The Coterie of Zombies

The Devil is in the Detail.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:53:00 +0000

So, according to the bible, by creating a new covenant between God and man, Jesus was Rainbow 2.0 or was it 3.0? Covenant with Noah, Moses and then Jesus, wasn't it? If God wants us to follow his rules, he really should sort out the documentation; it's a mish mash of edits and authors. If only He'd used Google Wave.

Baby Badger Badges!

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:59:00 +0000

Baby Badger Badges!, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

That is all I have to say on the matter.

Badger: Then and Now

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Badger: Then and Now, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

New Badger book has arrived! I'm a bit too scared to put online ordering up on the web shop until the postal strikes are all out of the way, so let me know if you'd like a copy (or some copies) and let's sort something out that way!

Creepy Militant Homosexuality.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:12:00 +0000

Creepy Militant Homosexuality., originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

I'm sure by now you'll all have seen Nick Griffin on the BBC this evening. Personally, I'd rather have seen an actual griffin. Perhaps someone could have told Nick Griffin that griffins are lovely hybrid creatures that combine two noble species to create a symbol of rampant strength?

Anyway, apparently, he thinks the sight of two men kissing is creepy. I think that's utterly tragic and sad. Poor man. If only he'd been shown more love as a child, or, perhaps, taught about love when he was at school.

So, I declare November National Creep Out The BNP month and intend to kiss in public. A lot. With anyone I want to kiss. Noisily, sloppily and in a heavily orchestrated manner.

What is an Eclipse?

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:41:00 +0000

What is an Eclipse?, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

I'm making lots of little things for the MCM Expo next weekend, including these very silly little things!

http://www.londonexpo.com/ for more about next weekend! It's MASSIVE!

In case you missed it...

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:18:00 +0000

Here's a rather interesting story about the freedom of the press being ignored to protect corporate interests. Read it while the link lasts and let's enjoy the fallout from this.

First attempt at letter press!

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:30:00 +0000

London Marathon 2010

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:26:00 +0000

So, as I mentioned in a slightly panicky message, I'm through to run the 2010 London Marathon (which is now sponsored by Virgin and not Flora. How things change!). I've told the THT that I'll fundraise for them, which is great because there's no minimum I need to raise now as I've already got my place on the race, so all the money goes to them rather than buying their space on the team, but also it gives me motivation to run and not give up.

I know running gets horribly boring and I really don't want to become one of those scary people whose lives revolve around a fixed circuit of their park, hill training, race pace, the wall and all that strange stuff, but I suspect I might have to in the (ahem) run-up to the race.

I'm not running to get some amazing time, I'll be thrilled if I actually survive running that far and pleased if I can raise some money while I'm at it, so I'm not going to aim for a 2h30 time or anything insane like that.

Anyway, if you are feeling wonderfully generous, please consider sponsoring me - clicky clicky!

Aaaaaagh!

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:33:00 +0000

I got through on the ballot for the London Marathon next year. Scared now!

References...

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:37:00 +0000

Shaun Tan

Edward Lear

N is for Neville, who died of ennui.

Krazy Kat, George Herriman

Just a few little visual mental notes at the moment, some stuff for me to think about...

The Peckham Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:16:00 +0000

Well, that and a whole bunch of other things, too.

So much to talk about! I had an appointment with the assessment centre for disabled students' allowance to ask if there's anything that they could offer to help with making notes in lectures and such like. I half expected them to tell me to piss off, but they were enormously helpful and I left feeling a little bit like I'd won on the Generation Game or something. Now to see if Student Finance England can sort it all out before I finish the course. One thing that stuck in my mind was that as we were saying goodbye and once I'd told the assessor about Plant Food, he said, "I've really enjoyed meeting you. Good luck with your course; it's so good to see someone doing something useful for a change."

At first I thought he was making fun of me, but it was an honest comment. Comics and illustration are useful, are they, compared to business studies degrees and such like? Interesting.

