Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

Digital Creatives at the Hot Source 7×7

Last week I was kindly invited to take part in the Hot Source 7×7 event hosted at our very own Foolproof Group offices in Norwich. Hot Source is a community collective of digital creative, natives, professionals, amateurs, enthusiasts, start-ups, business owners, in fact, anybody who might have anything to do with digital in and around Norwich

The last Thursday of every month, we gather together, have a couple of drinks, and invite a couple of folks to talk about something that means a lot to them and might be of interest to the rest of us. And very nice events they are too. This time around, we thought we might change the format slightly, to get a few more people up and talking and, on a warm summer evening, get a little more informal.

The short-form talk format is pretty popular these days and allows a pretty diverse set of subjects to be covered in a short space of time. In this case, seven speakers each had seven minutes to talk about something that mattered to them. As you might expect from such a broad community, the subject matter varied greatly, which is what makes these kind of events really dynamic. Tom Wood, who helped put the schedule together, seemed to strike a good balance with the speakers and subjects. Tom Wood, who helped put the schedule together, put me on last. I can’t think why.

Diversity

So, after a few beers and some excellent charcuterie, things kicked off with a Mr George Wood, who was known rather personally to our Mr Tom Wood (Dad), who gave us an insight into the wonderful world of Minecraft, with a live demo included. Nobody wanted to follow that, but one by one, the other speakers gamely stepped up to talk about Google author profiles, the History of Advertising Trust, using the Gmaps API to create fabulous visualisations, 10 hateful things about user interfaces, and a great showcase of TV production that comes out of Norwich. And me.

Not wanting to disappoint, with me being in the ‘put him on last’ slot, I delivered what has subsequently been described to me as ‘some kind of performance theatre’, on the subject of why technology is great but is also rubbish. If I tell you it involved me talking to myself on a failing video conference for 7 minutes, then you can fill the blanks yourself. Hugely enjoyable. Questionably engaging.

In the end, the point of Hot Source is to provide a forum for like-minded people to meet, talk and discuss things that matter to us. It’s mostly digital, but that doesn’t mean we have some heavy-handed governance the precludes related topics. If it’s interesting, if it’s relevant, we want to hear about it. More importantly, gives people the chance to talk about it. If you’d like to get involved, head over to the Hot Source site for more.

Hacking NFC

Not strictly speaking hacking the protocol or platform or whatever you want to call it, because that might require rather more technical knowledge than I have left and implies something that is probably illegal, but hacking, in terms of using the near field communication infrastructure to muck about and produce something akin to a chocolate fireguard that you can show other people and say ‘look! I did a chocolate fireguard!’, as they add the finishing touches to their ‘tap-to-space travel’ demo.
 
Last week, the UK’s first NFC hack event was launched in Norwich. It’s a pretty ad hoc affair, under the Hot Source banner, that Proxamaare supporting by making their NFC technology platform available to anybody who wanted to enter a team. All you have to bring to the party is your creative minds and a willingness to stand in front of the other 17 teams at the end of the month and show them what you’ve managed to build. And show them you can. With an NFC-enabled phone, access to Proxama’s hardware and software, tags and tech, you really can build an NFC-enabled technology solution. You just write that HTML5 stuff that displays a monkey, loyalty card, free gift or whatever, when your programmed NFC tag is tapped with your phone. Of course, since your team defines the experience, owns the code, has the idea in the first place, you can do much more than monkeys. If you want to write a bunch of HTML that’s loaded in webkit, or the Proxama app, and then have that web content do something else, like, say, integrate with your ecommerce platform, turn on the lights, leverage location services on your device and send a message to the queen specifying exactly where the bloody cake is to be delivered already, then you can do that, just with a tap of your phone on the programmable tag.
 
