The Continuing Tentacular Debauch of Nom

( Where am I? Where have I been to? Where am I going???... 2017 edition )

Here's last year's, 2015 (I seem to have missed 2014 somehow), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008. TL;DR: slightly better at travel and keeping in touch with folks but a way to go, I am apparently permanently bonded to HORRIBLE DOG and still could do with getting my act together career-wise, though progress has been made. Potential nuclear conflicts/resurrection of labour camps for liberals aside, it'll be interesting to see what the year holds.

( Where am I? Where have I been to? Where am I going???... 2016 edition )

Here's last year's (I seem to have missed 2014 somehow),
2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008. I'm still a bit of an overworked navel-gazer, but despite it being a bit of a fallow year for travelling and keeping in touch with people, I am ceasing to be massively stressed about things (or at least ceasing to acknowledge or notice being bothered by as much).

It's been just over three weeks since we moved from Southampton to Kingston and I started my new job in a crazy university lab in Bloomsbury. To say that I am enjoying it is an understatement - I can't remember the last time I felt so consistently un-stressed! Teething troubles and packing/unpacking/bill-wrangling woes notwithstanding... Getting to work takes about an hour by overground and underground, but I've so far managed to get a seat on both almost every time, and my fellow commuters seem reasonably chilled and genteel.

Working in Bloomsbury is just amazing - I've been walking the 10 mins to the British Museum most lunchtimes, eating my packed lunch on the wall outside, and then taking half an hour or more to walk round the exhibits before a swift trot back to the lab. So far I've re-visited Dr John Dee's scrying equipment in the Age of Enlightenment (near the naughy Priapus paraphernalia), discovered the Islamic World galleries at the Montague Place entrance (which boasts a beautiful metal harpy and some stunning lustreware) and done a flit round Asia (Tibetan skull cups and many-armed deities).

My lab is also right next door to the small but perfectly formed (and free!) Grant Museum of Zoology, which I've been to twice. I fully intend to adopt a specimen there - I have my eye on a particularly gnarly one. The infamous jar of moles is already taken, obviously! I honestly can't believe I work so close to so much amazing stuff (The Wellcome Collection is also less than 10min away) - even better than when I worked next door to the Hunterian!



We also live less than 10mins walk from Richmond Park - a haven for grazing herds of deer, flocks of loud green parrakeets and cheeky, Hula Hoop and milk-snaffling jackdaws. It's a strange place and reminds me more than a little of the New Forest in places. We've already walked round it for hours and still only seen a tiny fraction. Pembroke Lodge, about an hour in, does amazing cream teas. The riverside in Kingston is also really lovely in the sun, and we've made friends with our neighbours who are threatening to take us pike fishing in their boat... we watched the new Godzilla with them and their kids last week, which was brainless fun. GO GO GOJIRA! I also seem to have become resident neighbourhood biologist, and spend almost every evening identifying and explaining some fungus or insect or other for the local yoof, which is pretty satisfying.



Yesterday we went to the awesome Pimlico District Heat Undertaking as part of London Open House (thanks squirmelia and swh for the heads up). Also free, and involving an enormous amount of clambering up scary industrial ladders and squeezing through crazy engine rooms and forests of curly ducting - the view from the top of the immense (2,500,000 litre) thermal store was astounding. We followed up by a great lunch and wonderful beer (Mad Hatter Sorachi Saison for me - om nom nom) at Cask. The best of my photos are HERE.

Music-wise, whilst I really miss the Fo'c'sle folk club, we tried out the altogether larger Ram Club in Hinchley Wood, which involved quite an exciting bus ride into the unknown, but which ended up in a stirring performance of sea shanties by Jenkins' Ear and the other half talking concertinas with one of the members until late. We've been practicing duetting mandolin (him) and mountain dulcimer (me) recently but are nowhere near performance standard!

All in all, I am almost wishing I'd taken the plunge earlier - can't wait to get the spare room up and running so we can have visitors!

This week has been a bit of a curate's egg - the first three days of the week were characterised by me feeling increasingly unwell, culminating in a sudden, huge stomach upset on Weds. Thursday I felt better than I've done in a month - so much so that I managed to go for an hour and a half long walk to take photos after work. Today I've felt largely rubbish again, though still better than at the beginning of the week. Goodness only knows what the hell causes it: dizziness, numb extremities, tiredness, blurred vision, dyspraxia, facial discomfort (especially sinuses) and bloating seem to be the key symptoms.

Anyway! Here are some photos I took yesterday - the light was perfect :)



And now: THE WEEKEND! Tomorrow is tapas with Caroline and Sunday I plan to do sweet F.A.
I've painted my nails (I've been doing that a lot lately, having iridescent bits of colour around to waggle is very good for your sanity...) Today I am on Orly - It's Not Rocket Science, which can only be described as a kind of insanely sparkly mossy zomboid sludge green. Probably not the most flattering shade but OOOO SHINY.

I might try updating daily for a while - just to get a handle on moods/events/linkages.

This last fortnight has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I applied for a job as senior biomedical scientist in technical development in the UCL Advanced Diagnostics unit about 8 weeks ago, and had forgotten that I even applied when I got an interview last week. Interview went amazingly, the people were friendly and enthusiastic and generally "my kind of people" and the post seemed pretty much perfect. I got offered the job the following day and was ecstatic, even though it would have involved moving to London, which I have always been very loathe to do.

Then I saw the pay offer...

