Never Twice the Same Circle

Sam suggested recently that I should do a post on how life has changed over the years, and I've decided to take up the suggestion, focussing specifically on the seven years since I first went to Root Hill.


I'd just finished sixth form, back in 2006.  I didn't know what I wanted to do next.  I'd barely started work on my giant mosaic project.  Cylinder and Miserable had only just started, and Grace and Caffeine wasn't even a twinkle in my eye yet.  I still had Arthur & the Punk in post-production, and the likes of Day-Glo! and The Probe Has Succeeded hadn't been so much as storyboarded.  Yateley Baptist was just two years into Adrian Reynolds' pastoral tenure, and the end wasn't remotely in sight.

In myself, I knew there was something wrong with me in terms of a chronic inability to empathise, but I had no idea what caused it or what to do about it.

And Root Hill?  New, bit scary... we had Andrew 'Moneybags' Sadler as one of the leaders, and we went to Guildford for the Tuesday outing, with Laserquest, boating and other things.  Other leader Dave Hollands was sometimes seen waving a tape-writing camcorder around, and the resultant video was available on either VHS (yes, really!) or DVD.


Fast forward seven years to 2013: I've been on the Root Hill camp eight times.  Andrew has been replaced by Jim Sayers (after a transition period in 2009 / 2010), and Guildford has been replaced on the timetable by Horsham, from 2011 onwards, because they shut down the Laserquest in Guildford.  The choice of churches on the Sunday morning remains largely the same, although I've switched my habits from Chilworth to Dorking in the interests of a shortened commute.  I took over as the videographer in 2008, and killed off the VHS option; my temporary successor went widescreen the next year; this year the video was shot by another newcomer, using a DSLR, and will be released exclusively online.

The people have nearly all changed - almost nobody else from the 2006 camp was still there for 2013 (one or two exceptions, but not many), but I'm not complaining.  I came into Root Hill as one of the youngsters, and felt a bit lost among the established friendships between the older campers; now, I am the older campers, and it's a lot easier taking on the younger ones as they arrive rather than trying to make my way around the whole new camp all in one go.  For me, the 2013 crowd feels much more like home - and feeling like home is, in my books, a very good thing.

But in spite of all the changes, Root Hill remains very much as it always was.  There's still a big pile of wood chippings next to the bonfire area each year, which I like to go and perch on top of to chew over things on some of the evenings.  The timetable and the menu barely change at all, in their major components at least.  And that's where the title of this post comes from: Root Hill is largely cyclical - it's ended up being a bit same-old-same-old, but it's a good kind of same-old-same-old, which is precisely what I keep going back for - but the cycle never repeats itself perfectly.  There's a degree of circularity, but it's never twice quite the same circle as any of the previous times.

This whole 'people' thing leads into another point of change over the last 7 years: the shift in my understanding of myself.  Five years ago, I was presented with the answer to why I struggle so much with people: it's a high-functioning autistic-spectrum condition, most likely a variant of Asperger's Syndrome.  In the half a decade since July 2008, the diagnosis has gone from new and shocking (I kinda wish my old Tailcast blog posts hadn't got wiped off the internet, as the one I did about my initial reaction would be good to link to for back-reference) to being fully accepted and normalised (as I mentioned a couple of posts back).

Adrian left Yateley Baptist four years ago after five years as our pastor.  We found and called his successor Andrew Wigham a few months ago, and he has moved in and started his work over the last two or three weeks.

I've passed my driving test, and been driving for long enough to pick up all sorts of terrible habits - palming the wheel more frequently than the gearstick, for example - and I've had a younger sibling get married, since 2006.

Cylinder and Miserable has run for 2126 episodes (1920 of them published, and counting); Grace and Caffeine has long since folded (after 178); cross-continuity spin-off Fort Paradox has had time to appear from nowhere, make strides, get forgotten, and get revived; the mosaic got completed, moved, damaged, repaired... I don't even know if it still exists, to be honest; Portal and its sequel got released, I got into them, and I found my other niche in life as a Portal 2 test chamber architect; The Probe Has Succeeded is very old news indeed, and my animation efforts have more recently been focussed on the likes of Papercuts and The Murkum Show.  What's next?  Who knows.

I probably missed a lot of stuff.  But you'd get bored if I went over everything.

Sam: thanks for the suggestion.


- The Colclough

What You're Not Reading This Year

Any of you who've kept an eye on my DeviantArt page might have arrived at the conclusion that this is the time of year when you could expect another round of blue-pencilled introspection in the form of some Knowing It's Called Aspergers drawings.  You would have been right.  But you may also have noticed that said drawings haven't happened.

Well, it's been five years now.  As of the 6th of July this year, I've lived for half a decade with the notion that it isn't just me being an unfortunate and inexplicable freak of nature, it's part of the autistic spectrum and as such is a known and documented phenomenon and not a unique failing on my part - and after half a decade of chewing over the idea and figuring out how it fits in with everything else, it finally seems to have normalised.  The drawings were, in essence, about how I felt on the subject, but now I seem to have assimilated it into my status quo and no longer feel much about it at all: "ah, that time of year.  How do I feel?  Um... no different to how I felt when I wasn't thinking about it."  Hence no drawings; there's nothing to draw this year.