I'd spent the weekend helping Pom Pom International teach (literally) hundreds of people to make pom-poms for peace to the point where I'd been dreaming about the things. It was an amazing weekend, and I'm still really pleased I'm able to be involved in the project, using something whimsical to bring people together. There were some lovely moments, watching a little girl teaching her dad to make one, watching strangers talk and help one another while making something. It might seem like a silly idea, and there were silly elements - my gingham pinny being one - but it helped people to connect through craft and that was all that mattered.

So, instead of being able to think about how the art I like is socially engaged practice, I was too tired from making pom-poms with strangers. Ah!

I've started poking around the bowels of the art school to learn about the letter press and I'm planning on going in to a load of workshops to learn how to use them properly over the next few weeks. I'm also going to get in on lots of computer courses to learn a bit more about Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign and maybe even some animation stuff, too, so beware.

This morning, I got up to find this in among all the twitter post:

BNP free phone line(from landlines only) 0800 0086191.Call from a pay phone, leave off the hook. Deflate their resources.

So, I shared it with friends and thought I'd keep an eye out for any pay phones I passed during the day and headed out to have lunch with Caroline and to take her photo for the Glastonbury registration system. All the pictures have her trying not to giggle, so she looks really sulky, so they're amazing in my book. Bought some more toe glove socks and a scarf in another slightly disappointing Westfield trek and went to the gym to make the mistake of showing the 5x5 stuff to Ilmar and Felipe. I'm going to regret that tomorrow, I think!

Anyway, after that I headed down to Camberwell again where all my life seems to happen at the moment and went to the launch of The Peckham Experiment, curated by the utterly beautiful Rachael House and Jo David (I mean, they're both beautiful, not that she is and he isn't) and I really loved the experience of artists acting as curators (or vice versa?) in socially-engaged thinking, where the exhibitions (not just the one I saw) respond to the original Peckham Experiment which was an inspired bit of social engineering where people who wanted to understand health as more than just the absence of disease and created what looks like an idyllic communal life for the people in the project before, sadly, the building was taken into the newly-formed NHS in 1950 as part of a much wider and more ambitious social experiment into understanding health.

At the same time as all of this was going on, I'd downloaded Grindr for the iPhone, an app that apparently you're meant to use for phone sex or arranging to have anonymous sex with strangers but so far I've been using it to talk to art students at other colleges who've just started using their phones and are baffled by them as much as I am and to chat to an old friend I used to meet at demonstrations. I think there's something quite amusing about trying to fit a discussion about the distinction between socialism and communism and to discuss perceived notions of class and about power over means of production and its rewards into a screen format that's quite clearly designed for conversations that start (and end, if they're with me) with "nice tatts m8, got more pix?"

Perhaps I'm not quite using it properly.

So, I should probably end this post and stop going through the BNP website telling them where they're making incorrect use of English in their posts because I think their moderators won't allow the comments past their irony filters. I quite like sending them all these emails with snippy corrections in, though. Perhaps tomorrow I'll start telling them they should reword their whole website to remove words that aren't of English origin, because, damn it, those migrant words, they come over here and they take all our sentences or something. There really wouldn't be much left, would there? English is a mish-mash of creolised German, French, Latin and Norse peppered with words from pretty much every country in the world. As English is, so is Britain and so should it continue to be.

Etymology as activism?

Yes, Labour are a train wreck on top of a car crash in the pit of a plane disaster at the moment and the rape of social services, education and every other socially-engaged practice in order to repay the billions and billions lost in the fiscal vortices of greed is inexcusable and unforgivable, but the swing to the right we're likely to see in their wake is every bit as troubling.

But I'm digressing when I should go to bed. I'll blog again soon, chances are, with a story of trying to get the men in the showers at the gym to stop wanking over each other and instead to start to show that they care for their fellow man through some kind of socially-engaged practice. Perhaps I'll tell them about the exhibition I went to see and see if politics gets them hard as much as nice tatts m8 does.

Or maybe I'll stare awkwardly at their willies and run off, which is what I did today.

The Magic of the iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:22:00 +0000

So, I made a deal with the devil and moved away from Orange after quite a bitter few months of problems with them and instead sold my soul to get myself an iPhone. Jonathan's had once since they first appeared and has been trying to get me to join the cult ever since. The first one had some problems I couldn't get past: the keyboard made too many mistakes, the camera was iffy and the tariffs weren't exactly favourable for new customers.

