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Aug 29 2011
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Daily Post, Flora/Fauna Gallery

On the hills above my house

Monday 29th August 2011, 12.25pm (day 4)

Scene on the hills, 29/8/11

I remember that on the very first day I moved into my house I walked up through the woods to the point at which they thinned out into fields and bramble patches. I looked at the scenery and thought, bloody hell, I live somewhere. This is a place. The environment round here can still do that.

Today I gave myself a break from work by going out and looking for blackberries. It’s been a cold, grey day and I didn’t find much fruit, but I did see these plants, and while I’m not botanist enough to identify them properly, this was the one point today at which the sun shone and it still felt like there was a vestige of summer in the air.

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Aug 28 2011
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Daily Post, Interior Gallery

Working in the attic

Sunday 28th August 2011, 9.50am (day 3)

Attic, 28/8/11

I like my house. I wouldn’t have been here more than 10 years, otherwise. Although it’s on a main road, and bits of it have a tendency to fall off now and again, I like the fact that it’s not some identikit Barratt Homes bollocks. I like the way the sun shines into the attic in the morning and turns it golden. I like that I can work here and not have to trug into Manchester every day. There will be many days over the next year where the defining feature is that I spent most of the time here. But I hope that will never be a problem, as it has not been for the last decade.

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Aug 27 2011
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Daily Post, Interior Gallery

It begins. Friday 26th & Saturday 27th August 2011.

I turned 42 yesterday (26/8/11). Douglas Adams famously made that number the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. If this is, then, to be the year in which I discover the meaning of life, perhaps it will be encoded here.

27th August 2011: The Science Museum, London.

Science Museum, London, 27/8/11

The Museum heaves with people, pressing buttons, touching screens, watching displays in the new, ICT-heavy wings. Meanwhile the fustier old cabinets in the Victorian sections seem neglected. But it’s in them that the history lies, and the interest; Joe likes the mechanical calculators, where you have to turn levers and clank gears to do the sums but the working of the machine is there in front of you. The newer sections, all about climate change and DNA, seem bland. There is a veneer of interactivity to them but it’s still the museum authorities telling us things. What we are shown – what they have chosen to show us – does not change, whatever we might think about it, whatever buttons we press, whomever and whatever we are.

26th August 2011: London College of Communication.

London College of Communication, 26/8/11

It shouldn’t matter, as long as you are using it to look out onto the world and learn.

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