That Was The Week That Was — 5th May 2019

Due to an invitation I received on the previous Friday, on the Tuesday I found myself sat in the Russian Visa Centre, documents in hand hoping to rush through a visa application so I could speak at an event on the 16th May in Moscow. As soon as the staff member saw the date I was travelling he told me there was no way they could process my application in time and get my passport back to me before I travelled. This was largely due to the four day public holiday they were shut for after the Tuesday. I could see Moscow slipping away from me — somewhere I've always wanted to visit. There was however one last chance. If I travel to Edinburgh the following week, they do a next day service. So the train is now booked for a quick trip to Edinburgh this coming week.

My trip to Manchester wasn't totally wasted though as I met up with Richard Goodall, owner of the gallery with the same name, and signed a new set of Cinema Redux posters for the upcoming affordable art fair in London. Cinema Redux still seems to resonate with people.

Tobi Lessnow came to my rescue when the person I had commissioned to do the music for the upcoming Beyond Tellerrand titles informed me he could no longer do it. The bat signal went up and Tobi answered like a beat-wielding super hero. Within two days he had nailed it, creating a perfect, mysterious, beautiful soundtrack to accompany my visuals. Now I had to crack-on and finish it in time for the conference. The posters that go with the titles are now all done — each one different, created — like the titles — in Houdini. Looking forward to seeing all this in place in Dusseldorf very soon.

Friday was an early start, travelling down to London to install an update at PWC on the installation I had created with Kate Egan back in 2017. I spoke to the woman serving coffee at the station about her new coffee machine — nothing fancy just one of these press-it and forget-it touch screen things, but she wasn't a fan as she said it took way longer than before. Sometimes new is not better.

Before I headed into the clients giant HQ I wrote a spur of the moment Twitter thread about my approach to getting work. It seemed to really hit a note with people, resulting in my most retweeted thing this year.

Meanwhile back at PWC I noticed that some things had been unplugged, a touch screen had died and a few other things needed fixing. After giving it some TLC and updating the software, I also installed a way to remotely monitor things being output from the command line, to help me see any future error or bugs. I left it all up and running after testing for two hours.

On the train home the Birmingham Design Festival released tickets for the events happening in June. With such a great line-up apparently they sold over 2000 tickets in 24 hours. Much of the events are free so do check it out. I'll be speaking on the Friday at 2pm — please come along if you're around.

By chance I managed to get home to the north west of England by 5pm. Still amazes me that I can zip down to London, do what I need to do and be back home at a decent time, even if our trains still run on Victorian infrastructure.