I keep falling off the edge of conversations

The people on my right are having one, as are the people on my left.

I'm not involved in either.

I fell off the edge of them both a few minutes back and lay there at the bottom of a pit of silence wondering if I could find anything interesting to say. 

Then I scuttled away from the party without saying goodbye.

And now I'm sitting here at 7.13am the next day writing a fucking blog post about it.

It's kind of stupid because this was a room full of people I know pretty well. I hadn't seem some of them for a while. I LIKE THESE PEOPLE A LOT. There should have been plenty to talk about.

In the past, carefully calculated quantities of alcohol have been my crutch. You know... enough to loosen your tongue, but not so much that you wake up the next morning with a blank. I should drink less. I'm toying with the idea of giving up drink completely for a while until I work out this not-talking thing. Maybe I should stop going to parties. Maybe my friends will stop inviting me when they read this.

What happens when I zone out from conversations?

Sometimes small details which beg to go unnoticed captivate me instead.

I will look at the cracks in a wall and wonder how they got there.

Or count things.

Yeah, Rain Man shit.

I count the rivets in the windows of train doors quite a lot. I used to do that on the way to work and could never seem to end up at the same number. But I try not to read too much into that kind of stuff. That would be really problematic.

Sometimes in my silence I just sit there and stew in jealousy at the people telling funny stories around me. Definitely kind of stupid.

If you want to slap the "introvert" label on me, go ahead.

Case closed. 

How can you spot an extrovert?

Extroverts are the kind of people who have never noticed that there are tiny things floating on your eyeballs which look like worms. Yeah, the ones that are really hard to look at because they are always gliding to the periphery of your vision like asteroids in the game Asteroids.

If you go on the David Icke forum you'll find people who think these 'floaters' really ARE worms. Which seems to be a fairly tame theory coming from a bunch of people who think the world is controlled by reptilian humanoids.

Scrub that, I just read the last post on the forum thread, which relates floaters to altered states of consciousness and the visions of a mystical Benedictine abbess called Hildegard of Bingen. Hmm. I'm guessing the person who came up with that is a little um, introverted. It's an interesting theory though.

The scientific theory is that floaters are just tiny imperfections in the gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of your eyeball. 

How else can you spot an extrovert?

Extroverts are the kind of people you walk down the street with and have to point out that they're about to step in dog turd because they are too busy talking to notice.

That makes it sound like I'm hating on extroverts though. I'm not. Introverts need extroverts to even things out. We should set up a buddy system. We'll help you navigate dog turds and in return you can do the talking for us.

I woke up an hour ago and lay in bed squirming about last night. My friends are leaving London and I couldn't even wish them a fond farewell. I felt pathetic about it. Sorry guys. I'm going to miss you. 

But then I took the cardboard boxes off my bedoom window (I haven't got round to buying curtains yet) and smiled because the sun was just easing over the roof of the houses opposite. I closed my eyes for ten minutes and tried to concentrate on my breathing. I'm not going to use the "m" word because it doesn't feel like that yet. I guess that's why they call it practice. 

What is it about group conversations that freaks me out?

Maybe I'm just plain embarrassed by my conversational inability and have to leave the scene of the crime.

Like when you trip walking along the pavement and look back accusingly at the offending crack, as if to deflect from the shame of your clumsiness.

I don't really know. 

Does it happen to you?

On not making cool shit for Bjork or working for minimal techno DJs in Berlin

When I was fresh out of art school and recovered from the shock that people weren't physically lining up to employ me at my degree show, I went on the prowl for jobs in London. 

Fresh faced and stupid. Standing next to my graduation show back in 2003.

One of the design studios near the top of my hitlist was Me Company. They made cool stuff for musicians like Bjork. Everything from the first Sugar Cubes single to designing the packaging for her groundbreaking 'Homogenic' album.

Bjork's Homogenic album. Art directed by Alexander McQueen, no less.

I emailed Me Company a link to my portfolio and wangled an interview. I was almost half an hour late because London still confused the hell out of me and they were based in a weird residential part of Camden. But it went ok and I somehow landed an offer of an internship. They weren't sure exactly what I was going to do, but they liked my work and thought they could carve out a little James-shaped hole in the studio for me. (I wouldn't really have worked on anything for Bjork of course but I needed a catchy headline for this article ok?)

Of course this being a design studio internship, there was no money involved.

I turned it down.

Yup.

And then I hauled my sorry ass back north to Glasgow and carried on pretending to be self-employed but actually doing fuck all for another couple of months.

I lived in a rundown flat with some mates in the same situation. It was a lot of fun but quite often I came home to find one of the guys sitting in his pants at 4pm playing video games.

One day the shower broke so we used a bucket to wash with for a week and when the landlord came to fix it (on his own, because he was too cheap to hire someone qualified to do the job) he nearly got himself electrocuted.

Another time I suggested we dress up in suits and go on a faux business lunch, you know, just so we could pretend to be at least mediocre achievers. By early afternoon our cover was blown because we were in a pub, word-slurringly drunk. I got pissed enough to ask the cute barmaid for her number, but also pissed enough to lose it straight away, and then ask her for it again. Next morning I did the hungover-pocket-emptying thing and found two bits of paper with her number on. We went on a single date and never spoke again.