You see what’s possible here? It’s not just about using your phone to pay for a banana. I mean, the platform could support that if you wanted to do that, but, like, you can already do that. The idea of the hack event is that armed with the technology platform, you create something new, innovative, quite possibly ridiculous, but definitely original and potentially commercially viable. And, if it is, all well and good. Take that idea away with you and make it commercially viable. Proxama aren’t going to steal it, it’s your IP. Do with it what you will. What the event is about is demonstrating what you can do with the NFC platform. And I’m leading the Flow team. There’s also a Foolproof team, but, you know, I don’t give them much hope for winning the competition. I mean, I can’t see how anyone is going to top my shark tank escape game. It’s simple – you get dropped in a shark tank with your NFC phone and have to tap on the hidden tags to open the escape hatch. You either tap all the tags, in the right order, within the time, or, well, the demo gets really interesting. I haven’t decided which team member is going to demo it yet, mind.
 

How I got found as a user experience designer

User experience design is a proper job. At least, user experience designer is a proper job title. It’s a job title I’ve given to myself for years and it’s worked for me to describe to others what I do, without necessarily having to describe to others what I do.

Three little words

More importantly, ‘user experience designer’ works as a job title when you want to be found. When I was hawking my freelance self around a couple of years ago, I made a decision on how I wanted to be discovered, and how easy I might facilitate that discovery. That decision was to bet the farm on 3 words – user, experience and designer – hopefully in that order. How I used those 3 words, and where I used them, was an important part of the strategy, but it is the 3 little words themselves that were to describe me to others.

Optimising for search

From the outset, I intended to capitalise on the visibility of those 3 little words and how they might somehow be associated with my own name. I thought at least having my name appear on the chunk of content returned by a search query would be a start. I like to think that the eye-tracking results would show a strong relationship between the user experience designer title and a real name in reasonably close proximity such that it fired some neural connection in the brain of the user that suggests I might be actually the embodiment of a user experience designer and therefore justifiably and majestically hoisted to the top of a mental list that someone is keeping.

There were a number of places I wanted that to happen:

  • My personal sites
  • CV/resume hosting sites
  • Recruitment sites
  • Job sites
  • Related sites (job title on flickr, linkedin, facebook)


Some of the searches I imagined were public searches, via google, bing, altavista, lycos, grep –r ‘user experience designer’ /theinternet, or something, for which I optimised on page titles, prominent usage in content blocks, page data, and so on. No black arts there. Others were more specialised, internal searches, such as cv/resume scans on recruitment databases, or paid-for searches on job sites. In these cases, I made assumptions about the data that was being interrogated, often based on the forms that collected the data, and tried to optimise based on that. For instance, I knew that no real person would actually read my uploaded resume until it passed at least round one of the keyword scanrobot, so if you’re not being specific about your job title, job categories and experience, then you stand less chance of rising to the surface, like Keanu Reeves does, when he’s dropped out of that slimepod into the machinespittle and chooses to breathe. I mean, a bit like that.

It takes a little patience to consistently optimise across multiple sites, with different search methods and black-box operational models, but the most important thing, as far as I was concerned, was to retain the focus on those 3 little words.

Maximising metadata

On its own, however, optimising for search using ‘user experience designer’ alone, was not enough. It got me closer to being discovered and considered, but I also needed something more unique that I could associate with the job title, that would filter the outputs to make them more about me.

Knowing that being found by virtue of someone looking at my own web site would be nice, but unlikely, I targeted those other sites that held my data, such as cv/resume sites and recruitment sites and picked a set of 3 attributes that I would bet my other farm on. Since these sites are largely form-based in their data-collection, and have reasonable overlap in their data sets, it is easy to pick the attributes you want to focus on and map that to the metadata they support.

The 3 attributes I picked were:

  • Location
  • Type (Freelance/Permanent)
  • Rate


It’s here that I had a special case, which was really the determining factor in being found. If I were wanting to stand out from a crowd of user experience designers, who had all optimised for search, and, for example, all lived in London, I’d be faced with a bit of a challenge. A user experience designer in London is like a bicycle in Beijing, right? They’re all over the place. Saying you’re in London doesn’t make you stand out at all.

Location, location, location, location

But what about if you’re in, say, Norwich? I mean, a user experience designer in Norwich is like a, well, I can’t think a good analogy for there not being many of them, suffice to say, there wasn’t. Which was to my advantage. Type and rate were pretty simple to define, more a case of setting a level of expectation and screening out derisory and pointless offers. Location, however, was my unique selling point. Except it wasn’t a selling point at all. When I moved out to Norwich about 8 years ago, with the support of a previous employer, I knew I’d put myself out on a limb. What I did (user experience design), just wasn’t done in Norwich, so, should I no longer work for that employer, I would have been pretty stuck. One day, I was no longer working for that employer, which is where this story begins.

