It’d be nice to get something back for the amount I spent on them, but in most cases, I’m happy to give them away. If you are in Liverpool I can drop them off or you can come and get them, or if you are further afield I’ll stick them in the post if you cover the cost of postage.

Most are in almost mint condition, some with a few scuffs and marks to the front covers.

Let me know if anything takes your fancy.

Creative Review:
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007 index
May 2007
June 2007 (2 copies)
July 2007 (2 copies)
August 2007 (2 copies)
September 2007 (2 copies)
October 2007 (2 copies)
November 2007 (2 copies)
December 2007 (2 copies)
January 2008 (2 copies)

Wallpaper:
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
August 2007 (2 copies)
September 2007
October 2007 (2 copies)
November 2007
December 2007

Apollo:
January 2007
February 2007
October 2007 (2 copies)
November 2007 (2 copies)
December 2007
January 2008 (3 copies)
February 2008 (2 copies)

Art Review:
December 2006
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007 (2 copies)
October 2007 (2 copies)
November 2007 (2 copies)
December 2007 (2 copies)
January 2008

Artists & Illustrators:
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007 (3 copies)
September 2007
November 2007 (3 copies)
December 2007 (3 copies)
January 2008 (3 copies)
February 2008 (4 copies)

Modern Painters:
December 2006/ January 2007
October 2007
November 2007 (4 copies)
December 2007/ January 2008 (4 copies)

The Art Newspaper:
December 2006
October 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008

Objekt*:
Issue 36 (2 issues)
Issue 38 (2 issues)
Issue 39 (2 issues)
Issue 40 (2 issues)

Provider*:
Issue 4 – fearless
Issue 5 – hybrid
Issue 6 – trans

*these are the ones I’m reluctant to give away for free, as they are a bit more interesting than the average art mag. Let me know if you are interested in them, and I’m sure we can come to an agreement.

Do you know of, or have a spare room in Liverpool, that might benefit from the addition of a medical student for a couple of weeks. She’s a girl so there’s no need to worry about rugby and beer kegs. And she’ll be renting a flat with a pal when her friend moves to Liverpool in a couple of weeks. In the meantime though, she could do with somewhere to live.

She gets up at 5:30 (quietly) to leave the house at 6:00 so she can get to her placement in Chester. Then she gets home at 8:00 in the evening. So, she needs somewhere quite central, or at least close to a Merseyrail station, and not too far out of town. Somewhere on the Chester branch of the Wirral line would be doable too.

Ideally, somewhere with a desk as well as a bed.

She’s lovely, tidy, and she can cook. She can also babysit on weekends if necessary. And if you have any lingering ailments that you’re worrying about, you can always get her to practise her diagnosing skills on you (that last bit is a joke).

I’ve put this on the internet, but obviously, I’m hoping that someone known to me, or someone known to someone I know might be able to help out. She comes highly recommended by me, so I’m looking for somewhere highly recommended for her to stay for a couple of weeks.

p.s. rent money is available, and under the rent a room scheme you can “receive a certain amount of tax-free ‘gross’ income (receipts before expenses) from renting furnished accommodation in your only or main home”. 

many thanks.

As I see it, there are 2 approaches to blogging in a personal context:

(1) Stick everything in the same place, it’s all me, people can read what they want, why hide things off in other places? That way, you have lots of lovely fresh original content, and can develop a loyal readership who really get to know you, rather than forcing people to go and look in 6 places if they want to read your stuff.

(2) Clearly separate the content into themed blogs, most people are browsers, looking for the content they want, and most people aren’t going to be interested in *everything* that you have to say. Lots of niche blogs helps curate lots of niche audiences, some of which may begin to overlap with each other.

The problem with (1) is that there is a risk that it becomes unfocused and people leave because there isn’t enough of the stuff they are interested in. But then the problem with (2) is that you don’t get as many updates and people stop coming because there’s not enough new stuff full stop.

Decisions, decisions.

Here’s my 6 current blogs, maybe you can help me find a way through this tangled mess.

Ninehundredmonths – That’s this one, it’s a personal blog, and usually the place where I stick opinionated posts about current affairs, politics and other stuff that I feel a burning desire to put ‘out there’.

