Anytime anyone asks you to explain why rugby is a better game than football (i.e. "soccer" for those of us who live in countries where there is more than one game that obviously qualifies as a type of football), just mention this bit from the Guardian newspaper's sports section, referring to the return of the World Cup-winning English rubgy side:

"The last time hundreds of English fans turned up at an airport to greet a returning England team was after the 1990 football World Cup when they lost the semi-final on penalties. Then the popular hero was Paul Gascoigne, and he greeted his public wearing a pair of false breasts."

Enough said, I think.

My stumbling around Europe continues.

At the moment I'm in Munich, visting friends and my god-daughter who has recently become a one-year old.
It's funny what being around young children does to you. I've only had limited experience of young children in my life, and it's quite amusing to find yourself making disjointed sounds that have no resemblance to normal conversation. Not only that, but you find yourself chasing said god-daughter around the room, between and underneath the furniture on all fours.
She's really lovely, and thankfully appreciates my presence (something to do with my expressive eyebrows, I think).

Thankfully at the end of the evening I get to retire to a far corner of the house, so I don't get to hear her when she starts to grizzle at 2:30am, unlike her parents who get to hear this only too well.

Much of today was spent at the Deutsches Museum, sort of like the Science Museum in London, expect with a very German slant. They had a very good section on printing and print technologies, partly because many of the inventors in the field were German (Gutenberg included).

Also, there was an excellent section on Astro-nautics (I think that's what it was called). partly because again they were making a point that all modern space rocket technology derived from the WWII V2 rocket and Werner Von Braun, its architect and subsequent head of the Nasa programme to send a mand to the moon.
I'm not one to quibble though about the national slant, and it was all very interesting stuff, if a bit boyish.

Something that's kept me busy for the last six weeks or so while I've been back in London are two printing courses that I've been doing at Kensington and Chelsea college, each a day a week.

It's been great to get back to doing printmaking, as it's something that I've really enjoyed in the past, and I've been learning quite a bit about some of the techniques I was unfamiliar about, helped by some very good tutors.

One thing that I've learnt during this time doesn't necessarily concern the printing process itself; I spent a fair bit of time doing drawings and hand-cutting plates, and these tasks can take a long time to complete depending on the difficulty and complexity of the image. What I've learnt in the process of doing these tasks, I think, is the reason why many people think that they are unable to draw or be an artist. Also, looking at some of the fantastically detailed works I've seen in some of the exhibitions around town in recent weeks (particularly the exhibition of contemporary Chinese printmakers at the British Library) has led me to the same idea.

There's no getting around the fact that much great and interesting artwork takes a significant investment of time. Doing my own work, I've been reminded of the patience that's needed to complete work, and I think a lot of people (myself included, all too often) get impatient to produce results quickly.
I'm sure that many people can produce great artwork if they put in the time, but too many of us expect to shoehorn results into a too small space of time, and maybe suffer from a lack of concentration.

The funny thing is, that when you get immersed in the work, you don't seem to be concious of how much time is passing, and are not bothered by the length of effort required.
I think this is something to do with the left brain / right brain thing; to simplify, the left side of the brain is quick and impatient, whereas the right side of the brain is more interested in the work itself. I do notice myself feeling quite relaxed and satisfied while doing some of these long tasks, once I get beyond any sense of impatience I may have about getting the job finished.

I'm sure if we all allowed ourselves more time, many of us would find that we could surprise ourselves with our abilities to draw and paint - I know I have.

I think there are also plenty of artists out there who expect quick results, and may not be so interested in investing the time required.
To paraphrase Banksy, "Why is it that many artists are prepared to suffer for their art, but not many artists are prepared to learn to draw?"

For some reason someone's erected a wind turbine on the southbank, just next to the Royal Festival Hall. I'm sure that this is not in order to pump an incremental bit of extra power into the grid supplying London, so maybe it's intended to get the general public to appreciate wind turbines as emblematic symbols of the modern age in order to soften us all up for future wind farms that will be springing up on skylines across the country.

Ah, here we go - turns out that this is basically what it is all about. From the 18th of November it will be generating something called the Shell Electric Storm, which will be a display of coloured lights and mist surrounding said wind turbine in order to "capture the imagination of Londoners and visitors to the capital and help build their awareness of renewable sources such as wind."

On another matter, why do I seem to have the knack of sustaining an average two day cold for more than a week?
My body seems only too efficient at producing large quantities of mucus (bet you wanted to know that), but the good thing is that it's got me off smoking for the last week.

At the moment I feel like my ears are stuffed with cotten wool, and I'm doing involuntary impersonations of Marlene Dietrich, albeit without the accent and one or two octaves lower.

I've been doing a lot of finding out about various aspects of relationships over the past few months, both from first-hand experience and from hearing about the experiences of friends.

As a result I've been doing a fair bit of learning and thinking about it all, and have been surprised at some of the things I've discovered. For instance, in an age such as we are living in now, we all have much more choice about how we will live our personal and public lives, but the flipside of this seems to be that we get to experience much more uncertainty.
I think I've always been a person who expects the world to deliver substantial amounts of black and white, but too often things are couched in various shades of grey. And the more that I think I know myself and what I want, perversely the more room there seems to be for these shades of grey to flourish.

Maybe this has got something to do with knowing enough to know what it is that we don't know (if you can follow that).

At university one of the subjects I majored in was economics, which I always found fascinating from the social side. However, the fatal flaw in the science of economics is that by and large it assumes that people make rational choices.
Fine for some of the time, but all too often we all make choices that don't have too much to do with rational thought at all, but are guided by a gut instinct or emotion. Sometimes our guts seem to have a better handle on the truth than our brains, but not all the time, and it's a wonder of the human condition that we've evolved into something that can be both supremely rational and irrational.

