Having a chat with my newfound Newtown neighbour and fellow IA @suzeingram it quickly became apparent there were enough IAs in and around the Newtown area to justify an immediate IA/EA/UXD drinks session.

The inaugural Newtown IA drinks will be held at the Carlisle Castle on Friday 18th from 6:30pm.

Join @suzeingram and I there if you know how to test a user or wire a frame. Look for the well-labelled table with a running card sort and a jug of beer. Dinner on the premises at the bistro for those inclined.

Here's a review of the Carlisle, in case you needed convincing.

Here's a map to the Carlisle, in case you need direction.

Here's a photo of the Carlisle, in case you need to previsualise.

See you there.

I have a new poem 'The Carnies' in the #9 issue of online journal Snorkel. Check it out.

Credit Lyonnais, originally uploaded by pureandapplied.

While in Paris (in October last year on our honeymoon) we stayed in an apartment in the district known as Opera, which is the home to many of France's financial institutions.

Each night we would sit in the window of our apartment having a wine, watching the street, and observing the workers in the Credit Lyonnais headquarters adjacent have meetings, talk on the phone, file documents, fiddle on their computers.

This fairly plain photo, taken on Friday night, Oct 14 shows one of those workers clearing her desk after being made redundant at the beginning of the financial crisis.

The first born's a nong and yet they give him
the hat and stick and jacket. Now golf's easier
than tennis, than anything I've tried, than all the ars

combined, and easier than memory - what colour
were your eyes, your hair - I speculate on your underwear.
You're vanishing, or the thought of you is less indelible,

the image of your form in the lab now a sunlit
shimmer - soon only a name, a half-remembered
gesture, my hand on your vulva between classes.

Still my brother's the better man - more domestic
than feral, suburban not dilettante - a glamourless,
blameless middle. Saturdays he carts the attack

all over the park; he shines as though all the shims
and wedges of the mighty were exerted at his whim;
how he wields the earth! And I'm laconic in the stands,

expectant as an aged passenger, static and seething,
where once I was unencumbered as a eucalypt. So we live
up here tethered at the whip-end of a steaming coil

of asphalt looped around the mountain - bachelor
captives on a hillside dairy where the buried forebears
set up a ceaseless chatter. Were I to go far from this place,

I'd miss the cows' gentle lowing, the town shopping strip
there below, the amateur theatrical society, Sunday mass,
the idiolect. In the manipulative sky, the implacable faces

of the angels decry my several murders, uncomposed, alone.

Written by the pseudonymous Flannery O'Malley, and first published in Cordite #23: Children of Malley,  April 2005.