Adam Dix’s paintings depict a smokey, Vaselined world of collective nostalgia and an almost cold-war style empathy for mass communications. They are skillfully painted and represent a thick-aired world that emanates the ‘close down’ colours of late-night TV – perhaps with the itchy rustle of an ill-tuned radio as a backdrop. They pose strange suggestions [...]

My old mate Simon Goode has been amassing printing, blocking, typesetting and paper cutting equipment since I’ve known him. I’ve never seen all this stuff in one place at once, but I just hope his ceilings are well supported. He doesn’t just collect this stuff; he utilises it all for his work first and foremost, [...]

The last week has been a blurry smudge of nervous excitement, apprehension and anxiety for me. A few weeks back I got a new job and since then I’ve been edging obliviously towards my last day with my current employers whom I’ve worked for over three years. A lot has happened during that time (not [...]

Back in the 1950′s British Railways had a rather smashing logo (see my ale-train post for a picture of it), it was smart, elegant and powerful. But by the time British Rail rose from the swarf and coal-dust of British Railways in the mid 1960′s, the logo had come to represent the old steam-powered era [...]

One of the oddities of living in a city is that sometimes your thought patterns are so distorted and bombarded by everything around you that your senses occasionally back-pedal a little and wrap themselves around a focal point that you have previously dismissed as the mundane. With a cock of the head and a modulation [...]

At the weekend, I spent a fair amount of time playing with Lego. It actually rather alarmed me just how easy my brain fell so quickly into the mindset of a 7 year old… First there was my eye’s ranging manically over the tumultuous heap of multi-coloured bricks, scanning for that all-important flat sixer brick [...]

I’ve made homebrew beer and cider since I was 17  years old and it’s a revivalistic pastime that I find both sublimely soothing and pleasantly challenging. That first uncapping of one of your own beers coupled with the little pleasant mist of Carbon Dioxide that hovers around the opening is a wonderful after-ripple of reward [...]

It seems that winter’s relentless grip is at last weakening. There is a pleasant aura in March. The air feels clean – cooled by winter but slowly warming in the afternoons. The birds too have suddenly starting making noises at dusk and there is a watery pale blue in the sky for longer. There is [...]