The Pudding Blog- A food blog, about pudding. That’s pretty much it. I like pudding

No Brown Bags – Another food blog, about packed lunches. This was supposed to be a way of helping me get into the habit of taking my lunch into work and therefore eating more healthily, and saving money. So far it only has a couple of posts on it, as I found blogging about packed lunches as well as actually taking them in quite hard work – particularly as my intention* was to do it every day.

Magpies and Mermaids – This was supposed to be a blog documenting the long and tortuous process of finding and buying a house, and then a more ‘house and home’ type of blog. But the process of housebuying has so far been so quick, smooth, and without pitfalls (touchwood) that there really hasn’t been much to say except “woohoo, we’re buying a house that we really like” – which makes for a dull blog. I could still do the ‘house and home’ thing once we’ve moved in though, maybe.

That’s What She Said- The first of my work/project blogs. I’m a bit of a communications junkie: I’m fascinated by the processes, by information, by language, nuance, media, memes, conversations, and all that sort of thing. And I may shortly be going back into that world professionally, in what capacity I don’t know yet (hence it’s gone a bit quiet over there), but that’s where all that sort of thing goes.

The Vintage Market – ooh, a Posterous, that makes a change. This is my second work/project related blog, where I’m doing the research and fact finding for my vintage project. It’s only intended to be temporary, until I am ready to launch the actual vintage thing, but it’s on the list for the sake of completeness.

Now I could merge a couple of them – the food blogs would be obvious candidates, as would this one and Magpies and Mermaids. But would someone who was interested in my new (currently hypothetical) curtains be interested in my occasional rants about why it’s utterly stupid to believe in The Law of Attraction? And is the healthy packed lunch demographic necessarily the same as the ‘sod it let’s have seconds’ pudding eating brigade?

But if I don’t merge some of them? What then? A blog is somewhat like a pet, or a pot plant – it needs tending and attention, and it needs to be fed on a regular basis. If I can’t be a responsible blog owner, should I seriously think about having them put down, or sent to the bloggypound (is there such a place – there really should be, shouldn’t there? Like the Battersea Blogs Home)?

My solution so far (such as it is) has been to link from here to The Pudding Blog (or wherever) whenever there has been something new up there, but is that enough? Is that really the most elegant solution there is?

What do you think, dear reader? Should I merge the blogs together? Dump some? Use this as a hub to link to all the others? Just keep them all separate? Can a blog survive on as little as 2 posts a month?

Let me know what you think in the comment box below – my blog is in your hands.

#30dayblog

*see paving on road to hell for example.

So when day 2 of the blogging challenge told me to go and write a ‘top tips’ blogpost, I figured, I might as well start sharing some vintage love around.

So here, without further ado, are 6 reasons why you should consider adding some vintage style to your wardrobe.

1) It’s ‘on trend’.

Fashion has always looked backwards for inspiration, but in 2011, vintage is very much the new black. And whether we’re talking about boho chic, or rockabilly, there’s a vintage look to suit you. And at the moment, there’s plenty to choose from on the high street as well as in vintage shops, perfect if you want to dip your toes into things but are a bit nervous about dressing head to toe in second hand clothes.

2) It’s timeless.

Even when the fashion cycle moves on, you can still look good in vintage. As Yves Saint Laurent once said, fashion fades, but style is eternal. With vintage, you can use the benefit of hindsight to look and see which things have already stood the rest of time. You can break free from the shackles of the fickle fashion mags and use 80 years of quality design to create your own personal style.

3) It has history.

We live in an era of disposable consumption where clothes are bought, worn and discarded all in the space of a couple of weeks – but that’s not how things used to be. People had less, and they had it for longer. Vintage items in good condition today are in such good shape because they have been looked after by someone for the past 30 or 40 years. It may have been a treasured item, or maybe something someone saved up for. Whatever, you can be sure it wasn’t shipped across the globe in a container with 10,000 identical items.

4) It’s green.

