Pete Hindle

Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.

Tag: travel

November 19, 2011

Fortean Unconvention, Camden Centre, London

Last weekend found me at the Fortean Times Unconvention 2011, thanks to a last-minute invite from Ian Simmons. Sadly, I wasn’t feeling up to much – getting up early enough to be in London at 10ish in the morning really takes it out of me – but I enjoyed the talks I did see.

I expected the crowd to be all fat men with beards, but there were a lot of really normal people there. When I attend a conference I usually spend a lot of time drawing rows of people from sitting level, and I think I’m getting pretty good at doing the back of people’s heads now. In fact, I think I’m going to have to break out a bit, and get beyond the back of people’s heads. Sadly, it is the only thing that keeps my attention span on the talk – otherwise I would have missed the wonderful talk by Ted Harrison (top) about various prophecies about the apocalypse. His best line was when he opened to questions from the floor, saying “… and before anybody asks, I don’t know the date!”

I like going to conferences both for intellectual stimulation, and to spend time drawing people. I’ve recently been spending a lot of time staring at my own face in the mirror, so I’m getting pretty good at drawing beards – but I’d be the first to admit I have no skill at drawing women. If only they would grow facial hair, I’d be on more solid ground.

What I can notice, looking back at my drawings from early this year, is that I’m tackling bigger crowd scenes. I had to split before the final session of the day (what looked to be an excellent film by Nina Conti on ventriloquist’s puppets) as I was already worn out.

Finally, a big thanks to Ian for getting me into the conference as his “plus one”. I missed his talk about extreme taxidermy (yes, it was that kind of conference) but it was great to see him again.

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October 19, 2011

How I Fought Capitalism on Tuesday

Yesterday I went to St. Paul’s cathedral, to join in with Occupy London. And to do some drawing. As you might know, I’ve got some health issues from being really sick a few years ago, so this was the first protest that I’ve been able to attend (as it involved sitting down somewhere and not walking around).

Such was my fear of being kettled that I walked the long, non-enclosed route from the tube station to the front of St. Paul’s. When I got there I saw loads of tents, tied down, and a fair few people milling around outside. There was even a guy in a miniskirt doing Irish dancing on the steps of the cathedral.

I sat down and produced my first sketch, below, but while I was doing it a sparkly-looking London researcher came up and wanted to talk to me. I said I’d rather get on with my drawing. Then, after a little while, an aggressive dick with an iPhone tried to ask me some questions about why I was there, but I told him I’d rather do my drawing. Although really I didn’t want to talk to him because he came across like a dick.

Other than annoying media-types, I didn’t talk to anybody else at the protest. A policeman did say that the top sketch was “GCSE-standard” after peeking over my shoulder, but thankfully they didn’t ask to see my artistic license. After a few hours, I decided to go somewhere to warm up (preferably somewhere that wouldn’t make me feel guilty about buying a coffee) before headed to the DACS/Artquest talk about artists in the current economic climate.

(Above: view from cafe near Holborn)

I felt a bit rubbish at the talk, probably owing to sitting outside in the wind for so long, and so I again completely failed at talking to anyone. A regular billy-no-mates, that’s me! The talk was about how recession and government policy would affect artists incomes, and what tactics they should use to maintain income. Bob and Roberta Smith, one of the speakers, was massively scathing of the current government, but also produced the funniest line of the night, pointing out that “if your son or daughter (who is involved in the arts) meets another person involved in the arts… then penury ensues”.

Both in the arts and elsewhere, there is a growing sense that merely being dissatisfied with the current power structures isn’t enough. I’m not sure how that will shake out, with either the people at St. Paul’s or the arts community, but a friend told me that it was important that I stood up to be counted. Technically, I sat down and refused to be quoted, but maybe that’s good enough.  

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June 13, 2011

Tune Yards, Scala, London

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Last week I went to London to see a gig by the effervescent Merrill Garbus, who performs as Tune Yards. This is really rare for me; I don’t usually go and see any live music, and I don’t usually go out at night. Like I said a few weeks ago, the evening is really the time I knuckle down and start making things, so I like to be at home making rather than out partying. I didn’t take my sketchbook, but I did take my camera. I snapped off this quick shot as we stood outside the gig.

