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Just a quick note to say that the Tate Britain Monet,Turner and Whistler exhibition is well worth seeing but take some sandwiches,a cattle prod and a large fan with you as the queues are enormous and it can get extremely claustrophobic and hot inside.

The 2005 Boat Race was won by Oxford with a superb performance where they drew away in the latter two thirds of the race to triumph by 2 lengths in a time of 16 minutes 42 seconds, the third fastest time ever. This brings the tally of wins to 78 for Cambridge, 72 for Oxford.Well done Oxford!

Ok now, here is my second short analysis of the blogging experience. Incidently the spell checker in blogger.com is so bad that for those of you who follow it implicitly here is my FLOGGING experience.
After what I thought was a good start with blogging I seemed to hit a wall in terms of reaching ,and getting back comments from ,an audience. My site traffic was not increasing by much at all let alone at an exponential rate. Here, I decided to go back to scouring other popular sites that interested me and leaving replies on their message boards. After a short time I was included in their links and had few more replies and visitors to my site.
To increase visitors further I was determined to be easibly accessible via search engines which had eluded me so far. I increased my use of metatags and used dmoz.org (an open directory site which increases your site profile)for a wider audience. This seem to help a bit and I was eventually put up at the top spot of most of the search engines, including google, when 'metromole' or metro mole' were typed. The main key words such as theatre,cinema etc also would return results with my site somewhere down the engine results pages. A google page rank,however,still eluded me,I think this can only come with time.
At this point I am now included in a small community including the likes of Scary duck, Mystic mog, Diamond geezer, The dark side , Blogjam, Lady Muck,Lorismith and Londonist (some of them being very good) and included them all my links to which some of them have included me in theirs. Indeed,much of the referral web pages that I can see in my site traffic analysis have come from these sites.
By joining these communities I found it not only important to write my blog on a regular basis but also to check others on a regular basis and leave feedback.With sites such as scary duck this was not a hard chore; some of them ,however,were!Indeed a few of the sites were, dare I say it, very boring and are only maintained on an irregular basis. Needless to say these sites received the least or no comments and probably the least visitors.
Along the way, I encountered a few problems.Every now and then the blogger.com system would go down which became very annoying if you had just written an article and couldn't save it in the drafts or publish it.This also prompted me to save my template and all my writing on hard drive in case the server went down and information was lost from good old cyber space.
I have now come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to blogging than I thought from when I first started.I think of it now more as a magazine whereby you can read articles on your favourite subject and by your favourite writers but ,beyond that, also interact with them and send and receive opinions from them.If your lucky you might even get a good laugh or a piece of astounding information from some of the blogs!

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Is on this weekend. If that doesn't improve my rubbishy traffic amounts I don't know what will......

BIGGIES

V&A
International arts and crafts movement until july 24th

Tate Modern
Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments until 2nd may

August Strindberg:
Painter, Photographer, Writer
Until 15 May
The first UK exhibition to explore the paintings and photography of this celebrated writer. These emotive works offer an illuminating insight into the mind of this often-troubled genius.

Tate Britain
Drawing on the influences and relationship between three giants of nineteenth century art.

LITTLIES:

Laurence Miller Gallery
A BAKER’S DOZEN
Thirteen Important Photographs from the Collection of Alexandra R. Marshall
March 10 – April 30, 2005
Alexandra R. Marshall began collecting photographs in 1977. She had a terrific eye informed by great intelligence, a passion for beauty, a delightful sense of humor, and her experience as a fashion model. Her collecting focused on several interconnected themes, including torsos, corsets, mannequins, women and romance.

Joan rivers is looking for 'outlandish,bizarre people with real issues' to come onto her show. I wonder if she has looked through the mirror recently. Although, it is quite hard to see your face when its on the back of your head...ouch.

If you visited the London International book fair a few days ago and were amazed by the amount of tat you are given or can get there, try looking at this from way back in 2002 for a record.

"A medical editor has smashed the British, Commonwealth and European record for
collecting freebies from an international expo centre. Moving with speed and
guile across all 72 exhibition stands at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference
Centre (SECC), Nigel Graber collected over 150 items of pointless tat, all
advertising miracle HIV drugs. His record haul included four clocks, a rucksack,
38 pens, 11 golf balls, a calendar, a CD wallet, a twig-shaped pencil, a
clockwork boxing fish, half a plastic mouse, 12 musical condoms and a car
headrest carved roughly in the shape of Brian Blessed's mother. A spokeman for
SECC said, "This was a magnificent performance, and we're particularly proud
that Nigel achieved it on Scottish soil. I have never seen a man hell-bent on
collecting utter shite move at such speed." Nigel Graber

