bignoseduglyguy

SWMBO has just found this photo amongst some papers in an old box.  I have no idea how old the photo is.  I cannot even recall the circumstances in which it was taken but it is a Polaroid test shot from a large format camera so it might have been from my acting days.  Judging by the earring, straighter nose and abundant hair and compared to the studio shot below, I’d guess there’s a fifteen to twenty year gap between the shots.  That the sprogs fell about laughing when they saw it has driven home the fact that I’m not what I used to be.

NB: First one to email me the relevance of this post’s title will win a spot prize of some description.

I shall be attempting to blog the progress of myself and friends throughout tonight’s Dunwich Dynamo, an unsupported 120 mile night ride from London to the east coast so keep a look out over the next 14 hours or so.

Update: Due to GPRS issues and zero cell coverage in rural East Anglia, this plan completely failed. Mine and others pictures of the ride appear in this Flickr group.

After the events of recent weeks and to calm the nerves of a nervous mother, I decided that I would accompany my daughter to her school on the last day of term – not on the Tube as she would usually but choosing the river bus instead. So, after picking up her friend, we made our way to the Masthead Terrace Pier, where we boarded the Thames Clipper service which runs to Savoy Pier.

From here, it was a short walk along the Embankment and across Parliament Square, from where the girls headed to the school and I pedalled off towards Paddington Station.

Once again, there is a great deal of police activity in London today including the fatal shooting by armed police of a man on the transport network this morning, followed by a suspect package at a mosque and now the search of an internet cafe. This being the case, I think I might just take a nice, quiet circuitous route home this afternoon.

Returning from an appointment in North London this morning, I turned on the car radio to hear that London was once again in the throes of dealing with another four bomb alerts.  Although none of us were on the Tube network or near the stations affected this time, the No.26 bus that was attacked was not too far my eldest’s school. 

It was only a couple of days ago, BBC4 sent a film crew and director to interview me about my reaction to being in fairly close proximity to the terrorist attacks two weeks ago and another nine years ago.  Like many others, I blogged the experience and posted an image to the We’re Not Afraid web site.  It was this image, along with others, that caught the eye of Alison, the director of BBC Arts Television, who contacted me through the press team at We’re Not Afraid.

The documentary, which is to air on the BBC4 digital channel on the 7th August (one month after the explosions), is to focus on why people posted images to the site and the story behind those images.  Over a couple of hours, the small crew filmed me and the area near my home, which is a few hundred yards from the 1996 IRA bomb at South Quay.  Ian, the cameraman, like a good friend of mine at Associated Press TV, had covered civil unrest in the Eastern Bloc and various conflicts around the globe and I was amused to learn that, whilst he didn’t get paid ‘danger money’, he had been allowed to claim overtime where appropriate, which seemed delightfully English to me.

During the course of the interview, I explained that I didn’t post the picture as an intentional act of defiance or as some knee-jerk nationalistic reaction. To be honest, I didn’t give it much thought at the time, pretty much taking and posting the image before I had even had time to ponder why I was doing it.  Upon reflection, my feelings in the wake of the latest attack are similar to those I had nine years ago and I would sum them up in this way.

I am an ordinary person with a wonderful family, good friends and trusting colleagues.  Just as I rely on them to be themselves, they all rely on me to do the same: to be the husband and father that provides a loving home and security; to be a friend who will be there in times of need and celebration; to be a leader, a peer and a team member who has integrity.  To let the actions of terrorists change such things would be to allow the perpetrators and those that guide them to alter the most fundamental and important elements of who I am.  Quite simply, that is not something that I can permit for, as well as the great, the good and the worthy, this world needs ordinary people because it is ordinary, everyday folk that we turn to first in our lives.

I hadn’t planned to write in this way and my thoughts are far from the polished platitudes that we are used to hearing these days but I felt that I needed to put a stake in the ground to mark my feelings on this.

Although I am sure there will be the usual handout at the start, I thought I would plot out the general route and directions for this weekend’s Dunwich Dynamo for my own reference.  Having done so, I thought I would make it available for others to use.

