#crtweetup

Or, why I've been MIA for some time. The last month or so an awful lot of my time has been spent organising the first Creative Review tweetup, which took place at the Design Museum last night, involved lots of free LEGO and Moleskines, oh and alcohol, and praise be, went off rather swimmingly.

There are lots of photos here of people having fun. And yet more on Flickr.

Serendipity & Veggiebox - redux

For anyone out there who liked and is missing Serendipity, I'm resurrecting it, sort of. I want tweets of a magical realist nature addressed to me on Twitter (@neilayres) and I'll retweet the ones I like best. I'll also regularly include the very best in a post on this here blog, with a credit and short bio for the author. Poems and song lyrics are as welcome as prose.

Here're some examples of the kind of thing I mean:

The speaker is a little man, shrunken and bent, who seems to shrink and bend more and more every time anyone calls him

- Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (Translated by William Weaver)

Troll brains do not hold many memories. Mostly their minds flicker and ripple like the glossy water in a forest tarn ruffled by the wind

- Kerstin Ekman, The Forest of Hours (Translated by Anna Paterson)

Holy ghosts and talk-show hosts are planted in the sand, to beautify the foothills and shake the many hands

- The Meat Puppets, Plateau

Along similar lines, you can address your veggiebook extracts to Aliya, and she'll no doubt do the same for the best quotes, breaches of copyright notwithstanding (@bluepootle)

Cheep, cheep

For those of a tweeting inclination, I'm now on Twitter, although probably won't make much use of it for a while. Follow me.