Now, I know Orange will have the iPhone in a month or two so I could have waited to see what they'd have to offer, but I'd be very surprised if they beat the deal I've got on a PAYG O2 deal at the moment where, so long as I put £10 a month onto the phone, I get unlimited data and unlimited texts. Also, for registering my account online I got an extra £20 credit. So, after sending about 500 texts in the first week and spending all my life online, I somehow have £29 credit after just putting a tenner on it when I bought it.

So, I've joined the ranks of the legion of iPhone zombies staunchly ignoring the world around themselves in favour of chatting to boys on Grindr, playing Scramble and, most importantly, working out while using the iPhone as a personal trainer. I've just started on the strength building programme on iFitness and I'm enjoying it - it's a 5x5 workout, so rather than doing three sets of about ten reps, you do shorter sets but more of them, so you can push yourself to do heavier weights. Oh my, but it's hard work.

Anyway, this is totally a stupid vain post with a photo of me with no top on in it. I spent the weekend making pompoms for peace. So there.

Even Forbidden Planet's excited.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:21:00 +0000

Baby Badger is born on Tuesday!

Are you excited? I am!

Solipsistic Pop

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Solipsistic Pop, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

The thing I'm currently working like crazy on is a piece for the wonderful Tom Humberstone's Solipsistic Pop anthology on the theme of Broken. I'm trying out muted colours for this one since I've got to re-draw it when all the scans came out too feint to use properly for something that's going to print. Add to that that I want to get the Badger book finished by the end of the month and we're looking at a mahoosive double deadline for me!

This is all awesome stuff, though. I might just never see any of my friends for a while though.

Do we like the colour?

Watching yourself change from the inside out.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:06:00 +0000

hair, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

...and I don't mean this cock-awful photo of me without anything happening to stop my hair looking like a tonsure. Well, maybe I do.

Every time I've tried to grow my hair out, it hits this stage and just looks dense, shapeless and impossible to manage without a bucketload of product. It's a very long time since I managed to get past the hell of in-between hair and got to show off the rolling waves my hair wants to fall into once it gets long enough.

Yes, that is an analogy you can smell there. No anal bleaching needed to notice that.

In the last couple of weeks, I've started doing the MA, had my last physio appointment for my numb hands, started on methylphenidate for ADHD, started back at interpreting work and generally, the dim and distant nimbus of life I'd had lurking in me burst into a supernova.

Methylphenidate is having some very interesting effects on me. I'm much less distracted than normal; my focus at the gym was incredible and I've been able to knuckle down and get a few weeks ahead on drawing Badger. The things I've been dithering about doing are finally getting done - from anthology pieces to cleaning out the washing machine. I'm pretty much exactly like a 1950's housewife, necking speed to get the chores done, only I'm not feeling like I'm tweaking on it and god knows I'd know what that's like. I'm feeling quite chilled out and just quite content.

Things are good, right now - I think I've got the right products in place (the right pharmaceuticals and the right people supporting me) and I think even though it's a bit thick and lumpy at the moment, it's a good period of growth I'm hoping I won't back away from again.

Alternative Village Fete

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:55:00 +0000

I'm going to be there helping people make Pom Poms. Fancy it? Here's the blurb, hold on to your hats.

Watch this Space Festival, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1

Saturday 26th September: 12pm - 7pm

Sunday 27th September: 12pm - 3pm

For the second year in a row, innovative live art and performance company, Home live art, presents a riotous weekend of artist’s, craft and produce stalls, performances and participatory activities which re-interpret the traditional village fete for the urban environment of the National Theatre.

At 12pm each day the Fete will be opened by a special Guest Star from the National Theatre….

Saturday will revolve around a vibrant stage programme - including a mass ukulele jam, contemporary barn dance, participatory skipping & hoola hooping and a spectacular bird of prey demonstration – alongside a wealth of fun, participatory fete based games and interactions that bring our traditional craft making practices into the 21st Century. The Legendary Miss Amy Lamé invites you to make a pom pom for peace, while you can brush up on your knitting, sewing and craft skills with The Make Lounge, I Knit London and Rockpool Candy, as well as play fete games with The Society of Wonders and sample beautiful cupcakes and herbal teas. There will also be handmade toys and crafts using recycled and found fabrics.

