, and make him believe that he is a traitor. His defensive mantra in the film—“My name is Harry Palmer”—was, like […]

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Grey Matters

You expect celebrity kids to grow up into adults with dependencies; you expect 80s pop stars to turn into casualties: Gary Coleman, Michael Jackson, Jason Donavan; Adam Ant, Whitney Houston, Billy Mackenzie, Billy Idol, MC Hammer, Stuart Adamson… But the phenomenon that scares me is that of the thirtysomething swashbucklers of my youth—then celebrated for […]

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Citizen Ghale

My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]

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Snapshots From My Glamorous Life

Last week, I noticed a registered Brighton & Hove taxi parked outside the Muslim community centre. Prominent on the dashboard was a hardback copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A couple of days later I saw the car (and the book) again. This time the vehicle was being attended to by two of B&H’s […]

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Say It Loud: I’m Chippy And Proud

“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that […]

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The European Confession

During the dying months of my doing bioinformatics for a living, I attended a scientific conference in Scotland. I helped to run a few of the seminars there, but had nothing to do with their planning. At one, I marched to the front during a student’s presentation and told a member of the audience to […]

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Yeah, Busy Again

My apologies to people who are waiting for email replies and blog content and other things. I’ve been away and out and I’ll probably begin to catch up with my email backlog on Wednesday.

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Intensive Care

Over the past few years, both here and elsewhere, I have from time to time suggested that Robbie Williams is an individual of limited talent whose output has consisted mainly of hamfisted pastiche, northern English karaoke of the sort that belongs alongside the deliberately lighthearted performances of stand-up comedian Peter Kay rather than next to […]

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A PooterGeek Appeal

I’ve been staying at my parents’ this weekend—thanks, folks—while I’ve been attending the National Wedding Show [of which more soon at the Wedding Photography Blog]. The show was on at the National Exhibition Centre, round the corner from their place. As a boy I never imagined that I’d grow up to spend working Saturdays, for […]

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Reach For The Pie

I’m sitting here eating a microwaved vegetable biryani in front of my computer, having returned from a Ginsters-fuelled morning shoot of a band at Shoreham Airport, a cute, art deco building surrounded by dodgy Italian mopeds of the sky—not just propellor aircraft that look like they are powered by elastic bands, but helicopters that were […]

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Tin-Eared

Yesterday I had two meetings in London, so I spent a bit of time on the Tube. I am fascinated by posters on the Underground. There’s an hilariously “retro” one for the Cyprus tourist board up at the moment that I imagine being devised by two sideburned ad execs, fresh from lunch in the pub […]

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Retroactive

I’m in Dixons Currys.digital, buying a new computer keyboard. What sounds like a competent cover version of Starship’s We Built This City is playing. For a moment I wonder if it’s the start of one of those godawful trance retreads of 80s guitar hits. You know the sort of thing: Owner Of A Lonely Heart/Max […]

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Millions Of Souls Cry Out

I’m taking a few days off from blogging because I’m busy so I will leave you, as always on such occasions, with one of PooterGeek’s famously hilarious repackaged jokes. But first, this is perhaps a good time to link to one man’s account of his attempt to go without the Net for a week: Day […]

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Leggo!

Via things magazine, I discovered an article in the Archinect about how when the people of the virtual community Second Life are given freedom to build whatever they want they recreate suburbia.The author of the piece broadcasts his own prejudices. I hate shopping as well, but I winced at this: [L]ike most utopias, [Second Life] […]

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Who Moved My Deep Freeze?

Today, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago: “The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?“, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the […]

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Overheard In The Newsagent’s

Remember this place? Yesterday I’m in there and a middle-aged white bloke in a cravat is sounding off at the (Gujarati) proprietor as the nearest consultable expert on the question of contemporary Indian pulchritude. “Everybody says that one on Big Brother is beautiful, but I’ve seen better. She’s very pale skinned. I wonder if she […]

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Lifting Airs

Part of my exercise warm-up is my brief run from my flat to the gym. A short distance from the front door of the club I begin walking cautiously to avoid being run over by a Mercedes or Jaguar whizzing down the drive. We are currently in the season of the resolutionists so, even during […]

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Dust-Up At The Coffee Bar

I used to tithe a proportion of my earnings to Oxfam. At least three friends of mine have worked for them. One of them wrote the organisation’s first official monograph on the genocide in Rwanda. I stopped giving Oxfam my money when they sent me junk mail inviting me to invest in a so-called ethical […]

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Sex-u-a-lity

Given that I spent New Year’s Eve alone at my computer keyboard tidying up my remote UNIX home directory, this is going to read like a middle-class white guy wibbling on about how “vibrant” the local “community” is as he moves into a flat in one of London’s tiny ethnic war-zones instead of the Georgian […]

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Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2007! I hope that you all have a better semi-arbitrary time period than the last one. Unless you get your kicks from the suffering of others of course. In which case now is your last chance to give yourself up to the authorities before I track you back to your computer and make […]

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