Nevertheless, Norwich was where I was, Norwich was where I wanted to stay, and so Norwich was the location I added to my data set. And I stuck to it. Which is the point – pick your data, optimise, and stick to it, because if that’s what really defines you, that’s how you’ll want people to find you.

Results

What I’d really narrowed myself down to was:

Keywords:

  • User
  • Experience
  • Designer

Attributes:

  • Location:Norwich
  • Type:Freelance or Permament
  • Rate:£ A number larger than the last number I thought of


What I got out of it was emails and calls from recruiters and robots that were slightly biased in favour of user experience design, and more or less centred on ‘the south east’ (including London), but, since I also included a number of other attributes as part of any upload, application or registration process, I also got a large number of administrator, programmer, database, design and other jobs as well. I got lots. Which was nice, but things weren’t really narrowed down to the degree that I had hoped for. Still, I hadn’t expected to get a perfect match, since, well, there wasn’t one.

What I had bet both my farms on was that one day, there would be a job, and its title would be User Experience Designer, and its location would be Norwich. When that job came up, if anybody was looking for a candidate, I would be the top of their search list. And that search list would have one name on it. And that name would be mine.

I had to wait a while. I had to do freelance work in London for a while. I had to travel 3 hours, each way, every day, for a while. But one day I got a call from a recruiter. I got lots of calls from recruiters, but this one sounded interesting. They had a user experience designer role. Duh. It was in Norwich. I’m listening. It’s permanent. It meets my criteria. Am I interested?

Have a plan

That call was for the job I’m currently in at Foolproof in Norwich. This job is the only job I want to do in Norwich. It’s a perfect job. And, because I was so busy travelling and sleeping and working, I hadn’t even noticed when they’d put the job posting out. I’d pretty much resigned myself to a London commute, and was actually considering an offer of a permanent user experience role based in Hammersmith. Which would have killed me.

But my bet paid off. When the recruiter searched for ‘user experience designer norwich’, I was indeed top of the list. There are others in the list now, as indeed there are other jobs that have appeared in the last year, but when I really needed it most, my plan was good. Have a plan, people, and stick to it.

hdr processing

elm hill 2
elm hill 2 by Tim Caynes

since Corie has started going out at night and taking lots of groovy hdr I was reminded that I kind of like doing those but can’t remember how because last time I did it it took ages even though I wrote all the steps down on a post-it note that I immediately misplaced. but I had a rummage around in my drawer that has all my photographic stuff in it – it’s a pretty small drawer – and lo, the post-it note was stuck to the underside of a digital slr photography magazine from last year sometime in which I could learn all about taking polarized macro photos of wet cdroms arranged under a snooted soft umbrella box or something.

unfortunately, I still had no idea what I was talking about. it was full of things like ‘PS HDR x3+ (d,m,l)‘ and ‘PM EB (3 PS HDR)‘ and the rather ambitious one liner ‘PS HDR 1/2/3 PM HDR PM EB 1/2 RAW‘, complete with a big bracket underneath which suggested I should put it all somewhere and then do something with a smart object, which, these days, I just get slightly queasy just thinking about on my 5-year-old computer. so I decided I’d go out and get some new bracketed exposures and just try and follow my own instructions to see how it would go. to make it even more of a nightmare to process, I figured I may as well make it a night shot. with trees in. or something. I initially headed out to the roof of Anglia Square car park, because I like car parks, but I’d miscalculated the sunset and golden hour (not the one with Simon Bates), and so I was up there far too early and the thought of spending another hour up there just waiting for the sun to set behind a knackered lift shaft and a ropey old street lamp didn’t really fill me with inspiration.