One of the weirder aspects about returning to Biggleswade is that there are almost no people between 20 – 35. Back in Newcastle I  lived in areas that were mostly comprised of people in that age range, but now I’m back in the parental abode I can go days before having a face-to-face conversation with somebody in my age range. I often complain about this to the few friends I have here over a coffee. The Tune Yards gig was, of course, full of people in my generation, making me look like an overly grumpy fool.

 

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May 9, 2011

Whale Skeleton

On Friday the 6th of May, I headed over to Cambridge with my parents, to gawk at the whale skeleton. It hangs outside the museum of zoology in a specially built portico, and as I sketched it, various tourists came up and joined me in gawking at it.

But portico was cold, and it was such a gorgeous day that it was a shame to sit in the shade. I wandered along and found a cafe to sit in, because I was feeling pretty terrible that day. I’ve had a run of “bad” days, feeling worn-out and sometimes painful in ways that aren’t a lot of fun. So I skipped the usual double espresso and had a fruit juice and a slice of delicious cake, whilst doing some watercolour studies of an ancient university entrance opposite the cafe. I managed to avoid washing my brush in the fruit juice, but it was a close-run thing.

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November 26, 2010

Boats! Boats! Boats!

Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.

I’ve recently been obsessing about boats again. The internet makes it easy to obsess over things; if you have a craving to find out everything about a particular topic, you just need to do a few Google searches and suddenly you’ve got thrimity-thrum tabs open and Firefox is using up 75% of your processing power.

When I was about 18, a friend of mine took me across the channel on his parents yacht. This was an amazing experience, going from flat, closed-off and conservative Bedfordshire to the world of harbours and ocean-going types. Technically, this means I have some sailing experience, but it was so long abo, and I was such an annoyingly lazy goon at that point in my life I think the only thing that I really took away from the experience was the memory of being at sea.

Coming across the above video reminded me of that, and the narrators vision of freedom and mobility is something that I find very attractive at the minute – I’m still too ill to hold down a job (no matter what the government said), and the idea of independence and travel that Hold Fast talks about is very attractive. Indeed, it’s so attractive that I ignored my NaNoWriMo effort for a few days, alternatively playing an Elite-style game while researching boating. I now have an enormous word-debt to get through if I want to finish NaNoWriMo this year, so I want to link-dump and move on until some point later.

  • To Mexico and Back – the narrator of the Hold Fast’s first trip out, which gives us some interesting views into how “Moxie Marlinspike” got into sailing in the first place
  • Instructable: How to get a free yacht – similar to Hold Fast and the above piece, this long instructable is the story of somebody who found a cheap, possibly dangerous boat, and put a lot of time into it to make it seaworthy.
  • Build a Dinghy – I was surprised to find that there are several sources for free boat-building plans on the internet. This links to a dinghy design that could be built if you were reasonably good at woodwork.
  • Times Up Boating Association – my friend Pippa built a dinghy as part of a residency with this arts/boating group, but some of the other projects they have been involved in are much more far-out, such as the use of a caravan as a diving bell. Not that building a boat looks easy, but caravan + submerging sounds deadly.
  • That man who keeps sailing around the UK with a roadmap – also see BBC coverage – is symptomatic of the split-nature of sailing. On one hand, it’s a clear set of skills and tools that keep people alive. On the other hand, there are people who are willing to throw themselves out into the sea with their hope and stupidity to keep them alive. While I am dubious of the amount of money the “proper” sailing world insists is needed, I also think it’s important not to be an idiot.
  • The cautionary tale of Bas Jan Alder – Bas Jan Alder was an artist who attempted to sail across the Atlantic in a thirteen-foot boat. He died.
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October 27, 2010

Berlin: And also…

Above: the video for Donna Summer aka Jason Forrest’s War Photographer, whose career took off in Berlin under his annoyingly pseudonym.

The other thing about Berlin is that (aside from being a centre for culture and a big, fun European city) it’s also a place where there are a lot of young people trying to do vaguely hipsterish things. And it’s been this way for ages. Since way before the word ‘hipster’ was invented.