So as you can see, being unemployed in Glasgow was much, much, much better than living in London and making cool 3D shit for musicians and Japanese robot manufacturers (another client that Me Company had on their roster further down the line).

Great life decision, James. 

Eventually I found a job in Glasgow and ended up designing adverts for hotel restaurants and overseeing bowel cancer awareness campaigns. Really. My first photoshoot involved old people sitting on toilets with their trousers down. Luckily the studio grew into something bigger and better and I worked with some really talented designers over the next five years.

In time though I grew tired, perhaps with my job, perhaps with Glasgow.

Whichever way you look at it, I'd been holed up in the cosy womb of the city's West End for nearly ten years if you included my student days, and needed a change. 

You'd have thought that this time I'd have learnt my lesson.

After due diligence, two job possibilities presented themselves: one in London working (again) as a digital designer, the other in Berlin working for a software company called Ableton who make programs for DJs and electronic musicians.

Now both Berlin and minimal techno were obsessions for me at the time. So needless to say the thought of working for a company on the inside of the scene was pretty exciting. 

I drew a line down a piece of paper, headed one side "London" and the other "Berlin", and made a list of pros and cons. Probably the scariest thing about Berlin for me was the prospect of having to learn a little German. The company themselves actually spoke English as a first language so in reality this wasn't really a huge problem. The second issue was of course not knowing anyone in Germany. 

Guess what, I chickened out, again.

I took the easy option. Gave up chasing the job in Berlin and moved to London, where many of my creative friends from Glasgow had already decamped.

Now, looking back a decade later, I wish I had been more dynamic. Pushed myself a little. Tested my mettle. I don't even know if I have any mettle back then. 

If Berlin hadn't work out for me, I could easily have moved back to the UK and tried something else. Nothing lasts for ever after all.

Except death.

I was going to end with those two words but it seems unnecessarily narcissistic. 

It's true though.

A nurse called Bronnie Ware compiled some evidence which my younger self could have done with. She recorded the most common regrets of patients under her care as they approached death, and came up with this list — The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying.

(Is it bad that I'm imagining this as a chart show style countdown? I think so, but I'm still going to put them into reverse order, and you can imagine the presenter excitedly reeling them off, if you like...)

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 

Now, I'm not old enough to know for sure what my top five regrets will be.

But I wish I had worked as an intern for a design studio that made cool shit for musicians like Bjork and Japanese robot manufacturers. 

I wish that I had gone and worked for minimal techno DJs in Berlin.

I wish that reading this might help you find the courage to do something which otherwise will be nothing more than an electrical impulse firing in your brain a decade later to create a stomach-crunching pang of regret.

Thirteen variations on less.

I stopped reading the news on a daily basis over a year ago. Newspapers have become a luxury reserved for killing time on long journeys. My TV is also long gone.

I've been trying to be more honest, mostly with myself. Less concerned with the gloss and sheen, the smoke and the mirrors of design. Less hung up on what other people think about me. My online dating profile now includes a paragraph about all the good and not-so-good stuff that happened to me last year, instead of a single sentence. Being truthful as often as possible (but never when it could hurt someone) feels refreshing. 

But, I'm writing this with eighteen browser tabs open. I turned the honesty up a notch too far with my family and wish I hadn't. If you're reading this, I still love you Mum/Dad/sister/brother. I just had to hire a van to move flat. Most of the boxes are still sitting unopened in a spare room. Books and CDs that I haven't made use of in years, but still lug around with all my emotional baggage.

Which prompted this list of the things I'd like less of in my life. 

Less sugar, gluten, grains and synthetic foodstuffs.

Less lying to yourself, and other people.

Less browser tabs.

Less complaining.

Less obligations.

Less meetings.

Less goals.

Less news.

Less email.

Less work.

Less stuff.

Less TV.

Less.

L

e

s

s

.

My first website

Pause for a moment and listen:

I can't think of a more evocative sound from my early online adventures.

Apart from an angry parent shouting "JAMESSSSSS! I NEED TO USE THE PHONEEEEEEE" from downstairs.

It was 1999. The internet and I were fresh-faced. (9 and 18 years old respectively).

I'd graduated from Microsoft Frontpage. Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver were my new toys, but I needed a reason to use them.

So I dreamt up a concept for my first website:

"Ever wondered what someone on the other side of the world looks like when they squash their face onto a scanner? Now's your chance to find out - Headscan brings hilarious images from across the globe direct to your desktop. Send us your picture and we will add it to the Scan Gallery, along with a dot marking you out on the map, and a link to your website".

By August 2000, Headscan had clocked up 14,000 hits and was receiving around 15 submissions a month.

Headscan as it looked in August 2000. You'll need to use your imagination as the Wayback Machine doesn't have any images for the site.

My Hotmail inbox filled up with the names of exotic places.

Sheffield. Frankfurt. Manila. Rido de Janeiro. Alabama. Warsaw.

It felt like the future had arrived.