after a couple of circular arguments I had with myself about the relative merits of Tombland and the cathedral I actually ended up in the irresistable scab of Norwich photographers that is Elm Hill. I mean, you don’t want to keep ending up there, but you can’t help picking at it now and then. If you’ve not taken at least 15 shots there over the years that you hide away in a hidden folder that you think you might process one day, then you get arrested. In this case, it was just about the right time of day to get a number of exposures with various shades of dark blue in the sky, but still get some appreciative cast from the pretty low-key street lighting. or that’s what I though. but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. nonetheless, I set up my Manfrotto, waited a few minutes while people rather annoyingly thought they might go about their business, and then took my 12 manually bracketed exposures from black to white, just as the wind picked up and threw the tree around like the wispy hair of a 42-year-old amateur photographer. the last exposure was about 30 seconds, during which at least 3 people stopped in their tracks as they came around the corner and saw me standing with my wireless remote looking, plainly, a bit mad in the dark. on the way home, I took about 59 pictures of the market at night for good measure, then I went home, ate a sandwich, watched the Champion’s League, the Bourne Identity and the 50 greatest 50 greatest celebrity cheese breakdown soap advert scary war film love scenes, and that was that.

a few days later, I actually kicked the computer into action, and tried to follow the scribbled workflow process, just to see if it would make any sense at all. it slowly came back to me and I remembered some of the things that I got caught out with before (don’t overprocess the HDR conversion, don’t auto-align in photoshop, don’t auto-align in photomatix, don’t try and do it with smart objects, etc.) which took a while to rectify, but on the whole, the scribbly wibbly workflow turned out to be alright. of course, there was mucho to do with blending, masking, opacity and highlight/shadow painting, and as it was a night photo, actually undoing most of the processing was the biggest challenge, but to get to the point where all the fancy automated processes had done as much as they were going to do, the workflow worked fine. so much so that I wrote it out all over again. but with boxes and arrows and things. on a computer. I think its called a flow diagram, but I largely made it up. if you want to see how little sense it makes when you first look at it, take a look for yourself, and, if you’ve got the tools, or at least some of them, you might want to try it out. I just want somebody to go through it so I can laugh at them later.

peter docherty calamity shenanigan tryst

on a evening full of strangeness I headed out to the Least Charitable Room in the Zafira and as there were some Mongolian nose flutes or something playing on Future Radio, I gave Zane Lowe a twiddle for the 5 minute drive, only to find that Mr Docherty was croaking all hopeful about Libertines reunions and playing in Norwich tonight, which, I thought, is where he should be right now which he probably was but nonetheless it was the first of many strange occurrences that would take place during the course of the evening. I’d failed in a number of previous attempts to pin down Sir Docherty, from the being a bit drunk on stage and having lots of fights period, through the being a bit out of it on stage and having lots of fights period, and the not being on stage at all when he should have been and he was having a fight somewhere else period, but since Mr Douchery has determined that he is now reincarnate as the thing he first thought of in 6th form, then its from that point we might evaluate tonight’s performance. in Grace/Wastelands, he’s made a record that meets that 6th form objective very neatly, so we should all give him the chance to show us his art in the way he would like us to experience it, before he degenerates much further and crosses that very thin line he treads between Peter Docherty and Shane McGowan.

when you turn up to a venue the size of the Lethergic Clapping Room you might expect to see a couple of 18-wheelers with enormous cables hanging out of them, full of upside-down crates with something like ‘bloc party’ stencilled, banksy-like, on the side and in your mind you’re already visualising a show of such epic grandieur that you suddenly need to go to the toilet. so when you actually trip round some dug-up concrete fountain in the misty half-light and catch sight of a transit van with something like ‘a1 rentals’ stencilled on the side with a couple of coat hangers where the aerial should be, you’re not quite filled with that same sense of awe. still, it is a solo acoustic show, for that is what it do say on the listings, so maybe in fact a transit van is overkill. notwithstanding this mental setback, I’m making way through the doors expecting that the room will be the living embodiment of a facebook page dedicated to underage girls who think kilimangiro is that hill what that Cheryl Cole sicked up on. I’m a bit disappointed when in actual fact the rather less than full room is more of a homburg and cardigan festival, although there does seem to be a healthy contingent of scary stoners, so there might be a good fight later, if nothing else. it does occur to me that there is something inherently wrong about 17 year olds dressed as Tony Hancock. strangely, the house lights are already down between supporting acts, which is either because it hides the empty spaces quite nicely, or because it really is too distressing to see what everybody looks like when you’re standing next to each other in a place like this, for which I’m rather grateful. and so is everybody else, probably. a cursory glance around at tonight’s hardware shop reaveals a curious demographic. not for this crowd the trusty motorola, nokia or sony ericsson. not even the jesus phone. no, tonight Matthew, we’re Jill Furmanovsky. look, we’ve all got our digital SLR cameras. look, there’s a canon 450. there’s a d50. don’t you people just come and watch any more?

