Random Text | Person is Not a Rude Word

Archive for the ‘Random Text’ Category

Bikesexual in East Sussex…

31/01/2015

Who said there’s no such thing as bikesexuality? I can attest to its alive-and-kickingness (and so does this Canadian website). But, how well I remember those mocking last-century-Eighties: hell hath no fury like the separatist homo sapiens…

I have to face-and-confess it: I’m an ex-closet A-sexual with an Extra-Gel saddle still hanging on the back of my front door. Yes, these days I’m a mere voyeur – or just another wannabe trikesexual…

(But the way my lower half feels some days, I’m more likely to be seen in the company of a Germanic trikescooter…)

Confused? Don’t be. Enjoy (hopefully) this introductory fotovideo capturing ‘the B word’ gloriously, proudly, out-and-about in Brighton and Hove (with an upbeat jazz-funk soundtrack too…)

Posted in Random Text, Video | Tagged Asexual, bikesexual, Brighton & Hove, St Germain, TravelScoot | Leave a Comment »

9 Ways to Lose & Find 4 Months…

14/01/2015

1. Have transgender reconstructive chest surgery at a Brighton hospital: Nuffield-swaddled and self-nestled atop the South Downs valley overlooking the Channel and changeable cloudscapes…

2. Hotel-recuperate in western Hove on the best late-Summer weekend of October: ice-cream inviting and skyscape foto-inducing…

3. Indulge in cafe stops between 2&4-hour-long anaesthetically-dopey siestas; add a little creativity, literary and 2nd-hand retail therapy…

4. Escape the whine of tree surgeons’ chainsaw pruning elms on home street; savour the autumnal flora in a local city oasis…

5. Be snap-happy at the Brighton PhotoBiennial: find new vistas from tucked-away venues…

6. Seek normalcy in scaffolding: from behind home blinds with house painters; from below Community Base with focus groupers; from beyond the station with city commuters…

7. Be bemused by across-Atlantic Halloween excesses on trips to Picture House and Rottingdean Museum, plus North Laine retro emporium…

8. Continue collaging self-identity self-portraits: Fridays for Mindful Art amongst friends…

9. Find the Festive Season all around and upon us: more of Life’s decorations and delicacies savoured and survived…

And so to 2015…

Posted in Images, Random Text | Tagged Brighton Photobiennial, Tove Jansson | Leave a Comment »

Homage to Tove Jansson…

06/07/2014

For the near 3 years that I have been living in Brighton & Hove, I’ve been eyeing up the Moomin character plastic plates and mugs on sale in the city’s Jubilee Library shop. I promised myself a gift of an item of Moomin picnic crockery – one day…

Then, idling through the North Laine, I was stopped in my tracks at the shop that stocks the full range of everything Moomin that can be bought from the Finland company, Arabia: the window display blared the news that 2014 was the centenary anniversary of the birth of Tove Jansson, Finnish creator of MoominValley and all its creatures. So, this had to be the year of the promised purchase!

My siblings and I received Moomin books as birthday presents from our uncle in Finland – and his Finnish wife and our 2 cousins – long before the American cartoon of the Moomins’ antics hit the TV screens in this country. Great delight followed when one year – for Christmas, perhaps – we received Moomin ‘dolls’. I got Moomin Papa: he had a silver grey fake fur body and a removable black leather top hat.

Reliving the delights of those fantasy books (some of which remained on my shelves or in precious storage into my middle age), I treated myself to a plate featuring a whole array of Moomin Valley creature beings: a special centenary celebration design – and one most fitting to celebrate my own recent 55th birthday!

Last Autumn I enjoyed rereading one of Tove Jansson’s much-loved fiction works for adults: ‘The Summer Book’. The delicious directness of her prose, in a collection of some of her own favourite short stories entitled ‘The Winter Book’, awaits my upcoming recuperation from gender corrective chest surgery – when I can read at my leisure in the shade of an elm tree, with a mug of sweet tea at my side and a flapjack on my new Moomin plate…

Perhaps in my dual-genderedness, I carry more of the Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden archetypes in my outer being than most; or is it just that I am more of an embodiment of Thingummy and Bob?

If you’ve not yet discovered Tove Jansson and Moomintrolls, then I hope my humble foto/text homage will tempt you to explore their world…

Moomins mugshot in the North Laine

Posted in Random Text | Tagged Moomintrolls, Tove Jansson | Leave a Comment »

Let Them Eat Cake…

23/06/2014

celophane-wrapped and beribboned chocolate cake on BUCFP beverage counter

To borrow the apparently incorrect &/or misquoted hackneyed phrase of the late Marie Antoinette… the latest ‘foodshare’ (for those nearer &/or on the bread line) that I’ve encountered was this past Tuesday: following the usual very good, hot vegan lunch at Brighton Unemployed Centre and Families Project (I volunteer on/for their food-growing allotments), a dark chocolate cake – lavishly decorated with thick slabs of chocolate – was cut into many small pieces and shared by the usual mixed bunch lunch crowd. Said cake was the offering to the Centre by the uber chocolatiers of East Sussex fame, namely Choccywoccydoodah. Not able to afford their delicacies normally – but well used to snapping images of same through their shop windows – this was a shared treat to savour with my mug of Ovaltine: ‘Yum’ in a word!

http://www.choccywoccydoodah.com/

Such treats – shared (aren’t potlucks always the best feasts?) or solitary fare – are a luxurious indulgence to calorifically-dumb-down my Aspie angsty and/or hyper-adrenalised or downward-dumps days… a dose of which was gladly ‘needed’ last Tuesday in the throws of the stresses of now (not-viewing-exhibitions but) co-curating the ‘Brighton Trans*formed’ multi-media-multi-venue exhibition due to hit the streets of our Gender-Dysphoria-by-the-Sea City in time for Trans* Pride No.2, the last weekend of July 2014…

http://gscene.com/news/brighton-transformed-exhibition-trail/

Since the About-This-Blog statement promises “a celebration of all things aesthetically pleasing, often edible and in-the-main inanimate” it seemed high time to slideshow-share some more often-edible-but-questionably-inanimate cake-y offerings devoured by sight, smell and taste senses over the past 10-or-so months… (with captions for visually-impaired and blind sweet-toothed folk)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Posted in Images, Random Text | Tagged Brighton Trans*formed, BUCFP, cake, Choccywoccydoodah | Leave a Comment »

From FAME to Tight Modern…

19/05/2014

Some once-obscure cap-gun-urban-flotsam-sporting artworks are just not content with their 5 seconds of out-in-public fame (not even when they are FAME itself: Fridge Art Magnet Examples)…

Abandoning its also-Japanese-paper-based & measure-tape-bearing sibling on the metal kitchen cabinet, this piece was not only discontented with brief loitering atop an orange and black recyling bin, but demanded further montage on corrugated card and red plastic and grid foil – plus being framed and exhibited in the Tight Modern, no less (after causing no end of adhesion angst & haiku hassle)…