Simon Pearson - minor9th.com

Two whole weeks off in London

posted in London

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The last time i had two consecutive weeks to myself was a very long time ago. Even at university, when only 30 weeks a year were spent in lectures, there wasn’t ever a time when I wasn’t staying up doing overnight recording sessions to finish off my portfolio or checking other people’s data entry to make ends meet.

So from Friday, aside from a visit to my family up in Wales, I’m pretty much free as a bird, with all of credit-crunched London at my disposal.

What’s a boy to do?

Victoria line closures in iCal format

posted in London, Travel

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I recently moved to Finsbury Park, and luckily the weekends have been nice enough to afford drinking tea outside on our teeny teeny little roof terrace thingy. Tea good.

Victoria line being off is a slight nuisance though, and it causes all kinds of woe when people want brave the tube and come round to share in said tea.

Because I’ve yet to find one, I’ve created an iCal of the closures up to November on the Victoria line only, compiled from the not overly parseable pdf of planned track closures on their site.

The next things I will do with this are:

• Add evening closures
• Write to tfl and ask them nicely to provide their own iCal version of the skanky pdf document of closures on tfl.gov.uk
• Update the calendar to include closures to March 2009 done
• Add the others lines’ closures (whilst waiting for tfl to do their own thing)

Download the Victoria line closures calendar (iCal) now

Who’d live in a house like this?

posted in Life, London

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Over the last month or so I’ve been flat-hunting extensively, crossing the threshold of various abodes listening to the same estate agent spiel.

Sadly the experience was nothing out of the ordinary, and despite what anyone says, garden flats will always be a bit dark; rooms remain the same size regardless of which way around you put the bed; if there are bars on the window there’s probably a good reason why; 15 minutes walk from the tube normally means 15 minute bus ride.

But most entertainment has come from dodgy ads on Gumtree, where property marketing through exquisite photography is the name of the game. These pictures represent just a few of the classy pads on offer in London this August.

Being an estate agent places stringent demands on the memory - it’s a job where the turnover of faces is high. But our charming, gelled-up letting agent Dan should really have realised that when I’m about to part with a large wodge of cash I’d rather not have my hand shaken by someone who calls me Peter.

Luckily we’ve found somewhere a little more inspiring than the above. And this post is the sole result of acute procrastination from packing.

• Check out more bad property listings…
• I customised a basic Yahoo! pipe to filter Gumtree rental ads by location. With a bit of tinkering it should work for whoever wants it. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t sophisticated enough to also filter by price - if anyone knows how to do this I’m all ears!

Boris vs Ken: is this really happening?

posted in London

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Not normally one to comment on politics, but the London mayoral election race just seems so much closer than it ought to. I mean. Really. Boris Johnson? As mayor? For real? Is anyone really going to vote for him? With that hair?

• Johnson vs Livingstone: it’s now on a knife-edge
• Stop Boris

Nice day for a blog wedding

posted in Web

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Big congratulations to Darren LMG and Sashinka on the announcement that they’re engaged! We do like a bit of love in the blogosphere. But in a world where our blog names are our surnames (Meg Meish (neé Notsosoft), Mike TD, Ian Blogadoon etc), obviously the biggest question of all is this: will it be Sasha LMG or Darren Sashinka?

Hamlet on a Sunday

posted in London, Theatre

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If you’ve a spare tenner next weekend get your ass along to The Factory theatre company’s Hamlet. It takes place in a different London venue each week with cast members playing different characters. There are no props other than those provided by the audience, which on my visit yesterday included a barbie doll, sponge, mop, water cooler bottles, a glow stick, a giant leek and rubber chickens, among other things. I took along a recorder which ended up being Hamlet’s sword.

It was a really engaging couple of hours - I spent the whole time on the edge of my (constantly moving) seat.

More praise:

• A very different version of Hamlet - Times online
• Richard Godwin getting his plays muddled up - Evening Standard

The sounds of early 2008

posted in London, Music

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Here are a few things I’ve been listening to so far this year - I’m on the look out for some new aural stimulation, and trusty last.fm recommendations can only go so far before you need a bit of good old word-of-blog, so if you have a minute let me know what’s been floating your musical boat in the comments…

The Fourers

Sing-along pop/rock - Next To Nothing has me adding my own questionable vocal harmonies. In the shower. Whilst my housemate’s friends cower in the bedroom next door. They do fall into the indie four beats / four chords trap occasionally but hey, they’re called The Fourers, and they normally manage to save themselves from oblivion with unexpected synths and the odd melodic turn.

