The Best Things in Life are Blue

Like a magpie is attracted to shiny objects I am drawn to blue things. And shiny things too. Also cake. But that's not the point. The point is the blue. I've got many, many photographs of blue and it's about time I did something with them.

The blue starts here.

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 5: Gadgets

Gadgets

I like gadgets, I have many. I have a laptop for media, one for art, one for writing and a broken one. I also have several hand-held devices, smartphone, pocket pc (I use it for reading ebooks), two iPods (one’s a Touch) and most recently an iPhone. Three cameras. I seem to get things in threes. If I had enough money and less common sense I would have lots more gadgets than I already have. I adore the feeling you get when you have just purchased a new gadget and you loose the next two days to exploring it and finding out all the ways to waste time with it. When I got my iPod Touch it was brilliant, I watched videos, searched endlessly on YouTube, listened to music and surfed the web. Then, a week later the system update that brought out the App Store arrived and suddenly I was loosing days at a time to this new little wonder. The things you can do with a hand-held gadget never fail to excite me.

But I’m not here to rave about how great gadgets are, nor am I here to complain about how many hours of my life I have wasted playing Angry Birds on my iPhone, or the days I’ve forgotten to eat because I want to get that elusive red block in Lego Star Wars for the Wii or DS Lite. I don’t actually mind spending my downtime lost in a haze of gadget lust. I can on occasion exhibit restraint and get a lot done most days. Most days.

No, what I am here to have a good angry mutter about is the space all these damn things take up!!

I have an artistic mind, personality and lifestyle. For the most part. I like things to be beautiful and I do enjoy a day spent with a paintbrush or pen in my hand. I don’t really mind being distracted by the odd email, or a curious urge to find out what strange things people are tweeting about. And I certainly don’t mind looking up from my notepad to see my big old flatscreen leering at me. I’m just pleased it made it up the stairs in one piece, y’know?

What does have a tendency to bother me is when you plan a room, you decorate it and place all your beautiful belongings about the place, you fill it will twenty-odd houseplants (though that could just be me) and it is all looking fabulous. Your bookshelves speak of a wide range of interests and a cultured if somewhat geeky literature collection. Even the extensive DVD boxset collection doesn’t look too bad when the action figures are arranged in front of them (again, could just be me). You stand back and survey your room. It looks perfect. Then someone comes in with a box of your gadgets and their accessories and your blood pressure rises. You have to find a home for three laptops, two graphics tablets, a wireless keyboard. The hand-held items are less of a problem, they slide in drawers, sit on the arm of the sofa or live in your pocket. Then you notice the tangled pile of chargers. Not good. Even when you’re as organised as I am and have individual drawstring bags for each charger they still take up room and you can never seem to find the one your looking for.

I look around me right now and what do I see? Gadgets, they have homes, for the most part, but as I use them all they rarely live in their homes. Power cables trip me up and my writing laptop still doesn’t have a permanent home.

Oh for a simpler life and less of a gadget addiction!

Did I mention the robots?

Art By Tori

I'm in the process of getting stuck back into my art at the moment, making new pieces and exhibiting them locally. You can see what I'm up to here, there are examples of most of my recent creations as well as a blog giving an insight into behind the scenes of my work.

getting at a baby sweetcorn...

...isn't so easy when it's fresh off the plant!

But very yummy when finally unwrapped.

U2 360 tour hits Wembley

Sing your heart out, sing my heart out – Breathe

So long ago now I can’t remember I bought two tickets to see U2 play at Wembley Stadium on 14^th August. This concert, four years, two months and two days after their Twickenham concert for the Vertigo tour couldn’t come soon enough.

The first thing that struck me as I walked through the doors to find my seat was the stage. I’m not entirely sure how you could miss it to be honest, it’s huge, almost monstrous but utterly beautiful, and the kind of thing only U2 could get away with. The fact that you could sit in your seat at one end of the stadium and see the fans sitting in their seats on the other side, through the stage was quite wonderful. What better backdrop to a concert could there be? People just as excited as you are, there for the same reason, all facing the object of everyone’s attention. Four men just doing the thing they’re best at.

Not that I’m waxing poetic or anything.