We create enough waste already, and choosing something new over something old just adds to the landfill (especially if the new thing falls apart in a couple of months and gets thrown away too). Wearing vintage not only slows down the amount of rubbish we produce, but if you start to get used to things not being brand new and shiny, you may find yourself opting for fewer shiny things in other areas if your life too.

5) It’s great value for money.

I’m not just talking about things being cheap, although some of it is, indeed, cheap, but about value for money. I have a beautifully tailored, green wool, 50′s Jaeger suit that I got online for £60, and some utterly gorgeous evening dresses that set me back no more than £40-£50 each. Even if I could find such items new in the shops, I’d be paying 3 or 4 times the price for that sort of quality. But you don’t have to spend anywhere near that much, with vintage shops often having sales, or bargain rails where you can pick up all sorts of things for under £20.

Then, once you’ve got the bug, and the knack, regular trips to charity shops, jumble sales, and car boot sales can uncover some real treasures, sometimes for little more than than pennies.

6) It’s individual.

If you’re the sort of person who worries about turning up to a party and seeing someone else in the same outfit, then vintage is definitely something you should consider. It won’t guarantee that you’ll never see anyone in the same thing (unless you’re buying vintage *and* handmade of course), but it reduces the chances to almost zero.

And then of course, when someone asks where you got that amazing hat/dress/suit/bag/scarf, in the hopes of going and getting one themselves, you can smile sweetly and say “It’s vintage, darling”.

#30dayblog

My memories of the Brownies are fairly sketchy to be honest. Aside from the fact that it feels like it was a geological age ago, I was a bit of a sporadic attender. I remember that the subs were 20p a week, I remember the oath and the song (“we’re brownie guides, we’re brownie guides, we’re here to do our best…”), but mostly I remember that The Brownie Guide Handbook contained instructions on how to do the washing up properly.

Obviously, I’ve got nothing against doing the washing up (I have really) but as a suggested activity for girls between the ages of 7 and 10, that does rather set the tone doesn’t it?

Ok, so it was the 80′s, and no doubt times have changed since then, and I’m sure that the new handbook is a little less ‘domestically orientated’, but when I was a kid, one of my favourite books was the Spy’s Guidebook, which taught me how to leave secret codes for people, and create a mini spy kit in a matchbox. We lived by a park and a river where we used to swing on trees and nearly drown each summer, and more than once we climbed on the hay bales in the fields over the way to watch the sun set in the evenings. Maybe if there had been more of that sort of thing, and less advice on how to be mother’s little helper, I would have turned up to Brownies more often.

#30dayblog

In the meantime, I’m going to focus on ninehundredmonths as my main personal blog, and to get me back in the habit of regular posting I’ve signed up to the 30 day blogging challenge from Nikki Pilkington, SEO expert and all-round good sort.

I’ve been blogging on and off for over 5 years now, but I’ve been majorly slack since The Artfinder’s Blog went to the great blogroll in the sky (long story), so I’m hoping that the 30 day challenge will be able to give me a kick up the digital bottom and offer some new tips and advice too.

It’s free by the way, so if you have a blog, or you want to blog, why not sign up for the challenge yourself? What could go wrong?

The thing is, as I see it, with AV, everyone gets more than one vote, you, me, the people who vote for the comedy candidates, everyone. The only difference is that as the process goes on, some people’s votes change.

Here’s how it works. You have 5 parties standing candidates – we’ll call them A, B, C, D and E. And for ease of explanation we’ll say that as well as being listed in alphabetical order, they are also in order of popularity.

If, after the first round of voting, no candidate has more than 50% of the votes then, essentially, the election is run again, but without the least popular candidate, in this case, E.

So, in an election between A, B, C, and D, it is assumed that if you voted for A, B, C, or D last round, you’ll vote for them this round – they are, after all, your first choice. If, however, you voted for E then your second choice vote is counted, because you can’t vote for your first choice any more. So, everyone gets to vote, again, but some people’s vote changes (unless they choose only to put a first choice down, which they are entitled to).

If, still, no candidate has a majority, then the process is repeated. Everyone’s votes are counted again, but if you voted for the least popular candidate then you have to vote for your second choice (or third, if you previously voted E), or abstain.