I thought it might have been nice to have one or two "I think things are winding down, so here's a little coda"-type drawings to conclude the series, but I spent most of July (on and off) thinking about the question, and couldn't come up with anything to draw as a coda that wouldn't have felt like a tired re-tread of the previous 44 pictures.  And in retrospect, I think the 44th - Day 1475 - serves well enough as a finale to the project.

I'm going to have to start putting something else on my DA page, aren't I?


- The Colclough

Still Alive

Time since last post: about five weeks.

Stuff achieved in that time: job worked, money earned (such a beautiful sheaf of purple banknotes...), Arc Phase Variations no. V partially inked, more Cylinder and Miserable written (just five days to go until Series 3 begins publication, in case you missed the announcement on the comic's homepage), Papercuts elements drawn... and computer reformatted.

I spent today wiping the C drive of my just-over-four-year-old PC, affectionately known as 'Beastie', and reinstalling my software, all in a bid to eradicate a nasty virus called Zeus which infected the machine last Wednesday and proved near-impossible to kill.  Fortunately, it only infected software files (not images, music or other media files) and only infected things on the C drive (not my other two hard disks), so I was able to back up my documents and stuff to the external drive, format C, and reinstate most of the stuff I want to keep.  Haven't got round to reinstalling my video editors or games yet, but I've got everything I need for my planned C&M writing binge tomorrow - picking up in the middle of the conversation I was writing last week when Zeus forced me to stop.

The first 24 hours when AVG first started telling me my files were getting infected, and before I'd managed to analyse the damage and work out a plan of attack, were somewhat traumatic.  I occasionally have dreams where I switch on my computer and instead of starting Windows like it should, it goes off and does loads of really weird stuff that doesn't make any sense at all, and what with me being the creature of habit and logic that I am, I tend to find those dreams quite upsetting.  So to actually have a program running around with a mind of its own and breaking things was pretty much a nightmare come true.  However, the nightmare is over, and although I might have lost the odd file here and there, I've been able to preserve all the files that I felt any attachment to, and the reformatting has had the beneficial side effect of clearing up quite a bit of software rot.  As I sit writing this, Beastie feels much like its old self... just a bit less cluttered.  And I've got Dusty the Hamster scuttling round my room, as he often does of an evening.  So things seem back to normal, or as close as makes no difference, and I can now look back at the whole escapade a bit more philosophically.

The week without a functional computer did have its downsides, but it actually had several upsides as well.  Among other things, it prompted me to spend more time working on the analogue stuff, and I've been very happy with some of the drawings I've got done - especially the exterior of the Papercuts house, which I'm quite looking forward to showing off once the rest of the drawing is done.  I also began reading Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book on "True Happiness", from Psalm 1, just hours after getting the first infection alert, which I have to say made a very interesting contrast.

All in all, I couldn't help thinking that quote from Portal seemed quite appropriate as today's headline.


Hopefully, normal levels of Colclough-ness will be resumed soon - I mentioned earlier that C&M will restart on Monday, and despite the fact that Papercuts seems to be creeping along very very slowly, the project is actually more alive than the casual viewer might be led to believe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and evict Dusty from on top of my pillow.  Again.


- The Colclough

My Hundred Days

I've been racking my brains a bit trying to think of something special to do for my 100th post on A White Horizon.  Hannah's done some interesting things for landmark posts, and I initially thought about offering my own take on one of those, but then I decided that the 'centenary' is too big a moment to settle for plagiarism.

On Monday night, I had an idea: a list of 100 of the most important/formative/memorable days of my existence.  I've done some maths and worked out that I've been on this planet for 8664 days (plus however long I was in development pre-birth), so on average I need to pick just one day in every 87 to feature on this list.  Here I go...

In chronological order:

