- making breakfast with bacon from the butchers, bread from the bakers, raspberries from the corner store. just like olden days. #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Archive
Welcome, gentle readers, to my new blog. I’ve imported my old Typepad blog so as to have something for you to peruse, but I consider this really to be a fresh start. After two years working in Londond and commuting to Cambridge I have recently gone freelance and hope that the extra time I have when I am not involved in hellish commuting will actually result in somewhat more frequent blog posting (more frequent than hardly ever, which is what I was managing lately…) I’ll also take advantage of the marvellous flexibility and extensibility of Wordpress to try to craft something lovely for you all to enjoy, with widgets galore and all manner of unnecessary but cool bells and whistles. So then, here we go again!
This is the Mobile Clubbing event at Paddington Station, London, on 30 November 2006. It was a lot of fun. I danced next to Geoff Dyer for a while, which was nice, since I really like his books, particularly Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It .
There were probably about 500 people there, and the atmosphere was just excellent, with lots of spontaneous waves of cheering erupting. Onlooking Police Ossifers even managed to crack a smile occassionally. I left after about an hour, having been filmed dancing by Reuters.
I’m happy to announce the ’soft launch’ of VinylRulz.com, which I’ve been working on in dribs and drabs for the last several months. It’s not quite finished yet, but near enough for your perusal, I reckon. I hope you like it, but let me know if you think anything, like, sucks.
The proprietors - Ray and Danny - are great guys and it has been lovely working with them on it. If you are in London and want to visit an excellent and friendly record store specialising in techno, minimal, electro, breaks and house, why not check it out?
We have a new Francis Francis X1 coffee machine at work. Yay! As a result, I’ve found that I can’t make latte for beans. I need to learn how to froth milk. Thank goodness, then, for the coffeegeek.com milk frothing guide. My colleague Anu tells me I need to ’surf the hole’…so there you go. I look forward to practising my barista skills, going forward. And saving quite a few quid per week into the bargain.
Creating a new niche literally almost every time I post these days, I’m now pioneering "rollerpublogging". I’m currently sitting in the Kingston Arms, Cambridge, after skating here very gingerly from the train station (why gingerly exactly, to be revealed forthcomingly…) and I’m enjoying a pint of Elgood’s Black Dog, having previously (just now) enjoyed a Hopback Brewery Entire Stout. Sadly, for some crazy reason, IE is the only browser installed on this admittedly gratis and free intarwebs terminal, and a hobbled version of IE at that, such that I can’t even open a new browser window (tabs are but a fond dream…) and as such can’t provide interactive hyperlinks currently to the aforementioned delightful pub, and beers. (Because I’d have to save this as a draft, then navigate to new page, copy URL [after I find it], return back to typepad page, open post again, paste in link url, repeat, and frankly who could be arsed?) Maybe I’ll go back later and add them in, who knows? Or do a guerilla install of Firefox on this, which I probably can’t due to various ’security’ measures. But I digress…
Anyway, I’m delighted to fulfil the request to blog the Kingston Arms which is in one of my comments which I can’t currently link to passim. It’s a delightful pub, a freehouse featuring an always interesting diversity of ales, some of which I am currently mixing with co-codamol and ibuprofen (for reason to be revealed real soon) to interesting effect.
So, yes, I’m trying to numb the pain. Yesterday I went for a skate at lunchtime and bugger me if it didn’t rain. So I decided to skate back to work in the rain, such is my dedication (hi Lee! :D), and on the way across Tower Bridge, despite trying to be ‘careful’, I hit a bit wet leaf and fell over, jarring my back and tearing a muscle. Which was very painful, let me tell you. But I’ll live, it’s not like I have a rare bone marrow disease. Sadly I wasn’t filming at the time of injury, but I was shortly beforehand so maybe I’ll also publish that footage at a later date. Because - and this really does amaze me, even though I am also already totally blasé about it - it is really easy to embed video footage into this blog which I flimed with my phone, while skating. And I’m, like, whatever. We’re so hard to please these days.
I’ll post part 2 of this blog after I’ve chatted a bit and had some dinner…
UPDATE: I suddenly felt quite monged and had to take a taxi home. Sorry about that.
Danaworld is the new(ish) blog of my lovely sister-in-law Dana Copithorne, whose debut novel The Steam Magnate was recently published by Aio Publishing. Check it out for samples of writing and some of Dana’s own artwork. And buy the book!
People often ask me - "Rik, what do you get up to at lunchtime, working right near Tower Bridge as you do?" So I thought I’d put together a little lunchtime travelogue for you all. This blog is so like interactive.
First I put my skates on, then I went to see what is in the Design Museum Tank at the moment. Turns out it was a bunch of weird chairs…
So, I made a mistake in my compelling narrative. They aren’t chairs by "Clay Maarten-Baas", rather, they are clay chairs by Maarten Baas. Wildly expensive clay chairs.
After getting my obligatory design-fix, I decided to skate over Tower Bridge…
Which was all very exciting. After skating along the north side of the river for a while (sorry, I couldn’t be arsed to film the Tower of London) I crossed back to the south side of the river via London Bridge and grabbed a coffee and a flapjack at Borough Market…
Monmouth Coffee Company does probably the best coffee in London. Look, you can almost smell the beans…
Having sat down and enjoyed my coffee I skated around a bit more, and then finally settled down for lunch, which today was a lovely, fattening hot salt beef sandwich. Banjeroo and I are going on a cleansing diet starting this weekend, so I thought I should indulge. Plus it was cold and grey and miserable and it cheered me up…
So that was my lunchtime. Food, exercise AND a travelogue/blog post. How is that for multitasking?
Mikey Lambe asks "You know I’ve always wanted to see someone video themselves
rollerblading through a hailstorm and narrowly missing a large anchor.
Do you think you could do that?". Glad to oblige!
Here is a short video I took while skating through Borough Market, the most upscale and posh foodmarket in London, which takes place every Friday just a little way from where I work. Yum! Borough Market is here.
This is also by way of a test-post of VideoEgg, which is a rather spiffy video-sharing service (yes, another one…) VideoEgg is neat for a number of reasons: the encoding of .3gp format movies (which is what I generally have given I take most clips on my phone) seems better than Y**Tube, you can edit and trim videos on the site before uploading (you need to download a small widget first), it enables you to post directly to TypePad, Blogger, eBay (no more copying and pasting code…) and the videoegg site is nice and clean, and features rounded corners, which as we all know, is a good thing. If they can add tagging and a few other things, I’ll be superhappy.
Also also, this is a test-post for a new idea I have for "niche" or even "uberniche" blogging - rollermobilegeovideoblogging or "romogeovlogging" - which is me skating around filming stuff on my phone and talking shit, essentially. I think it could be a winner and will start up a dedicated blog any day now. Meanwhile, I implore you, dear readers, to suggest places in London (or Cambridge) that you would like me to romogeovlog! Go on, comment, please. It makes me happy…
Recent Comments