peteashtondotcom

Right, after all that excitement I’m off to Oxford for the weekend for Caption and comicky goodness with beer. The weather is notoriously good for Caption - only one year in ten does it rain - and the forecast is promising.

Please, Birmingham, try not to get attacked by Godzilla or some shit while I’m away.

A storm had been threatening all day and when it hit there was a massive thunderclap, like the sky had been torn apart. A few minutes later chum Matt phoned to ask if I’d just had a tornado tear through Bournville. Nah, I laughed back, just a thunderstorm. Stop exagerating! Um, they had in Moseley. He was walking through the streets as he talked, trees had been uprooted, houses smashed up, debris everywhere and, oh, Jez’s house had been hit. Broken windows. Not secure. And they’re on holiday.

I left a message for Jez and Nat, jumped on the bike (remembering to take my camera of course) and sped over there with a sense of chidlish glee. This was going to be cool. As I entered Moseley there was no sign of damage. Turning down Forest Road there was a bit of a traffic jam and then at the top of Church Road a makeshift police barrier blocking traffic. Uh oh. I passed through this and was suddenly confronted by the kind of eerie calm that happens after mild devastation. Trees in the street, leaves and tiles everywhere and people milling around looking dazed. Though not too dazed to take photos. Although that might just been a coping mechanism. When confronted by something really odd, take photos of it. I know that’s what I did.

After a bit I knocked on Matt’s door. He’d been at home when it happened and said everything went dark and he saw stuff flying around that he thought were leaves but which turned out to be tiles. Being American he has an instinct for dealing with this kind of thing so he shut all the doors and stood in the hallway while the tornado hit. I, of course, would have opened the windows for a better view so it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t there. He’d only had one window broken by a flying tile. He was very lucky. In fact Jez was very lucky. A house two doors down (which I inexplicably didn’t photograph) had its whole roof torn off.

I finally got through to Nat and got hold of their keys from a neighbour. They had 17 broken windows, about six of them completely obliterated. The entire ground floor was covered in glass including all the kitchen work surfaces. It seems the tiles had been shot through the windows like cannonballs. While it’s obviously not nice to be away when your house is attacked by nature it’s a good job they weren’t at home. I have this image of the kids playing in the living room as the tiles and glass hit them at 100mph and it’s not a nice picture.

Since Matt and I just had to keep and eye on the place we figured out a rota and I set to work clearing up the glass because what else can you do? The clearing thing seemed to be a common reaction as everyone in the street automatically started sweeping up the debris. From kids to pensioners, everyone was picking up stuff and creating large tidy piles of branches, wood and tiles.

Police response was very rapid, but then there is a station about 100 yards away. Fire engines were also there pretty sharpish as were the council tree surgeons with their tree-shredding machines. In fact most of the debris and blockages were cleared by the time I went home at eight.

As news spread via the word-of-mouth vine it emerged that the tornado had run from Kings Heath down to Small Heath so this was only a fraction. I texted ex-housemate Sam, who works in Small Heath, and she replied thus: “We were driving in it! Nightmare, bins and trees flying, buildings down, cars with trees in!” And there was I in Bournville getting all excited about the guttering overflowing…

In all a very odd afternoon. I thought it was going to be cool but it’s was just wrong and rather confusing. Of course it wasn’t a really bad tornado and I’m sure those from other countries will be scoffing at our over-reaction to a little bit of severe weather, but this kind of shit isn’t supposed to happen here. Birmingham weather is notoriously mediocre and boring - it’s either raining or it’s not raining. A fucking tornado is just utterly discombobulating.

Updates: Matt’s posted his tornado report.
This is the house two doors down from Jez that lost its roof

My first Freecycle acquisition is a 1980s Amstrad home studio thingy. I’ve been wanting to learn about hard-core audio stuff for ages but never found an entry point. This could be it. Or at least by the time I figure out how to record from this into my Mac I’ll be an expert. So many buttons and nobs! And no manual!

The story behind this is kinda neat. I’ve been following the Birmingham Freecycle mailing list for a few weeks and wrote about it here. When this came up I was very interested so I went to email the chap offering it, only to discover it was my chum Gareth who I’d turned onto Freecycle. Not only that, but the studio had been in my flat for five years - he’d just got it back in November. And now it’s back again. Some kind of destiny…

The post title is a line from the Mountain Goats song Letter From Belgium. We seem to be acquiring a fair amount of kit right now so it’s rather apt. We don’t need any stage makeup though.

I knew the Daily Express was getting worse but this is beyond parody.

via Jonathan, originally on the BBC news site.

I’ve just relaunched the BugPowder Weblog with a spangly new design. BugPowder, if you didn’t know, is the group blog I’ve been running with Jez since 2000 for the British small press and self-published comics community. I used to be a pretty active figure on that scene back in the 90s, reviewing things, publishing zines and running a mail order distro, but in recent years I’ve taken something of a back seat, retiring to the comfy chairs with my pipe and slippers while the next generation took over, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

However, BugPowder (which evolved out of my distro) refused to join me in the old scenesters home and despite my best efforts kept jumping around me demanding attention like a caffeinated puppy. I tried to give it away but hit a major problem - anyone who is involved and enthused enough to run something like this will already have their own thing going on that takes up all their energies. Back in the day when I started growing my little empire I had no interest in taking over someone else’s setup - I wanted to develop my own.

The obvious answer is to just mothball the whole thing and let it die, but as far as I can tell there isn’t really anything like BugPowder out there, at least in weblog form. And most frustratingly whenever I go to some small press comics event at least one person will gush to me about how BugPowder introduced them to the scene and how essential the site is for them. So if I can’t kill it then it might as well live a good life.

Since I don’t have the time or inclination to run BugPowder as a full-on comics resource (like, for example, Tom Spurgeon’s excellent Comics Reporter), and since there’s plenty of activity going on scattered around the web (as opposed to when BugPowder started in 2000 and hardly anyone had their own site), the best solution I can see is to rejig BugPowder as more of a linklog with quick and, most importantly, easy to post pointers to what’s going on. An aggregator of activity, if you like. We’ll see if it works.

And, of course, since it’s now a lot more streamlined it’s much easier for those involved in the community to post to it without detracting from their personal projects. Get in touch if you’d like to join or collar me at Caption this weekend.

I hope you think it looks nice That background image will be replaced soon by something that actually looks like piles of comics rather than an indistinct red smudge and do let me know if you think the hover-for-legibility sidebar is a really bad idea (doesn’t work in IE). If you’re interested in the more techy design aspects, the permalink structure now goes to Daily archives with Monthly as a secondary option while the RSS feed comes in daily chunks. Do let me know if anything is broken.