1. Sometime in the second half of May 1987: conception.  Psalm 51:5b, and all that.
2. 18 February 1988: started being born.
3. 19 February 1988: arrived at a hospital in Portsmouth, still inside Mum, and after 24 very unpleasant hours (I don't remember them, but Mum and Dad say they were terrible and I'm willing to bet I didn't enjoy them much either), I finished being born at about 22:45.
4. Early-mid March 1988: at the age of only 3 weeks, I moved house for the first of several times, from Havant to Bristol.
5. 13 June 1990: lost my only-child status as Catherine was born, at about 23:15.
6. Probably circa 1992: that incident with the stuffed E.T. toy.
7. December 1992: that school Christmas party.  I served my first two terms of school (yes, the use of prison-esque terminology is deliberate) at a little primary in Bristol, which I hated.  I had numerous disagreements with my teachers, despised several aspects of the place which I thought were illogical (why did I start off in Class 5, for example?  I thought you should begin at the beginning, and start in Class 1?), and never made a single friend.  And then there was some sort of party, I think a pre-Christmas one, and there was a misunderstanding as to whether the party food was instead of or in addition to the usual packed-lunch requirements, and after wandering around the building being confused for half of lunchtime, I ended up having to eat some sort of sandwich things that really didn't appeal.
8. Somewhere from September 1992 to March 1993: on the subject of that school, there was also the incident where my teacher carried me kicking and screaming (quite literally, I'm afraid) to a different classroom to see how well-behaved the children were there.  I fell compelled to point out that I really thought I had a genuine grievance to throw that strop about - I wasn't just being difficult because I felt like it.
9. Circa 1992 / 1993: I vaguely remember being shown Snow White and the Seven Dwarves sometime in my early days.  In retrospect, it was probably just after the film's digitally-remastered re-release.  It might have been my first cinema trip, and it's definitely the first film or TV material that I specifically remember seeing.  The bit that stuck in my head was this rather charming moment in the dungeon - I hope that doesn't say anything too bad about the state of my head?
10. Early March 1993: we moved from Bristol to Cardiff.
11. Sometime in 1993: cottoned on to the fact that each day and each year had its own number - I understanding the calendar, basically.  No idea what date this was, but I definitely remember it was in '93.
12. Probably 1993 or 1994: my school class (I liked the school in Cardiff much better than the one in Bristol, by the way) was taken up to the staff room and fed small pieces of cooked turnip.  I really don't know what they were trying to prove, I just remember the veg.
13. Probably late 1994 or early 1995: was allowed to make a cardboard model house at school (can't remember what academic context it might have had).  It only had a ground floor, and my ambitious lighting scheme was curtailed by the fact that they only let me have one bulb, but otherwise the project ranks as one of the high points of my three years in school.
14. September 1995: began home education.
15. Second half of 1995: on a visit to someone else's house (I can't remember whose) I came across a Buzz Lightyear toy.  Didn't think anything of it at the time, but that inconspicuous moment was the first time I crossed paths with Pixar Animation Studios.
16. Tuesday 26 September 1995: started keeping my oldest surviving diary/journal thing.  The first entry was about some sunflowers I'd been growing in the back garden, and the book has some of the petals (remarkably well-preserved) laid out on its front cover under some sticky-backed plastic film.
17. Wednesday 4 October 1995: the second entry in the sunflower journal records the fact that "we saw lots of snails on dead twigs" - I still remember the incident: the 'twigs' weren't technically twigs, but the dead stems of some annual hedgerow plant, two or three feet high, and the shiny little yellow- and brown-shelled snails which caught my attention, sitting on the dead twigs in large numbers, were almost certainly Cepaea hortensis.  This might not have been the very beginning of my fondness for the species, but it was certainly very close to the beginning, and an important formative moment.
18. 6 January 1996: we left the UK for a two-year stay in Hong Kong, where Dad had got a contract to set up a test lab for a government agency.
19. Later January 1996: found a two- or three-inch-long shell in a gutter, white with dark-brown spots.  Kept it (and, I'm sure you'll be glad to know, cleaned it).  It turned out to be the first of several of its species that I would acquire in Hong Kong, and it kicked my recently-formed interest in shells into a whole new gear.
20. Late January / early February 1996: moved into our new flat at 17G Orchid Court, Sha Tin, which we would call home for nearly two years.  The block of flats, along with four others, is on the roof of a shopping centre, whose McDonalds' and Pizza Hut outlets would be a lifeline, and there was also a musical fountain in the middle of the main atrium, which I found endlessly fascinating.
    
