Dave's blog

I’m writing for a new magazine, the soon to be released Dodgem Logic. I’m put a link up to their website as and when I get it. Before then though here’s the press release -
DODGEM LOGIC: Colliding ideas to see what happens.

Forty years after the uproarious heyday of the alternative press, writer Alan Moore is launching the 21st century’s first underground magazine from his home town of Northampton, a community that is right at the geographical, political and economic heart of the country; one which has half its high street boarded up and is at present dying on its arse, just like everywhere else.
Drawing upon an overlooked and energetic pool of local talent as well as numerous friends and co-conspirators from comic books, the arts or entertainment, Dodgem Logic sets out to provide a splash of subterranean colour in a bleached-out cultural and social landscape. Published every other month by counter-culture veterans KNOCKABOUT, Dodgem Logic is a forty page full-colour spectacle that, in addition, has an eight-page local section in each issue, thus inviting other areas to publish regional editions by providing their own inserts.
As cheap and beautiful as a heartbreaking teenage prostitute, Dodgem Logic has a cover price of £2.50, with its content similarly tailored to the fiscal toilet-bowl that we are currently engaged in sliding down. Regular columnists provide delicious, inexpensive recipes, wide-ranging medical advice, simple instructions for creating stylish clothing and accessories from next to nothing, guides to growing your own dinner by becoming a guerilla gardener, and, in the first of Dave (The Self-Sufficient-ish Bible) Hamilton’s environmental columns, a bold experiment in living with no money. The same approach to helping readers deal with socio-economic meltdown and a blitz of repossessions is there in upcoming features on the present-day resurgence of the squatters’ movement, or in our communiqués from the Steampunk/ Post-Civilisation gang on how to start rebuilding culture and society before those things have broken down completely and our children are reduced to battering each other to a bloody pulp with their now-useless X-Boxes in a dispute over the last tub of pot noodles.
Not only seeking to give practical advice on getting through a rough stretch, Dodgem Logic is also committed to alleviating the attendant sense of anguish and despair by brightening the world with the astonishing cartoon-work of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s sublime Kevin O’Neill or that of underground legend Savage Pencil; the regular musings of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Book’s own Graham Linehan or of the nation’s sweetheart, the implacably positive Josie Long; even a delirious commemoration of the lunar landing’s anniversary by the masterful Steve Aylett. In addition to a variously-hosted women’s column launched by Lost Girls co-creator and erstwhile underground cartoon artist Melinda Gebbie, Mr. Moore will himself be contributing a lead feature on the history of underground subversive publishing from its origins in the thirteenth century, along with various illustrations and words of advice. All these and many other sterling features, including a free CD of magnificent home-grown Northampton music over fifty years, sporting an hallucinatory front cover by fantastic local digital artiste Tamara Rogers, will be contained in the historic premier issue, debuting this November.

I am currently a prisoner in my own house just because 3 mobile can’t give an exact time to deliver my partners mobile. It’s now 12.00pm and I am only 4 hours into my sentence.

Regular readers to this blog might know I was planning to move to the countryside – well I have and it is making this waiting even worse. It’s a beautiful day outside, the leaves are starting to turn, the sky is a glorious shade of blue and I’m stuck playing freecell, settling old bills and doing housework.

All these things do need doing (bar computer based card games) but at the same time they are all things that can really wait until another day. I’ve called up 3 customer services and they’ve been about as helpful as a throwing a drowning man two ends of a rope. I have no way of getting the delivery number as Ellie is in Exeter without any means of communication and I need the delivery number to find out the delivery time. They offered to text the delivery number to the account holder , hmm, one flaw in this plan, they are delivering the account holders phone!

Grrrr!

Well I’ve just made a squirrel sculpture out of all the hazelnuts I’ve been collecting this year.That killed some time.

I’m ahead with work, I’ve got nothing due until January, I could pitch some ideas but that would require a mind free of distractions, such as looking at the window every time I hear a vehicle slow down. As I live on a crossroads that seems to be every five minutes. In fact I took a look at ‘ahead with work’ and ‘every time I hear’.