Sunday's lunchtime programme will mark the seasonal move towards Autumn and Harvest with a series of innovative food and horticulture projects where visitors can share in the art of preparing, cooking and tasting to the sounds of anarchic Balkan beats from the Transsiberian March Band, ending with the fabulous School of Dance, where the audience can learn the Samba alongside the legendary Miss High Leg Kick and Boogaloo Stu.

Food artist Prudence Statie will be sculpting in chocolate, whilst Sharon Baker invites you to vote for your favourite bread breast bun, alongside cup cakes, home made jams & preserves, and innovative food interactions from performance company Curious and artists Lisa Cheung, Miche Fabre Lewin and Sophie Herxheimer.
Participants: The Benoit Viellefon Band, Bo-Peep Kids, Blue Field, Chrissy Cromer, Curious, Cut a Shine, The Dulwich Ukulele Club, Golden Co-operative, The Hawk Experience, Hedgerow Provender, Miss High Leg Kick and Boogalou Stu's School of Dance, I Knit London, Lisa Cheung, Liz Bentley, The Make Lounge, MC Paul L Martin, Mary Mathieson, Miche Fabre Lewin, Peggy's Cupcakes, Pom Pom International (Amy Lamé & Shane Waltener), Prudence Staite, Rock a Hula! Rockpool Candy, Roots & Shoots, Ros Badger, Sharon Baker, Simon Withers & Chris Jones, Skip Sisters, Skip Theatre, Society of Wonders, Sophie Herxheimer, Sugargrain, The Transsiberian March Band.

Skeletal

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:03:00 +0000

Skeletal, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

I started on a portrait commission this morning and got distracted when I couldn't get his nose right and he just looked too young. I think perhaps I've got a bit on my mind at the moment, all about chapters ending and beginning and anxieties about things I can't change.

This week's been pretty monumental in terms of changes for me and as September came, so has every change I'd wanted. I've enrolled at college and I start properly next week. I'm starting doing little bits of interpreting work again, which in turn means I should have a little more money again. I've been discharged from the physiotherapist with instructions that I'm to keep doing the exercises I've been given for the rest of my life and to avoid particular types of movement wherever possible. That's a bit weird.

I'm back at the gym, just not doing certain types of movement (that means you, men in the showers), I should get my report from the ADHD clinic that has the potential to completely change my world, I've decided to press the complaint against Lewisham hospital further and I'm trying to sort out stuff with Student Finance England.

Um, am I not meant to be making more time to draw?

Perhaps I'm not the best person to manage my own time, am I?

Words and Images

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:26:00 +0000

Chicagothulhu, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

So, as soon as I've finished this cheese and pickle sandwich, I'm off to enrol for the MA in Visual Art: Illustration at Camberwell. Apparently this means I'm an art student again and a super cool illustrator or something.

I looked through some of the course books in Foyles yesterday and didn't like the writing style in most of the ones they had in stock. This is good, it saved me buying them online and wasting money never reading them because of something nebulous about the way they structure their sentences.

Hmm. Nervous now. So many things changing this week, it's hard to know which doors I need to close, which to keep open and which to slam in the faces of fucktards. (Orthopaedic surgeons, you might want to make a maxillofacial appointment now. You're getting a ultramega slam, you know that?)

My Jeans Don't Fit

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:20:00 +0000

My Jeans Don't Fit, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

...and I've only been back at the gym a couple of weeks. This could get expensive! Apologies for the substandard guyswithiphones.com style photo.

I think I still like my hair, though, so there.

I'd write more, but it'd either be about bats in Ravenscourt Park or Grizzly Bear Thursday and I can't finish a sentence at the moment that doesn't somehow end up being starting the MA this week. My poor little brain.

College.