21. Saturday 22 June 1996: one of the occasional Saturday mornings on which I went with Dad to his lab.  I don't know whether it was the first, but I saw fit to record this one in my journal.
22. Summer 1996: my conversion to Christianity.
23. Can't remember if it was the autumn of 1996 or 1997: was told I would be taking part in the Sunday School musical production for Christmas, and was duly packed off to the upstairs classroom where the first rehearsal was taking place.  I hated it with every fibre of my being - I can't and won't sing on a stage, and nobody has any right to tell me otherwise - so I stood at the back of the group in ferocious silence, with my arms folded and (I'm told) a glare like a thundercloud.  Once the adults concerned had realised I really wasn't going to sing, they decided to let me be the narrator instead, which suited much better.
24. Saturday 28 September 1996: went for a walk in the local park, and picked up a load of leftover wax from the candles used in the Moon Festival lanterns the previous night.  Made a candle of our own from the leftovers.
25. Sunday 27 October 1996: my baptism.
26. Wednesday 27 November 1996: went round the local park to see the giant lanterns that had been set up for the Zigong Lantern Festival.
27. Sometime in 1997, I think, but it could have been late 1996: our train stopped at a station which happened to offer a view of the road where our bus route to church, the Kowloon Motor Bus 85, went - and on the road below I spotted an 85.  But not just any old 85.  Instead of the dull-yellow colours which 85s usually sported, this one was white - which probably won't mean much to you unless I explain that the white livery was reserved for air-conditioned buses.  After several months of suffering our way to and from church in non-air-conditioned buses, KMB had finally seen fit to put air-con vehicles on the route.  That made me enormously happy.
28. Saturday 4 January 1997: drew the first in a series of pictures (each comprising four A4 sheets end-to-end) showing various villages in a fictional country of my own creation.
29. Tuesday 11 February 1997: went down to Hong Kong Harbour to see the Chinese New Year fireworks show.
30. Early 1997: went to the cinema to see Star Wars 20th-anniversary Special Edition.  It mostly went over my head, but repeat viewings on rented VHS tapes over the next few years were better appreciated.
31. Wednesday 28 May 1997: Ben born, 20:53.
32. September 1997: left Hong Kong for a 3-week trip to Australia, via Manila Airport in the Philippines.
33. Later September 1997: discovered a shell shop in Townsville, North Queensland, and was struck by several specimens of the Venus Comb Murex.  Couldn't afford one at the time, and had to wait years and years to get hold of one.
34. Friday 9 January 1998: touched down at Heathrow 4 in the early morning, back on native soil for the first time in two years and three days.  My diary says Auntie Tina met us at the airport, but nobody else seems to remember that point.  We immediately head back to the old lair in Cardiff, and on the way make our first crossing of the New Severn Bridge, which was opened in our absence.
35. Friday 23 January 1998: we acquired our purple Ford Galaxy, which we gradually ran into the ground over the next 13-and-a-half years.
36. Saturday 13 June 1998: we went to a Christian home educators' meeting, and meet a family called the Johnstons for the first time.  I certainly didn't appreciate the gravity of this moment at the time, but it turns out to have been very, very important day.
37. Sometime in 1998: completed the loft conversion which we'd done to create a new play room.  Began building a new incarnation of my lego-and-cardboard city.
38. Sunday 28 March 1999: first visit to Yateley Baptist Church.  I've been there so long now that it almost seems weird to think that there was a first visit.
39. Monday 2 August 1999: I woke up late for a Monday, realised that Dad didn't come in to say goodbye before setting off to Hampshire for the working week, and started getting a bit upset, before it turned out he didn't go to Hampshire at all that morning, because Sophie had been born at 05:01.
40. Friday 22 October 1999: we moved out of our house in Cardiff, spent part of the day with friends at their enormous, half-decorated pile (which I found a fascinating place) and then went down to Devon to stay with Mum's parents in Plymouth for a few weeks.
41. Early December 1999: we moved into our current house in Hampshire, and started going to YBC regularly.
42. Sometime in 2001: Universe XGT had its beginnings in a Lego-based game while Tim was on a visit to Hampshire.
43. Last week of October 2001: joined our church's annual Youth Hostelling holiday, which was in Hastings that year.
44. Thursday 20 December 2001: Mum, Dad, Cat and me went to the Odeon Cinema, Guildford, to see The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the day after it opened.  My interest in filmmaking began during these 3 hours.
45. 15 June 2002: started work on my first-ever animation - a tiny little clip of a plant sprouting, with the frames created pixel-by-pixel in Microsoft Paint.  It was so bad that I don't plan on showing it to you, but it sowed the seed of better things to come...
46. September 2002: began GCSE studies with an online school called NorthStar.
47. 5 February 2003: began work on what would become my first completed CGI animated short, Martian Ballet, in collaboration with Dave Allwright.
48. Not really sure when, but possibly circa 2003: the night Dad and I helped Grandma and Grandad move out of their old house.
49. June / July 2004: completed GCSEs.
50. 28 August 2004: completed my first successful attempt at stopmotion, White-tack.
51. September 2004: began A-level studies at Farnborough Sixth Form College.
52. 5 January 2006: began work on Arthur & the Punk, the first in a trio of plasticene-stopmotion shorts which would take a total of almost four years to complete.
53. Sunday 19 February 2006: turned 18.  Now legally allowed to buy pointy objects, tobacco, booze and Quentin Tarantino films on DVD.  Didn't make use of any of these new-found rights.
54. Friday 9 June 2006: on the spur of the moment, wrote the first eleven episodes of a little webcomic called Cylinder and Miserable.  I put 4-digit numbers in the filenames (e.g. "Cyl_and_Mis_0001.gif" - now reduced to "CM-0001.gif"), but never really expected that I'd need all those zeros.  Time would tell...
55. July 2006: completed A-level studies at Farnborough Sixth.
56. Last week of August 2006: attended Root Hill Camp for the first time.
57. Last week of October 2006: went on my sixth and last YBC Youth Hostelling holiday.
58. Friday 27 October 2006: Tim and I filmed X-Battles GT1: Attacking, mainly as an exercise to let Tim have a go at stopmotion.  It turned out to be the first of several instalments in an increasingly technically complex series.
