My, my, my - what an interesting weekend I have just spent. Shattered and brain-dead, I got home yesterday afternoon and figured I could have gone straight back out and done it all again. You get a certain momentum beneath you once you start running with these things that's hard to apply the brakes to. There are certainly plenty worse ways to spend your weekend than hanging out with 10,000 people and some friends you haven't seen in a good few months.
Friends like Millie Dollar...
...and Paul Sweeney:
Before scowling intently at tattoos that have been freshly loaded onto people with your other pals, Trent and Paula, in the vain hope that nobody will notice your hair has become three different colours since this time last year and the dominant colour is grey...
Before handing out some of these for top notch work:
(Thanks to Nicky Connor for these pics... just four of something like 800 and counting last time I looked)
Work aside - as that will be discussed elsewhere at length - there was a sit down meet with a literary agent, a discussion with an indie film-maker, my buddy Wayne Simmons came down to hang out, I got started on the long-planned tattoo on my other arm and met some lovely people who, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, I will meet again in the not too distant future.
Basically, my head is awash with a thousand possibilities and all I need to do is figure out just what the hell to do with them all. Patience and deep thought are required. Today however, the best I can do is take Hector out. So far, we've been to the woods in the rain and then after lunch, we went down to the beach and walked until we could walk no more.
In other news from the past 24 hours, I was also asked to do some work with Radio 5 last night - and for the third time in my history with them, the station sold me a pig's ear. I should have known better because it looked like a pig's ear before we even began but you know... you turn up in the hope that 'this time' will be different. That will be the end of that 'relationship' then. Words fail me as to exactly how much of a waste of airtime that station is. I was bang in the middle of the Philip Roth documentary too...
Finally, sometime last year, I read a book that I really liked. I mailed the author and told him so. I also told him that I thought his publishing house had misrepresented him with the cover design and duly, redesigned it for him simply because I dig designing book covers. Come full circle to this morning and it turns out he will be relaunching the book across the world for your digital devices and would like to use it. I'll hook it up here just as soon as I know what's really going on with it but that was a cool thing to find in the inbox. First, I have to find which of my safe places I put it in...
...and before that I had best finish the introduction I was writing for my friend Dirk Behlau's new book. More on that tomorrow.