Call me strange, call me weird or call me a creepy old mole but tonight was a strange night indeed. I had a gut feeling of ominous doom today, to the point that I was on my nerves edge in the streets, in the supermarket and crossing the roads. It was such a strong feeling of anxiety I just had to take notice of it. So much so that as I came out of the supermarket carrying two bags of heavy shopping and was about to cross a side road off Edgeware rd I stopped as the next car trundling up the street was quite a way off. Normally I would have crossed it without a thought, but because of the days feelings I stopped at the curb. As I did so , an old guy crossed and veered outward towards Edgeware rd in order to keep a distance from the car. Something I might well have done. At the exact moment this happened a bus veered left from Edgware rd, I think to avoid a car turning, ploughing into the man's body as if it were a rag doll. My lower lip quivered as I heard the crack of his head hit the floor.I couldn't bring myself to stay to see the result.The bus driver had stopped and the driver ran down to the 'body'. I doubt he survived, but all I could think about (call me selfish ) was that it could have been me. Make of it what you will but this was not your normal sort of day....

Watching Peter Ackroyd on London last night was really interesting (what, I forgot to tell you ? Oh dear) and was about the crowds of London. The greasy haired, stiff walking guy with the lisp talked about the 18th and 19th century where crime was high, people were raucous, dirty and smutty. The theatres were rife with fighting outside and inside.Centre point became area of complete poverty and prostitutes and one of the names given to whores was 'moles'. So, you may say to yourself, some things haven't changed much then have they? I also found out that the hangings took place at Tyburn , which is now Marble arch, not a few hundred metres from where i live. This could explain a lot, the people round our way look as if they need stringing up.
Quote of the week:
Cilla and Roy in the cafe at Coronation St.
Cilla: "Have you any idea how hard it is to keep Two grown men and a great dane satisfied?"
Roy loooking slightly uncomforatable: "No"

There's an interesting event on at the city hall this friday called 'Celebrating Mad Culture' with films and debate on madness. Some people would say it couldn't have been housed in a better place. Also there the 'Urban eye' features work by disabled photgraphers including Hugh Hill.
Also i noticed an advert or an Oyster card lowest fare promise. Does this mean FINALLY they have capped the daily Oyster card prices? I'll believe it when I see it.....

The Good Friday meeting to be held on March 25, is taking shape and the Prix de BPA International Stayers Race will be one of the highlights of the action packed programme.Don't drive there, bike it!!

Finally , The Davinci code has been knocked off the top of the charts. But that isn't the greatest thing .It was knocked off by not one, not two but three, count them,THREE children's books. Hurrah!! And not one of them was Harry Potter book.

T.v choice
Monday at 11.05 on channel 4 sees that weird and wonderful interpretation of the Anthony Burgess novel 'A clockwork orange' . No, that's not the one with John Cleese running around like a demented frog, that's 'clockwise'.

Those of you who've seen 'friends' will know about ugly naked guy, a man who walks around naked across the street for all to see. We too have one of these unfortunately. Except although he has 5 inches of lurpak around his waist he only seems to have 2 inches in every other department. He spends most nights naked, lifting sugar bags instead of weights and I can't help thinking that anyone who has two bags of sugar spare in their house will never lose the lurpak around their waste anyway. His blinds are always left indiscreetly open which means that our blinds ,when we have visitors, have to remain firmly shut. Quite embarrassing if it were only 5 o' clock on a summers day. Anyone else have similar problems out there?

Just to let you know the London International Book Fair is on 13 March 2005 - 15 March 2005 at Olympia where you can find an interesting Rainbow book stall , also a charitable institution. For those of you who remember the original rainbow t.v series try watching this hilarious clip which was 'never shown'.It's worth the download!

This years Art of Love exhibition was held in February in the gallery@oxo and Bargehouse gallery and you might like to visit this website to see the winners. Those of you who aren't interested in the least might like to see an alternative love theme here..or is it? Video

• It occurred to me today that so far this year it has been the year of apologies.
  
  Blair apologised for the Guildford four even though he wasn't responsible for their arrests in the first place.
  
  The BBC was forced to issue an apology after the Rev Dr John Bell used the slot on February 10 to tell the story of a young Arab-Israeli soldier supposedly conscripted into the Israeli army and imprisoned for refusing to shoot Palestinian children. So What?
  
  Prince harry apologises for being insensitive to Auschwitz.
  
  Ken doesn't apologise but was supposed to apologise for his insensitivity to Auschwitz.
  
  Have the Germans apologised for Auschwitz? I dunno but everyone else seems to have.
  
  The Sun apologised to Liverpool
  
  Boris apologised to Liverpool
  
  I make no apologies to Liverpool but apologise for Liverpool.It is one ugly city.
  
