Space Invader invaders The Outsiders gallery, London.

Space Invader currently has a show at The Outsiders, in Soho. It’s not quite as epic as his 1000th Parisian Invader show earlier this year – but you can get Invader waffles.. Mmmm. There’s also a cool video of the artist at work in the basement along with an invaded disco ball. Or you can drop a cool £5000+ to buy an official alias on one of his many works. Hint: It’s getting close to Christmas and the show’s on till Christmas Eve… Click here for a few pics.

And extra Invader bonus.. he’s also put up a few new tiled beauties around London while here for the exhibition. There’s a big one outside Lazarides gallery on Rathbone place (see below) and also a few down in Brixton according to Street Art London. Huzah!

Spin forward to today, and the whole of England, if not the world, is heading towards a real sea change. Arguably one of the people who really put the ‘terror’ in the ‘war on terror’ was facing his own trial of sorts. Rupert Murdoch and his son, answered questions from British MPs regarding his newspaper’s apparent repeated and callous disregard for the law in the pursuit of a story. The owner of the biggest propaganda machine in the US if not the world, Fox News, sitting front and center as the story himself. This may not seem like much, but the number of influential people this looks to be impacting is fascinating and disturbing. It shows that with our modern, connected, social media rich communication there is no way for a story to be kept under wraps, under the control of media cartels who only seem to answer to their bottom line not the public’s best interest.

So as I got ready for my usual run along the Thames Embankment this evening, I thought maybe I should avoid Parliament. Stay away from the melee. Then I realised that this was a moment in history that I did not want to miss. One of those times you remember always and tell your grandchildren about. As I ran through the crowds gathered around the streets, and the media tents brightly lit on the lawn, I could feel the sense of excitement and anticipation. A buzz as people saw the moment happening, when a brighter future emerged.

A few weeks ago Gerard Smith, the bassist from TV on the Radio, died from lung cancer age 34. I found this out in New York, sitting in the flat of my friends who live above Union Pool – the very place I’d first seen TV on the Radio play with Gerard in a small, intimate, sweaty and fun filled gig. Sad news at any time, but especially so in that situation, and my thoughts immediately turned to his friends, family and bandmates and the shock of someone dying so young.

Like most TV on the Radio fans, I never knew Gerard as anyone other than a member of the band, playing wonderful music that made us smile, dance and sing. but one moment will stay with me that I wanted to share. In July 2009 TV on the Radio played Brixton Academy, shortly after playing a more intimate gig at Shepherds Bush. In coming out from the plastic cup strewn hall, we found a crowd of people gathered around a t-shirt vendor on the street. The t-shirts, bad knock offs of official merchandise, were laid out on the ground to catch happy fans on the way out of the gig. What made this scene so different from every other time, was that this time two of the band members themselves were helping sell the t-shirts. Jaleel and Gerard were laughing, smiling and trying to convince their fans that these were the best t-shirts ever much to the enjoyment of everyone around, especially the t-shirt vendor. A beautiful moment. Gerard, sorry the photo isn’t worthy of it, but the memory you left is one of the very best. Happy travels.

Weekends round here seem to oscillate between fun adventures outside of town and homebody sessions. This weekend is very much homebody, catching up with errands and geek activities such as installing new computer operating systems, watching the entire extended edition of Lord of the Rings (classic being ill recovery movie) and finding out that Crucial seem to have run out of MacBook Pro memory right now – what with that? Guess my ageing laptop will have to wait for its final upgrade. All this is in stark contract to last weekend, where a group of us headed off to celebrate Miette’s birthday at the lovely Castle Farm in Capel-y-Ffin right in the Black Mountains.

Castle Farm is a lovely location, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, although as we arrived on a windy, almost moon-less night it seemed less than idyllic – no small thanks to Tom suggesting a recently escaped psycho from a local prison and the wind trying to throw everything at our windscreen as we crawled up pitch black, windy country lanes avoiding fallen branches. All this city-folk fear subsided once we were inside the large, but cost house and had a roaring fire lit. Oh, and after a few drinks. A few hours later, everyone else arrived and the weekend’s party began in earnest with many more logs being burnt.

The next morning was still overcast and windy, but we could now see the epic view out the windows. Nestled in a valley between two spurs of the Black Mountains, the farm has a stunning outlook, green fields dotted with windswept trees and sheep. Although it was less than perfect walking conditions we took a ‘brief’ (four hour) constitutional up to Lord Hereford’s Knob where the wind tried its best to blow us off. The hill that is. Mountain scaled we pushed through the wind, back down in the rapidly fading afternoon gloom to the warmth of the fire, where everyone else was enjoying Britain’s Got Talent, pretty much in the same place we’d left them four hours earlier. For some reason they all seemed pretty sure this was the better choice… The evening passed in a haze of good food, cake, board games, possibly some vino and enjoying a roaring fire as the wind howled outside the window. Perfect.