There’s a wonderful thing that happens when the support acts have had their moment, and the stadium is finally filled up with all 88,000 people (holy mutha!). Suddenly the background music kicks up a notch and Bowie’s voice lets us know that something special is about to begin, even if he doesn’t actually say so. Then there they are. The gigantic claw comes to beautiful life as, led by Larry, the band stride into the welcoming arms of each and every one of us. The drummer, looking as ageless as ever. Adam, striding around with his bass with the authority of a man who knows his place in the world. Edge, weaving magic in his special Edge way. And finally, a playful Bono, keen to merge with the crowd and bring that invisible fourth wall down once and for all.

Breathe is first up, followed swiftly by No Line on the Horizon, Get on Your Boots, and Magnificent. What do I spend the first few songs thinking? The bridges between the main stage and B stage move. They freaking move. Edge and Adam doing their thing in the middle of the two bridges as they rotate around the circle. I watch the lucky ones in the inner circle go mad as they feed directly from the energy of the band and the band feed right back. That was me four years, two months and two days ago. I love being in the seats seeing everything that happens but a large part of me wishes fervently to be down there, hurling every ounce of emotion I have within me towards those four men who make such good rock music.

Beautiful Day, I get up despite the people resolutely sitting around me, and I begin hurling that emotion. I am here and am damn well going to enjoy myself. Elevation is next and I do enjoy being Bono’s echo once again. I had not forgotten how good this felt, but it is great to refresh the feeling.

When the band starts playing I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, I was waiting for this since the walk to the stadium listening to the soundcheck. Bono got us started off on the first verse and then we got a little carried away and he just let us have at it. Good man, that was a nice moment. I wonder sometimes what he must feel having so many thousands of people singing his words to him. The expression on his face suggests he gets a big kick out of it!!

Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of is one of my favourite songs and I will never tire of hearing Bono sing it live. I’m unsure at this point if I’m spending more time watching the stage than the band! I love the spike through the middle and I noticed before the show started the shiny teardrop at the top, can’t wait to see what happens with that!

To my, and everyone eles's amazement the screens start to pull apart. The whole thing is expanding, bloody hell. Things really are happening here! The spike lights up, the stage changes colour, the whole thing looks like it could take off at any moment. I idly wonder if the designer had watched Stargate Atlantis. When the city takes flight…

Unknown Caller bleeds into The Unforgettable Fire, heavily remixed to the point that it takes me longer than usual to work out what I’m listening to. I feel in the middle of a huge party and my mind thinks PopMart. My musings on Atlantis and the stage come back to me during City of Blinding Lights and searchlight bright lights shoot straight up into the sky. I’m convinced at this point the whole thing will just uproot itself and head into the stratosphere.

I do enjoy Vertigo live, it’s a lot of fun. I spend some time watching Adam and Edge prowl around the stage. I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight surprises me with how well it plays live.

The stage suddenly turns green for Sunday Bloody Sunday, somehow things heat up even more. Pride, so good live, so very good live. I always think Rattle and Hum when Pride comes along. I get terribly excited when MLK follows and I get to have a moment to let my body recover even though I don’t let up with the vocal chords. I can be quite tomorrow, right?!

Sticking with the political theme Bono reminds us all of Aung San Suu Kyi and volunteers wearing masks of her face come onto the B stage while the band plays Walk On. Where the Streets Have No Name gets a huge cheer from all around the stadium.

Bono praises the successes of the One campaign, as he rightly should before One gets yet another huge cheer.

I get my excitement on again for Mysterious Ways, just a couple of weeks earlier I’d been hoping this would make it onto the setlist along with…

…The first of the Encore Ultraviolet (Light My Way), how I have wanted to hear this live. And, no U2 concert would be complete without With or Without You and we’re not disappointed. This song never gets old. At least not for me. That is a mirror ball up there. Brilliant!

The lights go down and come back up for Moment of Surrender, my favourite song from the new album. A nice way to end the show.

Suddenly it’s over. Twenty-three songs? Felt more like thirteen. And that’s all I can remember at three in the morning when I sit down to see how many I can list. I’m sure I would have done better if my mind wasn’t quickly shutting down requesting sleep.

Sleep, sleep tonight and may your dreams be realised - MLK

Yes, I forgot a lot of stuff. I left out a lot of stuff. You had to be there, really. If you want all the details then buy the DVD when it comes out.

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 4: Roadkill

Okay, so I’m stretching this with the modern I know. There have been roads for a bloody long time, but there haven’t been super speedy motors tearing about the countryside for a bloody long time, so it evens out.

