small ritual

more redundancies

not a good day at work. another round of redundancies was announced. i've dodged the bullet for the third time, but morale's not good. the boss was visibly upset at having to make the announcement. matters are complicated by mandatory HR procedures which drag out the process while seeming to leave everyone in the dark as to who's going until they go or have gone.

but i'm not hugely surprised. some of us have been very busy this year, but it's not clear what will sustain us through 2010. i don't expect any real recovery in britain until 2011. there has to be an election next may at the latest and the direction of the economy and of the public finances are uncertain until that's done.

more tattoos

adding in lines to mirror the ones on my left arm and shoulder. i look more balanced now. there's space to fill in later around the labyrinth tattoo. the outlines hurt more than i remember from the last time, but the fill was ignorable, which is strange because it's a triple needle and the outlines are a single. harry spent ages getting the lines in exactly the right place on my body before inking, checking symmetries, curves, distances from joints etc. he's a perfectionist, but that's the way it has to be.

50

50 today. no cards because there's a postal strike in london today - there's about one a week at the moment, i don't know why. i spent over 6 hours on site in a meeting, or series of meetings rolled together, until the security guard on the building chucked us all out. it was too late to go back to the office, so i went to st pauls tube station to go home. i always seem to end up working late on my birthday due to some project crisis - i think it just reflects the timing of building projects which happen in the summer. it's always frantic in the run up to christmas, too, but that is usually design or drawing work that has to be closed out by christmas so that a new phase can begin in january [to go on site in spring, to hit crises in august, etc etc].

so i never have time or energy in august to fix up birthday celebrations. i know it's going to be derailed by work.

how to be english

this evening on the tube, an indian guy with three dissimilar bags got on and put one on the seat next to him [it was full of prescription drugs]. some tourists got on and all found a seat except one woman. suddenly a bald white man sitting opposite the indian guy said loudly "take your bag off the seat so the lady can sit down" and started to rebuke him "this is england and in this country we take our bags off seats for ladies". the indian guy became quite irate and yelled back "english people don't speak to others like that". they traded variations on this at increasing volume. the woman was embarrassed and moved away. and i thought to myself, in england if someone's bag is on the seat we look at them disapprovingly but say nothing for fear of causing an embarrassing scene. but of course i said nothing.

robot pole dancers

vaguely obscene robot pole dancers and dj at the boss design showroom launch party tonight

the event photographer was snapping me filming this so it might turn up in an industry magazine with who knows what caption.

snowy london movie

excerpts from my journey to work yesterday, and the last quarter is scenes on the riverbank outside tate modern at lunchtime. i can't remember ever seeing st pauls with snow on before. the millennium bridge was unpleasantly slippery so i turned back.

london snow 02.02.09 from steve collins on Vimeo.

still plenty of snow around today, but not quite as pretty anymore.

apparently this last happened in 1991. there was a barely suppressed party atmosphere yesterday - ambitious snowmen being constructed everywhere, snowball fights galore. it was hard to concentrate on work, i was emailing our moscow office with photos of the view from my desk [they are having -20 to -25C!], and the office closed early at 4.30pm to help everyone get home safely [only about a quarter actually made it in].

snowbound london

6-10 inches overnight and it's still falling. i made it into work, though it took two hours. somehow there's always just enough transport available to oblige you to keep going - never quite a solid excuse to stay at home. even so i was stuck on a train five minutes from paddington for half an hour due to points failure. i filmed the journey in - i don't expect to see this again, or not for a while. the last time i remember so much snow in central london was in about 1988 or 89 before the warming trend really kicked in.

i suspect jonny baker has been out on ealing common taking photos ;)

i cracked

i finally bought one after years of resistance

bought an ion turntable too, to digitize my 12" vinyl and cassettes - some of that stuff is otherwise unobtainable. it will be good to recover a large chunk of my musical history that i haven't heard for years.

naz & jane's pARTy

a couple of weeks ago naz and jane had a party that was also an art exhibition. they had filled their house with works by michael l radcliffe [the modern icons] and joanne vance [the portraits]

this is my video shot during the party:

naz and jane's pARTy from steve collins on Vimeo.

you can see mike at about 2:55 in the rectangular glasses explaining one of his paintings. his account is here and he shot a little pre-party video which i like so much i've added it here:

family visit

went to grimsby and cleethorpes a couple of weeks ago for the first proper visit in five years. i wanted to see my wider family somewhere other than at funerals, especially since my aunt's sudden illness and death in the spring. that's my grandmother, father and his sister gone since 2005. i didn't want to blog about my aunt's death at the time. all this has changed the shape of the family considerably, and we're regrouping, so to speak, around a different set of connections. the children of my four cousins are all teenagers now, so there is another layer approaching adulthood. and the latest family addtion is my niece elisabeth, born last week!

as for the photos of grimsby and cleethorpes, there's nowhere deader than a seaside town on a weekday out of season in cold weather. it's easy to produce those empty scenes that i seem to specialise in ;) the traces of my childhood are still around, but fading. places go, or you lose them. it was strange and difficult to pass my grandmother's old house and not be able to walk in like the last and every other time. also hard to pass asda, where my aunt worked for so many years. and even now, my sense of scale for the town is that of a child, and i'm always nonplussed by how much shorter distances are than in my mind. the fact that i think of the old sea wall as curving over my head, gives you some idea.