Pete Ashton’s Blog

In which I realise I’ve been a bad blogger and start a process of daily blogging about whatever I’ve been up to, principally for the benefit of my mother.

Been ill these last few days with a throat infection, as followers of my Twitter will no doubt be aware. Twitter is great for moaning about such things without worrying that you’re really annoying anyone - Pete’s ill, skim! - but it did bring a couple of angels to my door armed with soup and friendship, so thanks angels.

Woke up this morning with a bit of a stab in the neck area but after a brief doze it had gone by noon which was promising and after a fairly active day it looks like the sickness has passed. Hooray! Now I have to get back to work. Boo! But I like my work so that’s okay.

After a few hours catching up on stuff, mainly Custard Factory blogging since that’s my main bread-winning activity right now, it was off to Digbeth for the launch of The Secret Garden, a fascinating art installation on a pointless patch of land on Floodgate St that has been overgrown for 15 years. Three artists have cleared it and are using shipping containers and existing structures to do art and that. I only had a few minutes to hang there but I liked what I saw and shot some TTV.

Then it was off to the TIC to give a talk with Stef on Web 2.0 for the Creative Networks gang. It was being filmed so should emerge online at some point in the hopefully not to distant future (though I note the Soweto Kinch talk from last month isn’t online yet…) so I won’t try and summarize it here but I felt it went fairly well. It’s nice doing talks with Stef as we’re coming from the same mindset but from completely different directions, if that makes sense, so we keep each other in check, but I’m thinking I’d like to develop a series of these on my own as there’s only so much you can cover in an hour and we never seem to cover enough of it. I’m thinking a weekly course of six seminars going into some depth. Just need to find a venue…