once I’ve been to the bar and wandered around a bit, of the overheard conversations around me, the most discernable was that of a couple looking wistfully at the door, bemoaning that fact that, apparently, he doesn’t come on until 9:15. which is, like, ages away. mostly the other conversations went something like ‘OI OI! PEEETAH! CAAHM ON SAAHN!’ and were accompanied by much large bloke posturing which was good natured in a fearing for your safety kind of way. in fact, as 9 o’clock approached, there was a strange violent tension building and at 8:52, we applaud the first beer lob. I suspect it won’t be the last. as another expensive camera that my dad got me fires off another flash bulb at the back of another person’s head, there’s a flurry of excitement and the sound of one hand clapping. there he is. hang on, no he isn’t. who’s that then? I don’t know. I think they’re his mates or something.

I tell myself that if I was at the arts centre on a thursday evening watching these three perform their alt.country.uk.banjo licks then I might quite like it, but I’m not, and I don’t. the couple stood directly in front of me start extracting each other’s teeth with their tongues and that annoying thing happens when you suddenly become a thoroughfare with an invisible drink in your hand. I think the last time I saw a banjo at the Lacklustre Country Room was at Gogol Bordello, but now, people are wondering if they’ve somehow stumbled into a fairy tent at the cambridge folk festival, but one full of agitated boors. by song 8 we’ve stopped pretending to clap. not even a spirited rendition of teardrop can disguise the fact that we’d quite like them to leave. so they do.

in another strange but subtle shift of mood, people are suddenly taking photos of themselves with their best gurning faces and there’s even a jovial half-baked slow hand clap being passed around like left-over celery. another overheard conversation goes something like ‘trouble is, first day of tour, been in Norwich all day, gets back here, nothing to do, jacks up and gets out of it’, which is plainly totally inaccurate. there’s plenty to do here. we’re starting to think the whole evening might be another no-show and the agitation creeps back in, making a fight seem the most likely significant occurrrence in the next few minutes, which might at least be midly entertaining in an I couldn’t possibly condone it kind of way. but then, just as you’re looking at the football scores on your phone, there he is.

Mr Doubtfire ambles on stage looking just like he’s already played for an hour in another room in some parallel universe next door and there’s nothing short of rapture as he launches straight into some song or other. the collective shrieky OMGOMG is almost palpable and overwhelms you for a few seconds, and in that short ecstatic period I’m led to think that right now he is a most curious mix of Bob Dylan and Rodney Bewes. after just a couple of craftily selected singalongs from the back catalogue there’s really no stopping him. anyone who had turned up having listed to Grace/Wastelands on repeat on Napster expecting him to be sitting Val Doonican style on a bar stool and just running through the new tracks really wasted an afternoon. not that I did that. there’s a healthy plundering of all that was and is great about the Libertines, Babyshambles and the erstwhile Peter himself, threaded randomly and with apprent ease throughout the set, for which everyone is spectacularly grateful. the performance effortlessly captivates what might as well be some north London bedroom packed with 1000 mates from down the pub, but there’s a nagging feeling that you’re witnessing the last and brightest of a light that will surely, sometime soon, go out. at one point during a sprited rendition of something or other, it feels eerily like being at Woodstock.

and then we get a bit bored. just like that. even our Peter looks somehow suddenly unclear as to what is actually going on. and he’s halfway through it. ‘you better be liking this’ he tells us, as if to remind us that actually, he’s baring his soul, thank you. so he throws himsef with much gusto into Kilimangiro and, for good measure, gives us Don’t Look Back into the Sun, after which there’s really no reason to doubt that to the people who paid to be here, he is actually the way, the truth and the light. at least, he’s done enough of this to know what makes a great show. the stoners go ape-like mental. there’s a fully-whipped frenzy. so Peter sits down for a bit. on the Val Doonican bar stool. but let this not sound the alarm bells of whimsy. he gets up again and gives us a splendid ham-fisted version of the Specials’ Gangsters. all together now. a fat drunk bloke looks at his watch and then looks at me. oh dear. not drunk. funny how people can take a dislike to you just for being taller than they are.