I guess life would be a bit boring otherwise.

I've been bothered a bit over the last week or two about this blog.

Although I've been putting up ocassional entries, I'm finding fewer things to write about, and haven't been feeling overly motivated about keeping it up to date.
After having a trawl through a number of other blogs the other day, I realised what the problem was. Much of my recent writings have not been too personal, more observational regarding little things in everyday life that I notice. Reading through some of the other blogs I've found, I realised that although the content and style differs incredibly, most of the best say something about the author and are often quite personal. In fact, a few go way beyond this and report stuff that the author would probably not be telling their collegues, or even partner ocassionally; it's funny how intimate people end up getting with the faceless masses on the Internet.

So, it's important I think to find the right balance between public and private when writing up a blog entry, and this is why I've been having a few problems with finding what to say.
There's been a lot going on in my life in recent times, and this weblog has only been reflecting a part of that. I think I need to change the balance of what I'm putting up, and stray a bit more into the personal.

Some of the other weblogs that I follow can be totally candid about everything in the author's life, largely I'd guess because the author is sure that noone they know is reading there work. As I know that a number of friends and family follow this, I'll not be putting every thought and reaction up here, but I will try to start writing a bit more honestly about my internal life, as well as what I'm finding going on around me.

Don't worry about the new approach though, I think I've got a reasonable nose for detecting and avoiding melodrama!

The area around Upper Street and Essex Road in Islington is full of plenty of restaurants, cafes, gift shops and the like, all quite happy to relieve you of your money, but there are a handful of shops that really stand out for me.

Starting down Essex Road from Angel, there's a shop on the right hand side called Past Caring, which has got to be one of the best junk shops in London.
The window is always full of fantastically shaped glass ashtrays and vases (there was a time in the 1970s when the ashtray was almost a form of high art), and there's usually plenty of interesting crockery, clothes and fabrics from the fities, sixties and seventies.

If you're lucky you'll ocassionally find an old dansette record player or funky radio lurking in a corner, and there are always a few weird and wonderful things that have spent much of their life hanging on the walls in someone's bachelor pad.

I am physically unable to walk past this shop without poking my head in for five or ten minutes to see what's new, and given that everything is priced at junk shop prices rather than antique shop prices there's always a healthy turnover of stuff.

Across the road is a shop that I've never bought anything from, but one which is certainly much weirder than Past Caring. Called Get Stuffed, it's a taxidermists, and the window is always full of animals with suitably startled expressions.

There's the odd dog or two, lease in mouth waiting eternally for its owner to reappear, but there are also much weirder creatures.
Walking past the other night, I remember seeing the following animals: an ostrich, a bat, a leeming looking like he'd just encountered the cliff he was going to jump over (and yes, I know it's a myth), a bat, a brace of hare hanging from the roof, owls, weasels, jays, moles blinking in the light, and weirdest of all, a London pigeon (for what reason would someone decide that it was worth stuffing the all too common street pigeon?).

I don't know who buys these animals, but I do notice that the turnover in Get Stuffed is a lot slower than that in Past Caring. I do also remember the owner getting into trouble a while back for having certain animals in the shop that are considered rare and endangered, though I can't remember which.

I'm not been much of a dance-orientated person for most of my life, but I've found myself introduced to the world of dance over this weekend in the form of a dance-orientated small film festival, and have been very pleased by what I've seen.

The most impressive film was about Carmen Amaya, the famous flamenco dancer, who captured the world's attention during the middle of the 20th century with her wild and furious innovations of the gypsy dance.
There was plenty of archival footage, including scenes from the movies that she appeared in, and her dancing was electric and very emotional.

Up to her time the traditional flamenco dancer either danced more expressively with the feet, or otherwise with the upper body, but for Carmen her whole body was used in the dance. The footwork was incredible, with very distinct and sharp stacatto threatening to drill holes in the floor, while her upper body would twirl and engage in all manner of improvised and set pieces.

She was a strong innovator, changing the nature of flamenco dance by using many of the male dance conventions in her dance, dancing in trousers at times rather than a dress, and using castanets and clicked fingers where they traditionally didn't appear, and changing the content and form of the traditionallt set styles of flamenco dance.

And not only was the dancing incredible, but the level of muscianship accompanying her was fantastic, with some of the best flamenco guitaring I've ever heard, particularly from Sabicas Castellon.

One thing common to most people organising a party is the dreaded fear that starts developing around 7pm on the eveniing of the party that noone will turn up.

I know I, like everyone else, have experienced this at least a couple of times in my life, and this Friday just gone it was my flatmate who was going through the same experience.
She'd decided to organise a Halloween party and had gone to some lengths with the decorations and her makeup (dressed up in a definately scary witch costume, she is also possessed with a very wicked natural cackle). Being a large flat (around 20 flatmates), some were going to be at the party but a number of others already had other plans, including a dinner party going on elsewhere in the flat.

C was starting to get quite anxious around about 8pm that there was nobody downstairs in the large basement area dedicated to the party, and we did our best to assure her that it'd be OK and that everyone would turn up when they'd been thrown out of the pubs, it being a Friday night.

And sure enough, people starting drifting in about 10-10:30pm, and things were very lively for the rest of the night, and much fun was had.
It's not necessarily a London thing, as other places where I've lived parties don't often get going properly until later in the evening, but the extreme example I encountered this summer as in Madrid where people don't even consider going out to a party until it's somewhere near midnight.

In the end C was very happy with the success of her party, but I did sympathise with the way she was feeling earlier in the evening.
There's plenty of fears that are irrational to have, but that doesn't stop us human beings having them anyway.