Using the list of villages on the Dunwich Dynamo FAQ listed on the DD FAQ and a bit of common sense, I ran the details through AutoRoute and have come up with with the shortest sensible route I can find.  I want to stress that this isn’t an official recommended route, a definitive guide or anything else of that nature; just a quick aide memoire I have knocked up to assist myself and others in their preparations.  Likewise, the map is only an indicative overview and is not intended as a navigational aid.  If I have time,  I can work up more detailed maps.

Dunwich Dynamo Route and Direction (see below) 

Dunwich Dynamo Overview Map (see below)

Feel free to give feedback on the route from the top of the Lea Bridge Road onwards…but there is no need to advise me of your favourite route from Hackney to the Waterworks roundabout at Woodford

Just found this nice tutorial on secure file synching between two Windows machines via the good folks on the 43 Folders Google group, all with open source tools so the price is right as well.

PARK

Fans of Andy Cato and Tom Findlay should glide along to Groove Armada’s Lovebox Weekend which is taking place in Victoria Park on Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th. It will be their only gig of the year and, apparently, the largest music event ever held in the park.

RIDE

Meanwhile, at the same time, I and a few hundred others will be embarking on the umpteenth Dunwich Dynamo. The Dynamo is a 120 mile unsupported overnight bike ride from London Fields to Dunwich on the Suffolk coast – with optional sea swim and fried breakfast upon arrival. If you’d like to get a feel for the event, listen to this evocative podcast from Jack Thurston’s Bike Show on Resonance FM.

It would seem that a few more folks read my online musings than I thought.  If I was mildly amused and chuffed to have The Guardian quote a piece of mine last week, I am more than a little surprised to find that the BBC would like to have a chat with me tomorrow regarding an image I posted to the We’re Not Afraid website in the early hours of the 8th July.  Following an email from the We’re Not Afraid media relations team yesterday, my commute home today was punctuated by a call from the director of BBC Arts Television asking if they could pop over tomorrow for a quick interview.  Lawks!  I’d better tidy up and run round with the Dyson.

I’ll keep you posted.

A different take on the democratisation of the news process and the true birth of the “citizen reporter”.

“It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.”

Guardian Unlimited – ‘We had 50 images within an hour’

Since last Thursday’s bombings in London, I have been troubled.  Like many other bloggers, I have posted a mixture of information, opinion and reflection on that day’s events.  Whilst I believe that I have done so with good motives and a clear conscience, it is hard not to feel that one is, in some small way, taking advantage of a situation or exploiting it.  Interestingly, when I shared this concern with fellow London blogger PinkFairyCat, she pointed me towards a post by Viennese Metroblogger Heinrich Hinterhalt, in which he questions where blogging ends and journalism begins.  Although Heinrich’s piece is short and far from conclusive, it does go someway to starting to explore the nature of the relationship between newspaper reportage and ‘citizen journalism’.

“blogging is on the way to reestablish choice of news sources, an alternative to politically influenced (read: abused) mass media. bloggers were the first to announce bush’s reelection, they tell you about all possible and impossible things you won’t read elsewhere from every imaginable point of view […] in my personal opinion blogging and journalism are two very different things meant to coexist. journalism should be serious, well investigated, checked, double checked, spellchecked, authorised by independent editorial staff… not to speak of critical unbiased and well written. blogging on the other hand is fast, it’s free and it’s fun. and it opens it’s readers a world of choice […] all in all it’s yours – the readers – decision: read it, or delete it.” [all links are Heinrich’s]

How strange then that, this morning, I learnt from a friend that one of my posts to the London Metroblog had been quoted in today’s Guardian newspaper in Mark Honigsbaum’s article on the role that blogs play in covering such events.

“From messages of support superimposed on well-known London landmarks to angry weblogs and defiant postings on community message boards, the internet was fizzing with responses yesterday to the London bombings. Many of the messages were posted by commuters who narrowly missed becoming victims of Thursday morning’s bomb atrocities. Others chronicled the appalled reaction of Arabs and Muslims eager to distance themselves from the acts of the terrorists. But interspersed with moving first-person accounts and agonised soul-searching there was also much defiant humour.”

Maybe I’m being arrogant and self-centred in thinking that folks actually care about what and how I write about in my blog posts.  Whatever the truth is, I hope that what I do write is fair, has integrity and adds to the debate, rather than detracts from it.