But I believe there’s something of a zeitgeist at the moment. The current economic climate makes it impossible for people under the age of thirty to buy houses across the EU, but they can support themselves doing freelance work on the internet. Hence, to some degree, a large foreign population arriving in Berlin to do arty things whilst working from home on their laptop. And I can see why; if I had a choice of sitting and tapping the keys on my laptop from here in Bedfordshire or in a Berlin neighbourhood, I’d have to pick Berlin.

I hear that Copenhagen has a similar hipster density. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never been there. But there are certainly areas in any city that draw a type of young, stylish person, such as Heaton in Newcastle. I’m not saying Heaton is as interesting as Kreuzberg, but what it does have are people who are interested in bouncing ideas off each other and trying new things. Living in Bedfordshire, as I am at the moment, that can seem like quite a draw. However, when I lived in Heaton, I found myself almost suffocated by the people around me. I guess the trick is to find somewhere that’s a balance between the two.

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October 24, 2010

So, Berlin:

After packing up my flat in Newcastle and returning to my parents house in Bedfordshire I was exhausted. Not just slightly tired, but borderline needing-medical-attention exhausted. I spent a week watching cartoons in bed, and a further week laying on the sofa watching bad TV, just to recover from my time away. During that period, an advert for Easyjet’s sale grabbed my attention more than one of the films I was watching, and I booked two return flights to Berlin.

About six weeks later my girlfriend and I stepped off the plane. It had been a beautiful flight all the way over to Germany, with the in-flight magazine mentioning my online friend Cassandra Harrison. When we started to land the pilot mentioned it was a brisk 8ºc outside, and our first steps through the airport reminded what that meant. However, we got to our hotel and collapsed for a little while, before dashing out to meet Pippa Buchanan and her fiance (of course, we got totally lost and went to the wrong station first, but that’s par for the course during the first 24 hours in a foreign city).

I’d been to Berlin a number of times before, and so I said that aside from meeting my friend Pippa and going up the TV tower, I was fine with whatever my girlfriend wanted to do. The next day we gorged ourself at the hotel breakfast and waddled out to do some sightseeing around Oranienburg Strasse, taking in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, the Synagogue, and the Ramones Museum, before heading off to the Reichstag to meet Pippa again.

(I would totally recommend the Ramones Museum, which showed you the history of the American punk group for €3.50, and also doubled as a really nice cafe. Kunstalle Tacheles was it’s usual pee-smelling graffiti-stained sixth-form art self, but it’s worth gawking at once. I can’t say I’ve ever seen any worthwhile art there though.)

Pippa had a cunning plan to get us into the Reichstag without queuing, and as we were not standing for election that involved going to the extremely fancy restaurant on top of the building. This meant queuing in the much shorter disabled entrance and taking a lift upstairs, which was a great relief to me as I was already starting to feel tired. It was also here that my phone had a freak-out, making me think that I wouldn’t have any of the photos from the trip – this caused me much nerd-consternation, but I tried to hide it and not let geekery spoil my time away.

The next day I woke up and felt awful. Fatigue hits me like that sometimes, when even a nights sleep won’t make me feel better. It’s like I’m too tired to sleep properly. I woke up and tried to force breakfast into myself, but had to give up and rest in the morning while the other half did cultural activities without me. I recovered enough for some less strenuous activities in the afternoon, and so we took the train down to Kreuzburger and wandered around. I saw Etsy Labs (from the outside), and the fabulously named Kreuzburger (try the haloumi burger!) before heading to spend a few hours at the Hamburger Bahnhof art gallery.

We were pretty tired after all that culture, although it was great to see some of the works on show there, and availed ourself of the very Germanic market at Alexanderplatz on the way back to the hotel. We had a meal of potato pancakes and hot sugared nuts, while watching a live duo sing polka songs for the entertainment of the masses. A holiday in Germany isn’t complete without that sort of omska-omska casio beat, but I was too tired to work out how to buy beer. The civilised European method of “paying a deposit for your glass” defeated my tired self, and so we returned to our hotel room and had an early night, watching subtitled movies and adverts for German TV shows (there seemed to be a TV show about crime-fighting monks who used kung-fu and BMWs. It looked awesome, but I might have misunderstood something owing to my near complete lack of German.)