Thomas Truax

The whole world should go and see Thomas Truax. With some unlikely raw meterials such as motors, spoons, wheels, spokes, a comb, some strings, ducting, dogs and moons, this man creates nothing short of a genius. He’s playing around the UK in March and April. Book it, book it, book it now. Diddly-do.

The Feeling

What’s their new single about, exactly? The thing I liked about The Feeling last year was that they had an instant, viral appeal. I couldn’t stop listening to the ebola-esque 12 Stops And Home, but it really wiped me out after a few weeks. On this single, they’ve pulled out considerably more than 12 stops: more is more, apparently, and I personally think they could’ve done with paring things down a bit, and perhaps lending a few of the extraneous leftovers to…

Hot Chip

…, who have really excelled themselves with the yawning void that is Ready For The Floor (listen). It sounds like exactly the sort of thing you’d be stuck in front of on the nightbus when trying to sleep. Not really a desert island disc (though it’d be fun to watch Joanna Lumley reprise her role as Girl Friday with this as a looping soundtrack).

Rod Thomas

Repeaters have more fun with Rod Thomas. First heard at Glastonbury last year, you can often hear him around various underground stations putting his Welsh-valley lungs to good use. His voice is incredibly strong, and he’s a master both of layering up great pop songs and making his audience fizz. Great stuff.

Calvin Harris and the Cinzano debacle

posted in Life

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And so that was Christmas. And what have we done? Well, bugger all other than eat and drink actually. On Christmas day alone I gained an astounding 5lb. This sudden weight gain combined with the sinking feeling that many of last year’s resolutions will have to be rolled over to this year, has kick started a new sense of urgency to Get Things Done (though so far I’m resisting the advice to sort my entire life into piles).

So I’m making only one modest addition to last year’s good intentions. After a brief trip to Paris at the end of November I half-resolved that it’d be bloody marvellous to live there for a while at some point. The city feels a little headier and more compact than London, and so I’ve been listening to the not-great-but-not-terrible learn french by podcast podcast, and I’ll be picking up a 12-week course from February to brush up on my “mais oui” and “bien sur”.

Incidentally, one of the things that amuses me about podcasts is that lots of them seem to have ever-so-slightly self-conscious theme music that doesn’t really seem to know what it’s there for. And it’s apparently a small industry in its own right - the creators of the Twit (This Week In Tech) podcast theme say “A theme song will make your podcast sound professional right from the start”. Well. That’s me told.

More incidentally - if you’re a bit of a geek and haven’t yet subscribed to the Guardian’s Tech weekly podcast, do so now. First episode was a little down on 2007 but was pretty insightful and very-well put together.

To finish, here’s a reassuring list of nice things that I lack the skill to weave into a paragraph:

• In a post very reminiscent of one I made well over six years ago, I can happily confirm that the bitch is back! Again! Hooray!
• Auto top-up. What a drunken queue-beating revelation. And the current promotion of having five free iTunes downloads when you purchase it has enabled me to jiggle around the flat to the sound of Acceptable in the 80s by Calvin Harris without feeling 79 pence worth of guilt (watch him move around awkwardly with a large reptile thing if you like)
• Cinzano: justsayno.
• Actually, there’s one more new year resolution, and that’s to make mushy peas. Just like Calvin Harris: so wrong, yet so right.

Merry Christmas

posted in Life

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Baubles, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Hope everyone’s having a restful time of things today. I’m a bit drunk already. More soon.

Aggregated fireworks

posted in London

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Like some deep-sea creature, originally uploaded by minor9th.

Wandered up to Primrose Hill to watch some good old Guy Fawkes remberance last night - not expecting a display up there, but hoping to get a good vantage point over the rest of the London’s displays.

All in all it was grand - bottle of port, couple of mugs, some good-natured, like-minded scarved folk, and a couple of distant, muted displays from (we think) Blackheath, St Paul’s, and others. There were also a couple of teeny back-garden fireworks in the park which were greeted with amusing over-enthusiasm.

Battersea’s display looked like the most impressive though - at one point it looked like Tina Turner’s entire head of hair was in the sky, so that’s my tip for next year…