59. Monday 27 November 2006: published the first episode of Cylinder and Miserable.
60. Sunday 17 December 2006: I drew and published the first episode of an untitled Christian comic strip series, which I would later name Grace and Caffeine.
61. April 2007: went to India for two weeks.  Got sick.  Nearly died.  Never going back.
62. 28 May 2007 (or thereabouts): after a very long time with no animals in the house, we acquired the first of what would prove to be at least half a dozen hamsters.  Hammy the hamster was Ben's main present for his 10th birthday, and would stay with us for about two-and-a-half years.
63. Mid-late June 2007: after 8 months' work, I completed my giant mosaic project I See the Light at the End, in the knowledge that it will soon have to be taken down and put into storage as the building housing it is going to be demolished.
64. Monday 2 July 2007: got my email working properly after several months of downtime.  May seem trivial in retrospect, but it meant a lot to me at the time.
65. Wednesday 4 July 2007: as an offhand remark in an email, I suggest the formation of a group called "the Fellowship of the Unsubtle Lead Bricks", to comprise (initially) myself, Tim and Sarah.
66. Friday 20 July 2007: took, and failed, my first driving test.  Everybody then told me that all the best drivers fail at least once, and the experience spurs them on to become better drivers.
67. Saturday 4 August 2007: while at a barbecue at Tim and Sarah's, I came up with the beginnings of an idea which I called Alpha One's Laser Cafe.  The resulting stopmotion film has become the first instalment of a quadrilogy, with the third film half-way through shooting, and the fourth in the scripting stages.
68. Thursday 13 September 2007: passed my driving test on the second attempt.
69. Later September 2007: began my BSc course at Farnborough College of Technology.
70. December 2007: discovered the existence of Farnborough Tech's very small Christian Union.
71. Monday 31 December 2007:  completed Day-Glo! (the second of my three plasticene short films) with just hours to go before the end of the year, after a final push by Tim to complete the score - the first of several he has composed for my films.
72. Some time in early 2008: met one Lewis Connolly for the first time.  Apparently he'd already 'met' Cat over Facebook, but this was the first time any of us saw him in person.
73. Sunday 6 July 2008: had problems, and ended up rather depressed by the evening.  Mum then decided it was time to tell me her thoughts re: me and the autistic spectrum - which explained a lot.
74. Monday 7 July 2008: I drew the first of what would prove to be an ongoing series of pictures documenting my feelings on the Aspergers diagnosis.
75. Monday 14 July 2008: visited a small war museum in Northumberland.  The enormity of what had happened got to me somewhat.
76. Last week of August 2008: my third year at Root Hill.  Met Sam Arthur for the first time.  Can't remember if this was also the year I first met Josh Hall or if that was 2007 (a little help here, Josh?).  Also took over as official videographer for the week from camp organiser Dave Hollands.
77. May / June 2009: directed live-action film for the first time, on the college project One in a Million.
78. Tuesday 9 June 2009: wrote the 1000th episode of Cylinder and Miserable, finally making use of all those zeros I gave myself three years earlier.
79. Saturday 1 August 2009: Cat & Lewis married at YBC.  I was one of the ushers, along with Lewis' brother, and Cat asked me to sign the register as one of the witnesses.
80. Friday 4 September 2009: the beginning of a long and productive relationship between myself and Sony Creative Software's Vegas Movie Studio.  Proves that despite what some Mac fans claim, you can edit HD video perfectly well on the Windows platform.
81. Saturday 5 December 2009: completed The Probe Has Succeeded, the last film in my claymation triptych.
82. Tuesday 27 April 2010: having previously written the script for Megastropulodon Attacks! and been tasked with supervising the visual effects, I was now given the director's chair after Esam sacked the previous director for not engaging properly with the project.
83. Early June 2010: completed the final module of my BSc at Farnborough Tech.
84. Friday 23 July 2010: during a sugar-fuelled bout of creative zaniness in the small hours of the morning, Tim, Sarah and I created the first few episodes of our new cross-continuity comic strip Fort Paradox.
85. Thursday 22 July 2010: completed X-Battles GT4: Deflecting (made by Tim, Sarah and myself), reviving the long-running tech-experimentation series and moving it into the HD age.
86. Saturday 31 July 2010: drew the 178th and last episode of Grace and Caffeine, ending a creative undertaking which had been part of my life for more than three-and-a-half years.
87. Last week of August 2010: my fifth year at Root Hill, and my second time doing the camp video - this time in widescreen!  Lots of major highs and lows.  High points included meeting a certain sheep- and Doctor Who-obsessed ginger person for the first time.
88. Wednesday 1 September 2010: started blogging at A White Horizon.
89. Tuesday 26 October 2010: found Coco the hamster dead in his cage, and as everyone else except Mum was away on various trips all week, it fell to me to carry out the funeral.
90. Thursday 28 October 2010: graduated from Farnborough Tech with first-class honours.
91. Tuesday 2 November 2010: published the first episode of Fort Paradox.
92. Saturday 27 November 2010: went to the Root Hill reunion in London.  Got a scenic tour of several major rail stations and discovered that I don't like Harrods.
93. Late November / early December 2010: quit Facebook, because I could.
94. Friday 3 December 2010: invented the Binary Advent Candle.
95. Thursday 30 December 2010: did my first acrylic painting since finishing A-level Fine Art six-and-a-half years previously.
96. Saturday 1 January 2011: completed the 720p HD remastered version of Martian Medicine - likely the final iteration of the Martian Ballet Trilogy, after seven years (on-and-off) in the making.
97. Saturday 22 January 2011: Hannah's 18th-birthday party - in Kent.  Getting there involved what is, to date, my longest-ever solo road trip.  There was a point half-way back to Hampshire in the small hours of the next morning when I sat in the car in a motorway services car park and seriously considered sleeping there until the morning, but I decided this wasn't a great plan.
98. Thursday 27 January 2011: set myself a weekly-animation challenge under the title Arbitrary Stopframe.
99. Thursday 19 May 2011: saw a kingfisher on the River Blackwater, which inspired me to begin work on my most ambitious painting ever.
100. Monday 7 November 2011: completed my kingfisher painting circa 23:40, after five-and-a-half months in progress.