I have never killed anything on the roads, primarily because I don’t drive and therefore am never in charge of anything that goes fast enough to cause a poor little critter to get dead. I do, however, get rather upset when I see ex-critters littering the sides of the roads. Especially if said dead things used to be precious, red squirrels for example. And deer, though they don’t appear to be precious to everyone, but I love deer, and I particularly like seeing them alive, not mortally wounded by some stupid 4x4 driven by someone who probably wouldn’t even consider going ‘off-road’. But, my dislike of pointless cars can wait for another day.

Roadkill is on my mind today because a friend hit a rabbit last night. He’s a little upset and while some people don’t seem to have the compassion to care, I do and I would be upset too if I had been in his place. It’s not pleasant to be driving along, minding your own business when suddenly your wheel thumps over a poor little critter that had really bad timing. I was in a car a while back when it ran over a small mammal, we could have swerved to avoid it, but as there was another car coming the other way squishing the animal seemed preferable to squishing ourselves. Apparently these are the decisions we have to make when we take on the responsibility of four wheels and a motor.

Anyway, I got to thinking about that little rabbit that kicked the bucket last night, I don’t think it died for nothing. Think about it, rabbits breed like there’s no tomorrow, and for a lot of them there really is no tomorrow. How many of them die from myxomatosis? I don’t know the exact number, something like half of infected rabbits die. Pretty grim figures, but they still seem to thrive, so it’s all good. A stoat can wipe out an entire nest of baby rabbits to feed her family. Still, the rabbits keep going.

I appear to have digressed. This is my take on last night’s events…

There’s a fox, or another carnivorous creature, and he’s got a family, he can’t reproduce in the numbers rabbits manage and back home he’s got a vixen caring for two little cubs. It’s been a hot couple of weeks, he’s been having a hard time finding food and his family is threatened. He’s out one night, feeling hungry and sniffing the air hopefully. Then he catches a scent, there’s blood on the air. Bounding up to the side of the road he discovers a slightly flattened rabbit just waiting to be taken back to his vixen. He snatches it up, leaps back into the undergrowth and disappears. The fox family eat well tonight.

Something good comes of something bad. Sure, it sucks to be the cause of something cute and fluffy coming to a sticky end, but nature has a way of making up for these things. Why do you think kestrels can be seen hovering above motorways? Roadkill. It’s an all you can eat buffet for our wildlife.

And sometimes, when your tyre kicks as you drive over something small and brown in the road, it is just a shoe!

Queen's inspired poetry

Wrote this little poem while waiting for Andy Roddick play his quarter final match and thought it would be nice to share it. It's about Roddick, if you hadn't already guessed.

The Sharpshooter

A four-time champion
Here at Queen's.
Going for a fifth
By any means.
How many aces will there be?
I'll just have to wait and see.

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 3: TV Audiences

Apparently they let any old moron into a studio for a live recording. While watching a US rerun the other day the host asked the audience to call out things they liked about the modern world. One idiot shouted out “beer” while the slightly clever masses yelled things like “TV” or “computers”.

If you’re going to shout something out to the whole world “I am a moron” isn’t usually on people’s short list. If you want to call out something modern trying an item that wasn’t invented thousands of years ago. There isn’t much that’s been around longer than beer. As long as humans have had spare time on their hands they have played around with fermented crops. So, pretty much all the while there has been agriculture there has been alcohol. And beer. All throughout history there have been records of beer consumption. Hell, even the ancient Egyptians had beer. Sure, it was lumpy, had to be strained before drinking and barely resembled the hop and barley mixture we have these days, but it was beer nonetheless. They even had beer festivals. Nothing really changes, does it?

So, if someone ever asks you to shout out something you like about the modern world, think carefully. A lot of what we enjoy these days has been around for centuries, even millennia.

Here are some handy suggestions…
The Internet
High Definition TV/DVD/etc
Film merchandise
iPod Touch
Plastic

And some things that would make you look silly if you suggested…
Books (they’ve been around in some form or another for donkeys years)
Wall art (cave paintings anyone?)
Tattoos and body piercing (the good old Egyptians and many other ancient cultures started that trend)
Boats (how d’ya think we spread so far over the world?!)

I’m gonna shut up now and go enjoy something modern…

6:15

Woken out of slumber,
By a massive clap of thunder.
Would I get to sleep again?
I was left to wonder.

...the invisible man

Or so he would have you believe.