I might as well use this time to say – I am available for commission, editors please leave a comment on the blog, I won’t publish it but I will get back to you.  At least that will give me something to do next time I have to wait in!

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

I’ve got a patch of land I want to work on, it’s nothing but bramble at the moment and I want to get clearing.

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

It’s a beautiful day, I could just walk up the lane at the back of the house.

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

Apples and nuts are in season, I know where they are I could just pop out for five minutes and pick them.

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

I could meet friends in town for a cup of tea!

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

I could take the bus to the edge of Dartmoor and go looking for mushrooms

I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE! I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE! I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE!

There is now a fly head-butting my window, it sounds like the door is knocking downstairs, nature is tormenting me!

I was sent a copy of Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins book, ‘Local Food’ some time ago but have since really dragged my heals writing this review.   This hasn’t been for any negative reason, quite the opposite in fact. I found the book so compelling that whenever I sat down to read it I would get so absorbed I would forget about the review altogether.

What makes the book so compelling is not only it’s excellent delivery but also the myriad of ways the author(s) address many of the problems we may face in the future as cheap energy disappears and climate change really starts to take a grip.  In many ways it talks about a lot of the subjects we do on this website; growing your own, keeping an allotment and there are even a couple of pages written by our friend and fellow forager Fergus Drennan (I love the alliteration of that sentence) on the subject of wild food.

‘Local Food’ however goes above and beyond what we write about on Self-Sufficientish. It suggests achievable remedies to the problems our modern food system has created and empowers the reader to get evolved in their own food security.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find food co-ops, community gardens, garden share schemes and a whole host of other food related community projects popping up around the country as this book starts to edge it’s way up the best-sellers list.

Local Food is a truly excellent book and retails at the very reasonable price of just £12.95.

Having a twin, especially one you work with on something public can sometimes mean their opinions get mixed up with your own. By and large this is fine, Andy does most of the time have very similar views to myself and I have no problem with this case of mistaken identity. In fact a lot of the time it can count in my favour as he has written something in a magazine or been interviewed expressing the same opinion as myself saving me the effort but still giving me the positive publicity. A good example of this was when I received an email from a prospective employer saying he liked my piece in Towpath magazine. I didn’t even know such a publication existed but rather than come clean I just avoided the subject in the reply.

However, every once in a while Andy comes out with something so jaw dropping that I’m not entirely sure which recesses of his mind they have emerged. At this point I usually want to tell people as loudly as I can – we are very different, his way of thinking is really NOT the way I think!

He came out with one such clanger just last week on Radio 4’s Farming Today. During the show they introduced us as ‘Andy and Dave Hamilton’ rather than introduce the listener to our individual voices. This doesn’t normally happen, Radio 4 usual way is to introduce guests after their initial line of speech – for example I could have said, ‘The nettle can be used to make a milk rennet’ and the announcer would say over the top, ‘Dave Hamilton’, then I would continue. However no such non-ambiguity for me when Andy bemoans that there were far less mushrooms around last year because of all the Eastern Europeans picking them!  I know Andy is not a racist but his  explanation to Bristol’s dwindling numbers of fungi could be seen as a little offensive to some.
Why didn’t he say the council could have been using more fungicides last year to prevent problems such as honey fungus damaging the trees? Or he could have said it was simply a bad year for mushrooms as it was wet and dry at just the wrong times!

So I would like to state from here on end that Self-Sufficientish or to put it more accurately, Andy Hamilton does not always express the views of Dave Hamilton. I may have to start including this in emails, just greyed out at the bottom –

Andy Hamilton does not always express the views of Dave Hamilton.

Thanks for reading

P.S. Andy was of course not very happy when he read this. He stands by his explanation and would like to point out that Eastern Europeans know a lot more about foraging mushrooms than native Brits.  Indeed Poland is the only country in the world where mushroom numbers are believed to have declined by human picking.  I still think it’s more than likely the council sprayed the field with fungicide after they found fairy rings AND honey fungus but then again what’s life if you can’t disagree on the odd thing – besides who even reads this blog!!!