So there you go.  Me to date.


- The Colclough

A Microcosm of Extremities

I went for another of my walks by the River Blackwater this morning, and I came across a rather paradoxical little scene: some sort of bird lying dead in some grass (I'd guess a magpie, but there was enough missing that I couldn't really tell) - fairly unpleasant, but then again, things die. Fact of life. And then, sitting on the corpse, there was an immaculate red admiral butterfly, apparently unfazed by its mouldering perch.  I got within two feet of it, and it just sat there.

Ironic, I thought, that the closest I've ever got to a live butterfly in the wild was when it had decided to take a sunbath on top of a headless bird corpse.

I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to read some significance into the event, but then decided not to bother.  These things happen, I guess.

Then I thought about painting it.  The jury is still out on whether or not that's a good idea.

Speaking of painting stuff from the Blackwater, here's some more development on my kingfisher:

Untitled Kingfisher Painting (work in progress++)

I did some more work on it today, but I haven't got a photo of the latest increment yet.


- The Colclough

Saturday and Stuff

Spent Saturday in London with friends from Root Hill.  Despite having been to RH itself 5 times, this was the first time I'd been to any reunion thing.  Partly because I'm not a great traveller, and because it's expensive (although, to be fair, Sam's train ticket was a lot pricier than mine), and because I'm not always in the loop with these things, and so on and so forth.  But it was a good day.  It was good just being around other people instead of staying in the same house all the time.  Not sure how good my presence was for the other people, mind you, but it was good from my POV.

Started the day with a scenic tour of some of London's train stations while we waited for people to turn up, and as soon as we'd got the group together we went to Leicester Square and split up again for lunch - I say 'split up', although most of us ended up at the same table in KFC.  KFC was, as usual, KFC, so the food wasn't anything out of the ordinary.  (Random aside: my first introduction to KFC was in Hong Kong, where there was at outlet in the shopping centre that we lived on top of.  We spent a lot more time at the McDonalds though.)

Then came Harrods.

I don't like Harrods.

I think I went once before, years and years ago, but I didn't really remember much.  But it only took me about two minutes after walking in the door this time around before I decided that the shop really wasn't my scene.  The whole building seems to be a labyrinth of small spaces, filled with far too much stuff and far too many people, with nothing to indicate where the exits are.  We got split up and a bit lost somewhere around the second room, and out of the original fifteen/twenty-ish-strong crowd, I ended up touring the building with a splinter group of just 3 or 4 other people.  I think I kept mumbling something about the exit most of the way around the building.

There were two bits that sort of appealed: the Lego area within the toy department (whatever some people might say, you're never really too old for Lego), and the audio-visual department.  The AV area was showing a looped clip of Avatar on most of the screens, but I think they'd set up the TVs' colour balance wrong - yes, it's a very colourful film, but I'm sure the blues and greens weren't that overblown in the cinema.

The photo frame upstairs was unforgivable.  They had this 5 x 7 inch photo frame (not a digital one, just a bog-standard photo frame) made of metal settings and crystals, that looked just like some average piece of aluminium and cheap-coloured-glass tat from a downmarket gift shop, but apparently this one was made of rare and expensive metals and gemstones instead… so they had the nerve to ask £35,000 for it!  I kid you not.  A photo frame with an asking price of thirty-five grand.  I just stood there and stared in shock, and mumbled things about broadcast-quality 1080p HD cameras, very nice cars, and employing a full-time servant for a year, any of which would cost about the same amount of money.

Enough about that.

We relocated to the science museum for the rest of the afternoon, which was much better.  Last time we were there, I didn't get to see the 'Birth of Hi-Tech Britain' gallery, and had a nagging sense of 'should have done that' at the back of my mind ever since, so I took the opportunity to make up for the omission.

Dinner happened in the basement of a Pizza Hut in Piccadilly.  A lot of the pre-dinner conversation involved talking to Hannah about Doctor Who and the relative merits of Steven Moffat - it's nice to be able to talk to someone about DW without having to stop every two minutes to straighten out the chronology or explain what an Ood is.  My younger brother and sister have some sort of working knowledge of the show, but they can't always remember what happened in what order, and they'd probably draw a complete blank if I mentioned 'Hartnell' or 'Pertwee' or something like that.