If we had to go to the ballot box after every round, it would be clear that no-one gets more votes than anyone else. The only reason it feels like some people get more votes than others is because some people can’t vote for their first or second choice in the later rounds.

I’ve been fairly sure that I was going to vote Yes to AV, and I was looking forward to reading DAG’s criticism of it, in case he’d seen something in AV that I hadn’t considered, which would change my mind. I’ll be honest, if the worst criticism is that I can go all my voting in one go instead of having to have a week of visits to the polling booth for multiple votes, then I’m sticking with my initial decision.

Yes to AV – it’s not perfect, but then, what is?

If you buy into the rhetoric of the current administration, then tough decisions need to be made, and libraries are a luxury that we can no longer afford, because nearly all information is available online these days, and books are getting cheaper by the day. Personally I’m not convinced – aside from the arguments about the significant difference in price between cheap and free, the fact that libraries do far far more than just give out books, and the point that a library, once closed, is very very unlikely to reopen in ‘better times’, there’s something else that a library offers that you really can’t get anywhere else.

The ability to browse.

I went into the library thinking I might pick up something about buying a house, but I left with a book by Iain Banks and a book about the Black Death in the British Isles. Yes, I know you can browse in a book shop, and I might have bought the Ian Banks book from Amazon or Waterstones, had I not put myself on a book buying crash diet (see, buying a house). But the second book I almost certainly wouldn’t have found or bought. It’s something that I’m interested in already, yes, but I knew nothing about this book, or the author, and I wasn’t looking for a book on the plague, so spending £20 on the hardcover version would have been quite a big risk.

But the library removes that risk. If I don’t like it, or I discover that it’s written really badly (although so far, so good on those scores) I can just take it back to the library and take out something else instead. And that’s at the heart of the importance of access to information. We need to have access to the information that we’re not looking for as well as the information that we are. Otherwise we are in danger of becoming more and more polarised, more and more tribal, more and more insular and less and less able to see beyond the end of our own nose.

We live increasingly self curated lives these days. We search online for the things that we want to read, we sky+ the programmes that we know we want to watch, we jump from link to link in the online version of our daily paper of choice, so we don’t have to look at the stories that don’t interest us, and our iTunes suggests music that we might want to listen to, based on the music that we already own.  And there’s nothing wrong with this, but it means that we are, slowly, cutting out opportunities to discover something new, something unexpected and something that we hadn’t considered before.

The public library is the antithesis of this. By its very definition it has to cater for more people than just you, now. It’s a collection of information that has been collected over many decades, for many people, and as such, is the ideal location to stumble upon something new.

Let’s look at that really big number. 200,000. Two Hundred Thousand. That is, indeed, a really big number. So big in fact that I don’t really have a frame of reference for it, I could think of it as 2.2 Wembly stadiums, but that’s still quite a big lump, so how about spreading the number out across the whole country.

There are 151 Primary Care Trusts in England, if we share those abortions out per PCT we get down to a number of about 1324. And that still seems like quite a large number, but it’s one that I have a better idea about.

But the abortion figures area about Britain, not England, so lets take a different measure, let’s try constituencies.

In the UK there are 650 constituencies , if we apply the number of abortions per year to the number of constituencies, we get… 307.69

Ok, that’s a smaller number, and that’s per year, so it works out at about 5.9 per week. So in reality, what we have is, about 1 abortion per day, per constituency, with one day off a week.

Now, if I were to ask you whether you thought 200,000 abortions a year was too many, would you give me the same answer as if I asked you whether less than 6 per week per constituency was too many?

Suddenly that number doesn’t look so big any more does it? Can you imagine an MP standing up in the houses of parliament and saying “Today, in my constituency, one woman had an abortion (unless today was the day a week when no woman had an abortion). We must stop this sort of thing!!”.

The basic message of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Law of Attraction’ is this, that you get what you focus on. Focus on illness, and you’ll get ill, but focus on health and you’ll get better. Focus on debt and you’ll have debt upon debt piled upon you, but focus on wealth and people will start appearing and giving you money, right out of the blue.

