Newcastle upon Tyne

After a week in Copenhagen, a train journey, an afternoon in Amsterdam and a ferry, I arrived home in Newcastle last week.

It has been 12 weeks of absence, so my thoughts have, since my return, been absorbed in this place that I know so well: the years of experience and adventures, and growing into a different person, and friends who have gone, and things forgotten but still lingering in the places I walk past. All that familiarity and nostalgia and working out what's going on this month and what I want to get involved with.

Gigs, collective endeavours, comics, the outdoors, meetings, agit-prop, groups like the newcastle philosophy group and the bothy association that I want to get back involved with.

(The Bothy Association are meeting the same day as the Bookfair, actualy, so I will have to miss them: I see their work as anarchist in both spirit and in effect. The Newcastle Philosophy Society brochure this autumn also speaks in terms that I rate:)

But for the last 2 days I've just been at home, digging out my old possessions and trying to cram everything into my room. Trying also to throw things out. As part of this I've linked with the Canny Little Library by collectivising some of my books.

I've printed off 2 short runs of zine/comics I made while on my anarchist pilgrimage, but they were not connected to the main aim and spirit of it so I've printed them off mainly to get them out of the way. Today, finally, I am re-focussing on the anarchist pilgrimage idea.

The London Anarchist Bookfair is this Saturday, and I want to have a 'sampler' or introduction ready for it. So right now I'm laying out the front-room table with all my notes, clippings and drawings from my journeys, in order to try and select some representative things to cut n paste and then print off on Friday as an 8-page mini-zine.

Now I am home, this blog will be kept up as a place to put in finished pages or work done for the final zine. I am, however, happily free of full time work now, so I will also be busy doing other zines, activities, and maybe even some actual politics. These will be updated on my main 'zine-it-yourself' blog, and may include a pornographic cartoon about Thomas Spence (a local radical from the 18th century) and a zine of band reviews called 'Opinionated Geordie Monsters'.