Pete Ashton’s Blog

My life is going to be pretty crazy this next week or so. While the nature of what I’m doing means I’ll be blogging a lot it won’t be business as usual and I certainly won’t be able to deal with the stuff I usually deal with (though of late I haven’t been dealing with it that well anyway so you might not notice a difference…)

In a couple of hours I get on a train to Cambridge. This journey should let me finish that article I blogged about last night. Thanks for the feedback there people.

Tomorrow Stef and I are running a couple of “breakout” sessions for Arts Council marketing bods about using blogs to communicate internally and to build new audiences and all that stuff. Should be fun.

Then we jump on a train to London, meet Jo, and go to the Guardian MEGAs awards at t’Dome. Swanky. That finishes about 1am when we’ll jump on another train to Gatwick and spend about 4 hours in a hotel there.

Then at some ungodly hour we have to get up and check in for a flight to Texas, arriving in Austin at 4pm local time, just as SXSWi starts. We’ll be meeting the rest of the W Mids contingent who are flying from Brum and you can track out activities on this blog which aggregates all our blogs, Twitters, etc. So if you’re just interested in me you can stick with this site, but I hope you’ll check out the others as it will be a collective thing.

One thing we want to do is be the eyes and ears of Birmingham at the event so if you want us to do anything leave a note here.

This goes on until Tuesday and we fly back into Brum on Wednesday. In theory I’ll then be back to normal, except I’ve been putting off a load of stuff until then. And I’m seriously thinking about booking a cottage in the middle of nowhere for a long weekend with nothing to do.

Where this leaves Created in Birmingham I have no fucking clue. Ideally I’d ramp it up given the attention of the award but it’s going to be tricky. I’ll try and post something on there tonight explaining everything and will of course report on there from the awards.

I’m still rather freaked out that all this is happening to me though I’m aware the modesty thing is getting a little tired. Hopefully it’ll all settle down over the next month and I can start putting all this stuff, which is currently floating around being all insubstantial, to work.

But above all, and if it’s not getting tiresome, thanks to everyone for everything over the last 18 months. Couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, there’s a chance I might have to say a few words on stage at the MEGAs. I’d like to big up Birmingham in some non-corny way so if you have any ideas, drop them in the comments!