If you go down to the woods today

There used to be a tradition in our family that every christmas day, after indulging in far too much turkey and spuds, we would take a leisurely walk across the common, collecting bits of firewood so that once we got back to the house we could make a fire and toast some crumpets and let the adults have a good snooze in front of the flickering flames while we, the children played with our latest shiny toys. 

This all stopped when it was discovered that the house had subsidence and the whole front wall of the house was trying to lie down in the front garden. Apparently someone decided to build the houses so they straddled a perimeter ditch that was filled in with sand, which has a tendency to shift over time.

We were relocated for the greater part of a year to another house while the house was underpinned, which also allowed us to completely redecorate the whole house in the absence of any inhabitants. Part of this plan involved taking out the fireplace, leaving a hole in the wall, which was to eventually be filled with another fireplace.

Fourteen years later and the fireplace still hasn't arrived to take its rightful place (Due to the fact that no fireplace has been ordered) At the moment the hole is covered up with some of my sisters artwork, which is held up by our VHS and DVD collection.

Hopefully by next christmas we will have a new fireplace, so we can toast crumpets again, that would make my christmas!

It was...Bedlam

The nights are closing in and all the students are back from a busy summer of...studentism. That must mean that the Bedlam bus is coming into town!
Yet again it was a relentless night of drum and bass, dubstep and a spot of grimey beatey type things with some wum-wum-wum-woh-woh-woh bass and I got to oversee the whole night. Me vs. two rooms of constantly changing MCs and DJs, equipment that would break when i leave the room and fix itself before I arrive and a promotor who got given a radio he couldn't hear because it was he was in loud rooms!

A list of broken equipment started forming before the clock even struck midnight, which included a sound engineer who broke his glasses by face-planting the stage! There was a welcome intermission around 2-3am when somehow amongst the smoke, haze, tobacco smoke, weed and general sweat fumes, smoke detector set off the fire alarms, causing a few thousand ravers to have to evacuate into the night air for a few minutes.

After 13 hours of Bedlam, I fell into bed and spent the next day walking as little as possible on my swollen feet and trying to surround myself in vibration-free silent things.

People were walking around with DSLRs in cinema rigs so hopefully a tasty-looking video will appear soon, you can't see much in the photos this year so i can't boast about it too much. Roll on Hospitality!