Baby Bio: Vauxhall goes gurn-crazy for Plant Food

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:49:00 +0000

Oh, the gays do make me laugh. Apparently the new fun drug that's going around is mephedrone, which is currently legal, even though it could be analogous to controlled substances. Enterprising websites have sprung up all over the place, but what's really rather amusing is that the sites which sell it are packaging it as plant food so it can be posted out to customers, along with a warning that they're not to stuff it up their noses as it makes people gurn.

I'd not heard from anyone who'd tried it until this weekend (although obviously I knew it was around, just not what it does), when two different people told me about it. I guess it's the bank holiday effect that's making all the kids go crazy on plant food.

What is it like? One person said it was like Parma Violets crushed up with speed, saying it woke him up a bit, made everything a bit swimmy and then got boring. The other person said it had a brief euphoric effect, then made for wobbly legs and a disinhibitory/aphrodisiac effect. Apparently the hangover's not terrifically pretty either.

Meh, I don't care, I'm not going to take it, but it just makes me laugh to think about the clubs being full of muscular, raunchy men, dancing all sweaty and topless, snogging and groping each other, all the while snorting a little bump of Baby Bio to make it all seem a little bit less like they're spending eight hours standing on one foot and then the other, staring at a few flashing lights.

It reminds me of when I was about 12 and I convinced the other boys who couldn't be arsed with sports day that they should try to smoke grass. One handful of wet turf, rolled in a page from a Tricolore French textbook and bingo, the asthmatic kid who suffered more from gullibility than any respiratory difficulties managed to get out of the four by four hundred relay. I think I had to do the hundred metre sprint, though.

So, rekindle my school days and let me be an enabler. Go out there and jack up Baby Bio, kiddies.

Um. My weekend wasn't spent gurning in Fire or getting punch fucked by a queue of men in Hidden, instead I went to Duckie, had a free lunch at Smollensky's and walked through Ravencourt Park and was surrounded by bats. Bruce Wayne's a twat if he was scared of them, they're beautiful and so incredibly agile.

I don't think they snort Baby Bio, though. Go do it for the bats.

Changing Room

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:01:00 +0000

Changing Room, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

That'll teach me to take posey photos in changing rooms before going for a hair cut, won't it? Still. I'm back at the gym and I hope I'll look fitter than this soon.

Night!

A is for Antidisestablishmentarianism

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:23:00 +0000

I want to do an alphabet book of sesquipedalian words. Please post your favourites!

P is for pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, for instance!

Japanese Rope Bondage Life Drawing

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:50:00 +0000

Terrible photo of a drawing. Some days I think perhaps dropping the scanner on the floor was a bit of a mistake. Anyway, I went along to the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green last night for a Japanese Rope Bondage Life Drawing session. I have to say, I'm impressed at how it was done - difficult poses held well and you were left to your own devices for the main part. I chatted to some lovely people there and there were free wasabi peas, so I can't complain. It got a bit annoying during one complex pose where two women were suspended from the ceiling together because there were a lot of photographers there and the flashes got distracting and a few people were talking by the bar, but then I realised it was eleven thirty, I'd been there since eight and I was about to miss the last tube home, so I'm assuming it was nature's way of saying that by eleven, it's a social event.

I plan on going again if they do another one, definitely. In fact, if you know of any life drawing class (perhaps cheaper than this one - the £15 covered snacks and sake, but I am off the booze and I'd already eaten, so didn't need to pay for those), let me know and let's go do it. I really want to get back to basics and improve my observational drawing.

This morning, I'm being interviewed by Liberation Frequency magazine about my comics and art and stuff. I hope I can think of something vaguely lucid to say to them!

I am the best at what I dooooo!

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:49:00 +0000

I am the best at what I dooooo!, originally uploaded by zombiecoterie.

It's a gratuitous t-shirt shot. Sue me.

New Clothes

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:45:00 +0000

Do you like the t-shirt I'm wearing in this photo? Ah, I see, perhaps I got a little bit excited while taking it. It's a t-shirt from Pictures For Sad Children and says, "A brief history of art," followed by one person saying, "Look" and the next saying "Look at me" - it's really rather wonderful. Jonathan and I sat on the floor this morning like it was Christmas, opening our parcel from Topatoco, which is just as well, as the latest t-shirt from T-post wasn't really to my taste. It might end up on ebay unless some hipster reading this makes me a better offer for it.

