Happy Australia Day

Yes its a day late for Australia day - but hey - it seems apt considering I just booked flights (ouch!) to Oz for Easter :). If you live in Perth, Adelaide or Melbourne then hopefully I'll be able to catch up with you.

The Kerouac Scroll

Just got back from my day trip up to Birmingham to see the scroll of "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. The scroll was, well, a scroll - but it was really cool to see it after reading so much about it a few years ago. Crazy to think it was last bought by some football club owner in America for US$2.4 million dollars.   What was probably more interesting than the scroll itself was an interactive display of one of Kerouacs' journals that he wrote when preparing for writing "On The Road". Contained some really interesting musings.
Anyway - no photos of the scroll itself. There was no photography allowed and I try not to get into the whole "trophy" photography thing (i.e. been there done that snapshots). Here you can find a far better shot than I could have got anyway (linked from this article.)

Birmingham

On The Road ...

Booked my train tickets this morning for a day trip to Birmingham on Saturday. Why ? To see the original manuscript of On The Road by Jack Kerouac - a book I was more than a little obsessed with for a while !! The cool thing about this manuscript is that the entire novel was written on one continuous roll of paper so he wouldn't need to change pages and interrupt his stream of conciousness writing.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Couple of interesting links for those interested in this kind of thing ...
http://www.barber.org.uk/ontheroad.html
http://www.ontheroad.org/

I'll let you know if it was worth the trip !

Please Don't Rain This Year

If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes ...

Tonight I went to see Bladerunner at the IMAX cinema. Very impressive on the huge IMAX screen.  To be honest, I don't think I have really appreciated Bladerunner that much before. But tonight, for some reason - maybe the big screen, the composition and lighting of some of the scenes really struck me.  Made me want to take more photos.  But then again : I always say that.

Brrrr to Grrrr

I got to Heathrow this morning with plenty of time to spare before my flight.  It was scheduled to leave at 9:30am.   Note the emphasis on "scheduled".  It didnt turn out that way.  My flight had been delayed an hour due to fog.  Not such a bad delay - an hour - if it wasn't for the fact it meant I was going to miss my connecting flight out of Munich.  After waiting in the reticketing line for an hour my only choices ended up being either fly to Bucharest, spend the night there and fly to my final destination 7:30am the next morning or cancel the whole thing.  I opted for the latter as it was going to mess around too much with my schedule or perhaps, more importantly, my sanity.

Out Of The Fridge ...

... into the freezer.  The cold snap which saw daytime temperatures of about -4 degrees in London has finally come to an end, leaving us with balmy days of 10 degrees forecast.  Now that things are warming up here in London I am off on a work trip on Wednesday to Romania.  As I write this entry it is currently -13 degrees C where I am heading.  Brrrrrr.  I've updated my weather feed (to the right above my profile picture) to let you share my pain !!

Jumping On The Twitter Bandwagon

Better late than never - I've joined Twitter . I'm hoping it might make for more frequent, albeit small, updates. What is Twitter - well according to their website it is

"... a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Why ? Well, the thing I like most about facebook is the status updates, and Twitter is kind of like that. Check out the "Twitter Updates" section on the right hand side of my blog for my latest inane updates :).

Happy New Year Y'All

Whoops .... there goes another year. It was a bit of a strange year that one - nothing much really changed. Not much ventured. Not much gained. I have a good feeling about this one though. Not sure why.