I made a prophetic declaration on my fledgling web-design portfolio:

"Thousands and thousands of new sites are launched every day. In ten years time nearly every business in Britain will be using the world wide web."

Hot damn, I was right!

But updating Headscan's static HTML was increasingly time-consuming. It would be another 4 years before I learnt PHP and mySQL, thanks to Wordpress.

I looked up the location of each submission in a printed atlas, then placed it by hand as a dot on the appropriate map. You'll need to trust me on this, as the Wayback Machine is the only record of Headscan I have — an imageless ghost of what was my digital pride and joy. 

I distinctly remember the mixed emotions the first New Zealand Headscan heralded.

Wow! Someone on the other side of the world has heard about me!

(No MySpace, Facebook or Twitter remember. I guess people just emailed links to each other. Or went on forums. I even read the newspaper to find new sites).

D'oh! The marker dot is obliterating New Zealand on my map.

So I made a new map to house Majik in Lower Hutt and laboriously linked up the other locations.

This was starting to feel like hard work.

I was now studying graphics in Glasgow and had more pressing needs. Like earning extra cash to fund my social life and get drunk enough to think I could dance. 

But I didn't own a computer. So I borrowed my flatmate's beige PC and once a week stayed up until dawn, cajoling pixels into place. I was hooked. 

I stopped updating Headscan, and began cold-emailing businesses in the phone book that didn't have a website, offering to build one for £100. A car-hire company was the first to take up my offer. But that's a story for another day. 

The only Headscan I can find online. I have a hunch this guy was from the Netherlands.

What did I learn from building my first website? 

1. Experiment. Have fun. Put new skills into practice.
2. Don't worry about technology or writing beautiful code. 99.99999% of people don't care. The other 0.00001% will be arguing about what the actual percentage of people who do care is.
3. Build your site around people. Make it human.
4. Make a backup, dummy, or take screenshots. In a few hundred years someone might take the same pleasure from looking at your website as they do now looking at old black and white photos, marvelling at smudges of horse-drawn carts and petticoats.

"Boulevard du Temple", a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, which is generally accepted as the earliest photograph of people.

---

This article is my entry to the 123-reg "Remember your first website" competition.

What was your first website?

Trust your internal bullshit detector

A generic business estate on the outskirts of town. A generic office building. Generic office spaces lined up neatly inside.

(Are these places cloned somewhere? Maybe that's what Milton Keynes is for?)

Not auspicious surroundings in which to meet new clients.

This was seven or eight years ago now. I was in my mid twenties. I worked for a 'boutique' graphic design studio as a web designer, but there was still grunt work to be done, hence this shitty assignment.

Oh and there's one more thing you should know: I also had a sizeable beard. It was a phase I was going through.

Anyhow, back to our meeting.

The youngest member of staff looked to be about sixteen years old. Even more worrying than this, he also seemed to be the smartest of the bunch. As if to prove it, the others retched up foul ideas for their new website, long erased from my memory.

We listened. Nodded out heads. Asked a few questions. Took a few notes.

It wasn't that complicated though. These guys basically had a system for putting adverts on the sides of lorries and rubbish trucks. 

So it was hard for me to get excited about the job.

Can you do great work for crappy clients? What would a design legend like Wim Crouwel or Paul Rand have done in this situation?  (Let's be honest, they probably wouldn't have gotten into it in the first place.)

My boss drove us back to the studio. My stomach twinged, uneasily, but I thought nothing of it.

Over the next few days I duly cranked out a couple of design options for the website. From what I remember, they looked quite nice.  

We returned a couple of weeks later to pitch my concepts.

This time it was even more apparent that the boss was partial to a wisecrack or two. He was positively fizzling with "wee man" energy, like a third rate comedian having an off night, trying to work a crowd he could have counted on one hand. If he could count that high.

It was a warning sign, but I missed it at the time.

We presented my designs for their website. Gave them the patter, the spiel, the bullshit. He didn't say as much, but it was clear the boss wasn't impressed.

As we left the meeting room and began to file back through the office, he paused.

Ah, I naviely thought, maybe he's going to compliment us on our fine and considered work now. 

Unfortunately he wasn't. 

In fact, he started to sing the theme song from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" at me. (Yes, because having a beard makes you look like someone from the bible. Of course. You're a pretty funny guy).

He sang quietly at first. But before I knew it he was cajoling the rest of his staff to join in.

What. The. Fuck.

I had a flashback.

That uneasy knot in my stomach I had felt a fortnight earlier wasn't something I had eaten for lunch.

It was my internal bullshit detector kicking in.

It was a primordial part of my brain saying "Get the hell out of this place, James. It's not good for you. Run. Now. Don't look back".

But I didn't listen to it, or say anything to my boss about my doubts for the job. 

So now I was facing the music. An entire office of people was taking the piss out of my beard (and me) using the medium of song. Even though Joseph doesn't even have a beard in most productions of the musical. Check your facts, people.

But more importantly, trust your gut.

Be aware of sublminal messages that your body sends you. 

Otherwise you might end up in a life-threatening situation, like this...

(Yes, I hate musicals. Something about them makes we want to punch people in the face)