...fun with shadows

Modern Life is Rubbish. Part 2: Gaming

If you’ve just spent the last five minutes searching around for Part 1 then let me be the first to tell you that you’ve just wasted five minutes. It’s not here. I lost it. If I remember correctly it had something to do with organisational skills. Clearly I don’t possess any.

So, on to Part 2: Gaming

Gaming (as in video/computer/etc) is, by its very nature, a modern phenomenon. The ancient Egyptians had their own games for sure, but there was a severe lack of Wiis and Xboxes. This is down to an equally debilitating lack of mains electricity. I’m quite sure that if the Romans had a healthy supply of games like Halo they might not have felt the need to conquer other nations and the world would be a very different place. BBC programs would have 2008 at the bottom of them instead of MMVIII. Less confusing but not so impressive and intellectual looking.

As far as I can tell there are three types of gamer…

The would-be professional: These people (probably the least likely to be married or have social lives that include going outside their basement homes) tear through a new game in the smallest time possible, probably not even noticing if the game is any fun at all. The object of the game, to them, is to find out the quickest way to get to the end and then post their findings on a website so that anyone equally not interested in playing to have a good time can race through just to be able to tell their mates they “did it in three hours”.

The second type buy a game to play it and enjoy it. They don’t mind taking their time over their game just so long as they get everything out of it. They’ll spend months if they have to on one game just to get to the end without checking a cheat site for a tip on how to get the last vital clue that leads to the final completion of the game. If they do resort to the cheat website they feel dirty for several weeks and probably don’t go back to the game for a while to let the smear of cheating wear off before starting all over again as a kind of penance.

The third group is generally populated by the older generations of hapless people who don’t know what the words ‘opposable thumb’ mean. This type of person will have a go at a game and laugh at themselves the whole time as they barely get a grip of the controls they need to use to make their character walk let alone perform any useful tasks. Gamers in the second group choose these people as their opponents in multiplayer games so they look good and get a chance to win most of the time. The flip side of this opposable-thumb-challenged group are the people incapable of laughing at themselves. Their games of choice are usually puzzle games that they can do in isolation with no fears of people laughing at their feeble attempts to get used to a piece of technology that doesn’t have a simple stop/go function.

...an adventure in bath

Bath the city, not a tub filled with water and bubbles.

Not exactly a true story, thankfully as I love my little Andox and would have hated it if this had really happened.

...a girl who can't stop grinning.

I can't help it. It started yesterday when I was on my way to see someone. I was walking along the street and there it was, a big grin plastered on my face. It felt good and I ended up giggling because of the feeling. I didn't much care if anyone saw me grinning like a mad person as I walked along because...well, why not?!

Besides, it's been months since I last felt good about anything and I have done little more than scowl when I'm out and about. So, when I was walking home and the grinning happened again I was delighted and confused more than a few passers by when I smiled and sometimes laughed at nothing. I felt like I owned the town.

Today I have got a body that's more than a little grumpy, all sorts of aches and pains for seemingly no reason, and some pains for very good reasons (it's that time of the month). Despite all that I still had to do the housework. Did not want to stand about washing greasy trays, but there you go, it has to be done. And to my surprise I find myself singing along more than happily to The Feeling and again the grinning and laughing came back. All the pain and aching seemed to disappear into the background! Yay. I'm feeing good about my life even though there's not overly much to celebrate at the moment.

Well, there's one thing. I threw away a big load of baggage the other day, and that took a huge weight off my shoulders. Waking up one morning without a broken heart was certainly a good thing. I want to shout it out to the world really, and I suppose that's where the grinning comes from. Not suffering from heartbreak anymore feels actually a lot better than being in love in the first place did!

He was a looser if you're wondering. I mean, I'm fabulous (and he knew it) yet he didn't want me. His loss. My gain by the looks of it.

..a mad crash through my brain

Welcome to my world. It’s mad, and I like it that way.

I’m an artist, a writer, a photographer, a gardener, a crocheter and a cook. A few years ago I worried that I had no hobbies and wasn’t overly good at much other than writing and art – not that I’m complaining, there isn’t much better in life than a completed story or painting – but then I found some motivation and creativity (thanks to leaving a job that had well and truly crushed my spirit) and I discovered all these things I loved to do. And I was good at them.And here I am babbling about them. Good for me.

I like to babble.

And here's something else I like to do...

(click it...see what happens)