not even the appearance on stage of guests-that-aren’t-graham-coxon and a banjo reprise can detract from the delightful shenanigans that continued for the next hour or so. as we reached, passed, and waved our private parts in the face of the decibel meter hour, there seemed no end to the spontaneous outpourings of Pete and even though there were more false endings than the 17th series of Lost we mostly stuck with it, even though some people really had to get their last bus, like, you know, even though he was doing that song about Kate Moss what I do love. by the strange anticlimactic conclusion to the performance, he really didn’t care what was going on and were it not for the fact that he would have probably collapsed, would, I’m sure, have continued into the small hours, as if it were some kind of lock-in.

it was a glorious shambles.

caught by the fuzz

its easy to get overexcited about things in norwich because when they actually happen nobody seems that bothered. such was the anticipation/apathy contradiction at the Lightly Crowded Room at the uea last night as the mighty supergrass found themselves in east anglia when they probably expected to be in the astoria where everyone would go mental and clap their hands and things like that. the last time I saw supergrass was in 1994 when they were supporting shed seven at the boardwalk in manchester which was a spectacularly upside-down night as clearly supergrass should have played after shed seven who were already the also-rans of 90s british alternative music that hailed from york and miserably underachieved except for dolphin or that one about rainbows which chris moyles probably likes because they’re from yorkshire and what else you might need to know about them I’m not sure. the boardwalk was also was also a canny little venue which crammed students and townies in all week and had, well, a boardwalk kind of thing in it from where you could pour red stripe onto teenagers on club nights but was the right size for the amount of people who actually went to gigs like that in those days before everything was sponsored by o2 or top man and you have to barter on ebay to pay double just to see the congolese nose-flute orchestra playing hex enduction hour backwards at the art centre.

so there was a little squeak of anticipation as I left the house after putting the bins out and filling the dishwasher and sorting out the recycling. 14 years later, supergrass and shed seven are still shuffling around the country peddling their indiewear but supergrass never went away and have popped out some super sparkly albums in the meantime and so are now touring to support their new album which I haven’t heard and don’t know what is called whereas the aforementioned shite seven have recently ‘done an abc’ and reformed because they apparently had nothing better to do and are hawking some kind of greatest hits tour which must be a pretty short affair and is undoubtedly rubbish. on arrival at the uea I parked the zafira under a street lamp in the hope that the wing mirrors would still be there on the way out and tritted down the hill to the concrete bastion of acoustic deconstruction which was by the time I got there a little bit kind of full but with gaps in the way that says its not sold out but the middle-class middle-aged have bagged all the steps round the edge and so you’ll have to push through them to mix with the teenage fanclubs and stoners who will undoubtedly lob their plastic pint over you at some point which they do. expecting the support to come on at any time I took my nasty-but-cold pint of 1664 and sorried and thankyoud my way through 5-deep of people even older than I and after nearly failing to negotiate the last step down to the pit arranged myself neatly in front of someone who was far too short to go to gigs at the uea anyway. I checked a couple of emails on my phone, like a w*nker, and then suddenly it went that kind of half-dark and on trolloped the other band from oxford (I’m not counting ride), and proceeded to rock out with a track from the new album. and another. and another, I think.

even though they had a rather splendid lcd backdrop (although not, unfortunately, an lcd soundsystem), by the time they’d rattled off some tracks from the new album and gaz had informed us that we’d probably be regailed with pretty much the whole of the new album, people were getting a bit twitchy and shuffling around and rather than taking pictures with their phones they were talking calls with their phones. but wait, salvation. deep enough to submerge dubai is the back catalogue and so we will be treated to a smattering of hits-u-like which will keep us amused enough not to leave and amuse they do. they obviously save caught by the fuzz right until the end, but in between the borderline prog-foo fighteriness of some of the new stuff they clasped our hands and walked us right into the 90s when the sun was always shining and I had hair. it was at its best when members 4 & 5 of the live band disappeared off stage or picked up a tamborine and gaz poked us with the whimsy stick with sublime renditions of late in the day and a soaring moving and you remembered why you came. they can rock out just fine but you don’t want to be doing that at the uea because it just sounds like a jet taking off without any wheels when it gets mashed unceremoniously through that arcane speaker stack although brecon beacons sounded nice until my eyes started bleeding with the sonic james bond laser attackness of the sound system even though some people were actually jumping up and down a bit which must have meant something.