  

Why is it that everytime I have no money on my Oyster card there is no ticket machine next to the bus stop? If there is one, it is usually broken or has 4 different varieties of urine and faeces on it making it impossible to get within three feet of the thing without throwing up. You may try to get on the bus and try and pay . Here is where the bus driver just looks at you as though you were a direct offspring of the elephant man and Janet street porter(the perfect freak) and were conceived on the planet Zorgon. Trying to explain there is no ticket machine doesn't help either, after all there is a tube station only about 2 miles away to top it up isn't there? Why not walk? Well, if I were to travel all the way to the tube station then I wouldn't need a feckin bus in the first place would I ?

Sherry Hewson ,A guest of Richard and Judy yesterday,had lots of surgery in a London clinic a while back and has no doubt made lots of money advertising the fact.She did say,however,that one of the reasons she did it was because "in the acting profession there's always someone there younger and prettier to step into your shoes".

Newsflash to Sherry
I'm afraid you have to face facts that you were never a looker or young looking in the first place . You are a CHARACTER actress and not chosen for your beautiful looks but your funny face.

Another comical quote ,what only can be described as a faux pas, from a guest asked "I don't know about you but I don't get nervous any more" , to which Richard and Judy replied with a very polite "no".

Newsflash to Judy
You shake like someone trying to distribute the salt around a packet of Smiths' 'salt and shake' crisps. Either stop lying or get some beta blockers . Ketamine might also do the trick. Now there's a new experiment for your show....

Well here I have to give an account of my blogging experience.
First of all I hadn't even heard of blogging and had to find out a bit about it. To sum it up it is a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links (yawn). A blog seems to be a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary/guide site, and there seems to be as many unique types of blogs as there are people.
I decided blogging.com was the best blogging site for my needs as it allowed enough editing of the html and was quite clear and concise on how to use it, although a bit more help and direction could have been provided. After working out all the idiosyncrasies of blogging.com (ie not being able to cut and paste in the compose section of the editor which is rather strange) I managed to think up a name and change the html on my page to allow a graphical heading of my suiting. Images were my first stumbling block as I wasn't sure where to keep the images in the first place to provide a url link. I then realised I could send images via the 'hello' program which works in cooperation with blogger.com. I could then delete this post but still keep the url of the image.
I had a quick peruse of some other blog sites to see how other people communicated and how many visitors they were receiving as a result of their sites.
I decided to place as many interests as possible in my profile to allow other bloggers to find my site via keywords. After adding a site meter I noticed that in just over a week I had managed to receive one hundred and fifty visitors but much to my dismay, only one comment. The reason, I realised was that there was no communication between other bloggers of similar interests and writing style and therefore no real sense of entering a community. To change this I started adding a couple of comments in blogging sites that I liked and subjects that I was interested in. An example of this is the site by 'scary duck'. I added a comment and also, rather cheekily, asked if he would add me to his links. This, in turn meant I had now formed a communication link with scary duck and other people who viewed his site, which was rather a lot judging by his visitor clock. I think the large input that this site gets is mainly due to the witty, interesting writing which, in turn, received a bit of advertising by winning the 2002 guardian blog awards.
Entering this community seems to help a lot as I have started to receive comments and feedback from a few other bloggers.Although there is a long way to go.
I have to say I think there is a difference blogging anonymously rather than being known (ie by University colleagues and teachers) as it is harder to express yourself in a more candid way when you know, personally or professionally, some of your readers.

According to the local weatherman we have had 11 consecutative days of snow in London.So what?? And where??. If they call that sprinkling of cold rain ,snow, then maybe they should live up north for a while where snow means more than 1mm.Why do they always moan about weather here in London? It has been one of the warmest and least icy of februarys for years and now that we get a bit of that weather we missed in this month and it makes local news.Get a life you news people.

5 useless facts about London:
1. The first pedestrian crossing in Great Britain was sited near the Houses of Parliament in London, in December 1926

2. In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but
only 6 people were injured.

3. There's no mobile reception at the top of the Gherkin in London - it's too high up at 40 storeys. The phone companies hadn't expected a tower so tall, and it's above the reception area.

4. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, has got solar panels fitted on the roof of his Cricklewood home.

5. Guests at the Queen's coronation in 1953 pilfered toilet paper from Westminster Abbey. "It was found early on Coronation Day, that much of the lavatory paper had been removed, and in future it will be necessary to take steps to prevent this," official records reveal.

T.v choice
WARHOL ON WARHOL
Five, 7.15pm

Andy Warhol produced a series of self-portraits throughout his life in much the same way that a dress designer would periodically launch a new collection. These self-portraits have been brought together in a travelling exhibition that is now being shown at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; they range from the deliberately naive sketches that he drew in the late 1940s while still a student at Pittsburgh through to the famous silk-screen images that continued until his death.