Basically, taking into account the high cost of moving to London or commuting, it would have been a salary drop of about £600/month. I just can't sink that kind of reduction :/ So I had to turn it down. Very disappointed. BUT! At least now I know that for the right job I actually would consider moving to London - so that's useful. Also, getting offered a senior position in a prestigious, cutting-edge institute was a great confidence booster.

Then I went to scope out a job I got invited to apply for in Southampton - instant no. The same deal as I have now, but in a less well-thought of hospital in a grubby windowless lab furnished with broken, uncared for equipment from the dark ages. And Even More On Call (BUT THINK OF THE MONEY,THE BEST THING ABOUT ON CALL IS THE AMAZING MONEY - said the manager with ££ in his eyes...). Yeah... no.

But then I finally seem to have got a collaboration with a major training hospital sorted out after 2 years of fruitless wrangling - which would enable me to do my Advanced Diploma in Dissection, and maybe even the Expert Diploma after that. So hurray! Cue getting drunk on a school night on prosecco and cocktails. I feel much more positive about staying in this post if I can only shift that running-on-the-spot-getting-older-and-less-skilled feeling. Hopefully a proper weekly training course will help.

On the printmaking front, I finished my Foundation in Printmaking and sold FOUR prints at the Foundation Show at Red Hot Press. I'm in a Proper Exhibition at a Proper Gallery mid June! If anyone wants a Private View invite it might be lots of fun. And you get to see my horrible fly prints in amongst nice flowers and more competent arty efforts.

My first two attempts at woodcut printing. I've since done some more Gojira prints with chine colle, which are currently drying all over the lounge floor...



I've also been crocheting octopi like there's no tomorrow for the two craft fairs: current total = 18 octopi, 4 platypi (all for commissions so none to sell yet!), 1 pig, 1 cuttlefish... have started doing Victorian villain octopi in top hats with moustaches, which are kinda fun!

So this is what I've been working on recently: an edition of 25 prints (linocut and chine colle) for a print exchange (20:20, which I'm doing through Red Hot Press). It's based on some reading around the origins of Beelzebub - apparently he shares some homology with a Greek momentary deity called Myiagros, who was invoked to order the flies from your offerings to Zeus, so that you would win more favour. I made a Pinterest album documenting my progress as part of the workings, and finally printed the last of the edition today. I have 32 workable prints, but as I have to add linework by hand (?maybe), that may all change!

Well, Germany was a bit of a washout, mostly for health reasons. Turns out that sedation, root canals, flying, work stress, sleep deprivation, a botched B12 top-up and staying in a beautiful medieval town with cobbled streets and nary a right angle combine to set my balance issues to thermonuclear. Anyway.

I've signed up for the 20:20 print exchange with the print studio I belong to, Red Hot Press. This means making an edition of 25 professional-quality prints by the end of October. Sounds like a long time but when you consider that the press is only open during working hours except for two sessions a month...

Finding a print subject is always hard - I've got interested in flies lately, particularly the bristly, unlovable black, grey and blue jobbies that rub their filthy feet together over all kinds of disgusting substances. Inevitably I ended up reading up on Beelzebub and his supposed malign command over flies and pitched up a Pinterest album exploring the link between flies and the occult and grotesque. But then I came to the conclusion that whilst flies may carry all sorts of pestilence about, they also play a stellar role in decomposition, without which disease would be far more rife. And Beelzebub wasn't always a minion of Satan - originally he was Myiagros, a momentary deity who could be invoked to clear the flies off of your tasty tributes to Zeus. A nice guy...



So I'm trying to make a piece that brings out the good and the bad in the flesh fly. This is where we're at so far: this is a mock up incorporating chine colle (which I'm doing with PVA and toile de jouy print tissue paper) and pen and ink. The black will be linocut in the final edition, this is just for layout.

Hope to cut the lino block this afternoon.

...there's been a week in Berlin, during which time I discovered the wonders of Liquidrom's spas/saunas where I tried frying in the sauna then walking about naked in the snow and floating in an isolation tank, the astounding Berliner Medizinhistoriches Museum and surreal, deserted snowy forests. Berlin was a lot of fun and just the ticket for relaxing - photos are here.

I went to the Horniman Collection in Forest Hill too. If deformed taxidermy is your bag, you should totally go. Or musical instruments. They have all of them, and you can hear the noises they all make too. And the view over London is tremendous. AND IT'S FREE. Photos are here.

We spent a long weekend on the Isle of Wight, too, at Gothic View, a tiny converted chapel in Chale Green. Went to the endlessly bizarre Blackgang Chine again and walked the Old Blackgang Road (most of which fell into the sea in the mid nineties) as far as we could, and came across an abandoned and ruined nudist camp, complete with naughty murals. The grey stone house at the bottom of that thread is now a ruin, having caught fire catastrophically some time in the last year. Photos to follow, when I get my arse in gear and find a new photo hosting site (see below*).

I've also taken up semi-permanent residency at Manor Farm - they have a never ending supply of Middle White x Saddleback and Saddleback piglets. So good for the soul. Currently undergoing some expensive psychotherapy, which actually appears to be helping, but at £6 a throw, scratching piglets and hand feeding chickens seems like better value.

*I'm truly sorry to have to link to Flickr there, by the way, as it seems to have done it's level best to make my nicely laid out, spaced out, tagged and geo-tagged photos into some kind of unlabelled visual vomit. If anyone knows of any valid alternatives, then do let me know?

...how many museums and galleries of the world I've been to?
I'll try to remember to add to this as I go along (and when I inevitably remember more I've been to)

So here goes, off the top of my head:

( Where I've Been )


and for the record, the wish-list:

( Where I want to go but haven't got round to )


Where do YOU think I should go?