Alasdair Watson

It occurs that there are several gentlemen of this parish who might thank me for this link to a load of Bill Drummond’s writings over the last few years. Drummond remains, for me, one of the few art critics worth listening to, one who is both very sharp, and extremely engaging.

I said I'd do it, and indeed, I have.  My hair, it is gone, and fuck me, it's very bastard weird.  Anyway, here's a suitably posy and shadowed shot of me, just to prove I've done it.

Just to remind you:

http://www.justgiving.com/get_a_haircut_hippy

 Is the link you'll want, in order to donate money, those that said you would, or even if you didn't say you would, but would like to help me raise money for cancer research anyway.

Ta.

Via tyrell, an excerpt from this post on a teacher’s blog, because it made me laugh:

“Arriving at the car park, I performed a quick Goth count. Forget ‘percentage of free school meals’ or the school’s behaviour policy, the best way to gauge behaviour is to do a Goth count. The number of moody teenagers dressed in black and wearing studded bracelets is in inverse proportion to the amount of bad behaviour in a school.

Though usually silent and aloof in class, Goths work reasonably hard, they have outside interests that extend beyond Lambrini and sportswear and, by their very disdain, they don’t disrupt.

OK, the condescension can get irritating but, overall, I like a healthy scattering of Goths in a school.”

So, the plan to get rid of my all hair is still going ahead, almost certainly this weekend. However, the British Heart Foundation are being fucking useless, not getting in touch when they say they will, and generally making it needlessly hard for me to give them money. So, I’m reverting to my default position, and raising money for Cancer Research UK instead.

You can sponsor me on-line here: http://www.justgiving.com/get_a_haircut_hippy

I’ll post a photo once I’m suitably shorn, if you’d prefer to wait – the page will remain available for you to donate through for the next month.

(If anyone who said they’d sponsor me when it was the the BHF I was raising for wants to pull out/change the amount, then they should feel free – I feel bad about moving the goalposts, but they really have been fucking useless.)

I know I am prone to colds, unless I am being basically nauseatingly healthy – exercise, healthy food, no smoking, minimal drinking and etc.

What I am not prone to, however, is headaches, fevers and nausea. I would like them to end please.

This has been a pointless whinge. Go back to what you were doing. I’m going back to bed.

Clubbing last night crystalised a few things for me, specifically about how fucking awful my lifestyle has become. What was planned as a short break from a more strict lifestyle (and I know there are any number of people who would collapse laughing if they heard me refer to my lifestyle at any point as “strict”, but these things are all relative) to relieve stress has done that, but has turned back into lazy fat-bastardism. So, time for a few lifestyle changes, or at least changes back.

More exercise, healthier habits, and a bit more clubbing.

But that’s not the point of this post.

While I’m changing things, there’s another change I’ve been havering about, and it’s time to do something about it. And one of the best reasons to do it is that frankly, I’m fucking scared to.

It’s this: get a haircut. Specifically, in the first instance: shave my head. I may grow it out a bit if I decide I look awful shaven-headed, but I need to ditch the long locks. I can see thirty looming up before me, and I always swore I wasn’t going to have long hair out of my twenties.

I’ve had shoulder length or longer hair for over ten years. For my entire adult life. You can probably understand how the prospect of ditching it might frighten me a little. So I’m going to bolster my courage, by attaching a bigger cause to it, rather than just saving my own dignity. I’ll do it for charity. Plenty of other idiots have raised money in this manner before so I figure I’ll do the same. The charity in question is the British Heart Foundation.

So, I’m looking for pledges of donations. I’ll sort out collecting the cash after the fact, either via Paypal or in person, but right now, I’m looking for you to give me your pledge, either in a comment, or if you prefer to be discrete about these things, in this poll what only I can see the responses to.

Please folks, donate whatever you can spare. It’s for an excellent cause, and if that’s not enough, you’ll be doing me a favour, helping me do something that scares me.

Thanks.

You can’t see it in the on-line edition (I’ve been sent PDFs of the print version), but the Austrian internet magazine E-media has just published one of my photos as part of an article on Flickr that they’re running this month. It’s the first (and hopefully not the last) time I’ve had any of my photography in print

Of course, this is slightly absurd, since between the time I agreed to let them use the photo as an example of the quality of stuff available on Flickr, and it seeing print, I’ve made the decision not to use Flickr any longer.

Still, onwards and upwards… :)