The picture makes my eyes water a little bit.

Let's see, there's rather a lot for me to tell you about, isn't there? I told you about winning money for tongue skills at the Deaf pub, showed you how bad I still am at using Illustrator, told you about how my mother rotted her septum by snorting drugs and I posted a picture of some dead ladybirds. Clearly there's a lot more happening than that if those are the only things I've been telling you about.

Well, the trip to Malmö was awesome. We stayed in Erik's flat and managed to avoid leaving dirty syringes and burned spoons all over the place, so hopefully he won't be too upset with us when he gets home. I really like having a place we can squat in whenever we need a few days away. I might even use it as a refuge if I need to catch up some pace with my work while I'm at college. That was kind of my plan a few years back before all kinds of silly nonsense got in the way.

The staff at Gatwick were a hoot; they looked at our passports and made fun of where we'd both been born, tried to make lewd suggestions about Jonathan's banana and the man by the metal detector said, "I'm terribly sorry sir, I'm going to have to squeeze your nipple." Which he did, to check it was pierced, and then he accidentally hit me in the face while I was watching him do it. His colleague said I should sue and I told her I wouldn't stand a chance because clearly there wasn't enough CCTV going on there.

This time, they didn't check to see if my phone was on drugs. Just as well, considering the last time they swabbed my phone they missed a dodgy text message from Chris by about a minute. Phew, eh? Sadly, nothing to do with meth or bombs or anything like that.

What did we do in Malmö? Well, it was the Malmö festival, but sadly we missed the headline act, Lady Sovereign. I hope she confused the hell out of them all. Instead, we saw some parpy jazz bands and Neneh Cherry's sister or someone like that. She was great, but the sound engineer let her down. She had an annoying habit of wandering over to an electric drum and hitting it out of time, so we had a whale of a time hitting each other with empty coke bottles we'd filled with vodka.

I had a look for locally made comics, but couldn't find any, which I thought was a bit odd because Malmö apparently produces some good illustrators. I shall have to go back again and have a proper look around. The comics shop did have some rather fine looking Call of Cthulhu game books that are hard to find here now. Damn the stupid exchange rate and my tiny rucksack.

We had a day out in Copenhagen before the Danish Kronor threatened us with bankruptcy for wanting to buy some chewing gum and we fled back on the train to Malmö, our slightly dull but wonderfully familiar home from home. Needless to say the next few weeks will be a bit lean on my side and will probably eat up a fair chunk of Jonathan's redundancy money. Erk. That Start of Term macbook air might just have to wait for a little while yet.

I had a long talk with someone who is doing a PhD at Oxford and I have to say I did then take a look at how the PhD programme at arts.ac.uk looks and I might see if I can do well enough in the MA to look at doing something higher. It's funny, now the ADHD is diagnosed and I'm starting to notice stupid behaviours I've learned, I'm starting to feel like I can achieve all kinds of things I'd have thought impossible. I might write a little more about this at some point soon, so I won't bore you with it now.

Anyway, yes, Malmö was a really welcome little break for Jonathan and me and I've come back refreshed and ready to take over the world, or at least try to get my life in order.

I'm determined I'm going to do well at college, otherwise there's no point in devoting the next two years of my life to it. I'm planning on trying to do two days a week paid work, either with museums and galleries or as an interpreter (only little short bookings until I know my hands can take it), I'm hoping to make it to the gym four mornings a week, spend three days a week at college or on college work, get to the theatre once a fortnight, go to gallery openings whenever I can and generally live like the person I'm hoping to become. Of course, I'm still going to spend loads of time playing role-playing games and killing monsters on the xbox, but clearly this is all in the name of research!

Um. I've totally lost track of what I was talking about now, sorry. Um. Oh! I went back to the gym today. There were naked men all over the place, but I really couldn't be bothered with them. I'm not in crippling pain in my arms yet, so it might just be I'll be okay there now.

Err, that was it. You probably didn't get past the weird photo, did you?