The pizza, surprisingly, turned out to be an avocado-scented sock instead... uh... no, actually, it was pizza, just like it said on the tin.  I won't bore you with a long description of the pizza.  You already know how it goes - dough, sauce, cheese, etc etc.  (Speaking of avocado though, are you reading Fort Paradox, and if so how is your brain coping?)

So now it's over, and I'm back to the usual set of other stuff.  I'm nearly finished editing the Root Hill video (just 2 or 3 months in the cutting room this time, instead of 5 ish!), and I'm starting to think it would be a good time to cut together the aforementioned trailer.  Watch this space.

And finally: I'd like to say thank you to everyone who responded to my 'How much have I told you?' research exercise last week.  I'll post the 'answers' - i.e. a list of who/what all those things are, and where they come from - later this week, so you can find out what those names are all about.  8]


- The Colclough

Notice is Hereby Served

...of my intention to quit Facebook.

Because I can, is why.  If I can live without Facebook, I can live without it.  If I can't, then there's a problem, and I need to fix it - by the cold turkey route if necessary.

TBH, I think I can live without it quite easily.  I did for years and years, and I only got roped in to having an account because people at FCOT wanted to use it for coordinating college-related meetings and stuff.  So, now that FCOT is over, I've decided that for the sake of maintaining my individuality, free will and principles (yes, those), I shall deactivate my account.  The aforementioned principles are mostly to do with the fact that FB is a massive time-waster.  The vast majority of what goes on FB is a load of *beep*.

I've got a two-week timeframe.  There's a Root Hill reunion a week on Saturday, which is being coordinated via FB, but once that's over I shall quit.

If you want a more philosophical-sounding reason, then how about this: because your life should be more than the sum of your websites.  If you find yourself at the point where you couldn't survive without any given site, then that site has become too dominant over you, and you need to get rid of it.  I'm not ditching FB because I think it has come to that, but to prove that it hasn't.

I've just shut down my account on another site too.  That was Tailcast, past tense.

It began life as a social-networking-esque thing with an artistic slant.  The focus was on writing, drawing, painting, photography and music, as opposed to the "here's a pointless update on the banal stuff I did today" ethos of most Facebook posts.  A search through my old emails tells me that I joined on the 24^th of May, 2008 – nearly two and a half years ago.  That sounds about right.  It feels like a long time.

While I was there, I uploaded 81 visual pieces, and 27 written.  In total, over 100 expressions of myself, including some of the most personal and intimate things I have ever published.  The written pieces included my first blog (A White Horizon is my second).

But something went wrong – the seeds of it snuck in by the back door a long time ago, like so: “wouldn’t it be cool if we had a ‘shop’ feature, where you could buy cards and wall art and stuff featuring the artwork uploaded to TC?”  Well, fair enough.  But as time went by, and the site kept getting more and more polished, there was a gradual but definite shift in emphasis, away from the community spirit that made Tailcast what it was in the old days, and towards commercialisation.  At the beginning of September, I got an email telling me that any artwork which did not meet the minimum resolution for creating products would be forcibly set to ‘private’, effectively removing it from my profile unless I put in the effort to re-upload newer, higher-resolution versions.  Well, out of my 81 visual uploads, a mere 7 were deemed high-res enough to stay online, and the other 74 have vanished from my profile without a trace (unless I log in and click ‘manage profile’ – then I can see them, but they’re greyed out).

Now, having the option to make cards and wall art and stuff is all very well and good, but most of the time that’s not what people want to do.  Mostly, people just want to look at stuff.  I, for one, just wanted to look at stuff, not stick it on a mug.  And for the webmasters to make the unilateral decision that “low-res artwork is unworthy to stay online, even just for looking at” seems to me like shooting themselves in the foot.

I had been gradually (and unintentionally) drifting away from Tailcast anyhow, but that bizarre and unfriendly decision was the final nail in the coffin for my membership.   As of a couple of weeks ago, I have gone through all of my written material on the site and copied it all to my hard disk for posterity – didn’t need to do so for the visual stuff, as that was all on my HDD already – and about half an hour ago, I finally shut down my account.

Strange thing is, the whole website went HTTP 404 on me when I was about three-quarters of the way through copying everything.  It’s almost like the servers could sense my intention, and were making a last-ditch effort to stop me leaving.  But it didn’t work.  The site came back from the ashes, and I continued my exit procedure.

So, that's over.  And soon, FB will be too.  Not that I'm completely parting company with the internet, mind you - I've still got email, this blog, and my YouTube channel, among other things.  I'm just pruning off the sites that aren't contributing anything worthwhile to my life.

And who knows what else I'll come across later.  Watch this space!

- The Colclough

Do I have ze Papers?

Semi-random philosophical question: what are the most important pieces of paper in your life?  Books don't count, because if you included books, the list could get really enormous really fast.  So, just loose bits of paper.  Hmnnn...