I make it sound half-hearted but it wasn’t but it was. they did what they do very well which is crack open a song box and let it pop all over the stage like a looney tune. we did what we do very well in norwich which is gawp like goons and start a mock fight while one hand claps and a stoner bounces of everyone shouting oi! oi! I think I may have enjoyed the whole experience much more if I hadn’t had to know in quite so much detail who I was surrounded by. there is an unfortunate trend currently to arrange a large number of lights on the rig so that they shine directly into the audience and mostly directly into your retina. at far-too-frequent moments in any given set, those lights will cascade over those assembled, presumably so that we can somehow join in with the signing bit where we’re supposed to join in but really, for about half the night we were bathed in an effervescent glow which only served to highlight the fact that you’re surround by people you don’t want to be surrounded by. I am quite happy for all the lights to point at the bloody band like what it always used to so that I can remain comfortably numb of my immediate surroundings and focus on the action. they do it down the waterfront too, but I don’t mind it so much there because in general what you see is akin to what you would see if david lynch made teenage pop horror, which is often better than what’s on stage, but at the uea, well, its just unpleasant. its not as if we need help in norwich to kill the atmosphere, but turning all the lights on like its the end of the school disco doesn’t really help.

uea nostalgia trip

for those of you currently watching the countdown timer on bloc party tickets on ebay or even watching the countdown timer on countdown, a small distraction in the shape of the gig nostaliafest has been put together by those good people at the uea. while you have 20 minutes to wait to see if cheesehelmet67 has placed an automatic bid on BLOC PARTY TICKETS 2!!! SOLD OUT NORICH UEA!!! that will trump your 80 quid at the last second, head over to the uea box office link and check out 1981. if you roll all those groups together into one uberretronostagliaplagagroup you end up with bloc party anyway. merry christmas!

for those of you like me who already have your bloc party tickets and actually thought you might as well get a feeling ticket as well while you were on the phone (see 17 mar 1982), take a little while to check out the list and after you’ve got past the october 1981 section to remind yourself about that u2 gig you went to where the whole of norwich apparently crammed into the lower common room at the same time based on how many people say they were there then have a browse at the rest of the eighties to remind yourself how rubbish/brilliant it was. I mean, there was only so many times you could go and see the thompson twins or tears for fears, but john martyn, the damned and killing joke in the space of 4 day? genius.

you are allowed to vote for your best of all time from that list, but it will just be for you own amusement.

don’t I know you?

oh, no. it’s just that for a moment I thought that you might be one of those people who used to wear overcoats in summer and loiter around a wall in town just frowning under your fringe and then spending 3 hours in the underground cafe with one cup of coffee and 15 likeminded other overcoat wearing pointy boot wearing black and white wearing teenage smoker smelling angst-ridden sticky-up-hair protecting youths just waiting for something to happen which never does in this town right so lets go to Jarrolds and sit in there for another 3 hours because you get 2 cups for the price of one there and no I’m not hot shutup anyway what’s that on your shirt that’s rubbish eyeless in gaza hahaha I’m going to Andy’s to see if I can find anything in the right place what are you doing tonight I’m up the Murderers int it.

