Whimsical Musings of a Loon

It's that most, wonderful time...of the year! No, not Christmas (thankfully). It's summer festival time, a period of a few months when the media go music-latest-band-mad. Newspapers are packed with photographs of music revelers basking in sun...or wallowing bravely in mud and torrents of rain. And the obligatory retro-comeback star (a la Shirley Bassey) in wellies. But as much as I love my music (don't get me started on how much I adore Rufus Wainwright and how he re-seals my wounded soul), my favourite festival is actually one of the book variety. The 2009 Hay-On-Wye literary festival comes to a close, and once again I am left counting down the days to the 2010 festival. Hay-On-Wye has always been a favourite jaunt of mine. My parents took us there frequently as kids on rainy Sunday afternoons when we had exhausted all the local castles and museums. Admittedly, I probably wanted to go to Disney Land if I had had the choice, but I am glad for it now. It was at Hay I realise...

Thinking back at when I studied photography, *cue Hovis ad music* and yes I can remember that far back, there are always one or two images from prolific photographers that particularly re-appear in my mind's playback facility. Whether I liked the photographs or not, their power or impact obviously tattooed themselves into my subconscious. One such image was Diane Arbus' photograph: Child with Toy Hand Grenade. It's bizarreness intrigued and fascinated me, I wanted to comb every inch of the print with my eyes. But it also made me want to stride down the lecture room, pull the slide out of the machine and throw it out the window into the path on oncoming escaped wildebeests. A photograph that draws such a conflicted set of emotions certainly put a firework up my artistic undercrackers. The scrawny boy is pulling a gruesome face, he looks utterly strange; he's stood in an American park, his stance is odd and uncomfortable, his clothes ruffled. He's holding a toy grenad...

Lately I have noticed something that has increasingly taken control of my thoughts, something more annoying than the media's obsession with MPs expenses, and something more additively obsessive than Twitter (don't get me started on that alluring, genius web 2 concept that is the siren of social networking). No, my life has been taken over by another kind of life. That of the humble battery. It's been there a while, tinkering away in the back of my subconscious...a running process in the system. I think it began when I purchased my first (and only so far, I am proud to say) iPod. This was in about 1789, when iPods were clockwork and you had to carve out your playlists in slate. It wasn't long into my iPod ownership that I became rather intrigued by how long the battery would last with continuous useage. It was important to me, I felt at the time, that I could last a whole day away from the sanctuary of a plug socket or USB port, to be able to listen to Rufus Wainwright, ...

The new Poet Laureate was announced recently. For a split second I was alarmed. Duffy!? All she's done is ride around on a bike sounding like a demented goat in some very un-droll Coke advert. Who would want to be Poet Laureate, writing nice about a royal? At least this latest literary news, diverts flu and Susan Boyle. -Me