I present, for your consideration, a list of candidates:

• A letter?  Could be, if you're in the habit of sending and/or receiving letters on paper.  Not for me though, as mine are nearly all in electronic form.  Haven't had a letter on paper in... uh... no idea actually.
• A cheque?  Depends on your financial situation 8p
• Something you wrote or drew?  I have thousands of these, and if push came to shove, one of them might win out - but a lot of them are pretty negligible.
• Your birth certificate?  Obviously important, but not that exciting.  After all, practically everyone has one.
• Your marriage certificate?  Much more exciting... if you have one.  Which I don't.
• Your death certificate?  Not really - you don't get one of these until  your life is over, so it can't count as an important piece of paper *in* your life.
• Your driving license?  Could be a winner for petrolheads, but from my point of view it's more a practical tool, rather than a thing of emotional significance.  Well, I say that after having had it for more than three years, with the trauma of failing my first test long since lost in the sands of time.  You might regard your license as your most important piece of paper for the first few months after you get it.
• A certificate of academic achievement?  Quite possibly, especially if it says something about first class honours.

I haven't actually picked one myself.  I just felt like having a philosophical ramble.

But then again, having been given a piece of paper at Guildford Cathedral yesterday which says something about Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours, I might just go for that one as my current choice for the time being 8]

I could take this as my cue to go tangential on the architecture of the Cathedral, but I'll leave religious masonry for another day.

It's a bit weird to find myself looking back on my graduation as a past event, after well over three years regarding it as something in the future.  Guildford may have one of the country's most minimalist and austere cathedrals, but it's a cathedral nonetheless, and being there with most of the other people on my course, all in matching superhero capes and funny hats (yes, we threw the hats afterwards) is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that sticks with you.  I think it will be, anyway.  It's interesting to question which aspects will be remembered - the determination of my cape to become asymetrical... the commentary on last month's haircut (which most of my coursemates hadn't seen yet)... the endless, hand-numbing applause... the long, oddly smug-yet-awkward walk down the aisle after shaking hands with the principal... the mildly inappropriate but not overly depressing weather... the funny puddings back at the college afterwards... or something else altogether?  Only time will tell, I suppose.

Some of the other guys have already got jobs - Steve said his mostly involves watching lots of Irish film trailers, which somehow seems inherently funny - and others (myself included) are still looking.  Or in my case, looking a bit, and writing monster movies on the side - as you do.

We didn't get professional photos taken.  We've got a Nikon D80 DSLR, and we adopted the tried-and-trusted digital photography method of keep-on-pointing-and-shooting-until-something-works.  Well, more or less.  It wasn't quite point-and-shoot per se, but you get the idea.  But it was a heck of a lot cheaper doing it ourselves.

*long pause*

Uh... that didn't really feel like a properly-written ending, but I'm not sure what else to say, so I'm going to leave it there for now.  Photos maybe coming sort of soonish.


- The Colclough

A Life Concluded

Some blogs you see coming from a mile off.  Others you find yourself writing at a moment's notice.  This is one of the latter type.

I've just buried Sophie's hamster, and got a little traumatised, so what follows is an exercise in catharsis.

We had Coco for about 14 months.  He was Sophie's third hamster, and our fourth overall (out of five to date - Ben has been keeping hamsters too). Although Coco wasn't one of the rodents that first inspired my dissertation film The Making of "Intergalactic Hamsters", he was one of the two who ended up featuring in it, so I had a bit more of a connection with him than I did with some of the others.

He seemed happy and healthy at the weekend, and I really don't know why he died.  I just looked in his cage this morning and he was sprawled on the floor, already gone.

Sophie doesn't know yet, as she's away on a church youth holiday until Friday.  I'm not looking forward to the explanations when she gets back.

But in the meantime, I've given him a decent burial.  He's in the raised flowerbeds in our back garden, along with his three predecessors, Hammy, Nibbles and Daisy.  I put him under a large stone, partly to mark the spot, and partly to stop the neighbourhood moggies digging up the grave.  By 'decent burial', I don't mean it was very elaborate - I just wrapped him in some tissue paper, along with a tiny little book that has been blu-tacked to the outside of his cage for months and months.  (I've been pragmatic a few times and pointed out to Sophie that hamsters can't read, but she's always insisted that it doesn't matter, and that he liked the book anyway, so it seemed an appropriate addition to his send-off.)  What I meant by 'decent burial' was more that, despite the simplicity, I tried to do it all with a certain amount of dignity.  It's what Sophie would have wanted if she'd been here.

So... it does seem surreal how fast you can go from not knowing/thinking there's a problem, to writing about the funeral in the past tense.  Such is the fragility of life on Earth, I suppose.  How people cope without any conception of life after death I have no idea.  If I thought this life was all there is, I'd probably have lost the will to live and gone raving mad by now.  Thank goodness for eternity.



- The Colclough

Coco as he will be remembered - alive and well and sitting on a QWERTY board, in a publicity still from the set of "Intergalactic Hamsters".