I’d still do that if I could but I don’t have the hair anymore and anyway everyone does it now but when we did it there was only like about 5 of us and everyone knew who we were not like all these emos outside the forum etc…

the end of the week as we know it

thaas loomoo 117
thaas loomoo 17 by Tim Caynes

nahaahah. stop ut. naahahaaeah. waas at? thaas a chair innut. waas at for? what? thaas a chair. thaas fer sittun stoopud, innut? neeehaahaha. I wanna go on the flyun chairs, dunt I. come on. aaaah, goo orn. for me. nah. I’m gonna get suffun else to drink. int they got export?

notwithstanding the mammoth packing task waiting in the upstairs bedroom and the live chat waiting in the office, in French, we troop up to chapelfield to check out the travelling fair that never seems to travel anywhere except maybe round the ring road and back to where it was last time there was some civic event which was probably last month but it feels like last week but we normally forget about them until it’s too late and we’ve taken rolls and capri sun to Waxham instead where there’s not enough wind for the peter powell stunt kite but enough to pull the windbreak out of it’s moorings even though you spent 2 hours crushing your palms against the 6 wooden stakes wondering why the hell you don’t have a mallet but you know that anyway.

we saw the usual unfolding containers that started out as badly painted boxes on wheels and unfolded into spectacularly unpleasant painted deathtraps on wheels which at least one of us thought looked like it might actually be fun all things considered while the rest of us instinctively touched our limbs, subconsciously musing on life wihout them following a tragic accident on the swirling bench ride that left us traumatized for life but never made it bigger than the local 6 o’clock news whereas if it had happened at Alton Towers there’d be questions asked in the house probably blaming video games and crack cocaine for something totally unrelated. naturally we did the rounds twice to check out the awfulness and succumbed to a couple of experiences that were about as exciting as standing on badly balanced milk crates for 2 quid each and oh joy, we also spent 2 quid each on hooking a plastic duck, brown with algae and age, and now we’re the proud owners of 2 inflatable aliens in David Beckham Manchester United shirts with purple heads that do a really annoying squeaking noise when you move their arms which someone has been doing for the last 2 hours while I’ve been trying to finish the design framework for the inernational rollout of the integated telesales program across the global sun.com sites.

we’re going to a stay in a monastery in the Dordogne on Thursday.

it’s just the same over here you know

Boulder. Norwich. they’re just like the illegitimate children of upper-middle class families separated at birth and rehoused on different sides of the atlantic. I mean, the nucleus of these places is like the result of an illicit conflagration between two drugged-up psychology students from the university on the edge of town, but peel off a few layers and progress a couple of miles into the suburbs and further out to the wilderness, then things get much more like the unfortunate in-bred collision of two disenfranchised and disaffected 15 year olds on crack who stumbled out of elementary with a working knowledge of woodworking and a lovebite on the neck. this is where people start building their own houses out of pieces of wood they salvaged from the local authority rather than getting the thursday edition of the local post and leafing through the property pages thinking about the next progression up the stakeholder lifestyle ladder and how much the difference between what they currently own and what they really need to work from home and walk to school and have an acre and have that one extra room that would make all the difference would be.

and there’s a great big community of hippies that won’t go away. they came to the university in 1975 to study geology and life sciences before there was such a thing as life sciences and they just never went back home. they just moved into the golden triangle with their afghans and tabalas and hung tie-dye on the wall and CND in the window and opened up the alternative pulse shops that Tesco and Walmart are now buying up and turning into drugstore expresses to cater for the burgeoning population of 2005 hippies that come to study, well, geology and life sciences, but have already got cars and mortgages and actually, are soo busy they can’t begin to think about the G8 summit or even cooking their own dinners so they congregate at the microbrewery and pretend to like football and try to shag each other, but in a polite way, cleaning up after themselves.

but always creeping in from the outskirts are the indigenous population of the unintelligable underclass that really own the city. they have been here for generations, often never leaving their own self-made house in the country. mostly they’ve not had any social intercourse outside their own extended family. mostly they’ve had no intercourse at all outside their own extended family. they suddenly appear over your shoulder when you’ve been busy checking out kites in the window of ‘kites and things’, their dribbly grin poking out of their bleached fringe, which is poking out of a baseball hat that you’re wondering just how it could get so unclean. they don’t want anything. they just do that looking at you thing and then gather together again like some idiot mercury in the middle of the high street and laugh. you’re not sure whether it’s at you or just in general, but you check your purse and head into a book shop all the same, because you’re safe in there, if a little grubby after the experience.

I’m only joking of course. I was born here and I’m quite normal.

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