Now, in a ‘power of positive thinking’ sense, some of this makes sense. As Richard Wiseman discovered in The Luck Factor (a much better and more useful book), people who believe that they are lucky, are actually luckier. It’s not that they necessarily come across more ‘lucky’ situations, it’s just that they notice them, and are open to them. If all you see is a mountain of debt, then it’s very difficult to look at the opportunities that may be out there to help you get out of debt, and it is well-known that the immune system can be effected by your mood and expectations – and if that’s as far as ‘The Secret’ went, then it would be a reasonably dull if useful book. But it doesn’t stop there.

Proponents of ‘The Secret’ believe that ‘the universe’ is actively aware of your thoughts and actively, physically, literally changes the world around you to ‘manifest’ those thoughts into your life. They regularly use the term ‘quantum physics’ as though they have any concept of what it means, to make it sound like it’s based in science, on the understanding that people will accept all sorts of crap if you are promising them an easy end to all their problems.

They will recount all sorts of ‘spooky’ anecdotes to show that it does work, really – a favourite is the ability to locate parking spaces when you need one. It goes a little something like this…

“I was driving into town the other day, and I was running late, and it’s always really busy where I was going, but I really focussed on there being a parking space near to my appointment, and when I got there, there it was!”

Now to believe that these two events (thinking about a parking space, and a parking space being available) have any sort of causal relationship at all requires you to accept one or more of the following things.

• That ‘the universe’ has nothing better to do than make sure that you are not inconvenienced by having to park further away from your appointment than you want to
• That ‘the universe’ has created more matter where there was none before in order to literally create a new parking space for your car
• That ‘the universe’ made the person who was already parked in that space return to their car and move it at just the moment that you turned up, even though they weren’t planning on moving their car yet
• That ‘the universe’ created some sort of visual illusion or fog so that even though there was an available parking space, no-one else that was looking for a space could see it
• That ‘the universe’ kept everyone who wanted to park in the area out of the area until you had found the parking space that you were looking for.

Now, you may say that people who use ‘The Secret’ to find parking spaces are delusional, but that in general, on the big things, on the ‘karmic, you get what you think about’ scale, it does work – and you’d still be wrong.

For a second, stop thinking about the people who have had good things happen to them. Don’t think about the people who won the lottery who ‘just knew’ that this was the week when their numbers were going to come up, because every week there will be millions of people who have that same feeling – until their numbers don’t come up. Let your mind linger on the darker side of life, on some of life’s unfairness, some of its tragedy. Pick anything you want – 9/11, Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, child abuse, cancer, The Holocaust, Alzheimer’s, the bubonic plague, the Columbine school shooting – take your merry pick.

Now, think about the people involved. For ‘The Secret’ to hold water, each and every one of the people who was affected by those events had to have attracted it to themselves somehow. Now maybe ‘the universe’ did some forward planning and put all the people who were thinking about tsunamis on that beach at the right time, and maybe while it was doing that it was delving into the thoughts of unborn children to make sure that they were born with congenital problems which killed them within a few hours, and don’t forget it was doing this at the same time as it was putting a £5 note on the pavement infront of you when you were ‘just thinking that you needed to get some cash out of the ATM for your night out later’.

Now I suppose it ‘might’ have done that, maybe.

But to take ‘The Secret’ even slightly seriously, you have to accept an incredibly narcissistic world view, where you are not only the centre of your own world, but everyone elses too. And you have to absolve everyone else of all of their actions in the way that they interact with you. The man who rapes you on the 3rd date is no more culpable than the man who turns up with roses – you attracted them both. The customer who robs a shop is no more responsible for his actions than the millionaire who comes in and decides to buy the whole shebang – you attracted them both. And so to believe that ‘The Secret’ can work for everyone, and that it does, in fact, apply to everyone on earth, is, to put it mildly, logically inconsistent.

If you can live with that, then that’s just peachy – personally I like a bit of reality and perspective in my life. It makes it so much easier to prepare for the unexpected.

In case you’re still thinking, ‘yeah but, yeah but, yeah but’ – go and read about confirmation bias , selective attention , coincidence , and the law of large numbers. All will be explained, and without the need for a single quark.