Weekend’s away, whether in Britain or abroad, are always so much fun – and though I’m sitting here somewhat wishing we had a roaring fire to enjoy, or a new place to explore, it’s the contrast of the two states that really make things pop in my mind. Every weekend enjoying the comforts of home can become deathy dull, conversely spending every weekend somewhere new is rapidly over-whelming so it becomes hard to fully appreciate the new wonders in front of you. Creating your own perfect preferred blend of experience and reflection is arguably part of what life’s all about. Or maybe just having an open fire everywhere you go. Mmmm… burny.

Another marathon session of going through photos clearing the backlog. Always fun to look at photos you took over three years ago to work out which are ‘good’. When I filter photos I’ve just taken I always find it really hard to abstract my emotions from the event as opposed to what’s there in the photo. As Terry Gilliam says, if it’s not on the screen it’s not on the screen. Given the number of photos still to go through I should be pretty good at it sometime soon – or at least I’ll be more brutal about it.

This cute little Space Invader used to live near Hoxton Square, alas no more. He’s gone along with pretty much every other recent invader in this area in something that, if tweeted, would likely be called #shoreditchspaceinvadermageddon. Or maybe something shorter. This trend of disappearing Invaders seems to be rapidly spreading across London, no idea the cause is ‘art lovers’ or Council officials ‘cleaning’ but either way it’s a sad loss to the modern landscape. So make sure you get out and find your local invader before it’s too late.

Before I move onto thoughts for 2011, the traditional review of 2010 is in order. Highlight of the year was likely the trip to Japan and Korea – an amazing whirlwind two weeks that gave a taste of two beautiful countries that has only whetted my appetite for more. Following quickly on from that was an unexpected visit to Israel. Most of this was spent in Jerusalem, a stunning city of amazing contrasts and well worth a visit – though you may want to avoid August heatwave season. Just a thought. Outside of travel 2010 has had some splendid gigs, from Flight of the Conchords, through Tom Jones and Robert Plant, to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Interpol. Union Chapel in Islington has become one of my new favourite venues, although the fixed up Garage in the same neighbourhood is really quite splendid too. According to my Lightroom I’ve taken roughly 20,000 pictures over this last year.. Flickr would disagree with that, having hardly seen any uploads in that same time for which I apologise and promise to do better this year. Honest. Other than that have been some lovely times with friends and family with many a good chat over a bottle or two of vin rouge. Oh, and I also grew a beard for the first time. I quite like it, so it’ll be around a while.

So onto 2011, what do I see for the year ahead? Fear not, this isn’t going to be a long list of resolutions, mainly because I’ll just look at my list for last year and then get stressed out about how many I’ve yet to do. Basically this is going to be a year of having fun, spending more time with friends and just getting on with stuff. There may also be a smidgin of more specific goals in there, such as right now I’m trying to go a month without wheat, but I just think there is just so much amazing stuff out there to try, learn, do and sometimes fail epically, as well as people to meet that there’s no time to lose. In summary, less telly. Well, at least until the new season of Mad Men comes on…

Boxing Day is always a bit of a strange one to me. Being British I’ve grown up with having two days off around Christmas, but having lived a good few years in New York I came to realise this was just us and our more friendly colonies (I’m thinking about you, Canada). Then again in the American world the very phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ is loaded with potential insult and hence the non-religious form ‘Happy Holidays’ is normally used. This bland greeting insults everyone in equal measure, no one group gets a big bee in their bonnet and everyone can continue with the business of loving one another and/or getting rich as appropriate. In America the only two day holiday is the non-religious Thanksgiving, sensibly always placed on a Thursday and Friday thus guaranteeing a long weekend for all. If only baby Jesus had had such forethought, but I digress.

Back to Boxing day and in Britain and there seems to be no real hard and fast agreement on what this is or how it came about. Even the ever useful Wikipedia shakes its head, asks for some more money like a disreputable Uncle and then deftly points us towards Snopes. At Snopes various possibilities are laid out, mostly involving some levelling of wealth between people of different strata of society – nominally from lords to serfs. So perhaps we should consider Boxing day like the Robin Hood of bank holidays, or to be more up to date a sort of ‘Tobin Tax’.

Suffice to say Boxing Day is the day after Christmas and it’s another day off. That sounds good enough to me. In our family it’s a day for eating cold turkey, sampling festive spirits that may or may not be presents from the year before, and taking a long constitutional along the cold Norfolk coastline looking at baby seals. This year the seals were particularly cute and abundant at Sea Palling, and I believe my youngest nephew won the seal spotting contest with his, as yet unverified, claim of ‘a gazillion’ seals. Perhaps he’s angling for a job in the Treasury…