The Bedside Crow

New Math: Equations for living

I'm liking this a lot. Mathematical formula applied to everyday concerns; it's such a brilliant idea that It's going to be ripped off from here to Sarawak and back again.

The author, artist Craig Damrauer has a website too, where we can all join in.

Buy the book.

Lonely Heart

Here's one for my writer friends.

Literary agents!  Save time when considering a manuscript by not bothering to read it at all.  Instead, set two beetles to race across the front page - one, a crippled, three-legged blind beetle named 'Accept', the other a steroid-taking model of beetle athleticism, wearing the very best beetle roller-skates, being pulled by a team of 16 beetle-sized horses and called 'Destroy Every Dream This Man Ever Had'.  Whichever beetle wins decides the fate of the author.  For a full set of rules and a licence to play (patent pending), write to sobbing, separated, newly alcoholic, chain-smoking man, 38, on pills for his nerves.  Box no 3524.

They call me naughty Lola.

forever england

A while back I wrote about Bollocks to Alton Towers a guide to uncommonly British days out. Well another entry that I didn't mention at the time is for Bekonscot model village.

Bekonscot was begun in 1927 by London accountant Rolland
Callingham in the garden of his Beconsfield home. His friend, James Shilcock, from Ascot (hence the name) donated the largest outdoor private model railway in the country, and together with his head gardener, Callingham commenced to build the world's first model village, opening it to the public in 1929.

Callingham died in 1961 and for some 30 years the curators of his folly were inclined to move with the times, modernising every few years or so, and even including at one time a miniature Concord with it's own runway.

In 1992 however, a decision was taken to restore the village to its early 1930s glory and this is how it remains today. Time stands still at a point where it never really existed or, as the boys from Bollocks would have it;

This is the same version of England that...haunts the dreams of Conservative politicians and local newspaper letters page correspondents - a  vision of a nation before some unspecified fall from grace, before the traffic wardens, the media studies lecturers, the new age travellers and the lesbians took over.

Now Liam Bailey has had the brilliant idea to document the lives of Bekonscot's 3000 or so inhabitants in close up, and in so doing, he has fashioned a very magical book. Justine says it reminds her of the world of Stanley Spencer.

Despite the resin nostalgia, all human life is here. From the woman struggling with her umbrella, to the little boy waiting in the doctors surgery with a saucepan stuck on his head, to the stern faced, but clearly perturbed father of the bride, to the games of football cricket and golf, the fairground and the crafty fag taken by the side of the canal - it is difficult not to look at these images without a genuine sense of yearning, for what I'm not quite sure, but it exists nevertheless.

Next please.