On our final day we rose sluggishly, ate our body-weight at the buffet breakfast, and then brought more hot sugared nuts at the market. I was feeling decidedly slow and we had a long day ahead of us, so we met up with Pippa again for a guided tour of Kreuzberg that ended up at a delicious Somalian felafel place. Then we staggered around the Film Museum at Potsdammer Platz before attempting to catch a train back, a process which shocked me having not one but two cancelled trains. We made it in time, however, and on my return I felt inordinately grateful to be able to understand the London Underground signage.

What I did miss from Berlin was the sense of being somewhere with wide open spaces, where transport hubs smelt of the bakeries in their basements at night, seeing young people in the streets, and discovering a whole new city (again). But at the same time it’s also taught me that I’m nowhere near fit enough to be galavanting around, and so I’ll be hibernating for the winter. By which I mean “resting up until it’s warm”, not “sleeping in a cave for four months”.

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May 27, 2010

Green Park Zone

Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.

Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.

On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:

Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.

Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.

But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.

Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.

This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.

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May 19, 2010

London Trip

Yesterday I took a trip into London by myself. I’d arranged to met up with Jock Mooney, who made this video:

We spent a few hours catching up, and then I set off for Camden’s juggling shop, Oddballs.

I’m not really into Camden. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m just not sold on the commercial aspects of the area, but it felt like I was walking into a permanent half-term. Coming up to street level I was looking at the folk heading down into the tube, and by my reckoning it was a ratio of roughly three kids to one tramp. Once I reached the surface I couldn’t work out how to split my ratio between kids, hipsters, tramps and aging punks, so I set off to the juggling shop by walking half a mile in the wrong direction.

After figuring this out the hard way, I turned back and eventually made it into London’s only juggling shop. It’s tiny, and I had to dodge not only somebody flinging some pink fluffy poi around, but a white guy with dreds and a black eye demonstrating the basics of 423. Juggling might be something I do as a hobby, but it really does attract the “skeezy geezer” type. I made my purchases and beat a hasty exit.

This means I now own a total of eighteen juggling balls. Five regular balls, three bouncy balls (one of which has disappeared), four large thuds and my six new regular thuds. Thuds are slightly squishy bean-bags which are named after the noise they make when they hit the ground. Unlike regular balls they don’t roll away, making them easier to find.

Of course, I can’t juggle 18 balls at once. On the Dancey juggling index, 18 balls in two hands has a difficulty of 8.5263. This is determined by the equation

d=b/(h + h/b)

where d is difficulty, b is the amount of balls, and h is the number of hands doing the juggling.

Using this equation, throwing a ball from one hand to the other has a difficulty index of 0.25. Therefore, anybody who learns to juggle 18 balls at once would be some sort of ubermensch of juggling. Anyone smarter than me who wishes to test my maths on this could check out Jack Kalvan’s paper on the subject, but everybody else could just check out this amazing example of teamwork:

After about five hours of being in London I was physically and mentally shattered. I’m still in recovery, and I know the price for this short trip is going to be spending the next few days resting on the couch, despite the fact I did very little whilst in the city. This makes me feel like mild-mannered Clark Kent, only without the interesting day job at the Daily Planet.

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March 31, 2010

I went to Newcastle and all I got was this lousy fatigue-based medical issue

Last Thursday I went back to Newcastle for the first time since November. I spent a short weekend back, celebrating a close friend’s birthday and gathering some of my possessions (because I’ve been living out of a backpack for the past five months).

Although I thought I was ready to start getting out again, I’ve found myself completely flattened by the experience. I guess I have to be a lot fitter – a lot healthier – then I am now, before I can pick up my old life. The only way I can explain it is like when you’re tired after some hard exercise. Except I don’t pick up after resting. This is my third day of resting up after my trip, and I’m still very weary.

Which really sucks, because the last thing I want to do is be stuck on the couch.

I might put a few posts up explaining what happened to me, as my medical crisis was both hilarious and gory. So when I can unstick myself from the couch, where I’m watching my way through these Star Trek box sets I brought back, I’ll update my blog with something a little more exciting than a post about shoes.

Addendum: I’m not actually that happy with this entry (hey – no links and no pictures?! Does this still qualify as a blog post?) but I’m just so knackered right now that it’ll have to do. It’s not like I can improve it with a picture of my couch.

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